Dave Gregory: the story behind the voice...

Dave's been in and around the world of music & broadcasting most of his working life. He started out as a club DJ and was soon persuaded to venture into radio by friends & colleagues' constant insistence that he had the ideal "voice".

Following some hairy adventures on board one of the last off-shore "pirates" (RNI), he found himself back on dry land, unwittingly paving the way for the future by writing & voicing "trailers" for BBC Radio 1 & 2, where he was soon spotted by a senior producer who gave him a crack at his own series of programmes.

This culminated in Dave hosting the Radio One Breakfast Show on several occasions; perhaps most notably when its then regular presenter, Tony Blackburn took some wedding leave.

After about three years of freelancing for the Beeb, Dave decided it was time to try for the newly opened breed of Independent stations that had sprung up firstly in London, and soon followed in most major UK cities, including Newcastle -upon - Tyne, where he would end up presenting some of the very first programmes on Metro Radio. This turned out to be the beginning of a seven-year stint in The North of England. First in Tyneside, then Teeside for five years (where he also got some substantial voice-over exposure for the first time since his early days at the BBC) and lastly West Yorkshire. Eventually in 1981 for career reasons, he made the trek back South to join Essex Radio in time for its launch on September 12th.

Whilst there he underwent some pretty interesting role changes: notably the combining of his former club "roots" and by now, considerable radio experience, to instigate the launch of a radical series of Soul & Dance shows. Broadcast originally from the studio and later from large capacity-filled venues, they blatantly and very successfully tapped in to urban Essex and East London's legendary appetite for funky rhythms!

For a while it all seemed unstoppable, until the dawning of a new homogenised "safe" era in UK music radio in the late Eighties brought much innovation and experimentation to a premature halt and resulted in Dave leaving Essex Radio following a spell of rebellious moonlighting for some of London's popular urban "pirates". Not long afterwards, came a year as the promotional manager of a dance label, followed by eighteen months as The Creative Producer at one of London's first official urban radio stations, Choice FM - before moving back into full-time presenting at London's Jazz FM for four years.

Then in the summer of 1997 came perhaps the most drastic change of professional direction in a long time. Rather than become what he felt was more or less a "robo-jock", in order to remain in music-based radio, apart from occasional projects, Dave decided to abandon full-time presenting in favour of the not altogether unfamiliar but still pretty scary - and fiercely competitive - world of the professional voice over!

Infinitely preferable he'd concluded though, to constantly living in fear of radio management whims & hostile take-overs. All he had to do now was find enough money to upgrade his home studio, enable it to interface with the outside world, polish up his old skills, learn some new ones - and basically re-invent himself! Then of course, there was the minor matter of telling the rest of the world about it…

Fast forward to the present and lots of grey and lost hairs later.

With a client base that to date includes more radio stations than he could have ever dreamt of working for before the advent of ISDN & The Internet, and an increasing number outside the UK - maybe, finally for Dave - the future's just begun!