Kiss & Tell with Rickie & Melvin

Imagine it is 6am, your alarm goes off and your dreading going to work/college – not a great start to the day! Now imagine waking up to fresh funky tunes, with lots of fun and laughter from young, off-the-wall presenters to fill your morning with madness, hype and lots and lots of energy. Waking up never felt so good before! Welcome to the Kiss 100 Breakfast show.Rickie Haywood Williams, Melvin Odoom and Charlie Hedges are the recent, fun young London-based presenters of The Kiss Breakfast show. They have been presenting since May 2007 and have already racked in 1.71 million listeners, in the first three months of 2009.

Rickie has previously worked for BBC (Radio 1 and 1Xtra), he is currently working as a TV presenter for MTV and he also presents The Hook Up on MySpace. Melvin has appeared in such shows as Dick and Dom In Da Bungalow, The Slammer, Smart, Basil’s Swap Shop and Gina’s Laughing Gear. He recently presented Big Brothers Big Mouth alongside Rickie for a brief period during Big Brother 9. He is currently working on a new television show called My Last Five Girlfriends. Charlie started out at Kiss as a work experience student and landed her self a permanent role as a presenter, she also DJ’s up and down the country as well as completing her BA (Hons) Journalism degree.

I caught up with the breakfast trio during their show to talk about why and how they got into radio broadcasting, what advice they would give to a young person trying to pursue a career within radio and why Kiss 100 is the better than any other station.

As a student on a multi-media and journalism course, I have recently got very interested in radio broadcasting and thought, who better to ask about the ins and outs of breaking into the radio business than top presenters themselves? So I was lucky enough to go down to the breakfast show to speak to them in person. First up was Rickie:

Why did you get into radio broadcasting?
Rickie: I always liked radio, liked listening to radio, I liked people like Dr Fox when I was younger, Chris Tarrant and Trevor Nelson. I just like music and loving the medium of radio. It is very personal. I just like interacting with it I like to get my old tape recorder and recordings of myself and my brothers and listening back to it and pretending to make mock-up radio shows when I was a kid so I have always liked it.

How did you get in to radio broadcasting?
Melvin: I actually got into radio broadcasting from secondary school where I started doing a Media Studies course. There was a local restricted service licence (RSL) called Town Radio and at that time I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I knew I was really interested in like acting and drama and presenting and stuff but I had no idea, so we went to this local radio station which went out via cable. We did a little show like a student-based show which just went out for a month and then I went to the University of Luton and did a Media Studies course with radio. This is where I met Rickie and that’s when I kinda thought ‘you know what? I really enjoy radio!’ so that’s where the foundation of radio began for me.

What advice would you give a young person wanting to get into radio broadcasting?
Charlie: Without a doubt, do not take ‘no’ for an answer. I also think that listening to other radio stations helps a lot. For example, Kiss may be your favourite radio station but I think it’s important that you listen to a variety of others because you might pick up certain things that you think ‘that doesn’t sound too good’ or ‘you know, I quite like that!’. Work experience again is key, but it’s not that easy. If you can’t get it, just maybe try university out. At university, you get to do placements and stuff, so I think it is definitely about work experience and if you can’t get it early on in life then try and get into university.

And finally we asked . . .

What makes Kiss 100 better than any other station?
Rickie: Kiss 100 is better than any other station in my opinion because we’re all about the music. We’re all about fun, we’re young, and just like myself, Melvin, Charlie and Adam, we’re all very friendly people. We love music, we love going to festivals, places like Ibiza, going to watch movies and places like Thorpe Park and I think our listeners can relate to us because we are very much like them and we do the things that they like to do.

So with the interview finished, the presenters had a lot of other work to get on with as they also have jobs other than Kiss Breakfast show, so Jade and I thanked them so much for their time in giving us an insight into how one of the top radio stations works. We start saying our goodbyes before I blurt out that they best watch out as I might be joining them soon, thanks to their great advice about breaking into radio!

This article was written by Sophie Porter a student on Dv8’s Multimedia and Journalism course. If you live in London and are interested in applying for this course click here. DV8 are based in Walthamstow and also run courses such as the Complete Music Industry Project and Music Production and Business.