John Campbell, Samantha Hayes and Tova O’Brien remember the Wellington radio station where their careers began.

John Campbell was studying English at Victoria University in the late ’80s when he fell in with a group of people working at Wellington radio station RadioActive. He and his friend Jim Scott began an alternative rugby commentary show, complete with radio aliases. “Jimmy was Friendly Brains and I was Sparkly Plug,” Campbell recalls. While he’s glad no audio of the show survives, he credits it with kickstarting his career in journalism. As he tells it, the chief reporter at Radio New Zealand heard the show while driving and mentioned their outlandish commentary to a colleague, who identified one of the co-hosts as Campbell.

“Eventually he gave me a call and said, ‘Do you wanna work at RNZ?’,” Campbell remembers. Three decades later, he’s one of New Zealand’s most revered broadcast journalists with a career encompasing RNZ’s Checkpoint and his own Campbell Live show; he’s now a presenter on TVNZ.

Stories like that abound among former hosts at Wellington’s original alternative radio station, which this year celebrates its 45th birthday. Campbell says it was RadioActive – and veteran producer and broadcaster Mark Cubey – which introduced him to hip hop, via Cubey’s show, the Wednesday Night Jam, which remains Aotearoa’s longest running hip hop show. Its early days, and the thriving hip hop community it helped nurture, are featured in the new podcast series Aotearoa Hip Hop: The Music, The People, The History.

Campbell is a hip hop obsessive to this day. His Spotify playlist, JC tryna be alive – 143 tracks and growing – showcases his favourite hip hop and RnB tracks, and has thousands of followers. “I had a pretty white upbringing,” he says. “Suddenly [at RadioActive], my heart was swelling and my eyes were opening because I was meeting all this new music for the first time”.

Newshub Live at 6pm anchor Samantha Hayes began her radio career at Radio One, the Otago student radio station, before landing at RadioActive. She says she bowled into the RadioActive studios one day after lectures at Victoria University and asked for a job. From then on, Hayes was at the door at 5.30am every weekday, ready to write and read the news on the breakfast show. Her passion for the station was eventually rewarded with her own lunchtime show and the DJ name “Sam Sixty”.

She also managed Handle the Jandal, the DIY music video competition RadioActive launched in the early 2000s. The finals were a huge night for the station – and were also what got Hayes her first job in TV, aged just 22. When the Nightline crew turned up at Wellington’s Embassy Theatre to interview station manager Dave Gibbons, he palmed them off on Hayes. She aced the interview, TV3 liked what they saw, and the rest is history.

Among Hayes’ fondest RadioActive memories were “keg Fridays”, an inventive way for local bars to “pay” for advertising with free beer. Although not much of a beer drinker, she says it was worth it for the “amazing parties” that followed.

Today FM breakfast host Tova O’Brien followed Hayes at RadioActive – and later, to TV3. O’Brien was working in hospitality, having done some travelling and dropped out of two degrees, when she first stumbled into volunteer radio. “RadioActive helped settle me and focus my mind,” she says. “It was only really when I got to Radioactive and found my feet with journalism that I figured out that was what I loved doing.”

By 2006, O’Brien was producing and co-hosting the RadioActive breakfast show with Liam Ryan. “We were Liam Luff and Tova Tuff, and after Liam left it was with Phil Reed aka Phil De Fur.”

Her show also led to her first forays into writing and reading the news. It was at RadioActive that O’ Brien did her first interviews with politicians, marking the start of what would be a highly successful career in political journalism. She remembers RadioActive as a nurturing training ground for journalists and a place of community for young broadcasters, techies and DJs.

John Campbell, Samantha Hayes and Tova O’Brien are just a few of the hundreds of people who have sat behind the microphone during RadioActive FM’s 45 years of life. The big personalities. The low-key announcers. The crate-digging music nuts who prefer to let the music speak for itself. Station loyalists who have been working, volunteering, living and breathing Active in all its iterations and frequencies across its four decades of existence.

Without them RadioActive wouldn’t be the thriving nexus music and community it continues to be. Rā whānau ki a RadioActive.FM!

Maggie Tweedie is breakfast host on RadioActive.FM.