About Housecall...

HousecallFM started life in 2009 as a fortnightly radio show hosted by acclaimed DJ & Producer, Grant Nelson.

The idea for the show was born from a comment on a social media site where, after Grant had been remarking about the lack of support for the more soulful house music on the radio, somebody suggested that he should do his own radio show. The UK’s excellent SSRadio provided the platform so, half-joking, he started “Grant Nelson’s Housecall” expecting a couple of thousand people, at absolute most, would tune in eventually.

The first show was pre-recorded and broadcast at 8PM(GMT) on Thursday 8th October 2009, and to his surprise, was extremely popular. He received a lot of messages from people saying how much that they enjoyed it and how much they were looking forward to the next one.

A couple of shows under his belt,  he decided that it would be more fun to record the shows live and have some interaction with the listeners via the now infamous Housecall Chat Room. So via an uplink to SSRadio, every other Thursday at 8PM you could find Grant playing music live over the net. Andy Ward‘s Vocal Booth radio show was a big inspiration for this interactive format and, being friends for years, he asked Andy for some valuable advice which eased him into the world of live broadcasting.

After settling on a format for the show that he was happy with, including regular features like Do You Remember House? (3 classic house tracks from 3 decades), Here’s One I Made Earlier (listeners requesting music that Grant has made over the years), Flashback (playing a vintage classic at the end of every show), to name a few, and setting up a website at www.gnhousecall.com to store the playlists and provide download links for podcasts, Housecall was now in full effect!

Within the first 3 months he was getting inundated with emails and messages from people of all ages (to date, the youngest has been 9 years old and the eldest 81!), from all around the World.

As well as quickly becoming the most popular show on SSRadio, he also had to upgrade his accounts with Podomatic & his web host to allow more storage and bandwidth as the amount of podcasts being downloaded were starting to get out of control. In fact his web hosting account was suspended 4 times due to the sheer amount of requests crashing the Housecall web server.

It soon became apparent that Housecall was here to stay, so  with a busy international DJing schedule, Grant enlisted the talents of long time friend, and a DJ that he really respects, South Africa’s Shane D, to cover the shows that he couldn’t do. This relationship has since evolved into the pair of them alternating shows, Grant hosting one week, Shane doing the next, and is part of the reason for Grant re-branding the show & website from “Grant Nelson’s Housecall” to “HousecallFM”.

The programme is now syndicated to over 40 radio stations around the globe and regularly attracts more than 3 million listeners via FM/DAB/SAT. It also has a huge following on web radio with episodes getting blogged all over the place.

2013 saw the launch of 24/7 streaming where listeners can tune into the latest show, anytime, anywhere, from the player on the front page. The player also relays the live show’s direct from SSRadio every other Thursday night. With this relay in place it seemed a logical move to extended the broadcasts. So, solely for the devoted live listeners, Grant asked DJ / Producer Rob Hayes to do a kind of after hours show which has now become the “Housecall Live-Lock In”. Rob plays a brilliant selection of tracks right after the main show ends via the player HERE.

Housecall regularly features guest mixes from World-renowned DJ’s & Producers from all over the planet (see them all right here), as well as up & coming talent, and retains it’s ‘no-genre-snobbery’ policy towards underground house music. If it’s good, it will get played!

For further reading check out this short Q&A that Grant did for Traxsource in 2013 HERE!