George Power
From Crackers dancers and Electric Ballroom nights to pirate radio, Kiss FM and Nice ’N’ Ripe, George Power helped build the London network that rave and UK garage would later inherit.
From Crackers to pirate radio and UK garage
Rave did not invent the London dancefloor from scratch. George Power’s story runs through the culture that was already there: serious dancers, specialist DJs, imported records, mixed crowds and pirate radio built by people who wanted something the mainstream was not giving them.
Akis Eracleous was born in Famagusta, Cyprus, on 26 December 1952 and came to Britain at an early age. He became known professionally as George Power. Immersed in North London’s multi-ethnic club culture, he moved from mobile DJ work and local residencies into one of the most influential rooms in 1970s London.
Crackers, on Wardour Street in Soho, had already built a reputation under Mark Roman for importing new soul, funk, jazz and disco. Power took over as its defining resident in 1976 and changed both the music and the crowd around the club.
What mattered at Crackers was the floor. Young Black dancers, gay clubbers, soul heads and white music fans packed into the same room while plenty of London venues were still making people fight the door before they ever heard a record. At George’s sessions, dancing was not the side attraction — it was the whole point.
George did not play safe either. He could take a room from disco and funk into jazz and fusion and expect the dancers to come with him. That trust is a big part of why Crackers became so important. Norman Jay later described Power as one of the key DJs for inner-city Black London, and people including Jazzie B, Fabio and Paul “Trouble” Anderson have all talked about Crackers as part of their foundation.
Power was not only playing records; he was identifying people. Paul “Trouble” Anderson moved from the Crackers dancefloor into DJing under George’s mentorship. That act alone links the 1970s soul scene directly to a DJ who would later become central to Kiss FM, house and garage.
After Crackers, Power expanded his club work. He promoted and DJ’d across venues including Spats, Gossips and the Electric Ballroom. By the early 1980s the Ballroom’s soul, jazz-funk and later electro-facing sessions were giving London dancers another important meeting point. Power worked there with DJs including Trouble Anderson, Paul Murphy and Gilles Peterson.
Power’s next major contribution was radio. In 1983 he co-founded London Greek Radio with Chris Harmanda, initially as an unlicensed community station serving London’s Greek and Cypriot population. Power used the name Akis on the station and remained deeply involved as LGR developed from a pirate operation into a licensed broadcaster.
The technical and organisational experience around LGR fed directly into another experiment. Alongside Gordon Mac, Tosca Jackson and engineer Pyers Easton, Power became one of the original shareholders and founders around the pirate station that became Kiss FM.
Kiss first developed in the mid-1980s as a specialist dance station built around DJs who already had real club followings. Its power came from that expertise: soul, funk, rare groove, hip hop, house and emerging dance music presented by people who lived inside those scenes rather than observing them from outside.
Power later concentrated on LGR, helping it become the first Greek-language station in Britain to secure an FM licence in 1989. His role there extended far beyond presenting: director, managing director, station manager, shareholder and mentor to younger broadcasters.
Yet his involvement with dance music never disappeared. In 1993 Power founded Nice ’N’ Ripe, a label that became closely associated with the emerging UK garage sound. Once again his career sat at the point where an older London dance tradition became infrastructure for something new.
In later years he revived the Crackers name as Crackers Radio, creating an online and DAB home for the soul, jazz-funk, disco, boogie and house tradition he had spent decades championing. He continued presenting his own Soul Crackers shows.
George Power died unexpectedly on 18 October 2018, aged 66. His influence stretches across scenes that are often written as separate chapters: 1970s soul boys, jazz-funk dancers, the Electric Ballroom, pirate radio, Kiss, LGR, UK garage and internet radio. In reality, his career shows how connected those chapters were.
Crackers: the dancers come first
The most important part of the Crackers story was not simply the records; it was the community the music made possible.
Power took over at Crackers in 1976 and became its best-known resident. The club’s Friday lunchtime and weekend sessions attracted serious dancers from across London. The room became especially important to young Black clubbers who often faced exclusion elsewhere in the West End.
The music ranged through new soul, funk, disco, jazz-funk and straight jazz. Power was prepared to test the crowd rather than simply service it. That attitude helped make Crackers one of the places from which later London dance culture would grow.
For anyone who came through rave later, the pattern is familiar even if the records are different. A committed crowd follows the selector, the selector pushes the crowd, word travels, and suddenly one room becomes more important than its size suggests. Crackers was doing that years before acid house gave the process a new soundtrack.
Electric Ballroom and the next generation
Power’s role as promoter and mentor mattered as much as his own sets.
Trouble Anderson
Paul Anderson moves from dancer to warm-up DJ under Power’s encouragement, beginning a career that would later run through Kiss, house and garage.
Electric Ballroom
Power’s Camden sessions give soul, jazz-funk and electro another major London platform.
Gilles Peterson & others
The Ballroom becomes another space where younger specialist DJs gain experience in front of committed dancers.
LGR: pirate radio as community infrastructure
London Greek Radio shows another side of Power’s work — radio built not only around music but around identity and community.
Power and Chris Harmanda launched LGR on 8 October 1983. The station began as an unlicensed service in North London, broadcasting Greek music and community programming from improvised studios and transmitters.
The early operation was properly hands-on: makeshift studios, rooftop aerials, equipment seizures and the constant job of getting the signal back after the authorities had taken it down. That pirate-radio graft matters to the later rave story. Long before dance pirates became part of every raver’s dial, Power already understood radio as something a community could build for itself when mainstream broadcasting left no room.
Its survival required the same qualities that later defined dance pirates: engineering knowledge, persistence, rooftop aerials, volunteers and a belief that communities deserved their own media. LGR eventually secured an FM licence in 1989 and became a permanent London institution.
Kiss FM: specialist club culture moves onto pirate radio
The original Kiss emerged from people who already had audiences in clubs and understood what mainstream radio was missing.
Power, Gordon Mac and Tosca Jackson were among the central figures in the station’s early formation, with Pyers Easton providing key engineering expertise. Kiss built its identity around specialist DJs playing the music that London’s clubs were already demanding.
That model became fundamental to rave. By the end of the 1980s, the relationship between clubs, specialist radio, white labels and record shops would become one of the main engines of London’s underground dance culture.
Nice ’N’ Ripe and UK garage
Power’s 1990s work proves that he was not simply preserving the soul scene of his youth.
Founded in 1993, Nice ’N’ Ripe became associated with the formative UK garage sound. The label arrived before “UK garage” had fully settled into a mainstream genre name, placing Power once again close to a new London dance movement before its wider breakthrough.
That continuity — Crackers to Kiss to UK garage — is one of the strongest reasons his career belongs inside a rave archive rather than being filed away only as 1970s soul history.
George Power through the years
From the club booth to radio, the photographs follow a career built around the same thing: putting specialist music in front of communities that were already waiting for it.
George Power.
George Power DJing.
George Power at Crackers Radio.
George Power in the radio studio.Soul Crackers on the radio
These later shows bring George back where he always made sense: selecting for people who cared about the music, joining soul, jazz-funk, disco and boogie without treating any of it like a museum piece.
Three hours of George doing what he had done for decades: digging deep and trusting the listener to stay with him.
Jazz, funk, soul, disco and boogie handled as one living dancefloor lineage rather than separate eras.
A later broadcast from George’s own archive, still joining the records together with the same taste that built his reputation.
George Power on film
Genuine moving footage of George Power behind the decks and on screen, adding the visual record required for the Hall audit.
Moving footage of George Power in the musical world he helped build across clubs, radio and London dance culture.
A second surviving moving-video source for George Power, retained as part of the Hall’s visual record.
The London continuum before and after rave
George’s story makes sense if you think of London dance music as one long conversation rather than a stack of separate genres. The Crackers crowd became DJs and promoters. Pirate radio gave specialist music somewhere to breathe. Kiss took that energy wider. Nice ’N’ Ripe then helped carry it into UK garage.
By the time rave exploded, plenty of the habits were already there: serious dancers, imported records, pirate transmitters, specialist selectors and people building their own platforms because nobody else was going to do it for them. George Power spent decades right in the middle of that chain.
Follow the London thread
Further reading & listening
The dancefloor became a network.
George Power helped connect London’s clubs, dancers, radio stations and labels across more than four decades.
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