(Credits: BBC)
Sat 17 January 2026 14:42, UK
It won’t be that much longer before the BBC will be celebrating the diamond anniversary of its flagship Radio 1 station, next year in fact.
It took the BBC enough time to catch up to pop’s rapidly evolving trends, London in full swing and the Summer of Love just passing, when the corporation finally sought to receive the countercultural memo sent by the Radio Caroline and Radio London pirate stations operating outside UK jurisdictions, playing the Top 40 hits the kids cared about while BBC programming was still struck on the dreary Light Programme scheduling.
So, on the morning of September 30th, 1967, the BBC split the station into two, BBC Radio 1 and 2. After Tony Blackburn’s official introduction, the first full song spun was that week’s number two, ‘Flowers in the Rain’ by The Move, skirting past the chart-topping ‘The Last Waltz’ by Engelbert Humperdinck, considered far too staid for the fresh new station.
From then on, BBC Radio 1 has stood as a national musical fixture, soldiering through its own identity crises when even the Caroline heroes became old hat across the 1980s, facing off the plethora of DAB challengers, questions of relevance in the shifting cultural and racial make-up of the country, and the perennial tussle between keeping a finger on the pulse and the BBC’s de facto duties as the voice of the establishment.
Still, it looks like Radio 1 isn’t going anywhere soon, still racking up millions of weekly listeners and branching off into the much-loved spin-off stations Anthems, Dance, and 1Xtra. Even as late as the 2010s, Radio 1 was still able to garner intense listener engagement, boasting one broadcast that broke serious records in the station’s entire history.
So, what is BBC Radio 1’s most played content?
Across the early 2010s, EDM and dubstep culture were at their commercial peak, finding a presence beyond dance culture and into the realms of rock and metal festivals around the world. At its centre was Sonny Moore. Fronting the post-hardcore band From First to Last, Moore began indulging in an electronic side-project under the moniker Skrillex, and after a string of highly successful releases, Skrillex was catapulted to superstar status in the converging worlds of headlining metal and arena-filling club music.
It was during this career explosion that Skrillex gifted BBC Radio 1 with their curious milestone. Only a few months after the Leaving EP, Skrillex took part in the station’s acclaimed Essential Mix series, offering a two-hour mashup twisting across electronic acts and remixed artists as diverse as Disclosure, Deftones, Kendrick Lamar, and old favourites Boys Noize.
Listeners certainly dug it. First broadcast in the early hours of Saturday, June 15th, 2013, Skrillex’s record label tweeted that his Essential Mix was the “single most played piece of content in BBC Radio 1 history across all media.”
The Essential Mix is no longer available to stream on BBC now, but Skrillex’s official YouTube upload counts some respectable numbers for a mere mix, boasting over 3.2million views in 2026.
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