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There is a long road that snakes over the edge of the West Pennine Moors and connects my small hometown of Horwich to the rest of Bolton. For a brief moment, Chorley Old Road gives you a view of the towering city of Manchester out in the distance.

The 125 bus takes you up and over that road, before descending into the dense criss-cross of terraced houses and old factories and mills, and into Bolton town centre. I’d always take the right hand side of the top deck on my journeys into town, on my way to do a show on community radio or loiter in HMV. That gave you the best view of the metropolis on the horizon. My heart would beat a little faster as it came into view. I’d imagine all the iconic musicians and writers and radio legends who had spun their webs through that city, who’d toiled over brilliant albums and crafted classic books and shared their lives through the late night radio I used to listen to under the covers at home. The Smiths, the Happy Mondays, Joy Division, Tony Wilson, Anthony Burgess, Terry Christian, Victoria Wood. The Madchester era was well past its peak, but it had laid such solid foundations that Manchester remained a cultural capital of the world… and I wanted to escape the shackles of Horwich, take off from Chorley Old Road and land right in the heart of it.

(As it happens, one of my first professional radio jobs would almost fulfil that fantasy. I was 16 years old, and after lots of badgering the producer, I was invited to spend a day fetching the coffee for Tony Wilson’s Talk of the Town, a Saturday morning chat show he presented on BBC Radio Manchester, live from the cafe of the iconic cinema and gallery The Cornerhouse. I was very excited and a little bit nervous. I had been playing it over in my head all week, playing out all the scenarios, chewing over the things that could go right and wrong. Until I sat down to watch North West Tonight on the Friday evening and learnt that Tony Wilson had in fact died. He’d been very unwell, but it was still quite sudden and caught many people by surprise, not least me. That wasn’t any of the scenarios I’d played out in my head. I turned up anyway and the show went on as a sort of tribute, hosted by the brilliant broadcaster Martin Kelner and including some of Tony’s old friends. Many years later, I ended up working with Martin at talkSPORT and talkRADIO, and our paths still cross occasionally. He often makes me a coffee to say thanks for the ones I made for him that day.)

What I hadn’t realised at the time was that amongst this iconic movement was a tiny radio station in Stockport, where some of the country’s most consequential people were honing their craft.

Stockport’s KFM was a cultural utopia. It spent the 1980s as a plucky pirate radio station, jabbing away at the more established Piccadilly Radio, before gaining a specialist music licence in the 1990s. The presenters included comedy legends Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash, some of my broadcasting heroes like Terry Christian and Geoff Lloyd, and the journalist and author Jon Ronson.

It’s where Craig and Caroline forged their working relationship, and where they developed the character of Mrs Merton and dreamt up The Royle Family. The radio station gave some iconic bands their first air time. The presenters and musicians used KFM to play around and experiment and make mistakes and find their voice, and they carved out a place for themselves at the heart of this chaotic cultural revolution in 1990s Manchester.

Last week, when I spoke to Jon Ronson for my radio show, I also asked him about his most formative cultural experiences for a lovely feature in The Sunday Times called My Cultural Firsts. It’s in the paper this Sunday, and you can read it online right now.

To my delight – and maybe because I forcefully shoved the conversation in that direction – his time at KFM came up.

I can’t share the full list here, obviously. You should buy The Sunday Times to read it all. But there was a bit of extra detail that didn’t quite make the cut, and so I can share it with you. I asked him when he first felt like he’d made it:

When I was doing a radio show in Stockport and I was in a record store, somebody standing next to me said, “You’re Jon Ronson,” and I said, “How do you know?” and she said, “You have a distinctive voice.” And I said, “Do I?”

I wondered if he knew at the time how legendary that moment in Manchester was going to become.

“Yes. I was at all the big shows. I was at all of the big, pivotal moments. It just exploded. There were a couple of really key moments, like when Stone Roses and Happy Mondays were both on Top of the Pops on the same night. I came up from London, and moving to Manchester just before all of that was a bit of a culture shock, because there weren’t many good restaurants, and it was all a little grey and falling down. My comfortable London life had suddenly vanished, and I was now in this place I didn’t really understand. Then suddenly, almost overnight, Oldham Street was like Haight-Ashbury in 1968. Kids in flares and wearing clothes that the Stone Roses would wear. It just changed overnight, and you really did feel you were at the centre of the universe. I met Tony Wilson a few times, but the people that I knew better were Tosh Ryan, who ran Rabid Records, the company behind the Buzzcocks and John Cooper Clarke. I knew Marc Riley from The Fall, [worked with] The Man From Delmonte and [was in] the Frank Sidebottom Band. We were slightly in our own orbit. I lived next door to Mani from The Stone Roses. It was such a small town. I think Tony Wilson always thought that The Man From Delmonte was a bit middle class, which was kind of ridiculous because we all lived in the same parts of Manchester. The Man From Delmonte was just a bit more artistic and a bit less laddy. But we all lived in the same shitty flats. Tony Wilson slightly looked down his nose at us, I think.”

Maybe the KFM days were so halcyon that they were never destined to end well. Jon was sacked, in a moment that became very formative in itself.

“It was a big, pivotal moment in my life. Me and Craig and Caroline used to do these wild late night shows, and we had a comparatively small but extremely engaged audience. One day a new programme controller came in and just fired us all, one by one. He decided that his business model to make the radio station more popular was at odds with my business model, which was to play unlistenable punk music. And as he fired me, he rubbed my back to console me. It blew my head off. I have never felt so upset. One man had the power to take everything away from me, and I decided I’m never going to let that happen again.”

Jon’s new book, The Castle, is all about the destabilising effect of insecure work. And it’s worth reading Jon’s whole list of cultural firsts. It includes some brilliant stories about visiting the set of Fawlty Towers, seeing The Specials and David Essex live, and how his aunt became shipwrecked with opium smugglers.

He talks about spending many of his formative years trying to escape provincial Cardiff through David Bowie albums and the writing of Jonathan Coe and Lynn Barber. He’d lose himself in their worlds, and hope that one day he could join them. Much like my journeys on the 125 bus, when I would gaze out to the promised land of Manchester – a Manchester Jon was in – and hope to one day join.