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New Somerville club Radio is a sound salvation – Metro US

New Somerville club Radio is a sound salvation

For the first few days of October, Aimee McGrath and Josh Banville’s every waking minute was spent wielding hammers and paint brushes as they attempted to finish revamping the space that’s now Radio. After all, with bands booked and the word out, the option of sitting back wasn’t there. Before they opened the Union Square venue, the pair spared a few minutes to chat. Her resolve, says McGrath, comes from one of her heroes: Winston Churchill.

“He’s my inspiration. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I’m half-English.”

Or maybe it’s his famously stoic resolve?

“Yes, exactly, that’s it,” she says.

“My inspiration is JFK,” says Banville. “I want to make enough money to have a nice place on the Cape like JFK.”

The pair met while working at Davis Square’s Joshua Tree years ago and the friendship continued at the Rosebud, where Banville, 32, tended bar and McGrath, 34, turned the back room into one of the most delightfully chill places to see bands.

“We’d always wanted to own a bar, and we just went for it. We stumbled upon this place a year and a half ago, and it was everything we wanted,” says McGrath of Radio, which was previously the Latin/hip-hop oriented Club Choices.

Radio is a bar and live mu- sic venue (currently Thurs.-Sun.) and eventually will be a full-service restaurant, too.

“We want do that right, step-by-step, and not rush it,” says Banville. “It’ll be American comfort food, but we’ll take that in stages and start simply with burgers and that type of thing.”

“We want to work for ourselves and create a place where people can have fun,” McGrath adds. “Somewhere that’s relaxed and not pretentious.”