Capital begins to claw back listeners as Magic dominates.

Neil Fox delivers blow by leapfrogging former employers in race for listeners, despite GCap delivering encouraging figures after bad Q2 showing

GCap says its flagship station Capital is reaching out to a "lost generation" of radio listeners, as the station bounced back from its worst Rajar showing to date in quarter two to reclaim the position of London's third most popular commercial station.

In last week's Rajar figures for the third quarter of 2007, Capital claimed a 4.7% audience share in the London market. This was up by 0.6 percentage points from the second quarter of 2007, when it dropped out of the top three London stations for the first time in its history, behind Kiss 100.

GCap group operations director Steve Orchard credited Capital's return to the top three on revisiting its roots as a contemporary hit radio station. "We have been growing our 15- to 25-year-old demographic, which was the lost generation of listeners that we had to get back, and the station looks and feels more connected to the 24/7 buzz of London."

Orchard also defended Capital's sister station Xfm, whose audience share fell from 2.0% in the previous quarter to 1.2%, claiming that it is too early to tell whether this was the result of its switch to XU programming, using no daytime presenters.

"We've seen a 4.2% increase in audience reach year-on-year and, although it's a disappointment, we're quietly confident that Xfm will come back," he says.

Capital was, however, still far behind Emap's Magic 105.4, which broke through the 2m listener mark for the first time as it registered an audience share of 6.2%.