Showing posts with label pirate radio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pirate radio. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Simply '70s: If you can't beat 'em. . . .


Sometimes, out there in the North Sea in the '60s and '70s, "pirate radio" lived up to its name.

In this case, realizing they couldn't beat
Radio Nordsee International's big pirate signal with their little pirate signal, some folks at Radio Veronica apparently thought arson on the high seas might be a winning business plan in May of 1971. As it turned out, it also made for some compelling radio -- just not for Veronica.


AS IT turned out, arson wasn't even that good of a knock-the-competition-off-the-air strategy. RNI went back on the air the next day.

It would take the Dutch government to pull the plug in 1974.

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

Your Daily '80s: (Radio) Anarchy in the U.K.


Bloody hell!

Pirate radio in the U.K.! Didn't the blokes in the Home Office take care of that in the late 1960s?

After all, it's 1982 now.



WELL, according to this documentary on Channel 4, I reckon not. I guess rock 'n' roll -- and pirate jocks -- are here to stay.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

More Daily '80s: Pirate radio in Brooklyn!


Pirate radio station WGUT rings in 1983 -- a very good year -- with its blowtorch 50-watt illegal signal reaching all the way to . . . Michigan?

It may be telling that pirate radio in 1983 was more professional and entertaining than professional radio today. It's kind of like we're all stumbling about on The Day After, only it didn't take nuclear war to get us this way.

Monday, November 16, 2009

When radio mattered


Once upon a time, radio mattered.

Once upon a time, popular-music radio mattered so much, "pirate" Top-40 stations off the English coast scared a government and provoked a massive official backlash.


Once upon a time, "pirate" disc jockeys were bigger stars than the musicians they put onto the airwaves -- and the youth of a nation fought to keep them on "free radio."


AND ONCE HER MAJESTY'S government -- in 1967 -- finally succeeded in pulling the plug, the staid facade of the British Broadcasting Corp., cracked under the weight of demands that it program for the people, not at the people. Later that year, BBC Radio 1 was born.

Top-40 BBC Radio 1.


Many of Radio 1's original DJs were hired off the pirate ships. Because the pirate ships mattered . . . and because radio mattered.

Across the pond and across four decades, things have changed mightily.
Because radio no longer matters.

At all.