During the swinging sixties, an event took place which was to shake up the radio business in the United Kingdom, and was instrumental in bringing legal commercial radio as we know it today into our homes.
A young Irishman, Ronan O’Rahilly, frustrated by the fact that he couldn’t get any airplay for his own artists on UK radio as it was dominated by the BBC’s monopoly, decided to start his own radio station. As commercial radio was not permitted in Britain and the BBC had a stranglehold on the airwaves, he purchased a ship, fitted it out in Ireland as a fully self-contained radio station and sailed it to the south east of England. He anchored it in international waters just outside the four mile territorial limit free from UK jurisdiction, and on Easter weekend 1964, turned on the transmitter, and Radio Caroline was born.
Over the next few years, many more offshore stations were established around the British coast, both on ships and abandoned former WW2 forts in the Thames Estuary, giving the listeners what they wanted – non-stop pop music, not available on the BBC. The stations were synonymous with the ‘swinging sixties’ and became affectionately known as ‘pirate stations’, staffed by real radio and music enthusiasts who brought their unbounded passion for what they were doing into the living rooms of thousands. It was also a means for new and unknown artists to reach the public’s ears, and many would agree that if it hadn’t been for the ‘pirates’, the Liverpool sound would never have taken off, and certainly the American Motown and Soul genres would never have been successful in Britain.
However, all good things always seem to come to an end, and after three short years the British government passed a bill in Parliament to outlaw the stations, moving the territorial limit to twelve miles and making it illegal to advertise on the stations, work on them, and, bizarrely, even listen to them! By August 1967, all of them had closed down. All, that is, except for Radio Caroline. It continued in defiance of the law for over twenty years, struggling to survive in many forms.
In the early seventies, a similar phenomenon took place off the coasts of Holland and Belgium when many offshore stations sprung up, following in the footsteps of the hugely successful and much loved Dutch pirate, Radio Veronica. By 1974, the Dutch government had introduced their own legislation, closing the offshore stations – except for Caroline which continued.
By the eighties and nineties, some intrepid entrepreneurs still believed it worthwhile to start up an offshore station even though legal commercial radio was, by then, well established on land in most European countries. It was a way of getting on-air immediately without jumping through all of the legislative hoops involving bidding for licences, battling for limited frequencies and adhering to various imposed broadcasting restraints, either relating to programme content, maximum transmitted power, or both. Many ingenious tricks were employed to get around the offshore broadcasting laws, including commercials being placed through US advertising agencies, tenders servicing the ships secretly from unknown sources, and staff who, in true pirate tradition, were willing to risk their freedom by defying all the rules just to play music on what was, in all honesty, some of the best radio ever heard on the European airwaves.
While we now have legal commercial radio in the UK with hundreds of stations broadcasting around the country, the sad fact is that most of them are just dull, soulless clones of each other. That is, until you find a little gem of a station tucked away in the back of beyond. There are a few, especially in Aberdeenshire, which are staffed by real passionate enthusiasts possessed with that special ‘something’ which made the offshore stations so unique. There is also a multitude of modern-day ‘cyber pirates’ to be heard on the internet, many of them emulating the former offshore stations, proving that the spirit of free radio lives on.