[Community Radio] Pirate radio station back on air

[Michelle McGuire]

Pirate radio station back on air

Julia Day, radio correspondent
Thursday May 12, 2005

One of the original pirate radio stations where John Peel, Kenny  
Everett and Tommy Vance kicked off their careers is making a comeback  
this weekend, 38 years after it was closed down.

Radio London, which broadcast from a rusting minesweeper moored in  
the North Sea off Essex in the late 60s, will be back on air this  
Saturday. To bypass British broadcasting regulations it is being  
beamed from the Netherlands.

Programmes for the station will be recorded live in studios in Essex  
town of Frinton-on-Sea and sent to the Netherlands where a  
transmitter will broadcast them back to the east of England on the AM  
wavelength.
It is a similar method used by the first pirate station, Radio  
Luxembourg, which broadcast to pop-starved British teenagers from the  
European principality in the 1960s, and more recently Atlantic 252,  
which broadcast to the UK from Dublin.

The Big L, as Radio London was nicknamed, will also be available on  
Sky channel 940 and streamed on the internet.

The station will be aimed resolutely at over-30s with music from the  
1950s onwards plus new tunes from the likes of Elton John and Sir  
Cliff Richard, who is helping to launch the station.

Mike Read, the former BBC Radio 1 DJ, TV's Pop Quiz presenter and  
recent I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! intern, will broadcast a  
weekday show and hosts the station's inaugural programme.

The man behind the relaunch, Ray Anderson, was still at school when  
Radio London was last on air. For him this week's launch is the  
culmination of eight years of trying, and failing, to get a permanent  
licence for the station in the UK.

"I have been very disillusioned with the Radio Authority and now  
Ofcom. They don't allow competition in to the market and protect  
exiting franchises. I have applied for licences before for other  
projects and it's an exclusive club," he said.

So Radio London's self-confessed "number one fan" set about finding a  
way to relaunch the station bypassing the media regulator, eventually  
securing the Dutch transmission site.

Mr Anderson is pitching the station as a commercial alternative to  
BBC Radio 2, playing the best old and new music, but leaving the  
garage, jungle and techno to younger stations.

"There is a little niche there. A lot of radio has been dumbed down  
and has lost the quality and the fun. We feel there's room for a more  
intellectual approach with personality DJs, not people who just read  
from cards.

"John Peel and Kenny Everett started here and because of that the  
standard is set very high," he added.
Radio London was one of a clutch of radio stations - like Radio  
Caroline - that broadcast from ships in the North Sea.

It was not until 1973 that the country's first commercial stations,  
Capital Radio and LBC, were born.
British law only prohibited commercial radio broadcasting on land, so  
pirate stations took to the seas to exploit the legal loophole  
allowing broadcasters to transmit from offshore waters.

However, the loophole was closed in 1967 and the pirates were closed  
down. A fortnight later BBC Radio 1 was launched to cater for the  
teenagers who had become addicted to the pirate stations and many of  
the pirate DJs, like Tony Blackburn, joined Radio 1 instead.

These days pirate radio is synonymous with underground dance and  
black music stations, especially in the London area. Many new stars  
such as rapper Dizzee Rascal have attributed their success to the  
play they first received on pirate stations.

Ofcom is attempting to turn the stations legitimate by offering new  
community licences for stations run for and by local people.

Source: Media Guardian
http://media.guardian.co.uk/radio/story/0,12636,1481672,00.html