I’m delighted to keep stumbling upon video artifacts of pirate radio, like the 1970s Portland public access footage and 1990 shortwave pirate documentary I recently shared. Next up I’ve found a more contemporary documentary from 2014 looking at London’s pirate radio scene. The city has long been a hotbed of unlicensed radio activity, such that […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about reports that the United Kingdom’s broadcast regulator has shut down 400 pirate radio stations over the last two years, many of them situated in London. Well over a third of those Ofcom busts took place in two boroughs: Haringey in North London and Lambeth in South London. Why these […]
The Portland Radio Project is Portland, Oregon’s newest low-power FM station. However, it started as an online station, with no plans for a terrestrial broadcast. On this episode we learn why PRP made this pivot, and the philosophy behind its public service approach to broadcasting. Paul and Eric run down the top radio news stories, […]
The United Kingdom is so famous for its pirate radio stations that Hollywood made a movie about one. But as always the government is quite dour about these unlicensed signals, and has shut 400 of them down recently, according to a newspaper report. The London Evening Standard says that a quarter of the crackdowns over […]
It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed what’s news in pirate radio. Here’s what’s up, including: 22 year-old N. London pirate stays true to drum & bass; Welsh nationalists were pirate radio pioneers in 1959; protest broadcasts in Minnesota, and more. Quietus writer John Doran pays a visit to long-running North London pirate station Rude […]
While pirate radio has existed in the US since the very invention of the medium, it’s had a far more significant impact in the UK. The movie Pirate Radio dramatized how pirates forged cracks in the dam that the staid BBC built against R&B and rock n’ roll in the 60s. But British pirates retained […]
Amazon.com Widgets Sunday was the forty-sixth anniversary of Radio Caroline, one of the most famous UK pirate stations of the 1960s, and the inspiration for the recent movie Pirate Radio a/k/a The Boat That Rocked. Those radio pirates were inspired, in part, by the fact that the BBC played almost no rock music, and was […]
