Author: Richard Barbrook
F.M. Fatale by Richard Barbrook
Pirate Radio in 1980s London
It is 1 a.m. on a hot Saturday night at London’s King’s Cross station. Outside there is a traffic jam like the middle of a weekday rush hour. The northbound road is partially blocked by people dancing in the street. House music is being pumped out by a very loud car stereo. Outnumbered, the police look on with sullen faces. Suddenly an address is given out to members of the street party. Everybody is going to the rave!! Ten minutes later, the jam has disappeared and the station is deserted apart from the drunks and the queue for the late night bus. Why were all these people dancing in the road outside King’s Cross Station? Because they had heard on Sunrise Radio that this was the meeting point for the night’s entertainment.
Sunrise Radio is an illegal radio station which broadcasts on 88.75 FM from a tower block somewhere in East London. Along with Centreforce Radio on 88.3 FM, Sunrise is one of the leading stations in the new wave of pirate radio stations in London. At the end of 1988, the major London pirates stations stopped broadcasting so they could apply for new licences being offered by the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA). However the listeners to pirate radio stations did not go away and they have transfered their loyalties to the pirates which have continued on‑air. Over the last decade, the music pirates have been the central link in a network of venues, shops, musicians, DJs and drugdealers which make up the city’s club scene. These stations have popularised the new musical styles which only many months later make it into mainstream radio. At present, the most popular London pirates devote themselves to non‑stop house music. This is a syncretic mix of disco, dub reggae and electro pop created by the introduction of new technologies in the production and recording of music. The new pirates have not simply adopted a new style of music. They have also started to dispense with the old types of music radio inherited from the 1960s.
From the days of Radio Caroline onwards, British radio adopted the American style of personality DJs playing records. The time‑checks, news, dedications, inane chat and bad jokes were an integral part of the show as the music. There even developed a more educated version of the same style where catalogue numbers and music information replaced the usual patter. Despite years of piracy, most DJs on the illegal stations have upto now followed the same format. At their worst, the pirate DJs sounded like bad imitations of mainstream radio. At best, they sounded like a knowledgeable friend taking you through their record collection. But, nowadays, this personality DJ style is becoming as redundant as BBC announcers in dinner‑jackets. When Sunrise Radio and Centreforce Radio are peaking, it is like having a sound system coming from your radio. No dedications, no chat, no artist credits, no timechecks, just records mixed into and on top of each other, with added sound effects and jingles. The occasional burst of ads is the only break in the music. The distance between club and radio DJ styles has disappeared.
This experimentation in music radio is possible because the government has been unable to stop pirate radio. The laws against illegal broadcasting are expensive to enforce and have crucial loopholes. For example, it is still legal to advertise on pirate stations. It is also only cost a few hundred pounds to buy a transmitter and makeshift studios are cheap. Music programmes are also inexpensive as the major recording costs are paid for by the record companies! Once on‑air, there is also the possibility of making big money by using the station to promote clubs and events. As there are dozens of spare frequencies, there are plenty of people who are wanting to become pirates. With haphazard enforcement, nowadays most stations are more likely to loose their transmitters to gangsters than to the law.
Above all else, there is a growing audience for the pirates. The mainstream radio stations haven’t updated their records or their feel. For many years, the Home Office believed that the demand for pop music radio had been satisfied by Radio 1 and commercial radio. After a decade of piracy, they now know better. The ministry has decided to move British radio towards the US or European model of broadcasting. Despite Thatcher’s rhetoric, this government has carried out very little deregulation in the electronic media. In practice, it has wanted more centralised control over radio and television. Even when the Tories have encouraged new media, their initiatives have not been very successful. Both cable and satellite television are flops! Now the government is planning to licence hundreds of new commercial radio stations. But this too could run into difficulties during a period of high interest rates and falling advertising. In the forthcoming Broadcasting Bill, the Tories are promising a ‘light touch’ regulatory authority for radio. But this new body is likely to be headed by Lord Chalfont, a friend of Thatcher, MI5 and apartheid South Africa! Therefore the Tories’ plans will be more free market than free speech.
The Home Office envisages a move from a few stations broadcasting to big audiences to many stations narrowcasting to fragmented and specialised audiences. Of course, in practice, simply adding to choice of outlets might worsen some existing services. For example, additional Top 40 stations could force Radio 1 adopt a more cautious musical policy. There is also the crucial question of whether there is enough money to run all these new stations. The truth behind the hype will only be discovered as new stations come on‑air. The IBA has just started the process by licencing 21 new stations, including LJR (London Jazz Radio). This is the first specialist music channel in London and two more are promised soon. This franchise award has caused a minor scandal because leading members of LJR were seen wining and dining with Lord Chalfont before the announcement in the House of Lords restaurant. LJR also has a list of shareholders consisting of M.P.s, Lords, generals and other such people. This licence award may be dubious, but some more radical stations have won licences away from the capital.
But a jazz station was not picked simply because it had powerful friends. It was also a compromise choice. The older pirates played a wide variety of black music, including jazz. This helped start a minor jazz revival in London. LJR have employed Gilles Peterson, a veteran of many London pirates. For the IBA, jazz is black music, but only just. Nowadays it has become art and even high‑brow. But can the IBA incorporate the more ragamuffin end of the pirates into the commercial system? So far the only licences given to ex‑pirates have been on low‑power or outside London. It is rumoured that the IBA still fear that black music stations could organise riots! Groups associated with ex‑pirates, such as Kiss‑FM, Rhythm Radio, Horizon and JBC, have all sought the respectability of licences. But they all face the problem of the emergence of the new wave of pirates.
Sunrise Radio, Centreforce Radio and their peers have fundamentally changed the sound of music radio in ways which the earlier pirates never did. This is not just changing the groove from funk to house, but also the transformation of the DJ from personality to mixer. Claude Collin, a French radio analyst, believes that innovative radio can only be created by stations as ephemeral as medium itself. The experimentation on London’s pirates is possible because it is cheap and easy for amateurs to get on‑air. The institutionalisation inherent in licencing pirate radio can kill off its creative edge. In its licence bid, Rhythm Radio proposed a Channel 4 model of commissioning music programmes to try to square this circle. But this does not solve the audience’s desire to listen to continuous house music stations such as Sunrise Radio or Centreforce Radio. The reorganisation of the music industry around microelectronic technologies and the convergence of the roles of DJ, musician and producer have concentrated the leading edge of popular music in the rhythms of the sound system. The Situationists believed that the supression of art will only occur when everyone is an artist. Perhaps Sunrise Radio and Centreforce Radio proves that radical radio is only possibile when anyone can become a broadcaster.
Within this MySpace version of the electronic agora, cybernetic communism was mainstream and unexceptional. What had once been a revolutionary dream was now an enjoyable part of everyday life.