Broadcasting radio without a licence can be fun, although of course you shouldn’t try this at home. As long as technically your transmissions are not causing anybody any grief, as in, you aren’t causing maydays from aircraft to go unheard or the little old lady next door to not be able to watch Corrie, then what’s the problem? Nothing. But it is against the law and you can be very heavily fined or go to prison for far longer than if you’d decided to systematically torture and kill a child.
Today there remain up to a hundred radio pirates around the UK, and in all cases they are using their transmitters for the subversive purpose of, erm, playing music.
Hmmm. Now, this is the bit I don’t really get. Ok, for those currently producing the next big thing, pirate radio is the only way to get said next big thing to the people, assuming that radio is still the method of delivery to the masses (There’s an argument that it no longer is). Legal radio, with the possible exception of the BBC’s digital only station 1Xtra, refuses to ‘break’ the new and unsafe. Definitely this is the case with the commercial sector. The next big thing has to already be the now big thing before commercial radio will touch it. The only exception of course being anything produced via one of Simon Cowell’s hour long pop promotional TV commercials like the X Factor.
Most of today’s pirate radio is in the hands of da yoof, and those most likely to be producing the next best thing. However, excitingly, there are a tiny handful of old folk who have being playing at piracy for decades. What wise and alternative radio can we expect from these fellows (it’s always men, never women) in their 40s and 50s? Will they use their hijacking of the airwaves to bring down the Government or to say “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take this any more!” as they orchestrate the revolution?
Nope, damn it. They’ll play nice safe pop and rock records from over 30 years ago. The same safe records that the commercial sector plays. Some of these granddad pirates will even go through all the expense and danger of putting on a transmitter in order to play recordings of entire radio broadcasts made over 30 years ago.
They’ll do this not because it’s a rousing speech or landmark revelation that was broadcast 30 years ago and we need it to re-educate the population or give them hope, but because it’s something safe and bland and represents some imagined safe and bland childhood they think they may have had. Bizarrely, all that the recording contains is a safe radio station of the day playing safe records that were current when the tape was recorded but are now 30 years old and even safer. Surely this is the behaviour of people with a mental condition you may suggest.
Who knows. It’s certainly not radical behaviour. It is the behaviour of old and pointless pirates. It is a waste of the potential power to empower that truly free radio should have.
Look. We have a confused country limping its way into becoming a third world nation. We have fearful futures with the undead like Tony Blair and his New World Order about to take control of us from a central command centre in Europe. We have global warming or destruction or whatever else we can find to be paranoid about. We have whole sectors of the population feeling disenfranchised, frightened, troubled, angry and suspicious of each other and everything around them. We want to be free. We are fed up with being so overcrowded, so alienated, so used and so abused. We want to hear people who sympathise with us being as mad as hell and not wanting to take it any more.
So what do the pirate radio stations run by the old people do? They put their fingers in their ears and play Devil Gate Drive by Suzi Quatro. Jeez.
We have racial disharmony, homophobic attacks, anger, guns, drugs out of control, confusion and fear. The old people are wise. They can call for calm or call for revolution. They can speak of solutions that the politicians daren’t speak of, or don’t want us to consider or know exist. These are our needs. So the old pirates give us Popcorn by Hot Butter.
It is time that the grass roots rebelled instead of being so compliant. It is time that pirate radio meant wise words showing us how to think freely and outside of the corporate politically correct box. But, we get Una Paloma Blanka.
Pirate radio operators from the older generations should be absolutely ashamed.
England's England 