August 19th, 1989 is 23 earth years ago.
Sigh. It’s also a radio anorak anniversary to be marked with black armbands (but only by radio anoraks).
You see, 23 years ago, Radio Caroline, the pop pirate, was broadcasting on three different frequencies from a ship anchored in the North Sea. Two of the frequencies were on ‘AM’ (or ‘Medium Wave’) and the other was on short-wave.
Now, it seems that Radio Caroline didn’t care that the short-wave frequency was reserved for emergency or military use. However, it was the use of this frequency that caused grief and upset for the various national authorities who claimed it. Radio Caroline had picked it because it seemed clear and nothing was broadcasting on it even if it had been reserved for World War II bombers or whatever.
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The frequency wasn’t used for Radio Caroline’s usual music programmes, but instead to broadcast propaganda. Religious propaganda in support of various cults of the Christian flavour.
Christianity is one of the greatest and most lucrative money-spinning cults, and Christianity by radio guaranteed those doing the broadcasting a huge income.
Indeed, the money that was passed on to Radio Caroline, in exchange for broadcasting the religious propaganda, paid for absolutely everything else. It fuelled the ship, fed the crew, and kept all three transmitters on the air.
As you can imagine, the loss of this primary income would seriously effect the entire offshore radio operation. Hence why, when the various authorities started to make contact with Radio Caroline to ask them to move to another frequency, the station’s shore support team put their fingers in their ears and hummed loudly.
With Radio Caroline ignoring them, the authorities had no alternative but to take action. On land they rounded up all the key players in the money chain, and at sea they boarded the ship in order to silence the transmissions they were complaining about.
Whilst the co-ordinated raids and arrests on land were executed across various territories without much attention (least of all by the radio anoraks), the raid on the ship came with an agonising 30 minutes of on-air death throes.
On-air death throes are radio anorak essential listening, and Radio Caroline complied brilliantly. A collection of songs that supposedly ‘meant something’ and artists that had previously been long term payola were played.
Inbetween the songs, the DJs gave a commentary of their situation, and lamented the fact that Radio Caroline would be going off the air “any second now”.
With the ‘seconds’ turning into long minutes, the race was on to find words to out ‘on-air death throe’ each other, as the DJs took it in turn to weep embarrassingly into the microphone.
Eventually the transmitters were switched off, allowing the vomit to stop filling ordinary listeners’ mouths.
I say ‘ordinary listeners’ as if anybody other than radio anoraks was actually listening. Actually, they weren’t. By 1989, there had been an end to the Musician Union’s stranglehold on radio stations through their prohibitive ‘needle-time restrictions’. Until the late 1980s, ‘needle-time restrictions’ dictated how many actual records could be played by a radio station. Where offshore radio stations were outside this law and could play as much as they wanted, by 1989 they no longer had this unique advantage, and so no longer had a purpose. The land-based radio stations could now play as many records as they wanted. Plus, they were broadcasting in far superior quality and had records before they were actually released.
All the offshore pirates could do to compete was record the songs from the chart shows on television, try to edit them and use them instead of the actual record, whilst somebody on land queued up outside HMV, bought the record and then tried to get it out to the ship.
The ordinary listeners had deserted the pirates in favour of the radio stations playing the latest songs, so when Radio Caroline was raided nobody really noticed. Well, as I said, apart from radio anoraks. Radio anoraks don’t listen to the content and would be quite happy to stay tuned to a test tone. Radio anoraks listen because the signal is coming from a ship and for absolutely no other reason whatsoever.
So, there you have it. On this day in history, ordinary people didn’t notice but a lot of people were arrested, a pirate radio ship was raided, and radio anoraks got something to record and play over and over and over again to themselves for decades to come.
England's England 