Coming from London, a city within which it is perfectly normal for over 60% of the radio stations available to be unlicensed, my move to Liverpool was a wake-up call in this respect.
Not only was there far less radio choice in this city, but absolutely none of the stations was a ‘pirate’.
This seemed very odd to me, considering that Liverpool contains an extremely large number of ‘yoofs’ because of its massive universities, its extensive underground music scene, huge nightlife choice, and large number of locals into being ‘gangsta scallies’ and that.
Yet there is nothing.
Liverpool was (as it is always keen to remind the world) the birthplace of the Beatles, of Merseybeat, of Gerry and the Pacemakers, of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, of Echo and the Bunnymen, of The Farm, of The Scaffold. Erm, ok, well let’s forget The Scaffold. The world outside of Liverpool has. But it’s not as if Liverpool isn’t providing new music for the world.
Yet there is nothing.
One legal radio station, Juice FM, caters for the ‘yoof’, and it is mainly biased to dance-oriented pop songs. The thriving local alternative music scene has no radio outlet whatsoever, despite the abundance of clubs and venues where these bands and artists regularly play.
With no ‘legal’ airplay you’d expect a pirate radio station to spring up to fill the gap.
Yet there is nothing.
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| (Not actually Liverpool pirate radio at all!) |
There have been a few pirate stations over the decades beaming in from outside of Liverpool, and, in their day, helping provide alternative radio for ‘da yoof’ of that day.
One station, Merseyland Alternative Radio, still operates at weekends tucked away on AM (or as they prefer to call it, ‘Medium Wave’). This appears to be a rock-oriented ‘oldies’ service aimed to appeal to listeners normally satisfied by ‘Magic AM‘ but not quite near dead enough to tune over to BBC Merseyside.
With a warm presentation style based on the BBC Light Programme of the 1960s, and with some of the shows sounding like ‘Family Favourites‘, it appears to provide a very niche service for a very niche elderly audience. It plays songs in clumps of twos or threes and has presenters whose main or sometimes sole task is to read out the names of presenters who will be on a bit later to continue reading out the names of presenters who will be on later still.
However, it’s not coming from Liverpool, so although it can sometimes be heard in Liverpool, it’s very much like any of the commercial stations with studios based hundreds of miles away, so still doesn’t actually satisfy the criteria of being pirate radio for Liverpool itself.
Liverpool does have pretty good campus radio stations for its main Universities. Radio 1 breakfast show host Nick Grimshaw even cut his teeth on the one for the University of Liverpool. Neighbouring Knowsley also has one (‘KCC Live‘) for a community college that can be heard across all but the very south of Liverpool on FM. However, nobody seems to be listening to the actual Liverpool ones as they are locked away on hard to receive AM or online.
A few years ago a couple of club owners and DJs were actually considering pirate radio and I got very excited. Sadly their plans never matured, leaving Liverpudlians devoid of a radio outlet for next generation music and modern experimental broadcasting, stuck instead with the safe and out of date homogenised commercial radio formats as the only choice for the radio starved youth.
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