- The Observer, Sunday 8 March 2009
- Article history
Staff of ship-based pirate radio station Radio Caroline arrive at Felixstowe after the station's closure, 15th August 1967. Photograph: Terry Disney/Getty Images
"I've got quite a good drugs story,' says the DJ Johnnie Walker. 'My girlfriend in London was an Irish girl called DeeDee. I used to live with her in Kilburn on my week off, and one day she said, 'Johnnie, do you need some spliffs for the ship?' I told her that none of us smoked out there.
"She said, 'You've got to be kidding. You must get bored, and this is just what you need.' So she rolled me up three joints, and I took them back to the ship.
"She said, 'If you want any more, I'm always listening around half nine. Just say you've run out of tea.'"
Walker got high with his friends and suddenly found himself popular. "So on my show at about half nine, I said, 'I just want to say good evening to Dee in Kilburn, and we've run out of tea, love.' Two days later a padded envelope arrives with four big spliffs in. And three days after that, sackfuls of mail with Typhoo and Tetley in it."
Walker, 63, is sitting in his club in Greek Street, drinking sparkling water. It is 40 years since he joined Radio 1, a decade since graduating to Radio 2, but his spliff stories are newly in demand. He is featured in composite form in the forthcoming Richard Curtis film The Boat That Rocked, a comedy about the last days of pirate radio in 1967, before the government made it illegal and sanctioned Radio 1 in its place. The movie features the usual pliable gang - Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Rhys Ifans - with Philip Seymour Hoffman filling the slot vacated by Hugh Grant. Based only loosely on real events, the film has music, sex and a sinking, and bears about as much relation to marine broadcasting as Notting Hill did to Notting Hill. Walker is a consultant on the movie, and he has seen rushes, which has led him to conclude that those aboard The Boat That Rocked "definitely had a better time than we had - more drugs, more women...".
There were women, Walker says, but they were not a regular occurrence. "Fans would come out to visit the ship. I wouldn't call them groupies. This was the 60s - people were just making love all over the place, no Aids or anything. So girls would come to the ship, and we'd tie their boat alongside, and we used to get the engineer to take their boyfriends off to look round the transmitters and the generators, and we'd take them downstairs to the cabins."
Fellow DJ Tom Lodge once took his long-term partner on board, and she used to waft around the ship in a see-through negligee. "Some of these Dutch sailors [who fished and cooked as the music played] would be on board the boat for three months at a time, so they were pretty horny, and it caused a lot of trouble; women were banned from then on."
When Radio Caroline began in March 1964, the world of British pop was a contradictory place. The music was unprecedented, an extraordinary burst of energy and frustration that still reverberates. Within 18 months, the Beatles, the Stones and the Who had thrown off not only post-war austerity and authority but also any notion that young people would ever be governable again. But the institutions that controlled the music - the stuffy record companies, the curfewed ballrooms, the weary, disbelieving parents - tried to keep the dampers on everything. No one had a more moralising grip on entertainment than the BBC, which rationed pop to a few hours a week on the Light Programme. No wonder teenagers screamed at their idols at concerts: it was an orgiastic release, true unbound freedom even as they were being levered back into their seats.
Radio Caroline began out of self-interest - its founder was a chancing young Irish pop manager called Ronan O'Rahilly, frustrated by the lack of outlets for his new talents, but he soon realised what could be unleashed. O'Rahilly had discovered something intriguing: unlicensed ships in Europe with pirate transmitters playing music of their choosing to a tiny audience in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. He thought he could do the same at greater volume for the UK. He anchored a ship in international waters off the Essex coast, where it escaped British legal jurisdiction, and hired DJs from British ballrooms and pop stations in the United States and Canada. O'Rahilly named his enterprise after Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the US president, who was six when he saw a photo of her in a magazine and considered her fresh and exciting - just the kind of image he was keen to promote.
Initial output was dignified, with shows aimed at housewives and children home from school; they did play the Beatles, but also the Searchers and Ken Dodd. But soon there was competition from other nearby ships, particularly "Wonderful Radio London", and they upped the tempo (the former Radio London DJ Keith Skues described his station as the "swingingest"); soon the Rolling Stones and the Byrds were enthralling anyone who, like a young Johnnie Walker listening in a suburb of Birmingham, could thread a long wire from their window and manipulate the spotty reception.
As a listener you felt you were part of a secret club, under the bedclothes with your pop stars and your favourite jocks. It was better than Radio Luxembourg, which only played records in part, and whose DJs seemed emasculated. The pirates talked a full-blooded language, even those on Caroline North, a second ship moored near the Isle of Man, who were keen to foster the personality of "zany": Jerry "Soopa" Leighton, Mick Luvzit, "Daffy" Don Allen, and they found an outlet for new creativity. Aboard Radio London, Kenny Everett developed his alter-egos and parodied Tony Benn; John Peel's The Perfumed Garden planted the seeds of bearded progressive rock. O'Rahilly tried to instruct the DJs about his theory of "Loving Awareness", which entailed much free-spiritedness and hugging. Unsurprisingly, Whitehall did not see this as innocent pleasure.
Harold Wilson's Labour government of 1964 was initially slow to respond to the pirate ships, not least because it held a narrow majority and feared alienating potential voters. But it was goaded into action by the Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe and the postmaster-general, Anthony Wedgwood (Tony) Benn, and soon familiar battle lines were drawn: the suits versus the hairies.
Benn railed against the unlicensed use of wavelengths that might interfere with emergency signals and confuse ships at sea. He banned supplies to the ships from British ports, and his support strengthened in 1966 when a takeover dispute between the unlicensed stations Radio Atlanta and Radio City resulted in the fatal shooting of Radio City's owner. The Musicians' Union claimed that the ships were not only failing to "keep music live" but didn't even pay for the records they played. And beneath the official complaints lay the festering establishment unease that young people were simply having too much fun.
"This explosion of music and fashion and teenage excitement - the lid had been kept on it for so long," Walker says. "So when it burst, it really burst, and it did scare the government. They didn't understand the half of it, but they did understand the unifying power of music. That's why the American government put Elvis in the army and why the British police hounded Brian Jones in an attempt to destroy the Stones. We knew the BBC were recording all our output from Caversham, and they were hoping we would get political and start having a go at Harold Wilson, but we never did."
Pirate DJs had more mundane things on the agenda. "Basically it was sleep in, read letters, pick records, eat and do your show," Walker says. "£25 a week, plus your on-shore leave paid for." The DJs worked two weeks on, one week off. "While you were broadcasting it was this really vibrant exciting place but if ever it went off air you realised you were just on this rusting hulk in the middle of the sea and you wanted to get off."
When the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act made the ships illegal in the summer of 1967, Walker took a heroic stance. There was a big farewell party in a ballroom with Procol Harum and many eager girls, but he always planned to return to the ship and defy the law. Most of his fellow DJs had other ambitions; some had contracts for Radio Luxembourg, others for the newly announced Radio 1. "But everyone knew what would happen if the government legitimised an onshore radio station - it's what we got when Radio 1 started, a terrible station to begin with. The government and the BBC were pretty much the same thing back then." Walker says he has seen a BBC memo from 1967 addressed to the Radio 1 controller: "On no account should Johnnie Walker be employed for at least a year to let the taint of criminality subside."
Walker now had to return to Caroline not from Harwich but via Dutch waters. He says that before the ban he was never told what to play ("The only memos from the office in London would be: 'There's a journalist coming out to the ship - don't be hanging out in your pyjamas.'"). But from August 1967 things changed. With no advertising revenue, slots on the playlist were sold, for about £100 a week.
Walker tells a story that may have become amplified with repeated airings. "Don Arden, the promoter [he managed the Small Faces and Lynsey de Paul, was Sharon Osbourne's father, and died in 2007], had recorded "Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler on the Roof, and it was dire. He bought the record on to the station.
"Unbeknown to me, Don has organised this big party at his house, and he's got radios in every room, and is telling people that 'my record is going to be on Radio Caroline'. He's got a sheet, similar to mine: 'Between 10 and 11 your record will be on.'
"So we're getting to half-ten, and where's your record, Don? 'Oh, it'll be on.'
"A quarter to eleven, still no record. Ten to eleven. At five to eleven, I say, 'I've been putting off playing this for a whole hour but I've got to play it now. This is the worst record you've ever heard. I wonder if we can improve it by whipping it up to 78?' So I turn him into a chipmunk. 'That's no good, let's try it at 33.' So basically I trash his record, and Don Arden goes absolutely ballistic. He threatened he'd break my legs."
On Caroline North, another popular DJ was seeing similar compromises. "We were infested with these awful records that had no right to be on the radio - pay for play," Tony "The Royal Ruler" Prince told me in the London office of his latest project, Wedding TV. "But this was before the bill came in. [Emperor] Rosko used to throw them overboard. One of the biggest hits was the Dubliners' "Seven Drunken Nights", which wouldn't have been a hit if Caroline North and South hadn't been playing it every hour every day for weeks. It drove the listeners crazy."
Prince, 64, has a compelling selection of photographs on his laptop: "That's me with Elvis... with the Crickets... Marie Osmond... Alvin Stardust... David Cassidy... This is me in the studio - in the middle of the ship, so that when you were in a force nine gale it didn't move quite so much. And there was a tape recorder here for when things got really bad and the stylus started lifting off the record."
He comes upon a photograph of himself and Harold Wilson. "I said to him, 'You made me unemployed, Mr Wilson.' He said, 'What were you - a miner?'"
Unlike Johnnie Walker, Tony Prince did jump ship in 1967, after seeking guidance from his listeners. "It was about 90% in favour of coming ashore and looking after myself, not doing anything silly. So we came ashore, and there was a double-page spread in the Mirror of Dave Lee Travis carrying me off the tender. There were a lot of fans in mourning. But I was pleased, because the station was quite patently crap compared to its heyday."
Like a prizefighter who can't hear the bell, Radio Caroline is still going. It did not die in the late 60s, and it has survived sinkings, seizures, numerous wavelength changes and parodies (Smashie and Nicey set their pirate years on Radio Geraldine). It is now legal, headquartered in Maidstone, Kent, and available on Sky and the internet. But you will not hear waves in the background. The breakfast show is broadcast from Los Angeles, and last week featured an interview with Bill Nighy about his role in The Boat That Rocked (he said he used to be a fan of Caroline as a teenager, lapping up anything by the Rolling Stones).
In a tame twist, the pirate spirit lives on at the BBC. Keith "Cardboard Shoes" Skues, now 70, presents Pirate Radio Skues on BBC Radio Norfolk on Sunday nights, while Johnnie Walker has a Saturday-night show on Radio 2 called Pirate Johnnie Walker. They both play big hits from their shipping days, though it is a cruel irony that something may be lost with high-quality digital reception.
On the Caroline website, founder Ronan O'Rahilly reveals that he was recently told by someone close to him that he had wasted his life on Radio Caroline, but he disagreed. "I don't think that creating something that has provided harmless free enjoyment for millions of people for four decades could really be described as a waste. It probably represents the most useful way I could have spent my life."
• The Boat That Rocked opens in the UK on 3 April.
Pirate radio: the history
July 1949 The Wireless Telegraphy Act bans radio stations not sanctioned by the government or the BBC.
March 1964 Radio Caroline is founded by the Irish businessman Ronan O'Rahilly in international waters off Felixstowe. It's the first pirate station to broadcast solely in English.
July 1964 Tony Blackburn joins Radio Caroline. At 21, he is the youngest DJ on British radio.
September 1964 Keith Skues joins Radio Caroline. In December 1965 he moves to Radio Luxembourg.
December 1964 Radio London, brainchild of Texan entrepreneur Don Pierson, begins broadcasting in direct competition with Radio Caroline, 3½ miles off Frinton-on-Sea. Kenny Everett is in the line-up.
May 1966 Pierson starts Swinging Radio England not far from WRL in the North Sea. Johnnie Walker begins his career here before moving to Radio Caroline.
March 1967 John Peel begins his British radio career on Radio London's midnight-2am shift.
August 1967 The Marine Broadcasting Offences Act outlaws pirate radio; all stations are forced to close. Six weeks later, the BBC launches Radio 1, employing many pirate radio DJs, including Blackburn, Everett and Peel.
part of the above appeared at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/mar/08/pirate-radio-johnnie-walker