Well, we are now nearly a week into the new year but better late than never... :)
Christmas and New Year came and went and left behind some 5 lbs extra around my waist and a lot of Christmas gifts to everyone in the family. One of the most popular was Singstar for PlayStation 2 with ABBA and 80's hits included. OMG, I was about to pee in my pants when the boys started duelling late on Cristmas eve. You know, here in the Nordic countries, Santa comes in person to give the gifts away on Christmas eve and then the fun starts.
We spent New Year's Eve with our good friends and brought the PS2 and Singstar eguipment along and continued singing until 2 am. Great fun! The lady in that family sings in a choir and her husband is a teacher but also a really skilled multi-instrumentalist, drums, bass guitar, rhythm and solo guitar and as it turned out, also a very good singer! So the competition was tough!
Another nice gift was "Mamma Mia - The Movie" on DVD. When putting the DVD in and starting to watch the trailers I was quite surprised to see this:
As I was quite an "Anorak" in my teens, I really have to go and watch this movie if it comes to Finland. The story is about some Pirate Radio stations competing with each other on international water, broadcasting to the UK offshore from the coast of Essex but also facing a common enemy: the British governement, especially the Postmaster General and the BBC.
The story is fictional but loosely based on the commercial offshore stations that were operating from international waters and broadcasting rock and pop music in the mid sixties but got prohibited by the Marine &c Broadcasting Offences Act of 1967
Followers of Pete Townshend's blog back in 2006 may have noticed that Pete gave a great credit to those stations and how they influenced the music scene of the UK and Europe at that time when most public radio stations like the BBC only broadcasted some 1/2 hour of pop and rock music once a week.
The station with the strongest and best signal here in Finland was Radio London and could be received all day long during the winters of 1965 to 1967 and that station was my source of new exciting music and the one where I first heard "Can't Explain" in early 1965.
The Radio London fan site, operated by Mary and Chris Payne contains all the Fab40 charts of Radio London aka BigL from the very start to the bitter end: http://www.radiolondon.co.uk/rl/scrap60/fabforty/index.html Radio London (as also the pioneer station Radio Caroline) was a breeding ground for many famous (in Europe and the UK...) DJ's and TV-personalities like Kenny Everett, Keith Skues, Tony Blackburn and John Peel to name a few.
A tip: put in "Hans" into the search engine of the Radio London site and hit "search"... ;)
Well... Hans Knots' site is a real goldmine for everyone interested in offshore Pirate Radio, follow the link to Offshore radio Stations on the right of his homepage.
Edit Jan 19:
I went searching for "Radio London" on YouTube the other day and I found a very nice video:
Here we see a lot of familliar "voices" in action. They who own the album "The Who Sell Out" will recognise the jingles. :)
Remember to stop Garys' radio station by hiting the square button while you watch these videos.
By the way, "The Boat That Rocked" will be out in Europe in the mid of April this year.
