It is the time of the year...

...when I remember what happened around Easter holidays 1964. There emerged a new radio station named Radio Caroline on the Medium Wave band and that station was playing my kind of music. More stations followed and in 1966 there were a lot of them on international waters around the coasts of the UK and most of them in the Thames estuary and south of the coast of Essex moored on the "Pirate Alley" From Clacton-on-sea to Frinton-on-sea.
It is now the 45:th anniversary of Radio Caroline and i will show you a QSL-card from that fabolous year of 1966 when offshore-radio was at its summit.



The BBC is also celebrating this, running special programs from the former lightship LV10 using the name "Pirate BBC Essex" from 10:th to 13:th of April.
Links:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/essex/content/articles/2007/08/01/pirate_bbc_essex_listen_live_feature.shtml
http://www.radiolondon.co.uk/kneesflashes/happenings/aprilmayjune09/TonyandArnold.pdf

A great lineup of former offshore DJ:s including Tony Blackburn and Keith Skues will attend.
Not to forget "The Boat that Rocked", the fiction movie about the abovementioned subject that is now out in the UK and will be out in the rest of Europe 16 - 17-APR-09
http://www./theboatthatrocked.com/
Watch the trailers and listen to the music! The soundtrack will be hot!

Offshore Radio

aka Pirate Radio is something that have fascinated me since my early teenages. It is also one of the major operators that made the Brittish R&R and pop-music explosion possible from early 1964.
This issue has got new actuality recently when both Pete and Roger of The Who both have given credit to Radio London and Radio Caroline for their immediate success in recent interviews.

Radio in Europe was something else than radio in the US back then, in most countries there was "public radio" only operated by governement owned monopoly and there was not much space for popular music programs and/or teenager oriented programs.
Commercial radio was not allowed except in Luxembourg but Radio Luxembourg was more or less in the hands of some few big record labels and did not provide much room for young emerging artists.
One method to overcome this was to launch a transmitter on international waters and that was what happened in the spring 1964 when Ronan O´Rahilly launched Radio Caroline.
You can read about my adventures on the airwaves in the mid-sixties here:
http://www.radiolondon.co.uk/rl/scrap60/hansa/hansqsl.html

If you Google using search phrases as "Offshore Radio", "Radio Caroline", "Radio Nord", "Radio Veronica", "Radio London" etc. you will find a lot of information.
Hans Knot in the Netherlands is THE information source:
http://www.hansknot.com
another good source is Martin van der Vens "Offshore Radio":
http://www.offshoreradio.de