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Chapter 8
The Radio Station

I’m not sure how much credit we can take for this one.  I suspect it’s actually fairer to refer to ourselves as willing participants rather than instigators this time around.  This tale’s more about the younger generation, and you’ve got to hand it to them.  For when it comes to technology they are far more up to speed with things than we ever would be.  We were all far happier with a good book, but on this occasion we were happy to go along for the ride.
It was actually The Quiet One’s kid brother that started all this off.  He had a thing about pirate radio stations.  It was all he listened to.  It wasn’t really any big ideological stance.  He just preferred the music.  House music.  Hardcore uproar.  You’d go round his place, and the noise would engulf you.  Personally, I could take the musical mayhem.  But the incessant banter of the DJs or MCs would drive me dotty.  And the blighters would never ever tell you what they’d just been playing.  You’d be sitting there thinking that was a cracking tune, and then it’d be gone, never to be heard again.  Strange times.

And the pirate stations would come and go.  One week you’d become a devotee of a particular outfit.  The next they’d be gone.  The official stations’ signals becoming stronger, and so on, intruding on the unofficial.  Or you’d hear of a raid by the authorities.  Another outfit closed down, as if that made any difference.  That really got us going.  All the things wrong with the world, and you had watchdogs clamping down on kids broadcasting some crazy records to the city.  What was going on?

The Quiet One’s kid brother, we noticed, had been doing an awful lot of reading up on the ins and outs of broadcasting technology, and he’d taken to disappearing during the days with a few of his mates we knew not where.  That is until one evening rather sheepishly he poked his head round The Quiet One’s door.  Gents, he said, we’ve got the wherewithal now to set up our own radio station, so don’t suppose you know of a suitable location we could use?

We should have guessed.  It ought to have been pretty obvious what the kid and his cronies were building up to.  All those manuals.  All those scribbled notes, diagrams and circuits.  Those piles of 12”s accumulating.  Neatly stacked and sorted.  The clues were there.  Not sure really how we missed them.  Probably too many noses buried in books.  As was our way.  But even to us latterday Luddites the idea of being in on starting up a pirate radio station had a certain something.  After all the romance of radio was long established.  Resistance fighters with receivers squirreled away.  Tony Hancock and The Radio Ham.  Crystal sets and shortwave broadcasts from far flung locations.  The Dread Broadcasting Corporation and The Clash’s Capital Radio.  All the time spent listening to the pirate stations.  And now it could be us.

But a suitable location?  That was easier said than done.  By tradition most of the London stations were broadcasting from requisitioned flats in run down tower blocks.  That was not really an option round our way.  For even the most nightmarish of flats, of which there were plenty, there was a queue a mile long and who’d want to share with us.  No, we needed something a bit different.  But first things first, and we had to ask a few questions about how our budding broadcasters had come by the necessary equipment.  And it has to be said they looked decidedly shifty, and were suitably evasive in their answers, which made great play of there being a new culture of buying and selling, where money was a bit passé.  Oh well.  Ask a silly question. 

After a few days of thinking The Fair One among us had his brainwave, which it certainly seemed initially was more of a brainstorm.  The old toilets, he said.  The ones by the gasworks.  Remember them?  The ones closed down due to misuse?  Well we could put them to good use.  When we had stopped howling with laughter we realised he was serious.  I am serious, he said.  It’s perfect, he said.  No one but no one would suspect they could house a radio station.  Okay, we countered, and just how are going to gain access?  Easy, we’ll speak to the Council and say we want to use them as an art studio.  There’s always grants available for such things, and the money would go to a good cause.  I’ll ring the Council now, he added with a huge grin.  We left him to it.

Now The Fair One can be a real charmer when he sets his mind to it, and before we knew it he was dangling a set of keys under our noses.  Voila, he said, our public awaits.  The kids were cock-a-hoop and couldn’t wait to get cracking.  But The Fair One is a hard man, and pointed out that as his name’s in the frame we should do some things by the book.  For the sake of appearances.  And so the budding broadcasters were dispatched with mops and buckets, bottles of bleach and tins of paint, overalls and rubber gloves.  Very conscientious they were too.  Amazing how young minds can be focussed when they need to be.  So before we knew it we had some very swish studios to set ourselves up in. 

The more artistic amongst us were to all intents and purposes pottering around painting and whatnot whilst more to the point the kids were setting up their gear for the first broadcasts.  Despite all the careful preparations there were plenty of teething troubles, though I was mesmerised by it all.  After all I struggled to wire a plug, and here were kids we’d watch grow up fiddling with some pretty complicated stuff.  So I was a little bit emotional when, somehow or another, the very first broadcast of Everything FM lit up the airwaves of a selected sector to the south of our city. 

For purely pragmatic reasons broadcasting was restricted to weekdays between around three and six in the afternoon.  This avoided stretching resources too much, and stopped things turning stale.  Always a danger that when you’re doing something day in and day out.  Nevertheless Everything FM must have got things pretty right for the kids started to build up quite a dedicated fan base within their catchment area.  News spread by word of mouth through clubs and colleges.  White labels and promos started to arrive unsolicited.  Unknown DJs and producers turned up with DAT tapes or whatever was the currency at that time.  Quite a cottage industry was growing up.  And you can imagine we had some fun with puns about that.

The best part of all was the deal done by The Fair One for there to be a special hour once a week dedicated to The Outside of Everything.  A prime time tea time slot, no less.  A chance for us to communicate with the masses, inculcate the youth.  Ah the strain was astonishing.  Which slices of soul to serve up?  What messages to get across however subtly?  It really got to us.  We almost fell out irreconcilably.  How many times can you play Express Yourself?  Should we stick to the obvious in the hope of connecting?  Or be wilfully obscure in the name of education?  The debates were endless, and the compromises painful.  In a way thankfully it had to end.

For Everything FM almost became a victim of its own success.  There are apparently people out there that monitor the airwaves.  Searching for the seditious?  More like just jobsworths joylessly doing their duty.  The more technical minded among the kids were highly suspicious that someone was hacking into their wavelength, or something of the sort.  So it was no surprise when one afternoon a helicopter was circling overhead.  The kids knew the end of nigh and started removing records and other valuables.  And before too long the official raid took place.  It was all a bit embarrassing really.  Some toad in an anorak had the official papers, and the police had the decency to look suitably embarrassed as they removed the wherewithal which had been so carefully acquired.  So that was that.
Except it wasn’t really.  We had a whale of a time stirring things up.  The local press was a good place to start.  The Fair One used his charm on one of the cub reporters there.  Faceless bureaucracy clamping down on youthful enterprise, that sort of thing.  Give the kids a chance to express themselves.  Poor mites can’t do right for doing wrong.  Freedom of speech.  Whatever happened to that?  We demand an enquiry, said the local paper.  We were only doing our job, said the authorities.

What we hadn’t banked on was the local people.  We were so wrapped in what we’d been doing that we hadn’t given any consideration to those locals out and about.  Seems so many people had been seen going and coming from the converted conveniences with records under their arms, and so on, that it hadn’t taken too much imagination to work out what was going on.  And people are often more accepting than you’d assume.  They rather liked the idea.  Had a hint of harmless fun about it.  And when you think of the state those old toilets had been left in, well the broadcasting had to be a good thing.  Keeps them off the streets, and all that.  Petitions were put together, and letters written to the local MP.  He took up the case, oddly enough, much to our chagrin, and even asked a question in the House.  Our kids were a cause celebre, but soon became yesterday’s news. 

Somewhere buried among my old vinyl though is a white label 12” which is a slice of the roughest old house you ever heard, with a sample from one of our shows.  The Fair One, no less, in his best Richard Burton declamatory way, telling the world this is The Outside of Everything.  There’s worse souvenirs to have stowed away.

© 2008 John Carney
Illustration © 2008 Alistair Fitchett