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(Via The Guardian)
The unique character of British popular music owes a lot to pirate radio. In the 1960s, the original pirates illicitly brought pop music to the shores of Britain, broadcasting from ships in international waters and forcing an anachronistic BBC to launch Radio 1 in response. From the 1980s, pirate radio saw the genesis of British underground culture, as transistors on top of towerblocks became the only places broadcasting reggae, rave, jungle, drum’n’bass, garage, grime and dubstep.
But piracy has always been at odds with the law. Earlier this month, Ofcom revealed that in London alone they have seized 400 suspected pirate radio setups over the past two years. Ofcom’s head of Spectrum Enforcement, Clive Corrie, says that mostly they stop stations broadcasting because they “interfere with vital radio communications used by the emergency services and aircraft systems, and frequently cause damage to property”. This is a problem specific to the capital, since “of the 100 or so stations illegally broadcasting in the UK, around 70 of them are in London”.
London’s music scene is forever being energised by pirates, on stations such as Itch and Flex. The combination of DJ, MC and thousands of songs that will never be heard anywhere else is like musical alchemy - whole genres are created in a few hours on air. To shut them down seems perverse, but it is also what keeps pirates alive – without the cat-and-mouse chase with the police, these stations can lose their urgency.
In recent years, Ofcom has been offering a slew of stations “community licences”, allowing them legitimate FM frequencies, usually in return for local outreach. Successful pirates such as Voice of Africa and Rinse, which for a while broadcast from grime artist Wiley’s mum’s kitchen, have now been awarded community licences and are joined by new “legal pirates” such as Reprezent, which has a roster of DJs all born in the 1990s.
At the same time internet radio has taken on a lot of the experimental and ambitious agenda of pirate radio. Stations such as NTS and Radar Radio often get first plays ahead of the traditional pirates. And, just as it did in the 1960s, the BBC has also responded to pirate radio with its own national station, 1Xtra – which snaps up a lot of the pirate DJ talent.
So with lionisation from legitimate stations and endless harassment by the police, is this the end for pirates? No way. On any given day in London you can still hear around 40 stations – changing all the time as masts get torn down and new ones go up. In the incredible Drowned City documentary released last year, you see eager pirates climbing up towerblocks in the dead of night, on the run from the police, the crunch of trespassing trainers on frozen grass, all just to shove a transistor on the roof.
Pirates might not have quite as much subcultural cachet as they once did, but the fight to reclaim the airwaves from the powers that be remains enough to keep this illicit industry broadcasting however it can.
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