In the week where the BBC marks it's 90th anniversary in total disarray over how
it has dealt with child abuse allegations, both on air and off, the resignation
of director-general George Entwistle, with a controversial 12 month salary
pay-off of £450k, and the subsequent resignations of the director of news Helen
Broaden and her deputy I thought it a good time to look back at another notorious
period of the BBC's chequered history from the late 1950's and the early 1960's',
as documented by Peter Moore, owner of the current Radio Caroline station.
In the late fifties the cult of the 'teenager' began to
emerge with the appearance of American style 'teddy boys' copying role models
seen on American imported movies. With this came American music; rock and roll,
blues and rhythm & blues were copied and then modified by young British
artists. Opportunity for hearing such music on BBC radio was limited to a
Sunday afternoon review of the current charts and a Saturday morning programme,
'The Saturday Skiffle Club,' (later the Saturday Club after the skiffle craze
ended.) These 'shows' were hosted by established BBC presenters in the style of
a headmaster presiding over a schoolboys picnic.
The only other way to hear modern popular music was to
tune to Radio Luxembourg, the only cross border broadcaster to the UK that had
been able to restart operations after the war. The Luxembourg signal could only
reach the UK after dark when the propagation conditions changed. Even then it
faded in and out for long periods. This notwithstanding, Luxembourg was hugely
popular.
Station air time was block booked in fifteen minute or
half hour slots and taken up entirely by the major record labels of the day;
Decca, Capitol, E.M.I., Parlophone etc... Only their own signed and recorded
artists could expect any air play.
In the early sixties then, all was fairly comfortable for
the BBC with their state monopoly and Luxembourg with their commercial monopoly
and yet more and more talented British groups and artists were modifying and
Anglicising imported music and then developing their own song writing skills.
How could this music be put before the public.
Around this time there arrived in London one Ronan
O'Rahilly, the tearaway son of a well known and wealthy Irish family. O'Rahilly
possessed a number of pertinent qualities; a back ground of generally getting
what he wanted, a quick and lateral thinking brain, a maturity and presence
which belied his tender years and an Irish naivety which gave him no knowledge
or regard for the accepted way of going about things. He settled into Soho and
London's club land. Ray Charles was his hero. Soon Ronan was operating his own
Rhythm & Blues Club. He bought the Rolling Stones their first set of stage
equipment and briefly managed them together with his friend, Georgiou Gomalski,
before entrepreneur Andrew Oldham snapped them up. But he still had the blues
singer Alexis Korner and northerner Georgie Fame as his protégés. He was influential
in the early days of Eric Burdon and the Animals even suggesting the name for
the band. Live gigs at small venues were a slow way to achieve popularity, but
nobody would record his artists. O'Rahilly created his own record label and
paid for his own acetates. When presenting these to the BBC he learned that the
Corporation only played music by established artists which begged the obvious
question 'how to get established.'
At Radio Luxembourg he fared worse, station bosses
laughed heartily showing him the programme schedules block booked by the major
labels. Independents had no chance of air play at all. The answer? Give up his
artists and hope they could be signed by a major label. 'Well,' O'Rahilly told
the Luxembourg directors, 'If after managing my own artists I have to create my
own record label because nobody will record them and if I then find that no
radio station will play their music, it seems that the only thing now is to
have my own radio station.' Radio Luxembourg thought this hugely funny and
showed him the door.
Soon after, at a party, a girl told Ronan about the
station Voice of America which was operating at sea from the official USA
vessel the MV Courier. He
gleaned information about this operation from the US Embassy and also travelled
to visit Jack Kotschack, the owner of the marine station, Radio Nord and the
owners of Radio Veronica an efficiently run Dutch offshore radio station. Radio
law in the Netherlands was as restrictive as in the UK. In Holland as in
Britain the law of the land only extended as far as territorial waters, three
miles out from the coast. Beyond that lay international waters where there was
no law other than that defined by the flag states of ships. A ship registered
to Panama for example, whilst in international waters recognised Panamanian
law. If the law of the flag state had no objection to international marine
broadcasting then the ship could make broadcasts which were not illegal and
could not be stopped. Even Veronica was using precedent created by earlier
marine broadcasts made off the Danish and Swedish coasts. The UK however with
the young population created by the post war baby boom and with burgeoning
youth culture and a new pop industry had untapped potential.
This was the breakthrough O'Rahilly needed and he had
certain advantages to build from.
He was now mixing in the clubs and coffee bars of Soho
and Chelsea with the young sons of very wealthy people. With his upbringing,
large sums of money did not faze him. His family wholly owned the Irish port of
Greenore, an ideal place to quietly convert a ship into a floating radio
station.
On a fund raising trip to the USA he was captivated by a
photograph in Life magazine showing president John F. Kennedy's daughter
Caroline playing in the Oval Office of the White House and disrupting the
serious business of government. This was exactly the image he wanted for his
station. The name had to be Radio Caroline.
With finance in place, the ex ferry Fredericia was purchased and taken to
his family owned port Greenore for conversion. Radio studios were built on the
upper decks behind the ships bridge. In the hold were A.C. generators connected
to two 10KW medium wave (AM ) broadcast transmitters. The combined power from
these was fed to a tall aerial tower near the bow of the ship.
Renamed the MV Caroline
the ship headed for the British coast off Essex, from where it would cover
London and the South East.
On Easter Sunday 1964, with their words having been
pre-recorded since they were too nervous to broadcast live, Chris Moore and the
then unknown actor Simon Dee announced 'This is Radio Caroline on 199, your all
day music station.'
Then this record was played and dedicated to Ronan
O'Rahilly.
Caroline was on the air!
A couple of months
later Caroline was joined off the Essex coat by Radio Atlanta broadcasting from
the MV Mia Amigo. Within weeks the stations merged and the original ship the MV
Caroline sailed to Ramsey Bay becoming Radio Caroline North and the Mi Amigo
stayed off Frinton-on-Sea becoming Radio Caroline South.
Now O'Rahilly had almost all of
the UK plus Southern Ireland and substantial parts of the continent in range of
his transmitters.
With Caroline as the catalyst and
its audience of tens of millions, new music and youth fashion accelerated at
astonishing speed and hundreds of new bands achieved massive and sometimes
lasting success, a fact still not
forgotten to this day by the now ageing stars that it helped get
started:
"...... Radio Caroline was
an exciting part of all our lives and summed up the spirit of the times,
culturally and musically." Sir Paul McCartney
"For The Who, Radio Caroline was an angelic force ........without
Caroline we would not have sold a single record." Pete Townshend
"Radio Caroline was more
adventurous than most of the stations around, it championed bands like The
Kinks, who owe much of their early success to Radio Caroline." Ray
Davies
"Radio Caroline gave us our
start, my eternal thanks." Spencer Davis
"Did you ever wonder why so
much fantastic music came out of Britain starting in the 60s? Pirates did it.
The story of how they did it seems unbelievable, but it really happened. It
completely altered the course of rock n roll." Steve Van Zandt, Bruce
Springsteen's band
"Radio Caroline was a great
breakthrough in pop music radio - the one place you could hear the charts and
new releases you couldn't hear anywhere else." Noddy Holder
"We wrote the song 'Rock n
Roll' which included the lyric ' waiting all the time to find radio plays on
Caroline'. This ballad was a big part of remembering how important Radio
Caroline was to us. The fact that private radio stations played our songs and
that they included some of the best DJs prompted the government to give the country
top 40 stations." Francis Rossi, Status Quo.
"I had already started my
recording career when Caroline launched. I loved lazing in bed in the morning
listening to all my favourite records. It was amazing!" Sandie Shaw
"Tuning in to Radio Caroline
in the 60s was an integral part of keeping abreast with the chart action of the
day. For us recording artists, it not only kept us on our toes, but - upon
hearing some sparkling new release - made us even more determined to match or
surpass the musical standards being set!" Mike d'Abo, Manfred Mann.
" Everyone needs competition
to maintain quality and provide alternatives and Radio Caroline was just what
we needed in the 60's, being one of the first to do this in radio .." Joe
Brown
"If there had been no Radio
Caroline, there would have been no Wild Thing and no Troggs, plus many other
groups we still know today from the 60s. God bless all who sailed in her."
Reg Presley, The Troggs
By the end of 1964 Caroline had
more listeners than the three BBC networks combined.
The monopolies of the
BBC and Luxembourg were shattered and UK radio was changed forever.
As always, the BBC was totally out of touch with what their audience wanted.
Nothing's changed there then!
