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Learn about the origins and evolution of pirate radio, a term for unlicensed or illegal broadcasting of radio signals. Explore the cases of pirate radio stations in the US, Europe, and the UK, and their challenges and controversies.
Learn how pirate radio stations defied government censorship and played rock 'n' roll music in the 1960s, and how they still exist today in the U.S. and the U.K. Find out the reasons, challenges and controversies of unlicensed broadcasting in the internet age.
- Overview
- Border blasters
- The golden age of offshore radio
- From piracy to microbroadcasting
pirate radio, unlicensed radio broadcast intended for general public reception. While many pirate radio stations have been short-lived low-power entities operated by amateur hobbyists, others have been elaborate professional undertakings that skirted government regulation by transmitting from outside the national boundaries of the signal’s target a...
The practice of broadcasting programming intended for an audience beyond the signal’s country of origin began with political transmissions from the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Soon, propaganda broadcasts blanketed Europe, with foreign-language programs emanating from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. As World War II progressed, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Voice of America (VOA) played an important role in preserving the morale of listeners in occupied Europe.
While the BBC and the VOA remained fixtures in the postwar era, so-called “border blasters”—commercial radio stations that sought to circumvent a government telecommunication monopoly (as in the case of the BBC) or government regulation of advertising content (as with the American Federal Communications Commission [FCC])—began to appear. Starting in 1951, British pop music fans tuned their dials to AM 1439 KHz (208 metres) for the English-language programming of Radio Luxembourg, which had been broadcasting from its 200,000-watt transmitter in defiance of European regulations since 1933. In the early 1960s, massive broadcast towers located in Mexico beamed the programming of disc jockeys such as the iconic Wolfman Jack into homes across North America. The outsize personalities that typified the border blasters, combined with playlists that emphasized rock and roll and rhythm and blues, captivated audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.
On Easter, 1964, Radio Caroline began broadcasting from a ship anchored in international waters off the coast of Essex in southeastern England. Moves to outlaw the station were under way within a week. But by the time Radio London, a station with a slickly professional sound and commercial clout, opened in December, the airwaves of the United Kingd...
By the 1970s, large-scale pirate operations were in decline. Not only had offshore disc jockeys migrated to the London studios of Radio 1, but the border blasters faced financial difficulties and increasingly restrictive treaties that limited their signal strength. A 1986 broadcasting agreement between the United States and Mexico effectively ended the border radio era in North America, and an increasingly competitive FM market forced Radio Luxembourg’s AM signal to go dark in 1991.
Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, a wave of industry consolidation in the United States saw the control of individual radio markets pass into the hands of an ever smaller group of media companies. In response, pirate stations—some broadcasting with as little as a single watt of transmission power—became fixtures in densely populated inner city neighbourhoods. While the five boroughs of New York City boasted perhaps the greatest density of pirate broadcasters, the next great stride in unlicensed radio came in 1985, when entrepreneur Walter Dunn took to the airwaves in Fresno, California. Dunn’s Zoom Black Magic Radio was the only station in the listening area to cater to Fresno’s African American community, and it served as the model for a burgeoning movement whose practitioners eschewed the “pirate” label, embracing instead the term “microbroadcaster.”
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This film is dedicated to all who worked and broadcast on the pirate stations - all those wonderful years, all day and all of the night. Alternate versions US distributor, Universal have chosen to re-title the film as "Pirate Radio" and release it under Focus Features in US territories.
- (117K)
- Comedy, Drama, Music
- Richard Curtis
- 2009-11-13
Pirate radio in the United Kingdom has been a popular and enduring radio medium since the 1960s, despite expansions in licensed broadcasting, and the advent of both digital radio and internet radio. Although it peaked throughout the 1960s and again during the 1980s/1990s, it remains in existence today. [ 1 ]
A 2009 comedy drama film about pirate radio in the UK in the 1960s, directed by Richard Curtis and starring Bill Nighy, Philip Seymour Hoffman and others. The film follows the crew of Radio Rock, a fictional station that broadcasts rock and pop music to the UK from a ship in the North Sea.
Quentin (Bill Nighy) is the commander of such a pirate station, overseeing a host of seedy, lusty and dope-smoking DJs, including the Count (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Dave (Nick Frost), who ...
- (167)
- Comedy, Drama
- R
