5 September 2008, 12:03 pm
The veteran radio ship "Ross Revenge" that has been undergoing restoration in Tilbury Docks, Essex could find a new anchorage at London's longest pier. The organisation Radio Caroline, with which she saw distinguished service in the nineteen-eighties, is seeking permission from a local council to moor alongside Erith pier on the south bank of the River Thames. The ship represents the final phase in Britain's offshore radio history that the Wilson Government sought to terminate back in 1967. Caroline continues to stream enthusiastic pop music programmes via the Internet and might succeed in gaining Restricted Service Licences for local FM broadcasts, as she did at Tilbury Cruise Terminal earlier this century. The German-built ship once known as the "Freyr", took part in the Icelandic "cod wars" when operating from the historic port of Grimsby, prior to conversion as a pirate radio base. Caroline is the most famous of the European pirate stations and did much to undercut the monopolistic position of the BBC in the mid-sixties. The stations that followed her revolutionary example brought a new generation of laid-back presenters, such as Tony Blackburn, Dave Cash, Roger Day, Simon Dee, John Peel, Johnnie Walker and the irreplaceable humorist Kenny Everett, to public prominence. The offshore radio stations - partly through an avoidance of royalty payments and partly through youthful bravado - helped to break the predictability of the pop charts and helped teenagers in Holland and the UK to discover a wider mix of music such as ska, heavy rock, jazz, Tamla Motown and bubblegum, some of which sounds far from radical today. Compared to laborious ballads it was all exciting in Caroline's early days and bands from the Dubliners to Status Quo frequently give credit to the so-called "watery wireless" era for widening their appeal.... read more
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