John Musgrave’s first novel, RADIO A-GO-GO, is out now.…What inspired it?
Hard to remember the sixties – even if you were there…
If pop music had been the purview of dance bands and crooners, by 1960 it was a rebel rousing call to arms, a guitar riff for a forgotten generation. Trouble was we weren’t able to hear it on the radio here in Britain. No WABC or KHJ for us….Just an hour or so a week of popular hits on the BBC. All we had was the wonderful exception of Radio Luxembourg broadcasting at night from an old castle far away in a fabled city. The signal rose and fell like the sea and some nights was impossible to pick up. How we clung to those wisps of transmission as we listened to transistor radios under our bed covers.
This all changed in 1964 with the arrival of the pirate radio. On ships and forts outside the three mile limit, Caroline, London, Radio City and Essex claimed they were breaking no British law. The signals grew weaker the further away from the Thames Estuary you were. Then Radio Caroline positioned a second ship off the Isle of Man. Radio Scotland followed. Later came, for my money the pick of the bunch, Radio 270. Bravely broadcasting from perhaps the worst anchorage of them all, Radio 270 – three miles out in the North Sea – had no real shelter and was tossed by storm and gale alike. Casual listeners rarely appreciated this, for the cheerful banter of the dee-jays continued undaunted.
The novel, ‘Radio A-Go-Go’, takes this as its starting point. For many teenagers, listening to rock and roll on a pirate radio station was an act of defiance. Everyone from parents, teachers, coast guards and the government disapproved of free radio. Pop music was regarded as subversive, dangerous. Those cheerful disc jockeys were like a personal friend in the room. They laughed at the bad weather, read out requests and payed endless rock and roll. The effect was liberating beyond belief. After another difficult day in drear post-war Britain here were these guys telling you not to take it all too seriously.
The establishment threw everything at the new stations yet the pirates sailed on blasting out rock and roll in cheerful defiance for three glorious years. Drawing on those days of listening to the raucous flotilla of free radio ships ‘Radio A-Go-Go’ is the imagined story of one of them. It may be fiction but the legend of the pirates lives on….
