Pirate Radio and the Underground Sound

Tune across the FM dial in London on a Friday night in the early nineties and, somewhere between the licensed stations, you would hit turbulence: a wall of breakbeats, an MC riding the rhythm, a phone number barked out over the top. That signal was illegal. It was almost certainly coming from an aerial bolted to a tower-block roof by someone who had climbed there in the dark. For four decades, this was where British underground music actually lived, not in the record industry or on the BBC, but on pirate radio.

This is the story of that infrastructure: not the genres it carried, but the network itself, the rigs, the roofs, the raids and the economics of a self-built broadcasting system that gave Black British and dance music the airtime the mainstream would not.

Pirate radio exists because legal British radio had a hole in it the size of a culture. In the 1960s the problem was pop itself: the BBC held a near-monopoly and, hamstrung by needle time agreements limiting how much recorded music it could broadcast, offered only a trickle of it. The offshore pirates filled the void. Radio Caroline, founded by the Irish entrepreneur Ronan O'Rahilly, began broadcasting from a converted ferry anchored off the Essex coast on Easter Saturday, 28 March 1964; rivals like Radio London followed. Broadcasting from international waters, they were beyond the reach of UK law until the Marine, &c., Broadcasting (Offences) Act 1967, passed that August, made it illegal to supply or advertise on them. The BBC's answer was to co-opt the model: Radio 1 launched at 7am on 30 September 1967, with the ex-Radio Caroline DJ Tony Blackburn at the mic.

By the late 1970s a second hole had opened, and this one never really closed. Legal radio gave almost no airtime to the soul, funk, reggae, boogie and, later, dance music that Black British communities were listening to. So the pirates came ashore. The pivotal early station was the Dread Broadcasting Corporation, DBC, a pun on the BBC, widely credited as Britain's first Black-owned radio station. It was founded by Leroy Lepke Anderson, brother of Rita Marley, who acquired a medium-wave transmitter and, in the autumn of 1980, began broadcasting from his home in Neasden, moving to FM at the end of 1981 before repeated raids ended the station in 1984. Others followed across London: Horizon, Solar, Invicta, London Weekend Radio and, most consequentially, Kiss FM, founded by Gordon Mac McNamee and George Power, which first broadcast on 7 October 1985. These were the sound-system continuum wired into the FM band: the same music, the same communities, now with citywide reach.

The genius of urban pirate radio was architectural. A station was never a single place; it was a system designed to survive being raided.

The transmitter and aerial went on the highest roof available, usually a council tower block, and were reached by climbing, often at night, sometimes over locked doors and via lift shafts. The studio, with the DJs and decks, sat in a completely separate flat, linked to the rig by a microwave or telephone link that beamed the signal in a straight line to the transmitter. That separation was the whole point: if enforcement officers traced the broadcast and seized the rig, they caught a cheap transmitter and an empty roof, not the crew. Engineers ran the link across the other side of the city, hid transmitters in biscuit tins, and built in backups so a station could be back on air within hours.

The economics were as improvised as the wiring. Stations paid residents for roof access and kept a stock of cheap transmitters, because losing one to a raid was a routine cost of doing business; you rebuilt and re-climbed. DJs typically paid subs for their slots, and revenue also came from adverts for raves, club nights and the local record shops where many of the DJs worked. And then there was the culture the format created: the shout-outs, the pager and phone-in requests, the sense of a direct line between a booth on the fifteenth floor and everyone locked in below. None of it was safe. Climbing tower blocks to bolt down aerials was genuinely dangerous, and the whole enterprise was, and remains, a crime.

Enforcement was a permanent game of cat and mouse. For decades the job fell to the Department of Trade and Industry's Radio Investigation Service, using direction-finding to triangulate signals; since 2003 it has been Ofcom, which raids studios, seizes equipment and prosecutes. The governing law is the Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006: operating an unlicensed station is a criminal offence carrying up to two years' imprisonment and a fine, capped at 5,000 pounds in the magistrates' court but unlimited in the Crown Court, with the apparatus also liable to seizure and confiscation. Ofcom's case against the pirates is consistent: that they damage property, cause anti-social behaviour and, most seriously, interfere with safety-of-life services. In March 2009 the regulator estimated more than 150 pirate stations operating across the UK, half of them in London and the South East, and its head of investigations Paul Mercer singled out interference with National Air Traffic Services and the London Fire Brigade.

The most famous casualty is instructive. In April 2005, after Ofcom disconnected a Rinse FM transmitter, co-founder DJ Slimzee, real name Dean Fullman, then 23 and caught by surveillance cameras at Shearsmith House in Stepney after a year-long hunt, received a three-year conditional discharge at Thames Magistrates Court for operating a pirate station and causing 10,000 pounds of damage by erecting equipment. At Tower Hamlets council's request he was also handed an ASBO, believed to be the first of its kind, banning him for five years from entering the roof of any building over four storeys without permission. As Slimzee later put it, visiting an aunt on the fifth floor would have sent him straight to prison. The order captures the whole dynamic: the authorities treating a DJ as an anti-social nuisance, and a scene treating a rooftop as a stage. The pressure was relentless; by the account of Rinse's own team, the station was knocked off air more than a dozen times that year, with Geeneus repeatedly buying new aerials to replace those seized.

Because it answered to no playlist and no regulator, pirate radio became the research-and-development lab for one British genre after another, a place to test a track, break it and make it a hit purely on the airwaves.

Acid house and hardcore came first. As rave exploded in 1989, stations like Centreforce, which first broadcast on 8 May 1989 and billed itself the first seven-day rave station, alongside Sunrise and Fantasy FM, became the nervous system of the scene, broadcasting the music and, crucially, the coded locations of illegal raves. Then came jungle. Kool FM, founded on 28 November 1991 by DJs Eastman and Smurf and broadcasting from the rooftops of Hackney's council estates, became the definitive jungle and drum and bass station, running for more than three decades.

The format itself, a DJ and a crew of MCs trading bars live over dubplates, was something legal radio simply had no equivalent for, and it drove the sounds that followed. UK garage was pushed through pirates like London Underground FM and Freek FM, home to DJ EZ, in the late nineties, with Delight FM giving early crews like So Solid their platform. Grime was almost entirely a pirate genre in its first years, built on the newest white-label dubplates and broadcast through the static of stations like Rinse FM, Deja Vu FM and Heat FM. Rinse, founded in 1994 by Geeneus and Slimzee, gave first exposure to Wiley and Dizzee Rascal and later a home to dubstep. A grime set on Deja Vu could carry ten MCs stacked in a cramped Hackney Wick flat; that clamour was the genre being born in real time.

The most successful pirates eventually came in from the cold. Kiss relaunched as a legal, licensed station on 1 September 1990. Two decades later Rinse FM won a community FM licence from Ofcom in 2010, going legal the following February without abandoning its sound, proof that legitimacy and the underground were not mutually exclusive.

The bigger shift was online. From the mid-2000s the culture migrated to the internet, where broadcasting needs no licence and carries no jail term. NTS Radio, founded in Hackney in 2011 by Femi Adeyemi, and Reprezent, which grew out of a Peckham youth project and won its community licence in 2010, carry the pirate spirit into a legal, global format, as does the wider ecosystem around Boiler Room and countless online stations. FM piracy still exists, and Ofcom still runs enforcement, but it is a shadow of its heyday.

Something was gained and something lost in the move online. Streaming and internet radio replicate the reach, and remove the risk, but they cannot replicate the locality or the scarcity, the sense that a signal belonged to your city, your estate, your Friday night, and might vanish by Monday. That is the paradox at the heart of pirate radio's legacy. It was, arguably, the most important piece of infrastructure in modern British music: an unlicensed, self-built, dangerous, brilliant distribution network that existed for one reason, to put a producer's newest dubplate directly in front of an audience, with no gatekeeper in between. Every independent producer releasing a track today, hoping to reach listeners without asking anyone's permission, is chasing the same thing those rooftop climbers built by hand.

• Pirate radio was the illegal, self-built broadcasting network that gave Black British and underground dance music the airtime legal radio refused.
• Its architecture, a transmitter on a tower-block roof with the studio hidden in a separate flat, was engineered to survive constant raids by the DTI and later Ofcom.
• Operating an unlicensed station is a crime under the Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006, punishable by up to two years in prison and a fine that is unlimited in the Crown Court.
• It served as the R&D lab that broke acid house, jungle, UK garage, grime and dubstep, via stations like Centreforce, Kool FM and Rinse FM.
• The culture went legal and online, with Kiss in 1990, Rinse in 2010 and 2011 and NTS from 2011, trading risk and locality for reach.