Movement Supports Pirate Radios

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31131, 6 August 1966, Page 15

Movement Supports Pirate Radios

(N Z.P A. Reuter—Copyright)

LONDON, August 5.

Britain’s pop-radio pirates, threatened with silence by law, have sent out an S.O.S. call for help to their millions of teen-age listeners.

The pirate broadcasters beat the ban on commercial radio in Britain by beaming their non-stop programme of pop music and advertisments from ships and abandoned sea forts off the coast.

Now they are planning mass rallies and petitions to Parliament to protest against the new Government bill which will re-establish the 8.8. C. radio monopoly. Radio Scotland, a pirate station anchored in the Firth

of Clyde, is leading the 10 pirate stations’ counterattack, with special trains from Glasgow to carry its young fans to Parliament The station claims to have a petition signed by two million people.

The new bill will ban commercial broadcasting from ships, aircraft and such structures as abandoned forts and make it an offence for British citizens to work for or aid the pirate stations or to advertise on them.

The bill follows the signing of a European convention banning pirate stations from the air. Other European countries plan similar measures to silence the pirates and prevent interference with authorised transmitters. The Swedes and the Dutch have already solved the problem. They sent boarding parties to the pirates’ ships and closed them down.

Pirate stations began in Britain only in 1964. The first and most successful, Radio Caroline, was named after President Kennedy’s daughter. Caroline, launched by an Australian businessman, Mr Allan Crawford, a former managing director of Southern Music —reputed to be the world’s largest music publishing business—is estimated to be making £BO,OOO a month. The other nine stations cannot compete with this, but

advertisers estimate that the 10 stations together are at present receiving about £2,000,000 in advertising revenue a year.

The expenses of the stations are high. The minimum

launching costs are about £200,000. The new bill arrived just after the pirates gained their first symbol of respectability. Britain's two major advertising institutes announced in June that they would set up a joint board with the pirate broadcasters to put their advertising on a more scientific basis.