Radio Caroline
 |
|
|---|---|
| Radio station ( pirate station , private radio ) | |
| reception | analogue terrestrial , internet radio , DAB |
| Reception area | United Kingdom |
| Start of transmission | March 28, 1964 |
| Program type | CHR , AOR |
| List of radio stations | |
Radio Caroline is the first private radio station in the UK and is responsible for the development of popular music in the 1960s central. Radio Caroline was founded in 1964 by the Irish music producer Ronan O'Rahilly as a pirate station and broadcast from the sea until 1990. The transmitter survived several shutdowns and interruptions. Today, Radio Caroline broadcasts legally 24 hours a day in parts of the UK on both DAB and the Internet.
history
The three mile zone
The music producer Ronan O'Rahilly was unable to accommodate his label's bands at the BBC or Radio Luxemburg and decided to set up his own station. Because private radio stations were not yet allowed in the UK in the 1960s, Radio Caroline broadcast from a ship, the Fredericia , which was anchored under the Panamanian flag in the North Sea, three miles from Essex .
The idea to leave the mainland came from the Voice of America , which at the time was partially broadcasting from sea. Three miles off the coast, ships were governed by the law of the nation under whose flag it was sailing. On the Fredericia was a medium wave transmitter with ten kW power, which was operated on the frequency 1520 kHz (197.3 meters ).
Naming
Radio Caroline is named after John F. Kennedy's daughter Caroline . O'Rahilly allegedly got the idea when he saw a photo of the girl playing in the Oval Office , disrupting the US President's work - that is, disrupting the government. This hit the image that O'Rahilly thought fit the station. Kennedy had been murdered a few months earlier.
Start of broadcasting in 1964
On March 28, 1964, a Holy Saturday , the two DJs Chris Moore and the then unknown Simon Dee went on air with the words "This is Radio Caroline on 199, your all day music station!" The first song played was Not Fade Away by the Rolling Stones . The title song Caroline, released by the Fortunes on January 1, 1964 and produced by Shel Talmy , was chosen as the theme song .
With the start of Radio Caroline O'Rahilly came before the Australian music manager Alan Crawford, with whom he was known. Crawford also planned to operate a commercial radio station from a ship. For this purpose Crawford bought the former radio ship of Radio Nord from Stockholm and named it Mi Amigo . On April 27, 1964, the Mi Amigo anchored off Frinton-on-Sea, which is also in Essex, and began on May 9 with the first test broadcasts. The regular program began three days later, on May 12, under the name Radio Atlanta .
Two transmission ships
Caroline and Atlanta appealed to the same audience. It was broadcast by the hour and on neighboring frequencies. So one station allegedly took the receiver away from the other. After six weeks of oldies on Radio Atlanta and more middle-of-the-road music on Radio Caroline, Crawford and O'Rahilly teamed up, and the Radio Caroline transmitter made its long journey to the Isle of June 2, 1964 Man in the Irish Sea, anchored 3.5 nautical miles off Ramsey Bay in international waters. During the trip it was broadcast at the now known broadcast times.
Radio Caroline from then on covered the northern part of the kingdom as Caroline North . The Mi Amigo remained at home as Caroline South in the south, so that Radio Caroline had two transmission ships. Another station, Wonderful Radio London , also known as Big L, began its official broadcasts on December 23, 1964 from former US minesweeper Density , renamed Galaxy ; the only station off the English coast that broadcast very professionally from day one according to a fixed program schedule. The model was the commercial US radio station KLIF in Dallas , Texas .
A spokesman for Radio Caroline, Andy Archer , is credited with coining and making known the British slang term anorak for loyal, somewhat obsessive fans in 1974 . In May 1974, fans of the station visited the radio broadcasters by boat not far from the Dutch coast. Radio Caroline decided to broadcast the program from deck in order to offer the loyal fans something despite the rather cold weather. Archer's remark that he is happy to welcome “so many anoraks” is considered to be the first use of the term used today for spotters , nerds and geeks.
Formerly sponsor and image rights scandal
Most listeners became aware of Radio Caroline through Queen magazine , the director of which, Jocelyn Stevens, expected the cooperation to attract a readership of wealthy, predominantly female teenagers - the Chelsea Set . Stevens participated financially in the pirate station from its foundation and used a photo of the Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger , who was a guest at the station in 1966 , to apply . Because neither the photo nor its commercial use had been discussed with Jagger and the manager of the Rolling Stones Andrew Loog Oldham , one of the first legal disputes arose over the rights of celebrities to their own image and the legitimacy of paparazzi photographs. The magazine and Radio Caroline lost in court in July 1966 for deliberately deceiving Mick Jagger. In addition, according to Oldham, the Rolling Stones were on principle against any connection with commercial products.
Further development
In the years that followed, Radio Caroline enjoyed success with British listeners as an alternative to BBC Radio 1 and played an important role in spreading new styles of pop and rock music. Bands like The Who or Status Quo became known through the station.
Radio Caroline had to stop broadcasting several times in the course of its existence. Sometimes because of state repression, sometimes because of the difficult conditions at sea. The first transmission ship, the Fredericia , was forcibly relocated for a while and was later immobilized in the Amsterdam port. From June 1972 the ship was scrapped in the F. Rijsdijk scrapping yard in Hendrik-Ido-Ambacht . The transmission ship Mi Amigo sank in the Thames estuary off Brightlingsea in 1980. Radio Caroline restarted each time and has had an official broadcast license since the mid-1990s.
reception
From 1983 to 1990 Radio Caroline broadcast from Ross Revenge . This ship had a 90 m high transmission mast. It was the highest mast erected on a ship to date. This record was only surpassed in 2004 by the sailing ship Mirabella V with a mast height of 91.44 m.
Radio Caroline can be heard today on web radio . Satellite broadcasting was discontinued on September 30, 2013 because reception in the actual transmission area, the United Kingdom, with the English Sky Pay TV receivers was too expensive and general satellite reception via manual settings was too low in terms of the number of listeners had proven to be able to continue financing the rented transponder. Instead, a new online channel Caroline Extra is to start with oldies from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, a medium wave frequency is still being contested because several transmitters, u. a. the BBC, have given up several MW frequencies that Ofcom can now reassign. In 2017, the station was awarded the old BBC medium wave frequency 648 kHz with a transmission power of 1 kW, limited to small English regions.
Radio Caroline in the film
Radio Caroline served as a template for the film Radio Rock Revolution .
literature
- Wolf-Dieter Roth: From the North Sea to the stars. Radio Caroline: The pirate station from 1964 is still very much alive after 37 years . In: Telepolis , July 7, 2001 ( read online )
- Tom Lodge: The Radio Caroline Story from the inside. USA: Umi Foundation, 2002 (118 pages)
Web links
- The official website (English)
- Radio Mi Amigo Live recording 1977 on soundcloud.com (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Keith Skues: Pop Went the Pirates II . Lambs' Meadow Publications, Horning 2009, ISBN 978-0-907398-05-9 , pp. 37 .
- ↑ a b Andy Archer at The Pirate Radio Hall Of Fame In: offshoreradio.co.uk. Retrieved January 10, 2017
- ↑ Alex Games: Balderdash & piffle: one sandwich short of a dog's dinner . BBC, London 2007, ISBN 978-1-84607-235-2 .
- ↑ Oxford Dictionaries: anorak, definition 2 In: oxforddictionaries.com. Retrieved January 10, 2017
- ^ The Times : High Court of Justice. Photograph Used As Advertisement , July 27, 1966, p. 6
- ↑ Ship data (English) In: miramarshipindex.org.nz. Retrieved January 10, 2017
- ↑ Entry at nationalhistoricships.org (English)
- ↑ Own presentation of the 648 frequency ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ News In: mediumwave.info, June 9, 2017.
