John Peel Pirate Radio Broadcast from 1967 (MP3)
Richard
Curtis’s Pirate
Radio opens tonight, and, as I mention in my
review, it’s fun and very funny, with a terrific (if anachronistic)
soundtrack and an even better cast. But, as movies like this are sometimes wont
to do, it sexes up the facts of the phenomenon by a fair bit.
First, despite
a the kaleidoscopic palate of Curtis’s film, the boatloads of buxom women, clad
in Carnaby Street couture, who board the broadcasting trawler for biweekly conjugal
visits, and the booze-fueled high-seas hijinks, the facts of the matter were a bit
more mundane. As Dave Lee Travis,
a DJ for Radio Caroline — the inspiration for the movie's "Radio Rock" ship — told
the Independent this past March, there was no well-stocked bar, and
certainly no need (as the movie depicts), for tanning oil or prophylactics. The
boat “had a mess hall, with tables bolted to the floor, nothing too fancy, you
understand. And you couldn't go sunbathing on the top deck because there wasn't
much call for that in the North Sea.... We
didn't have women on board, or parties. There'd be five or six DJs, plus the
Dutch crew.”
Also, as John
Dougan writes in his
excellent book from Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, The Who Sell Out — about
that band’s classic 1967 album, which itself was conceived to simulate a
broadcast, complete with radio promos and fake jingles, of off-shore Radio London — pirate
radio broadcasts began, pre-WWII, to serve the listening needs of the UK’s “growing,
class variegated community of listeners [who] were increasingly less enamored
of the BBC’s programming rigidity [and] condescending tone.”
Yet at
first, at least, even though the idea of rebel DJs floating in international
waters, beyond the reach of the law, offered the “promise of mutinous freedom,
a willful, anti-corporate, outlaw capitalism, wherein the creation of an
alternative, bootleg economy attacks and undermines corporate hegemony,” Dougan
writes, early broadcasts weren’t quite so heavy on rock and pop like the
Turtles and the Yardbirds.
Instead,
the exigencies of an advertiser-based model meant that “the
reality was that in the early days . . . listeners were as likely to hear the
music of Jim Reeves, Ray Conniff, and Andy Williams, as they were anything
classified as R&B or rock and roll.”
With the ‘60s in full throttle, however, and Swinging London
efflorescent with electric and lysergic energy, the notion of pirate DJs as spinners
of the newest and best LPs and 45s — from the Easybeats’ “Friday on my Mind" and the Troggs’ "With A Girl Like You" (each of which are featured in the film’s great soundtrack) earlier on, to the Doors and Procol Harum a bit later
— was solidified.
Dougan’s
book, which spends almost as much time delving into the history of the short-lived
medium (the ships were shut down in 1967 after passage of the Marine
Broadcasting Offences Act) as the Who’s album, limning the background of some
of pirate radio’s key players — chief among them like Ronan O’Rahilly, the rakish
Irish impresario who founded Radio Caroline (it was named after President
Kennedy’s daughter) and DJ John Peel, the title of his Wonderful Radio London
show, The Perfumed Garden, “reeking
of pot, patchouli, and hippie-era condescension.”
Peel, of course, would go on to
become a legendary broadcaster on BBC Radio 1, his dry and droll delivery,
infectious passion, probing curiosity, deep knowlege, and hugely catholic tastes made him beloved by
millions on either side of the pond — not least for the mammoth series of
live-in-studio Peel Sessions, which began in late 1967 and only ended after his untimely death in 2004.
Peel’s DJ
career started in early ‘60s — in Texas, ironically. He was living in Dallas for a few years (where he’d met President Kennedy in
1960, and was present for the arraignment of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963), and when
Beatlemania broke in 1964, his Liverpool accent made him a popular jockey on KLIF
in Dallas and later KOMA in Oklahoma City.
In the States, Peel heard brash, ballsy freewheeling patter of American DJs — a far cry
from the stuffy and hidebound tones on the BBC, which took its
mandate to “inform, educate, and entertain” a mite seriously.
So it was a
natural that when he returned to the UK, Peel would take to the freedom of the seas, helming
the late-night shift on Wonderful Radio
London, with “The
Perfumed Garden,” transmitting crackly tracks — Pink Floyd, Cream, Love, the
Velvets, Sgt. Pepper — to a grateful mainland.
As canonical as many of those songs have become, listening to one of his
broadcasts is revelatory — offering a fascinating time capsule, with the between-song talk, promo
ads for Juicy Fruit, and news flashes about the Six-Day War offering an
aural glimpse of how the airwaves sounded in England during the height of the
‘60s.
LISTEN: John
Peel on “The Perfumed Garden,” July 1, 1967 (MP3)
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