Brief History of Pirate Dance Music Radio Stations

In the early '80's, pirate radio entered its second golden age, with the rise of black music stations like Horizon, JFM, Dread Broadcasting Corporation and LWR, specialising in the soul, reggae and funk that Radio One marginalised. But the nautical connotations of "pirate" had faded; the new pirates broadcast not just from the mainland, but from the heart of the metropolis, using the tower block (high-rise apartment building) method that remains the backbone for today's jungle stations.

As the government closed loopholes in the law and increased the penalties, the illegal stations grew ever more cunning in their struggle to outwit the Department of Trade and Industry's anti-pirate agency, the Radio Investigation Service. The invention of the microlink (a method of relaying the station's signal to a distant transmitter) made it harder for the DTI to trace and raid the illegal station's studio. The result was an explosion of piracy; by 1989-90, there were over 600 stations nationwide, and 60 in the London area alone. And in 1989, a new breed of rave pirates, like Sunrise, Dance FM, Fantasy and Centreforce, joined the ranks of established black dance stations like LWR and Kiss.

As in the 1960's, the government responded with the double whammy of suppression and limited permission. In a weird echo of the pardons offered ultra- successful buccaneers and corsairs in the 16th and 17th Centuries, the pirate stations were offered an amnesty if they went off the air, and a chance to apply for one of the bonanza of licenses being made available as part of the Conservative governments commitment to "freeing" the airwaves. LWR and Kiss closed down voluntarily, but only Kiss won a licence. The legitimatisation of Kiss, in combination with a new, toughened Broadcasting Act in January 1990, reduced pirate activity to its lowest since 1967.

But in 1992, the London pirates resurged massively, as a crucial component of hardcore rave's underground infrastructure, alongside home-studio recording, indie labels, white label releases and specialist dance stores. Abandoning the last vestiges of trad pop radio broadcasting protocol, the new 'ardkore pirates sounded like "raves on the air": rowdy, chaotic, with the DJ's voiceover replaced by a raucous rave-style MC (Master of Ceremonies), and with a strong emphasis on audience participation (enabled by the spread of the portable cellular phone, which made the studio location impossible to trace by the DTI).

With Kiss FM's playsafe programming unable to satisfy the demand for raw-to-the- core 'ardkore, and the dance culture fragmenting into a myriad post-rave sub-scenes, 1992-93 saw the biggest boom in the history of radio piracy. Despite the government's latest package of draconian penalties (unlimited fines, prison sentences of up to two years, and the confiscation of all studio equipment, including domestic hi-fi equipment and the DJ's precious record collection), despite some 536 raids by the DTI in 1992-93, the renegade stations persisted. In the words of a track by Rum & Black, the pirate attitude remained: "**** the Legal Stations".

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