Evening Standard: The new pirate radio economy
Ms Dynamite, Craig David and So Solid Crew started on illegal radio stations. Now this underworld business is making some real money. Investigation by David Rowan
TO visit the studios of Galaxy FM, you must first make a series of mobile phone calls to set up your vetting interview in a bleak Peckham pub. Then, provided Abdul and Rene decide that your answers can be trusted, you will be given further instructions to return early on Sunday morning and wait at a nearby street corner.
"We'll have to blindfold you before we can drive you to the studio," Rene explains, a little apologetically. "It's for security - operating a station like this, you can never be too careful." Rene, who looks to be in his late forties, knows that by running one of London's 80 or so pirate radio stations he faces a two-year jail sentence and an unlimited fine if caught. But he is prepared to take the risk in order to play reggae music and host phone-ins that, as he sees it, are "empowering" south London's black community with a message of racial pride.
By 9am on Sunday, the studio - a converted bedroom on a council estate not far from where Damilola Taylor died - is buzzing with more than a dozen DJs, friends and local activists, as cannabis smoke wafts towards the Malcolm X posters on the wall. "Listeners call us, fax us, text us - because we're here for them when the mainstream radio stations aren't," says Rene. "Even the police use Galaxy to help find missing people."
It may be illegal, but pirate radio is booming as it fills gaps not catered for by licensed stations. The number of pirate stations has doubled in 10 years, finding audiences for otherwise neglected music such as UK garage and drum 'n' bass, or using £400 homemade transmitters to spread anarchist or black-power propaganda. Typically, the DJs are in their late teens and early twenties, often mixing tracks in improvised bedroom studios. But this is no amateur hobby. With some stations now earning £3,000 in a weekend by selling adverts, plus thousands by promoting club nights, it is an industry making real money for its sharpest impresarios.
It is also creating stars for record companies and mainstream broadcasters, from Daniel Bedingfield and Craig David to Judge Jules and Trevor Nelson. Just as Radio 1 took its presenters and attitude from Radio Caroline in the Sixties, so the BBC's new digital black-music station, 1Xtra, is modelling itself on today's hottest pirate stations. 1Xtra even boasts that its DJs - 24-year-old Femme Fatale, for example - learned their trade on illegal stations in "dodgy high-rise blocks in south-east London". Even at Broadcasting House, it seems, the glamour of this criminal underworld is too great to ignore.
The pirates are certainly proving influential in shaping our musical culture. The Mercury Award winner Ms Dynamite got her start DJing on the London stations Freek FM and Raw FM, and So Solid Crew built their fan base through Supreme FM and Delight FM, which they helped set up.
Delight, a black-music station based in Battersea, claims to reach 10,000 listeners, who are encouraged to buy tickets for the station's dance events and records promoted by mainstream labels. "My aim is to go international - to be the Puff Daddy of radio," management spokesman Mr C, an early twenties, south London entrepreneur, well-built and wearing a thick gold chain, tells me in a Clapham bar. "We're a training school for presenters, and are giving listeners a reason to get on to the FM dial." The three-year-old station, broadcasting on 103FM from a tower-block roof, is heard as far away as Milton Keynes and Guildford, and involves a team of more than 100 people, from MCs to technicians.
According to a smooth young station executive calling himself AJ - pirates avoid using their real names, for obvious reasons - professionalism demands that DJs sign up to a strict set of rules. "There's no swearing, violence, drugs, smoking or drinking in the studio, and you can't bring friends," AJ explains. "We'd like to go legal - that's the exit strategy. We're hustling, and if we see an opportunity, we'll take it. If the law obliges us to pay our taxes, do the news and the weather, then we will."
It is a dream that Kiss FM achieved in 1990, after its illegal broadcasts attracted a claimed 500,000 listeners across London with a mix of hip hop and house music. Today, the legal stations are feeling increasingly threatened by the pirates' growing influence, and have been urging tougher government action to clear the airwaves. They point out that pirates do not pay music royalties - up to five per cent of a legal station's turnover - and that they steal listeners and advertisers. They also promote their own club nights at venues such as the Astoria in Charing Cross Road and Caesars in the Old Kent Road. Ticket sales are lucrative.
JUST before Christmas, the Government responded by targeting the nightclubs that let pirate stations hold dance nights. "Pirate radio stations cause interference to legal broadcasters and damage property and annoy local residents," explained radio minister Stephen Timms, as he warned club owners that they, too, faced twoyear jail sentences. "Those who support the stations, by supplying premises or advertising with them, are just as bad."
The Radiocommunications Agency, the Government body that polices the airwaves, argues that pirates interfere with legal stations' signals and can block the radio systems used by airports and the emergency services. Last summer, a west London pirate station disrupted air-traffic control at Heathrow for around six hours until an enforcement team shut it down. The agency also warns that some stations are linked to drug gangs and other criminal activities, and its staff talk of being threatened with knives.
For some illegal broadcasters, violence appears to be an acceptable means of protecting their equipment. In a studio raid last year in Lewisham, police removed a copy of "Radio Is My Bomb", a guide to running a pirate station. "One easy way to hit back [at enforcement officials] on tower blocks is to trap them in the lifts," the booklet advises. "Then you take your gear down the stairs, beating up any of them you meet on the way." It continues: "If you're going to attack them directly, make sure you're well masked and tooled up. Go straight for the police officers and disable them before they can make their 'officer in distress' call (take or smash their radios, or have someone jamming their frequencies). Other direct ways of hitting back are attacking officials at their bases, attacking their vehicles at their depot, obtaining home addresses/ phone numbers of chief officers and harassing them."
According to Woody "Uptown Bad Boy", a former station owner and "mixmaster" who now works in a Soho record shop, pirates are far more concerned to protect their "rigs"( transmitters) from rival stations. Some stations, he says, booby-trap transmitters with CS spray to keep them from being stolen, and one has kept pit bulls on a tower-block roof in Hackney.
"The established pirates put up grids on the roofs so people can't gain access," explains Woody, 30. "One station had an electrician fix a rig to an elevator shaft so that it went up and down with the lift. There were 200,000 volts going through it - but it didn't get busted for months."
Woody estimates that a station can be on the air for less than £1,000, to include a "microlink" transmitter that allows the studio to be some distance from the rooftop aerial. The studio will normally be in a squat or a £50a-week rented room, and electricity will commonly be stolen from the mains network. He claims that at least 10 stations in London are now highly profitable.
"With 20 advertisers, you could easily make £3,000 a weekend," he says. "You charge the DJs for their slots, say £10. There's also talk of record companies paying DJs to play certain tunes. And stations such as Kool FM are making plenty of money from their raves."
Music stations Unique FM and Station FM have also been featuring advertisements for West End nightclubs, and even the police-backed Crimestoppers Trust - but the difficulty for the authorities is proving that a company knowingly bought a slot. Paper receipts are rarely issued. So far, the stations seem to be winning. In 2001, The Radiocommunications Agency carried out 1,438 raids on stations across Britain, yet it secured just 20 convictions. The average fine was £397. In a typical case, two men aged 19 and 21 were convicted last month at Highbury Magistrates Court of running an Islington-based pirate called Y2K - they were fined £50 and £100 respectively.
That is what other stations say they can earn from selling a single advertising package. As one enforcement officer told the Evening Standard: "It's not a bad little earner - especially when they're not paying royalties for records and stealing electricity."
(Evening Standard, January 2 2003)
TO visit the studios of Galaxy FM, you must first make a series of mobile phone calls to set up your vetting interview in a bleak Peckham pub. Then, provided Abdul and Rene decide that your answers can be trusted, you will be given further instructions to return early on Sunday morning and wait at a nearby street corner.
"We'll have to blindfold you before we can drive you to the studio," Rene explains, a little apologetically. "It's for security - operating a station like this, you can never be too careful." Rene, who looks to be in his late forties, knows that by running one of London's 80 or so pirate radio stations he faces a two-year jail sentence and an unlimited fine if caught. But he is prepared to take the risk in order to play reggae music and host phone-ins that, as he sees it, are "empowering" south London's black community with a message of racial pride.
By 9am on Sunday, the studio - a converted bedroom on a council estate not far from where Damilola Taylor died - is buzzing with more than a dozen DJs, friends and local activists, as cannabis smoke wafts towards the Malcolm X posters on the wall. "Listeners call us, fax us, text us - because we're here for them when the mainstream radio stations aren't," says Rene. "Even the police use Galaxy to help find missing people."
It may be illegal, but pirate radio is booming as it fills gaps not catered for by licensed stations. The number of pirate stations has doubled in 10 years, finding audiences for otherwise neglected music such as UK garage and drum 'n' bass, or using £400 homemade transmitters to spread anarchist or black-power propaganda. Typically, the DJs are in their late teens and early twenties, often mixing tracks in improvised bedroom studios. But this is no amateur hobby. With some stations now earning £3,000 in a weekend by selling adverts, plus thousands by promoting club nights, it is an industry making real money for its sharpest impresarios.
It is also creating stars for record companies and mainstream broadcasters, from Daniel Bedingfield and Craig David to Judge Jules and Trevor Nelson. Just as Radio 1 took its presenters and attitude from Radio Caroline in the Sixties, so the BBC's new digital black-music station, 1Xtra, is modelling itself on today's hottest pirate stations. 1Xtra even boasts that its DJs - 24-year-old Femme Fatale, for example - learned their trade on illegal stations in "dodgy high-rise blocks in south-east London". Even at Broadcasting House, it seems, the glamour of this criminal underworld is too great to ignore.
The pirates are certainly proving influential in shaping our musical culture. The Mercury Award winner Ms Dynamite got her start DJing on the London stations Freek FM and Raw FM, and So Solid Crew built their fan base through Supreme FM and Delight FM, which they helped set up.
Delight, a black-music station based in Battersea, claims to reach 10,000 listeners, who are encouraged to buy tickets for the station's dance events and records promoted by mainstream labels. "My aim is to go international - to be the Puff Daddy of radio," management spokesman Mr C, an early twenties, south London entrepreneur, well-built and wearing a thick gold chain, tells me in a Clapham bar. "We're a training school for presenters, and are giving listeners a reason to get on to the FM dial." The three-year-old station, broadcasting on 103FM from a tower-block roof, is heard as far away as Milton Keynes and Guildford, and involves a team of more than 100 people, from MCs to technicians.
According to a smooth young station executive calling himself AJ - pirates avoid using their real names, for obvious reasons - professionalism demands that DJs sign up to a strict set of rules. "There's no swearing, violence, drugs, smoking or drinking in the studio, and you can't bring friends," AJ explains. "We'd like to go legal - that's the exit strategy. We're hustling, and if we see an opportunity, we'll take it. If the law obliges us to pay our taxes, do the news and the weather, then we will."
It is a dream that Kiss FM achieved in 1990, after its illegal broadcasts attracted a claimed 500,000 listeners across London with a mix of hip hop and house music. Today, the legal stations are feeling increasingly threatened by the pirates' growing influence, and have been urging tougher government action to clear the airwaves. They point out that pirates do not pay music royalties - up to five per cent of a legal station's turnover - and that they steal listeners and advertisers. They also promote their own club nights at venues such as the Astoria in Charing Cross Road and Caesars in the Old Kent Road. Ticket sales are lucrative.
JUST before Christmas, the Government responded by targeting the nightclubs that let pirate stations hold dance nights. "Pirate radio stations cause interference to legal broadcasters and damage property and annoy local residents," explained radio minister Stephen Timms, as he warned club owners that they, too, faced twoyear jail sentences. "Those who support the stations, by supplying premises or advertising with them, are just as bad."
The Radiocommunications Agency, the Government body that polices the airwaves, argues that pirates interfere with legal stations' signals and can block the radio systems used by airports and the emergency services. Last summer, a west London pirate station disrupted air-traffic control at Heathrow for around six hours until an enforcement team shut it down. The agency also warns that some stations are linked to drug gangs and other criminal activities, and its staff talk of being threatened with knives.
For some illegal broadcasters, violence appears to be an acceptable means of protecting their equipment. In a studio raid last year in Lewisham, police removed a copy of "Radio Is My Bomb", a guide to running a pirate station. "One easy way to hit back [at enforcement officials] on tower blocks is to trap them in the lifts," the booklet advises. "Then you take your gear down the stairs, beating up any of them you meet on the way." It continues: "If you're going to attack them directly, make sure you're well masked and tooled up. Go straight for the police officers and disable them before they can make their 'officer in distress' call (take or smash their radios, or have someone jamming their frequencies). Other direct ways of hitting back are attacking officials at their bases, attacking their vehicles at their depot, obtaining home addresses/ phone numbers of chief officers and harassing them."
According to Woody "Uptown Bad Boy", a former station owner and "mixmaster" who now works in a Soho record shop, pirates are far more concerned to protect their "rigs"( transmitters) from rival stations. Some stations, he says, booby-trap transmitters with CS spray to keep them from being stolen, and one has kept pit bulls on a tower-block roof in Hackney.
"The established pirates put up grids on the roofs so people can't gain access," explains Woody, 30. "One station had an electrician fix a rig to an elevator shaft so that it went up and down with the lift. There were 200,000 volts going through it - but it didn't get busted for months."
Woody estimates that a station can be on the air for less than £1,000, to include a "microlink" transmitter that allows the studio to be some distance from the rooftop aerial. The studio will normally be in a squat or a £50a-week rented room, and electricity will commonly be stolen from the mains network. He claims that at least 10 stations in London are now highly profitable.
"With 20 advertisers, you could easily make £3,000 a weekend," he says. "You charge the DJs for their slots, say £10. There's also talk of record companies paying DJs to play certain tunes. And stations such as Kool FM are making plenty of money from their raves."
Music stations Unique FM and Station FM have also been featuring advertisements for West End nightclubs, and even the police-backed Crimestoppers Trust - but the difficulty for the authorities is proving that a company knowingly bought a slot. Paper receipts are rarely issued. So far, the stations seem to be winning. In 2001, The Radiocommunications Agency carried out 1,438 raids on stations across Britain, yet it secured just 20 convictions. The average fine was £397. In a typical case, two men aged 19 and 21 were convicted last month at Highbury Magistrates Court of running an Islington-based pirate called Y2K - they were fined £50 and £100 respectively.
That is what other stations say they can earn from selling a single advertising package. As one enforcement officer told the Evening Standard: "It's not a bad little earner - especially when they're not paying royalties for records and stealing electricity."
(Evening Standard, January 2 2003)
posted by David Rowan at Thursday, January 02, 2003
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