[cr-india] pirate radio in the UK

[Monica Narula]

http://www.irational.org/sic/radio

7th September 2003 - Sunday Times Magazine
Criminal Records
Report by Matt Munday

Pirate radio is illegal, dangerous - and taking over the airwaves of
Britain. But without it, stars like Ms Dynamite might never have been heard

So here I am, lost and blindfolded, being hurried along a north London
street by my captor. Subtle pressure from a hand on my shoulder helps me
weave a trajectory around lampposts, past oncoming pedestrians. The man's
other hand propels a photographer, who, like me, has had a baseball cap
jammed onto his head, the peak yanked below eye level.

We met our "guide" 20 minutes earlier in the West End. He calls himself
"Big N" and his appearance fits his name - built like a pocket Tyson, in a
hooded top and baggy jeans. I wonder how passers-by are reacting to our
plight; it must look as if we are being kidnapped.

Fortunately, we aren't. Of the three of us, only Big N is on edge. He runs
an unlicensed radio station, Xtreme FM, and, if caught, could face a
two-year sentence for contravening the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949. Big
N remembers the fate of another pirate station, Freek FM, featured in a
national newspaper two years ago and, days later, raided by police. Hence
the makeshift blindfolds, ensuring that Xtreme's location remains secret.

We're ushered through a doorway, up some stairs. We're in a large old
house, possibly a squat. Through another door, and - caps off - welcome to
Xtreme FM's studio. This turns out to be a spartan room, not much bigger
than a student bedsit, and only slightly less grotty. A sheet is pinned
across the window, the room lit by a bare bulb. The walls are peeling,
there is a torn carpet underfoot and, in one corner, some rickety chairs.

In another corner, six sportswear-clad youths cluster around some basic
sound equipment: turntables, a mixer, a microphone and, on the floor
nearby, a hi-fi and a small black custom-made "link box". The link box
sends Xtreme's signal, via a cable, through a tiny hole in the wall and up
onto the roof. From here, a microwave "LNB" link - a hand-sized
transmitter, "liberated" from a satellite TV dish - beams it to the main
transmitter, "the rig" in pirate parlance, which is located on some high
point, usually a tower-block roof, and could be anything up to five miles
away. The rig is connected to an aerial that beams Xtreme onto the FM dial.

A show is in progress, the DJs taking turns to mix records together and
exchange banter in a cockney pirate patois. The music veers from chunky hip
hop to saccharine R&B - like most contemporary pirates, Xtreme champions
"urban" sounds, a term that originated as a euphemism for black music. When
not DJ-ing, they fiddle with their mobile phones: texting, reading texts,
taking calls. Everyone has a top-of-the-range handset.

There is a studio mobile too. It vibrates every few seconds like a faulty
alarm clock, as listeners call and text. Scrolling through its inbox, I
notice scores of "missed calls". Big N explains that this is how pirates
gauge a record's popularity. If listeners like a tune, they call in and
then ring off, so the studio mobile registers a "missed call". This costs
callers nothing. If Xtreme receives over 20 missed calls from different
numbers before a track ends, the DJs play it again. This is why teenagers
listen to pirate radio: it's interactive in ways legal stations can't
match. Some tune in on their mobiles - on the bus, in the high street, even
at school.

Pirate stations like Xtreme are proliferating. According to the Radio
Communications Agency, the government organisation that polices the
airwaves, there are 209 UK pirates, 181 of which are in London. They have
more than doubled in the past 15 years. It's an increasingly lucrative
game. Advertisers pay around £120 a week each, and stations can gross up to
£3,000 a week. But the rewards don't stop there: everyone at Xtreme knows
that if you're good enough, and play your cards right, this is a stepping
stone to a champagne lifestyle, a media career, a No 1 record, fame and
fortune. This is Pop Idol, ghetto-style.

"This is the best way to make a name for yourself," says Big N, scrolling
through his texts. Now 28, Big N has been a DJ since he was 14. "I couldn't
get a gig, but I knew that if I could get onto a pirate, clubs would
eventually try me out. You're aware it's illegal, but you're equally aware
that once you start getting gigs, things can snowball."

Ms Dynamite is the best-known beneficiary of this "snowball" effect.
Currently the nation's favourite female pop star and the £1m face of
Pepsi-Cola, Dynamite was risking arrest every week on the ill-fated Freek
FM barely three years ago. It was a calculated gamble. Her slots MC-ing on
pirate radio helped establish a substantial teen fan base. Her debut
single, Booo!, gatecrashed the top 40 on the back of heavy pirate rotation,
which led to an album deal with Polydor and the coveted Mercury music
prize; from there, her career went supernova.

Pirate DJs played a fundamental role in creating UK garage - the hybrid of
house music and Jamaican dancehall from which Ms Dynamite, and several
other chart stars, such as Craig David and Daniel Bedingfield, have
emerged. There were pirate stations whose entire musical oeuvre was devoted
to garage long before national radio woke up to it - but the pirates'
musical agenda moves at such a velocity that garage is already old hat.

What keeps the kids tuning in is the DJs' ability to stay one step ahead.
So garage is undergoing a transitional phase as DJs create a bewildering
rash of new subgenres: bashy, 8-bar, tech-step - each, possibly, the next
big thing. At Xtreme, a new style is in the offing. "But we don't have a
proper name for it yet," says one of the DJs, Caspa C. "We just call it
'bass'."

Major labels know that if they sign an artist that is big on pirate radio,
they also acquire a guaranteed fan base. BMG, whose roster includes the
urban superstars the Neptunes and Whitney Houston, has courted pirate
stations for 10 years. "We were among the first to set up 'street teams',
whose job is to find out what is going on on pirate radio," explains Mervyn
Lyn, BMG vice-president of European marketing and promotion. "Now all the
majors do the same. Pirates are simply too influential to ignore."

The music industry isn't the only business sector after a slice of the
action. Blue-chip brands are becoming involved too - where kids with
disposable income go, advertising will follow.

"These pirate kids are early adopters and they're trendsetters," says
Rooney Carruthers, a partner at the advertising agency VCCP, whose clients
include Coca-Cola and the mobile network O2. "They spend virtually all
their disposable income on clothes, mobiles and text-messaging; they've got
this must-have-the-right-label attitude, and if a brand can tap into that,
it could be worth millions."

"Brands are having to be more savvy, and understand that this world
exists," agrees Yusuf Chuku, a strategist at Naked Communications, a
consultancy for brands such as Honda and MTV. "It's getting harder to reach
cool kids through conventional media channels. Kids rarely watch TV or read
magazines en masse - the things that are cool in their world start closer
to home. They listen to pirates where the DJs are friends of friends; they
can text them and almost feel as if they have part-ownership of the station."

There are, of course, manifest problems with this, not least the question
of legality. And how do brands and agencies more used to dining at the Ivy
than stumbling around north London wearing blindfolds make the necessary
inroads?

In the Xtreme studio is a tall, calmly spoken, bald-headed man who says he
has the answer. His name is Steve Gordon, and his club, Twice As Nice, has
itself evolved into a global brand - from its London base, it now
entertains over 25,000 people a week in summer months at venues across Europe.

Gordon is well connected in this world. The DJs he uses all come from
pirate backgrounds. When called upon, he acts as a consultant to brands
wishing to target the urban market. He claims to have helped at least three
advertise directly on pirate radio - though, of course, he won't say which.
However, he does admit to helping brands including PlayStation, O2 and
Warner Bros permeate the culture virally, in ways that stop short of
breaking the law.

"In the case of Warners, we've collaborated on compilation albums," he
says, "while PlayStation and O2 sponsor our events."

And although said companies haven't paid to advertise directly on pirate
stations, the chances of a Twice As Nice club night or album being plugged
on air by pirate DJs are all but assured.

Our time at Xtreme is up. Four more DJs have arrived and it's getting
crowded. Before we leave, one of the DJs saunters over and unwittingly
illustrates how little time today's pirate generation devotes to
conventional media channels. "So you're from The Sunday Times?" he
inquires. "I don't think I've seen that. Is it anything like The Sun?"

Pirate DJs know that aside from lucrative nightclub work - where top
earners charge £200 to £400 an hour - they can also be scouted by legal
stations, a tradition dating back to the advent of Radio 1. In the 1960s,
the first generation of sea-based pirates such as Radio Caroline attracted
audiences of millions with their rock'n'roll programming. In response, the
government outlawed marine broadcasting in 1967 and formed Radio 1 as a sop
to pop fans, poaching the pirates' most prolific presenters, such as Tony
Blackburn and John Peel.

In the 1980s, growing demand for soul and rap led to a new wave of pirates
springing up in big UK cities. Unlike their marine forebears, who could
reach large swathes of the UK by broadcasting on medium wave from converted
fishing boats, second-generation pirates such as London's LWR and JFM
broadcast on the FM dial; their audience wanted to hear the music in
stereo, and FM transmitters have a smaller range. This forced the pirates
inland, where they hid within council estates and derelict buildings.
Several presenters from these stations, including Pete Tong and Tim
Westwood, are now Radio 1 mainstays.

In 1990, Kiss FM rolled up its skull and crossbones, having won a licence
to broadcast to London legally. With over 30 specialist music shows a week,
it was able to showcase the myriad new genres of dance music spiralling out
of rave culture faster than mainstream radio could cope with. Radio 1,
worried it was no longer down with the kids, began ditching greying
ex-Caroline presenters and poaching Kiss's rising stars, who were replaced
at Kiss, itself desperate to retain street credibility, by up-and-coming
pirate DJs.

According to one of Kiss FM's founders, Jazzie B - who won a Grammy in 1989
with his band, Soul II Soul - the rise of the land-based pirates is
synonymous with black self-empowerment.

"We switch on and we hear the nucleus of what black Britain has to offer,"
he says. "And it will remain that way until we are properly included. It
will end when the BBC has black people in positions of power and when
record companies and mainstream organisations have enough black people in
place. Until then, there will always be pirate radio."

Whenever they broadcast, pirates know that the Radio Communications Agency
is monitoring them. The agency's radio specialists stake out stations from
inside unmarked vehicles, moving in to seize transmitters and enlisting the
police for raids. A few days after visiting Xtreme, I join a pair of radio
specialists driving up Brixton Hill in a Ford saloon. Like their pirate
nemeses, neither gives his real name. Most pirates acknowledge they are
just doing their job, they say, but on occasion things have turned nasty.
Their car's tyres have been slashed and its windscreen shattered. One of
the pair has been threatened with violence.

Their car's glove compartment contains a small rectangular box with two
dials, which lock onto whatever frequency the radio is tuned into. A
flickering needle on the first dial monitors the signal strength; the
second has a circular, compass-like face, on which a vacillating red blob
indicates the signal's direction. We're on the trail of a local pirate
radio station, Bassline FM. Halfway up Brixton Hill, the blob veers left,
and we turn off the main road into a council estate. Bassline instantly
cuts out. One minute we're listening to a reggae breakfast show; the next,
there's just a dull crackle. Somewhere, in one of the blocks looming above
us, someone has recognised our car and pulled the plug.

Coincidentally, we trace another signal, Lightning FM, to a block just two
streets away. Lightning's aerial is housed inside a 40ft scaffold pole,
clearly, almost brazenly, visible from ground level. Also on the roof is a
small, horn-like microwave link that receives the studio's signal and is
connected to the biscuit-tin-sized rig. The specialists are after the rig.
When they remove it, the station will be off air.

As we park, however, Lightning's signal also cuts out. The specialists
decide to head for the roof anyway, up eight flights of stairs. A padlocked
hatch leads onto the roof from one corner of the highest walkway. As we
arrive, a man in blue workman's overalls is halfway along the walkway,
strolling towards the stairs at the other end. He carries a sports bag. As
he disappears down the opposite set of stairs, he sneaks a look back at us.
There's no point giving chase: the radio specialists have no powers of
arrest. Sure enough, when we ascend to the roof, the rig is gone.

The cat-and-mouse game continues. Two more specialists arrive with a
microwave tracer - a bulky, typewriter-sized machine that one of the men
straps to his chest, before slowly rotating on the spot, holding aloft a
funnel-like receiver. If the station is still broadcasting from its studio,
the tracer will pinpoint the signal's direction, narrowing the hunt down to
two or three blocks of flats, which will then be placed under surveillance.
This morning, however, the specialists are out of luck: their tracer
remains silent.

Two hours later we arrive in Plumstead, southeast London, hot on the trail
of another station, Flava FM, whose signal is blocking Ministry of Defence
radio transmissions. It's a common problem: pirate rigs are home-made, and
sometimes signals "leak" onto other frequencies, scrambling broadcasts by
emergency services and air-traffic controllers (who, fortunately, are able
to switch frequencies). The worst-affected are tower-block residents:
pirate aerials are sometimes anchored in rooftop drains, causing leakage
into flats below, and the transmitters can scramble TV reception.

We trace Flava's signal to another block, and this time the station remains
on air - although our progress through the roof hatch is slowed by gloopy
anti-climbing paint, courtesy of Flava's management. One of the team then
dons the tracer, and as he swings the funnel round, it crackles to life, a
tinny UK-garage rhythm filling the air. The funnel points north across the
Thames, at two blocks a couple of miles away. The specialists note the
location. Then one saws the rig loose from a bicycle lock holding it in
place. Flava vanishes from the FM dial - for now.

In 2002 the Radio Communications Agency completed 1,046 raids against
pirate stations, but only a handful were studio raids - the rest were
mostly rig seizures. Forty-nine people were prosecuted, though most
received fines of around £700, and nobody went to jail. Against 209 pirate
stations across the UK, the agency seems like a big-game hunter armed with
a fly swatter - although it claims its latest tactic of targeting
advertisers, thus hitting pirate revenues, is finally starting to reduce
the number of stations.

Pirates know that when a rig vanishes, the culprit is more likely to be a
rival station. "All the two-bob stations steal," grumbles Tony T, manager
of the south London pirate Flash FM. "These days every youngster is either
a DJ or an MC. They all want to play on the big stations, and they can't -
so they find out how to put a station on, and get out there. But it takes
around £5,000 to £6,000 to set up and they haven't got that much, so they
see a short cut and nick the rigs. It's a big problem."


A former pirate DJ on a now-defunct station called Upfront reveals how
things can escalate. "Our rig was on the roof of some flats in south
London, and another station smashed it up," he says. "They were
broadcasting on the same frequency as us. We replaced it, but got word that
they were coming again. We waited for them, and it turned into a massive
fight. It got out of hand. We didn't get into pirate radio to spend our
time fighting - but people's livelihoods were at stake."

In January, things turned nastier still. A 24-year-old man was shot in the
leg and beaten with baseball bats at Oldfields Trading Estate in Sutton,
south London. Four men were reported fleeing the scene. Police believe that
a conflict between the pirate station Flight FM, which broadcast from a
rented unit on the estate, and a rival station may have sparked the assault.

With competition turning ugly, some have turned to other, safer and
potentially more lucrative methods of broadcasting. I travelled to Brighton
to meet Patrick, a pirate operator with a difference: his station,
InterFace, exists entirely on the internet. This is entirely legal,
although it began life as an illegal pirate, Face FM.

Patrick now runs InterFace from his bedroom, surrounded by computer
screens, each monitoring something different: servers, a chat room,
listener data.

"Our DJs are based all around the world," Patrick explains. "They simply
upload their shows from wherever they are, and I stream them onto the site."

Six years ago, Face FM teamed up with the internet security company AL
Digital and became InterFace, an online dance-music station with a global
audience. At the height of the dotcom boom, Patrick claims InterFace almost
hit pay dirt. "A Japanese company offered us £100m for the station," he
says. "They wanted to set up an internet disco. We laughed it away, but
they flew over to visit us. They were serious! We also had a similar offer
from an American venture capitalist." InterFace turned down both offers.

"If these money men had come aboard, our freedom would have been completely
ruined. They would have turned us into Radio 1." For £100m, I argue, most
people wouldn't have cared if they'd been turned into Bill and Ben, the
Flowerpot Men - but Patrick remains unimpressed.

It's no little irony that back in London, Radio 1 is busy running a
pirate-style station of its own. A year ago, it launched a digital radio
station, 1Xtra, whose DJ roster is almost entirely ex-pirate. And although
take-up of digital radio sets has been sluggish, when car manufacturers
begin installing them as standard, 1Xtra's audience is set to rocket.

And so the game continues. For the winners - on both sides of the law -
untold riches may be just around the corner; for the losers, a bullet from
a rival. Meanwhile, the kids in the middle get on with making and consuming
beats, rhymes and "bass" - the soundtrack of inner-city ambition
-- 
Monica Narula
Sarai:The New Media Initiative
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.sarai.net