UPDATED APRIL 2024
New this month: Steve England has found some more offshore recordings in Leon Tipler's tape archive; correspondent Peter Parish provides a recording of Radio
City's return to the air after the raid in June 1966; we have updated the selection of offshore programme schedules from the sixties; and we hear from one of the ‘lost’
Caroline DJs of the seventies, Doctor Boogie!
Legendary DJ Johnnie Walker recently recorded a reflection on his life and career. Called Walker on Walker it was
broadcast on Radio 2 on Easter Day. Clash of The Pirates, featuring Johnnie and Tony Blackburn was on Good Friday.
Both programmes are available online for a month. The media attention surrounding Radio Caroline's 60th birthday on 28th March brought an influx of visitors to The Pirate Radio Hall of
Fame, as can be seen here. Welcome to you all.
We were sad to hear of the death of David Gapes, one of the founders of New Zealand's offshore station, Radio Hauraki (see Radio New Zealand / Newstalk ZB); and of Andrew
Turner, newsreader and occasional DJ on Laser Hot Hits (see Radio Today). RIP
A revised third edition of Ray Clark's book Radio Caroline: The True Story Of The Boat That Rocked has just been published. It is available from Amazon and all good
book shops. (The first edition of Ray's book is reviewed here.)
See the contents page and DJ Directories of the sixties, seventies and eighties for full details of this website.
If you click to follow us on our Facebook page, you will be alerted when this site is updated.
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FORTY-FIVE YEARS AGO:
15th April 1979, Easter Sunday: After nearly six months of silence Radio Caroline returned to the air from the mv Mi Amigo with Dutch and English programmes on 963 kHz
(see here for more details).
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Britain's first offshore radio station, Radio Caroline, began broadcasting at Easter 1964 from a ship anchored just outside UK territorial waters.
She was followed by a host of other radio stations based on boats and marine structures dotted around the coast.
These “pirates” rapidly won an enormous and enthusiastic audience.
The Pirate Radio Hall of Fame
has been set up to honour the stars, the broadcasters, from that golden era of music radio.
This site is a tribute to the people who endured a daily battle with the elements to provide a soundtrack to the swinging sixties.
(The Pirate Radio Hall of Fame is a British-based website. It only includes those DJs who broadcast in English and could be heard in the UK. Offshore radio also flourished in Denmark,
Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Israel and New Zealand. The absence of the DJs from these countries in the Hall of Fame does not suggest that they are any less deserving, just that they are outside the scope of this site. Please
see the links page for details of websites which cover offshore radio in other parts of the world.)
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The inductees in The Pirate Radio Hall of Fame are listed alphabetically. To find your favourite voice from the sixties either select
it from the drop-down list below, search the site using the Google box or click on the appropriate page from the table of contents beneath. For broadcasters from the later decades, go to the Seventies
Supplement or Eighties Supplement. There are some that we know very little about - see the help wanted page.
THE OFFSHORE STATIONS OF THE 60s, 70s AND 80s
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The Laser Story (part one) |
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We are very grateful to everyone who has contributed information, recordings or memorabilia to The
Pirate Radio Hall of Fame. We are always on the lookout for more so, if you have any items of interest, please get
in
touch.
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A number of the photos, stickers and recordings on this site are beginning to show
their age. Apologies for those that are of less than perfect quality. Many of the photographs were distributed freely by the various radio stations
and were intended for as wide a circulation as possible. Others have been donated to The Pirate Radio Hall of
Fame which are of unknown origin. Where photos have been scanned from books, newspapers or magazines, we have given credit.
However, if anybody believes that their copyright has been inadvertently infringed by the inclusion of an item on this site, please
get in touch and it will be removed immediately. Similarly, anybody who has supplied
audio for The Pirate Radio Hall of Fame has been credited but tapes get passed from collector
to collector and often there is no way of knowing who made the original recording. Our apologies to anyone who thinks their work has been used
here without due acknowledgment.
The name ‘Radio London’ and the RL logo are used by kind permission of Radio London Ltd.
The Pirate Radio Hall of Fame links to MP3s which can be downloaded by UK-based
customers from Amazon. As in a traditional record shop, Amazon offers multiple versions of some songs. It isn't always easy to identify precisely which
version is which. We have endeavoured to ensure that each link leads to the appropriate version of the relevant track - the one that was played by the
offshore DJs of the era - but please listen carefully before purchasing. If you discover that any of them are later re-recordings, please
let us know.
The Pirate Radio Hall of Fame participates in the Amazon Europe S.à r.l. Associates Programme, an affiliate
advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.co.uk.
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