Luke Owen of Death Is Not The End just recently put out a really interesting release: Making Records: Home Recordings c. 1890-1920 - a collection of DIY home recordings, transferred from blank and repurposed brown and black wax cylinders, dating back to the early years of widespread phonographic technology, from the late 1890s and first couple of decades of 20th Century. In the words of David Giovannoni, whose collection is the source of this material: "For the first time in human history we could take sonic selfies, audio snapshots with friends, and aural portraits of loved ones. Our phonographs captured the sounds of everyday life, both silly and serious: the baby’s squalling, Johnny’s naughty joke, Grandma’s favorite hymn as only she could sing it, our letters to loved ones in foreign lands...."
In honor of yet another fascinating Death Is Not The End release, here's my piece on an earlier archival triumph - Pirate Radio Adverts 1984-1993 Vol. 1 .... followed by my liner note for Pause for the Cause, aka Vol. 2 of the Pirate Radio Adverts compilation series.... followed by my interview with Luke about the project as previously Q-and-A'd at Blissblog.... followed by a bonus piece about my cherished pirate radio tapes originally done for The Wire.
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Save and Rave! How A Compilation of Pirate Radio Adverts Captures a Lost Britain
director's cut, The Guardian, Feb 16 2021
“Have you got that record that goes
ah-woo-ooo-ooh-yeah-yeah?” It’s a
scene familiar to anyone who spent time in a hardcore rave record shop in the
1990s – a punter asking for a tune they’ve heard on pirate radio or at a rave but
they don’t know the title, so they mimic the riff or sample-hook hoping that
someone behind the counter can recognise it.
A relic of pre-Shazam life, the
ritual is preserved in an advert for Music Power Records aired on the pirate
station Pulse FM in 1992. Nick Power, owner of the Harringay, North London
shop, recalls that no matter how mangled the customer’s rendition, “nearly
always, you’d be able to identify the exact record they were looking for.”
In the advert, Power himself plays the
roles of both sales assistant and punter (pinching his nose to alter his
voice). Now, almost 40 years later, the comic skit commercial has been
resurrected on London Pirate Radio Adverts 1984-1993 Vol. 1, the first
of a pair of compilations pulled together by audio archivist Luke Owen.
Released via his label Death Is Not
The End, Vol. 1 is available digitally at a name-your-price rate and for
£7.50 as a limited-edition cassette tape – a cute echo of the format on which
pirate listeners captured transmissions of hardcore and jungle. Back then,
most fans pressed ‘pause’ when the ad break started, which means that
surviving documents of the form are relatively scarce. But what once seemed
ephemeral and irritating have subsequently acquired period charm and – for some
- collectability.
Owen started Death Is Not The End in
2014 as a label and NTS radio show that trawled much further back in the 20th
Century to scoop up early gospel and obscure blues. But early last year, he put
out Bristol Pirates, tapping his own teenage memories of that city’s 1990s
radioscape. The adverts loomed in his nostalgic reveries with particular
vividness: “they were infectious and endearingly DIY… some of them memorable to the point of fever
loops. I can still remember one or two word for word”. Owen sees
“pirate radio broadcasts” in general as
“archival folk music” that fits perfectly logically alongside the field
recordings and Jamaican doowop he’d earlier reissued. “They are raw, impromptu
and communal musical experiences.”
Pirate MCs and DJs often described an
upcoming ad break as “a pause for the cause” – an annoying but necessary
interruption, because the revenue funded the station’s operation. But the ads
were useful to listeners, alerting them to raves and club nights. Promoters
likewise depended on the pirates as the primary means of reaching their market,
along with flyers left in record shops.
Author of London’s Pirate Pioneers,
Stephen Hebditch says that pirate radio – once a middle-class hobby – had by
the late Eighties become “urban enterprise for the people most excluded from the legitimate
media system… London reggae labels in particular put a lot of money into the
pirates. Then when acid house came along promoters were splashing out a fortune
on the stations linked to the rave scene”. Some of this revenue covered the costs
of replacing radio equipment seized by the authorities. But larger pirate
operations could “make back the cost of losing a transmitter in just a few
hours of broadcasting”.
Although demonized by the government
and news media as gangsters of the airwaves,
the pirates were genuine community stations, playing music marginalized
by mainstream broadcasters. The pirates represented minority populations – most
obviously Black British, but other ethnicities too, like Greek-Cypriot Londoners. That’s Nick Power’s background, so he was
tickled to hear a Greek-language ad for a Willesden Green beauty salon on London
Pirate Radio Adverts Vol. 1. On Vol.2, out in early February, a similar one for a
Harrow Road kebab house sits alongside ads for the Peckham jungle club
Innersense at the Lazerdrome and for Chillin’ FM’s ravers dating service.
Death Is Not The End’s compilations could be seen as a haunted audio cartography
of a disappearing London. But that sounds a bit ghostly and elegiac: more
crucially, these pirate adverts are joyous mementos of enterprising fun, young
people grabbing good times at the outer edge of the law.
Sleevenote for Pause for the Cause: London Rave Adverts 1991-1996, Vol. 2
2022
Back in the early ‘90s, whenever the pirate radio MC announced “a pause for the cause”, I usually pressed pause on my cassette recorder. That’s something I would regret years later, when ad breaks had become cherished mementos of the hardcore rave era. Luckily, back in the day I often left the tape running while I went off to do something else. So a fair number of ad breaks got captured accidentally for my later delectation. Not nearly enough, though. So in recent years I started combing through the immense number of pirate radio sets archived on the internet. Sometimes the tracklists would note “ad break” or “ads”, helping to narrow the search. But often I’d just stumble on a bunch in the middle of a pirate show preserved on YouTube or an oldskool blog. A few of my original unintended “saves” and latterday “finds” are included in this wonderful collection by audio archaeologist Luke Owen. It’s the latest in his series of compilations of UK pirate radio advertisements, with this volume focusing on the audio equivalent of the rave flyer: MCs breathlessly hyping a club night or upcoming rave, listing the lineup of deejays and MCs, boasting about hi-tech attractions like lasers and projections, mentioning prices and nearest landmarks to the venue, and occasionally promising “clean toilets” and “tight but polite security” (“sensible security” is another variation). Some of these ads are etched into my brain as lividly as the classic hardcore and jungle tunes of that time. (Most rave ads incorporate snippets of current music, of course – big anthems and obscure “mystery tracks” alike). Names of deejays ring out like mythological figures: who were Shaggy & Breeze, Kieran the Herbalist, Tinrib, Food Junkie? Putting on my serious hat for a moment, I think these ads are valuable deposits of sociocultural data, capturing the hustling energy of an underground micro-economy in which promoters, deejays and MCs competed for a larger slice of the dancing audience. But mostly, they are hard hits of pure nostalgic pleasure, amusing and thrilling through their blend of period charm, endearing amateurism, and contagiously manic excitement about rave music’s forward-surge into an unknown future. The best of these ads give me a memory-rush to rival the top tunes and MC routines of the era.
— Simon Reynolds, author of Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture.
Chat with audio archivist Luke Owen about the Pirate Radio Adverts project:
How did you get interested in pirate radio in general and in pirate radio adverts in particular?
I began tuning in to pirate radio from my early teens in Bristol in the late 90s - there was a lot of action on the dial back then and I was sucked in. It was a portal into the drum and bass/Full Cycle stuff happening in the city when I was too young for the clubs, and it also nurtured my love of reggae, dub and Bollywood soundtracks at a relatively young age. The ads were often infectious and endearingly DIY, and some were memorable to the point of fever loops, I can still remember one or two word for word.
I came upon the Pirate Radio Archive website a couple of years back, and there I found a trove of recordings from across the 80s and 90s through which I could transport myself back in time to some of those broadcasts I had been brought up on. I had been running Death Is Not The End since 2014 as a record label and NTS radio show focused mostly on "deep digs" into early gospel/blues/folk, field recordings and various archival finds. Coming across these recordings I was immediately stuck by the desire to do something with them, and put together a mixtape for the Blowing Up The Workshop mixblog and subsequently released it on DINTE as a cassette. It was a bit of a left-turn for the label perhaps, but being both archival and field recordings I thought it fit. I'm interested in "folk music" having a broader contemporary remit, and what it can mean in context. To me, recordings like these pirate radio broadcasts can represent archival folk music of sorts - they are raw, impromptu and communal musical experiences.
For me, the appeal of them is multi-leveled – there’s nostalgia, there’s period charm, there’s the amateur nature of them, some of the comedy ones are genuinely funny… But I also think they provide a valuable and historically important archive of subculture and British ‘lifeworlds’, especially minority populations (e.g. you have the Greek salon ad on Vol 1 ).
Yes, a lot are hilarious and some to the point of being genuinely a bit unhinged in places... A big part of the uniqueness of pirate radio is in the ads I think - it reflects the alternative culture through the lens of local business and events in a way that often contrasts with the staleness of "commercial" radio as much as the music itself. The whole thing often just seems to thrive on amping up the madness a bit, because they can. The London Pirate Radio Adverts collection was also intriguing from a local history perspective. I've always been interested in the changing landscape of areas, the previous lives of buildings, music venues, long gone record shops etc. By chance a lot of the adverts I collected for this happen to be for clubs and bars in places in South East London and East London that I've come to know quite well since moving here in the mid-noughties so that's another facet of it for me. Also, Immigrant communities making use of pirate radio as a means to supply an essential community service is an inherent element to pirate radio as a whole I think.
I like also the range. You have the slick-aspiring ads (with a tiny bit of Smashy + Nicey about the patter, quite common with pirate deejays before ’92 when it got a lot more ruffneck and hooligan in vibe - or they’ll hire that voiceover guy that also appeared in cinema adverts, the one with the incredibly deep voice, he pops up a few times on your tapes). And then the much more amateurish efforts.
Redd Pepper? I'm never quite sure whether it's him or an imitator... He sure must have gotten a lot of work around this time regardless. There's another guy who seems to have been the voiceover guy for a large portion of reggae & dancehall/soundclash events in the past couple decades (this is him @ 5.40 on Side A) and is still going strong. I'm going to do my best to track him down, I think I might have a friend of a friend who hired him for an ad once.
I think there's sometimes a conscious effort to get someone with a posh accent (or affecting one) for some of the dances that are billing themselves as classy & exclusive affairs. Then you've got some hilariously oddball voices, and a really bad Scouse impression that I have no idea what it's trying to achieve! I think pirate radio in general is prone to jokes and reference points that only the small group of listeners (or more likely mates of the station and the DJs) are "in" on, and this can bleed through to the ads as much as the chatter.
They often seem to like putting FX on the voice.
Yes, the use of delay on pirate radio station voiceover and adverts seems to be a point of reference that's bled in from sound system culture. I think it also helps the adverts "pop" and the feedback has the handy effect of papering over cracks where they may often sound too muddy and amateurish otherwise. I've also added tape delay here and there to aid with the transitions from one track to the next - the idea was initially for this to have the flow of a mixtape as much as possible.
Most of the ads on pirates were for raves, clubs, records shops, occasionally a compilation or a 12 inch release … But it’s interesting that quite a few of them are for non-music-related businesses - there’s one I came across for a bakers, you’ll get ones for hairdressers or a restaurant. Or on Vol. 1 the shop fittings ad for Trade Equip and the one for Fidel’s Menswear.
In a way I find the non-music related ads as some of the most intriguing and charming. It shows that the stations were often genuinely part of a thriving localised economy, and not just for soundheads. It seems a bit mad to think of a small high-street business advertising on the radio these days, and I suppose with the advent of social media marketing we're probably seeing the last of small businesses in print advertising to a large degree - it's just not attractive as you don't get to monitor the traffic it's generating and target your audience down to the minutiae, but it leaves a document of that business that can be preserved from a local history perspective (whereas when a business folds their online presence will likely disappear with it).
Even on the music history level alone, though, they are valuable – there’s a sort of established history of rave where certain legendary clubs get mentioned over and over (Rage, Labrynth, Innersense) and the same applies to the raves, labels, record shops. But these ads capture just how many clubs, raves etc there were, in all different parts of London or UK… many that have been forgotten or only ran for a short while. And there are addresses, times, prices mentioned.
Yes, the provision of full addresses, and often bus routes and the general specifics for the clubs and venues always gives me a pang of nerdy excitement. The addition of local landmarks, "under this flyover", "next to Tescos" etc. gives me extra info with which I can go sleuthing on Streetview and look at the ghost of the club mentioned in the advert (and for extra nerdery I can swipe backward in time on street view to see it's former guises too).
The raver’s dateline courtesy Chillin FM advert is very interesting and surprising!
Yes I was surprised to come across so many ravers datelines! I wonder if this is something you had come across before? Hooking up and meeting potential partners never struck me as a priority to pilled-up ravers but I must be mistaken... It was relatively before my time, and I suppose it's easy to be swayed by the dominant narrative of early rave being a drug-fuelled oasis away from meat-market bars & clubs, but there was clearly a market for it! I can't help being reminded of Father Ted's priest chatback line whenever I hear it, also.
I think you mentioned in that Crack interview how most people paused the tape when the ads came on… so there’s a limited number of ad breaks that have survived intact.
Yeah I guess it makes sense that the music is what the majority of the listeners are there for, and the ads can do one - or indeed be edited out later. The sources I had were pretty much all online, so I suppose you could say that a portion of those who have ripped/digitized their tapes didn't stop their recordings when the ads came on, and rather they have cropped them out in the process. But in general it's the same principle as to when you would record a TV show on VHS - a waste of valuable magnetic tape space.
What number did you accumulate before you started winnowing them down?
Maybe 100 total? It's been a bit of a blur to be honest. At some point I think I was losing it a bit.
It’s good that you have ads that aren’t just rave / hardcore / jungle, but others kind of music that were big then – like mellow house and progressive house etc.
It's easy to imagine pirate radio as exclusively a place for jungle, hardcore, reggae and dancehall etc. but yes it's refreshing. I particularly am interested in the popularity of rare groove and how that fits into the mix. The Under 18s Disco advert strikes me for it's mix up of styles - 'ragga, house, rap & swing'.
What is your favorite ad out of all the ones on the two cassettes? Or top 2 or 3.
I think probably the Videobox rental shop is up there, it's the faux dialogue that just makes me smile. The Rolls Royce & A Big House in 89 is just fantastic for the list of celebrities who have "been invited", and that you simply need to go into your local hairdresser for £1 tickets.
PIRATES OF THE AIRWAVES
The Wire, 2008
By Simon Reynolds
In which case, if only I'd used higher quality
cassettes! Before I got wise, I'd tape
over unwanted advance tapes from record labels: since the radio signal could
often be poor, buying chrome blanks seemed a waste . Plus, in those early days, I wasn't doing it
out of some archival preservationist impulse.
Like a lot of ravers I was just taping to get hold of the music,
something hard to do otherwise because deejays rarely identified tunes. Later I'd discover that
many were dubplates that wouldn't be in the shops for months anyway; in some
cases, they were test pressing experiments that never got released at all. I was taping simply to have the music to play
through the week when the pirates mostly dropped off the airwaves, and in 1993,
when I spent large chunks of the year in New York, I took the tapes with me to
keep the rave flame burning during my exile.
These relics of UK rave's heyday are editions-of-one because they're mutilated by my spontaneous editing decisions: switching between stations repeatedly when a pirate show's energy dimmed, or the DJ dropped a run of tracks I'd taped several times already; cutting off arbitrarily when I couldn't stay awake any longer, or dwindling into lameness because I'd left the tape running and went off to do something else. In the early days I often pressed 'pause' when the commercial breaks came on, something I now regret because those that survived are among my absolute favourite bits. With their goofy, made-on-the-fly quality, the ads for the big raves and the pirate station jingles contribute heavily to the dense layering of socio-cultural data and period vibes that make these tapes so valuable.
The crucial added element to these tapes, something you don't get from the original
vinyl 12 inches played in isolation or
even from the official DJ mix-tapes and mix-CDs of the era, is life.
In two senses: the
autobiographical imprint of my personal
early Nineties, someone hurled disoriented into the vortex of the UK
rave scene and still figuring it out, but also the live-and-direct messiness of
deejays mixing on the fly and using whatever new tunes were in the shops that
week, of MCs randomizing further with
their gritty and witty patter. The tapes
are capsules of a living culture.
Something about the mode of transmission itself seems to intensify the
music, with radio's compression effect
exaggerating hardcore's already imbalanced frequency spectrum of treble-sparkly high end and sub-bass
rumblizm. Pirate deejays, typically mid-level jocks or amateurs, also took more
risks than big-name DJs crowd-pleasing at the mega-raves. Playing to a
home-listening or car-driving audience, the DJs mixed with an edge-of-chaos
looseness and squeezed in some of the
scene's odder output rather than just sticking to floor-filling anthems.
Oh, they're not all pure gold, these tapes. Many shows
stayed stuck at "decent" or slumped outright into "tepid".
But the ones that ignited… ooh
gosh! The vital alchemical catalyst was
invariably the MC. On some sessions, it's like a flash-of-the- spirit has
possessed the rapper, as electrifying to the ears as a first-class
Pentecostal preacher or demagogue; you sense the
MC and the decktician spurring each other to higher heights. It tends to be the lesser knowns that thrill
me most: not the famous big-rave
jungle toasters like Moose or Five-O but
forgotten figures like OC and Ryme Tyme, who forged unique styles that melded
the commanding cadences and gruff rootsiness of U-Roy-style deejay
talkover with the chirpy hyperkinesis of nutty rave, or collided barrow boy argy-bargy with B-boy human beatboxing. Some of these tapes I
know so well that the tracks are inseparable from the chants and the chatter
entwined around the drops and melody-riffs; years later when I finally worked
out what the mystery tunes were and bought them, they sounded flat without that
extra layer of rhythmatized speech thickening the breakbeat broth.
1992 to 1994, ardkore to darkcore to jungle, is the prime
period for me. I seldom revisit the drum and bass years, when things got
serious; things pick up again with the poptastic re-efflorescence of UK garage
and 2step, when the number of London pirates resurged to its highest level.
Grime is an odd one: I've got masses of
tapes, and there's masses more to be found archived on the web, but the
emergence of the MC as a capital A artist strikes me as a mixed blessing. With
one eye on their career prospects (an album deal) the MCs increasingly came in
with pre-written verses, reams of carefully crafted verbiage dropped with
little regard to how it fit the groove.
Pirate MCs always had an arsenal of signature catchphrases and
mouth-music gimmicks, but with grime a vital element of ad-libbing
improvisation got severely diminished.
So excepting some 2002 tapes from
grime's protozoan dawn, I've not got the
same attachment or affection as I do for the classic rave sets.
Oddly, I've rarely found people who shared my obsession to
anything like the same degree: a handful
of collector-traders, and a guy called DJ Wrongspeed, whose fantastic Pirate
Flava CD collaged the best bits from his now defunct Resonance FM series
based around re-presenting pirate radio broadcasts. Often I've come across
people who'll talk enthusiastically about recording the pirates "back in the day," only
to reveal they'd long since taped over the cassettes, left them in the car to curdle in the heat,
or just lost them. Aaaaargh!
But as a quick web search reveals, pirate tape fiends are
out there lurking, and not just ones obsessed with the London-centric hardcore
continuum: there's online archives and
merchants for the original pirate radio of the 1960s (stations anchored in
international waters or occupying abandoned offshore military forts) and sites
dedicated to the land-based pirates of the Seventies and Eighties and to the
Eighties hip hop mix-shows broadcast by London's pre-rave pirates. In terms of my particular addiction, you can
find ardkore, jungle and UK garage sets archived at old skool sites, or offered
for trade or sale; on various rave,
drum'n'bass and dubstep message boards you'll come across individuals sharing
huge caches of vintage
transmissions. The pirate penchant seems
to be a minority taste within the larger niche market for DJ mix-tapes of the
sort recorded through the sound board at the big commercial raves and then sold commercially through specialist
record stores. People have been selling or swapping dupes of these sets for a
dozen years at least (nostalgia for 1990-92 set in as early as 1996!). Today,
an original Top Buzz mix-tape circa 1992, say, might fetch sixty pounds on
Ebay. Strangely, from my point of view
anyway, old skool fanatics generally prefer the slickly-mixed official releases
to the vibe-rich but erratic pirate tapes; a lot of people just don't like MCs,
it seems. But if, like me, you dig the
brink-of-bedlam atmosphere of the pirate set, or are just curious to cop an
in-the-raw feel of what it was like in those crazed days, seek out these online
deposits of delirium:
http://www.hardscore.com/radiosets.htm
A sizeable cache of 1989-97 shows, mostly from the London
area.
http://www.londonpirates.co.uk/TouchdownAudio.htm
http://www.londonpirates.co.uk/DonAudio.htm
Sets from two of my favourite stations of the 1992-93
"golden age"
http://www.yorkshirejunkies.co.uk/music-pirate-radio-recordings.php
Massive archive of
broadcasts from Sheffield, Leeds,
Bradford, York, Huddersfield, Hull and other North of England stations,
1992 - 2006
http://www.tapesgalore.co.uk/prtapes.htm
Huge selection of pirate tapes, albeit for sale rather than
download.
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