radiocarolineonair.com

Radio Caroline

Legendary

Iconic

A survivor against the odds

Don’t just take our word for it...

• "...... Radio Caroline was an exciting part of all our lives and summed up the spirit of the times, culturally and musically." Sir Paul McCartney
  
  
• "For The Who, Radio Caroline was an angelic force ........without Caroline we would not have sold a single record." Pete Townshend
  
  
• "Radio Caroline was more adventurous than most of the stations around, it championed bands like The Kinks, who owe much of their early success to Radio Caroline." Ray Davies
  
  
• "Radio Caroline gave us our start, my eternal thanks." Spencer Davis
  
  
• "Did you ever wonder why so much fantastic music came out of Britain starting in the 60s? Pirates did it. The story of how they did it seems unbelievable, but it really happened. It completely altered the course of rock n roll." Steve Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen's band
  
  
• "Radio Caroline was a great breakthrough in pop music radio - the one place you could hear the charts and new releases you couldn't hear anywhere else." Noddy Holder
  
  
• "We wrote the song 'Rock n Roll' which included the lyric ' waiting all the time to find radio plays on Caroline'. This ballad was a big part of remembering how important Radio Caroline was to us. The fact that private radio stations played our songs and that they included some of the best DJs prompted the government to give the country top 40 stations." Francis Rossi, Status Quo.
  
  
• "I had already started my recording career when Caroline launched. I loved lazing in bed in the morning listening to all my favourite records. It was amazing!" Sandie Shaw
  
  
• "Tuning in to Radio Caroline in the 60s was an integral part of keeping abreast with the chart action of the day. For us recording artists, it not only kept us on our toes, but - upon hearing some sparkling new release - made us even more determined to match or surpass the musical standards being set!" Mike d'Abo, Manfred Mann.
  
  
• " Everyone needs competition to maintain quality and provide alternatives and Radio Caroline was just what we needed in the 60's, being one of the first to do this in radio .." Joe Brown
  
  
• "If there had been no Radio Caroline, there would have been no Wild Thing and no Troggs, plus many other groups we still know today from the 60s. God bless all who sailed in her." Reg Presley, The Troggs

BBC Radio 2 presenter Johnnie Walker looks back fondly on his pioneering days with Caroline and has often credited the station for providing the happiest days of his broadcasting career. "When ‘the sixties’ finally arrived, a few years into the decade, Radio Caroline was the catalyst. Our audience of tens of millions, new music and youth fashion accelerated at astonishing speed. Hundreds of new bands achieved massive, and sometimes lasting, success."

Recalling his simple throwaway pop song 'Everyone's Gone To The Moon', Jonathan King, broadcaster and pop pundit says that within weeks of initial air play on Caroline he was projected from obscurity to starring on prime time television at the prestigious London Palladium.

Unknown actor Simon Dee was head hunted from Caroline to become the first superstar chat show host on British TV and many of the household names of the past five decades owe a debt of gratitude to Radio Caroline.

Radio Caroline began broadcasting on the medium wave in March 1964. Since February 1999 we have been operating as a fully licensed satellite radio station, anybody with Sky TV can tune into our programmes on channel 0199 or they can listen via our website at www.radiocaroline.co.uk.

Now, in 2011, as the radio industry is preparing for an almost wholesale move to DAB, medium wave is being abandoned. OFCOM, who regulate radio communications on behalf of government, announced four years ago that there would be no further licences issued for medium wave.

Our request is simple;

"if nobody else wants it, could we have a licence to broadcast on medium wave to our traditional core listenership in the south-east of the country?"

Who could argue against the station which started it all being allowed a small piece of the radio spectrum to do what it has been doing for almost 47 years, playing music which the others don’t play, to an appreciative audience, many of whom display their loyalty via monthly subscriptions year in and year out?

The existing commercial radio stations continue to follow the path to profit by broadcasting commercially acceptable, high-yield programmes which the advertising industry has determined will give the best financial return. Many thousands of pounds are spent researching the best formats to achieve this and the best radio programming brains in the UK are constantly battling for a larger share of the listening pie.

We are not interested in creating a profit, we are a non profit making organisation which has the programme output at heart. We are probably the only commercial radio station in the UK with a deliberate policy of not chasing advertising; we are a radio station with very clear ideas about our programmes, if we can find organisations willing to advertise around what we do we will, of course, carry their advertising message. The funding which allows us to continue is a mixture of advertising revenue and listener subscriptions, this combination has worked for us for the last 11 years and we see no reason for it to stop working for us. It means that we are not beholden to the advertising industry, or the music industry; we don’t have to change our music format every time a new fad appears.

In the early 1970s Radio Caroline pioneered a format of playing music from albums, rather than the Top 40 singles chart. It is a format we still adhere to today, it allows us the freedom to play music from many genres and many eras and makes our programmes sufficiently different from anything else available in the UK.

Our studio base is in Kent but we also utilise our radio ship Ross Revenge whenever we can. This year we have been licensed to broadcast very low power medium wave from our ship on all the bank holiday weekends, our request was granted as we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the ship, a vessel laden with history. She played a significant part in the famous "cod wars" of the 1970’s when she became the "mother ship" of the UK's long range fishing fleet, operating on voyages of two or three weeks duration to Icelandic and Northern Arctic waters. Her formidable strength, power and agility were key factors in her ability to operate in waters as low as -20 degrees centigrade, where extensive catches of cod and herring could be found.

For the next decade Ross Revenge made the record books for the size of loads she was bringing home - a single trip could net as much as £77,000 at a time when a new house cost £15,000. However, seeing many foreign ships depleting fish stocks around their homeland, the Icelandic government increased its territorial limits and started to police them and the so called "Cod Wars" broke out. The Ross Revenge amongst many other UK ships was frequently challenged by Icelandic Navy gunboats attempting to intercept her and either inspect her catch or cut through her nets. On more than one occasion tempers flared and accusations were levelled about attempts to ram other vessels. However, the Ross Revenge with such a powerful engine was known to be capable of outrunning many of the Icelandic navy ships, and her skipper of the time was notorious amongst the Icelandic coastguard for being somewhat of a challenge to their authority. By the late 1970's Britain, and many other European governments, reluctantly accepted Iceland’s new 200 mile limit and with little stocks closer to home, the long range fishing industry went into very sharp decline. Many of her contemporaries met with the cutters torch, whilst some went on to be converted for use in the then booming North Sea oil industry. However, The Ross Revenge laid in port for almost two years before she was acquired for use as a salvage ship and tug to operate from the Cornish coast in 1979.

In 1983 she began her new life as the offshore home of Radio Caroline, lying anchored in the North Sea. North Easterly gales in November 1991 looked to have finally put the ship to rest when, battered and bruised, she was dragged from her anchorage and drifted 17 miles before running aground on the notorious Goodwin Sands. In the early light of the morning her crew was taken off by helicopter and she was left alone to succumb to nature on the notorious sands where hundreds of ships and thousands of lives have been taken. For a while it looked as if Ross Revenge was destined to become another one but the history books will tell you that only two vessels have ever survived a grounding on those sands, one has since been sunk in an unrelated incident, the other is our spiritual home Ross Revenge.

Our aim is to broadcast our programmes on medium wave to our traditional heartland of the south east of the UK, ideally from our ship. The two parts of Radio Caroline, the radio station and the ship, are firmly implanted in British history and the two should be available for the people to enjoy. By switching on a cheaply available medium wave radio and listening to our programmes, and by visiting our ship (in much the same way as one would visit Cutty Sark or HMS Belfast), we can make history ..... British history .... available to the people.

Official website www.radiocaroline.co.uk

Ross Revenge website www.rossrevenge.co.uk