ROCKING THE BOAT

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Remembering Britain’s first pirate radio station: Not so much sex or drugs, but lots of rock ’n’ roll.

ON Easter Sunday in 1964, Tom Lodge and his friends found themselves aboard an old ferry ship anchored a bit more than three miles off the southeastern coast of Great Brit­ain.

It was as good a place as any to start a tidal wave.

Despite the ocean setting, the tidal wave was not literal, but cultural. With a flip of a switch, Lodge and his colleagues that day began an audacious experiment in cultural revolution that in the annals of British rock 'n' roll history stands as the musical equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It was the beginning of Radio Caroline.

Lodge, who now makes his home in Santa Cruz County, was the first program director of the first rock radio station in England that spawned the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and countless other musical demigods. It's a story being told -- albeit in highly stylized fictional form -- in the new film Pirate Radio.

Neither Lodge nor Radio Caroline are mentioned by name in the movie by writer/director Richard Curtis, who wrote the script based on Caroline and its many imitators. But Lodge, whose book about his experiences with Radio Caroline will be published in December, said the film is entertaining, however much it misses the import of the real story.

"They made it a lot of fun with sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll," he said. "But that's not really what it was about then. It was about a transition in popular music. We changed the world."

That's a heady claim for what was a bunch of young renegade radio jocks playing their favourite blues records in international waters to avoid the jurisdiction of British broadcasting law. But consider what popular culture was in the U.K. before that Easter Sunday. The BBC covered the island nation like a blanket in what amounted to a government broadcasting monopoly. And the BBC had no taste whatsoever for rock music.

While Elvis, Chuck Berry and Little Richard were electrifying the U.S. with this new form of youth music, Britain remained doggedly resistant to it. Rock 'n' roll wasn't on the radio, and it wasn't generally in the record stores either.

"Teenagers didn't have any outlet but their own clubs," said Lodge. "It was American sailors who brought into London and Liverpool Chuck Berry and B.B. King and other records. Then, British kids would take them and learn them on their guitars and teach others as well."

Enter Ronan O'Rahilly, an Irish-born nightclub manager who also managed the early career of British pop star Georgie Fame. Frustrated that he couldn't get Fame's music on the radio, O'Rahilly founded Radio Caroline, hiring Lodge to bring on a team of rock enthusiasts to blast rock 'n' roll across the British mainland outside the control of the BBC or British authorities.

"Ronan was smart," Lodge said. "He registered the ship in 10 different countries. So, we would fly the flag of Panama. And when the British government, as everyone expected they would, put pressure on Panama to revoke the ship's charter, there was a package on board the ship that was like those Russian dolls, one package inside another. So when the Panamanian flag came down, we would open the package and there was the Honduras flag."

The establishment of Radio Caroline coincided not only with the rise of such talented young Brits as the Beatles, the Stones and the Who, it also took place right when the portable transistor radio was becoming widely available. What resulted was a mass phenomenon, a teen craze that exasperated the older generation across the country.

Back on board Radio Caroline, Lodge and his young DJs lived on the ship around the clock, an experience in isolation that prevented them from understanding the revolution they were bringing about. It was in the summer of that first year that Lodge and his staff asked loyal listeners to come to the beach closest to the ship, which was then cruising in a circle around the country, and shine their cosmetic mirrors at the ship.

Soon after, Lodge wrote in his book The Ship That Rocked the World: How Radio Caroline Defied the Establishment, Launched the British Invasion and Made the Planet Safe for Rock and Roll: "The coastline lit up with flashing lights. The whole coastline was sparkling. This went on all day, all along the coast."

Almost instantly, the Radio Caroline staff were celebrities. Lodge interviewed several of the iconic names of the period, including the Beatles in a hush-hush interview at the height of the band's popularity that Lodge documents in his book. He emceed rock shows around the country. But, he said, one thing that Pirate Radio gets wrong has to do with drugs.

"Our regimen was one beer a day," Lodge said. "We didn't know anything about marijuana. I didn't even know it existed before 1968."

Lodge, who grew up in Virginia but attended high school in the U.K. and spent much of his youth in Canada, stayed with Radio Caroline until 1967, by which time the once-renegade station was but one of several off-shore radio stations in operation. He moved to the West Coast in 1999.

Lodge said he sent his book and a screenplay based on it to writer-director Curtis but was told that the filmmaker was not interested in working with him. He hopes that the forthcoming publication of the book might one day spark another film to tell the "real" story of Radio Caroline.

The main thing that Pirate Radio does get wrong is the age of the principal players, Lodge said.

"The movie has the owner of the station played by actor Bill Nighy, who is 60. Ronan was 24 years old. We were all just kids. We all had 32-inch waists or less. I don't think there was a waist in the film under 40."

-- Santa Cruz Sentinel

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 21, 2009 F1