The Pirate Radio Edition

Colin here. I’ve long admired the record store Boomkat in the UK. They focus on the interesting and overlooked, regardless of genre. I find their drone, ambient, and other electronic music selections to be on point. I’ve been mostly shopping them for beautifully produced physical releases as well as their excellent 14-track genre samplers. But I never thought I’d be seeking them out to listen to old radio advertising.

Why is this interesting?

Boomkat recently released a fascinating series of compilations called Death Is Not The End that are recordings of adverts that appeared on London pirate radio during various time periods. For those unfamiliar, pirate radio was the operation of unlicensed radio stations that were often hyper pure and non-commercialized expressions of underground sounds ranging from jungle to house, to two-step depending on the era. 

As Boomkat describes the release: 

Scanning the airwaves of a golden era in London history between 1984-1993 when dancehall soundsystem culture fostered the early stirrings and full rush of hardcore, Death Is Not The End turn their beady ear to one of the epicentres of UK rave music with stacks of raggo vignettes advertising everything from Greek salons to school reunions, video shops, datelines, drug helplines, and dances, each set to backdrops of contemporaneous club, rare groove, jungle and house.  

As much as anything, the set speaks to London’s inimitable, cultural variegation, charting the myriad voices and flavours that make up the city’s stylistic mosaic, and would go on to deeply inform British pop and dance culture for decades to come. It’s as thrilling as Sublime Frequencies’ best radio surveys, but with an extra layer of familiarity for UK listeners, not just those who lived thru that era, but anyone who had the radio crackling as ambient wallpaper during that era…if you allow for some vicarious nostalgia, this tape documents a rich slice of the collective cultural memory that we’ve all come to share.

The power of releases like this is they are time capsules and hyper-specific shared cultural memories. I also love the idea that a small business, that might not have been able to market in other means, turned to the cost-effective, and underground stations in turn funding their illicit sonic output. The ads, ranging from what sounds like a Greek salon and a video store to proper raves, are the original native advertising as well, using the low-fi vernacular, accents, and slang that the DJs were also using. Even as a non-brit, it is incredibly interesting to hear a time of underground music through the ads that were played on pirate radio. (CJN)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) 

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