1st April 1991

How ever you slice it, 30 years is a long time in anyone's life. To be looking back on UK-based hobby pirates from that length of time ago is undoubtedly unusual if only for its own sake, but where and how they figured within the patchwork quilt of my life at the time, and to varying extents since, has very much been the basis of my blog.

To undertake this project simply to give my slant on the shortwave free radio scene of the time would have been insufficient reason in itself, but the early 1990s represented some of the most influential and tumultuous years in my life to date. The overlap of an outstanding period for music a few years either side of 1990 with free radio certainly resonated at the time as it still does to some extent today, but my stumbling across of pirate radio would not have had the same effect upon me if it had been in a different era, perhaps even a different year, as its unique selling point captivated my life as much as the football and music scenes of the time, and the discovery of the pluses and minuses associated with teenage relationships with the opposite sex. 

A symbiotic existence of  the constituent parts of my life was held together by one area predominating when perhaps another fell short of expectations and desires, which would be commonplace in the ephemeral worlds of sporting success and musical mastery. Free radio would also at times frustrate, as it only ever could if by that point one was so immersed within it, but the relative joy and dejection of hearing, or not as the case may be, stations that became favourites would neatly mesh in with the ebb and flow of teenage years, although I perhaps did not think of it like that at the time. 

The April Fools' Day of 1991 has brought back many memories for me, including how my rapidly burgeoning interest in shortwave free radio had manifested itself. It was a wild, windy, and wet Easter bank holiday Monday in the UK, and I was staying at my grandparents' house during part of the school holidays. How much radio had become part of my life only 6 months after first hearing pirate stations on the 48 metre band was demonstrated in the way I turned my grandparents' library/second sitting room into a radio shack, complete with a long wire antenna projecting from my Russian-issue Venturer 2959 multi-band analogue receiver that actually came as standard with a shoulder strap - the irony being it was anything but a easily portable radio even with this unorthodox appendage.

Despite my grandparents' house being in a semi-rural location compared to my then anything but rural place of residence, reception conditions had never in the past been what I hoped them to be. Perhaps I had previously just been unlucky, or that I expected too much from what was an extremely modest and at times frustrating piece of listening equipment. Either way, I didn't expect a great deal of listening success on April 1st thirty years ago, but fortunately that proved to be unduly pessimistic. 

In the absence of my now long gone logbooks, I am indebted to a copy of FRS Goes DX from the 22nd April 1991 recently sourced online to jolt my memory of the stations heard that public holiday. To say it was memorable but I couldn't otherwise have recalled those broadcasting that day without the Dutch-based publication sounds rather counter-intuitive but in my defence it has of course been thirty years, but I always knew it to be a significant day of listening, as born out by the loggings from that day.

As with most of the defining moments and facets of my teenage years, a Venn Diagram could be drawn as to how the individual influences tied in with each other. That my listening post was at the home of my late and much missed grandparents' isn't lost upon me, but neatly dovetails as a microcosm of the fluctuating emotions that reverberated from such interdependent memories of the time. 

My abiding recollection of the day was hearing Wee Guy Radio, a spoof 'station' operated by a well known Scottish gentleman whose presence on shortwave was synonymous with the 1990s shortwave hobby pirate scene. With little compunction bound up in an astute ability to mimic, gently mock and even deride several other free radio operators of the time, Wee Guy's yearly appearances were as brief as they were entertaining through an ability to subtly and blatantly point the finger at those who took themselves too seriously, and where extremely minor celebrity had gone to several heads. It was though the harmless and gentle satirizing of the late Norman Nelson of Radio East Coast Commercial as Norman Nesquik of a West Coast equivalent which has stayed with me, along with other more derogatory caricatures of those whose blushes I will spare. 

Elsewhere on 48 metres that day, Weekend Music Radio(funnily enough...!), Live Wire, Radio Confusion(later Subterranean Sounds) and a Mike Wilson(Bogusman)-inspired Radio Orion were also heard, along with fellow UK-based broadcasters Rocket 48, Radio Stella, and Midlands' Music Radio. Not only was this a day for quantity, there was no lack of quality within the output of the aforementioned - which more or less came as standard. To have so many listenable stations vying for attention during one morning reflects just how different the scene was then to what it has become today. 

It is unfair of me to say that the forthcoming Easter bank holiday Monday is not worth the effort of tuning in, but as the aforementioned leviathans of the 1990s slowly drifted away into semi or permanent broadcasting retirement, those of a similar calibre or who showed signs of having the potential to take up the mantle have generally been few and far between, and increasingly conspicuous by their absence. 

As with any decade the 1990s branded the most impressionable growing up in that era with an imprint which whilst not defining the road subsequently travelled in later life, certainly had a guiding influence on lives which in my case make the decade, especially its early to mid-years, so memorable for their own sake, but often depressing when contrasting like for like with today and the emotions engendered that will, just like the familial and radio protagonists of the time, never return.

It is said that comparisons are odious but if conditions and circumstances allow, only the Xenon Transmitting Company(XTC) of the stations that have that unique listenability so commonplace in the 1990s but now which are more or less absent, lost, and/or unavailable has the potential to be heard this forthcoming Easter Monday. That though is through arriving at the rather unrealistic conclusion that all who listen to free radio or have previously done so demand the same things from it as I once did. To many who tune in today the output on offer will be entirely to their taste and represent an exciting alternative to the homogenized mainstream. When though you can remember the glory days of one's own listening, and which now seems like a half a lifetime away, that is because it actually is, representing changes in taste, technology, and the importance or otherwise free radio plays in the lives of its listeners. 

There is no way of returning to the past but unearthing the FRS Goes DX publication was to me akin to an archaeological find from another age. When reminiscence goes beyond fondly remembering the past into territory of deriding the present, it is there where it must stop. There is a always a time to remember, but also one from which to move on. Being able to recognize the boundaries between the two is the difficult part.