Issue eleven: Pirate Radio Tapes
Issue eleven: Pirate Radio Tapes
Thing of the Month: a regular series
October’s Things of the Month are two cassette tapes documenting the last broadcast by Bush FM, a pirate radio station run by teenagers from a village in Oxfordshire, UK, during the summer of 1994. I’ve made a digital transfer of the cassettes, which you can listen to via the SoundCloud links in this essay or in full here. For period flavour, I’ve kept the recordings in their raw form, complete with tape hiss, distortion, signal interference, and other audio artifacts.
Summer, 1994. We’d finally finished secondary school. For a laugh, because why else, four friends of mine—Ambler, Cook, Kev and Nath, I recall, though I may have that wrong—decided to set up a pirate radio station. It was something to do until September came, when university, jobs, apprenticeships, art foundation courses, or other plans would disperse us. For reasons long forgotten but likely juvenile, they named it Bush FM. Cook was handy with electronics and built a small radio transmitter using components bought from the Maplin mail order catalogue. It had a broadcast radius of one mile, give or take. Enough to cover our large village and graze the poplar trees lining the ancient ‘Church Waye’ to the south, the ASDA supermarket car park and ruined railway bridge at the village’s eastern edge, and the farms and woods that lay north and west. Nath’s parents’ house was chosen as the station. It was located on the crest of the small valley in which the village sat, just across the A40 dual carriageway that scratched its top. His house had the highest elevation, which provided the widest signal range. It also had the advantage of a skylight bedroom window, through which an aerial was rigged on a steel pole, and Nath’s pair of Technics SL-1200 record turntables and mixer.
During our final years of school, if the weather conditions were favourable it was possible pick out from the frizz of radio static Kiss FM, a station 60 miles away in London that played out the latest dance music. Music magazines and word-of mouth—usually someone or other’s cousin’s boyfriend who lived up in London—reported the existence of illegal pirate stations transmitting the new, futuristic breakbeat sounds of jungle, drum’n’bass and hardcore rave. The pirate signals didn’t reach as far as our village but the music, emerging in the comet trail of acid house and the rave scene, was hard to miss. You’d rarely hear it on the TV or mainstream radio, but you caught the music pumping out of passing cars and bedroom windows. DIY music being made across the country on consumer electronic gear, distributed on white-label 12-inches and through mixtape multipacks. Seemingly each week a fresh mutant genre splintered into existence: techstep, hardstep, darkcore, jump-up, ambient d’n’b. It was reshaping the nation’s subcultures, including our little corner ten miles outside the city of Oxford. Illicit raves were held on deserted airstrips nearby. Castlemorton was in the news. Ecstacy scare stories were all over the tabloid newpapers. The music felt outlaw, dangerous, all the things that matter when you’re young.
The lads were heavily into breakbeat music of all stripes, collecting 12-inch records on labels such as Moving Shadow, Suburban Base, Chill, Reinforced and Good Looking, mostly bought on a Saturday afternoon from Massive Records in Oxford. They lived for it. I loved some of this music, and some of it left me agnostic. The tunes sounded alien to my ears, alien with occasional bright patches of euphoric melody. My tastes ran back into guitar music, to records from the 1960s and ‘70s, which belonged to other people’s youth. I couldn’t be bothered with the partisan attitude to music that some people at the time subscribed to, to the idea that you had to pick a side, dance music or guitar music. But I did recognize that jungle represented the here-and-now. That this sound belonged to us and I would be a fool to ignore the moment. What my ears found difficult about jungle was also what made it new and thrilling. “For about five years, between 1992 and 1997, jungle sounded like the future rushing in,” wrote the late Mark Fisher. Kodwo Eshun put it in more visceral terms:
“[Jungle] grips you so much you can’t believe it—you think ‘what the hell is this?’—and your fear-flight thresholds are screaming, it’s like your whole body's turned into this giant series of alarm bells, like your organs want to run away from you. It’s like your leg wants to head north and your arm wants to head south, and your feet want to take off somewhere else. It’s like your entire body would like to vacate. Basically, you want to go AWOL from yourself. But you can’t, so you stay and enjoy it.”
An empty sliver of frequency was found for the station at 106.1 FM. It was well away from the ends of the dial used by the emergency services and which would attract trouble. Bush FM broadcast for a couple of hours on Saturday evenings, when Nath’s parents were out. Ambler, Cook, Kev and Nath would DJ and MC. One or two other kids, perhaps someone’s girlfriend, might turn up. I’d occasionally go along and be given ten minutes on the decks, but my mixing skills were terrible. So I’d lounge on a beanbag, take some photos, enjoy the show.
I can’t remember how many times Bush FM went on air. Four, maybe five? The final broadcast was on August 27th, the bank holiday weekend. I stayed at home that night and made these tape recordings. I lived just under a mile from Nath’s house, as the crow flies, but the signal was not always crystal—the first 10 minutes of Tape 1, Side B, for instance, are furred with static. The broadcast passed through treetops, over the heads of cows and sheep. At best only a handful of local kids ever reached up to grab it. “Big shout to Dave and Chris drivin’ around in Chris’s car,” says Nath, MCing on the tapes. (You can hear this at 15:00 mins, Tape 1, Side B.) I recall someone telling me that they had tuned in on their car stereo while parked down at the ASDA supermarket, by the disused train line at the east end of the village. There was a period when joyriders took stolen cars there in the evenings to do handbrake turns. I liked to dangle my legs over the edge of the broken Brunel railway bridge and listen to Suede on my Walkman.
The station had a cute ident, someone’s little sister gabbling into a dictaphone: “Bush FM is wicked! Bush FM is wicked I love it I love it!” (00:00 mins, Tape 2, Side A.) The lads borrowed a London affect when they MC’d, trying to sound tougher, more worldly, than than any of us were. “Junglist massive, hear this!” “Yeah, this one’s real.” “Big up the bassline!” There are repeated references to “anyone goin’ to Ibiza next Wednesday: this tune’s yours mate,” which sounded like hedonistically grown-up vacation plans, though I don’t remember anyone actually going. Goofy innocence and Oxfordshire accents would always betray the bravado and city fantasies. “Ambler, if you’re listenin’ to this, I want my tape back please.” Nath’s record decks had a cuddly green pterodactyl perched on them, and were watched over by a toy Smurf and a glow-in-the-dark crucifix. The shout-outs gave away a sweet localism, name-checking friends in villages even smaller than our own and with centuries-old names. “Big shout to everyone in Wheatley, Horspath, Holton, Garsington, Ickford, Marsh Baldon, Toot Baldon! Ten-sixty-one crew takin’ you through! Easy does it now!” (06:35 mins, Tape 2, Side B.) “Got a big shout to Dan Fox. Got a shout out to Peers and his bruvva, and all the muppets in Wheatley, Horspath.” (42:15 mins, Tape 2, Side A. “Muppets” was occasional slang for kids younger than ourselves.) “The next one’s goin’ out to Emma, if you’re listenin’. Also it’s goin’ out to anyone who’s been listenin’ over the summer holidays.” (16:20 mins, Tape 2, Side B.) Did Emma ever tune in? I doubt it. A phone-in is announced at one point. “We repeat, phone lines are open…” A few minutes pass. “Oi, what you waitin’ for? Phone lines are open!” Clearly nobody’s calling because nobody’s listening. Then something happens off mic. “If you know the number, don’t ring. Sorry about that. Got cut off.” (15:00–25:00. Tape 01, Side B.) Probably Nath’s parents returning home early.
The bathos was endearing but the tunes were blistering. The pace is relentless, despite the shambolic mixing. Breakbeats skitter and patter, complex patterns made on primitive drum machines, or rough, accelerated samples from old funk and reggae songs. The basslines are menacing and mobile. They stride up and down the scale. They boom, roll, reverse, tumble. In places the bass is so thick and subterranean that it’s hard to discern notes, only sense what they might be. Melody is sparse and borderline atonal. Long passages are given over to pummelling rhythms, which eventually relent and give way to pretty piano licks and lush synth strings, like sun breaking cloud. Occasionally the music is straight up funky. (Check Kan U Feel It? by Skool of Hard Knocks, which irresistibly mashes down samples from The JBs, The Jacksons and the Jungle Bros, before sliding into Subnation’s horror-inspired Scottie. 25:15, Tape A, Side B.) Beyond a few basic elements, the tracks are structurally anarchic, following no law other than the the producer’s own. The atmosphere on these tapes careens from dark to sunny, from confrontational to sentimental. The effect—of the whiplash speed, the funk, the pressure drops in mood—is exhilarating. It’s punk.
Bush FM doesn’t give a bad snapshot of the genre, given how difficult it was for us to obtain a lot of the records where we lived. You can hear a handful of period classics scattered throughout—Subnation’s Scottie, with its sample from the Evil Dead movie; Dark Stranger by Boogie Times Tribe; Lord of Null Lines’ Hyper On Experience. The tastes of the Bush FM lads seem to gravitate towards dancehall-inspired tracks which blend real-deal MC toasting with soulful vocals. (43:05 to the end of Tape 1, Side A.) But you can also hear instances of rave’s sped-up vocals and house-y piano riffs (Sweet Harmony by Liquid, 00:55, Tape 2, Side A), and the deep jazz, almost ambient direction that was emerging at the time (Redy 2 Atak, Cold Mission, 30:50, Tape 2, Side A).
It’s a strikingly cinephile genre. Many tracks make use of sampled dialogue from horror films, sci-fis and thrillers. There’s an entire Discogs thread devoted to sleuthing movie samples in 1990s drum’n’bass. Predator was a big one. Also Videodrome, Silence of the Lambs, Alien, The Godfather, Blue Velvet, Coppola’s Dracula, Flash Gordon, Marked for Death. On one of the best records of the era you can hear the voice of Gene Wilder in his 1971 role as Willy Wonka. (The Dreamer, by Intense, which also samples Enya. 08:10, Tape 2, Side B.) Another track on the tapes, which I can’t identify, samples John Huston reflecting on Marilyn Monroe’s death. “Her great enemy was sleeplessness. Only God knows why she feared it so much.” (15:14, Tape 2, Side A.)
As the broadcast winds down someone says “That’s it. End of Bush FM til 1995.” But that really was to be the end. I would lose touch with the crew. Thirty years on, the tapes sound to me like summer and mischief. But the music doesn’t make me nostalgic. Its ideas still convey a sense of possibility. I’m glad I paid attention to what I didn’t understand.
RECOMMENDATIONS
—RIP the great Pharoah Sanders.
—If you’re into documentary photography, then you will already know the fantastic Cafe Royal Books. Based in Southport, UK, it was founded in 2005 by Craig Atkinson, to publish small, affordable books of work by “photographers from all backgrounds, the widely known, the unseen and the underrepresented.” They make about 70 of these mini books each year, and over the past 20 years their backlist has grown into a remarkable record of changing shifts in British culture (with a handful on international topics too). I just bought one on Oxford in 1978, another on free festivals and the counterculture in the 1970s, and London’s Soho of the ‘90s. Get your snaps here.
—Alexandre Alexeieff was a Russian-born artist who spent most of his working life in Paris. In the 1930s, Alexeieff and his wife, the American Claire Parker, invented the pinscreen with which they made the stately prologue sequence to Orson Welles’ 1962 adaptation of The Trial by Franz Kafka. The following year they made this animated version of Nikolai Gogol’s satirical story, The Nose, about a civil servant who discovers that his nose has embarked on a political career of its own. The left nostril can be viewed above. The right nostril is here.