Part Two: Pirate Radio: From International Waters to Squatted Apartment Buildings

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media, Hello.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
And welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. You're weekly.
Reminder that I always introduced the show by calling it weekly,
even though it's twice a week, because I don't know
whether bi weekly means twice a week or every two weeks.
I think it means every two weeks. I am your host,
Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is Bursts, one of
the hosts of The Final Straw Radio, which is both
a radio show and a podcast. How are you.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
I'm doing pretty well.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
I missed you, I know in this five minute break
where we sat around and talked about cats.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
We have a producer. My name's Sophie.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
We have a producer, hy Sophie.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Hi.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
That's always how I introduce you, vaguely, awkwardly, as if
you weren't the person who gets happened. It's amazing. No notes.
Our audio engineer is Eva hi Eva.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
Hi Eva hi Eva.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Our theme music was written for us by un woman.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
Hi On Women. I love your music.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Hi On Woman. I don't know if you listen, but
thanks for making this music. We picked this theme music
because I was like, I want something that seems incongruous
with talking about like all kinds of wild revolutionary shit.
I think it gives us a nice vibe. I still
really like it.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
I know that you've performed with on Women before. Do
you have a favorite on Women track?

Speaker 2 (01:18):
I do. My favorite un Woman track is called Written
in Red, Yes, and it is the poem written by
Volting to Claire, who I am really shocked has not
really come up on this show. Vulturing to Claire was
a the oldie banner CHISTI lady.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
Contemporary of Emma Goldman. Yeah, that's my favorite one of
on Women's tracks as well. It's beautiful.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah, it's so good. Anyway, we are talking about pirate
radio this week, and on Monday we talked very confusedly
about how pirate radio, at least in the UK was
started by people who were capitalists. Yeah. Just I mean
it's cool that they did that. I have no qualms

(01:57):
with them setting up boats and playing rock music. It
just was surprising. It wasn't what I was expecting when
I was like, I'm going to research the history of
pirate radio. And actually next week we're going to talk
about the first act of radio piracy. But whatever, that's
for next week. So you've got this three way fight
going on between commercial radio, public radio, and state owned radio.

(02:20):
And we've so far talked about state owned radio and
commercial radio, but we haven't gone to the public part.
And what's fascinating is that both commercial and public radio
are perfectly willing to go pirate, although both are also
perfectly willing to be licensed and just do things in
that way too. Honestly, I suppose state owned radio is
also perfectly willing to be pirate because you have things

(02:41):
like Radio Free Europe, which was a CIA funded radio
operation to broadcast Western radio across the Iron Curtain, which
is kind of an interesting thing in its own right,
despite where its funding came from, But it is not
what we're going to be talking about today. Instead, I'm
going to talk about how as monopolies on state radio
started to waiver across Western Europe, small radio operators, legal

(03:03):
and otherwise cropped up everywhere. And we're going to start
with Italy because I think it sets us up well
to understand the three way fight. Italian politics don't map
to the politics of the rest of Europe. You ever
noticed that they're just like their own thing.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
This is the thing I've heard.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
Yeah, it gets real confusing if you ever want to
hear about leftist nationalists, read about there's a lot of
leftist nationalists, but the unification of Italy was this whole thing,
and then there's people who were whatever Italian politics are
just confusing. It's no wonder that that place gave us
Fascism'm not even in a slight to Italy, just in
a way that everything is different.

Speaker 3 (03:41):
Yeah, the whole like syncretism of it, especially like Mizzini
and like all of these earlier Republicans that helped to
found it were like also running alongside of Bakunin and yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah, they're just everyone was doing all kinds of stuff
together and antagonistically to each other. And Mussolini's father was
into Italian nationalism and anarchism, and then Mussolini was in
their socialism. But then he was like, actually, I just
like the revolutionary part, I don't like the leftism part.
And the Communist Party for most of the twentieth century
was like the status quo, bad boring, It's like the

(04:14):
equivalent of our democrats. You know, we've talked a bit
about Italian politics in the second half of the twentieth
century before on this show, and what's important to understand
when we're going to talk about radio stuff in the seventies,
is that politics in Italy are heated. They're heated in
a way that is like hard to understand. In the

(04:35):
American context, you have the years of lead from about
nineteen sixty eight to nineteen eighty eight, with far right
and far left groups doing a lot of terrorism and
shooting and urban guerrilla stuff, lots of false flag stuff
where the people are blaming anarchists for things, but anarchists
are also doing things. And you've got the autonomous and
you've got all this stuff. It's just stuff everything. You

(05:00):
also need to understand autonomists a little bit because they
are a big part of Italy and basically, since the
Communist Party was more or less the Democrats, people are
can get really mad about that comparison, and they might
even be right to be mad at me about it,
because I've only read so much about Italy and it's
all confusing.

Speaker 3 (05:17):
Graham, she was basically FDR full stop.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
Wait, wasn't he more of an autonomist? Oh I don't know, No, No, Gram,
she wasn't. Never mind, he was.

Speaker 3 (05:26):
The head of the Communist Party who died in prison
under mus Kenny, but.

Speaker 2 (05:29):
That was before the Communist Party got democraty. Yeah, Graham,
She's probably the like Capital C communists whose works I
have found the most resonant with some of how I
understand things. But that might be because when I went
to Italy, all of the anarchists were also like, whatever,
this is completely besides the point. Everything is wild over there.
It's upside downland, it's confusing, and so you have the

(05:52):
rise of autonomous Marxism, which is basically people were like, well,
we like Marxism, but we actually don't like the state
because the official Marxists are bored and we don't like them.
So you have this whole radical movement of communists and
then the anarchists are someone closely tied together.

Speaker 3 (06:11):
Is that because the Communist Party at that point was
basically towing the Stalinist line.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
I am not certain. I am under the impression, and
I genuinely could be wrong about this. The stuff I
have read has implied heavily that the Communist Party at
this point is like just status quo government and like
doing more what people would normally accuse like a socialist
party elsewhere in Europe of being, which still sounds radical

(06:37):
to the American context, but is like not really further
left than like Bernie and is sometimes to the right
of Bernie Sanders.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
Because I guess you had neo fascists from the MSI
that were like, had been part of the Salo Republic
and they were backed by the CIA going on at
the same time.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
I believe you. I've even had people explain it to me.
I was on a years of LED podcast as a
pod cast idiot once, and I tried to be a
good podcast idiot where you've learned, and instead it was like,
well that sounds crazy. Everything's weird. Why I keep shooting
each other? So you get autonomous Marxists and the autonomous

(07:16):
in Italy are mostly doing this urban guerrilla thing. But
then autonomism starts spreading throughout the rust of Europe up
into Germany, and there the autonomous and the anarchists start
doing this thing that we've talked about way more on
the show, of creating this kind of subcultural outside the
systems space. And that's going to tie into radio a lot, right.

(07:37):
People who are like, well, we don't want to do
what we're told. We want to build an entirely different
society within this society are of course going to turn
to pirate radio and be some of the more influential
figures within it. And a side quest, I promised you Italy,
but what if we talk about Germany? Eh? Eh, So
the side quest over to follow those autonomous for a second.

(08:00):
Germany and East Germany are two of the most repressive
anti pirate radio societies going on at the time. East
Germany is repressive because state communism. West Germany because the
government is fighting tooth and nail against the squatter movement,
the punks, the autonomous, the anarchists to maintain control of
the cities. We talked about this a bit on the

(08:21):
Black Block episodes that people want to hear more about
this time. I've always sort of thought that there's like
almost two methods of policing, and one is exemplified by Germany,
and one is exemplified by like mostly the global South
or Mexico would be the main place that I kind
of know about this, where there's the kind of we
are going to control everything so rigidly that no one
steps out of line, and if they do, they are

(08:42):
like pacified and controlled and taken away, right. And then
there's societies that are like more permissive, but then the
cops are like more likely to while out and kill you.
And America is sort of both at once. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
Yeah, there's a lot of impunity. There's a lot of like, yeah,
they're just too using when and who to impose it against.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
Yeah, and so Germany is this very repressive society, but
actually people are fighting back against it very successfully. But
in West Germany it only takes the state about ten
minutes to locate a pirate radio broadcast and show up
in force, and that is wild, Like that kind of
response time is just because you have to know what's happening,

(09:25):
which means you have to be watching all of the
airwaves over all of the city and have cops just
ready to go, and they did.

Speaker 3 (09:35):
I've got some friends that do broadcasting through this thing
called the Fria Radio Network in Germany. A Radio Berlin
is one of these projects, Anarchist Radio Berlin. Yeah. I
was like asking one of my friends why they don't
have pirate broadcasts if there's such like a you know,
a history of squatting movements and such that he told
exactly that same story of just started recording in a
squad in Kreuzberg and then within like fifteen or twenty minutes,

(09:58):
a bunch of people in tactical uniforms with assault rifles
come through the door just to shut down a radio broadcast.
It's insane.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
I can imagine it happening, but not that quickly. That's
the part that is I'm just like, yeah, I guess
they're just ready to go. And so you have this
culture where instead of having sustained pirate radio stations, you
have action stations which were set up on the fly,
often on the move in vehicles, for ten minute broadcasts

(10:28):
in order to accomplish some specific tasks and the three
tasks that I found. So this isn't a very good
way to like release your new single, although actually if
it's just a new single, actually that'd be kind of cool.
People should do that. Anyway, it's not what I'm aware
of them using it for. They would announce a demonstration,
they would release a communicate for some direct action that

(10:50):
had happened, or during an ongoing demonstration, they would provide
like information about what's happening. Those are the action stations
that I'm aware of. There was one exception that I
found a German station called Radio Dreeklund and that's probably
not how they pronounced it. In order to have this

(11:11):
German pirate radio station in the seventies or eighties, they
had to do it in France. It's kind of the
equivalent of doing an offshore radio station. It was largely
broadcast from forested mountains, so when the cops did try
to shut it down, they would just get lost and
couldn't find it in the wilderness, which rules, and these
pirates were willing to have some fun playing a high

(11:33):
stake pranks. At one point they came down into Germany
out of the mountains and they broadcast from the city
and I don't remember what city this is, and they
surrounded the building with hundreds of supporters right to hold
the police away so they could broadcast. So cops showed
up and push their way through the crowd and then
smashed up the entire building trying to find the transmitter.

(11:53):
The transmitter was not in that building. They just surrounded
a building in order to make the cops think it
was in that it was hidden nearby. They broadcasted the
entire time. It was just to waste the cops time.
And then they did literally the same thing again. They
went down into Germany, they surrounded a building with protesters
and they broadcast from somewhere else and the cops fell

(12:16):
for it the same way the second time.

Speaker 3 (12:19):
When was this in the like seventies or I.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
Think this is late seventies, early eighties. I have a
lot more really specific information when we get to the
UK pirate radio stations, because I read a blow by
blow written at great length by our voice radio or
our radio. It's in the script. I'll get to it.
But when I'm covering a lot of the other ones,
I'm finding like references in various interviews with people like ah,

(12:43):
remember that time we did the thing, and I'm trying
to cross reference them as much I was able to
find this lesson, like here's a history book describing everything,
and I had to do a lot more cross reference,
and so things are a little blurrier when I'm talking
about these ones.

Speaker 3 (12:55):
Yeah, the one. The only thing that I really know
about the autonomous movement is stuff that I pulled from
this Cutzia Ficus book The Subversion of Politics, and it
talks about autonomous movements in Italy and I think in
Netherlands and Germany. But I don't think I ever heard
about Radio Drickland.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
That's cool, Yeah, but it probably talks about radio Alllysis,
which I'm about to get to because we're going to
go back to Italy now, because I promised you Italy.
In Italy, laws were loosened up in nineteen seventy four
to allow non state operated radio stations, and hundreds or
thousands of different micro stations took to the airwaves. The
stuff I've read basically is like this is just like

(13:37):
how people practically had conversations for a couple of years.
The sort of social media of the time is like
all of these micro stations everywhere, which sounds really fun. Yeah, absolutely,
And an awful lot of these are autonomous or anarchist,
and a lot of them are tied into this wild
protest culture that's happening that is both like labor move

(14:00):
movement stuff and urban gorilla and like all kinds of
occupations and yeah, totally, And the most famous of these stations,
as best as I can tell, I genuinely think this
is the most famous of these stations, but obviously my
sources are biased towards thinking the radical stations are the
most famous was a station called Radio Alice, based out
of the city of Bologna, and it ran for years

(14:22):
despite heavy repression coming into it. You said you've heard
a bit about Radio.

Speaker 3 (14:26):
Alice, Yeah, and I don't know, Like we've done interviews
on our show in the past with people involved in
student movements or like occupations to defend forests I think
in Bologna also. But Bologna, I know, has like a
very long radical history and is one of the centers
of like lyftist politics in Italy. But I've heard the
name Radio Alice like thrown out as maybe like a

(14:49):
gimme line in like a Patti Smith song or something
like that. I don't know interest about it, though.

Speaker 2 (14:53):
Okay, they had this radio station, Radio Alice and Bologna,
and it's sort of a quintessential version of what this
sort of seventies and eighties pirate radio tended to look like,
which is these very political stations that specifically well According
to an article by Julius Gavroche Quote, Radio Alice's output

(15:16):
covered a myriad of subjects labor protests, poetry, yoga lessons,
political analysis, love declarations, cooking recipes, Jefferson airplane area which
appears to be the name of a band or Beethoven music.
I've never heard of this band, area. I should have
looked them up. Do you know this band?

Speaker 3 (15:34):
Either of you na never heard of them?

Speaker 4 (15:36):
Nop.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
I wonder if it's a translation of an Italian name anyway,
whatever I'm no longer quoting. It was organized by a
weekly assembly of all of the different groups that use
this radio station. Like there'd be like a gay group
and a feminist group and a workers group and things
like that. And this was kind of the model for
every political pirate station that I've found. They tend to

(15:57):
be run collectively or cooperatively long anarchistor autonomous principles, but
are open to all sorts of different groups. It's this
thing that happens a lot where when you need to
get people together and have everyone be treated as equals
across a political spectrum, you need a non hierarchical model
for that. So there'll be emphasis on different special interest
groups like queer rights, black power, labor organizing, women's groups,

(16:20):
the anti nuclear movement is a big part of a
lot of these. So all of these different collectives come
together to run a radio station together. I think that's
real cool.

Speaker 3 (16:32):
Yeah, that makes sense. I wonder if, like the groups
just sort of like are pre existing, and then they
have like a radio committee within them, you know what
I mean. Like if there's like a feminist collective for
you know, pushing for social wage or something like that,
and they're like, who's going to go do the radio
slat that we've got for feminist struggle.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
Yeah, I could really easily see both things happening where
they're like, oh, there's a new radio station, Hey, let's
get together and do a women's show. Or they're like, hey,
we're the local feminist organization. We're going to get together
and you know, we're going to yeah, put together an
hour of content every week or whatever. You know. Radio
Alice was wildly influential on culture, and it accomplished a

(17:10):
lot in a few short years. One participant in this
who's much more famous for other things, And when I
say much more famous, I mean to a really niche
part of our audience is the autonomoust author Bifo, who
wrote about it. Quote in Bologna nineteen seventy seven, there
was a movement in schools, in the universities and in
some of the factories, and a zone of the city

(17:32):
was occupied. So basically everyone comes together and occupies the city.
The police came into the university and killed someone in
the movement, and for three days the town was occupied
and barricaded. In the period of the riots, Radio Alice
was one of the means of communication, organization, and information
for the people. And so I like this thing that

(17:54):
a lot of cultural stuff does, where you create an
infrastructure and then when it's needed, it steps up into
a radical, you know, role or whatever. Although I suppose
Gramsci would probably say that it was radical and purposeful
all the time as participating in the cultural I don't
remember how Grimy.

Speaker 3 (18:16):
I love your Marxist speech that you just did.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
Yeah, thank you. I've been practicing that for a while.
I was really sad. I was in Italy and I
was like on tour talking about anarchist fiction and people
are like, oh, like Gramsci and I'm like, man, I
don't I don't fuck with no Marxist whatever. I'm a
young asshole. And then they would explain his ideas and
I was like, yes, that is very similar to what
I thought I came up with. I see that people

(18:40):
think about things.

Speaker 3 (18:41):
Smart changing culture. Here we go.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:45):
And during these riots, during the occupation of the city.
Folks at the barricades would call into the radio station
and be like, hey, we need more people or whatever.
It's such and such intersection. Unfortunately, by making themselves indispensable
to this movement, on the second cops raided and smashed
everything up at Radio Alice. Although they rebuilt eventually, Radio

(19:06):
Alice was successfully repressed. But they had a particular poetry
to everything. They wrote. In one manifesto, this is actually
a thing that does make them different than a lot
of the other pirate radio stations. Everything they write is
like incomprehensibly poetic. In one manifesto written by some Radio
Alice arrestees during their time in jail, as best as
I can tell, they wrote, quote, this is an invitation

(19:30):
to speak and think, in invitation to always be present
in the situations in the town, the neighborhoods, the schools,
the barracks, the factories, the roads. Let's exhaust the enemy.
Let's wear the giant monster by beating it all over
its body. Let's not talk about desires anymore. Let's desire.
We are desiring machines, machines of war.

Speaker 3 (19:53):
That is yeah, incredibly poetic, I know, But.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
Do you know who else is invited to speak on
our show.

Speaker 3 (20:02):
The hydra.

Speaker 2 (20:03):
Yes, right, I say, that's a metaphor for capitalism, and
that is who is now going to be present and
talking to you and we're back. Okay, wait, what's the hydra?

Speaker 3 (20:17):
Oh? I was just thinking of the idea of this,
like we're going to be in many places all at
once and doing these things, and like the there's a
really good book by I'm actually not going to remember
the names of the authors, but Rehdicker was one of them,
called the Many Headed Hydra, about collaborative organizing in the
early colonial period in North America by different populations to

(20:37):
resist It's called the many Headed Hydra. Really good history.

Speaker 2 (20:40):
It was a positive version of a hydra.

Speaker 3 (20:42):
Yeah, they're actually reclaiming it consciously because I guess it
was coming up a lot in the writings, for instance,
of Shakespeare at the time of talking about the need
to suppress all of these like many varied you know,
dark skinned, evil people that are promoting discord in our colonies.

(21:02):
That they were positing the Empire of Britain as being
a colonizing good that acted as hercules to destroy the hydra.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
But and so these people are like fuck yeah, we're
the hydra. Fuck you hercules.

Speaker 3 (21:14):
Yeah you can't get all our heads look at us.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
Go hell yeah, that's awesome. I like reclaiming that. Another
thing that the same Radio Alice zine that is incomprehensible.
I was like, oh great, I found a zene about
Radio Alice. It is incomprehensible. It is so beautiful, as
many beautiful parts. I had to piece most of what
I got about Radio Alics from different interviews, mostly with Bifo,

(21:37):
but elsewhere in the zine it says, quote, the practice
of happiness is subversive when it becomes collective. And I
love that. I love that. I'm trying to research Radio
Alice and instead I learn a single line that pulls
apart exactly what's wrong with like the self care narrative.
I don't know, the practice of happiness is subversive when

(21:57):
it becomes collective. Fuck yah, let's be happy together. So
the state was like, no, I don't want you to
be happy together. And so they are instead repressing these
hundreds or thousands of radio stations as fast as they can.
But in the end, the state doesn't successfully repress all
of these small voices. They find a better way to

(22:19):
do it. They legalized radio piracy, and as they intended,
this means that the commercial radio pirates take over. They
can afford these huge transmitters that just wipe out all
of the smaller you know, people talking about things. And
so the commercial radio comes in and they want to

(22:41):
just replicate the American radio model. The spoken word is diminished.
Everyone's playing the same songs, and the radio stations start
buying each other out and building a monopoly. It's the
dream of radio Caroline has come to Italy and yeah,
that's Italy. I guess that one doesn't end. But they
wrote cool stuff along the way, And I don't actually know.

(23:03):
Almost everything I read about all of this stuff was
like written in the eighties, and so I can't speak
as much to what it's like now.

Speaker 3 (23:11):
Even if like the projects ended up ending, they had
an amazing influence in the meantime, Like they helped to
shape people's lives, people helped to shape that itself.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
Totally.

Speaker 3 (23:21):
Yeah, that's pretty inspirational.

Speaker 2 (23:22):
Yeah, totally. And you a low further west to Spain
and France and you find another model for how to
do independent radio federations, radio pirates in Spain and France
resisted repression fairly effectively for a while. To be clear,
my main source on a lot of this is a
zine out of the UK called The Radio is My

(23:44):
Bomb that came out in nineteen eighty seven, and so
I don't have a lot of it, and then this
is what happened later information about these things, but at
least one of the French stations is still around. In
Spain and especially in France, the political pirate stations organized
together and organized well. When you need crime organized, there's
two groups that you can turn to, and abortion rights

(24:08):
show this really clearly. There's hierarchical capitalist organizations like the
mafia very good at organizing crime. No one is denying
that they can organize crime. In fact, they just call
them organized crime.

Speaker 3 (24:21):
Yeah, exactly, Yeah, there's the of organized crime.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yeah, they really are. The other group that has proven
really good at organizing crime at scale is a narcosyndicalists.
We covered this a bit in our episodes about abortion
in Germany during the Weimar Republic, where a narcosyndicalist organizing
models were being used all across the country to perform

(24:47):
millions of abortions a year, completely illegally and safely, well
as safely as anyone was able to do it in
the nineteen twenties. And an narcosyndicalist tend to form federations
collecting diverse groups who work together to defend each other,
which is what pirate Radio needed. So in Spain, when
the dictator Franco Franco whatever well in the fucking asshole

(25:10):
of two names that are the same name in a
row died in nineteen seventy five, democracy returned and the
state monopoly on radio went away, and free radio popped up.
Various stations formed a federation, the CRL, and they agreed
to certain rules for themselves. And this is an interesting
set of rules that I can't quite tell you exactly

(25:31):
what it means about the ideology of the people who
formed it. No political parties, no unions like, no labor unions,
because the labor unions in Spain have kind of comparable
amounts of powers of political party in some ways.

Speaker 3 (25:45):
Yeah, but what about like the CNT.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
That's great, I know anyway, That's why I'm like, I
do not know exactly what they mean by that part
of it, that they would promote music by independent musicians,
and they would transmit with limited power so that a
lot of people can get on the air, and hundreds
of these stations existed as part of this federation.

Speaker 3 (26:05):
Was that like the Libertarian Confederation of Spanish Radios?

Speaker 2 (26:09):
Is it? Oh? Probably? I again when I this comes
out of an old photocopied zine from the nineteen eighties,
and I tried searching most of this shit and it
is just like if it's on the internet, it's not
in English, you know, or would take me uncovering even
more rocks than I managed to over. In France, pirate

(26:32):
radio was heavily repressed by the right wing government of
the late seventies. In nineteen eighty one, the Socialist Party
came to power and for a very brief period they
were like, what if we're nice and so they got
rid of the state monopoly on radio. But by nineteen
eighty two legalization prioritized large commercial stations. The non commercial
pirates formed several federations. One of them, the FNRL, had

(26:54):
three hundred stations committed to being non commercial. Though this
isn't an ad pivot. Some of them. Leftist stations in
France did also sell ads. I'm unsure if those ones
could federate with the FNRL or not, But I know that, like,
it's actually a thing that I like always look for
when I research, because I think about my own compromises
that I make in this world, and I like radical

(27:16):
newspapers throughout the years were almost always selling ads anyway.

Speaker 3 (27:20):
They were probably just like picky about who they're selling to,
like not the Washington State Police or like certain companies
selling gold or yeah, potato mafia.

Speaker 1 (27:30):
Yeah, God, wouldn't that suck if that happened, if someone
without their consent?

Speaker 2 (27:34):
That's just so yeah. Yeah, what if a network of
radical podcasts had like specifically said these are the categories
that we refuse to advertise with.

Speaker 1 (27:44):
And then they put the Washington State Patrol under business.

Speaker 2 (27:51):
It's kind of honest, it says a lot.

Speaker 3 (27:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah. So the pirate radio station that I learned them
about in France, the most famous of these is Radio Libertaire,
run by the French Anarchist Federation. And this radio station
started a nineteen eighty one and you probably know more
about this than I do. I believe is still going

(28:14):
strong today at eighty nine point four FM in Paris.

Speaker 3 (28:18):
Yeah, I got to visit them in like twenty eighteen
and kind of check out the station. It's really cool
they have I think since about the beginning they've still
had this like a continuous broadcast of a show that's
teaching people how to speak esperanto. That's not the only
things they do. Like it sounds like a joke, but
it's amazing. But no, that is like one of their

(28:40):
longest running shows. The Final Start is a part of
this network called the a radio network that Radio Libertaire
at least used to participate in. But that's good. It's
a pretty cool project.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
And also like, what is that forty four years that
they've been around so far? That is longer than most
commercial projects period, you know.

Speaker 3 (29:04):
Yeah, and they showed that they can do it right.
They've got like this big collaboration of people volunteering over
a forty four year period, Yeah, to make decisions to
clean the building, to like fund the place. Like that's
I think they might get a little bit of state funding.
I'm not sure, but it's possible.

Speaker 2 (29:22):
I do know that they get eighty nine point four
reserve for them because of a whole lot of rioting
that I'm about to talk about. Oh cool, the radio
station Radio Libertaria has gone through so much. It was
raided and then it was legalized, and then it was banned,
and then it was raided, and then it eventually it
was just tolerated as something the state couldn't get rid of.
Like other anarchist stations. I've found. It's let all sorts

(29:44):
of different groups use it, and it had a huge
listenership of all sorts of people who are just happy
to have a more independent voice on air. Like they
didn't conceive of their listenership as inherently anarchist or whatever. Right,
but by nineteen eighty three the writing was on the wall.
French government started talking about all the complaints about the
crowded FM radio air space, specifically the anarchists were to

(30:06):
be targeted to make room for more of the commercial
stations that were going to play nice with the government.
Radio Libertaire started to get ready. They threw benefit concerts
and they started mobilizing their listenership to get ready to
defend it. And it helped that the most popular singer
songwriter in France at the time was this guy, Leo
fair Feerri And I don't know what letters I'm supposed

(30:27):
to drop off of the end of French things. He
was an anarchist who appeared on air with them and
said you can count on me if things get rough
and you're put off air. The fight for this radio
station is what brought anarchism back to the cultural and
political scene in France and pulling them out of marginalization
so they start getting ready. Several teams of activists with

(30:49):
Cbee radios patrolled the area around the station for weeks
to scout for police raids. They barricaded the studio and
started broadcasting all day and night. When the cops came,
it was around five forty am on Sunday, August twenty eighth,
nineteen eighty three. A scout called in the radio and
the heads up gave the radio operators time to call

(31:09):
another pirate station here and now, who started broadcasting about
the raid. While it was happening, the cops closed off
the surrounding area playing closed cops were holding up drivers
at gunpoint to make sure they weren't supporters. On their
way to defend the radio station. The cops smashed in
the door and beat everyone they found inside and after

(31:29):
the raid. This was global news and the reason it
was global news is because the International Anarchist Federation made
it global news. There were support actions for this radio
station in Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Australia, Japan, the USA,
and Mexico at least syndicalis Labor unions were powerful forces

(31:51):
in Spain and Norway and Sweden at the time and
started organizing there about it and started bothering their governments
about it, being like, hey, we're like a really big
union and you're going to I'll listen to us, and
you need to start putting pressure on France about this
radio station, like that's fucking tight. Yeah, And so in
Paris thousands of people showed up from all sorts of
groups and they marched to the smashed up radio station.

(32:15):
A pirate technician set the radio station back up, apparently
like on the toilet, Apparently that was like the only
place you could sit or something, and I'm not entirely
sure concerts with famous musicians. Some Socialist Party members of
the government started defending it, and basically everyone just was like, look,
we may or may not be anarchist, but no, thank you,

(32:36):
we would like to keep our anarchist radio station because
we like it. And we're willing to riot about it,
and it forced the state to give them a permit
and they're still around today.

Speaker 3 (32:49):
Can you imagine that happening for a podcast they've been
kicked off of Spotify or whatever, like people going to
the streets.

Speaker 2 (32:57):
I could weirdly see that, like the way things are going,
that there might be if people getting arrested for podcasts.

Speaker 3 (33:04):
Yeah, like I lost my left eye during the Joe
Rogan riots of twenty twenty seven or whatever.

Speaker 2 (33:12):
Joe Rogan goes.

Speaker 1 (33:13):
Woke, just like the way that like they just like
decide to do like culture wars over what was the.

Speaker 4 (33:19):
Dumb one in the last two weeks.

Speaker 1 (33:21):
Oh yeah the cracker barrel logo. Oh yeah, yeah, like yeah,
I just the standards are so low, so low.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
But you know what else is low? These prices wow
on these goods and service. Actually there's usually not any
sales attached to these ads. It's usually just ads. But
imagine the prices as low, and by manifesting or rioting,
you can make prices go down.

Speaker 3 (33:53):
Imagine low by high.

Speaker 2 (34:01):
And we're back. And don't worry, listeners, you missed all
of us as old men yelling at clouds, so over
in the UK, the anarchist radio nerds were looking at
Spain and France with jealousy. They wanted a federation of
low power radio stations to support one another against state repression,
and they tried hard to get it. They didn't win,

(34:24):
to be honest, but they learned a ton of shit
along the way, and they got a lot of shit done,
including working tirelessly to make the technical knowledge of building
transmitters more accessible to people and leaving me to read
way too many documents of things I don't understand. And
by doing this they helped pave the way for the
rave scene of the nineties, which isn't the main thing

(34:45):
we're going to talk about, but like.

Speaker 3 (34:48):
Are we going to talk reclaim the streets?

Speaker 2 (34:50):
Oh, we've been talking about that in the alter globalization movement,
but it's going to lead to all of that stuff.
I just love the tangled web of history, I know.
So about ten years after the offshore radio stations were
shut down in the late seventies, there was a London
campaign for open access radio called ComCom and it didn't work.
And then in nineteen eighty people formed London Open Radio

(35:13):
to lobby for alternative radio and it successfully raised some
money but failed at lobbying, and so they just went
pirate instead and they formed our Radio on one oh
three point eight FM. And it's kind of interesting because
this one is like, Oh, I.

Speaker 1 (35:33):
Thought you were saying are as in the letter.

Speaker 2 (35:35):
You're saying our radio hour radio radio.

Speaker 3 (35:38):
Oh I thought it was a pirate joke.

Speaker 2 (35:41):
So did I wait? How did British people pronounce the
word r ah ah?

Speaker 4 (35:46):
Right?

Speaker 2 (35:46):
Does that mean British pirates?

Speaker 4 (35:48):
Go?

Speaker 1 (35:48):
Ah, I'm just gonna head a time apologized to my
colleague James Stout for.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
What you just did. Yeah, I try really hard to
not make British jokes sometimes I was right there. Oh,
I just try not do what James is on. Other
than the rest of the time, I just no, no, no, no, no,
that's the best time. That's the best time to make
those jokes. Yeah, fair enough. So they form our radio.

(36:17):
Oh you are. And it's kind of interesting because it's
like this one's actually a pretty ideologically diverse, well from
like progressive to anarchist group of people who form this.
They keep talking in the ZNE They're like, we even
had labor voters in our group, And they're kind of
a little bit excited and embarrassed about that is the

(36:38):
tone of it. At the time, the commercial pirate engineers
were closely guarding how to build transmitters, and so the
first thing these nerds had to do was reverse engineer
a bunch of transmitters. They didn't have YouTube back then,
and they started to tell people how to do it.
They know financial backers other than the folks around them.
They paid for the whole thing themselves, despite all of

(37:00):
them being broken on the dole, which is not pineapples
but is instead what universal basic income. That's not technically true. Whatever, Anyway,
it's not America. They have a little bit more money
to play with. When they're broke, they throw the occasional
benefit show to help out. And transmitters were expensive in

(37:21):
the eighties. They get substantially more accessible and affordable in
the nineties, which is what made the aforementioned rave scene possible.
But our radio, our radio started broadcasting in nineteen eighty
two on Wednesday nights. They picked Wednesday because most of
the raids against pirate stations seemed to be happening on weekends,

(37:41):
and they were like, eh, eh, Although I think that
they should have done it on weekends because then there's
like they're busy rating other people, I don't know whatever.
They worked off of pre recorded cassettes because they couldn't
put any live broadcast equipment alongside the transmitter because of
the fear of busts. So this is like almost closer
to a German style thing where they're like they're hunting us.

(38:04):
You know, this isn't a like slowly the state is
going to be like, oh, I guess we should shut
this down. They are like priate radio is being hunted
down in England at this time.

Speaker 3 (38:14):
Now, like in the US, where you might get a
letter saying please cease and desist again, is that actually
what happens, Yeah, generally the US, because it I mean,
this is like a positive of not really funding parts
of the federal enforcement part of the government. Is the
SEC operates around pirate broadcasts based on complaints. And so

(38:34):
if you're stepping on someone's broadcast with yours that station,
I complain, or regular listeners of that station, I complain.
If you're like my Alma mater and nobody else is
broadcasting on that frequency, then you can get away with
it for a long time until you decide to play
SEC at noon on a Monday, you know, and that
goes against the community standards, that gets people's hackles up.

(38:55):
The FCC hears it. I think in that case they
probably came to visit because of that poke in the
eye that they got. But oftentimes the SEC, they'll try
to find the address of the person where it's being
broadcast from, send them a letter that says cease and
desist from doing this, and so you get a warning
and then it's after that they'll start finding you or
maybe sending law enforcement to cut it down afterwards. So

(39:18):
like Berkeley Liberation Radio for a bunch of years they
aired US back in like twenty ten or twenty eleven,
and they had their shit locked down in a van
that would just drive around Alameda County and broadcast from
different places on an FM radio like a set schedule.
I would imagine you couldn't hear it sometimes, but if

(39:40):
they drove up into the Oakland Hills, you could probably
pick it up from all over the Bay area.

Speaker 2 (39:44):
Okay, yeah, this isn't legal advice, but that's good to know.

Speaker 3 (39:48):
Vans are useful.

Speaker 2 (39:50):
Yeah, everyone needs a van. They're working off of pre
recorded cassettes and they were working to build a link transmitter,
like some kind of microwave transmitter, to be able to
do it live by being in a second location and
broadcasting to their own transmitter, but they couldn't afford it.
They were like working on building it before the whole

(40:10):
thing got shut down. Our radio was run by consensus,
and many of the people and the collective wanted to
ban political parties from contributing, but some labor folks were
there and so that wasn't consensed upon. And they themselves
were all against advertising, but they decided they wouldn't ban
shows that chose to include advertising, and Margaret from twenty
twenty five appreciates their willingness to compromise on that issue.

(40:33):
In only a short time, they accomplished so much. They
had all sorts of shows. They had Utapia, which was
like Utopia with a tape in it that was a
mixture of plays and poetry and music. Gay Waves was
the first ever radio program in England by and four homosexuals.
It was two hours long with music and news, and
it was an open access show for gay men, and

(40:54):
it was working on becoming a six hour show. It
was going to be two for gay men two for
lesbians and two for both doing humored together. I would
love to have heard nineteen eighty four or whatever humor
that is gay men and lesbians trying to do jokes together.

Speaker 3 (41:09):
Was homosexuality legalized at this point yet in the UK?

Speaker 2 (41:12):
Do you know, Oh Lord, I've covered this before and
I can't remember. The Gay Liberation Front stuff has already
been happening in the UK at this point, but I
can't remember. I know they had some pretty wild sodomy
loss for a while. This is the show Gay Waves
that got the most ire and the most complaints. The
cops in the mainstream papers hated Gay Waves, but so

(41:33):
did mainstream gay papers because they didn't like that Gay
Waves was lefty as hell and a time when gays
were supposed to be doing assimilation. Then there was Women
on the Waves, music buy and for women, put together
by various feminist and anarca feminist groups. The Message was
a sort of the central catch all political show of
the radio station was run by anarchists, but it was

(41:53):
opened to all radicals who weren't fascists, sexists, or racists.
The Free Space was the explicitly anarchist show. The Bag
was a late night show. They had a Polish show
for Polish exiles from Soviet controlled Poland that worked in
conjunction with a pirate radio station from beyond the Iron Curtain,
and instead of running a black show on their station,
they worked in conjunction with Dread Broadcasting Corporation, which was

(42:16):
a black reggae station that used our radio's equipment and expertise,
but remained independent as a separate station. I hope these
shows are archived somewhere. If you're listening and nowhere to
find this shit, please let me know now. The way
the station went off the air was because they kept
getting busted and couldn't afford to replace the equipment. But
in their own discussion of the matter, they felt like

(42:38):
it was because they didn't reach a large enough base
to support. Basically, they were like, if we had enough
people to defend us, we could have kept going. I
questioned this analysis because basically all of the pirates were
getting busted in the UK at that point, and then
throughout their own text, they make a big point of
showing that their political nature didn't make them any more

(42:58):
or less targeted than anyone else. Basically because like a
lot of other pirate radio stations were like, Oh, if
we play it safe, we might get to be safe,
and so their whole point was like, no, playing it
safe doesn't keep you safe. You are still if you're
going to be an enemy of the state, be an
enemy of the state. They transmitted from a different place

(43:19):
each week. They hauled around eighty pounds worth of equipment
and broadcasted from I think the roof of various apartment buildings,
and they would have scouts down on the street with
a CB radio to warn them of incoming cops. And
they successfully got away with this time after time, including
evading like a whole ton of raids. It helped that

(43:39):
they were all radio nerds, so they were listening into
the cops radios themselves, like literally like on their off time,
and so they'd be like, oh, the cops are like
thinking about busting the following people, or like they're really
trying to step it up this week or whatever. The
first successful bust against them was on December fifteenth, nineteen
eighty two. One person was arrested, they lost all their gear,

(44:00):
and a bystander was fined for admitting to listening to
pirate radio. Never admit to anything. It took them five
weeks to rebuild, but rebuild they did. When the police
tried a full scale raid on February twenty third, nineteen
eighty three, the pirates figured it out ahead of time,

(44:21):
and so they hid in a squatted flat in the
apartment building they were broadcasting from, and the cops didn't
get them there. They played cat and mouse pretty much
every week after that, escaping time and time again, but
then a month later, on March twenty third, they were
finally caught. The cops interrupted them in the middle of
gay waves. They went back to the same apartment building

(44:41):
that had been caught at the first time, and they
hid in the same flat, but the cops had a
warrant that time, so they got them out of the flat.
One person was arrested, all their gear was stolen, and
so ends our radio. The collective instead moves on to
supporting other radio stations around the country, and they a
bunch of more successful priate radio stations take off. But

(45:02):
this isn't an eighteen hour podcast. Pirate stations keep doing
their thing on and off despite heavy repression, especially like
different political groups will have like radio stations specifically themed
around like anti nuke movement stuff and things like that.
And then in the nineties and a story that I
haven't investigated that much about yet, transmitters got really cheap,

(45:23):
and much like how young rock and rollers in the
fifties took matters into their own hands when the BBC
wouldn't play their shit, both commercial and BBC radio weren't
playing underground techno and shit, so people just started doing
it themselves. And unlike the fifties movement, it wasn't a
commercial movement. Okay, the Netherlands see pirates like Radio Veronica

(45:44):
and the Netherlands were doing their thing, but the.

Speaker 3 (45:46):
Dutch score Radio Veronica was the other. So we've got
this theme of women.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
Yeah, huh. I wonder if after Caroline they were just like,
all right, we gotta use British girl names.

Speaker 3 (45:58):
Maybe it's like ships somehow.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
Oh maybe. All I know is that there's probably Radio
Margaret somewhere right here in our hearts, probably Radio Sophie. Oh,
radio burst says a different meaning, and we don't talk
about that. Oh Okay. The Dutch squatter movement would house
pirate radio in their squats, and since the squats themselves
we talked about this pretty early on in the show.

(46:22):
Dutch squats at this time were fortresses. The reason that
they resisted deviction is that they physically resisted eviction and
the police were not capable of evicting them despite trying,
and so they were able to transmit from the squats
and be like, well, you already tried to evict us
and fail, so what are you gonna do? Evict us
Rai Kaiser Radio was run out of six different barricaded

(46:43):
squats and it broadcast on one oh one megahertz. A
bunch of the squats got legalized, literally on the condition
that they're like, all right, we'll legalize you if you please,
just don't let the pirate radio run out of there anymore.
And the pirates just moved all their stuff to different
squats throughout the city. There was women radio on Tuesday,
anarchist radio on Wednesday. During the riots, the radio would

(47:05):
transmit the locations of the police, and activists would listen
to ear pieces like they would have a little portable
radio and they would listen to an earpiece to know
where the police were. And it reached the point this
is the reason I want to talk about the Dutch
ones really quick. It reached the point where even the
police would tune into the pirate radio station during the
riots to have a sense of what was going on,

(47:26):
because the anarchists had a better information architecture than the
police did. The cops in the Netherlands were rating like
ten stations a day in the eighties, but there were
still so many more, six to twenty thousand different radio
stations in that tiny country. And by the mid eighties
they were running a conference for radio pirates from around Europe.

(47:46):
And what happens after that, I don't know because my
sources were written around that time. And I'm sorry everyone,
but I have one week to read the eighteen million things,
and I try to anyway that's radio with me your
host on a podcast that's not radio, and burse yay.

(48:08):
Any final thoughts.

Speaker 3 (48:10):
I kind of wonder when something like this is gonna
kick back in. I know that technology has changed so
much that a lot of it feels archaic and like
it doesn't really make that much sense, but it's also
so inexpensive, Like our area was devastated by Hurricane Helen
last year, and one of the biggest sources for information
for most people because all the internet infrastructure, the cellular infrastructure.

(48:32):
All that stuff just got washed down the hills. Was
the local NPR station was able to keep running, keeping
people up to date about what roads were closed, about
what water was safe to drink, where food was getting distributed,
where you could get a shower, where there was electricity
to charge stuff, what hospitals were open, all that sort
of stuff. Like radio feels like such an important piece

(48:54):
of technology that when stuff does happen, and considering that
environmental stuff is happening more and more, things that felt
really stable can go away and you know, a couple
of hours of heavy rain. Yeah, it's inspirational to hear
about what people have done with this technology and makes
me think about the possibilities.

Speaker 2 (49:16):
That's a good point. And honestly, I wonder if as
people move more and more away from listening to radio,
I wonder if it will be easier to get fewer
complaints when you run a pirate station. Although I did
eventually learn that people do still listen to the radio,
including people I know, and so apparently it's a totally
normal thing. And I'm just like the only I never

(49:37):
listened to the radio when I'm driving person, I probably
would have a better sense of what's happening in the world,
even if I listen to the commercial radio. But I
think that radio is preparedness beyond just like amateur radio stuff,
but like literally like broadcasting on FM. It's a thing
that gets done.

Speaker 3 (49:58):
And also there's that thing that you pointed to just
now about like knowing what's going on in the world.
I like the fact that the technology. I love podcasts like,
I listen to them constantly, but I often feel like
I'm in this little bubble and I get challenged a
little bit when I have to like scan through the
dial and yeah, maybe he's stuff that I wouldn't seek
out otherwise, and maybe it's crap, but also maybe it's just,

(50:20):
you know, not the ear candy that I would go
for totally.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
Yeah, radio is a certain magic. I love being a podcaster.
But you know, who knows. Maybe you'll be listening to
this in the waste Lands of twenty twenty seven and
you'll be like, but Margaret, you are on the radio,
and who knows to speak in a radio? You run
a radio show? What is it?

Speaker 3 (50:47):
Yeah? I'm the co host of The Final Straw Radio.
It's a long running anarchist podcast and radio show that
airs on about a dozen stations like little stations for
the most part around the US. But yeah, we cover
also issues around folks organizing against their incarceration or against
conditions inside of prisons, or ecological struggles, anti war struggles,

(51:08):
anti fascist organizing, all sorts of stuff. It's worth checking
out and you can find it at TFSR dot media.
And I like the radio because I've been contacted by
prisoners that have heard the radio show before, and that's
kind of cool to be able to get past all
the privatized media that they're allowed, Like they can only
get certain books, they can only get certain newspapers, they

(51:29):
can maybe hear podcasts from certain companies depending on the
tech that they've got inside, but if they've got a radio,
they can hear whatever happens to be coming through the airwaves. Yeah,
but thanks for the opportunity to come on.

Speaker 2 (51:40):
Fuck. Yah, it's actually one of the things I wanted
to end up covering, and I just didn't end up
having time in this as I know that every now
and then people set up radio stations like kind of
the equivalent of Radio Free Europe, just outside prisons and
broadcast in the prisons.

Speaker 3 (51:55):
I heard about a situation in maybe a dozen years
ago in the Midwest where somebody was charged with sneaking
into a prison basically or sneaking in materials into a prison.
They had set up a pirate broadcast between like five
different prisons right at the corner of a couple of states,

(52:15):
including some federal prisons that were there, and sent flyers
into prisoners at each of the prisons. But that meant
that like five different police forces of varying levels came
down on them. Oh they've aided charges luckily, but that's
good to know. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (52:33):
Well, so, if you got a thing you want to
plug Behind the Bastards is doing a live show in Portland,
organ with all performer pursuits going towards the Portland Billfund
and it will be on September twenty fifth at eight
pm PST at the Alberta Rose Theater. Tickets are on
sale now.

Speaker 2 (52:50):
Hell yeah, I'll plug that there is. If you want
to read another obsolete form of media communication that's incredibly useful,
long form writing or longish article writing that is constantly deplatformed,
just check out crimethink dot com. They always have articles
from people all over the world involved in struggle and

(53:11):
there's I don't know, a recent one that went up
just now is about operational security for demonstrators and all
kinds of good stuff there. They've been doing things for
a long time. They're pretty reliable.

Speaker 3 (53:24):
I think they just put one out too, like collecting
voices of folks involved in the uprising in Indonesia, which
is pretty amazing.

Speaker 2 (53:31):
I haven't finished reading it yet, so I was like,
that's actually why I was thinking about it, is that
I was reading it before we hit record. But yeah,
if you want to find out what's going on all
over the world, that's another way to do it is
by reading. And so this podcast is brought to you
by reading. It's in a book. It's that's probably copyrighted

(53:51):
jingle anyway from someone who also runs a podcast. I
will see everyone soon, including everyone on this call and
all of you listeners. I will see every single one
of you. I will peer in through your nope, in
your dreams and dreams. Yep, all right, by bye anymore?

Speaker 3 (54:12):
Goodbye.

Speaker 1 (54:15):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Goolezonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, app a podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.

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Episode Transcript

Host

Margaret Killjoy

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part Two: Pirate Radio: From International Waters to Squatted Apartment Buildings