Book you need "London's Pirate pioneers"

[FMEnjoyer]

By Stephen Hebditch. The first thing I can say is the guy who wrote this book had a VERY keen ear and I mean he could dig a station right out of the noise and dirt of a busy FM dial. I know this for a fact.

This is a great book 309 pages of pirate radio fun from start to end, lots of stories technical stuff and a year by year blow by blow account of what stations came on and who was who doing what all with some tech updates frequencies and other anecdotes.

It is a MUST have for any pirate interested people. Just had to remind people it existed as it is a great book and info resource 70's through 1990. I wish it had gone on a bit fiurther into the late 90's maybe there is another book there ? let's hope so !

This is a great Yootube channel as well, plenty of hours fun listening and nostagia.

I think AM/FM was a magazine which I bought a few times, once it was A5 cartoony and typewriter print early computer days, really old skool looking....and then it got bigger and turned to A4 size mag. It may have changed name.

https://www.youtube.com/@amfmldn/videos

[FMEnjoyer]

You may like this as well this was the A5 fanzine kind of mag. TX Mag.

https://archive.org/details/txmagazinep ... p/mode/2up

Just some previews though I think.

[Albert H]

Unfortunately, there's a lot of errors and half-truths in the Hebditch book. It's partly OK.

[FMEnjoyer]

I think that is a good statement, and can be applied to most of pirate radio information, you need only look through this very forum to see no one knows it all. It is quite a comprehensive book with lots of good info. I would like to see something from the 90's onwards in a similar style. Maybe he felt he had done enough by then.

A few friedns and I had a little station and when I say little, I mean little and it is in the book, he did not omit that for which I am thankful it shows he was a very attentive listener, probably 10W radiated after losses and incompetencies, few hours a week and he still found it. That was amongst some very powerful big boys, 30-40 100Watters at a guess and maybe another 30 odd 50-100W stations and a handful of hobby anorak people. He was really listening.

The rest he would have been reliant on what information people gave him and you cannot expect more really in what became an activity filled with many dodgy and probably very dodgy people who you were better off not associating with.

[radionortheast]

A century of irish radio 1900 - 2000 is good too, london’s pirate pioneers, pirate radio dispatches alot of it was london centric, some of the text was small in tx, wish there had been one about stations up north.

[matt_tee]

Unfortunately, there's a lot of errors and half-truths in the Hebditch book. It's partly OK.

Would be really interesting to know a bit of this! I really like the book but I guessed that there are things missed and things that are incorrect. Would you be able to give any examples? Purely for my anarok-y interest, not to stir anything up.