If pirate radio has a home, it's in London's tower blocks and tinny car radios. Bar the capital, where else can you find one DJ playing Ghanaian gospel and another spinning some ancient dub track, followed by a crackly ad for "Reg's Records", in which a man named Reg nervously offers to buy up all your dusty reggae vinyl? Chances are: nowhere – mostly because no other city has nearly as many pirates simultaneously on air at any one time (around 70 at Ofcom's last count).
Many of these stations come and go within a matter of years – an inevitability, considering they're illegal to run; punishable with fines, the seizure of equipment and, for repeat offenders, a prison sentence. But some pirates stick around. Some have as firm a spot in London's cultural depot as Carnival, or the ICA, or G-A-Y, or that time David Blaine sat in a glass box above the Thames and a load of shirtless English men threw Stella cans at him.
Few pirates embody this perseverance better than Kool London, the city's longest-running jungle station. Founded as Kool FM in 1991 by DJs Eastman and Smurff, it's spent nearly a quarter of a century transmitting hardcore, jungle and drum 'n' bass from antennas installed on the roofs of Hackney's council flats.
"The way it started," says Eastman, now Kool's remaining co-founder after Smurff's departure in 1998, "is that my little sister had a group of friends from Hackney Wick. I knew one of them – this Turkish guy, T – and he had a brother called Smurff, who approached me and said he wanted to start a new station. He'd done a couple of little ones before, but they kept getting hit by other pirates – smashed up and that. He said, 'I want a bit of muscle behind me to do something new.' I was running a reggae sound-system, and was also head of security at my father's club, Telepathy, in [Stratford]. The security side was what he needed, so that was that: we set up Kool."
By Jamie Clifton for VICE
0 comments:
Post a Comment