Robert Chapman: Selling the Sixties: The Pirates and Pop Music Radio (1992)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1960s, music, piracy, pirate radio, popular culture, public broadcasting, radio, united kingdom
Was it a non-stop psychedelic party or was there more to pirate radio in the sixties than hedonism and hip radicalism? From Kenny Everett’s sacking to John Peel’s legendary `Perfumed Garden’ show, to the influence of the multi-national ad agencies, and the eventual assimilationof aspects of unofficial pop radio into Radio One, Selling the Sixties examines the boom of private broadcasting in Britain.
Using two contrasting models of pop piracy, Radios Caroline and London, Robert Chapman sets pirate radio in its social and cultural context. In doing so he challenges the myths surrounding its maverick `Kings Road’ image, separating populist consumerism from the economic and political machinations which were the flipside of the pirate phenomenon.
Selling the Sixties includes previously unseen evidence from the pirates’ archives, revealing interviews and an unrivalled selection of rare audio materials.
Publisher Routledge, 1992
ISBN 0415079705, 9780415079709
295 pages
Richard J. Aldrich: GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · code, cold war, computing, encryption, history, intelligence agency, surveillance, technology, united kingdom
The gripping inside story of the last unknown realm of the British secret service: GCHQ (Government Communication Headquarters).
GCHQ is the successor to the famous Bletchley Park wartime code-breaking organisation and is the largest and most secretive intelligence organisation in the country. During the war, it commanded more staff than MI5 and MI6 combined and has produced a number of intelligence triumphs, as well as some notable failures. Since the end of the Cold War, it has played a pivotal role in shaping Britain’s secret state. Still, we know almost nothing about it.
In this ground-breaking new book, Richard Aldrich traces GCHQ’s evolvement from a wartime code-breaking operation based in the Bedfordshire countryside, staffed by eccentric crossword puzzlers, to one of the world leading espionage organisations. It is packed full of dramatic spy stories that shed fresh light on Britain’s role in the Cold War – from the secret tunnels dug beneath Vienna and Berlin to tap Soviet phone lines, and daring submarine missions to gather intelligence from the Soviet fleet, to the notorious case of Geoffrey Pine, one of the most damaging moles ever recruited by the Soviets inside British intelligence. The book reveals for the first time how GCHQ operators based in Cheltenham affected the outcome of military confrontations in far-flung locations such as Indonesia and Malaya, and exposes the shocking case of three GGHQ workers who were killed in an infamous shootout with terrorists while working undercover in Turkey.
Today’s GCHQ struggles with some of the most difficult issues of our time. A leading force of the state’s security efforts against militant terrorist organisations like Al-Qaeda, they are also involved in fundamental issues that will mould the future of British society. Compelling and revelatory, Aldrich’s book is the crucial missing link in Britain’s intelligence history.
Publisher HarperPress, 2010
ISBN 0007278470, 9780007278473
666 pages
review (Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian)
review (Sinclair McKay, The Telegraph)
review (Duncan Campbell, New Statesman)
review (The Economist)
Adrian Johns: Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · libertarianism, mass media, media history, piracy, pirate radio, public broadcasting, radio, united kingdom
A killing in the English countryside takes us inside the world of pirate radio in its mid-1960s heyday.
When the pirate operator Oliver Smedley shoots and kills his rival Reg Calvert in Smedley’s country cottage on June 21, 1966, it is a turning point in the careening career of the outlaw radio stations dotting the coastal waters of England. Situated on ships and offshore forts like Shivering Sands, these stations blasted away at the high-minded BBC’s broadcast monopoly with the new beats of the Stones and the Who and DJs like Screaming Lord Sutch. For free-market ideologues like Smedley, the pirate stations were entrepreneurial efforts to undermine the growing British welfare state as embodied by the BBC.
The worlds of high table and underground collide in a riveting story full of memorable characters like the Bondian Kitty Black, an intellectual femme fatale who becomes Smedley’s co-conspirator, and the notorious Kray twins, brazenly violent operators of a London protection racket. Here is a rousing entertainment with an intellectual edge.
Publisher W. W. Norton & Company, 2010
ISBN 0393068609, 9780393068603
305 pages
WFMU’s Too Much Information show hosting the author
The Curse of TINA (Smedley’s story told by Adam Curtis, BBC)
PDF (updated on 2012-11-11)
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