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)
Comments (3)Lars Nyre: Sound Media: From Live Journalism to Music Recording (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · journalism, mass media, music, music history, popular culture, public broadcasting, radio, sound recording
Sound Media considers how music recording, radio broadcasting and muzak influence people’s daily lives and introduces the many and varied creative techniques that have developed in music and journalism throughout the twentieth century. Lars Nyre starts with the contemporary cultures of sound media, and works back to the archaic soundscapes of the 1870s.
The first part of the book devotes five chapters to contemporary digital media, and presents the internet, the personal computer, digital radio (news and talk) and various types of loudspeaker media (muzak, DJ-ing, clubbing and PA systems). The second part examines the historical accumulation of techniques and sounds in sound media, and presents multitrack music in the 1960s, the golden age of radio in the 1950s and back to the 1930s, microphone recording of music in the 1930s, the experimental phase of wireless radio in the 1910s and 1900s, and the invention of the gramophone and phonograph in the late nineteenth century.
Sound Media includes a soundtrack CD with thirty-six examples from broadcasting and music recording in Europe and the USA, from Edith Piaf to Sarah Cox, and is richly illustrated with figures, timelines and technical drawings.
Publisher Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis, 2008
ISBN 041539113X, 9780415391139
221 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)
Comment (0)Robert T. Holt: Radio Free Europe (1958)
Filed under book | Tags: · bulgaria, central europe, communism, czechoslovakia, history, hungary, mass media, poland, politics, propaganda, public broadcasting, radio, romania, southeastern europe
What is radio Free Europe? Where does it broadcast? Who runs it? What are its purposes? Although thousands of Americans are familiar with Radio Free Europe (many have contributed to its support through the Crusade for Freedom campaigns), few know enough about its background to answer these and similar questions. In this book a political scientist with first-hand knowledge gives a detailed account of the organization and development of this unique propaganda enterprise.
Radio Free Europe was established as a private broadcasting project in 1949 by the Free Europe Committee, headed by Joseph C. Grew, as part of the Committee’s program of broad, long-range assistance to democratic exiles from totalitarian countries. The operational headquarters are located at Munich, and the broadcasts are directed to the people of five satellite countries: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland.
Professor Holt tells how Radio Free Europe was established, outlines its basic policies and objectives, describes its organization, personnel, programming, and services, discusses transmission problems, and examines the effectiveness of the propaganda. He describes in detail the role of RFE in connection with the uprisings in Poland and Hungary and analyzes the charges that RFE stimulated the Hungarian revolt.
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1958
ISBN 978-0-8166-5788-9
249 pages