I had no idea Radio Caroline, the most famous pirate radio station in the '60s, still existed [View all]

[highplainsdem]

Ran across a tweet from one of its DJs yesterday.

Boomers like me will probably remember hearing about it. Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Caroline

You can listen online at https://www.radiocaroline.co.uk/ . There's both a US stream and a UK stream. The UK stream is live, and the US stream apparently replays it hours later on a US time schedule

I ran across this info checking Twitter as well as Google yesterday for news about George Kooymans, the Golden Earring guitarist who's started doing interviews again this past month, after having heen diagnosed with ALS in late 2020. He's promoting a new album with American singer/songwriter/guitarist Frank Carillo, and a Radio Caroline DJ from the Netherlands tweeted about it:

Link to tweet

I'd never heard of Andre van Os before, hadn't run across his name on any articles, but Radio Caroline's presenter profile includes this info:

Inspired by Radio Caroline and Mi Amigo in the late 1970's, André started making radio on a landbased pirate in his home country The Netherlands and for a short spell on a Belgium one. He did music and news programmes for hospital radio up north and in Amsterdam, where he was also passionately involved in local newsradio on FM.

For twenty years he worked for several national public broadcasters as an internet pioneer, setting up their first streaming webradio stations with documentaries and current affairs. He was head of the internet department of Radio Netherlands Worldwide, until the government unfortunately cut most of the station's funding.

He's a DJ on their main, AOR channel, their Quality Album channel. (Radio Caroline was one of the first AOR stations.) They also have a channel for pop singles from the '60s and '70s, which I'll probably check out later.

Although he's Dutch, this is a British station so I'm assuming the broadcast will be in English. I don't know if George Kooymans will be doing a phone interview, but he's done a number of other phone interviews for radio stations lately, and he does speak English as well as Dutch. I've been checking for new interviews, because when he started doing interviews to talk about his battle with ALS last month -- https://democraticunderground.com/10181674319 -- I said I'd post updates.

It was a nice bonus to discover Radio Caroline still exists. It'd been a long time since I'd run across that name.

There was a 2009 British comedy about pirate radio, The Boat That Rocked (retitled Pirate Radio in the US), that unfortunately bombed despite an amazing cast and a great soundtrack. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boat_That_Rocked and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boat_That_Rocked_(soundtrack) .