Cool Zone Media, Hello.

And welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff.

You're weekly.

Reminder that I always introduced the show by calling it weekly, even though it's twice a week, because I don't know whether bi weekly means twice a week or every two weeks.

I think it means every two weeks.

I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is Bursts, one of the hosts of The Final Straw Radio, which is both a radio show and a podcast.

How are you.

I'm doing pretty well.

I missed you, I know in this five minute break where we sat around and talked about cats.

Yeah.

We have a producer.

My name's Sophie.

We have a producer, hy Sophie.

Hi.

That's always how I introduce you, vaguely, awkwardly, as if you weren't the person who gets happened.

It's amazing.

No notes.

Our audio engineer is Eva hi Eva.

Hi Eva hi Eva.

Our theme music was written for us by un woman.

Hi On Women.

I love your music.

Hi On Woman.

I don't know if you listen, but thanks for making this music.

We picked this theme music because I was like, I want something that seems incongruous with talking about like all kinds of wild revolutionary shit.

I think it gives us a nice vibe.

I still really like it.

I know that you've performed with on Women before.

Do you have a favorite on Women track?

I do.

My favorite un Woman track is called Written in Red, Yes, and it is the poem written by Volting to Claire, who I am really shocked has not really come up on this show.

Vulturing to Claire was a the oldie banner CHISTI lady.

Contemporary of Emma Goldman.

Yeah, that's my favorite one of on Women's tracks as well.

It's beautiful.

Yeah, it's so good.

Anyway, we are talking about pirate radio this week, and on Monday we talked very confusedly about how pirate radio, at least in the UK was started by people who were capitalists.

Yeah.

Just I mean it's cool that they did that.

I have no qualms with them setting up boats and playing rock music.

It just was surprising.

It wasn't what I was expecting when I was like, I'm going to research the history of pirate radio.

And actually next week we're going to talk about the first act of radio piracy.

But whatever, that's for next week.

So you've got this three way fight going on between commercial radio, public radio, and state owned radio.

And we've so far talked about state owned radio and commercial radio, but we haven't gone to the public part.

And what's fascinating is that both commercial and public radio are perfectly willing to go pirate, although both are also perfectly willing to be licensed and just do things in that way too.

Honestly, I suppose state owned radio is also perfectly willing to be pirate because you have things like Radio Free Europe, which was a CIA funded radio operation to broadcast Western radio across the Iron Curtain, which is kind of an interesting thing in its own right, despite where its funding came from, But it is not what we're going to be talking about today.

Instead, I'm going to talk about how as monopolies on state radio started to waiver across Western Europe, small radio operators, legal and otherwise cropped up everywhere.

And we're going to start with Italy because I think it sets us up well to understand the three way fight.

Italian politics don't map to the politics of the rest of Europe.

You ever noticed that they're just like their own thing.

This is the thing I've heard.

Yeah, it gets real confusing if you ever want to hear about leftist nationalists, read about there's a lot of leftist nationalists, but the unification of Italy was this whole thing, and then there's people who were whatever Italian politics are just confusing.

It's no wonder that that place gave us Fascism'm not even in a slight to Italy, just in a way that everything is different.

Yeah, the whole like syncretism of it, especially like Mizzini and like all of these earlier Republicans that helped to found it were like also running alongside of Bakunin and yeah.

Yeah, they're just everyone was doing all kinds of stuff together and antagonistically to each other.

And Mussolini's father was into Italian nationalism and anarchism, and then Mussolini was in their socialism.

But then he was like, actually, I just like the revolutionary part, I don't like the leftism part.

And the Communist Party for most of the twentieth century was like the status quo, bad boring, It's like the equivalent of our democrats.

You know, we've talked a bit about Italian politics in the second half of the twentieth century before on this show, and what's important to understand when we're going to talk about radio stuff in the seventies, is that politics in Italy are heated.

They're heated in a way that is like hard to understand.

In the American context, you have the years of lead from about nineteen sixty eight to nineteen eighty eight, with far right and far left groups doing a lot of terrorism and shooting and urban guerrilla stuff, lots of false flag stuff where the people are blaming anarchists for things, but anarchists are also doing things.

And you've got the autonomous and you've got all this stuff.

It's just stuff everything.

You also need to understand autonomists a little bit because they are a big part of Italy and basically, since the Communist Party was more or less the Democrats, people are can get really mad about that comparison, and they might even be right to be mad at me about it, because I've only read so much about Italy and it's all confusing.

Graham, she was basically FDR full stop.

Wait, wasn't he more of an autonomist?

Oh I don't know, No, No, Gram, she wasn't.

Never mind, he was.

The head of the Communist Party who died in prison under mus Kenny, but.

That was before the Communist Party got democraty.

Yeah, Graham, She's probably the like Capital C communists whose works I have found the most resonant with some of how I understand things.

But that might be because when I went to Italy, all of the anarchists were also like, whatever, this is completely besides the point.

Everything is wild over there.

It's upside downland, it's confusing, and so you have the rise of autonomous Marxism, which is basically people were like, well, we like Marxism, but we actually don't like the state because the official Marxists are bored and we don't like them.

So you have this whole radical movement of communists and then the anarchists are someone closely tied together.

Is that because the Communist Party at that point was basically towing the Stalinist line.

I am not certain.

I am under the impression, and I genuinely could be wrong about this.

The stuff I have read has implied heavily that the Communist Party at this point is like just status quo government and like doing more what people would normally accuse like a socialist party elsewhere in Europe of being, which still sounds radical to the American context, but is like not really further left than like Bernie and is sometimes to the right of Bernie Sanders.

Because I guess you had neo fascists from the MSI that were like, had been part of the Salo Republic and they were backed by the CIA going on at the same time.

I believe you.

I've even had people explain it to me.

I was on a years of LED podcast as a pod cast idiot once, and I tried to be a good podcast idiot where you've learned, and instead it was like, well that sounds crazy.

Everything's weird.

Why I keep shooting each other?

So you get autonomous Marxists and the autonomous in Italy are mostly doing this urban guerrilla thing.

But then autonomism starts spreading throughout the rust of Europe up into Germany, and there the autonomous and the anarchists start doing this thing that we've talked about way more on the show, of creating this kind of subcultural outside the systems space.

And that's going to tie into radio a lot, right.

People who are like, well, we don't want to do what we're told.

We want to build an entirely different society within this society are of course going to turn to pirate radio and be some of the more influential figures within it.

And a side quest, I promised you Italy, but what if we talk about Germany?

Eh?

Eh, So the side quest over to follow those autonomous for a second.

Germany and East Germany are two of the most repressive anti pirate radio societies going on at the time.

East Germany is repressive because state communism.

West Germany because the government is fighting tooth and nail against the squatter movement, the punks, the autonomous, the anarchists to maintain control of the cities.

We talked about this a bit on the Black Block episodes that people want to hear more about this time.

I've always sort of thought that there's like almost two methods of policing, and one is exemplified by Germany, and one is exemplified by like mostly the global South or Mexico would be the main place that I kind of know about this, where there's the kind of we are going to control everything so rigidly that no one steps out of line, and if they do, they are like pacified and controlled and taken away, right.

And then there's societies that are like more permissive, but then the cops are like more likely to while out and kill you.

And America is sort of both at once.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's a lot of impunity.

There's a lot of like, yeah, they're just too using when and who to impose it against.

Yeah, and so Germany is this very repressive society, but actually people are fighting back against it very successfully.

But in West Germany it only takes the state about ten minutes to locate a pirate radio broadcast and show up in force, and that is wild, Like that kind of response time is just because you have to know what's happening, which means you have to be watching all of the airwaves over all of the city and have cops just ready to go, and they did.

I've got some friends that do broadcasting through this thing called the Fria Radio Network in Germany.

A Radio Berlin is one of these projects, Anarchist Radio Berlin.

Yeah.

I was like asking one of my friends why they don't have pirate broadcasts if there's such like a you know, a history of squatting movements and such that he told exactly that same story of just started recording in a squad in Kreuzberg and then within like fifteen or twenty minutes, a bunch of people in tactical uniforms with assault rifles come through the door just to shut down a radio broadcast.

It's insane.

I can imagine it happening, but not that quickly.

That's the part that is I'm just like, yeah, I guess they're just ready to go.

And so you have this culture where instead of having sustained pirate radio stations, you have action stations which were set up on the fly, often on the move in vehicles, for ten minute broadcasts in order to accomplish some specific tasks and the three tasks that I found.

So this isn't a very good way to like release your new single, although actually if it's just a new single, actually that'd be kind of cool.

People should do that.

Anyway, it's not what I'm aware of them using it for.

They would announce a demonstration, they would release a communicate for some direct action that had happened, or during an ongoing demonstration, they would provide like information about what's happening.

Those are the action stations that I'm aware of.

There was one exception that I found a German station called Radio Dreeklund and that's probably not how they pronounced it.

In order to have this German pirate radio station in the seventies or eighties, they had to do it in France.

It's kind of the equivalent of doing an offshore radio station.

It was largely broadcast from forested mountains, so when the cops did try to shut it down, they would just get lost and couldn't find it in the wilderness, which rules, and these pirates were willing to have some fun playing a high stake pranks.

At one point they came down into Germany out of the mountains and they broadcast from the city and I don't remember what city this is, and they surrounded the building with hundreds of supporters right to hold the police away so they could broadcast.

So cops showed up and push their way through the crowd and then smashed up the entire building trying to find the transmitter.

The transmitter was not in that building.

They just surrounded a building in order to make the cops think it was in that it was hidden nearby.

They broadcasted the entire time.

It was just to waste the cops time.

And then they did literally the same thing again.

They went down into Germany, they surrounded a building with protesters and they broadcast from somewhere else and the cops fell for it the same way the second time.

When was this in the like seventies or I.

Think this is late seventies, early eighties.

I have a lot more really specific information when we get to the UK pirate radio stations, because I read a blow by blow written at great length by our voice radio or our radio.

It's in the script.

I'll get to it.

But when I'm covering a lot of the other ones, I'm finding like references in various interviews with people like ah, remember that time we did the thing, and I'm trying to cross reference them as much I was able to find this lesson, like here's a history book describing everything, and I had to do a lot more cross reference, and so things are a little blurrier when I'm talking about these ones.

Yeah, the one.

The only thing that I really know about the autonomous movement is stuff that I pulled from this Cutzia Ficus book The Subversion of Politics, and it talks about autonomous movements in Italy and I think in Netherlands and Germany.

But I don't think I ever heard about Radio Drickland.

That's cool, Yeah, but it probably talks about radio Alllysis, which I'm about to get to because we're going to go back to Italy now, because I promised you Italy.

In Italy, laws were loosened up in nineteen seventy four to allow non state operated radio stations, and hundreds or thousands of different micro stations took to the airwaves.

The stuff I've read basically is like this is just like how people practically had conversations for a couple of years.

The sort of social media of the time is like all of these micro stations everywhere, which sounds really fun.

Yeah, absolutely, And an awful lot of these are autonomous or anarchist, and a lot of them are tied into this wild protest culture that's happening that is both like labor move movement stuff and urban gorilla and like all kinds of occupations and yeah, totally, And the most famous of these stations, as best as I can tell, I genuinely think this is the most famous of these stations, but obviously my sources are biased towards thinking the radical stations are the most famous was a station called Radio Alice, based out of the city of Bologna, and it ran for years despite heavy repression coming into it.

You said you've heard a bit about Radio.

Alice, Yeah, and I don't know, Like we've done interviews on our show in the past with people involved in student movements or like occupations to defend forests I think in Bologna also.

But Bologna, I know, has like a very long radical history and is one of the centers of like lyftist politics in Italy.

But I've heard the name Radio Alice like thrown out as maybe like a gimme line in like a Patti Smith song or something like that.

I don't know interest about it, though.

Okay, they had this radio station, Radio Alice and Bologna, and it's sort of a quintessential version of what this sort of seventies and eighties pirate radio tended to look like, which is these very political stations that specifically well According to an article by Julius Gavroche Quote, Radio Alice's output covered a myriad of subjects labor protests, poetry, yoga lessons, political analysis, love declarations, cooking recipes, Jefferson airplane area which appears to be the name of a band or Beethoven music.

I've never heard of this band, area.

I should have looked them up.

Do you know this band?

Either of you na never heard of them?

Nop.

I wonder if it's a translation of an Italian name anyway, whatever I'm no longer quoting.

It was organized by a weekly assembly of all of the different groups that use this radio station.

Like there'd be like a gay group and a feminist group and a workers group and things like that.

And this was kind of the model for every political pirate station that I've found.

They tend to be run collectively or cooperatively long anarchistor autonomous principles, but are open to all sorts of different groups.

It's this thing that happens a lot where when you need to get people together and have everyone be treated as equals across a political spectrum, you need a non hierarchical model for that.

So there'll be emphasis on different special interest groups like queer rights, black power, labor organizing, women's groups, the anti nuclear movement is a big part of a lot of these.

So all of these different collectives come together to run a radio station together.

I think that's real cool.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I wonder if, like the groups just sort of like are pre existing, and then they have like a radio committee within them, you know what I mean.

Like if there's like a feminist collective for you know, pushing for social wage or something like that, and they're like, who's going to go do the radio slat that we've got for feminist struggle.

Yeah, I could really easily see both things happening where they're like, oh, there's a new radio station, Hey, let's get together and do a women's show.

Or they're like, hey, we're the local feminist organization.

We're going to get together and you know, we're going to yeah, put together an hour of content every week or whatever.

You know.

Radio Alice was wildly influential on culture, and it accomplished a lot in a few short years.

One participant in this who's much more famous for other things, And when I say much more famous, I mean to a really niche part of our audience is the autonomoust author Bifo, who wrote about it.

Quote in Bologna nineteen seventy seven, there was a movement in schools, in the universities and in some of the factories, and a zone of the city was occupied.

So basically everyone comes together and occupies the city.

The police came into the university and killed someone in the movement, and for three days the town was occupied and barricaded.

In the period of the riots, Radio Alice was one of the means of communication, organization, and information for the people.

And so I like this thing that a lot of cultural stuff does, where you create an infrastructure and then when it's needed, it steps up into a radical, you know, role or whatever.

Although I suppose Gramsci would probably say that it was radical and purposeful all the time as participating in the cultural I don't remember how Grimy.

I love your Marxist speech that you just did.

Yeah, thank you.

I've been practicing that for a while.

I was really sad.

I was in Italy and I was like on tour talking about anarchist fiction and people are like, oh, like Gramsci and I'm like, man, I don't I don't fuck with no Marxist whatever.

I'm a young asshole.

And then they would explain his ideas and I was like, yes, that is very similar to what I thought I came up with.

I see that people think about things.

Smart changing culture.

Here we go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And during these riots, during the occupation of the city.

Folks at the barricades would call into the radio station and be like, hey, we need more people or whatever.

It's such and such intersection.

Unfortunately, by making themselves indispensable to this movement, on the second cops raided and smashed everything up at Radio Alice.

Although they rebuilt eventually, Radio Alice was successfully repressed.

But they had a particular poetry to everything.

They wrote.

In one manifesto, this is actually a thing that does make them different than a lot of the other pirate radio stations.

Everything they write is like incomprehensibly poetic.

In one manifesto written by some Radio Alice arrestees during their time in jail, as best as I can tell, they wrote, quote, this is an invitation to speak and think, in invitation to always be present in the situations in the town, the neighborhoods, the schools, the barracks, the factories, the roads.

Let's exhaust the enemy.

Let's wear the giant monster by beating it all over its body.

Let's not talk about desires anymore.

Let's desire.

We are desiring machines, machines of war.

That is yeah, incredibly poetic, I know, But.

Do you know who else is invited to speak on our show.

The hydra.

Yes, right, I say, that's a metaphor for capitalism, and that is who is now going to be present and talking to you and we're back.

Okay, wait, what's the hydra?

Oh?

I was just thinking of the idea of this, like we're going to be in many places all at once and doing these things, and like the there's a really good book by I'm actually not going to remember the names of the authors, but Rehdicker was one of them, called the Many Headed Hydra, about collaborative organizing in the early colonial period in North America by different populations to resist It's called the many Headed Hydra.

Really good history.

It was a positive version of a hydra.

Yeah, they're actually reclaiming it consciously because I guess it was coming up a lot in the writings, for instance, of Shakespeare at the time of talking about the need to suppress all of these like many varied you know, dark skinned, evil people that are promoting discord in our colonies.

That they were positing the Empire of Britain as being a colonizing good that acted as hercules to destroy the hydra.

But and so these people are like fuck yeah, we're the hydra.

Fuck you hercules.

Yeah you can't get all our heads look at us.

Go hell yeah, that's awesome.

I like reclaiming that.

Another thing that the same Radio Alice zine that is incomprehensible.

I was like, oh great, I found a zene about Radio Alice.

It is incomprehensible.

It is so beautiful, as many beautiful parts.

I had to piece most of what I got about Radio Alics from different interviews, mostly with Bifo, but elsewhere in the zine it says, quote, the practice of happiness is subversive when it becomes collective.

And I love that.

I love that.

I'm trying to research Radio Alice and instead I learn a single line that pulls apart exactly what's wrong with like the self care narrative.

I don't know, the practice of happiness is subversive when it becomes collective.

Fuck yah, let's be happy together.

So the state was like, no, I don't want you to be happy together.

And so they are instead repressing these hundreds or thousands of radio stations as fast as they can.

But in the end, the state doesn't successfully repress all of these small voices.

They find a better way to do it.

They legalized radio piracy, and as they intended, this means that the commercial radio pirates take over.

They can afford these huge transmitters that just wipe out all of the smaller you know, people talking about things.

And so the commercial radio comes in and they want to just replicate the American radio model.

The spoken word is diminished.

Everyone's playing the same songs, and the radio stations start buying each other out and building a monopoly.

It's the dream of radio Caroline has come to Italy and yeah, that's Italy.

I guess that one doesn't end.

But they wrote cool stuff along the way, And I don't actually know.

Almost everything I read about all of this stuff was like written in the eighties, and so I can't speak as much to what it's like now.

Even if like the projects ended up ending, they had an amazing influence in the meantime, Like they helped to shape people's lives, people helped to shape that itself.

Totally.

Yeah, that's pretty inspirational.

Yeah, totally.

And you a low further west to Spain and France and you find another model for how to do independent radio federations, radio pirates in Spain and France resisted repression fairly effectively for a while.

To be clear, my main source on a lot of this is a zine out of the UK called The Radio is My Bomb that came out in nineteen eighty seven, and so I don't have a lot of it, and then this is what happened later information about these things, but at least one of the French stations is still around.

In Spain and especially in France, the political pirate stations organized together and organized well.

When you need crime organized, there's two groups that you can turn to, and abortion rights show this really clearly.

There's hierarchical capitalist organizations like the mafia very good at organizing crime.

No one is denying that they can organize crime.

In fact, they just call them organized crime.

Yeah, exactly, Yeah, there's the of organized crime.

Yeah, they really are.

The other group that has proven really good at organizing crime at scale is a narcosyndicalists.

We covered this a bit in our episodes about abortion in Germany during the Weimar Republic, where a narcosyndicalist organizing models were being used all across the country to perform millions of abortions a year, completely illegally and safely, well as safely as anyone was able to do it in the nineteen twenties.

And an narcosyndicalist tend to form federations collecting diverse groups who work together to defend each other, which is what pirate Radio needed.

So in Spain, when the dictator Franco Franco whatever well in the fucking asshole of two names that are the same name in a row died in nineteen seventy five, democracy returned and the state monopoly on radio went away, and free radio popped up.

Various stations formed a federation, the CRL, and they agreed to certain rules for themselves.

And this is an interesting set of rules that I can't quite tell you exactly what it means about the ideology of the people who formed it.

No political parties, no unions like, no labor unions, because the labor unions in Spain have kind of comparable amounts of powers of political party in some ways.

Yeah, but what about like the CNT.

That's great, I know anyway, That's why I'm like, I do not know exactly what they mean by that part of it, that they would promote music by independent musicians, and they would transmit with limited power so that a lot of people can get on the air, and hundreds of these stations existed as part of this federation.

Was that like the Libertarian Confederation of Spanish Radios?

Is it?

Oh?

Probably?

I again when I this comes out of an old photocopied zine from the nineteen eighties, and I tried searching most of this shit and it is just like if it's on the internet, it's not in English, you know, or would take me uncovering even more rocks than I managed to over.

In France, pirate radio was heavily repressed by the right wing government of the late seventies.

In nineteen eighty one, the Socialist Party came to power and for a very brief period they were like, what if we're nice and so they got rid of the state monopoly on radio.

But by nineteen eighty two legalization prioritized large commercial stations.

The non commercial pirates formed several federations.

One of them, the FNRL, had three hundred stations committed to being non commercial.

Though this isn't an ad pivot.

Some of them.

Leftist stations in France did also sell ads.

I'm unsure if those ones could federate with the FNRL or not, But I know that, like, it's actually a thing that I like always look for when I research, because I think about my own compromises that I make in this world, and I like radical newspapers throughout the years were almost always selling ads anyway.

They were probably just like picky about who they're selling to, like not the Washington State Police or like certain companies selling gold or yeah, potato mafia.

Yeah, God, wouldn't that suck if that happened, if someone without their consent?

That's just so yeah.

Yeah, what if a network of radical podcasts had like specifically said these are the categories that we refuse to advertise with.

And then they put the Washington State Patrol under business.

It's kind of honest, it says a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the pirate radio station that I learned them about in France, the most famous of these is Radio Libertaire, run by the French Anarchist Federation.

And this radio station started a nineteen eighty one and you probably know more about this than I do.

I believe is still going strong today at eighty nine point four FM in Paris.

Yeah, I got to visit them in like twenty eighteen and kind of check out the station.

It's really cool they have I think since about the beginning they've still had this like a continuous broadcast of a show that's teaching people how to speak esperanto.

That's not the only things they do.

Like it sounds like a joke, but it's amazing.

But no, that is like one of their longest running shows.

The Final Start is a part of this network called the a radio network that Radio Libertaire at least used to participate in.

But that's good.

It's a pretty cool project.

And also like, what is that forty four years that they've been around so far?

That is longer than most commercial projects period, you know.

Yeah, and they showed that they can do it right.

They've got like this big collaboration of people volunteering over a forty four year period, Yeah, to make decisions to clean the building, to like fund the place.

Like that's I think they might get a little bit of state funding.

I'm not sure, but it's possible.

I do know that they get eighty nine point four reserve for them because of a whole lot of rioting that I'm about to talk about.

Oh cool, the radio station Radio Libertaria has gone through so much.

It was raided and then it was legalized, and then it was banned, and then it was raided, and then it eventually it was just tolerated as something the state couldn't get rid of.

Like other anarchist stations.

I've found.

It's let all sorts of different groups use it, and it had a huge listenership of all sorts of people who are just happy to have a more independent voice on air.

Like they didn't conceive of their listenership as inherently anarchist or whatever.

Right, but by nineteen eighty three the writing was on the wall.

French government started talking about all the complaints about the crowded FM radio air space, specifically the anarchists were to be targeted to make room for more of the commercial stations that were going to play nice with the government.

Radio Libertaire started to get ready.

They threw benefit concerts and they started mobilizing their listenership to get ready to defend it.

And it helped that the most popular singer songwriter in France at the time was this guy, Leo fair Feerri And I don't know what letters I'm supposed to drop off of the end of French things.

He was an anarchist who appeared on air with them and said you can count on me if things get rough and you're put off air.

The fight for this radio station is what brought anarchism back to the cultural and political scene in France and pulling them out of marginalization so they start getting ready.

Several teams of activists with Cbee radios patrolled the area around the station for weeks to scout for police raids.

They barricaded the studio and started broadcasting all day and night.

When the cops came, it was around five forty am on Sunday, August twenty eighth, nineteen eighty three.

A scout called in the radio and the heads up gave the radio operators time to call another pirate station here and now, who started broadcasting about the raid.

While it was happening, the cops closed off the surrounding area playing closed cops were holding up drivers at gunpoint to make sure they weren't supporters.

On their way to defend the radio station.

The cops smashed in the door and beat everyone they found inside and after the raid.

This was global news and the reason it was global news is because the International Anarchist Federation made it global news.

There were support actions for this radio station in Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Australia, Japan, the USA, and Mexico at least syndicalis Labor unions were powerful forces in Spain and Norway and Sweden at the time and started organizing there about it and started bothering their governments about it, being like, hey, we're like a really big union and you're going to I'll listen to us, and you need to start putting pressure on France about this radio station, like that's fucking tight.

Yeah, And so in Paris thousands of people showed up from all sorts of groups and they marched to the smashed up radio station.

A pirate technician set the radio station back up, apparently like on the toilet, Apparently that was like the only place you could sit or something, and I'm not entirely sure concerts with famous musicians.

Some Socialist Party members of the government started defending it, and basically everyone just was like, look, we may or may not be anarchist, but no, thank you, we would like to keep our anarchist radio station because we like it.

And we're willing to riot about it, and it forced the state to give them a permit and they're still around today.

Can you imagine that happening for a podcast they've been kicked off of Spotify or whatever, like people going to the streets.

I could weirdly see that, like the way things are going, that there might be if people getting arrested for podcasts.

Yeah, like I lost my left eye during the Joe Rogan riots of twenty twenty seven or whatever.

Joe Rogan goes.

Woke, just like the way that like they just like decide to do like culture wars over what was the.

Dumb one in the last two weeks.

Oh yeah the cracker barrel logo.

Oh yeah, yeah, like yeah, I just the standards are so low, so low.

But you know what else is low?

These prices wow on these goods and service.

Actually there's usually not any sales attached to these ads.

It's usually just ads.

But imagine the prices as low, and by manifesting or rioting, you can make prices go down.

Imagine low by high.

And we're back.

And don't worry, listeners, you missed all of us as old men yelling at clouds, so over in the UK, the anarchist radio nerds were looking at Spain and France with jealousy.

They wanted a federation of low power radio stations to support one another against state repression, and they tried hard to get it.

They didn't win, to be honest, but they learned a ton of shit along the way, and they got a lot of shit done, including working tirelessly to make the technical knowledge of building transmitters more accessible to people and leaving me to read way too many documents of things I don't understand.

And by doing this they helped pave the way for the rave scene of the nineties, which isn't the main thing we're going to talk about, but like.

Are we going to talk reclaim the streets?

Oh, we've been talking about that in the alter globalization movement, but it's going to lead to all of that stuff.

I just love the tangled web of history, I know.

So about ten years after the offshore radio stations were shut down in the late seventies, there was a London campaign for open access radio called ComCom and it didn't work.

And then in nineteen eighty people formed London Open Radio to lobby for alternative radio and it successfully raised some money but failed at lobbying, and so they just went pirate instead and they formed our Radio on one oh three point eight FM.

And it's kind of interesting because this one is like, Oh, I.

Thought you were saying are as in the letter.

You're saying our radio hour radio radio.

Oh I thought it was a pirate joke.

So did I wait?

How did British people pronounce the word r ah ah?

Right?

Does that mean British pirates?

Go?

Ah, I'm just gonna head a time apologized to my colleague James Stout for.

What you just did.

Yeah, I try really hard to not make British jokes sometimes I was right there.

Oh, I just try not do what James is on.

Other than the rest of the time, I just no, no, no, no, no, that's the best time.

That's the best time to make those jokes.

Yeah, fair enough.

So they form our radio.

Oh you are.

And it's kind of interesting because it's like this one's actually a pretty ideologically diverse, well from like progressive to anarchist group of people who form this.

They keep talking in the ZNE They're like, we even had labor voters in our group, And they're kind of a little bit excited and embarrassed about that is the tone of it.

At the time, the commercial pirate engineers were closely guarding how to build transmitters, and so the first thing these nerds had to do was reverse engineer a bunch of transmitters.

They didn't have YouTube back then, and they started to tell people how to do it.

They know financial backers other than the folks around them.

They paid for the whole thing themselves, despite all of them being broken on the dole, which is not pineapples but is instead what universal basic income.

That's not technically true.

Whatever, Anyway, it's not America.

They have a little bit more money to play with.

When they're broke, they throw the occasional benefit show to help out.

And transmitters were expensive in the eighties.

They get substantially more accessible and affordable in the nineties, which is what made the aforementioned rave scene possible.

But our radio, our radio started broadcasting in nineteen eighty two on Wednesday nights.

They picked Wednesday because most of the raids against pirate stations seemed to be happening on weekends, and they were like, eh, eh, Although I think that they should have done it on weekends because then there's like they're busy rating other people, I don't know whatever.

They worked off of pre recorded cassettes because they couldn't put any live broadcast equipment alongside the transmitter because of the fear of busts.

So this is like almost closer to a German style thing where they're like they're hunting us.

You know, this isn't a like slowly the state is going to be like, oh, I guess we should shut this down.

They are like priate radio is being hunted down in England at this time.

Now, like in the US, where you might get a letter saying please cease and desist again, is that actually what happens, Yeah, generally the US, because it I mean, this is like a positive of not really funding parts of the federal enforcement part of the government.

Is the SEC operates around pirate broadcasts based on complaints.

And so if you're stepping on someone's broadcast with yours that station, I complain, or regular listeners of that station, I complain.

If you're like my Alma mater and nobody else is broadcasting on that frequency, then you can get away with it for a long time until you decide to play SEC at noon on a Monday, you know, and that goes against the community standards, that gets people's hackles up.

The FCC hears it.

I think in that case they probably came to visit because of that poke in the eye that they got.

But oftentimes the SEC, they'll try to find the address of the person where it's being broadcast from, send them a letter that says cease and desist from doing this, and so you get a warning and then it's after that they'll start finding you or maybe sending law enforcement to cut it down afterwards.

So like Berkeley Liberation Radio for a bunch of years they aired US back in like twenty ten or twenty eleven, and they had their shit locked down in a van that would just drive around Alameda County and broadcast from different places on an FM radio like a set schedule.

I would imagine you couldn't hear it sometimes, but if they drove up into the Oakland Hills, you could probably pick it up from all over the Bay area.

Okay, yeah, this isn't legal advice, but that's good to know.

Vans are useful.

Yeah, everyone needs a van.

They're working off of pre recorded cassettes and they were working to build a link transmitter, like some kind of microwave transmitter, to be able to do it live by being in a second location and broadcasting to their own transmitter, but they couldn't afford it.

They were like working on building it before the whole thing got shut down.

Our radio was run by consensus, and many of the people and the collective wanted to ban political parties from contributing, but some labor folks were there and so that wasn't consensed upon.

And they themselves were all against advertising, but they decided they wouldn't ban shows that chose to include advertising, and Margaret from twenty twenty five appreciates their willingness to compromise on that issue.

In only a short time, they accomplished so much.

They had all sorts of shows.

They had Utapia, which was like Utopia with a tape in it that was a mixture of plays and poetry and music.

Gay Waves was the first ever radio program in England by and four homosexuals.

It was two hours long with music and news, and it was an open access show for gay men, and it was working on becoming a six hour show.

It was going to be two for gay men two for lesbians and two for both doing humored together.

I would love to have heard nineteen eighty four or whatever humor that is gay men and lesbians trying to do jokes together.

Was homosexuality legalized at this point yet in the UK?

Do you know, Oh Lord, I've covered this before and I can't remember.

The Gay Liberation Front stuff has already been happening in the UK at this point, but I can't remember.

I know they had some pretty wild sodomy loss for a while.

This is the show Gay Waves that got the most ire and the most complaints.

The cops in the mainstream papers hated Gay Waves, but so did mainstream gay papers because they didn't like that Gay Waves was lefty as hell and a time when gays were supposed to be doing assimilation.

Then there was Women on the Waves, music buy and for women, put together by various feminist and anarca feminist groups.

The Message was a sort of the central catch all political show of the radio station was run by anarchists, but it was opened to all radicals who weren't fascists, sexists, or racists.

The Free Space was the explicitly anarchist show.

The Bag was a late night show.

They had a Polish show for Polish exiles from Soviet controlled Poland that worked in conjunction with a pirate radio station from beyond the Iron Curtain, and instead of running a black show on their station, they worked in conjunction with Dread Broadcasting Corporation, which was a black reggae station that used our radio's equipment and expertise, but remained independent as a separate station.

I hope these shows are archived somewhere.

If you're listening and nowhere to find this shit, please let me know now.

The way the station went off the air was because they kept getting busted and couldn't afford to replace the equipment.

But in their own discussion of the matter, they felt like it was because they didn't reach a large enough base to support.

Basically, they were like, if we had enough people to defend us, we could have kept going.

I questioned this analysis because basically all of the pirates were getting busted in the UK at that point, and then throughout their own text, they make a big point of showing that their political nature didn't make them any more or less targeted than anyone else.

Basically because like a lot of other pirate radio stations were like, Oh, if we play it safe, we might get to be safe, and so their whole point was like, no, playing it safe doesn't keep you safe.

You are still if you're going to be an enemy of the state, be an enemy of the state.

They transmitted from a different place each week.

They hauled around eighty pounds worth of equipment and broadcasted from I think the roof of various apartment buildings, and they would have scouts down on the street with a CB radio to warn them of incoming cops.

And they successfully got away with this time after time, including evading like a whole ton of raids.

It helped that they were all radio nerds, so they were listening into the cops radios themselves, like literally like on their off time, and so they'd be like, oh, the cops are like thinking about busting the following people, or like they're really trying to step it up this week or whatever.

The first successful bust against them was on December fifteenth, nineteen eighty two.

One person was arrested, they lost all their gear, and a bystander was fined for admitting to listening to pirate radio.

Never admit to anything.

It took them five weeks to rebuild, but rebuild they did.

When the police tried a full scale raid on February twenty third, nineteen eighty three, the pirates figured it out ahead of time, and so they hid in a squatted flat in the apartment building they were broadcasting from, and the cops didn't get them there.

They played cat and mouse pretty much every week after that, escaping time and time again, but then a month later, on March twenty third, they were finally caught.

The cops interrupted them in the middle of gay waves.

They went back to the same apartment building that had been caught at the first time, and they hid in the same flat, but the cops had a warrant that time, so they got them out of the flat.

One person was arrested, all their gear was stolen, and so ends our radio.

The collective instead moves on to supporting other radio stations around the country, and they a bunch of more successful priate radio stations take off.

But this isn't an eighteen hour podcast.

Pirate stations keep doing their thing on and off despite heavy repression, especially like different political groups will have like radio stations specifically themed around like anti nuke movement stuff and things like that.

And then in the nineties and a story that I haven't investigated that much about yet, transmitters got really cheap, and much like how young rock and rollers in the fifties took matters into their own hands when the BBC wouldn't play their shit, both commercial and BBC radio weren't playing underground techno and shit, so people just started doing it themselves.

And unlike the fifties movement, it wasn't a commercial movement.

Okay, the Netherlands see pirates like Radio Veronica and the Netherlands were doing their thing, but the.

Dutch score Radio Veronica was the other.

So we've got this theme of women.

Yeah, huh.

I wonder if after Caroline they were just like, all right, we gotta use British girl names.

Maybe it's like ships somehow.

Oh maybe.

All I know is that there's probably Radio Margaret somewhere right here in our hearts, probably Radio Sophie.

Oh, radio burst says a different meaning, and we don't talk about that.

Oh Okay.

The Dutch squatter movement would house pirate radio in their squats, and since the squats themselves we talked about this pretty early on in the show.

Dutch squats at this time were fortresses.

The reason that they resisted deviction is that they physically resisted eviction and the police were not capable of evicting them despite trying, and so they were able to transmit from the squats and be like, well, you already tried to evict us and fail, so what are you gonna do?

Evict us Rai Kaiser Radio was run out of six different barricaded squats and it broadcast on one oh one megahertz.

A bunch of the squats got legalized, literally on the condition that they're like, all right, we'll legalize you if you please, just don't let the pirate radio run out of there anymore.

And the pirates just moved all their stuff to different squats throughout the city.

There was women radio on Tuesday, anarchist radio on Wednesday.

During the riots, the radio would transmit the locations of the police, and activists would listen to ear pieces like they would have a little portable radio and they would listen to an earpiece to know where the police were.

And it reached the point this is the reason I want to talk about the Dutch ones really quick.

It reached the point where even the police would tune into the pirate radio station during the riots to have a sense of what was going on, because the anarchists had a better information architecture than the police did.

The cops in the Netherlands were rating like ten stations a day in the eighties, but there were still so many more, six to twenty thousand different radio stations in that tiny country.

And by the mid eighties they were running a conference for radio pirates from around Europe.

And what happens after that, I don't know because my sources were written around that time.

And I'm sorry everyone, but I have one week to read the eighteen million things, and I try to anyway that's radio with me your host on a podcast that's not radio, and burse yay.

Any final thoughts.

I kind of wonder when something like this is gonna kick back in.

I know that technology has changed so much that a lot of it feels archaic and like it doesn't really make that much sense, but it's also so inexpensive, Like our area was devastated by Hurricane Helen last year, and one of the biggest sources for information for most people because all the internet infrastructure, the cellular infrastructure.

All that stuff just got washed down the hills.

Was the local NPR station was able to keep running, keeping people up to date about what roads were closed, about what water was safe to drink, where food was getting distributed, where you could get a shower, where there was electricity to charge stuff, what hospitals were open, all that sort of stuff.

Like radio feels like such an important piece of technology that when stuff does happen, and considering that environmental stuff is happening more and more, things that felt really stable can go away and you know, a couple of hours of heavy rain.

Yeah, it's inspirational to hear about what people have done with this technology and makes me think about the possibilities.

That's a good point.

And honestly, I wonder if as people move more and more away from listening to radio, I wonder if it will be easier to get fewer complaints when you run a pirate station.

Although I did eventually learn that people do still listen to the radio, including people I know, and so apparently it's a totally normal thing.

And I'm just like the only I never listened to the radio when I'm driving person, I probably would have a better sense of what's happening in the world, even if I listen to the commercial radio.

But I think that radio is preparedness beyond just like amateur radio stuff, but like literally like broadcasting on FM.

It's a thing that gets done.

And also there's that thing that you pointed to just now about like knowing what's going on in the world.

I like the fact that the technology.

I love podcasts like, I listen to them constantly, but I often feel like I'm in this little bubble and I get challenged a little bit when I have to like scan through the dial and yeah, maybe he's stuff that I wouldn't seek out otherwise, and maybe it's crap, but also maybe it's just, you know, not the ear candy that I would go for totally.

Yeah, radio is a certain magic.

I love being a podcaster.

But you know, who knows.

Maybe you'll be listening to this in the waste Lands of twenty twenty seven and you'll be like, but Margaret, you are on the radio, and who knows to speak in a radio?

You run a radio show?

What is it?

Yeah?

I'm the co host of The Final Straw Radio.

It's a long running anarchist podcast and radio show that airs on about a dozen stations like little stations for the most part around the US.

But yeah, we cover also issues around folks organizing against their incarceration or against conditions inside of prisons, or ecological struggles, anti war struggles, anti fascist organizing, all sorts of stuff.

It's worth checking out and you can find it at TFSR dot media.

And I like the radio because I've been contacted by prisoners that have heard the radio show before, and that's kind of cool to be able to get past all the privatized media that they're allowed, Like they can only get certain books, they can only get certain newspapers, they can maybe hear podcasts from certain companies depending on the tech that they've got inside, but if they've got a radio, they can hear whatever happens to be coming through the airwaves.

Yeah, but thanks for the opportunity to come on.

Fuck.

Yah, it's actually one of the things I wanted to end up covering, and I just didn't end up having time in this as I know that every now and then people set up radio stations like kind of the equivalent of Radio Free Europe, just outside prisons and broadcast in the prisons.

I heard about a situation in maybe a dozen years ago in the Midwest where somebody was charged with sneaking into a prison basically or sneaking in materials into a prison.

They had set up a pirate broadcast between like five different prisons right at the corner of a couple of states, including some federal prisons that were there, and sent flyers into prisoners at each of the prisons.

But that meant that like five different police forces of varying levels came down on them.

Oh they've aided charges luckily, but that's good to know.

Yeah.

Well, so, if you got a thing you want to plug Behind the Bastards is doing a live show in Portland, organ with all performer pursuits going towards the Portland Billfund and it will be on September twenty fifth at eight pm PST at the Alberta Rose Theater.

Tickets are on sale now.

Hell yeah, I'll plug that there is.

If you want to read another obsolete form of media communication that's incredibly useful, long form writing or longish article writing that is constantly deplatformed, just check out crimethink dot com.

They always have articles from people all over the world involved in struggle and there's I don't know, a recent one that went up just now is about operational security for demonstrators and all kinds of good stuff there.

They've been doing things for a long time.

They're pretty reliable.

I think they just put one out too, like collecting voices of folks involved in the uprising in Indonesia, which is pretty amazing.

I haven't finished reading it yet, so I was like, that's actually why I was thinking about it, is that I was reading it before we hit record.

But yeah, if you want to find out what's going on all over the world, that's another way to do it is by reading.

And so this podcast is brought to you by reading.

It's in a book.

It's that's probably copyrighted jingle anyway from someone who also runs a podcast.

I will see everyone soon, including everyone on this call and all of you listeners.

I will see every single one of you.

I will peer in through your nope, in your dreams and dreams.

Yep, all right, by bye anymore?

Goodbye.

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.

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