Irishman talks about life on real ‘Pirate Radio’ ship in movie 'Shiprocked'

For some men the thought of becoming a pirate is still completely irresistible. After all, haven’t adventurous young Irish men been running away to the sea for centuries?

But for Dubliner Steve Conway, 45, it wasn’t the thought of a dramatic eye patch or a wooden leg that was the main attraction. It was the siren call of rock and roll.

In his evocatively written new book “Shiprocked”, Conway covers his four happy years as DJ for Radio Caroline, the infamous “Pirate Radio” station that operated under several guises from the 1960s through the late 1980s just outside British waters.

By 1987 when he stepped aboard Radio Caroline was already a living legend, because it played the music that official stations overlooked or outright banned.

Hosted on a leaky ship called the Ross Revenge, the floating rock station boasted an impressive antenna system atop a 300-foot high mast that at the time was the tallest on any ship in the world. There was a very good reason to keep the mast so high and the ship so far from land.

Because of chokingly tight restrictions on British radio, “Pirate Radio” ships transmitted their non-commercial music from international waters to the grateful music lovers that were their most passionate fans.

Radio Caroline didn’t just play rock and roll, it was at the forefront of it, introducing the public to emerging new acts like REM and U2. These pirate deejays were men and women on a mission, and that mission was to save rock and roll from the dross that was always threatening to engulf it.

Conway is in no doubt about why he signed up to come aboard.

“It was absolutely the sense of freedom,” he tells IrishCentral’s sister publication the Irish Voice. “We were this small band of people exiled out in international waters. We were cut off from the people on land and we’d endure weeks and months out there to bring great music to the people.

“To me it seemed like a real rebel lifestyle. I had moved to London when I was 19 because Ireland was in the middle of a terrible recession and there was no work, and I just fell in love with the idea of “Pirate Radio”.”

On board the Ross Revenge, Conway started out as a journalist, reading the news. Eventually he became a DJ, and shortly after that he was promoted to program controller.

It was the kind of rapid rise from rookie to captain that could only happen in fit-up operations of this kind. “If you enjoyed the life you could move up the ranks very quickly,” he says.

Growing up in the village of Churchtown, Co. Dublin, Conway had heard about Radio Caroline because it had been founded by an Irishman, Ronan O’Rahilly, who’s grandfather Michael Joseph -- a man known to all in Dublin as The O’Rahilly -- was one of the most important rebels in the 1916 Rising (there’s a monument to him in the center of Dublin).

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Nster.com