In this post about my life in radio, we’re still in 1970. I graduate from being a solo radio nut — I cement my friendship with a soul-mate from school, and together we embark upon an adventuresome period which begins with turning his bedroom into a pirate radio station …

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My new-found school friend Bill had something I really wanted to get my hands on: his own radio studio. It resided in his bedroom in the fifth-floor flat of a tower block not far from where I lived with my mum in Leytonstone. Bill lived in John Walsh Tower with his long-suffering mum — a woman gifted with the patience of a saint, and someone I remember with great affection. I think she regarded herself as a kind of surrogate parent, probably because I spent so much time there and, as she knew I’d lost my dad and brother, her maternal instinct kicked in. She provided some welcome additional emotional support for me.

Photo: John Walsh Tower, Leytonstone, London. Credit: Find A Property

Squeezed into the tiny room along with his bed and virtually nothing else save piles of records, tapes and unwashed clothes, Bill’s ‘radio studio’ was an old, mahogany-veneered, floor-standing radiogram from which he’d removed the lid and extracted the Armstrong valve amplifier, making just enough space inside for two BSR turntables balanced on polystyrene blocks tall enough to raise them to a height where they could be more easily accessed. He’d removed the arms that held the records in place and put squares of felt on each of the turntables’ surfaces to act as slip-mats.

Photo: BSR turntable. Credit: jabw.demon.co.uk

The exposed amp, all glowing valves, huge, hot capacitors and other ancient, dusty components, now stood on a low table to one side. On the other there was a domestic reel-to-reel tape recorder — I can’t recall the brand, but it had a joystick control that you pushed away from you to play and pulled back to stop. Added to this arrangement was the tape recorder’s plastic microphone taped to a broom handle sticking up at the front of the radiogram box, and completing the set-up was a tiny, gold-coloured four-channel Radio Shack mixer no bigger than a tobacco tin, its miniscule knobs barely large enough to be tweaked between finger and thumb. This was precariously taped to the front ledge of the radiogram.

Photo: Example of an early Armstrong amplifier-tuner chassis. Credit: Audio Miscellany

All of these items were interconnected with varying lengths of bell-wire. Where a single length wasn’t long enough, he’d twisted the ends of several pieces together, wrapping the joins in black insulating tape and, when that had run out, Sellotape. They ran everywhere across and around the equipment, festooning it like randomly-flung strands of spaghetti.

When switched on and fully powered up, the thing was probably a death trap. But this didn’t occur to me — the first time I saw it, I fell in love with it instantly and considered Bill to be some kind of genius in the field of electronics.

At first, I wasn’t allowed to touch anything. He gave me a demonstration on how to use it — cueing the vinyl 45s up on the turntables, from which he’d removed all the cogs and things that usually automated the process of playing records, getting a jingle ready to play on the tape recorder (he’d recorded dozens of radio jingles from Radio Caroline, Radio London and the other pirate stations that had only relatively recently been silenced), showing me how you had to untwist two wires at the back of the mixer while talking between discs and re-twist one of the wires around a third — a natty innovation of his own devising that he called a ‘treble filter’, necessary because everything was so electrically unbalanced that without it the music playing through the radiogram’s 12-inch Goodmans speaker sounded way too thin and tinny); then, with a tweak of one of the tiny mixer knobs, the mic was on, and –

Here I must digress for a moment to explain that there were several aspects of this extraordinary setup that I can’t explain to you from this distance in time, such as how the PFL (pre-fade listen) circuit worked (so the next record could be cued up while the current one still played out loud), or how the headphones (a.k.a. ‘cans’ in the trade) were wired up.

Photo: Example of some old headphones. Credit: The DZ company

You’ll just have to take my word that, somehow, these functions, essential to a radio studio’s operation, just worked. Thinking back, there must have been some little switches somewhere within the maze of ad-hoc circuitry that needed to be flipped to get the PFL piped into the cans, but the detail escapes me now. And the cans were nothing like the modern-day variety, lightweight and padded — bought from a local Army Surplus store, they had naked metal head straps that cut into your bonce after a few minutes’ use and earpieces made, as I recall, from Bakelite.

Anyway, Bill tweaked the mic up as a record faded, and away he went.

Like me, Bill had picked up all his DJ-ing tips by listening to his heroes on the radio and sought to emulate them. With all this equipment to hand, he’d had much more practice than me with my single tape recorder and no turntables. So when he back-announced the record in his “Gor blimey” Cockney accent, yelling at the top of his voice, yabbering away at ninety miles an hour and calling himself Alan West — “WEST HAR!!!” — I was immensely impressed with his performance. He sounded just like a real DJ!

Photo: Alan West on RNI. Credit: offshore-radio.de

I was a relative newcomer to RNI — Radio Northsea International, a pirate station that had only recently come on air — but was familiar with the line-up of English-speaking DJs on the Dutch-based offshore station. Alan West was one of its stars.

“Can’t use your own name mate,” he explained. “No-one does on air. You’d be arrested coming through customs if they saw it on your passport. So who d’you wanna be?” I decided that for my bedroom broadcast debut I would be Stevie Merike — “Stee-vee MER-ikk!” — one of Alan West’s zany colleagues on RNI. I don’t remember the first record I played, or how that first link went as far as my style was concerned. It was all eclipsed by the concentration needed to deal with the mechanics of the process.

Photo: Stevie Merike (with Alan West in foreground) on RNI. Credit: quizquest

Bill sat on his bed as I stood in front of the microphone and held the square of felt on the revolving turntable with one hand, the needle lined up at the start of the track. I turned up the mic knob with the other hand, then untwisted the ‘treble filter’ wires and grappled with re-twisting one of them with the other elusive strand (an acquired accomplishment, using just finger and thumb, that took me weeks to master before I could do it without thinking) while mumbling something along the lines of “And that was … er [insert name of artist and song], um — here on, er, Radio … Northsea International — ah, yes, Stevie err Merike with you, um — and now, er … we’ve got, um [insert name of next artist and song] …”

Thus was born my broadcasting career.

We were West and Merike for a few more weeks of constant practising upstairs in his cramped bedroom, using every spare moment we had after school and at weekends. After a while a change of names came when Bill decided he’d be Dave Cash, so I became Kenny Everett. Then Bill had an inspired idea.

We needed more room. So we’d move the equipment downstairs, into the living-room.

As I said, his mum must’ve had the patience of a saint, because one weekend the whole kit ‘n’ kaboodle suddenly appeared amongst the armchairs and the settee, the coffee table and the TV, occupying a vacant corner of the lounge. We moved it all ourselves, while she was out. I thought he’d asked her if it would be OK. I should’ve known Bill’s mind didn’t work quite like that. What Bill wanted, Bill generally got.

Fortunately, she soon became accustomed to living with the beast in the corner — she even did one or two sessions on the gear once she’d calmed down.

Another little innovation Bill added to the equipment while it was in the lounge: he wired a spare radio into the circuitry, found an open frequency on medium wave and mixed the sound of the radio’s white noise into our ‘signal’, so that it sounded just as though we were broadcasting for real. He put the Goodmans speaker in his bedroom, the wires dangling from the bedroom window to the balcony below and snaking in through the balcony door to connect to the amplifier, so whoever wasn’t on air could sit upstairs and listen to whoever was on air and provide a critique of their work afterwards.

Several months passed with us doing our ‘on-air shifts’ whenever time permitted. We used to rush back to his place in our lunch-breaks (school was just around the corner) and do precisely twenty-two and a half minutes each, which gave us just enough time to get back for afternoon registration. Saturdays and Sundays from 10am to 10pm were filled with additional three-hour shifts, turn and turn about. We listened avidly to each other’s shows, dispensing praise for the occasional good bits and criticising the rather more frequent rubbishy sequences.

And then: more inspiration from Bill — he proposed another move, this time into the L-shaped walk-in wardrobe in his mum’s bedroom upstairs. This time he asked first, and she was only too happy to agree in order to get her living-room back. The cavernous walk-in wardrobe had enough room for us to install a proper working surface, which we had someone cut from pieces of plywood board. It was supported with legs of three-by-two timber. Holes were cut in the plywood for the record decks, an angle-poise lamp was adapted for a mic boom (we’d bought a better microphone for our new studio), shelves were erected for the records and tapes and other sundry items. Bill fitted loudspeakers into every room in the flat, including the bathroom. I remember the thrill of anticipation we felt during the evening as we prepared to switch it all on in its new home: we were astonished and mightily relieved when it all worked without anything catching fire or blowing any fuses.

Whilst we’d been planning the physical move, we’d also been working on expanding our ‘service’ and further developing our individual personas — it was time for us to do away with the purloined alter-egos of Kenny and Cash and become ourselves. Bill didn’t like his real full name, and I wasn’t keen on mine either — and we had this thing about using different ‘on-air’ names just like we thought all real DJs did. So one evening we thumbed through the letters pages of a Record Mirror and picked two names from the contributors there. We swapped the surnames around, so I became Bob Kingsley and Bill became … well, for reasons explained in Radio Daze: Interlude #1 — From This Perspective, that will remain my little secret — but that was how I chose my on-air name, and it’s stuck with me ever since, being finally adopted permanently when I changed my name by Deed Poll over a decade later.

We’d also had enough of pretending to be Radio Northsea International. We wanted our own station — so we re-branded our little enterprise as Radio Freedom International, broadcasting from the M.V. Freedom II anchored five miles off the coast of Holland on medium wave, FM and short wave.

All of it was make-believe, yet to us it was more real than the air we breathed, more important than the final exams we were soon due to face at school.

We had lived through this stage in our lives thinking we were unique in what we were doing — certainly, no-one else at school shared our interest: most seemed to think we were a little mad and we were ribbed mercilessly about our geeky behaviour. This coloured our judgement — we couldn’t imagine anyone else in the wider world going to all the trouble we had. But we found out we were wrong when we finally plucked up the courage to visit a local hospital radio station to see if we might, by now, be good enough get some on-air work there.

That’s where we go on the next part of the journey.

To read part 1 of this series, see Radio Daze: Beginnings

To read part 2 of this series, see Radio Daze: Schoolboy Dreams

To read part 3 of this series, see Radio Daze: Interlude #1 — From This Perspective

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Some of you may be wondering why this series of memoirs about my life in radio hasn’t grown since October 2009, after the second part was published. Let me reassure you that it will, and very soon now. But before I move on, here’s an explanation for the delay …

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“Write about what you know,” the experts say. Which is what I decided to do when beginning this series of recollections. I know my past pretty well. Or so I thought, as I whizzed through Beginnings, and then Schoolboy Dreams, both of which dealt with my pre- and early-teen years. Then I found myself confronting a couple of problems.

First, the question of accuracy. When I cast my mind back to the 1970s now, it feels to me like it’s still not that long ago. But forty years have passed since those halcyon days, and I must confess to having a poor recollection of specific events and their correct chronology. I didn’t keep diaries, so it’s possible — probably extremely likely, in fact — that my memories have become embellished over time with an accretion of imagined scenes and wildly inaccurate conversations. This has worked fine while the memories have remained in my head for my own private viewing, but setting them down for public consumption has presented me with a dilemma: how accurate, how truthful, do I need to be, to ensure the integrity of these memoirs? Does it matter if I sometimes confuse the true and the real?

For example: I concluded Schoolboy Dreams by talking about my friend Bill’s makeshift radio “studio” being at his gran’s house. After I’d published the post, I thought again about this and realised that it probably wasn’t — I think now it was in the living-room of the 5th-floor flat in a tower-block where he lived with his mum. We often used to visit his gran, but the more I try to visualise the ancient, butchered radiogram with two BSR turntables balanced precariously inside its guts on wobbly polystyrene blocks and a microphone taped to a broom-handle in situ at granny’s place, the less I’m able to conjure it up there. Does it matter? To the wider world, probably not. But Bill might think so, if he ever reads that account.

Allied to the “accuracy” aspect is the question of whether I can safely identify the people I came into contact with all those years ago without causing some of them to squirm with embarrassment. Most of them are, as far as I know, still alive; I’m in contact with a few through Facebook and other social networking sites, but I’ve had no contact with most since leaving school, or moving on from hospital radio, or the various radio stations on which I later worked. Some of the things I remember (or think I remember) are quite comical in nature — or at least, they are to my mind when I think back on them now. They’d make good anecdotes, even if they are somewhat embellished.

Separated from the actual events by forty years, I like to think that all now involved in them would look back on those remarkable days with a wistful smile and allow me to recount them, from my point of view, without taking umbrage — after all, we were naive teenagers or in our early twenties back then, and so much water has since passed under the bridge that we’re completely different people now — but still, I worry that to use real full names might cause some upset here and there, and I’m not one to deliberately inflict feelings of embarrassment on anyone.

To take Bill as an example again: he might blush now to read my description of him then as being a “long-haired, unkempt guy” and having a “slightly wild appearance, short stature and puggish face”. (Let me tell you, I was no oil painting myself — gawky, painfully skinny, spotty, buck teeth, pudding-basin haircut and forced by Mum to wear short trousers to high school for several months, even though everyone else there had graduated to the long variety upon leaving junior school.) I’m sure Bill no longer looks anything like he did when he was in his early teens — although I can’t say for sure, as I haven’t been in contact with him for nearly thirty years.

In Bill’s case, however, his blushes have, I think, been spared, as he changed his name to something completely different by Deed Poll during the time I knew him. (I eventually changed mine to Bob Kingsley by Deed Poll, but many years later.) I doubt anyone in his current circle of friends knows his first name was once Bill, and I suspect only a vanishingly small number of my readers — if any at all — would be able to identify him today.

The point about my friendship with Bill, and why it will need to be talked about at some length in this recollection, is that I owe him everything. Aside from his early-teen rebellious flamboyance and cockney schoolboy potty-mouth (he swore like a trooper), aspects of his character which influenced me for both good and ill at the time, I want to say here and now that if it wasn’t for him with his ersatz studio and his willingness to let me play with it, I would probably never have got into radio at all.

So the debt I owe him is immense — and this is another reason why I don’t wish to cause him any undue embarrassment as I recount some of our schoolboy antics, which will necessitate expanding on some aspects of his unique personality. Although he later changed his name, I’ll continue to refer to him as Bill and hope that, if he ever reads these memoirs he’ll see that although my memories of our adventures together may be flawed here and there, my gratitude for what he did for me back then remains undiminished by time.

There are, of course, others in the early days who also greatly influenced me — none of whom, as far as I’m aware, went so far as to change their names by Deed Poll, though many had informally adopted “made up” names for their early, non-professional radio work, which a lucky few continued to use when they later turned professional. Still others stuck to using their given names; some continue to be involved in the radio industry in one way or another while others never got the “big break”.

After giving it much thought, I still don’t know whether I’m being overly cautious, but I’ve concluded the best thing to do, wherever it’s appropriate, is to use only the first names by which I knew them. I want to pass on my long-overdue and profound thanks to all of them for being part of my life and helping to shape what turned out to be, against all the odds, a wonderful and eventful life in radio. If they choose to identify themselves by posting comments — and perhaps even correct me when I’ve got something wrong — I’ll be very happy to hear from them.

To read part 1 of this series, see Radio Daze: Beginnings

To read part 2 of this series, see Radio Daze: Schoolboy Dreams

To read part 4 of this series, see Radio Daze: Bedroom Broadcasting

Cartoon credit: Allan Cavanagh, from Charlie Adley’s Double Vision blog

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