Pirate mentality: How London radio has shaped creative practice in grime music

Grime music is an Afrodiasporic performance form originating in London. While artists such as Stormzy and Skepta are now international stars, its gestation took place within a grounded network of record shops, radio stations and raves. This article argues for grime pirate radio’s role as both an oppositional channel and site of creative practice. Based on empirical work undertaken from 2017 to 2019 in London’s grime scene, it demonstrates how artists harness radio’s communicative power to engender a Black counterpublic, before outlining a framework for creative agency: afforded by a network of stations and practitioners; made meaningful through its community of listeners; and realized through improvisatory practice. Existing studies focusing on pirate radio often present these fora as domains for dissemination. In grime, however, its creative function highlights the potentiality of radio as a performance medium: a space for quotidian belonging and co-presence, but also for musical development and grassroots practice.

Mutualism, massive and the city to come: Jungle Pirate Radio in 1990s London

1990s Britain was under Thatcherite continuity rule. But radio waves were appearing that carried fragments of the future: weekend broadcasts of a new kind of music - Jungle - were being illegally beamed across the city from the rooftops of tower blocks, appropriating them as the locus of an alternative cultural infrastructure. Pirate stations used newly emerging technologies to spread subversive sounds from the margins and to challenge dominant cultures.

The Radio Right in Decline

As the National Council of Churches’ Fairness Doctrine campaign accelerated, US Senate Democrats on the Commerce Committee announced an investigation into the Radio Right. That one-two punch convinced hundreds of radio station owners to drop conservative programs altogether. The cost of paying for free response time combined with the risk of losing their station license was too much. Carl McIntire appealed for help to Richard Nixon, but the administration was much more interested in the ways it could use the Fairness Doctrine to intimidate the major television networks into giving the president and the war in Vietnam more favorable coverage. With no help forthcoming and the loss of station WXUR in 1974, Carl McIntire’s program declined precipitously, although not without one last protest action from McIntire involving a World War II surplus minesweeper blasting a pirate radio signal off the shore of Cape May, New Jersey, in defiance of Federal Communications Commission rules.

January 1967

Jimi’s onstage antics bring him widespread coverage and interview opportunities in Record Mirror, New Musical Express (NME), Disc and Music Echo, and other British music magazines. The band tours extensively outside of London and gains further exposure through their records being played by pirate radio stations and Radio Luxemburg. A row about Kathy Etchingham’s cooking inspires Jimi to compose “The Wind Cries Mary,” which the band records in a single session the following day. As the month progresses, the Experience record “Purple Haze,” “51st Anniversary,” “Fire.” A who’s-who of British rock musicians – the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Marianne Faithfull, and Donovan among them – regularly attend the Experience’s London performances. Staid British publications begin refering to Jimi with the racist term “Wild Man of Borneo.” In a series of interviews, some fuelled by his consumption of LSD, Jimi discuss his life, songwriting techniques, fears, loves, and spiritual beliefs. At month’s end, the Experience are filmed at the Saville Theatre.