Pirate radio and the city: The end days of welfare state London
The epicentre of London’s 1990s jungle pirate radio scene: Hackney’s Nightingale estate
An event mixing film and lecture to tell the story of how London’s 1990s jungle music scene was created from the decaying architectural fabric of the welfare state.
With Malcolm James and Tom Cordell
Tuesday 23rd July 2024 at 1900hrs
At the Alan Baxter Gallery and streamed
There had been UK pirate radio before: broadcast from ships in the 1950s and 1960s, and later from illicit land-based transmitters, but jungle pirate radio of the 1990s was different. As part of an autonomous economy of vinyl pressing houses, record stores, and transmitter fabricators, it existed to provide music otherwise denied to a young constituency of Londoners, unserved by the mainstream.
Broadcast from sheds, disused flats, squats, and hired premises, jungle pirate radio is most associated with council-owned tower blocks. Pirate radio transmitters were placed on the rooftops of local authority housing because this maximised the reach of their FM signals. But the tower block also had symbolic value representing the idea of the big estates of council housing that had been built across London from the 1950s to the 1970s - because these were the habitat for London’s multicultural working class communities that formed the core audience for jungle music. It is not hard to make the connection between jungle pirate radio and the last days of Britain’s comprehensive welfare state.
In a landscape of isolated micro-environments – bedrooms, cars and living rooms – jungle pirate radio shrunk the stranger’s metropolis to London Town; a patchwork of 10-25km radius jungle transmissions. The music they played collected the hardcore, techno, hip hop, reggae and dub scenes of the Thames Basin.
Thousands of fans from different class and racial geographies tuned in weekly. In a fractured and sped-up society, jungle pirate radio was the unifying force through which listeners from different places felt known and heard by others. Untidy and error-prone; redolent of stutters, mumbles and background noise; the MCs voice was sometimes barely audible over the music; and that patterning affirmed the messy vernacular of everyday life, opening listeners to the station and each other.
Malcolm James is Co-Director of Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Sussex, UK. He is author of Sonic Intimacy: Reggae Sound Systems, Jungle Pirate Radio and Grime YouTube Music Videos (Bloomsbury) and Urban Multiculture: Youth, Politics and Cultural Transformation (Palgrave); and co-editor of Regeneration Songs: Sounds of Investment and Loss in East London (Repeater). He has written for The Guardian, Tribune, Salvage, Red Pepper, Open Democracy and has contributed to BBC Radio 4 The Listening Project.
Tom Cordell is a Docomomo UK’s co-ordinator, and an occasional filmmaker and writer. He directed the film Utopia London, which tells the story of London’s welfare-state modernist architecture.