The Radio Luxembourg, Caroline pirate ship, DMC and Mixmag founder live and direct after finally putting pen to paper to explain how this crazy music world all began…
Interview by Dan Prince
Why have you written this particular book?
I always enjoyed writing. When I found myself living in New York in 1998 I started writing my memoirs to get through some lonely nights in my Battery City apartment without Christine who had to stay in England to run DMC whilst I managed DMC USA. We’d sold Mixmag and were trying to launch Mixer – it’s equivalent in the USA. Apart from going to see Sasha and Digweed once a month at Twilo, my nights were empty. I didn’t want to become a 54 year old party animal, so writing helped me control those urges.
This book is a little more than your memoirs isn’t it?
Yes. When I eventually returned to the UK I was invited to a reunion in Czechoslovakia, where in 1970 I had toured three cities – the only DJ to do so under their Communist system and not too long after the Russian invasion and the end of the Prague Spring as their brief freedom was known. The club owner and the DJ I’d met at the BAV club in Brno wanted to throw a reunion of my appearance 30 years earlier so off I went. For the second time I met Jan Sestak, the DJ who had looked after Christine 30 years earlier whilst I did my thing on stage. It was at this second meeting where we talked into the night and I suddenly fully realised what teenage hell was like!
Why did you decide to make it a double autobiography sharing your stories with Jan’s?
I knew this format of jumping from a DJ on Europe’s big pop station to a kid escaping by listening to that station would be a unique way of telling two important stories. The teenage experience in the Eastern Bloc has never been told and damn well needs to be.
Explain important…
How many clubbers lying on the beaches of Ibiza or BPM know what we went through to free music and allow music radio its freedom? They’re lying on those beaches because of things that happened in the 60’s without which there would never have been a Beatles. Motown wouldn’t have flourished, even Elvis Presley wouldn’t have achieved the global exposure that secured his title as The King. That may sound like a wild statement, especially for someone reading this in the USA or countries where radio flowed like a stream, but when they read our book and learn about the Musician’s Union and their attempt to kill vinyl records, the reason pirate radio was born in Britain and how it ended the despicable monopoly the British Government had established with just one radio station, (the BBC), their eyes will be opened. Whilst I fought the MU, became a pirate DJ and formed a DJ career without ever joining the BBC, Jan Sestak overcame a music lovers obstacles that, in this day and age, are truly hard to believe. The book is actually about the power of music and how it helped us to rid the world of the despicable communist dogma. No wonder they gave Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature, they should also have given him the Peace prize too! The communists blocked a lot of radio stations they didn’t want the people to listen to but they forgot or ignored Radio Luxembourg probably because they thought pop music wasn’t political. That was a massive mistake!
Tell me more about Jan…
He was a listener. Listening to the pirate ships and Radio Luxembourg became his obsession. It encouraged him to master the English language, it framed his every waking moment bringing colour into his dark world, a world where he could never talk too loudly about his nocturnal habit or the Secret Police would have him locked up. Both his parents had survived the Dachau and Ravensbrück concentration camps. His father who repaired radio’s for the Nazis brought one home when the American forces freed him from Dachau. It was this mains wireless that stimulated his son’s senses especially when he came across Radio Luxembourg.
What was it about Radio Luxembourg?
Everyone in the UK and across greater Europe and Scandinavia listened to this station on 208 meters Medium wave (AM). It was all we had as a source for the pop tunes and it only broadcast at night, it was the little brother station of RTL’s giant trans-euro radio and TV network, within RTL it was known as the English Service. Our parents had listened for a different reason, big band music, plays and game shows. It was a much lighter, commercial entity to that of the BBC. But when Elvis Presley exploded onto the airwaves, every single kid in Europe were dialing 208. Most countries across Europe had, like the UK, set up monopoly radio stations under government control. The Musician’s Union made sure these stations were sterilized forcing live musicians onto them and controlling how many records they could air. If we heard 10 records in one day on the BBC Light Programme we were lucky. So you can imagine what happened at 7.30pm when 208 came on the air till 3am every night.
How does Jan’s story counter-balance with your own adventures?
He became best mates with local musicians in his city. These musicians relied on him to bring them the exact lyrics of the Top 20 tunes the kids heard and loved. That may sound simple enough but Jan didn’t have a means of recording them and there wasn’t a record shop anywhere in the Eastern Bloc that stocked these western pop records. Then he wants to become a DJ and how he went about this, finding his first ever Beatles record in a mountainside shop on the Polish border is a ridiculous event which kick-starts the DJ in him. Coming face to facewith a communist committee who refused to give him permission to be a DJ, well I could go on, it’s just a horror story. That’s when he had to start working on the railway.
So whilst Jan struggled, I suppose you were living a totally different life?
It’s only when you sit down to write a book that you realise how you walked the yellow brick road. I had more fun and excitement than you could imagine but any tragedies I had shrink into insignificance set against Jan Sestak’s trials and tribulations. Putting my DJ experiences into chapters counterpoising Jan’s journey, has, in the end, served to emphasise my highs and his lows. How can any DJ experience compare to introducing Elvis on stage in Las Vegas? How can any DJ challenge compare to hosting a live four hour show the moment we heard that Elvis was dead? How can anyone who started out as a singer who was then expelled from the Musician’s Union believe what is happening to him when he finds himself singing with Paul McCartney? And let’s not forget that my stories recount some amazing tales of my colleagues, Tony Blackburn on Caroline, Noel Edmonds, Kid Jensen and Paul Burnett on 208. If people think it might be fun being a DJ, come into our world. It’s no longer like it was so what we have I guess is a moment in time, a historic account of something very special.
Is DMC a part of the book?
It was when I was writing in New York, but once I’d decided to juxtapose Jan’s story with mine DMC was put into the ‘saved’ file for future reference. Even then we were looking at 800 pages so some serious editing had to be done which at almost 500 pages turned out to be the right thing to do. It really runs at pace now. I guess the DMC story is for the future but don’t hold your breath, The Royal Ruler and the Railway DJ took 16 years to reach publication!
Why Royal Ruler? Why Railway DJ?
Read the book!
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