Power To The Pirates!
I close this year with a special 40 records tribute to the pirate radio stations at the Dutch and British coasts in the 1960s and 1970s. To be honest, I enjoyed the pirate stations (mostly Radio Veronica and Radio Noordzee) for only one summer, the warm months of 1974, when the Dutch lost from the Germans in the World Cup soccer final. After that summer they were all banned and the pirate stations disappeared from the Dutch coast. But it was my introduction to pop music, so they made quite an impression to me. This is also a tribute to the music that sounded so good on AM radio. Those songs from the early sixties to the mid-seventies were very powerful and catchy. They just blew out of my radio, like a piece of dynamite or like an explosion in my soul, to quote the Soul Survivors (who were produced by Philly soul legends Gamble & Huff). Although the movie ‘ The boat that rocked ’ (picture below) was not as good as I hoped it would be, it gives us a rather romantic impression of