Last Wednesday was Pirate FM‘s 21st anniversary – and to celebrate, they dug out a bunch of their old JAM jingles from their 1992 launch. I wish I’d managed to record the whole day, but sadly I only captured a part of Hometime with James Dundon – of which the below is just a small badly-edited snippet:
Download “Pirate FM 21st Anniversary – 3/4/13 5pm” (10MB MP3, 8:16)
Highlights include the amazing Pirate FM song at 1:45 (“The future’s looking great, at Great Britain’s Western Gate…”), and a hilariously sniffy contemporary BBC Spotlight report of the launch at 3:35. The whole day was a fantastic, heartfelt celebration – I only wish every radio station celebrated its anniversaries by having so much fun on the air.
The main thing I’d point out though, is how wonderful those jingles – now 21 years old – sound today. And more importantly, still work with a huge variety of different music – from Prefab Sprout in 1988, to a 2012 Pink hit. They made the station sound bloody fantastic. And, dare I say, deserve bringing back for more than one day…
2 comments
James Dundon on 3 April 2014 @ 1pm
Just found this. We’re doing it again today! Quick tune in!!
Stuart on 8 August 2015 @ 11am
Love the original Pirate FM jingles, happy memories.
A few years later the team behind Pirate FM won the license for Guildford and reused lots of the Pirate jingle package, including the theme tune. It didn’t work as well, not only was he first line the desperate ‘Surrey and North East Hampshire, it’s a very special place’ but the name of the station ‘Eagle 96.4’ didn’t scan either
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