Radio
Caroline has a dedicated team of people who give up a
lot of their time to raise money to pay the bills for
the station. One of these people is Nigel Pearson who I
met recently at his home in Manhattan Beach California.
He told me how he first found the station as a student
in the 1960s and how he moved to the USA and found the
station again eventually getting involved with the start
of the excellent web streams we have today and then
fundraising.
Part 1
His first memory of the station was when his dad,
who was a solicitor in Coventry used to bring him home
from school for his lunch and they read in the papers
about Radio Caroline starting in May 1964. They lived
about 130 miles from the ship so he hadn’t bothered to
try to tune in as he thought it was too far away. Also
he wasn’t allowed to touch his Fathers radio but this
time he decided he would be bold and tuned the radio
down and probably found Radio Atlanta before Radio
Caroline. He remembers hearing the Chapel of love by the Dixi Cups and fell in love with the whole idea of guys
out on a ship somewhere broadcasting music, which we
weren’t allowed to hear at least in the daytime those
days. The whole thing appealed to him, the music the
glamour the adventure and the fact that they were
outside the law even though they weren’t really breaking
any laws. The government was up in arms but didn’t seem
to be able to do anything about it and he found the
whole thing completely captivating. He was a 13 year old
teenager and the rest of his teenage years were spent
listening to Caroline.
When Caroline went off the air he
was distraught. By the time RNI started broadcasting
from the Mebo 2, he was a law student in London and
again like most people was upset when the Government
started jamming the signal and called up the phone
number the station gave out. He remembers being given an
address and going down to Hayes Mews in Mayfair which is
where they were conducting the General election
campaign. When he got there somebody told him that he
was in charge of Hampstead and as it was a marginal
constituency they wanted him to deliver free radio
posters to every house in Hampstead. When he asked how
he would do that, they gave him a phone numbers of other
volunteers to call up to get help to deliver the
leaflets. He got the A-Z map out, copied it, divided it
up, called up 8 people and they all came to his flat and
he gave them leaflets showing their section of
Hampstead. After that they went on a march and Hampstead
became one of the marginal constituencies that went
conservative and he likes to think that he played a part
that eventually brought commercial radio to the Uk.
In
the 70s he was delighted when Caroline came back on the
air and listened pretty much solidly throughout and was
distraught when the Mi Amigo sank and he thought that
was the end of the story.
Nigel moved to New York with
his wife and baby daughter in the summer of 83 and
missed the start of Caroline from the Ross Revenge, only
hearing it occasionally on a few trips back to the UK
throughout the 80s. Like most people he wondered what
was really happening. He moved to California in 1987 and
got a job as a practising attorney in the entertainment
business. When the internet started he put Radio
Caroline into a search engine and was amazed to find
lots of information about the station. It was 1996, 97
and the Anoraks were speculating that the ship would go
back to sea. Caroline already had a website in those
days and the next big thing was when the internet
streams started thanks to the guys in Holland, then he
was sitting in his home in California listening to Radio
Caroline again and he couldn’t believe his ears. When
the guys in Holland went off to stream Radio Seagull,
Radio Caroline was left with “Live 365” streaming the
output from a Sky Satellite box. This often went off on
a Sunday afternoon and returned on Monday morning. He
called the station and asked why the stream kept going
off over the weekend. The guy gave him a number to call
and one morning while he was driving to work Peter Moore
was on the line talking to this crazy guy in Los Angeles
on a cell phone complaining about the web stream going
off. Peter explained that it was because the guy was
running the web stream from his office and he locked his
office on a Friday evening and if the satellite box got
retuned by Sky over the weekend it had to wait until he
opened up his office on a Monday before he could retune
it back.
At the beginning of 2004 there was a discussion
on a Yahoo forum about how we could get a better web
stream and a guy called Oliver Hicks came on who said he
could supply the streams. Nigel put him in touch with
Marc Dezzani who was running the website at that point
and with help from Bob Squirrel we had the beginning of
the modern day Radio Caroline professional web streams
from the stations website. In the summer of 2004 Nigel
came over to England and visited the Ross on the
passenger cruise terminal and he met up with Oliver
Hicks and Bob Squirrel on the ship. Nigel was remodelling his house and wanted to put stereo speakers
in the ceiling and needed to have Radio Caroline in
Stereo which wasn’t possible at that point as Oliver was
streaming the Satellite which was in Mono. They came up
with a plan that could get a stereo stream live from the
Maidstone studios and that took a lot of e-mailing for
several months. Eventually the stereo stream was
launched at the end of 2004 and he was then very happy
to show off his new speakers in his house with Radio
Caroline playing in stereo.
Part 2
Fundraising Nigel
met up with Peter Moore in London and discussed selling
souvenirs and they hatched a plan to start selling
merchandise. In 2005 when apart from helping to start
setting up the web shop he went to Sebourga to meet Mark
Dezzani. They came up with a plan to start an “on line”
drive to encourage listeners to join the Radio Caroline
support group. The system as it was then worked fairly
well but he thought the station could recruit more
people if it could do something that had a live nature
to it. He was inspired by public stations in the US
which are partly funded by listener donations and have
fundraising drives where listeners can phone in to
pledge money. So the idea was to do something similar
with Radio Caroline. Mark Dezzani was creating a half
hour documentary about the sinking of the Mi Amigo and
so they decided that this would be the main prize. At
the same time his brother was cleaning out his loft and
found some reel to reel tapes that he had made when he
was a teenager in the 1960s. Nigel remembered that he
had recorded the first day that the Mi Amigo came back
on 259 meters in April 1966. His brother found them and
sent him the reel to reel tapes and Ray Robinson who
runs azanorak over there kindly agreed to digitise them
using his reel to reel tape recorders. They found a tape
of Tony Blackburn sitting in on the Tom Lodge show in
April 1966, he was doing a hook up with the Cheeta 2 on
199 meters. Ray also found some tapes of Tony Blackburn
on the Cheeta 2 and Mi Amigo so they did a Tony
Blackburn special as a secondary prize for people
joining. They completed the Tony Blackburn CDs and Ray
made copies but Mark had made some more interviews on
the Ross during Easter 2005 and he decided that he
needed to incorporate these into the half hour Mi Amigo
goes down video. After the pledge drive was completed
the film wasn’t ready to send out and he remembered
getting up in the middle of the night on a holiday in
China to call Peter Moore and asking him, “What are we
going to do? The film is not ready and it’s already 3
weeks after the event.” They decided to send out the
Tony Blackburn CD immediately and the Mi Amigo goes down
video was sent out a few weeks later. Nigel thought it
was a good documentary and well worth waiting for.
So
after they did the first pledge drive they had to keep
it going, in fact for the first couple of years they did
two a year with another on the August Bank holiday. The
year that the station went onto Sky channel 0199 Peter
Moore ordered some T Shirts with “I love Caroline on Sky
Channel 0199”and they got a lot of new members as a
result of the shirts being offered as prizes. Each year
since then there have been more donations than on the
previous year. Nigel was then able to get some bigger
prizes donated by his friends who work in the business
and they built it up by giving out 40 more prizes.
The
concept comes from public radio station KCRW in Santa
Monica where someone who wants to promote their product
basically gives it to the station and they give it away
during the course of the support group drive. The
product gets mentioned many times during the drive in
fact they get more mentions for their product than they
would have done if they had placed advertising. KCRW
give away cars, Mac books and holidays in Australia.
Caroline haven’t quite got up to that level but it is
building up and weekend tickets to the 2011 Fashion
music festival in London which were worth over 300
dollars each were given away and they got a lot of
promotion from that. This year Caroline was given 5
weekends passes to the Hop Farm Festival and a George
Harrison documentary. Nigel said there was a funny story
about the George Harrison documentaries because the
producer gave us 10 DVDS and asked his assistant to
arrange it. Nigel e-mailed the assistant with the
address to send the DVDs to and the assistant e-mailed
back telling him that she also had 10 box sets. Her boss
who was copied in the e-mail asked if these were the box
sets worth £65 and she said yes, Nigel thought they were
going to withdraw them as they were worth a lot of money
but they didn’t and they turned up. Nigel said that it
was fun organising the drives especially when it all
comes together at the last minute and people contribute
the prizes. We don’t quite know what we are going to
have going into it but it always seems to work out well
in the end. We have an on line ticker that the DJs have
access to and its really overwhelming and satisfying
seeing all the money coming in. Nigel said that the DJs
have a lot to do with it. It was hard in the early days
as in a way we are begging for money but there is an
elegant way to ask for money, it’s not easy but the
presenters have found a way to do it so that it doesn’t
seem as though we are begging and they can make a joke
out of it. I think it comes across well and the
listeners respond well. Also the presenters comment on
air as a direct result of all the donations coming in.
He thinks it’s a wonderful way to run the radio station
without having to run wall to wall adverts and he feels
it’s like a big extended family because not only do we
see the same people contributing each year but a lot of
new listeners. Some people would rather not win a prize
as maybe they don’t appreciate that most of the prizes
are donated. Last year someone won an I Pod and he was
very happy with that but this year he waited until the
last moment on the last day probably hoping he didn’t
win another prize, it was a good way to close this year.
Nigel said that he undertakes all this fundraising work
mostly for his own benefit as he has a vested interest
in trying to keep Radio Caroline on the air as he wants
to listen over in California. Perhaps that’s a lesson
for all of us to do our bit to keep our favourite
station on the air. He hopes the station continues for
many years to come and he will be able to continue to
contribute his time.
Presenters
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