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By Mark Stone

Former Kelowna DJ Steve Young is reliving his experience on Radio Caroline, made famous in the recent flick Pirate Radio (photo: fandango.com)

Thanks to the latest Hollywood film Pirate Radio, Steve Young, who used to work the Kelowna airwaves back on CKOV 630 AM in the 1970s, is reliving one of the most fascinating times of his life. The film stars Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Kenneth Branagh and tells the story of Radio Caroline, a pirate radio station broadcasting from a large ship in the ’60s. In the UK, the BBC used to broadcast only about 30 minutes per day of pop music. A strange fact given that this was the time of the birth of rock ‘n’ roll – with the Beatles and Rolling Stones just starting their careers.

Today, with satellite radio and the proliferation of accessible radio stations on the Internet, it is rare for any radio station to boast a huge following. Even the most popular radio stations in the world’s largest cities often don’t receive over a million listeners at one time. But Young says the listenership for Radio Caroline was staggering: “We would have upwards of 30 million people listening. I did the midnight-to-six show, and had listeners all over Europe, in almost every country. It was surreal.”

So how did Young, then working as a disc jockey on the prairies in a small market, come into a job that most DJs would kill for? “In 1965, I went to England to retrace my roots but had no concept of getting a job on a pirate station,” Young says. “But a friend of mine from Calgary came to England and looked me up; he was going to get a job on one of the pirate stations. Weeks later he phoned me and told me about Radio Caroline. He gave me the name of production director Tom Lodge, and a week later I was hired.”

Young was living his dream on the ship, as this thrilling vocation was something he always aspired to – even as a young child. “I used to listen to all these shortwave stations from faraway places as a kid and tried to get a sense of the world beyond what we had on the prairies. I’d say to myself, ‘This is so exciting, this is what it’s all about.’ I’d lie there with my head back… it took you away from your existing life and took you to all these great places,” he says.

Young explains that to a certain extent, the film captures what it was like working on the ship for about a year of his life. “The movie plays it fairly lightweight, and more for comedic value. Which I can understand… a bit of Hollywood, you know. I have even seen it twice now, once in the UK in August in flight (the UK version is called The Boat That Rocked) and then again on the big screen here on the coast. They removed about half an hour for the North American version,” he says.

Life on the ship was something he will never forget. “This was the time of ‘Swinging England.’ You’d live on board for two weeks and have a week of shore leave. Meals were catered, cigarettes and drinks were always provided. It was not exactly a life of luxury, but it was all tax-free because we were in international waters,” Young says.  The salaries? Impressive. “Our weekly pay had probably earning five times what the average wage was in England.”

Although the ship continued to broadcast in an unofficial capacity, Aug. 14, 1966 was the official end of Radio Caroline.

After leaving the ship, Steve Young continued working as a DJ for a short while and then retired from the business, still doing some voice work and even landing a small role in the revival of The Twilight Zone TV show. The former Kelowna resident has fond memories of our city and now lives on the coast spending his time travelling and working on restoring his old house.

Tags: dj, Pirate Radio, Radio Caroline, Steve Young

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under Entertainment, Kelowna Entertainment, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.