Radio back in the day on the Continent

Here's a great piece that came our way from our friend June Renwick, who was in Great Britain when pirate radio was happening. This article is from John Peel Wiki at Fandom (https://peel.fandom.com/wiki/Radio_Geronimo) and is part of the greater story of freeform radio worldwide and that extraordinary time when art was the priority in broadcasting and commerce did or didn't find a way to support it. Great stuff to read and our thanks to the source:

Radio Geronimo

Radio Geronimo was a "free-form" music station broadcasting weekends in 1970 by hiring late-night air-time from Radio Monte Carlo on 205m (1466khz) with 400kw of power. The station was founded by music publicist Terry Yason with journalist Hugh Nolan and Geoffrey Bass, with financial help from record producer Jimmy Miller (Traffic, Rolling Stones, ....) and pop-music manager Tony Secunda (The Move).

Programmes were pre-recorded in Harley Street, London and consisted of an eclectic mixture of jazz, folk, blues, rock and classical along with advice for the counter-culture and a touch of anarchy. The organisers turned down advertising opportunities, preferring instead to obtain money by way of direct offers to listeners, a financial plan that failed and the station closed before the end of 1970.

Links to Peel

Issue 60 of International Times, dated July 18-31 1969, carried a report on Radio Andorra - the "first underground rock station", which was due to start broadcasting in mid-August; and claimed that "some programmes will be put together by John Peel and Mick Farren" . In the end, however, after a number of test broadcasts the station only began a regular schedule, under the name of Radio Geronimo, in February 1970, via Radio Monte Carlo[1]. The names mentioned in the IT article were associated with Radio Geronimo, but neither Peel nor Farren broadcast on the station.

Nevertheless, one of Geronimo's co-founders, Hugh Nolan, worked at Disc & Music Echo at the time when Peel was writing a column for the paper, and a Peel influence was clear in both the laid-back hippy presentation style of Geronimo's DJs and the station's eclectic choice of music, ranging from tracks from newly released albums to more esoteric music choices. As the station was free from needletime restrictions and censorship it was able to play more tracks than Peel was able to at the time. These included both sequences of tracks from specific albums or artists (Rod Stewart's early work, most notably the LP Gasoline Alley, was an example) and very long tracks like Terry Riley's "A Rainbow In Curved Air" and the Incredible String Band's "Creation". Geronimo also espoused the underground causes JP then favoured.

On the Radio Geronimo website is a photo of Peel at the 1970 Hollywood Festival, in front of the turntables of the "Geronimo Starship". The accompanying text describes how Peel helped the station by supplying it with copies of recordings which he was unable to play on the BBC, but some of the information is wrong - the Captain Beefheart album in question was "Lick My Decals Off, Baby"[2] (tracks can be heard here), not "Safe As Milk", and by that time Beefheart was hardly an "unknown". However, Geronimo did play the Last Poets, whose album Peel rated highly but was unable to play on Top Gear because of its use of "obscene" language, and the DJs themselves were not afraid of using four-letter words.

Despite this, it was financial problems rather than challenges to authority which led to the station's closedown. In June 1970, Hugh Nolan wrote an article for International Times [3]describing how Radio Geronimo had been influenced by Peel's Perfumed Garden, outlining the station's money problems and explaining how it hoped to survive as a listener-sponsored station, like some in the USA (he mentions WBAI in New York as an example) - but unfortunately this never worked and Geronimo was forced to close in late 1970. It was briefly replaced on Radio Monte Carlo by more conventional and commercial late-night shows hosted by Tommy Vance and Dave Cash. Recordings of some Radio Geronimo shows survive and can be found online.