Episode 1. From Idea to Airwaves: The BLB Origins

In this first episode Mark Quinn takes us back to the late 1970’s to explore the origins of pirate radio in Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland. He reveals how Southside Radio, and later BLB, provided exciting and fresh experiences for both the deejays and listeners in Bray. Through this journey, we get a glimpse of life during that time and learn how the story of BLB began.

Credits: 

Sound recording by Mike Quinn 

Sound mixing by Luke Conlon 

High Wire Post Production, Dublin, Ireland 

www.highwire.ie  

Artwork by Jody Hogg Design 

www.jodyhogg.com  

Produced and presented by Mark Quinn 

The copyright for this podcast series is owned by Mark Quinn and is hereby reserved.

Bray Talking Heads – Stories from a Seaside Town. A podcast celebrating the stories, history, and people of Bray, past and present. Whether you're a lifelong Brayite or just discovering this special town, join us for conversations that connect, inspire, and bring our community to life - wherever you are in the world. Hosted by Mark Quinn, Leah Kinsella, and Pat Hannon. Connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky @braytalkingheads, or email us at braytalkingheads@gmail.com

https://blb.buzzsprout.com

Transcript

 A radiogenic production.



 BLB, Sounds from the Past. Memories of pirate radio and storiesof Bray Local broadcasting. Episode 1.



 The best things in life happen when you least expect them to. And so it was for me when unplanned and unexpected. In my early twenties I was introduced to the magical world of radio broadcasting.



 And perhaps what made it even more exciting was that this world was just a little bit outside the law.



 In the late 1970s, like a lot of guys my age, I wanted to be in a band. But alas, that didn't work out. And so through my love of music, I set up as a DJ doing gigs locally. And through this, I found myself involved in the setting up of a pirate radio station in Bray, County Wicklow, where I grew up. Helping to find others to get involved. Producing programs. And most magical of all, presenting or DJing live on air. That world and some of the people and friends who were inhabitants in it is the subject of this podcast series. I'm Mark Quinn and over these episodes we'll delve into a long gone era. The late 1970s and through the 1980s and the heady days of a pirate radio station called Bray Local Broadcasting or BLB. A radio station that had a profound effect on those who were in its orbit.



 Sometime in 2018 I realized that the following year, 2019, was going to be the 40th anniversary of the founding of BLB in 1979. So I started formulating some sort of rough plan to mark that forthcoming anniversary.



 I've spent my working life in television and film post-production, helping to create many TV series and film projects. So it seemed only natural that what I should do to celebrate this forthcoming anniversary of the beloved radio station of my youth was to make a short film about it. But as I started to meet with and interview old friends, some of whom I'd not spoken with for many years, something fascinating started to happen. Everyone I met spoke about BLB and their involvement in it with such affection and warmth of how the station had had a profound effect on them and their subsequent lives. It gradually became clear to me that I would be making a production of much greater substance and duration than just a few minutes. In the end the film was called Every Kind of People and it ran to about 90 minutes long when it was launched at the Mermaid Theatre in Bray in November 2021.



 Now this podcast series is a deeper dive than the film. There's mention of the many shops and businesses that formed the heart of the town of Bray and of the personalities, many of whom are long gone, who made Bray what it was all those years ago.



 BLB was a pirate radio station that grew out of the inspiration of a few of us who wanted to create something different and worthwhile and above all to prove an idea for a radio broadcasting model that we felt would have a future in the minds of the legislators who for many years had dithered over issuing licenses for local radio in Ireland. BLB was launched in August 1979.



 They were the authentic voices of the people of Bray.

 I

 don't

 think any community is truly that without having its own radio station.

 The request is starting to flow in at the moment and if you would like.

 Bray needs communication and I think communication will open things up for everyone.

 Welcome to another fall fall community council programme.

 There was the Meath Road listeners, there was the Wolftone Square listeners, there was the Bogall Road. Hey what, Glen Curtain? A sad little ditty, a bad salad. Sorry, a sad ballad.

 Sitting on the dark coming home and saying I liked your programme this morning. Oh what on earth was that rubbish you played? It was wonderful. BLB, the magnificent service that it provided at the time. There really was the voice, the glue that made us what we are today. I think the tongue rediscovered its vibrant identity.



 Now before we move on, a little housekeeping. Throughout the series you're going to hear lots of different voices who I'll name check for you. For rights reasons I sadly haven't been able to include any of the commercial music that was so much a part of the sound of BLB but you'll hear some atmospheric music and as many off air clips as could be found after all these years.



 So let's meet some of the participants and find out a little more about them and what Bray County Wicklow, Ireland was like in the late 1970s. We start with Freddie Morahan who was a presenter on BLB and who ran the now long gone Rogan supermarket on Bray's main street.



 I first came to Bray in the year 1969. It was September 1969 and my brother had been working in a shop called Rogan's on the main street of Bray and he asked me whether I would come and join him in working in the supermarket and I didn't want to do it but it was a chance to work for yourself and in those days to be able to work for yourself for all of us was absolutely fantastic. So we started off in September 1969 and Bray at that stage I thought, I used to come in and out of Dublin every day and I thought it was a very, very country town. Now I know the people of Bray go mad but I felt that I had that atmosphere about it.

 Local former school teacher and president of Bray Chamber of Commerce, Pat Hunt.

 I arrived here to teach in the rest of secondary school in the autumn of 1973.



 That was my first time I had ever set foot in the town. I knew very little if anything about it and then I married the following year and we set up home on Bray where we have been ever since and our permanent home will be in the local graveyard at some stage.



 I got married in 1970 and we moved straight away to Bray. Former presenter Nick Ugin. I followed a job. I came to Bray to work in Shannon Caravans which was at the harbour in Bray because I was a cabinetmaker by trade. I loved Bray because it had everything I would have expected from a seaside resort. You know, holidaymakers from the north and Scotland. They made up the bulk of the visitors to Bray at that time.

 Hilda Hennessey presented the classical programme on BLB.

 In the 70s and 80s it was a very busy place. The town itself was a really vibrant town I remember. I mean, you know, totally different to what it is nowadays unfortunately. But looking back now, I mean, we had everything in Bray. We had lovely dress shops, we had lovely grocery shops, you know, and all that kind of thing. Very, very vibrant town.



 Because I left school in 1979, my memories of that time are quite idyllic.

 Mark Mortell is a former BLB presenter.

 It's a time when the sun seemed to shine during the summertime, every summer, which I'm sure it didn't. But it was a very vibrant place to be and at that age you had school. I was in Prez and you had Bray Head and the seafront and the visitors coming in and the girls and my memory anyway was an energetic, vibrant,



 exciting place to be part of. And my memories are very, very positive.

 Doug McGuire was a founding member of BLB.

 Well back in 79 I'd been 22 going on 23. I was involved in different areas in Bray. I was involved in the amateur dramatics. A few years before I'd been doing discos and that. Life was good. I remember sunny days and I was enjoying things. I was young, innocent, single and it was good. Yeah, Bray was, it was a good place. It was a lively place then.

 So I bought my first house in Bray and moved there in 76.

 John Murphy, also a founding member of the station.

 It was an up and coming town. It was snowing the first time I moved in there and I knew nobody. Pat Hont again.

 I found it very hard to get a handle on it. I come from a small town down the country in County Carlo where I'd been working before and I found here that the sense of community was sort of fractured.



 I often reflected on why that might be because some of the organisations I was interested in joining, they weren't, shall we say, flourishing. Some of them were in slow, others were in very rapid decline even though they had performed heroically here over the years before that. And I think the main reason for that is that the town was undergoing some kind of an identity crisis because it had been the Brighton of Ireland, you know, it was the tourist destination of, not just of Ireland but many parts of England as well, the 1950s as we moved into the 60s.

 John Ryan, former BLB presenter.

 Bray was obviously the town of my childhood where he grew up.



 Lots of good memories of the time. There were less cars around if that was the main thing. I mean parking wasn't the problem that has become nowadays. But the main street was certainly a happening place. If you start at the Credit Union at the top of the town and you work your way down, there wasn't an empty shop.



 There were thriving businesses. There were old family businesses that had been there for generations. People like Lochner's, Butcher's, Capranis,



 Napier's was another good one, Mermaid Florists, and then Gaffneys and Owens. And we actually had three hardware stores on the main street at the time because we had Marduk, Saran, Valesuk became. We had Marks and there was a third one which was lead which is the wonderful lead which is.

 There was about six grocery shops on the main street. There were shops like Finn Lader's. There was paying carries, paying takes. There was a few small grocery shops and ourselves. All the shops would close on Wednesday afternoon.



 And on Sunday, nothing would open on Sunday. Jack Morphy has a small shop up the main street and he would sell cream. That's all. He'd sell cream on Sunday morning. And then there was a fellow called Danny Royley or Chicken Royley. He was a famous newspaper seller. And he used to sell newspapers outside of the church. And he sent every newspaper because that was the only place you get a newspaper. There was no shops open on the main street.

 There was a huge influx of people into Bray. They had come into these new housing estates where there appears to be one going up every week.



 You had little Bray up towards the North and then to the South you had a Wollftown.



 That was the old Bray. And then gradually houses started being built up in Ardmore Park. Houses started being built in Charnwood. The town started getting bigger and bigger and bigger. But the main street was basically the same.



 Ardmore Park was being built, Ferry Hill was being built, Silver Hill, Arnie Park. All those outlining estates got built around that time.



 Between one thing and another, I felt that Bray at that stage was being brought together.



 Instead of being a sort of a country's town, you had the two sides. All these new parts of Bray was coming together.



 You could feel the growth in the housing estates being built. The action that that kind of brought, the interruption that brought with trucks and stuff going around. And at that stage, I'd been involved in doing things in the town late, 77, 78, 79, been involved in summer projects through the Holy Redeemer Church. And you could see the amount of people interested in getting involved was getting bigger and bigger and bigger all the time. And it did feel like a real growing, exciting, economically vibrant place as well.

 Looking around us, we sort of found with what do we identify in the town? And then onto the scene, there came this fantastic local radio service called BLB.

 All right, OK, hold it there, Pat. We're not diving into BLB yet because it didn't go on air until 1979. In order to tell the whole story, we've got to go back to the very first pirate radio station that opened in Bray at the end of 1978. And to be fair, where it all started. And that was Southside Radio.



 They say that life is all about timing and my introduction to radio broadcasting through my involvement in Southside Radio was to prove to be the sweetest of timing. I was working nights as a DJ, doing discos and parties and so on. And I had free time during the day. So out of the blue, Andrew Coffey called me and asked me if I'd like to come to a meeting in his house on the Meath Road around the corner from where I lived about the setting up of a radio station in Bray. Although it was a DJ, I'd never considered radio as an option. And there were quite a few pirate stations operating in Dublin at that time. Anyway, in fairness to Andrew, he had a vision for a station in Bray and he was contacting DJs in the area to fill the schedule. I suppose his logic was that if you were DJing, then you at least had some kind of a head start when it came to radio broadcasting and you probably had a decent record collection. But as time would tell, not all disco DJs made good radio DJs. Radio broadcasting was to prove an altogether different challenge, which some took to with ease and others not so. Now, here's one of the few surviving recordings from that time with Andrew reading an ad live on air for a local chip shop.

 Henry and Rose Takeaway are pleased to announce that they have now reopened under new management. They are now open from 12 o'clock noon until 3 a.m. on the weekends.



 Curry sauce is available and we now sell cheeseburgers, pineapple burgers, egg burgers, bacon burgers and grilled tomato burgers.



 We also sell takeaway soup, coffee, tea, bottle and milk.



 And try a king sized burger with cheese, egg, pineapple, bacon and grilled tomato for only one pound.

 Ah, here a cheese, egg, pineapple, bacon and grilled tomato burger for a pound. Well, I suppose it was 1978.

 Henry and Rose Takeaway now reopened under new management beside the railway station in Bray.



 That first Southside radio meeting had surprisingly few people at it and they were all lads I knew from school. Those I remember that were there were Andrew's brother Greg, Kahlo Riley and John Reynolds. And there was something of the late 1970s punk spirit in the air, which the setting up of a pirate radio station seemed to fit in with. I was laughingly elected head DJ and it was to be my job to help find more DJs to fill the planned mainly music schedule. Here's a youthful sounding me on Southside.



 Say when there, Layman Loveage's latest single, not quite as impressive as Lucky Number, but the follow up to that one nevertheless. Taking from the album, Stateless and also Lucky Numbers on that album as well if you're interested in buying it. Very good album too, I've heard a few tracks from it, not bad at all. Might give it a feature sometime here on the show. Anyhow, you're listening to Mark Quinn here on Southside Radio on 300m on the Medium Wave. And as I said to you a little earlier, Blockhead blasphemy coming your way. An insult to Ian, this is. Would you believe a disco version of Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll?



 Ah yes, 300m Medium Wave. Those were the days. I'm glad to hear that I was playing at least some good music back then.



 Before Southside launched properly with the help of Ken Duff, we did some test transmissions from over Duff's pub on the Main Street in Bray. But these weren't being heard very well in certain parts of the town. So we moved to the higher ground of the Vivi Road, where Andrew negotiated with Michael Stack of Stack's butchers for use of a concrete shed in his garden. And we went on air in Christmas Week 1978.



 Hello and a very good afternoon to you all. Welcome along to the show at one minute pass by.

 Yes, I can remember those days of trudging to the studio to present my daily show, Rain or Shine, with a plastic shopping bag full of singles and LPs. Vinyl records to you young folk.



 Sadly, or maybe thankfully, very little of early Southside Radio's output was recorded. Except for these clips that you're hearing now. This is Vicky Lee, whose real name is Kathy Cregan, and who's had a long career in radio since those early days.

 Not a big thank you to Mark Gwynne for the past two hours.



 Poor Mark has to go home in the rain now.



 I think it's fair to say that Southside Radio was a huge success right from the start. There was no other station in the Bray area. Our signal was really strong and we were playing nonstop pop music, all of which meant that everyone was listening to 300 meters medium wave or 1000 kilohertz. Shops, factories, school kids, people at home, and it was great to be part of it. I remember that feeling of empowerment at 20 years of age. We were all living the dream and loving the local notoriety of being on the radio. Mark Mortell again.

 I can remember Southside Radio starting and because there were a couple of people involved in it, Mark Gwynne, Andrew Coffey, you kind of had people who you knew that these guys were a couple of years older than me. And therefore they were suddenly stars that you could touch and feel and feel part of. So it became very exotic and exciting and was also now suddenly bringing immediacy to your capacity to learn and hear about what's going on rather than waiting for the brave people once a week. Like, goodness me. So, yes, I remember Southside very, very well.

 I was presenting a daily weekday tea time program from six to eight. And I set about trying to recruit more presenters, starting with my old school friend and neighbor, Doug McGuire. I got a

 call from Mark who said, look, we're thinking of setting up a radio station. Would you be interested? I said, yeah, sounds good. What do you want me to do? Well, actually, we'd like you to present a program. I said, yeah, fine.



 This Saturday, he said, I said, what?



 I said, OK, yeah, what do you want me to do? I just play a few records, he said. We'll go go along with that. That's what I did. I turned up to what was the studio of the radio then in the Vivienne Bray. I remember I was I was terrified. I was going to say brick in it, but I was scared. Never done this. I was talking into a microphone, playing my music and I enjoyed it. And it was funny. It was two hours long. I played music and it was a bit like of that was this is and played music. But, you know, at the end of the two hours, I wanted to do it again.



 I got the bug. I enjoyed it. It was probably the greatest heap of rubbish, but it was a beginning and that was how we did it. And from that, then I went to a meeting with all people, got introduced to other people.



 Andrew Coffey, John, Mollwin Dixon and other people who were all getting involved in starting this radio. At the time, it was called Southside Radio. We progressed. Things got better. We moved out to the back garden to a coal shed with no windows and a box on the wall where you put in two shilling bits to to power the power. And many times there were programs that in the middle suddenly went lights out. Everything stopped. We'd run out of money and having to get up and recycle the two shilling pieces to go back on it.

 Anna Stack was 13 years old when she discovered that her father, Michael Stack, the butcher based on Vivi Road Bray, had a secret.

 I used to regularly pop into dad's butchers. I could be chatting to him. I could be helping him clear up at the end of the day, you know, sweeping the floor and throwing down fresh thought and stuff or whatever. And the back door would often be open out to the garden. And I noticed activity at the top of the garden at the shed. I think I spotted somebody going in. And I said to dad, there's somebody in the garden shed. And he goes, no. And I said, no, seriously, I there's someone there's something happening. There's activity up there. I go check it out. And he goes, no, no, no, no, don't, don't, don't get that fine. Grant. And then he had to I was persistent. He had to let me in on his secret that there was this Irish radio station operating. The garden shed. And I was absolutely stunned because he was telling me that I had to keep it a secret that it was illegal. And my dad was like pillar of society. I said, you can't be doing anything illegal. I was worried for him. Would he get in trouble? And he was trying to explain that there were just a few people, young people wanting to play a few records, play a few requests. What was wrong with that? And he assured me that he would never be in trouble. And I said, but you're letting them do it in our on our property. But he insisted. So anyway, he talked me around and he assured me, no, he'd never be in trouble. When I came to terms with the idea, sure, then I was charged. He told me to keep it a secret. And I could tell my sister, Frieda, who was just a year younger than me, but that it was our secret. So really and truly we were both charmed knowing because back in that day, you know, there wasn't even a mobile phone like people on the radio were like celebrities and think that they were operating out of our shed. And I guess we felt we had rights and sometimes you could walk the knock on the door. We were let in a few times. We got to watch the DJs as they spoke. And we were told to be very silent. And we got to shove little bits of paper under the door with requests. And we were delighted. It was really, really lovely. A lovely little secret to keep, you know, nice memories.

 Anna Stack and many young people of her age in Bray were attracted to Southside because of the perceived glamour as are many of the local DJs like Barry Nevin.

 When Southside Radio came along, I think the qualifying thing was you had to have your own records. And I did because I was dabbling as a DJ for 21st and stuff like that. So I had my own records and I think I did an hour long show in the evening. And my memories of that were always we'd finish up about midnight sometime around that and we'd finish with Robert Palmer and every kind of people. And that was the if you like the theme music to Southside at the time.

 Ah, yes, every kind of people. That piece of inspiration was due to John Reynolds, who chose to play it at the end of his weekday rock show on Southside or SSR to us DJs.



 It was new to all of us. We were all finding our way in it. We were all teenagers or just early twenties or that sort of thing. So it was all brand new to us as an experience. But what was picked up on people of the same age really liked and tuned in. And if you were going down the street and people knew who you were and they could put a face to your name and stuff like that, they would say they were listening to the programme.

 Like I think great is a very intimate medium and it got even more intimate when it was about your place with people who you knew. And now suddenly you were part of it, even as a passive listener, you felt engaged and connected. And that I have to say, really excited my early childhood interest in radio even more. And I wanted to be Mark Quinn. That was very important to me.

 Mark Mortel again, absolutely guaranteeing his inclusion in this series.



 As Southside Radio grew, some of us in the station began to realise the potency of what we were involved in. And unbeknown to us at the time, we were sowing the seeds for what would become defined as community radio. Because as part of our desire to do something different and to prove that we could provide a radio service that was far more substantial than just playing the top 30 hits. John Murphy, Doug McGuire, Ollie Dixon, Mick Curtis and myself, along with a few others, set up two weekend speech based programmes on Southside, interviewing local individuals and organisations. Then in June 1979, with the help of local man Paddy Feeley, we decided to make some programmes on the forthcoming local elections by interviewing all of the candidates. And this really gave us a chance to shine.

 And in conjunction with these elections, Southside Radio's two local community programmes, Roundabout and Lunchtime Lookaround, will be holding an election special.

 I can remember the elections in 1979. Coverage of it at such a local level was an interesting, really novel thing. Like it seems silly to talk about it now, but at that time, that had never really happened before. You were relying on national view of things. This was now so local, so real, so connected to the people and the names and the people you knew about around. So that was the beginning of something really different. And also the fact that it wasn't legal, so there was a bit of a whiff of sulphur about it, but it was also, it felt proper and right and correct. And you sort of said, goodness, why does it take so long for this to happen?

 The local elections were everywhere at the time, obviously, and the national station covered in an international way. But local radio could focus only on the local area, could do the interviews the big stations couldn't do and had a relevance. And that for me was the beginning of why a small local station was valuable and relevant. We got a huge audience for that.

 We were proving the worth of local radio with our coverage of the run up to the local elections and Southside Radio was holding a much larger audience than ever before. But it was all going to change radically.



 So this brings us to the turning point in the early story of local radio in Bray and something that I got asked about for years after it happened. And that is to do with the split in Southside Radio. Here's John Murphy.

 In Ireland, there's always a split at some stage, right? And Southside Radio was the brainchild of Andrew Coffey in fairness. So he had a clear philosophy about Southside being a music station. And as Mark and Doug and I thought there was going to be more to it than that. And we started talking about programs with content. We started talking about local interest programs interviewing people locally. And I think that was too much for him. And one day he and the equipment disappeared.

 So rather than have a discussion about it, Andrew decided to take his transmitter and run. It was a great pity that things ended the way they did because the magic that was Southside Radio was lost that day. Although they did set up somewhere else in South County Dublin shortly afterwards, Bray had lost its local pirate radio station and listeners were devastated, especially Anna Stack.

 I think I was 13 or 14 the first time I went to the Dailton with my sister. And on our return, the dad collected us from Houston station and we were just chatting, going home in the car and filling them in on our experiences in the girls' home. And then I asked him, had he any news? And he said, well, yeah, actually, the radio station has been shut down. And I just burst into tears, like, unconsoleably crying. And dad was shocked. He's like, gosh, I didn't realize it meant that much to you. And I think it was a combination of, like, saying goodbye to my girls, have friends. And now coming home and nailing the path on no radio station to go home to either. Because we felt that we were part of it, really, although we weren't. But, you know, so, yeah, I was devastated.



 But better things were to come with a sizeable group of us opting not to join, nor indeed being invited to join Southside Radio Mark 2, but rather to set up our own station in the town. The beginnings of the BLB adventure is the subject of our next episode. And we'll get to meet more of the BLB folk like Daphne Mitchell, who was always involved in some drama or other.

 There was a knock at the door and this man came in and he put a gun to my head and he said, I want you to read this out.



 My sincere thanks to all of the participants in this series.



 Sound recording was by Mike Quinn and sound mixing was by Luke Conlon, both ofHigh Wire post-production Dublin.



 BLB, Sounds from the Past, Memories of Pirate Radio and Stories of Bray Local Broadcasting, was produced and presented by me, Mark Quinn, and is a radiogenic production.