London's underground pirates

While much of London's media faces its worst recession for a decade, one sector is positively booming. This business can earn its bosses £3,000 in a weekend, and has such a hold on street culture that it has created three number-one singles since the summer. Pirate radio might still be illegal - but in the capital, it is now making real money.

More than 80 illegal FM stations currently broadcast to London, up from around 25 a decade ago. For some owners, their stations are there to promote extreme political views. But for many more, they are a lucrative way to profit from advertisers keen to reach niche audiences. At dusk on Christmas Day, the Evening Standard monitored 44 pirates from Waterloo Bridge, mainly playing music - garage, trance, jungle - and ignored by mainstream stations.

Yet despite constant raids by the Radiocommunications Agency, the government body that polices the airwaves, the pirates appear to be winning the battle.

According to the agency's most recent figures, its enforcement officers mounted 1,494 raids against illegal radio stations in 2000, around 1,300 of these in London. If caught, pirate broadcasters face up to two years in jail and unlimited fines.

Yet, despite making three times as many raids as a decade earlier, the agency, part of the DTI, secured just 40 convictions. And when broadcasters are convicted, they face an average fine of just £377 - a fraction of their profits from organising a single party club night.

Stations in London that we spoke to charge between £50 and £150 to advertise every hour over a weekend - what a legal station might charge for one 20-second slot. The more established pirates promote up to 20 "clients" at a time: on music stations such as Unique FM and Station FM, the Evening Standard heard adverts for West End nightclubs, and even the police-backed Crimestoppers Trust.

Remarkably, last summer the Metropolitan Police planned to advertise Operation Trident, its anti-gun campaign, on north London pirates - until Scotland Yard lawyers pointed out that this was illegal under the 1949 Wireless Telegraphy Act.

"There's no advertising recession among the pirates," according to Woody "Uptown Badboy", 29, a former station owner and "mixmaster" on a number of London pirates. "Station, Kool, Taste, Delight - at least 10 are making a profit now bigtime. With 20 advertisers, you could easily make £3,000 a weekend. You charge the DJs for their slots, say £10. There's also talk of record companies paying DJs to play certain tunes. And stations like Kool FM are making plenty of money from their raves."

Some stations have become hugely influential in defining the nation's musical tastes. Just as Radio Caroline in the 1960s paved the way for Radio 1, the London pirates are turning garage and dance music into commercial hits. Last year's number-one singles from DJ Pied Piper, Daniel Bedingfield and So Solid Crew were boosted by early pirate airplay. The Relentless record label, in particular, specialises in sourcing talent from the London FM pirates.

So Solid Crew retains close links to Delight 103FM, a commercially successful south London music station that now claims 10,000 listeners. Members of the station's management team, who met us in a Clapham bar, explained how, for legal reasons, the station was carefully distanced from the parent music-promotions company.

"You could say that Delight Entertainment 'sponsors' Delight FM to promote its events," explained AJ (no radio pirate we met was prepared to give a real name). "If we didn't have the station, we'd find another way to promote the gigs - but it's very effective. Business is better than ever." Delight makes DJs sign up to a strict set of rules - no swearing, violence, drugs, smoking or drinking - and eventually hopes to go legal. "My aim is to go international - to be the Puff Daddy of radio," management spokesman Mr C said. "We're a training school for presenters, and are giving listeners a reason to get on to the FM dial."

For most pirates, advertising profits more than compensate for the cost of transmitters regularly seized by the DTI. These cost from £350, including a "microlink" that allows a studio to be some distance from the tower block where the transmitter is sited. But money is not the only force driving the pirate boom. Some owners refuse adverts, lest they compromise their stations' calls for political agitation or "black empowerment".

Among the most radical voices is Interference FM, which broadcasts intermittently to London, Bristol and Brighton with an anti-capitalist direct-action message. On election day, Interference FM urged listeners to "Vote for Nobody"; it has also been active during Reclaim the Streets marches, anti-hunting demonstrations, and the recent protests against the Laeken European summit.

"The fact that we're illegal doesn't bother me," explained cofounder Chris Winton (not his real name). "What's more of a crime is the way we're lied to by the corporate media with their constant onslaught of neo-liberal rubbish." Winton believes that "most pirate stations nowadays are motivated by greed and profit." He added: "Yet the music pirates are left alone for months. We're considered dangerous, so they pull us off the air before the day is out."

Another, very different, advertising-free station is Galaxy FM, in Peckham, whose mission is "to de-brainwash the black community". Galaxy combines soca and reggae music with a robust articulation of "black empowerment" against a system "designed to oppress our brothers and sisters". In live phone-ins to mobile-phone numbers, listeners are urged to integrate "not with Europe, but with Africa", and warned against the "Freemasons and illuminati controlling the racist media".

Beyond its politics, Galaxy also supports a community otherwise unrepresented. Sandra Lewis, a Jamaican mother living on a Hackney estate, failed to interest the mainstream media in her three-yearold daughter's need for a life-saving lung transplant in America. But Galaxy and two other black pirate stations launched an appeal before Christmas, which is well on the way to raising the £50,000 needed.

The legal stations are not impressed. "It's absolute bilge about pirates being needed by the community," said Paul Brown, chief executive of the Commercial Radio Companies' Association, the commercial stations' trade body. "These crooks broadcast at enormous power and obliterate legal radio stations." Some are now so concerned at the growing competition from pirates that they fear for their own survival. Thames Radio, broadcasting legally from Kingston upon Thames, claims that pirate interference to its 107.8FM frequency is limiting its transmission area, and losing listeners and advertising revenue.

"We're the victims," said Mark Walker, the programme controller. "I rise and fall on my audience figures, and these stations come along and stop us reaching our listeners. We have to pay licence fees, wages, performingrights fees, taxes - while these guys just squat our frequency. If this carries on, people here are going to lose their jobs."

Official complaints can be counterproductive: Thames Radio says one pirate responded by vandalising a presenter's car. Legal stations are also frustrated at the courts' "lenient" sentences for those caught. So they have taken to suing individual broadcasters to keep them off the air.

Barry Maxwell, director of the Radiocommunications Agency, agrees that the courts could be tougher. "It would be nice to see some higher fines. There's a fairly villainous element behind (some of the) bigger stations." But the agency faces a dilemma: "You can spend a very small time taking away lots of their transmitters. Or you can spend a lot of time looking for a studio or going for a prosecution. It's a question of balancing resources."

A constant priority for the agency is silencing stations that cause radio interference. Usually complaints relate to no more than disruption to television reception, but occasionally the agency is called out on far more urgent business. Two days before the Evening Standard went on patrol with the agency's north-west London enforcement team, the agency received an emergency "safety of life" call. Flight crews coming in to Heathrow had found one of their communications channels blocked by "Arabic music", which drowned out instructions from air-traffic control. Investigators traced the signal to a poorly constructed transmitter above Wembley Central station.

"We found the transmitter within an hour and called police for backup," one of the enforcement officers told us. "Unfortunately the police were busy dealing with two dead bodies, so we had to wait four hours for their assistance." Two days later, when the Standard returned to Wembley Central, a replacement transmitter was already in place.

At least 10 prosecutions have been brought since 1996 for pirate interference with aeronautical equipment. One one occasion, an east London station was reported to have jammed Heathrow's automatic landing system. National Air Traffic Services, responsible for air-traffic control, confirmed that Heathrow calls out the Radiocommunications Agency around 10 times a year. A spokesman described pirate broadcasters as a "nuisance" to air-traffic control, who must then alert air crews to use a back-up frequency.

Occasionally the agency can face the resistance of stations determined not to lose transmitters. "The established pirates put up grids on tower-block roofs so people can't gain access," explained Woody "Uptown Badboy" - mostly to prevent other stations stealing equipment. "One London station has kept two dogs on the roof of a Hackney tower block. Others brick up the rig (transmitter). One station has used CS spray inside a concrete enclosure so it's not tampered with." Lewisham Council says it found one tower-block rooftop booby-trapped by pirates "putting a 240V electrical supply on the locks".

During our tour of duty with the agency, its three-man team removed six transmitters in a morning. Freeze FM came off first, from the roof of a 13-floor block in Newmarket Avenue, Northolt. The transmitter, encased in concrete, was hidden beneath the water tank. "We've removed a transmitter 20 times from here over two years, but they're still making money on ads," said John, an enforcement officer for 35 years. "It's a game. They'll reinstall the whole kit in less than an hour."

The team's Doppler signal box - built into its unmarked blue Nissan van - then detected an unlawful signal on 90.0FM. The signal strengthened as we approached Wembley. "It's payday," said a second officer as we reached Wembley Central station. "It's the transmitter that interfered with Heathrow. As we don't know who's behind it, we'll call for police protection."

The police did not arrive, so the team broke the lock with its threefoot hydraulic cutter. They cut up the aluminium aerial pole before removing the transmitter.

"We're almost permanently carrying out risk assessments," said Paul, the area team leader. "If we're not familiar with a station, we never know what they're going to spring on us. We had a guy with a knife in Stratford, threatening us. But they're more concerned with rig thieves."

Other victims that day included Street FM (silenced from behind a flat in Bolton Road, Harlesden) and Unique (above a Harlesden bakery). On a tower block in Palmerston Road, Acton, Cruise FM's transmitter was broadcasting on 95.4FM when the team removed it. "In May, we raided their studio on Goldhawk Road with 80 police in helmets," a radio investigator explained. "Unbeknown to us, below the studio was a crack cocaine den. Police knew we'd be walking past it. We found one bloke there, interviewed him under caution, and took the turntables and records."

But the agency's triumphs that morning proved short-lived. Since the Standard saw their transmitters removed, all these stations have returned to the airwaves.

David Rowan reports on the national picture tonight on Channel 4 News at 7pm.