Some record label days out are better than others. This one involved a boat.
The Nice Records team, recently made the journey out to the Ross Revenge, the legendary home of Radio Caroline, moored on the River Blackwater in Essex.
Why Caroline matters to this story
If you love the Small Faces, you owe Radio Caroline more than you might realise.
When 'Whatcha Gonna Do About It' hit the shops in 1965, the BBC was rationing pop music to a few grudging hours a week. It was the pirates — Caroline chief among them, broadcasting from a ship anchored beyond the reach of the authorities — who actually played the records. Caroline's first unauthorised broadcast went out from off the Essex coast in March 1964, and for the next few years the station was the soundtrack to Swinging England, pumping the new sounds of the Small Faces, the Kinks and the Who into transistor radios across the country.
Those Decca singles we've just lovingly repressed? Radio Caroline was spinning the originals when the vinyl was still warm.
Aboard the Ross Revenge
The Ross Revenge — a 200ft former deep-sea trawler, the last radio ship of her kind still afloat — has been Caroline's home since the early 1980s, surviving hurricanes, shipwreck on the Goodwin Sands and everything successive governments could throw at her.
Stepping aboard today is like walking into broadcasting history. The restored legacy studio looks just as it did in Caroline's heyday, the record library is a thing of beauty, and the whole ship hums with the stubborn, romantic spirit that kept the station on the air against all odds.
We couldn't have asked for a better guide, either. We were met by Ray Clark, who took us on a tour of the ship from bridge to record library — and Ray knows this world from the inside. After years of boat trips out to the North Sea in the '70s and '80s, he eventually stayed aboard and broadcast on Caroline 558 under the name Mick Williams (borrowed, he admits, from a friend). He's gone on to a long and award-winning radio career since — one of the few people to have presented the breakfast show on pirate, commercial, American and BBC radio.
Hearing the Caroline story told aboard the Ross Revenge herself, by someone who lived it, is something else entirely. Every corner of the ship has a tale attached — storms weathered, raids survived, records played — and Ray had all of them.
Kindred spirits
Standing in that studio, it struck us that Nice Records and Radio Caroline are in the same business, really: keeping the music of that extraordinary era alive, properly, and refusing to let it be forgotten or done on the cheap.
Caroline is still broadcasting today — online at radiocaroline.co.uk and on 648 AM — and the Ross Revenge is currently the subject of a major fundraising appeal to secure her future with a much-needed shipyard overhaul. If this era of music means anything to you, she's a cause worth supporting — and the boat trips out to visit her are an unforgettable day out for any music fan.
Our thanks to the Radio Caroline crew for the warmest of welcomes.
It's all too beautiful, indeed.
