Soul music went from pirate radio to streaming – but it's still misunderstood

Soul music tells us everything there is to know about radio and its remarkable history. In much the same way that technology innovators like to compare pornography with developments in digital media, soul music parallels the story of how we listen and how recorded music was first beamed into our homes.

I first heard soul music – then a distant magic from Detroit and Chicago – on a crackling transistor radio in my bedroom in Perth courtesy of the former lightship LV Comet which had been fitted out with RCA technology in a boatyard in Guernsey.

This was the heyday of pirate radio when illegal stations floated on boats outside the UK’s territorial waters serving a hungry generation of teenagers disenchanted with the old BBC Home Service.

These were heady times in Scotland too. The United States Navy had set up a nuclear base in Holy Loch and peace demonstrations took place in the area almost every weekend.

Groups such as CND and an alliance of Scottish socialist and nationalist communities attended largely peaceful but hugely theatrical protests. The song We Dinnae Want Polaris – We Shall Not Be Moved was self-consciously adapted from gospel and from Martin Luther King’s civil rights marches of the era.

The beatniks and protesters of the day sang traditional Scottish folk songs and hurriedly assembled skiffle-bands, with mouth organs, washboards and old thimbles as percussion and adapted tea-chests as upright bass, creating a new kind of do-it-yourself music. The singer Billy Bragg describes it as a prequel to punk rock.

Gradually, two forms of black music came to Scotland – the blues protest songs that travelled from the deep south of America through the folk scene and a more modern form of urban soul that US sailors brought with them from the ghettos of the north. Suddenly, new names were being bandied about by Scottish teenagers – Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jimmy Witherspoon, Lee Dorsey, Otis Redding and Rufus Thomas, pictured below.

Among the most sought afters labels was Stax Records from Memphis, a studio in the mid-South which had been launched by the brother and sister team Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, the grandchildren of a Scottish family, who had grown up immersed in Scottish culture.

Jim Stewart was a virtuoso fiddler and his first few releases were aimed at the Memphis hillbilly market, but as segregation broke down he found himself servicing the black R&B market.

Then vinyl began to trickle into Scotland, the initiated began to collect and the rest of us clung to our transistors energised by the shock of the new.

On Hogmanay 1965 the pirate radio station Radio Scotland came on air. The theme tune is burnt in my mind decades later: “Fun For You On Radio Scotland. Radio Scotland Calling You, Fun for You On Radio Scotland, Radio Scotland 242.”

Twee as it may sound now this was revolutionary: a bandit gang of Scottish DJs playing pop and soul on the high seas, with none of the plummy voices of the BBC.

It was the first major boom in indigenous Scottish pop music, bringing American inspired garage bands from new housing schemes across Scotland: The Beatstalkers, The Poets, The Bruins, The Stoics, The Beachcombers and a local band that regularly played in my own local community centre, The Vikings from Perth, founded by the Average White Band’s Alan Gorrie.

This was the nursery grounds of some of Scotland’s greatest soul-inspired voices – Frankie Miller, Maggie Bell (pictured below) and The Sensational Alex Harvey among them.

Something was working but something obstructed the sound of Young Scotland. So many great bands were strangled at birth, in part by their distance from the London-dominated pop market and in part by the lack of strong management and distribution.

The Beatles had Brian Epstein and Scotland did not. Never mind, the music was great and the only place you could hear it was the pirate ships or at a local dancehall.

For a while the SV Comet was stationed off the coast of Dunbar and so was easily picked up in Edinburgh and up along the Fife coast to Dundee and Perth. It then moved west and floated off the coast near Troon, and Glasgow came within its reach, breaking new sounds and setting the template that eventually became the official BBC Radio 1.

Soul by this time was dominating the charts. Martha and the Vandellas, The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, and The Four Tops were universally popular, and then in the inevitable cycle of cultural change, the music went underground again, to all-nighters, northern soul clubs and eventually to illegal raves.

Maxine Brown

It took another pirate radio boom, this time in the 1980s in makeshift studios in remote housing schemes in London and Manchester, where the next generation of underground soul – jazz-funk, rare groove and street sounds – emerged. By then radio was facing the next disruptive stage in its innovation – the move to digital.

Digital meant more radio stations and the opportunity to expand, appealing to every conceivable taste – or so it was assumed.

THE BBC expanded all its services – news, talk and music – eventually launching a dedicated new music channel, BBC Radio 6 Music, a station with a hugely dedicated following mostly dedicated to the indie rock traditions, with high-profile DJs from known performers, Cerys Matthews of Catatonia and Jarvis Cocker from Pulp. Yet again soul obsessives felt edged out and let down, relegated to a few selective slots.

So why in the era of endless digital spectrum was soul edged out again? One reason is that radio programme planners have always failed to understand soul –treating it as a genre of pop music rather than a lifestyle, an innovator, a cause or in many cases an asylum for obsession.

New stations emerged, some of them such as Kiss FM and Solar with their roost in the pirate stations of the 1980s, and innovations, came thick and fast.

My major radio station of the moment is Mixcloud and it’s not really a radio station at all. It’s more accurately described as a digital soul cloud, and it’s the best place to hear cutting-edge dance music from Scotland.

Mixcloud is an indication of how far the distribution of soul music has come since it first broke into Scottish homes via the pirate radio.

Now major Scottish DJs Slam, Dave Clarke, Harri and Dominic, Jasper James and visiting honorary Scots like the Detroit Techno overlord Derrick May upload their entire sets to Mixcloud for your listening pleasure.

This is the logical extension of the old pirates – intense music, pure authenticity and bucking the system. It is where local meets global and a place where Scotland’s already formidable electronic dance music can be heard by the world.

And by the way, if you’re looking for great soul that sums up Brexit, then try The Temptations’ Ball Of Confusion. As for indyref, that’s the easiest of them all: Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come, James Brown’s Please, Please, Please and Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On.

The final book in Stuart Cosgrove’s Soul Trilogy, Harlem 69: the Future of Soul is published by Polygon