Radio Caroline was the iconic pirate radio station. It invigorated a generation, capturing the imaginations of millions of people across Britain and Ireland when it started broadcasting music twenty-four hours a day from the North Sea in 1964.
In 1985, twenty-one-year-old IT executive Steve Conway left his job in England and moved to the ship The Ross Revenge to work as a newsreader for Radio Caroline. SHIPROCKED is the story of his adventures on board, as a member of a dedicated crew struggling to keep the radio station – and the ship – afloat in hazardous conditions, amid the stress of operating on a shoestring budget, with ever-present government harassment.
Hurricane-force winds and towering waves marked the sad demise of The Ross Revenge’s outlaw days. The ship was smashed onto the notorious Goodwin Sands in Kent in a dramatic storm that almost drowned Conway and his companions.
This new edition of SHIPROCKED, marking Radio Caroline’s fiftieth anniversary, includes a new introduction by the author and an epilogue on the revolutionary era of pirate radio, which laid the foundations for our current unregulated music market. The book inspired the movie The Boat That Rocked, with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy and Rhys Ifans. A must-read.