Pirate Radio
In 1964, with Alan Crawford, Smedley helped to form the British company Project Atlanta, Limited that successfully launched Britain's second full-time offshore commercial pirate radio station called Radio Atlanta. The station used a ship that had once been the home of Radio Nord. Radio Atlanta eventually merged with the Caroline Organization led by Irishman Ronan O'Rahilly and changed its name to Radio Caroline South.
When Reginald Calvert, manager of The Fortunes pop group, founded the rival pirate station Radio City, Smedley tried to persuade Calvert to amalgamate with Radio Caroline in exchange for a new transmitter. The transmitter turned out not to work properly and Calvert refused to pay for it. Smedley in response hired a group of riggers to board Radio City and retrieve the transmitter. The next day Calvert went to Smedley's house, where Smedley killed him with a shotgun. Smedley claimed that he feared Calvert was there to kill him and was acquitted of murder on the grounds of self defence.
Read more about this topic: Oliver Smedley
Famous quotes containing the words pirate and/or radio:
“A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Now they can do the radio in so many languages that nobody any longer dreams of a single language, and there should not any longer be dreams of conquest because the globe is all one, anybody can hear everything and everybody can hear the same thing, so what is the use of conquering.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)