chio said:
Maybe a bit harsh there, but I certainly don't think they were done for the love of music!
I think you possibly had to be there. The _only_ music on the radio was on the BBC Light Programme, where the likes of David Jacobs really didn't cater for our side of the generation gap (a phrase you don't hear very often any more).
Plus Radio Luxemburg, to be fair, which was there and which did play stuff aimed at the likes of me, but which somehow never really gripped the imagination.
The pirates were alive, and like hippogriff says, they had the music but they also made the demand for provision for
us. It was protest, it was sticking two fingers up at authority, firmly from the perspective of those who resented the straightjacket conformity rule of the men in grey suits.
Sure it's dead easy to look at this with 2005 eyes and attribute all the motivation to cynical greed for airplay money and a battle for market share. But that isn't seeing the story from the perspective of mid-sixties pent-up demand for individual expression. The pirates opened up a window, and it's not coincidental that this happpened at a time when young men were shocking the nation by not wearing a tie and -shock, horror- growing their hair over their ears. Today we'd look at that as a fashion statement cynically manipulated by the hairdressing industry to reinvigorate falling revenues...
That was a simpler age, which doesn't mean the pirates weren't businesses.
So I made a crystal set and listened to Radio London under the bedclothes- which is what it had to be because the parents believed the stuff about the pirates brainwashing the young. And when the men in grey suits realised by how much they'd lost the plot, they fought back by inventing Radio 1 and playlists and so on.
And while I'm here, and since no-one has mentioned them, an honourable mention for Radio Jackie, who flew the pirate flag for lots of years through the 70s & 80s and also for the wonderful DBC (Dread Broadcasting Corp) who brought raggae and roots (and popularised the concept of the phenomenally stoned DJ) to prominence at a time when Aunty Radio 1 was completely ignoring anything outside the mainstream.
I've just found a show list for the Light Programme here, which gives a flavour. That was it, all of it, nothing else. 
BUT I rather like them in principle. A guy parked his van outside my flat one Sunday morning recently and was broadcasting for a few hours. I really enjoy these unexpected aspects of living in such a dvierse community™ And I don't mind listening to The Archers on headphones for a bit 
