The Beginning
The idea of launching a radio station at the Glastonbury Festival was coined at the festival in 1982 by Lawrie Hallett and Norman McLeod. Radio Avalon was launched the next year (1983) operating from a tent and a red VW camper van. Norman McLeod and Lawrie Hallett were joined by Alan Brown, Paul Garner and others. The crew in these early years came from Wireless Workshop in Brighton, Phoenix Communications in London and Sheffield Peace Radio. The transmission equipment used was built by the members and much of the outboard equipment came from the founders' domestic hi-fi, reflecting the DIY ethic that characterised much of the Radio Avalon approach for several years. At this time, the station's programme was a very free format, with one show flowing into another depending on which crew member was available and who wanted to do a show. For several years, these pioneering broadcasts came from a tent near to Goose Hall and the signal very occasionally made it as far as Glastonbury town, a distance of 5 miles away. The presenters from midnight to daybreak were known as "The Dead Heads"—they played mainly Grateful Dead records mixed with other late night tracks. By the mid-1980s the team was joined by a number of volunteers from Ireland and in particular from Bray Local Broadcasting. A regular feature of these early broadcasts were various outside broadcasts from backstage and or from the top of Glastonbury Tor, looking down across the festival site just visible several miles away.
Radio Avalon remained a pirate radio station for the first 7 years of its life. It was always the aim of its members that it would become a legal broadcaster and following changes to government legislation in 1988 and again in 1991, Radio Avalon applied for and was awarded a Restricted Service Licence (RSL).
Read more about this topic: Radio Avalon
Famous quotes containing the words the beginning and/or beginning:
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)