Pirate radio in the United Kingdom Caroline and Radio London started to broadcast on medium wave to the UK from offshore ships or disused sea forts. At the time, these stations were not illegal because they were broadcasting from international waters. The stations were set up by entrepreneurs and music enthusiasts to meet the growing demand for pop and rock music, which was not catered for by the legal BBC Radio services. The first British pirate radio station was Radio Caroline, which was launched by Irish music entrepreneur Ronan O'Rahilly, and started broadcasting from a ship off the Essex coast in 1964. By 1967 ten pirate
Irish pirate radio have attracted the best of the talent from the burgeoning pirate scene – as well as several presenters who had worked on the pirate stations of the 1980s. The station was an instant success, attracting the wrath of commercial operators and the Government regulator. Over the course of its eight-month existence, the station's signals were jammed repeatedly by FM104, one of the (then) only two licensed commercial operators for the Dublin area, and its various mountain transmitter sites were raided by the Department of Communications. Kiss 103 finally closed in November 1994. No station in the history of pirate radio