A tribute To Limerick's 'Big L' pirate-radio station of the 80's.
My first 'real' job was in De Beers, Shannon Industrial Estate. Given that only the living-dead chose to stay in Shannon itself (hehe!) I had myself a bedsit in Limerick, taking the bus to & from Shannon each day. I still recall being eager to get home from work so I could tune into pirate station Big L's 'Listeners Top 10', catching perhaps the final half-hour (5.30 - 6.00pm) if CIE was doing its job. Yep, I was a big Big L fan back then, thinking "wow,this station is really cool!" when I first discovered it. In fact, I never realised that it was a pirate-station until recently! For the uninformed, Big L broadcasted in Limerick on both AM and FM from 1978 - 1985.
They did things that the likes of RTE, who had a virtual monopoly in broadcasting back then, would (could?) never do - 1.5 hours of back-to-back recordings by the same artist, or a listeners personal Top 10 being the ones I remember most.
Anyway, I liked what I was hearing at the time, and ended up recording a couple of audio cassettes worth of material during my stay in Limerick in 1984 - tapes I still have and listen to occasionally. Given that they're almost 30 years old now and have been played 100's of times, I thought it was about time that I digitised them for posterity. And then thought that there are probably a few people out there that feel nostalgic about this kind of stuff as well and would be interested in hearing some of the DJ's again, not to mention some cool music!
The bad news, although recorded from their FM stereo signal, back then I only had an old single-speaker radio-cassette player that had been discarded by my sister - so it's mono-only I'm afraid. They are encoded in the open-source 'ogg' format, codecs for which are freely available here if your setup doesn't already have them. Each file is about 45 minutes long (C90 cassettes) and close to 25meg in size.
I should add that I came across a site dedicated to Big L here - which was a surprise! - although it considers other pirate Big L's as well, the grand-daddy of them having been an off-shore pirate broadcasting to London which shut down in 1967. These audio files are perhaps more suited to a site like that rather than a blog, but its Contact information field is empty... Anyway, I 'borrowed' the Big L logo above from that site which I hope he won't mind.
Edit:
Finally got the rest of the tapes done. Please note that there's about 10min of non-relevant stuff on Tape 2. I thought about editing it out but decided to leave it as it is.
Big L Radio Tapes (Google Drive folder)
Great post very complimentary, thanks for being a fan. have fixed the contact page so you can use it as you may, would love to copy originals from you at your convenience for my book,the real story, on www.biglradiolimerick.com Thanks again
ReplyDeleteHello & welcome to this little-travelled corner of cyberspace - you're one of an exalted 15 that have read this blog-post in the past 7 months! The reason I was looking for your contact information way back then was to see if you wanted to host these recordings on your site - so you're welcome to use them as you see fit! Not sure what you mean by "copy originals from you" - if you are talking about physical tapes, you can easily copy the files I have uploaded to tapes yourself. Although I still have the original & much larger WAV's that were produced when recording from tape, given that the tapes themselves are mono and of fairly poor quality to begin with, the 'ogg' file sound-quality would be practically indistinguishable from either the WAV's or the tapes themselves.
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