I can recall quite clearly first tuning into what was then a truly innovative phenomenon in radio. It was a Sunday morning in the spring of 1964 and The Observer newspaper had a story on the front page about test transmissions from a radio ship called Radio Caroline anchored somewhere off the Thames estuary. Portable transistor radios were, in those days, still a relatively new arrival on the consumer goods shelves and they lacked the power and sensitivity to receive such weak signals. True enough, I could not receive Radio Caroline from my home in the north of Scotland on a transistor radio but, being something of a radio afficionado at the tender age of 15, a former Bomber Command radio receiver (type R1224A, if my memory does not deceive me) lurked in the attic and was connected to a 120 foot-long wire antenna in the garden below. I was not altogether sure why at the time, but I felt a very distinct thrill of excitement as I tuned the dial and heard, for the very first time, ‘Good morning, this is Caroline on 199. Your all day music station’.

At the beginning of the 21st century it must be difficult to comprehend what a world virtually without popular music radio was like. At the beginning of the 1960s, most of the time there was no pop music to be heard on the airwaves. Indeed, some of the time there was no music at all. In the UK, the airwaves were the exclusive and unquestioned prerogative of the British Broadcasting Corporation which still strictly operated by the Reithian principles imposed by its eminence grise in the 1920s and ‘30s." - From the new preface by Paul Harris.