When I lived in London, the pirate radio stations I found all seemed to consist of back-to-back banging tunes and urban music, linked by a DJ who invariably sounded as though he was swallowing the mike. I didn't expect to find any pirate stations here in Suffolk. Back in the 1960s, this was almost a line of sight reception area for the likes of Radio Caroline and Radio London, but the original Caroline ship is at the bottom of the North Sea, and the legendary Keith Skues can now be found on BBC local radio here in the East, rather than on Big L.

It was a surprise, then, to catch one of the recent test broadcasts for an apparently unlicensed station calling itself Radio Lowestoft. It was an even greater surprise to discover that the music played by the station was curiously agreeable, and that it employed avuncular old-school presenters, who knew the correct distance to be maintained twixt gob and microphone.

The station doesn't seem to have begun broadcasting in earnest yet, but I feel that more people should know about its good works. So, I held my Prinztronic cassette recorder to the speaker of the kitchen wireless and recorded the aforementioned test transmission, which I now offer for your delectation.

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