Fifty years ago, after a long delay, the government acted to close down the dozen or so pirate radio stations which had sprung up around the British coast. Many of the stories about those ships and offshore forts are well known, but this book asks intriguing questions about what was really going on behind the scenes.

Offshore unlicensed radio stations were not a new idea, they had existed in different forms elsewhere for decades, so why did the phenomenon blossom in the UK when it did?

It is common to conflate the rise of the UK pirate radio stations with the liberation struggles going on at the same time: civil rights protests, anti-war movements, student unrest and increasingly liberal attitudes to sex and sexuality. Fifty years on we can appreciate the reality: the people behind the early offshore stations were frequently motivated by very different political agendas and often the ships and forts were simply pawns in much bigger power games.