Radio London

Peel Remembers
"Early in 1967 – I was married at the time to an American girl, and it was a fairly catastrophic marriage, so I decided to get out of the area to the extent of coming back to Britain. And went to live with my mother in Notting Hill. And obviously I had no work, and no expectation of work. And a fellow who was living next to her at the time had dealings with Radio London, the pirate ship, and he said why didn’t I go along and see Alan Keane, who was running the station from the offices in Curzon Street. So I went along. Fortunately, they didn’t ask me to audition. I just said I’d been working on the radio in California and they were sufficiently impressed by this to give me a job. And I was very pleased to get it, because as I said, my marriage was in tatters already and the idea of being on a ship for two weeks out of three seemed to be terribly appealing, because it meant I was away from domestic strife."