I had delivery of a fabulous new book yesterday and have spent the last 24 hours leafing through it - and translating, as its in Swedish, which I'm not exactly proficient at! But the pictures are simply wonderful.
It's called Stick iväg, Jack!, and is by Jan Kotschack, who is son of the famous film producer Jack Kotschack who started Radio Nord and first converted the Mi Amigo to a radio ship.
This new book is almost 400 pages long and it tells the story of how Radio Nord came about, and the other activities and adventures of everyone's favourite radio ship (I think that’s correct; everyone I know thinks that Mi Amigo was the most comfortable ship - she would
certainly be the longest serving radio ship anyway). So many riveting bits of offshore radio history come alive in this book - including the plan to have a new service to Copenhagen, via another ship, and into Oslo, from a plane fling up and down the Kattegat! I had fleetingly heard of this last bit way back in 1980 when Howard Rose and I were trying to get a SCAN RADIO offshore station to sea in the Skagerak but this is the first time I saw anything about the
proposal actually in print, complete with a map!
So much in this book is new to me, even though I have long had a copy of the original Radio Nord book, published by Paul Harris back in 1969. This new one has the Miss Radio Nord beauty queens, the charts and they are really ccooooorrrrrrr!
(OK, I’m back now)
It also has the somewhat dry political battles and it even talks about the Mi Amigo's later life as Caroline, complete with the recently released picture of her in her watery grave, courtesy of the PLA's hydrographers.
It seems to be very well written, I'm no expert on Swedish prose though. But the pictures are superb, and come from the Kotschack’s family collection and other sources. There is also a DVD with the book - some of the shots have been seen before but many are fresh. Anyone who remembers the old lady looking a bit sorry in the seventies will love her gracious lines when she was the most listened to station in Scandinavia.
I've long been interested in Swedish broadcasting - they tried to go all-FM by about 1960, much earlier than the UK, but Radio Nord help prick that by being on MW. Sweden had no commercial radio until the mid 1990s (we had plans to broadcast Baltic Radio to there from Poland and Lithuania in the early 1990s, but the huge capital investment necessary wasn't forthcoming).
So, if you read Swedish, or just like looking at these great pictures of the Mi Amigo in all her glory, this is a great book for any Anorak's bookshelf.
Paul Rusling, på Radio Carolines forum på Yahoo
