BEFORE achieving stardom as one of the pioneers of Britain’s pirate radio stations, Colin Nichol had already earned his place in Western Australian history as the voice that brought it rock ’n’ roll.

Mr Nichol died on Tuesday following a brief battle with pancreatic cancer.

The Bibra Lake resident started in radio in 1957, signing up as an announcer with 6PM (as Hit 92.9 was known back then) just as the waves from Bill Haley and Elvis Presley’s first seismic chart-toppers were being felt around the world.

• Pirate DJ, BBC announcer, malls manager – and even an MI5 target – Colin Nichol led a remarkable life.

Hi Fi Club

As the state’s leading DJ in 1959, he was chosen to run a WA chapter of the Coca-Cola Bottlers Hi Fi Club, a radio club originating out of New York – Bert Newton headed up South Australia’s version.

The club gave Nichol’s program access to interviews from international artists and competitions, but most crucially for listeners, access to records from the emerging rock ’n’ roll scenes in the UK and US that weren’t otherwise available in Australia.

It led him to booking out ballrooms, theatres and town halls across the state, his dances attracting thousands who were introduced to acts once household names and still etched in the country’s Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame; Johnny O’Keefe, Col Joye and Johnny Young.

Having taken on managing bands, in 1963 Nichol gave up his WA gig and headed to England for a tour with friends Terry Walker, Tony Tyler and Jim Sheridan, who became The Times.

• Interviewing The Beatles, with George Martin in the background.

While they returned to WA to score a minor chart hit, Nichol stayed in England and saw his career hit new heights.

Fellow Aussie Allan Crawford had had a brainwave; in order to break the government and recording companies’ iron grip on the radio waves, he was planning to rig up a ship broadcasting into the country from international waters.

The era of British pirate radio was about to make its own waves.

Making waves

Crawford signed on Nichol, who was scheduled to make the first pirate broadcast from Radio Atlanta before high-seas shenanigans saw rival outfit Radio Caroline pip them to the post. Eventually the two merged, taking the latter moniker.

While Nichol pooh-poohed the movie The Boat that Rocked as bearing only a passing resemblance to life on Caroline, he once told the Herald there was one question he was constantly asked about.

“The sex, drugs and rock and roll thing,” he said.

“All were everywhere, just about everyone was at it. 

“That was Swinging England, after all, and we made it swing. We were part of the music, the fashion and the daily news.”

He said life on the ship wasn’t the one big party as depicted, as there were storms that turned many a DJ green, shortages of food when supplies couldn’t make it – and cabin fever.

• With Britt Wadner and Ronan O’Rahilly the “Pirate Radio King” launching Radio Atlanta.

“I would not be here if I hadn’t casually moved my head while typing in my cabin, to just miss the deadly impact of a hurled can full of beer which embedded in the thick insulation of the bulkhead,” he once wrote for the Herald.

“The chief engineer had lost it.”

Once government restrictions finally caught up to silence the pirates, Nichol landed a stint reading the news for the BBC – a rare honour for someone with an Aussie accent.

On his return to Australia, Nichol took a different tack and spent several years managing Adelaide’s Rundle Street Malls, an experience he later used to benchmark Fremantle’s own retail efforts in a series of articles he contributed to the Herald. Rarely did it stack up, in his opinion.

Nichol’s niece Jenny Nichol told the Herald her uncle was something of an “enigma” to the family.

Humble

“Parts of his career drips out every now and then, but he was a bit of a mystery to us because he was also quite a humble guy so he never blew his own trumpet about what he had done.

“In fact, we’re sort of finding out more and more things as we go through his papers.”

Ms Nichol said the family often had no idea what he was up to on the other side of the world; he left when his youngest sister was still in her early teens and she didn’t see him again until her forties.

“A whole lot of fascinating things were happening to him that nobody actually knew about,” Ms Nichol said.

“We found a certificate from the first Concorde flight which went in March 1969 and he was a passenger.”

Nichol was the oldest of four siblings, and tragically his brother Mike died earlier this year and the elder sister just three weeks ago.

by STEVE GRANT