Steve Conway Reads from 'Shiprocked, Life on the Waves with Radio Caroline'

dublin | arts and media | event notice Sunday February 21, 2010 20:58 by Seven Towers Agency - Seven Towers Agency info at seventowers dot ie

Baldoyle Public Library

7pm on Tuesday 9th March

Baldoyle Public Library, Baldoyle Dublin

In his late teens, in the throes of the 1980s depression, Dubliner Steve Conway emigrated to London where he began working in a small computer firm in the South London suburb of Surbiton, providing customer service and installation advice to the pioneers in the office and home computing world. There Steve also began a love affair with the new revolution, spreading across the South East of England – the Pirate Revolution. Before you start wondering, there were no hooked hands involved, no cutlasses and swords, but there was a ship, there was a crew, there were high seas, and waves and a battle to stay one step ahead of the authorities. There was also bandwidth and waves of another type, for Steve fell in love with the pirate radio revolution which battled in this country and in the UK from the mid 1960s until the late 1990s. In Steve’s case, his, although working on a number of stations, his true love was the most famous of all the Pirate Radio Stations – Radio Caroline - which, founded by an Irish Man, Ronan O’Rahilly, sailed the high seas, fighting the battle to bring good and constant music to the homes of the UK and North Europe, (when the weather conditions were right, parts of Ireland) from March 23rd 1964 until the final Caroline Radio Ship, the Ross Revenge, ran aground on the Goodwin Sands in Kent on 20th November 1991.

Steve Conway joined Radio Caroline in February 1987, and rose through the ranks from being an initially very bad news reader to being programme controller on the Station, helping to keep it going through the hurricane that really was in October 1987 and the Great Mast Fall in November 1987, and the life-threatening task of re-building the mast at sea during storms, as they could not risk arrest by bringing the ship in to shore! All this well as generally battling the elements, surviving without chocolate – and almost without food and water at one point – in order to bring consistently good music to the world! There were fine times too – the exploding donuts for one, moonlight jaunts, the ocean liner friends, birthday celebrations and Christmas gifts from shore, for others.

Steve was among the final 5 crew who were air lifted to safety by an RAF helicopter after the Ross Revenge Radio Ship ran aground on the treacherous ship swallowing Goodwin Sands in Kent – rescued only minutes after they overheard the coast guard telling the nearby ships that they may be looking for bodies in the water.

Steve has written of his adventures on the high seas in the best-selling memoir Shiprocked, Life on the Waves with Radio Caroline published by Dublin publisher Liberties Press in March 2009, and with the second printing well on its way to selling out as the book continues to leap off the shelves in Ireland, UK and US.

Some of the wonderful reviews of this book are attached.
Steve will be reading from Shiprocked at Baldoyle Public Library at 7pm on Tuesday 9th March.

Steve will also be signing copies of his book at the reading and a collection box will also be available for listeners to donate to the RNLI.

Steve Conway is represented by The Seven Towers Agency which is a not for profit creative arts agency and independent publishing house. Steve has an additional Radio Caroline story in Census, The First Seven Towers Anthology published by Seven Towers, with royalties going to AWARE, the charity which seeks to provide awareness, education and support about and to people affected by depression. Census, The First Seven Towers Anthology is part of the 1000 books challenge which seeks to encourage the public and business to fund independent publishers though purchase of their publications, with the message that, for every 1000 books sold, 2 -3 further titles can be published.
The RNLI, AWARE and The Seven Towers Agency are all non-for-profit organisations.

Gareth O’Callaghan, also a former Caroline DJ praises Steve’s “wonderful ability to tell stories and create pictures” and said “no movie script can ever better or overshadow the story that you tell so finely and so passionately”.
“he writes with a contagious sense of wonderment . . . reads like the radio obsessive version of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch” Stuart Clarke, Sunday Business Post.
“Written in a conversational style with all the geeky zeal of a real Radio anorak it's hard to resist Conway's anecdotes about life on board, the esprit de corps that comes with living in close quarters, and the on-going struggles to keep Caroline on air and afloat in the face of much static from killjoy authorities. Alan Corr, RTE Guide

Library Journal of America
“Conway's evocatively written memoir is animated and engaging . . . “Fluidly written” Library Journal of America