So we’re sitting in Daragh’s car. It’s really early on a summertime morning- say 7am. Way too early to be up and sitting in a auto up the mountains under normal situations, but when you’re in your early 20 s and you’d simply finished a gig in Club Marlay around 3am, it was ridiculous.

But then we were young and that wasn’t even the most ridiculous thing “were just” do that day.

To set the situation, we were both DJs on what was probably Dublin’s biggest raider radio terminal in 1994- Kiss FM. We were on 103.2 FM playing’ hot hits’ and truly very popular with the 15 -2 4 year age-old demographic( I didn’t know they were a demographic back then, only an age group ).

Popularity is good, especially in the broadcast industry, but in this case it was very much a double-edged sword. All the plagiarists had been closed down in 1988 as the legal depots came on, but you can’t deter a good plagiarist down, and by’ 94 the demand was there for something other than the boring by-rote depots introduce into life by the IRTC( Independent Radio and Television Commission ).

There were spate of other stations, Sunset were large-scale and dancey, if I remember, from somewhere in Sandyford, but Kiss began with people I’d been doing radio with since I was 16- up the mountains that summer. Daragh I knew from college, and a series of increasingly bad gigs we did together that once almost resulted in us being blown up when his car went on fire in Goatstown. We positioned it out with bottles of fizzy Ballygowan we bought from a nearby newsagent.

Kiss FM programme from above the Xtravision video rental shop on Whitehall Road. We had cart machines and a yellow-bellied daddy shield on the primary studio mic. On the other mic we had an old-time sock. We might even had had some bumper stickers met. It was fun and first I was doing afternoons until I moved to the breakfast show at some station. You can see how much recreation it was in the picture below.

Around the time Daragh and I find ourselves up the mountain, I study I was still on afternoons. Anyway, the esteem of the terminal was such that one of the legal depots in Dublin- aimed at much the same audience- decided to jam us, i.e block our signal.

There are a number of versions of this depending on who you listen to, but the fib extends that said terminal were doing the jamming from their city centre studios- but were also providing a national news service to all the independents. One hour, at the top of the hour, the newsreader sat in the booth waiting to bring the latest headlines to all the radio stations taking the feed and got nothing but the music/ racket they were exerting to obstruct our communications. As did all those stations.

Ooops!

After that, they were well and truly after us. They included the hapless jammers, the Department of Communications, the guards and various other disgruntled gatherings. Somehow, perhaps via a mole in the authorities concerned or a relative of one of the station owneds, we discovered we were going to be raided. Fairly standard for a pirate depot- being attacked was like some kind of initiation into the real world of radio.

“Now my son, having eaten the heart of that lion, “youre a man”! ”

Except there was no lion and no delicious ventricular snacks for us to chow down on. See, it wasn’t the studios they were after. It was the transmitter, located off Mount Venus Road in the Dublin mountains. Quite how it was decided we’d all take turns doing displacements to keep an eye out is beyond me now, but we did and for some reason Daragh and I had the early watch. I believe it’s because we thought they were talking a load of bollocks about the raid and we could at least be seen to do our chip while snoozing in the car.

So, we go and do the gig in Club Marlay, the nightclub equivalent of going a Ronan Keating tattoo on your shoulder. It was the age of Cotton Eyed Joe and dance music with banjos in it. We represented everything is. There was no shame. “Theres not” chagrin even now.

After the gig we went back to my house, at the paw of the mountains as Daragh was from the other side of town, slept for what seemed a few minutes, before waking up to drive up and keep an eye on the transmitter place- a barn at the back of a farmer’s house. We get coffee and possibly some apple Danish on the way. We parked the car, we sat there. We probably talked about what a quantity of stupid old shit this was and why the blaze are we up a mountain at 7am on a Friday morning and there’s no way anything’s going to happen and then Daragh says, “Erm, what’s that? ”

I stopped grumbling and seemed down the road. We were at the top of a mountain and could see quite a room down.

“Well Daragh, ” I said, “if I’m not mistaken that appears to be a number of police cars and some vans which I would suggest are driven by officers from the Department of Communications.”

“Oh bollocks”, I said.

“SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTT !! ”, he said.

We rushed out of the car, hopped over the fence into the farmer’s yard, and ran into the barn where the transmitter was sitting. We unplugged it, we took the cables out, we operated down the side of the mountain and before we got to the Pitch and Putt course we disguised it in a load of very profound, dense gorse. We were very much out of breath because ranging at that time of the morning is not something we were used to. We “re not” athletes. We were quite unfit, very tired undoubtedly, DJs.

We were also, I think it’s fair to say, overjoyed. We had outsmarted the police and the authorities concerned! In your face people with authority and the power to arrest us. We’re too smart for you. Kiss FM won’t be stillness. The young people will continue to get what they want from their radio( when we get the thing hooked back up again of course ), and there’s nothing you can do about it!

“Phew, ” said Daragh, as something dawned on me.

“Yes, you have been able say’ phew’”, I said. “The other thing you could say is’ What about my auto? ’”

“Ah shite.”

Our plan to escape through the barricade, through the Pitch and Putt course, and out onto the road was scuppered by the small issue of the vehicle we had left in plain sight and from which they could undoubtedly get Daragh’s name and address. We brainstormed. We concluded. We studied. We mused over this plan and that.

And after careful consideration the best thing we could come up with was to walk back the course we came, stroll calmly past all the police and Department of Communications people, and if they invited us anything we’d say we were mountain walkers out for the purposes of an early promenade. I was wearing ripped jeans and a David Bowie t-shirt. Daragh probably had on one of those woolly jerseys he always wore and some docs. Proper mountain accompany gear, all right.

Still, that’s what we did.

“Where are you boys coming from? ”, said the firstly Garda the moment we got in sight.

“We were just out for an early stretch of the legs”, I smiled.

“A mountain walk! ”, said Daragh.

“Is that freedom? ”, he said.

“It is”, I said, trying to conclude my highway past him and his two other Garda mates who had come over.

“You don’t much look like mountaineers”, said Garda 2.

“There’s a difference between a mountaineer and someone treading in the mountains, ” I affirmed most helpfully.

“Well you don’t look like either of them, ya feckin’ eejit”, he said, and he led us over to the Department of Communications.

They knew. We knew they knew. They knew we knew they knew. But now it was all about the dance. If we admitted anything, we’d lose the transmitter and it’d be a big setback for the station that we were both working at for free. I hadn’t mentioned the for free part? We were 23, and on the radio, it was all about the adoration of playing Whigfield’s Saturday Night on a 90 instant rotation.

They quizzed us this course and that about who we were, what we were doing, why “were just” doing it. One of the Gardai knew my father.

“What would he say if he knew you were up here this morning? ”, he said.

“He’d think I was a bit of gobshite, to be honest, but he’d probably have a laugh about it.”

To be fair to the Garda, he chuckled more. It went on like this for ages, more officials arrived. They had bird-dogs. I don’t know why. Are there transmitter inhaling bird-dogs? Someone from the Department came over to talk to us, but his prodigious mobile phone went off.

“It’s the 98 FM Cash Call !, ” I said, referencing one of those promotions where if your telephone reverberate and you answered by saying the name of the radio station you’d earn PS1000, but he wasn’t amazed in the slightest.

Time went by, they knew they weren’t getting anything from us and that they’d have to let us go. They did commit it one last try though, in fairness. The eldest Garda there brought us over to the fence, and we stood gaping out over sun-kissed Dublin city on a beautiful summer’s morning.

“Do you like football boys? ”, he said.

“Sure”, I replied.

“The World Cup. I gamble ye’re are aroused for that”.

We were. Ireland had qualified for USA ’9 4 and were gearing up to play Italy in their first game.

“It’s on in America, so it is. Great place that America, have you ever been? ”, he asked, looking wistfully out at the city down below us.

We had. We told him so. He then turning now to us both with a face of resound, and clamoured, “WELL YE’LL NEVER BE ABLE TO GO AGIN IF YOU HAVE A CRIMINAL RECORD! ”

I think this was the bit where he expected us to break down, our hopes and dreams of making a brand-new life in Americay smashed by our heinous and prohibited transmitter concealing/ mountain walking.

It didn’t work. They let us go and later, after we’d given the right people the coordinates of the transmitter, Kiss FM was back on breeze. For our honor we were given a 100% salary rise by the station proprietors and maybe, just perhaps, we got bought a cod and microchips from Borza’s on Whitehall Road.

It was the last time Daragh and I ever vanished mountain moving together. Once was quite enough.

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