BC166 - “We Can Be Free”: The Pirate Radio Explosion of Ezee D on Don FM (February 20, 1993)
A Pop Conference presentation, as scripted
Logo via YouTube
The bad news: I can’t afford to be in Los Angeles for Pop Conference 2026, three years in a row I’ve missed out. The good news: They accepted my presentation, which is written out below. I delivered it as an audio talk, and then did Q&A via Zoom. Good times. Enjoy!
Hello. I miss you all dearly. I’m going to talk about Ezee-D on Don 105.7 FM in London, recorded from the air on February 20, 1993, and uploaded to SoundCloud by Deep Inside the Oldskool on February 19, 2015. This my favorite pirate radio DJ set of all time, and I am going to play you its first fifteen seconds, and I’m going to do it a few times, so be prepared for that. I’m doing this because these fifteen seconds contain a lot of data. The track in question is “We Can Be Free,” by Tom & Jerry—a 4Hero alias. Let’s begin.
[Play 0:00 to 0:15, fade down] That comes in a hair fast, you can just about hear it, and moreover you can feel it. It’s a technical mistake that opens an experiential wormhole. Your heart rate is about to jump—now it has. Let’s hear it again. [Play first 15 seconds again, lower volume]
What I want to highlight in hindsight there is the fuzz. This has a couple of meanings with regard to pirate tapes. One of these involves law enforcement—as the name implies, pirates were in court of law illegal. So was a lot of what was fueling them and what they in turn fueled, not least on the part of the participants. That is reflected by the music alone in this opening fifteen seconds—as we’ll see, it is often matched or surpassed, vibe-wise, by the DJ’s handiwork, let’s call it. This was commonplace right then. Let me read you an excerpt from an archived webpage, from London Pirates, about a Don FM splinter faction, written by one of its members, Stevie A:
Whilst on Don, I managed to pick up a lot of technical skills, and along with DJs Ruxspin [as in Teddy Ruxpin, the doll that popularized home animatronics for kids], Phil B, Crown, and DJ Nut Nut [speaking of names . . .], I set up Scandal FM. We were the craziest bunch of kids on the airwaves—
Let me pause here: Jesus Christ, really?! Examples TK, trust.
Back to the quote—
and we discovered DJs such as Scott Garcia, Donna D, and Deekline, who played on our station regularly. I remember a fair bit about the Scandal days but much of it is just a blur! Scandal was a constant party and nothing or nobody else mattered. I think you get the picture! But in case you don’t, just try to imagine fifteen teenagers earning thousands of pounds a week and running a radio station that they loved more than life! Due to certain events, which I won’t go into, the Scandal crew parted company.
What a tone-drop! There’s a lifetime in that quote—fifteen of them, in fact. I can’t help but wonder how many of them are still around. There are a similar number of lifetimes in the first fifteen seconds of the Ezee-D mix in question, which I’ll play you again, this time with a proviso: Listen for the aural static. [Play first 15 seconds again, lower volume]
There’s something voluptuous about the way that static comes in, applying itself to the high notes, gilding them. It’s completely accidental, as is so much else in this set, but the way it accents the incoming a cappella vocal is like the first snow on a street sign.
The reason for that static, of course, is that the pirates were precisely placed along the London airwaves. Let me quote here from Simon Reynolds’ Energy Flash, where he interviews Marcus of the legendary early-nineties jungle pirate Don FM: “Most pirates use transmitters that are ‘crystal-locked, so that the whole emergency frequency scare is just a lie,’ insists Marcus. ‘The FM frequency band goes up in 0.05 steps, and to be locked means that your signal is precisely on that 0.05, and there’s no leakage either side of it.’”
Leading to endless amounts of static on an endless ocean of pirate tapes.
So that’s our first fifteen seconds, heard three different ways, as a model of musical excitement, subcultural cum criminal culture, and the way stray noise enhances the vibe of a transmission, gives it aural gravity and weight, a sense of time and place, a kind of corporeality older listeners have long associated with live recordings of grouped musicians. The other thing that connects them is that every single part communicates as an accident even as it also communicates as a perfect model of the form.
Let’s start with yet another reason this is the case—the fact of it being the beginning of the tape, but not of the set, per se. Don FM DJs, as Reynolds reported in Energy Flash, paid the station ten pounds to play ninety-minute on-air shifts—literal pay-for-play. The logic was that it would get the DJs club gigs, which it frequently did—see DJ Trace, a Don discovery who transitioned to drum & bass figurehead in an impressively short period. This set is thirty-three minutes almost exactly. It’s not a document of what happened when Ezee-D got on the decks and the microphone, so much as the result of when somebody popped a tape in and hit “record.” It’s the tail end of his set, even though the way the tape catches the beginning gives it a perfect introductory quality.
That, in part, is an element of the appeal of pirate tapes—they were caught on the run, not presented as a finished item. The static was part of the appeal, the illegality and partying indulgences, the here-now-gone-next-fortnight tracks—the very fleetingness of the whole thing, a sense that the future was both in their hands and out of their control. All of that is in this tape.
[Play 0:50 to 1:25, fade down.]
Why this one, though? As Simon Reynolds noted in February 2018, “Don FM is my favorite station,” and it had moved him to do some math about his favorite era of its history: “[From] Nov ’92 to end of ’93—that must amount to some three thousand hours of Don FM transmissions. So, if there’s forty-five hours of it online, that means just one out of every sixty-six of its hours of broadcast in that period is archived publicly.”
Let me repeat, with stress: This was eight years ago, and that number has most certainly gone up. That doesn’t mean that the audience for it is that big. I, too, was moved to do a little math about the DJ behind my favorite tape. Using the DJ’s MixesDB page as my guide, I searched the play numbers for each of the eleven Ezee-D sets listed, all but one of them on Don FM between December 1992 and May 1993, apart from a 1994 set on another jungle pirate, Flex FM.
All but three of these tapes came courtesy of Deep Inside the Oldskool—and I double-checked, it is up to date there; that’s how many Ezee-D sets they’ve uploaded so far, the most recent in 2024. The first seven of these on the page, listed chronologically, have fewer than 3,800 listens between them—the lowest has 357, the highest 727; the mean listenership is 396. That goes up sharply for the two that are on YouTube pages—May 1993, via an account called Oldskool Raver, and the 1994 set on Flex FM, via TheWorldIsInTrouble, each with around 6,400 plays. That tells us a lot about where the audience for these tapes are: YouTube much more than SoundCloud.
That leaves two tapes, and what is striking is that they were recorded on consecutive days. One of them, of course, is my beloved February 20, 1993, which as I type this is nearing the fifteen-hundred mark. I am happy to attribute at least a little bit of this to my own previous intervention on this set’s behalf. The April 2018 issue of The Wire magazine, number 410, has the jazz guitarist Mary Halvorson on the cover, and contains my own piece, “The Primer: Pirate radio DJ sets,” which highlights 28 mixes spanning the unofficial British airwaves’ hold on electronic dance music from acid house to the rise of the podcast. The February 20, 1993 set is among them.
But the other outlier was the Don FM tape from February 19, 1993, the day before my selection—and it’s even more popular, around 1,775 plays to date. Unlike February 20, the tape is shared (in fact, most of the Ezee-D tapes cited here are split among multiple DJs). February 19 is shared with Ed Rush and MC Ryme Time. It’s fierce as fuck, too, and Ezee-D’s enunciation is still slurry, but it is positively monastic compared to what he did a day later.
[Play 3:49 to 4:49; talk over before fading down, after first timing error]
OK, are you hearing the obvious errors in there? This is called mixing outside your headphones. You’re supposed to put that fader down while you’re monkeying with the timing, but Ezee-D doesn’t G.A.F. He’s paying for the time, and if he wants to practice on the air, he may.
The thing is, it’s mesmerizing. It only makes the tape better. It only enhances the vibe. It’s all about gaining velocity—the DJ is tripping all over his shoes on the decks, pitch-shifting the next record on the air rather than in his headphones, which he does multiple times throughout this tape. And what it transmits is clear—nothing can stop this music’s momentum, except of course the DJ.
[Play 7:22 to 7:50, fade down]
I want to highlight that transition for two reasons. One, turning the turntable off and letting the track drag to a close is a time-honored tradition that the pirates utilized plenty, and this is a good example. In this case, the song that comes to a stop is Bad Influence’s “Never Too Much (Remix).”
The other reason I’m highlighting this section is that is that instead of bringing in something wholly different, as many DJs use this technique to do, Ezee-D brings in a track—in this case, “Total Feeling” by Joint Project—that matches it tonally, timbrally, and in terms of brightness and momentum. That is, the Joint Project record matches the sound of the other turntable rumbling to a halt.
It also demonstrates how, whatever the efficacy, Ezee-D here was playing tracks upon tracks upon tracks—and in a music where the tracks were themselves often simply collages of other records, the effect was often dizzying. Again, everything on this set pushes the future hard. Some of the tape’s most astounding moments are among its most garish, such as this one I’ll play next. This one is long—over two minutes, and I’m going to explain it first. It’s later in the set, starting at 13:42 and ending a few seconds shy of sixteen minutes, and it is also a wobbly but vibey mix. Try to hear the way he wrestles with the two tracks’ balance, taking his time and really trying to put the damn thing through, and then hear how he finally negotiates the tender balance between them.
[Play 13:42 to 15:50, fade out]
“Tender balance,” what a comedian. That sudden, violent backspin out of the chipmunk R&B of DJ Massive’s “Ruff in the Comfort Zone” into the truly imperious gaseous diva vocal from X Project’s “Walking in the Air (Mix 3)” is one of my favorite moments of any mix. Especially in a post-Ableton Live world where a DJ editing beats together is a snap, this set’s sheer outlandishness is a wonder to behold. I’m going to leave you with this bit from near the end of the tape:
[Play 30:01 to 31:10, fade out]
OK, I just want to reiterate what Ezee-D said on the microphone there just now. It’s very important, and it speaks to the state of mind he was undoubtedly in when he made it. He said, “Bluh bluh-bluh bluh-bluh bluh-bluh.” You’re welcome. Thank you.