Reg Calvert was David’s manager and they cooked up the stunt between them. We were all in on it – roadie Brian Paull, keyboard player (and later actor) Paul Dean Nicholas, guitarist Geoff Mew, all David’s group The Savages, plus myself. We were all sworn to secrecy because the publicity, we hoped would be massive. It was.
 
We launched the station on the good ship Cornucopia, but it never went much further than London Bridge! We actually went out to sea on another vessel, a fishing boat called The Harvester. This boat was owned by Fred Downs, Fred died in a tragic accident in 1974 - he drowned. The Harvester boats 1 and 2 supplied the Gun Towers, Radio Sutch, with everything we needed, and Fred Downs did a great job in looking after us. The day that Radio Sutch started we sailed out of Whitstable, and sailed into history. We sailed out into the Thames Estury, leaving loads of reporters on the dock. Cameras were flashing, reporters were running along the quay shouting for us to pose. David got seasick, I remember. We were all doing our bit dressed up as pirates, flashing our swords and anything else we could flash! Several girls were running along the dock waving skull and crossbone, flags and anything else they could wave (I think some of them got mixed up and thought Tom Jones was on board!). We had to hang on to the boat . There was a heavy swell running – in fact we had to hang on for dear life. This was to get away from the reporters so that they would not catch on that this was just a stunt.
  When we got out about eight miles we looked at each other and said ‘what do we do now?’ It was just at that moment that one of us spied the Gun Towers. It was like a miracle. We said to the fishing guy steering the boat, ‘What are those?’ He told us they were the old Gun Towers on Shivering Sands, used during the Second World War as a base for ack-ack guns to fire at the German planes as they came up the Thames Estury to try to bomb London. A STAR WAS BORN? The gun towers at Shivering Sands became the home of Radio Sutch and later Radio City.
  We could not believe our luck as we landed – by that I mean we went climbing up the ladder onto these massive gun towers. We were like kids with a new toy. We were running all over the place. There was room after room, great big water tanks that had stored drinking water, they had everything. The roofs of the towers were made of concrete 20 foot thick and there were cat-walks leading from one tower to another. We were made up.
 
We went straight back to land, collected a transmitter and some 12 volt car batteries, plus a turntable, some records and a microphone. Food and drinking water came next (we had to wash and shave in salt water which is not easy – soap does not lather in salt water).

Thank God for Reg Calvert, he was a genius. He turned a load of old rubbish equipment into a radio station.

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