Lee Morrison
Lee profile
My name's Lee Morrison, and I'm from the south of England. I hope you won't hold that against me.

I've always been a fan of progressive and melodic rock. In fact at school I was part of a small clique of Yes and ELP fans, and we all had to put up with a lot of ridicule from the rest of our year who all seemed to be into Bob Marley. (Not that I have anything against the late Mr Marley or his fans, of course.)

The soundtrack to my misspent youth was supplied by Radio Caroline, where DJs like James Ross, Mark Lawrence and Hawkwind fan Ed Foster were broadcasting album tracks and Loving Awareness from the increasingly battered and leaky MV Mi Amigo, although I occasionally defected to BBC Radio 1 to hear Tommy Vance and Alan Freeman playing rock in glorious stereo. Not 'arf!

After the leaks joined up in 1980 and the poor old Mi Amigo went down, I discovered a couple of London-based pirates, Alice's Restaurant and RFM. It was the first time I realised that land-based pirates could also be into my sort of music rather than just dance, and despite the hissy FM quality I listened religiously until they mysteriously disappeared from the airwaves a few years later
.

In the 1980s I got into bands like IQ, Pallas, Pendragon, Galahad, Grace, Final Conflict and Twelfth Night, and of course The Enid. Astonishingly, many of these bands are still going strong in the 2010s - how many of today's top 40 artists will still be recording thirty years from now?

My own big break in radio came, when a couple of the guys from MAR heard a rock show that I'd sent to a Radio Caroline fan site and invited me to contribute. I put together four shows for the Easter 2007 broadcast, and since then I've been on MAR more or less continuously.

At one point I was also supplying a 2-hour show to the late lamented
Radio Xanadu every week, but the workload got a bit much, so as of 2011 I'm content to appear once a week on MAR, and annually on the RJN tribute broadcasts. My alter-ego, the offshore radio anorak, sometimes takes over (usually at bank holidays) to present pirate archive shows, in a voice that he seems to have borrowed from Marty Feldman.

My favourite music can still surprise me, thrill me, excite me and move me, and so I'll keep playing it in the sincere hope that it can do the same for you.



Back