Spangles Muldoon

Spangles Muldoon, real name Chris Cary, was a radio broadcaster best known for his work on British offshore radio station Radio Caroline. Cary was a key figure in the British rock music radio revolution of the 1960s. He was born in Chester, U.K., on 5 October 1946 and died on 29 February 2008, in Tenerife, Spain, after suffering from two strokes.

Cary was one of the DJs who broadcast from the offshore pirate radio ship Radio Caroline in 1967 and 1968.[1] At its peak the station had 23 million listeners. In the 1970s Cary was a DJ on RNI [2] before a stint at Radio Luxembourg.

Chris worked on Radio Caroline when it came back on air in 1972 after being in the port of Amsterdam for 5 years (from 1968) and later went to Radio Luxembourg 208 in 1975 and stayed there until around 1978.

He operated pioneering computer retailer Compshop in North London in the late 1970s, and was involved with the design of the Compukit UK101 and sold the MicroAce,[3] an unlicensed "clone" of the Sinlair ZX80.[4].

In 1980 Cary went to Ireland with Robbie Robinson to set up Sunshine Radio. In 1981 he returned to Ireland again to set up Ireland's Radio Nova, which was the most successful commercial Top 40 radio station in Ireland to date in terms of professionalism and listenership. Many of the programming philosophies on Nova were based around Los Angeles station KIIS-FM. Chris met his future second wife Sybil Fennell on Radio Nova, as she was a newsreader on that station. He also set up a sister station to Nova called Kiss FM. He broadcast from time to time himself on Nova. 1986 Nova closed down and Chris moved back to the UK. He now had a company dealing in satellite equipment and for a while ran a satellite-distributed version of Radio Nova in Britain which employed a number of former pirate DJs including Paul Burnett, Mark Wesley and Tony Blackburn. Chris did present some programmes on the successor to Radio Nova called Energy 103. In the late 1980s', Chris set up a satellite station called Radio Nova International.

In 1978 Cary went to Ireland with Robbie Robinson and DJ Roger Swann to set up Sunshine Radio with the stated objective of broadcasting to holidaymakers in Majorca. The cars they travelled in (a Lincoln Continental and a Mercedes) contained much of the broadcasting equipment that they intended to fit to an ancient wooden keeled sloop. Unfortunately the Mercedes broke down on the M1 but the Lincoln Continental made it to Larne where the "radio ship" was being prepared. DJ Roger Swann left after 10 days or so and ended up working on the voice of Peace and the pirate radio ship didn't make further than Dublin... The final fate of the radio ship is unknown but rumor has it that some broadcasts to the Irish republic were made from the ship..

His son Nico Cary is a British triathlete who completed three marathons back to back raising over £14,000 for Movember UK[5]

References
  1. Pirate Radio Hall of Fame
  2. Pirate Radio Hall of Fame
  3. Advertisement (November 1980). "A Microcomputer for everyone at a Micro Price". BYTE. p. 359. Retrieved 18 October 2013.
  4. Microace repair, detailing byte-swap
  5. Marathon Man Gets All Social

See Spangles Muldoon on Pirate Radio Hall of Fame, pictured with Ray Cooper, Radio London link.


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