Farringdon Road a radio station broadcasts to the world - across the Internet.
Steve Armstrong on the former pirate station turned global force.

When a group of outlaws from the glory days of pirate radio team up with London's new music breed to put out the world's first virtual pirate station on the Internet, it's got to be worth getting online. Interface FM has been up and running for a year and is claiming 600,000 hits a month from places as far flung as Yemen, Bosnia and the US. Since it has been transmitting, its been taken up by stations around the world and replayed live to stunned listeners, even hardwired into the Muzak station of a US shopping mall to shake the guts of fat American housewives drifting through the emptiness of K-Mart.

Interestingly, it has a high percentage of military listeners. So far, two US military bases in Japan and the Balkans have taken the service and put it out over their own airwaves. The Yankee soldiers are pretty keen on drum and bass, it appears. The station is planning to make up a weekly Best Of compilation and mail it out to grateful broadcasters around the world. This is a new breed of pirate. Indeed, perhaps they are closer in spirit to the privateers, who's legality was always a blurred issue. With letters of marque from the free international seas of the Internet, which government has jurisdiction over such on-line activity?

"To an extent, we are finding our way," says the station's boss, Mad Ash. "We aren't break-ing any rules or laws as far as I'm aware, we're just broadcasting the finest music that Britain has to offer to a grateful world. We've been on-line for almost a year and no-one has approached us to tell us we're doing wrong. In fact, there are about 100 - 120 pirate stations that have come on-line since we've been going, which is brilliant. We were the first, of course." He's right about the legality. The station still has the pirate feel, however, run as it is on non-profit making lines. The team behind it all hail from London's long serving pirate station Face FM (Face/Interface. Geddit?), who legalised their distinctive mix of dance music earlier this year by taking it on-line in a basement beneath the Farringdon Road. There's a strong drum and bass feel to much of the output - labels like Reinforced records, Moving Shadow, Section 5 Records and Trouble on Vinyl are all playing on the station. Hard house label True Love and garage outfit Catch records are also involved while experimental electronic superheros Juice Box have been taking the wires into all sorts of bleepy weirdness.

If the cutting edge of dance is too extreme for your taste, there's also an eclectic Wednesday night spectacular, which kicks off with housey, party tunes then moves on every hour through Muzik magazine, PPQ's Northern Soul nastiness, and Michael Blow's double decade mix of disco through to hip hop. It's the same crew who run Happiness Stans at the Jazz Bistro in Farringdon on Saturday nights.

Tune in on www.pirate-radio.co.uk and find out for yourself.

Steve Armstrong writes for The Face, The Guardian, The Sundag Times and Time Out.