I first met Peter Gibney in 1979. We were both 16. I was building my own radio station while he already had one. His was “Radio Caroline Dublin”. Mine “Radio Mi Amigo”. Peter was an original. He became my mentor, supplying schematic diagrams, parts, advice and ideas. In return I presented a Sunday show on his station. We became fast friends.
Those were the early pirate days in Dublin with stations popping up everywhere to offer respite from a monotonous RTÉ monopoly. Some like ours were “hobby” stations, broadcasting only at weekends because the rest of the week there was school.
The fact that Peter operated an illegal radio station from home while his late father was a senior Garda was just one of those splendid contradictions in 1970/80s Ireland.
Our station boasted something no other had, two phone numbers. This was because outside the nearby Comet Pub in Santry there were two phone boxes. They are still there.
We would send two kids to stand at them, one to take requests, the other to cycle back and forth to our studio with these. At such times normal use of those phones by the public was frowned on.
As unique was the perfectly designed transmitter, and its studio, hand-built within the budget of Peter’s pocket-money. Despite, or perhaps because of the penury, the design was elegant simplicity in action. Parts too expensive to buy, were improvised.
Instead of a large electrolytic capacitor to tune the transmitter to its aerial, costing hundreds, Peter achieved the same by cutting Castrol GTX cans into sheets, separated by scrap plate glass, costing pennies.
I witnessed the genesis of an unparalleled creative engineering mind. This Peter who would go on to be the rock upon which many a well-known radio station was built. He was soon in great demand by full-time pirates. Following the closure of one, for which he had not been paid, he enlisted my help to recover equipment which was his. While his policeman father waited outside in the car, we entered the property. The owner arrived on the scene with a shotgun, pinning us both to a wall. Eventually, we were allowed take the equipment. Another escapade in the wild world of early pirate radio.
He joined Sunshine Radio, the first of the so-called “Super-Pirates”. With high-powered transmitters and a 180ft broadcasting tower, this was big time. It was here Peter found his niche, designing, building and maintaining.
It was an analogue, pre-digital time where everything from the record decks, to the cart machines, to the reel-to-reel recorders moved. Everything had a motor, all in need of constant maintenance. There was nothing that Peter, or “Gibbo” as he was now more commonly known, could not repair.
After the pirate era he went on to engineer Dublin’s 98FM as well as working on stations abroad. But I always suspected he found independent radio, now legal, corporate and serious, a strait-jacket.
Medium wave was left behind for the higher quality but less technically challenging FM, employing more modern transmitters that rarely broke down. Which was no fun.
It is said that when he left 98FM there was consternation as it emerged passwords to almost every piece of software and computer were not recorded anywhere. Peter just carried them around in his head.
And so the years passed. I expected to hear one day that he had invented some new clean fuel source for the world, sorted out global warming or, maybe, discovered perpetual motion. It would not have surprised me. Then he died unexpectedly on April 4th, only 52.
Peter would tell anyone who would listen that a good radio signal requires two essential elements, a good earth and a good aerial. The transmitter must be well grounded, the better that it might broadcast into the air.
I was reminded of this at his funeral. As his body was buried I thought it indeed fitting – the better that his spirit might rise up and, like his beloved radio waves, travel outwards at the speed of light, eternally, to the heavens and to the arms of a loving God. Go placidly ... mi amigo.