Johnnie Walker, who has died aged 79, began his career as a disc jockey in the offshore pirate radio era of the mid-1960s. He was one of four pirate DJs – the others were John Peel, Tony Blackburn and Kenny Everett – who came to symbolise that time and continued to prosper in its aftermath.
The pirate radio stations, of which the most famous was Radio Caroline, were set up on ships and disused forts in the North Sea, avoiding British regulation by broadcasting from international waters and providing pop music to a British teen market not catered for by the BBC stations of the era.
Their DJs offered a fantasy version of adolescence from clued-up older-brother substitutes who, in the case of Peel, Blackburn and Walker, were former public schoolboys. Within this dreamscape Walker’s persona was that of the smooth-talking kid who got the girl. His theme tune was Duane Eddy’s 1960 American hit Because They’re Young, which more than 40 years later was still being reworked into the intro to Walker’s Radio 2 drivetime slot.
The pirates went on air in the dying months of Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s Conservative government, and Harold Wilson’s succeeding Labour administration devoted an extraordinary amount of energy to suppressing this sound of youth. The Marine Offences Act of 1967 brought an end to prosecution-free pirate radio on 14 August, but Walker could still be heard proclaiming the cause of freedom and the unreasonableness of adults from Radio Caroline the next day.
Peel, Everett and Blackburn were among the DJs who abandoned the rusting boats off the coast for a comfortable billet at BBC Broadcasting House in Langham Place, London, where Radio 1 was launched that September to meet the demand that the pirate stations had identified. The illegal broadcasting had confirmed Walker’s place in teenage affections, but by the spring of 1968 Caroline too had buckled under the pressure to stop broadcasting, and a year later Walker decamped to Radio 1, taking over its lunchtime slot.
Walker was born Peter Dingley in Hampton-in-Arden near Birmingham, the fourth of five children of Trevor Dingley, a salesman for W Canning & Co, an electroplating company, and his wife, Mary (nee Waters). At Solihull school, Peter failed his O-levels because, he claimed, he did not want a piece of paper to determine his path in life. So, at 16, he became a car salesman while moonlighting as a dance hall DJ under the name “Peter Dee”.
In May 1966 he joined Swinging Radio England, on a ship off the coast of Essex, and changed his name to Johnnie Walker. A couple of months later he switched to Radio Caroline, the first, and the most fashionable, of the pirates.
Walker was a radio natural, laconic but warm, and somebody who clearly cared about the music he was playing. His taste was for the adult oriented rock that dominated the pre-punk 1970s – or at least its album charts – bands such as Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan and Steve Harley’s Cockney Rebel.
At BBC Radio 1, this brought him into conflict with a management that had become enamoured with Top 20-dominated playlists. The Bay City Rollers, in those ancient times the teenybopper rage, were, Walker suggested, “musical garbage”. He told callers put out by his views to “take a running jump”. Thus, by 1976 he had quit the station to seek his fortune in California.
He did not really find it, and after spells with the stations KSAN in San Francisco and WHFS in Bethesda, Maryland, he returned to Britain in the early 1980s. He worked for local commercial stations until 1987, when he rejoined Radio 1. He then went to the BBC’s Greater London Radio from 1988 until 1990, when he was sacked for suggesting that the ousting of the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, would have people “dancing in the streets”.
Despite that setback, his career in the 1990s, with Radio 1, LBC and Classic Gold was a success. In 1998 he joined Radio 2, which by then was playing the very same music he had been promoting three decades earlier when it was young and supposedly fresh.
In 1999 the progress of his revitalised career was disrupted when he became the subject of a classic News of the World undercover sting. Walker was videoed taking cocaine and offering to provide the “tycoons” – NoW reporters – with the services of sex workers. He was suspended by the BBC, went into drug rehabilitation and after being fined £2,000 for possession of cocaine was reinstated at Radio 2. The NoW’s work had made it difficult, the magistrate observed, for him to receive a fair trial.
In 2003 Walker took absence from his show for cancer treatment, from which he made a good recovery. In 2009 he began presenting the show that would define his later career, Sounds of the 70s.
He was appointed MBE in 2006, and in 2013 he received the gold badge of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors. His eponymous autobiography was published in 2007. In 2008-09 he was an adviser to the Richard Curtis film The Boat That Rocked, an attempt to recapture the pirate radio era.
Walker announced in early October that he was retiring from radio after 58 years, having been diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, and presented his final Sounds of the 70s show at the end of that month.
He is survived by his second wife, Tiggy (nee Jarvis), whom he married in 2003, and by the son and daughter of his first marriage, to Frances Kum, which ended in divorce.
• Johnnie Walker (Peter Waters Dingley), radio presenter, born 30 March 1945; died 31 December 2024
