Forty years ago this week, pirate radio stations started broadcasting from ships moored just off the coast of England.

The “British Invasion” rock revolution had already been well underway. But BBC radio spent only a few hours a week on it–and even those shows were heavily padded out with interviews, due to union regulations limiting “needle time.” There was still no commercial radio in Britain, which had had commercial TV since 1955.

So, some clever Irish entrepreneurs taught themselves the shticks of U.S. top-40 stations, fitted an old lightship with studios and a transmitter, and began Radio Caroline (named after JFK’s daughter). Caroline was followed by several others, including Wonderful Radio London (whose Dallas-produced jingles were included on the album The Who Sell Out).

Pirate radio ships soon surrounded Britain. Unlicensed stations even popped up on abandoned British Army forts. The government cracked down, and devised the Marine Offences Act to prohibit UK citizens from working for, supplying to, or advertising on the pirates. By August 1967, all the pirate stations were gone except Caroline; whose owners slogged through years of struggle to stay, literally and fiscally, afloat. (Radio Caroline still exists as a mostly-volunteer organization. It runs an Internet and satellite radio station, while raising money to restore one of the old radio ships.)

The BBC started its own belated pop station, Radio One, just as the first pirates shut down. But it, and the legal commercial stations that finally showed up in 1973, still had needle-time restrictions; and besides, the music had become a lot less fun by the days of Steely Dan. Still, a newer wave of pirates, mostly noncommercial volunteers using cheap low-power equipment, carried on.

So this week, who’s officially celebrating all this history? Why, the BBC of course. It’s temporarily renamed one of its local stations as “Pirate BBC Essex,” with current DJs and old pirate-station celebs in a studio on a lightship moored just off England’s east coast. And you can hear it all streaming online; though its all-oldies playlist sounds a little too familiar to these Stateside ears.

The lesson of those times for today? Those early seaborne pirate stations were thoroughly commercial operations and also branded themselves as daring rebels; that stance has become mightily tiresome in our present age, when screeching business magazines proclaim one corporate “revolution” after another. (More specifically, those of us who knew old U.S. AM radio might find it hard to comprehend how that poppy, hook-y, ad-laden format could seem a breath of fresh air in stuffy paternalistic old Britain.)

Today, in both the U.S. and the U.K., commercial radio is a consolidated, tightly controlled space, weighted down by cross-conglomerate “synergies” and strafed by cost-cutting. Satellite radio offers more formats, but each of those is just as strictly predictable as its broadcast counterparts.

We need every new attempt to break this hegemony–online stations, low-power stations, and, yes, even a scurrilous pirate here and there.