There is a rising trio of DJs called Haunted House. Every Tuesday night, you can hear them on Kiss 100, across most of Britain on digital radio and Freeview, and in London on FM.

These young black dance-music aficionados are making a name for themselves, like Radio 1’s Trevor Nelson and the three-man Dreem Teem (one of whom, Spoony, is also Mr Golf on Five Live, and even has personalised balls). But not so long ago, all these people were broadcasting illegally. They were pirates, just as Kiss itself was once a pirate station.

Forty years ago next week, another group of young men embarked on a similarly illicit adventure. They, in contrast, were white and middle-class: people such as Tony Blackburn, a doctor’s son who went to Millfield, CN Henty-Dodd, better known as Simon Dee, and a future Tory MP, Roger Gale.

They set up their equipment not in a council estate, but on a ship anchored four miles off the Essex coast, in inter- national waters. It was called Radio Caroline, two words guaranteed to evoke the same misty-eyed nostalgia as Biba and flower power.

Caroline was the first of Britain’s offshore pirate radio stations in ships and abandoned wartime forts. They unleashed a tidal wave of all-day pop on an unsuspecting but welcoming nation — the young bit of it, anyway — and paved the way for the creation of Radio 1.

The first record ever played on Caroline, on March 29, 1964, was the Rolling Stones’ Not Fade Away, which turned out to be an appropriate choice: over the past 40 years, the signal of the pirates has faded in and out, changed colour and direction, but never faded away.

Radio Caroline began at Easter because its founder, Ronan O’Rahilly, was following a family tradition of resistance to authority and mono-poly. His grandfather, who was one of the leaders of the Easter rebellion, was shot by the English in Dublin in 1916.

There has always been a dark underbelly to pirate radio. The owner of Radio City, based on a fort on Shivering Sands, off Whitstable, was shot dead in a business row in 1966, precipitating a murder trial and the acceleration of the bill that eventually drove the pirates off the air. Radio Caroline (and Johnnie Walker, now on Radio 2) was the only one to defy the law, and stayed on air, on and off, until 1990. It still exists, being now a satellite station that goes out on Sky and the internet.

The anniversary is being marked next month by a week-long tribute on BBC Essex, whose three medium-wave frequencies will be called “Pirate BBC Essex” for the occasion. Former North Sea pirates, including Keith Skues and Pete Brady, are heading for Harwich, with, I hope, the answer to a niggling question. Were or are there any lady pirates? The only one I can think of to have carried a cutlass was Ranking Miss P, sister-in-law of Bob Marley. She used to sing jingles on her brother’s (long gone) London pirate station, later went to Radio 1 and is now on BBC London on Thursdays.

Are women more inclined to be law-abiding, or is it that they know instinctively that there are better uses for a human thigh than to be reduced to a bone, crossed with another, and placed beneath a skull?