05/08/2024
Dutch commercial radio network Radio Veronica has published its listeners chart of the best one thousand singles of the nineteen eighties. Many LGBTQIA+ artists are represented, with the highest placed being Queen and David Bowie, with their classic 1981 collaboration Under Pressure standing at number four. George Michael's "Careless Whisper", a pan-European hit single in the summer of 1984, is at number fifteen. Perhaps surprisingly, indie band The Cure topped the chart with "A Forest", perhaps representing the fact that sometimes continental tastes are different from those in the UK. Radio Veronica is a well established network in the Netherlands. It began life as a pirate radio station transmitting from a ship anchored off the Dutch North Sea coast in 1960. When the Dutch government moved to make life more difficult for offshore pirate stations in 1974, Veronica campaigned to become part of the public transmission system, which it achieved in 1977. Since then, Veronica has been relaunched as a legal FM and DAB network with a variety of different channels catering to different listening tastes.
