Saturday Interview: Former radio pirate Kevin Stewart, the man behind the newest addition to Edinburgh�s airwaves, believes he owes his enterprising nature to his adventurer grandfather from Glasgow�s infamous Gorbals.

Former radio pirate Kevin Stewart, the man behind the newest addition to Edinburgh's airwaves, believes he owes his enterprising nature - not to mention his love of whisky and porridge - to his adventurer grandfather from Glasgow's infamous Gorbals.

Stewart, a former disc jockey with pirate broadcaster Radio Caroline - on which the film The Boat That Rocked is based - today launches the music-based "more tracks, less talk" Coast 107 station for the capital on a temporary Restricted Service Licence from Ofcom.

The station, which for now will broadcast for just one month, is part of Stewart's drive to persuade the regulator to readvertise the abandoned 107 frequency - primarily so that he and his financial supporters can bid for the slot on a full-time basis later this year.

The Herald met him in a Starbucks on rare sunny day last week in Glasgow.

Stewart was sun-tanned, relaxed and confident - and, as might be expected from a former Caroline DJ, he loves to talk.

His hair is swept back, as though he has just stepped off the Mi Amigo, the ship from where the legendary Radio Caroline station was broadcast, some 12 miles off the coast of Felixstowe in the international waters of the North Sea. Stewart's voice is a deep, finely-enunciated London drawl with the edges smoothed.

It is clear from the outset that radio is in his blood - not to mention his voice. He has honed to a fine art that certain comforting, "trust-me" baritone of a seasoned newscaster.

Probably because he is being interviewed by a Scottish newspaper, he launches almost immediately into the story of his Gorbals grandfather, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking Scot with an eye on the main prize and an insistence that life must at all times be lived to the fullest.

Stewart sips his coffee, and recounts how sometime during the early years of the twentieth century his grandfather fled Scotland for unknown reasons and made his way to London to seek his fame and fortune.

"He was a kind of lovable rogue, but he was real gentleman. And at the same time a gentle man" Stewart says. "I can still see him to this day, with a cigarette in his mouth - always a cigarette in his mouth."

The Gorbals of his grandfather's youth was a district known in equal measure for the closeness of its community and for the squalor and unimaginable poverty that its inhabitants endured. For Stewart's grandfather, escape was both difficult and necessary. "At one point during the 1920s - I suppose he was already in London at this point - he sailed to New York and opened a few cafes," said Stewart, his baritone wavering with pride.

"This was during prohibition in America and I think these cafes were more speakeasy than coffee house, and he ended up getting arrested and deported back to Britain. The details were always a bit sketchy, but I don't think he was deported for a parking ticket.

"Anyway, it barely broke his stride. He was a man who could turn his hand to anything - a kind of prototype Del Trotter. At one point he had 5000 bottles of perfume in his house.

"Some people might not like that, but I'm proud of it. At base, he was a survivor and I like to think there is a lot of him in me.

"He liked his porridge every morning and his whisky every night, and so do I. He was a maverick and so am I."

His big regret is that his grandfather never lived to hear him on the radio.

Stewart was born in 1957, in Sutton, Surrey. By the age of 13 he was already involved in radio with a pirate station in London called Radio Jackie.

"Radio has always been my passion. But back then I couldn't let my father know, because he wanted me to be an accountant," he says.

"As a child I always listened to the radio, and the thrill of working with Radio Jackie in the early days was just amazing.

"We used put the show together on a tape and then take it to the middle of an empty field and set up a transmitter and broadcast it from there.

"We used to rig up the antenna on tall trees and we could reach of whole of south London. You have to remember that in 1972, there were no commercial radio stations in the UK - everything was controlled by the BBC - so what we were doing was revolutionary.

"I can tell you that sometimes we had to run for it when the police came. That was pretty exciting."

Nonetheless, after leaving school, he decided to follow his father's wishes and began studying to become an accountant. Two years into those studies, however, everything changed.

"One day in 1977, completely out of the blue, I got a call from Ronan O'Rahilly, the founder of Radio Caroline, and the next thing I knew I was heading about 12 miles off the coast of Felixstowe en route to the Mi Amigo, anchored in the North Sea in international waters. Ronan, this genius Irishman, had heard me on Radio Jackie."

Those old enough to remember will know that during the 1960s and early 1970s if listeners were searching for the revolutionary sounds of Tamla Motown, delta Blues, psychedelia or anything that might have been considered "edgy", Radio Caroline was really the only game in town. However, the station was famed also for the banter of its DJs. Between introducing music, they blabbered insanely about women, made suggestive jokes, pondered about their listeners' sexual habits, criticised public officials, and provided detailed accounts of their fantasies after two weeks at sea.

One question that had to be asked regarded the illicit pleasures and anarchic storms on and off air aboard the pirate vessel: were they anything like the film that celebrated them?

Stewart sipped his coffee and smiled wistfully. "What they got right was the sense of fun and camaraderie between the DJs," he said.

"There was definitely a lot of craziness. But the boat in the film was utterly luxurious by comparison. In reality, the Mi Amigo was a total rust bucket.

"I remember when things got really desperate on board, we used play Sloop John B by the Beach Boys, and that was a signal that we really needed supplies."

Stewart, who is now married to his third wife and has five children, adds: "And when I wasn't at sea, I stayed at a nurses' home in London."

Asked why a nurses' home, he replies: "Wouldn't you want to stay in a nurses' home. There were 500 beautiful girls in there."

At that moment there was an unmistakable twinkle in Stewart's eye, but it wasn't possible to ascertain whether he really did live with 500 nurses or if this was a fantasy recalled from his Caroline days.

I wonder if he misses those days. "They were fun times, but different times. We all have to move on," he says. "I'm the kind of person who always needs a new mountain to climb. My grandfather was a man who understood the idea of that next mountain."

Stewart's next mountain, of course, is The Coast 107. His backer, Celador, the company behind Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire, last year decided to move into the radio business and recruited Stewart to launch The Coast 107 in Southampton.

Its Scottish sister station will broadcast from the former home of UTV Radio-owned Talk 107, which went off the air last Christmas Eve, less than three years after being set up, and during which time it failed to attract enough listeners in the Edinburgh area to make it commercially viable.

Nonetheless, Stewart and Celador believe there is a commercial opportunity in the silence of the fallow frequency. The new station's PR statement notes that Coast 107 is aimed at over-40s "who appreciate quality, credible music with no inane speech on their radio station".

No inane speech? From a former Radio Caroline DJ who more than likely told thousands of listeners about his nurses' home fantasy?

Stewart added: "The market we are aiming at is those who are too young to listen to Terry Wogan and would rather not be listening to a zoo with their breakfast on the other stations.

"The main thing is that we want our listeners - those who are of the right age to appreciate it - to imagine themselves driving a convertible sports car up the coast road in California, with the top down, the sun shining, a beautiful person in the passenger seat and The Coast 107 playing great music like the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton and Chris de Burgh.

"I'm not sure it gets any better than that."