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10 Mike Hollis (Radio Luxembourg, the great 208)

9 Mike Reed (Breakfast Show Radio 1)

8 Paul Locket (Piccadilly Radio)

7 Cuddly Dave (Piccadilly Radio)

6 Pete Baker (Piccadilly Radio)

5 Bob Harris (Radio 1 and 2)

4 Roger Scott (Radio 1 and 2)

3 Alan Freeman (Radio 1 and 2)

2 Steve Wright (Radio 1 and 2)

1…read on

My brother was a DJ. I knew this because he came home late most nights and had hefty black record cases with Roxy Music stickers on the side. He’s over ten years older than me. I was a mistake apparently—my mum was over forty when I arrived, very old for a new mother in those days. She says she travelled to the hospital to have me on the bus. I’m not sure if this is true but I’ve never liked buses since.

My brother David was not so much my hero but I did think he was cool—the chief responsibility of an elder brother. I wanted to be like him, I even wanted my bedroom to smell like his, which was bloody awful come to think of it—the thought of that stench now makes me want to gag. What is that smell in older boys’ bedrooms? Is it the smell of ‘anxiety’ so to speak; and why on earth did I find it so alluring? Maybe it just smelt older and older is what all kids want to be.

My brother seemed to be very happy with his life—something that always intrigued me until one Saturday morning when I found out perhaps why he was so content. I came downstairs and there was this gorgeous girl asleep on the sofa. She really was something else, dressed head to foot in a long, black, flowing lace dress with black stockings and black shoes—in fact everything about her was long except her hair, which was cropped short in a sexy chic kind of style. Long legs, long arms, a long neck, long fingers and long fingernails painted jet black. I didn’t know exactly how she’d come to be in our house but I did know she was an absolute babe.

It transpired that David had met this goddess as a result of his job as DJ at the Carlton Club, a popular nightspot in Warrington town centre situated over the top of Woolies just off the high street.

I made another mental note. Deejaying makes geeks more attractive to gorgeous women.

Both my brother and I have always looked a bit geeky although David did have a cool Fifties thing going on as a kid. Here’s a pic.

Other than him taking me to my first-ever rock concert—ELO, the Out of The Blue tour when I was thirteen, for which I will be eternally grateful—and what a ‘two’ nights that was,* David and I never did much together and we’ve never done much since. As with my sister; we all sort of live through Mum. We are a decent family but not a close family, something that isn’t helped by the fact that we all live miles apart: my sister Diane is in Yorkshire, whilst David currently lives in Australia and before that New Zealand for close to the last twenty years.

That said, however, it was definitely ‘our Dave’, as we call him, who set me off on the road to playing records and talking in between them as a way of earning a living.

Emulating my big brother deejaying in night clubs was a cool enough goal for me to aspire to as it was, but we were about to behold a whole new world of record-spinning possibilities as the explosion of independent commercial radio was just around the corner.

*David organised a trip through his work for a coach load of peeps to go and see ELO. He asked me did I want to go, to which the answer was of course yes. I had never been to any kind of live event before and ELO were my favourite band apart from The Beatles. The order has since swapped and if I had to die listening to one or the other—it would be ELO…probably ‘Sweet Talkin’ Woman’. We set off from St Helens but it was such a cold night the coach literally froze to a halt on the M6. We had to be properly rescued from the motorway along with hundreds of other people who had suffered the same fate; it was minus ten degrees or something ridiculous. As we had no way of getting home so we all slept on the floor of a local pub. I had never even been in a pub before, nor had I ever had whisky, which the landlady dished out free of charge. ‘Come on you need this,’ she urged me. It turned out that so many fans had failed to get to the concert that night the band put on an extra show a couple of nights later with all unused tickets still valid. The gig was truly amazing and to this date by far the best gig I have ever been to. Thank you brother. x.