Читать книгу Good Morning Nantwich: Adventures in Breakfast Radio - Phill Jupitus - Страница 12
ОглавлениеUnlike all of those British post-war rose-tinted views of school as ‘the happiest days of our lives’ I have to say that it was the day that I actually left boarding school that was the happiest day of mine. After scraping a few O levels, I attended Palmers sixth-form college. It was at this point in my life when I discovered girls and Jamaican ska almost simultaneously but under unrelated circumstances. After royally screwing up any chance of A levels, I took my meagre qualifications and found a job working for the Manpower Services Commission at Gray’s Jobcentre in Essex as a clerical officer on 1 July 1980, the paradox of this being that there weren’t any jobs.
Partially as a reaction to my newly confined life as a desk jockey, I became an unstoppable doodler. I was already a fan of comics and graphic novels and had rudimentary drawing skills of my own. Indeed I was on one occasion officially reprimanded for the state of my desk blotter, covered as it was with cartoon pigs, tanks, stick figures, pretty ladies and band logos. What little income I had was spent on comics, maintaining girlfriends, buying records and going to gigs. It was at one of these where I saw a bunch of poets, some of whom were so unbelievably dire, I decided to add ‘poetry’ to my extracurricular portfolio alongside ‘blotter cartoonist’. My rationale being, ‘If those idiots can do it then so can I…’
Under the name Porky the Poet, I started performing light-hearted political nonsense to partisan crowds in November 1983. Alongside such luminaries as Swift Nick and Kool Notes, I performed increasingly angry poems to increasingly angry audiences and even got a nice review in the NME. On 8 March 1984 I met Billy Bragg for the very first time and my life was changed forever. We had common ground in that we both came from Barking and shared a love of comics and West Ham. A year later, Billy invited me to be the opening act on his 1985 Jobs & Industry Tour, which allowed me to quit the civil service and start life properly. I will remain forever in his debt for that.
Between the winter of 1985 and the summer of 1990 I was employed by record label Go! Discs, who at the time were releasing Billy’s records. When I started there, the job description stretched no further than answering the phones and hanging about a bit. But over the years this gradually expanded and I found myself writing press releases, doing mail-outs and babysitting bands before ascending to the dizzy heights of regional press and radio officer. I was living the dream, sending copies of The La’s debut album to the Bournemouth Echo and Clyde FM.
But however cool this might sound, it’s showbusiness not showfriends, and my jaundiced view of life backstage in the world of music eventually sucked the joy out of it for me. The constant bickering and contractual wrangling, the petulance of the artists, the tedious jargon of plug and marketing all eventually got to be too much. When I left in the spring of 1990 to become a stand-up comedian I really couldn’t care if I never saw another record again.
Life threw me a wonderful if unexpected curveball when I quit Go! Discs and discovered that my girlfriend Shelley was pregnant. This caused an initial panic about what our prospects might be with her a pregnant primary school teacher and me an unemployed poet/comedian/ cartoonist. But we knuckled down and stuck to the game plan. I had nine months to try and crack the London comedy circuit, and crack it I did. Within a year I was a regular at clubs like the Comedy Store, Up the Creek, The T&C2, Ha Bloody Ha, the Banana, the Red Rose and the Meccano and I was making the same money I had been on at Go! The beauty part of being a comedian was that I only gigged at night, so when Shelley went back to teaching I had the luxury of five glorious years as a house husband raising my two daughters Emily and Molly.
By the mid-1990s, while by now earning my keep on the UK comedy circuit doing twenty-minute sets in pubs and clubs, my part-time personal crusade to become a radio deejay hit several brick walls – or, to be more accurate, speed bumps, not the least of which being that I was doing so much work as a stand-up comedian that I had no free time left to indulge in my wireless pursuit. It’s a sad fact of the business that until the internet gets the right user-friendly hardware sorted out, television will remain popular media’s alpha dog. You get paid more for network TV appearances, and in our post-Murdoch world there are many more outlets than on radio. While there is an undoubted cachet to appearing on a high-profile show like The News Quiz
