Читать книгу Good Morning Nantwich: Adventures in Breakfast Radio - Phill Jupitus - Страница 6

Corner office. Those were the two words that were going through my head as I walked into the bright, airy room. I had never before understood the significance of a ‘corner office’ or why one should be so desirable. Now I was actually stood in one, I understood. It’s all about having more square feet of windows than your subordinates. Simple really. While your many underlings crawl around in cubicles and subterranean studios, their pale waxy skin craving just the odd shaft of natural sunlight to bring them some much-needed vitamin D, you can bask in your greenhouse, knowing that when the sun goes just that bit too far west you can simply lower the blinds on the acres of windows adorning your west-facing wall. Presumably those fortunate souls who had risen to the higher echelons of management at the BBC required such rarefied conditions because, in addition to their corporate abilities, if push came to shove, they could also photosynthesise.

Addison Cresswell is my agent. He is very loud, very talented and on occasion almost unintelligible. And he was on the line.

‘Hello Ad…’ I said nervously.

It was autumn 2001, two years after I had walked out of GLR. As soon as I saw Ad’s name flash up on the screen of my mobile phone, I inhaled sharply and braced myself.

Whenever Ad called personally it was either really good or really bad news. It seemed that nothing between these two extremes was reason enough for him to pick up the phone, so I always experienced a frisson whenever there was a call from him.

‘PHILL!ADDISON!LISTENMATEI’VEHADACALL FROMMYMATELESLEYDOUGLASHERAND JIMMOIRWANTSTOSEEYOUSOWE’REGOING TOGOINANDSEETHEMBOTHNEXTWEEK ALRIGHTMATE.’

‘Ummm…’

‘BRILLIANTTHEYWANTUSTOGOINNEXT WEDNESDAYATELEVENO’CLOCKATJIM’SOFFI CEI’LLCOMEINWITHYOUANDWE’LLSEEWHAT THISISALLABOUT…LOTSALOVEMATE!’

Much like you have just had to very slowly re-read and pick apart the words in the above barrage of capital letters, any listener also has to slowly deconstruct a phone call from Addison. But mercifully, this one was both brief and to the point. We had been called in to see Jim Moir at Radio 2.

Jim Moir was a broadcasting legend, who had more than earned the corner office in which I was now standing. But Jim Moir didn’t need to photosynthesise because the sun shone out of him.

When you meet Jim Moir, he is one of those characters for whom the phrase ‘larger than life’ seems tailormade. A huge, red-faced, charismatic and incredibly funny man, I always thought that he is exactly what Santa would look like if he’d chucked in the whole toy thing, lost the beard and gone into middle management. As a bit of a fanboy I was slightly in awe of him as he had produced The Generation Game with Bruce Forsyth, as well as undergoing a stint as the BBC’s Head of Variety and Light Entertainment. His career at the Corporation spanned decades. Admittedly today you can’t throw a doughnut off a double-decker bus in London without hitting a TV producer, but Moir was producing ratings-busting television programmes back when there were only three channels…I know – three. We were all like the fucking Amish in the seventies.

Big Jim had been handed the stewardship of Radio 2 in 1996, and in no time at all had deftly changed its image from that slightly starchy station where they played show tunes that your mum listened to into a hip, fun, sparky and forward-thinking network which swiftly became the highest-rated radio station in the country. Addison already had clients Mark Lamarr and Jonathan Ross with weekly shows on 2 and in the light of his manic phone call to me it was reasonable to assume that I might well be joining them on the airwaves.

I started to mentally flick through the schedule to try and work out what slots might soon be coming available. None of the heavy hitters like Wogan, Ken Bruce or Steve Wright would be going anywhere as they were all doing very nicely thank you. The recently rehabilitated Johnny Walker was going great guns on drivetime, and as for Sir Jimmy Young, he just seemed to be permanently locked in his lunchtime studio like it was a high-tech sarcophagus. The only place that man would be moving to, if he was lucky, was the Egyptology wing of the British Museum.

So it might be a weekend slot. Jonathan Ross owned Saturday mornings with his slick blend of great music and hilarious interviews, apart from one memorable encounter with a surly Dannii Minogue who had apparently undergone a sense-of-humour bypass. Maybe they’d be asking me to do something on Sunday mornings. Might Steve Wright’s ‘Sunday Love Songs’ be getting the old ‘Spanish Archer’?

I spent odd moments pondering over what the gig might be as the day of the meeting approached, but couldn’t work it out with any degree of certainty. It did cross my mind that this sort of thing can often turn out to be nothing more than a cursory meet and greet. ‘Let us know if you have any ideas for a show, we’d really love to work with you!’ was quite often the end result of two hours on the trains and tube and sitting with a big grin slapped on your face in front of somebody who occasionally nodded. These speculative encounters mean that they get to put a tick in their managerial ‘job done’ box, but it feels like a colossal waste of time.

I met up with Addison in reception at Western House in Great Portland Street, just north of Oxford Circus in London’s glitzy West End, and we were whisked up to the first floor and Jim’s office.

I looked wide-eyed around the walls. There were photos of Jim arm in arm with various dignitaries and celebs. Awards for shows jostled for position with Ken Pyne cartoons from Private Eye, archly mocking Moir. There was a large coffee table in the centre of the room and a couple of standard-issue big managerial sofas and a vast desk behind which sat the commanding figure of Jim Moir himself. As I looked down at the coffee table I wondered how many people had been fired over its dark, forbidding surface. Had Jim ever had to arm-wrestle Wogan on it during contract negotiations? Also in on the meeting was Moir’s second-in-command at Radio 2, Lesley Douglas. A no-nonsense Geordie, throughout the time I knew her Douglas was passionate about just two things, radio and Bruce Springsteen.

While Ad sparred around with the two of them I sat and smiled to myself, and mentally prepared for the vague promises of the ‘We’d love to work with you sometime!’ chat. I couldn’t have been wider of the mark. After Ad had finished verbally knocking our hosts about, we took our seats and got down to business. Moir looked round at me.

‘Now then, we will be launching a brand new music radio station in the March of next year, and we would like you to be the host of the breakfast show.’

I took a slightly firmer grip of my coffee and cocked my head towards him in an inquisitive fashion, not unlike a puzzled Labrador.

‘The BBC are going to be starting a number of new digital radio services in partnership with existing stations,’ Jim thundered on. ‘Radio 4 will be launching one, as will Radio 1, and we will have one as well.’

I looked at the beaming face of Moir and mustered up all my intellectual reserves to come up with a trenchant response to his very kind offer.

‘Oh…right!’ were the only words I could muster.

‘Ah, the new digital services,’ I thought to myself. With the advances in technology, the BBC, like all broadcasters, would be slowly transferring all of its radio and television services to digital platforms. The digital switchover meant that everybody in the UK would be listening to radio and watching television on digital receivers by 2012. I really should have been more aware that this was happening as the BBC had used me to front a television campaign to promote this rapidly approaching technological wonder. I spent two days in a van and on location with Andy Parsons and Henry Naylor who played my hapless film crew. We were supposedly making a ‘fly on the wall’ documentary about this exciting new technology. The loose gag of the thing was that as we went from place to place we kept being caught by our unwitting subjects. The first day was spent shooting with Leslie Grantham, Sanjeev Baskar, Kulvinder Ghir and a couple of puppets. I had a fairly energetic time of it, jumping through hedges, falling off a ladder and getting wedged in a serving hatch.

On day two I was lucky enough to spend a few hours on a studio set with John Peel. Peely’s role involved him listening to a digital radio while he was taking a bath, while I, naturally enough, had to stick my head through a cat-flap in order to see what he was up to. As the army of technicians fussed around the set, I sat with John in the hospitality area, me in a rather nice Tonik Blue two-piece and John in a dressing gown and swimming trunks ready for his bath scene. As we sat there I did my level best to hide the obvious joy at finally meeting him. I thought a nice neutral opener would be to say how much my wife and I enjoyed listening to Home Truths. He sipped his red wine and sighed. I had the feeling I might have inadvertently touched a nerve.

‘Yes, it’s a good show, but I don’t know…’ He paused before going on. ‘They do too many of them. That’s the thing with the BBC, as soon as they find something that does well they always want more of it. I hardly get any time off because I’m always recording bloody Home Truths.’

John had been with the BBC since the late 1960s and had become one of the leading lights of change in music with the arrival of the punk scene in 1976. But one of the problems with staying loyal to the Corporation is that you can end up being completely taken for granted by management. Each new controller of Radio 1 didn’t seem to know what to do with him. At the same time, none of them had the balls to fire him because they knew just how much outcry there would be. The time slots of his show were shuffled around with little regard for the man who had championed so many bands throughout his career. So as time went on Peel’s shows became more and more marginalised. He was a kind of broadcasting equivalent of the ravens at the Tower of London. Home Truths, which aired from 1998 on Radio 4, was a programme driven solely by contributions from the listeners, and was presented by John. Within the course of one show the subject matter often veered from the side-splittingly hilarious to the tear-jerkingly tragic. But at the centre of it all was the avuncular Peel, who handled both, deftly. Having finally met him, it was somehow sad to think that he didn’t enjoy the show as much as we enjoyed listening to it.

In the van home later that night Andy Parsons pointed out that John was on air, so we got the driver to tune in to Radio 1. As the record finished Peel began to speak.

‘As you might imagine I am on occasion asked to do some quite unusual things in the name of “promoting” the BBC but I can reveal that I spent most of today sat in a bath of lukewarm water while Phill Jupitus stuck his head through a cat-flap.’

My first mention on Peel’s show, while only in passing, remains a favourite memory. Had I never listened to his shows as a child, I might not be sat in a prominent BBC executive’s office being offered a job as a deejay.

When you are presented with a deal of that stature, your thought processes start to accelerate and, somewhat unwisely, you do find your mind wandering out of the room. While Moir and Douglas enthusiastically explained the ambitions and workings of what they were currently calling ‘Network Y’, I did not hear a word of it. In my head I was furiously working out the day-to-day logistics of being a breakfast-time broadcaster and how it would affect my current working life. In the late nineties I had done four weeks deputising for Johnny Vaughan on Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast and was acutely aware of how much that impacted on my existence.

My mind was racing. ‘Right, so I can still do Buzzcocks, but I’d probably have to stop doing stand-up, but I can still do the News Quiz, but I couldn’t really go to see music gigs any more…and I’d have to get up at like half four every day and drive into town five days a week…and if I do happen to get offered any big telly gigs I’d have to turn those down…and I can’t do the Edinburgh Fringe…’

I was frantically working out how being a breakfast deejay would fuck up my life, while the people in the room were conversely explaining just what a good idea it would be.

Lesley began to explain that this exciting new station would be more music-focused, aimed at those who read music magazines every month and regularly go to gigs and festivals, but who don’t really care for the usual chart fare. To reflect this, there would be a more ‘alternative’ playlist, specialist shows, a varied selection of classic pop and rock as well as extensive use of the BBC’s own archive of session recordings. This was the point at which I began to sit up and take notice.

When it first started, XFM was just such a bold and innovative station, run by a small core of people who truly loved music. But as soon as it started performing well commercially it was sold to the Capital group, and almost overnight all of the fire and originality were slung out of the window and it was turned into a playlist-based, high-rotation, revenue-gathering machine. But here was a chance to be part of a new kind of radio station, one which would pay respect to the huge legacy that new music owed to its past. In my head I started thinking of all the old Peel sessions I might get the chance to air again. The first Fall session, Bethnal, The Members, Siouxsie and The Banshees, Three Mustaphas Three…My mind started reeling at the mere thought of not only hearing these gems once more but playing them on the radio. At fucking breakfast time!

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Lesley and Jim patiently told us about some of the other people who they would be approaching with a view to presenting shows. Janice Long, Tom Robinson, Bruce Dickinson and Billy Bragg were all mentioned. But back in my troublesome brain I was still far too preoccupied, mentally indexing even more John Peel sessions…The Specials, Altered Images, Madness, Elastica, Wire, Sham 69, Buzzcocks, Pulp…By this point in the proceedings it was fair to say that I had sustained an erection.

My agent could see that my mind wasn’t really what you could call focused, so he manfully filled the breach and duly explained that we’d have to go away and think about it. Moir nodded, but at the same time he was having none of it.

‘You’re our man, Phill!’ he boomed in my direction. ‘You are the man we want to launch this station!’

I nodded weakly and crossed my legs with a slight sense of disappointment as I recalled that The Clash never recorded any Peel sessions. Then I smiled weakly and thanked them for their interest and it was all hearty handshakes, backslaps and goodbyes. As he grasped my fragile hand within his meaty paw Moir stared deep into my eyes. My attention was drawn to the glorious mane of silver hair atop the powerful head that filled my field of vision.

‘You’re going to do this…’ he growled into my face. My nascent erection was immediately lulled into submission.

As we stepped out into the brisk bright London afternoon Addison looked round at me.

‘THATALLSOUNDSALRIGHTTHENDON’T ITWHATI’LLDOISHAVEATALKWITH LESLEYLATERTHISWEEKANDBEATTHEM UPOVERTHEMONEYANDSEEWHATWECAN GETOUTOFTHEMSEEYOULATERTROOPER.’

And with that he was gone. I was left there on my own, reeling. I’d just been offered a proper high-profile BBC gig for the first time. But I was left with a bit of a conundrum. On the cusp of my forties and with a good career as a stand-up, did I really want to be a full-time breakfast deejay?

For someone who loved radio as much as I did, surely such a question was a no-brainer. I was being offered a daily alternative music show on a plate. This was something I had always wanted, wasn’t it? Not to mention there was also the opportunity to launch a brand new network and a dazzling array of new media technology to go along with it.

And yet my contrary ‘glass-half-empty’ outlook was already undermining this thought. Of all the various jobs I had done since leaving the civil service, surely ‘disc jockey’ was the easiest. It was a doss. A blag at best! You do nothing more than sit in a room, prattle and press buttons. In a reductive sense, you are performing the kind of task that a well-trained chimp could manage without much bother. You are nothing more than a jukebox with mood swings. Playing music and chatting is something I had happily done throughout my entire adolescence without feeling I should be drawing a wage for the privilege. But maybe the time was right for me to think about a change in my life.

In one sense, the BBC would now ostensibly be paying me to regress back to my teenage years. My job description was playing good music and shooting the breeze between seven and ten in the morning, five days a week for around forty-six weeks of the year. The majority of the various shows I had made for GLR were weekly, which gave you the luxury of six full days to think about what music to play and what subjects to talk about. You didn’t exactly sit down and plan the show as such, but you were mindful of it for a whole week, so it just sort of percolated forwards to the front of your brain over the six days. This suited my pace of thought nicely. But a three-hour show five times a week early in the morning would be a different prospect altogether. This would be high-turnover stuff. As I ambled slowly towards Oxford Street, I began to formulate a rough plan. I’d do it for a couple of years and then get out. That was assuming that they hadn’t already sacked me at some point in the first year. And so the state of mind with which I decided to take on one of the biggest jobs of my life was one where I had already started to work out when I could quit.

Despite the apparent luxury of knowing when I would finish a job I hadn’t even started yet, I still needed to give some serious thought to what sort of breakfast show I wanted to do. Right away I knew I would be on a very sticky wicket. Not only would I be launching a new radio station, but it was one that was only available via new media. Indeed it was so new that when we started broadcasting in March 2002 the only people who could listen were those who subscribed to a digital TV service that also carried BBC radio, people with computers and a broadband connection, and the eight geeks in the UK at that point who actually owned DAB radios. In those early days a lot was made of the phrase ‘potential listeners’. Indeed, if you added up everybody in the country who had cable or satellite, broadband and the eight dateless wonders with the DAB radios, our total potential listenership was around several million. And eight.

However, people are simply not in the habit of listening to radio on their televisions. It just feels weird! Booting up their computer first thing in the morning presented its own problems. Once you’d forgotten the system password for the third time, the machine would be hurtling out of an upstairs window. And the DAB radios we had heard so much about were about as easy to come by as rocking-horse shit. Admittedly at the time of writing DABs are now available in all good electrical retailers. Not to mention the several radio applications for the iPhone, which allow you to stream live radio from almost anywhere in the world. But back in those almost feudal days of early 2002, such flights of fancy would be considered the insane ramblings of a deranged madman, or Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple to give him his full title. To my mind, the only way to pull in the punters to something that required such a Herculean effort to listen would be to do a show that no one else would do. In order to accomplish this I would have to be mindful of what the competition was putting out.

Breakfast radio is an area of extremes. At the quiet end of the spectrum you have the kind of non-threatening programming which lulls you into your day. These would be programmes like Today on Radio 4 or Terry Wogan on 2, Radio 3, Classic FM, BBC local radio and the gentler, more easy-listening-based commercial stations. Then in the middle there’s not very much choice before you suddenly hit those shouty people at the opposite end of the spectrum who think that just because they are up at seven o’clock in the morning then you should be as well. I have never fully understood the ethos behind the ‘perky’ breakfast deejay. I am more than aware that millions of people truly appreciate the breezy banter and lively tone of the majority of breakfast broadcasting. However, I had always wondered why you never heard anybody on the radio who woke up at the same variable pace as you.

I admit that on occasion I have been known to wake up in a good mood, and do feel quite chirpy. For me this is maybe one day a year, and my entire family are similarly disposed. I have two teenage daughters who as a matter of course do not use verbs until gone nine o’clock. I consider the coarse wakey-wakey style of broadcasting an insult to the injury of perfectly good sleep interrupted. Instead of a raucous ‘GOOD MORNING!’ how about a more considered and laid back…‘Alright?’ The ‘shouty’ breakfast shows all appear to be predicated on deceit. Nobody really likes getting up in the morning, but let’s pretend that we do! Not only do these shows lie to you, the listener, but they then have the audacity to invite you to participate in the deception. This is not entertainment. It is mass hypnosis. To have some jumpy idiot telling you what a great day it is before going on to assault your ears with the accumulated wisdom of Robbie Williams in 4/4 time and C major just seems rude. And turning the dial of my radio I have found legions of these shrill, mindless early-morning liars.

Perhaps that is a bit harsh, you know…‘liars’. But in my defence we can all tell when somebody on the radio is using fake diction, and if you listen to radio stations all over the world I would estimate that at least half of the people on air are not using the natural voice they grew up with. How did this happen? Who decided that people who played records on the radio should evolve such an absurd style of speech? How can the people who do it even begin to think that it is a normal way to behave? I have been in rooms with radio interviewers who have spoken to me quite normally when I arrive before experiencing a sudden and terrifying transformation:

‘So anyway Phill, this is being recorded for tomorrow’s breakfast show and we’ll be putting it out just after eight thirty…so here we go and…HEEEEEEYEEE! GOOOOOO-OD MORNING EVERYBODY YOU’RE LISTENING TO THEEEE BREEZE NINETY SEVEN POINT SEVEN AAAAAAAND IT’S TIME TO WELCOME A BIG BIG BIG BIG FRIEND OF THE SHOW, APPEARING AT THE QUEENS THEATRE ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT IIIIIIIIIIIIT’S MISTER PHI-I-ILL JEEE-YOOOW-PIDDUSS! HEY PHILL HOW’S IT GOING?’

How I have never physically beaten one of these fakes about the face and neck with the shitty radio station coffee mug that was in front of me, I’ll never know.

Do you think that there’s any psychological damage that you can do yourself by repeatedly using an artificial voice as part of your day-to-day work? I imagine not, or they’d have banged up Rory Bremner years ago. But these apparently troubled individuals are affecting an entirely constructed personality. They are pretending to be something they’re not, and in order to somehow facilitate this further they have decided that it would be a great idea to use the voice of a complete mental defective. Mindful of this fact, I decided that in my own case it might be an idea just to be myself and talk to people in calm and measured tones. After all, I wouldn’t want to have to quit suddenly due to the onset of schizophrenia or a bruised larynx.

To be brutally honest it felt like I was on a fool’s errand in even taking the job on. My own regular breakfast radio listening was restricted to just two stations out of dozens of contenders. I was either tuned to the steady procession of grim news coming out of Westminster and the Middle East on the Today programme on Radio 4, or in the event that I fancied something a little easier on the ears I would slide over to the wonderful Terry Wogan on Radio 2. These two shows for me represented the zenith of early-morning radio. And the reason they did so was that they were consistently good at what they did, and had both built up a reputation for excellence over decades of broadcasting. Mind you, the only reason I didn’t listen to anything else at breakfast time was that the kind of music radio I would want to listen to simply did not exist. What I wanted to listen to was a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of a show with the intelligent chat of Today, shackled to the humour and irreverence of Wogan, all bolted to the best bits of John Peel’s playlist. Christian O’Connell came very close to this, but the playlist at XFM was leaden, not to mention that the second I heard an advert I’d want to hurl the radio into a lit furnace.

As a music fan I had a collection which encompassed just about everything except heavy metal and progressive rock (and within the year even that would change). I loved the chaotic slalom of John Peel’s musical selections. I would giggle with glee when he’d dovetail techno with old rhythm & blues, or grindcore with country & western. My shorthand for this was the Peggy Lee/Ruts theory. I saw no reason at all why you shouldn’t play ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl’ and immediately follow it up with ‘Staring at the Rude Boys’. Surely any halfway decent radio show should thrive on just this kind of wilful eclecticism? Just because you play contrasting musical styles from decades apart is no reason people should tune out, and if they do, then bollocks to them. A good radio show should be for those with open ears as well as open minds. If somebody actually wants to hear the latest inane stadium-filling toss from bloody Coldplay and fucking Razorlight, then by all means they could listen to Radio 1. It’s a free country.

I began to get quite inspired by the notion of offering up some kind of alternative for listeners in the morning. At the same time I was seemingly unaware of the inherent contradiction of offering them ‘choice’ while at the same time denying them whatever I judged to be rubbish. Like so many before me, I envisioned myself as a revolutionary liberator but in the end turned out to be more of a benign dictator with a big CD box. My inner template was the driven farmer played by Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, and the words he heard in his head, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ I naively thought that if a radio programme like the one I imagined existed, then people would just eventually get to hear about it and in no time at all we’d be a massive hit. Oh yeah, I thought lots of crazy shit back then.

My personal vision for the show was simply to make a morning programme that me and my mates would listen to. I had a large group of friends who covered a wide age range so if I aimed the show at them then it should cover a potentially interesting audience. When I imagined the potential listeners for this new network, they seemed to be quite a disenfranchised bunch. They cared naught for the charts, but were keen on hearing new artists. They were also music enthusiasts, which would discount age as a specific demographic marker.

This was something that marketing people would have a dickens of a time dealing with, since their formulas tend to use age groupings or comparative income as defining factors. It was a very non-specific bunch whose radio listening habits I was hoping to change. And not just their radio habits: with them being music fans, the majority would already have a large and diverse mix of sounds filling their personal MP3 players. So in addition to dragging them screaming from their radio station of choice, I would have to tear them away from their very own music collections as well. I was about to become broadcasting’s answer to the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. ‘Sweeeeets…Lollipops…Gang of Four session tracks…Futureheads B-Sides…new Johnny Cash!’

Another of the initial misgivings I had about taking the job was the level of commitment in terms of time. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be working a five-day week all over again. The principal reason that I had got into performing in the first place was that office work really wasn’t my bag. And it’s not like I didn’t give it a fair shot – I was a clerical officer in the Manpower Services Commission for five years. And those five years were enough to make me realise that it wasn’t really the right environment for me to flourish in, unless judging performance on the huge improvement in my doodling skills.

So I called home and spoke to my wife Shelley and told her all about the job I’d just been offered. She quite rightly pointed out that we had always talked about me doing regular radio a bit later in life, the dream gig being a weekly show of some kind on Radio 2. But in the light of the new offer we didn’t take long to decide. The regularity of work and a steady income would be a refreshing change after the seasonal vagaries of life as a stand-up and TV performer. The fact that I would no longer be able to tour or do gigs was actually a bit of a bonus family-wise. I also told her about my idea to just do the show for two years, which also met with a resounding thumbs up. After agreeing with her that it would be nice to have some stability for a couple of years, I then somewhat foolishly added that I’d now have a perfect excuse to buy limitless CDs! On hearing this Mrs Jupitus started swearing profusely, and I pretended we were going into a tunnel and hung up.