Читать книгу Good Morning Nantwich: Adventures in Breakfast Radio - Phill Jupitus - Страница 8

As long as I can remember I have loved radio. A love which has become all the more bittersweet since I got the opportunity in the second half of my life to actually work in the medium. The actual time when the idea of radio was hard-wired into my consciousness was the 1960s. Commentators are wont to wax lyrical about this brisk little decade, perhaps best summed up in an episode of The Simpsons where Homer’s view on it was a concise and brilliant ‘Mmm…turbulent…’ Memories of it are sketchy as I was born in June 1962. I was a sixties ‘love child’ born to my mother Dorothy at Newport on the Isle of Wight. Having fallen pregnant with me, Mum was keen to avoid any trouble with her father, so with her savings and my grandmother’s knowledge, she relocated to a caravan park on the Isle of Wight to await my birth.

My original birth certificate from Newport Hospital has an anonymous handwritten dash in the box marked ‘father’ which has bothered me over my life a good deal more than any piece of punctuation ever bothered Lynne Truss. Before long, Dot and I were moving on to Aldgate, Barking, Ryde on the island again, back to Barking, Horndon on the Hill, back to Barking yet again before eventually settling in the quiet dormitory town of Stanford Le Hope in 1970, pausing only for her to reconnect with her college boyfriend Bob Jupitus who, much to my joy, manfully took on the job of being my stepfather in 1968, after which, as far as we were all concerned, he became Dad. Apart from our brief sojourn back on the Isle of Wight, it did seem that for some reason Mum always liked to stay close to the A13. I’m not sure why she felt the need to do this, unless her freewheeling gypsy spirit dictated that she should never live more than a mile from a main arterial road. On reflection that’s one of the many ways that Mum differed from George W. Bush, in that she has always maintained a well-thought-out exit strategy.

The first home that I clearly remember was the Brewery Tap, a huge pub located on Ripple Road in Barking, Essex. For the development of interpersonal family relationships, living in a busy working pub is something of a double-edged sword. The environment is absurdly hectic. Every day, dozens of staff would come and go, huge brewery lorries would arrive, groaning with crates and barrels of fizzy Ind Coope keg beer, then between noon and midnight hundreds of strangers would come into what I considered my home to drink, bicker, laugh, chat, cry, flirt, dance, vomit and fight with each other, mercifully not in their own homes. Despite the fact that I considered such behaviour not a little rude, it took place without interruption and regular as clockwork seven nights a week, fifty-two weeks a year.

The king and queen of this boozy monarchy were my maternal grandparents Sid and Edie Swann. Sid was a tall, broad, prepossessing man with bad feet and a spectacular line in malapropisms (he once memorably described Mum’s Mini Metro as a ‘hunchback’). The family feared him, the punters adored him, and the brewery revered him. He was a publican with the golden touch, able to turn dodgy pubs round over the space of a few months. Wherever he found himself, he always managed to remain onside with the local constabulary and villains alike. He was never so crass as to try and play them off against each other, he was simply savvy enough to make sure the two groups were never in on the same night. The peace was maintained, and by keeping a foot in both camps he had two places to turn if there was ever any trouble.

Regardless of who he was talking to at the bar, he had the knack of making them feel like they were his sole confidant. He would mutter things whilst pulling pints and they would gently smile and nod, thinking that only they had been vouchsafed the most precious of landlordly secrets. Then he would take their money, share a conspiratorial wink with them, and the hapless drinker would wander off, laden with light ales but now feeling part of Sid’s select inner circle. As soon as they were out of earshot, he’d tell the next bloke exactly the same stuff in the same way and another acolyte would be born. He was hardly Machiavelli, but he knew the kind of simple things that made people feel good.

My grandmother Edie was a very different kettle of fish, a chain-smoking, chain-knitting, passive-aggressive Essex matriarch, controlling the comings and goings of the family with almost military precision. One of her shrewdest moves was to only tell Sid what he absolutely needed to know about what was going on with the family outside of the pub. A great example of this spectacular ability to control the flow of family information was the first time he heard about my mother’s pregnancy. Mum had returned to Barking carrying a new addition to the Swann clan. She marched into the lounge without a word, then I was matter of factly thrust into my grandfather’s arms by Mum with the words, ‘This is your new grandson.’ Then she went downstairs for a drink. Nothing dissipates a sense of anger quite as quickly as a two-week-old baby.

Generally Nan had a quick temper, but when she was out from under Granddad’s shadow she became more breezy and outgoing. To the general public during opening hours they were a sparkling double act like George Burns and Gracie Allen, each working their own areas of the bar with a slick grace and minimum of effort. Jokes and lively banter would fill the air. But once the doors were bolted shut, the bar had been wiped clean and they trudged upstairs, the knowing smiles and conspiratorial winks were turned off and the day-to-day business of making other people’s lives pleasurable was somewhat perversely put on hold for the members of their own family.

One of the afternoon golden rules for us at the Brewery Tap was never to wake Sid up when he was having his nap. It made for an unusual upbringing. I saw two extreme sides of my family members, a lively public façade and a sullen private one. Even as a small child I realised that the public faces were a lot more fun to be around, which is why I hung around downstairs as often as I could get away with it…

To have the run of a large pub outside of opening hours is not unlike having a wardrobe with Narnia in the back of it. Your home is located over the top of a big, scary place where you weren’t really supposed to go. Behind the bars themselves was a dense tangle of pipes, wires, pumps and bottles, which I was only allowed near when I was helping the head barman, Jock, with the daily rigmarole of bottling up. After seeing off a bowl of porridge, I’d leg it downstairs and Jock would take me down into the huge dank cellar. To this day occasionally when I’m in a pub, I’ll catch a whiff of that combination of the odour of stale beer and damp mortar and I’m back down that old staircase. Jock would consult his pencilled list, then point me towards various crates and ask me to fetch ‘baby’ bottles of tonic or bitter lemon, as he humped the weighty crates of light and brown ale up the stairs. I’ve often counted myself lucky that I was able to enjoy the early knockings of my childhood at a time before Saturday morning children’s television started the profitable business of distracting young people from the world around them.

Mum and I shared a bedroom on the first floor that was directly above the cavernous saloon bar at the front of the building. The bedroom windows looked out over the street with Barking Broadway just to the left. I can dimly recall being awoken by screams, shouting and the smashing of glass on a fairly regular basis, which would usually be followed by a short lull in proceedings before the familiar blare of the approaching police sirens. Then I would stare up at the ceiling bathed in the contrasting orange glow of street illumination and the blue strobe of the police lights. Being short, I mercifully couldn’t get high enough to see down on to the pavement immediately below the window. What I could see was the staggering participants being held up against the street railings for their own good. The real victims of these incidents remained mercifully out of view.

I never found such violent events frightening or disturbing; the most they brought out in me was idle curiosity. The noises were completely foreign to me, so my innocent young mind couldn’t fill in the ghastly images they represented. Conversely I found domestic arguments completely terrifying. My family were unashamed screamers when it came to their own petty rows, which they didn’t seem to mind tearing through with a wide-eyed four-year-old in the room. The legacy of this family quirk is that to this day I find it impossible to handle confrontation directly and tend to react either with glib responses or with incandescent rage. You’ve gotta love genetics.

We shared our room with an impressive wooden radiogram. Ninety per cent of the time I used it to listen to Sterling Holloway retelling the story of The Jungle Book on the Disney LP that we bought after seeing the film. As it was the only album in the bedroom for two years, it got a fair hammering. But eventually even I’d had enough of ‘I’m the King of the Swingers’. And this is how my inquisitive little hands eventually found their way to the tuner.

There are fewer sounds more seductive than the multifarious looping swooshes, crackles, squeaks, hisses and whistles of a radio being tuned in. It’s like a form of music in and of itself. I soon realised that the slower I turned the ridged ivory and gold plastic dial the more stuff I could hear. This was the first place I ever listened to the sound of a foreign voice. Without leaving my bedroom, I opened a door on another world. Overlapping stations would phase in and out with each other depending on their signal strength. You’d slide past a German bloke talking about who knows what, which would slowly give way to the sound of Doris Day or BBC news or the Russian weather forecast. Having no idea what all these strange sounds signified was part of the joy of listening. I would spend ages wandering through this sprawling audio desert up the dial and all the way back down again. None of it had any particular meaning to me, nor did it need to. The simple combination of my own curiosity and funny noises was apparently enough. It’s not a thousand miles from what I call ‘the-box-it-came-in principle’: you buy your child a vast and financially crippling toy and they end up playing with the box it came in. I wasn’t listening to the radio as was intended. I was playing the radio…

Eventually I started occasionally listening to programmes, the news being the most regular daily fare. As a child it seemed to me that the radio carried news, while our telly in the living room seemed to be mainly for wrestling, Thunderbirds, Pogle’s Wood and NASA space missions. So naturally enough I felt myself privy to information that the rest of the family were sadly denied by TV. One broadcast was to provide some much-needed grist to my eager young conversational mill. In March 1967 a supertanker called the Torrey Canyon hit rocks between the Isles of Scilly and Cornwall, spilling over 30 million gallons of crude oil into the sea. It was one of the first real headline-grabbing environmental disasters, and was widely reported on the radio. The coastline of southern England and even the Brittany Coast was devastated.

My young mind was obviously keen to impart this urgent nugget to anyone who would listen. Mum was entertaining one of her friends with tea, biscuits and ‘grown-up talk’ and I was being frozen out of proceedings.

Eventually, when I could contain myself no more I blurted to her friend, ‘Have you heard about the Torrey Canyon disaster? It’s very bad.’

The two adults stared at me in silence for the briefest moment before bursting into fits of laughter. I consider this the sole reason I never moved into current affairs as a career.

At the age of six, we lived in a shack in the scrubby Essex woodland just north of Horndon on the Hill with Bob. It was here where I crystallised the notion that the radio was something that could be listened to for the pure enjoyment of its actual content rather than just the daft noises you could get out of it. This discovery was facilitated by the shack not having any mains electricity, which precluded telly. I listened to the radio because there was little else to do in the morning, or at night. The only outside entertainment coming into the shack was weekly copies of The Beano, Dandy and Victor and the various broadcasts on what Bob delightfully referred to as ‘the wireless’.

It was in this rural idyll that he would sit me down to listen to The Goon Show. These absurd tales with their endless parade of silly voices and effects punctuated by the elegant swing of Ray Ellington and the band or the incredible harmonica of Max Geldray were the soundtrack to my woodland years. No child could fail to be entertained by such madness; even if the majority of the jokes did go soaring over my head, the joy was implicit in the sound. Bob explained to me that he had listened to it as a boy and the shows were actually over ten years old! That seemed incredible to me, that I was listening to something made before I was born.

Despite being born in the television age, 1968 for me was my radio year. In the evening we’d all sit around the radio and just listen. I’m quite glad that I had the chance to experience family evenings in the same way my parents had. On one occasion listening to The Goons, I leaned against one of the supporting beams in the middle of the room in my pyjamas and slid down it to sit on the floor. As I did so, a one-inch splinter of wood buried itself in my back. I remember Bob doing his Eccles voice in an attempt to distract me from my howling as Mum dug the splinter out with the aid of Dettol, hot water and the business end of a safety pin.

During the day the radio was always on, just burbling away in the background. So one of my first solid memories is of Jimmy Young doing his recipes, with the assistance of ‘Raymondo’. There was something almost hypnotic about the timbre of his voice and the repetition of the instructions.

‘Take eight ounces of self-raising flour…’ Then he’d say it again but slower. ‘…That’s eight…ounces…of self-raising flour.’ After he’d told you the ingredients, Raymondo would pipe up with his Pinky and Perky high-pitched voice, ‘And this is what you do…’ I thought Raymondo was hilarious when I was five.

All the while the music of the day was burying itself in my mind, only to surface again decades later when I listened to Brian Matthew’s Sounds of the Sixties on Radio 2. It’s a really odd feeling to hear something that you haven’t heard in forty years. You feel an uneasy wave of familiarity even though the name of the song and the artist doesn’t ring a bell. The fact that radio was operating on me in this subliminal way, at a time when none of us knew what subliminal meant, has always made me aware of its power as a medium.

We moved back to Barking briefly in 1969. The only reason I am sure of this is that I remember watching Neil Armstrong take his first steps on the Moon from the vantage point of Granddad’s Parker Knoll reclining chair. I was blithely unaware of the significance of the events fuzzily unfolding on the screen in front of me. This was what most people nowadays cite as the single most important television moment, but I just thought the picture was rubbish.

Also in the mix was my Aunt Josie. She was a vital conduit to the teenage culture of the day. She and her mates Lynn and Helen would spin Motown and Trojan records and ensure that the kitchen wireless was tuned to the new Radio 1 whenever they were around. The sounds of Detroit and Jamaica were now a fundamental part of my childhood in suburban Essex. The turbulent sixties ended in just that fashion, with Sid running off with Peggy the barmaid. Nan’s seemingly unassailable rule had been broken along with her heart and her spirit, and she was never the same again. Those of us left in the wake of this disaster left the Tap and Barking behind us and carried on. Nan and Josie went to live with Auntie Pat in Suffolk. Uncle Gerald went to work overseas as a diving engineer, and we went back to Bob who had left the shack for a new home.

We moved to Stanford Le Hope in summer 1969 and, as I was growing older, so music and radio were becoming more and more a part of my life. Our house was a former manse and conveniently situated next door to Stanford Junior School where I would be a pupil for the next four years. It was here that I met up with people who had older brothers. And older brothers had record collections. Children are slavishly populist by nature so it takes an outsider to show you what kind of alternatives might be available to mainstream culture.

Mark Tindale’s brother David was a guitar-playing hipster deep into his Lou Reed and David Bowie. The record player in his room was on a plywood board suspended from the ceiling on wires. I remember going round to his house and picking up the guitar and swinging the neck round and accidentally hitting the record player, sending the stylus skidding noisily across the surface of his brand new copy of Transformer. I was never allowed into his room again. Brian Gooden’s brother John worked for a record label in London so we had all kinds of unknown white label treats available to listen to at Brian’s. Every Thursday I watched Top of the Pops religiously. It came on immediately after Tomorrow’s World. Now I could see those bands who were playing the great songs I was listening to on the radio: Slade, Marc Bolan, David Bowie and my own favourites, The Sweet.

For Christmas one year I got my own small transistor radio. It was a black plastic model with a volume dial, a tuning dial and a socket for an earpiece. My nights were often spent cruising the ether looking for more strange sounds. Every Sunday I would listen to the chart countdown show for what new entries had arrived and how the bands had fared since last week. Some of my friends were so clued in that they recorded their favourite tracks with the condenser microphones that came with their cassette decks. Listening to Radio 1 on medium wave on a Sunday night, however, meant that your enjoyment of the show was usually marred by the repetitive call signal of Radio Prague, a sonorous brass and woodwind jingle that would play for five seconds, then a ten second pause, then it would play again. This would annoyingly go on for the entire hour of the chart countdown no matter how much you tried to fine-tune your receiver.

Mum always had the radio on during the day, so whenever I came home at lunchtime I’d hear what was on. She can’t have been listening to Radio 1 because I often heard comedy shows like I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, Hello Cheeky and I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. Years later I appeared as a panellist on Clue alongside Tim Brooke-Taylor, who didn’t seem that happy as I told him that I used to listen to him when I was at junior school.

Radio started to fall out of favour with me when I got my first record player, a beige boxy Ferguson model with a lid and four speed settings. Now I could pick exactly what I listened to, who needed radio? I had access to music or comedy on my own now and whenever it suited me. Mates would come round with boxes of 7″ singles or comedy albums and we would sit around and listen. The Goons and Peter Sellers were the frontrunners in the comedy stakes. Judge Dredd was a popular musical choice because his songs were all so filthy.

In 1973 I was taken out of Hassenbrook School because I was bombing academically, and sent to a place called Woolverstone Hall. Renowned at the time as ‘the poor man’s Eton’, it was a former manor house located on the Shotley Peninsula just east of Ipswich. The school came under the control of the Inner London Education Authority, so its diverse intake ranged from the sons of the military to those of well-to-do green-grocers and scholarship cases, which was where I came in. Although my cousins were there, I never liked it from the moment I arrived. The second my parents drove away on my first day, I knew I’d made a colossal mistake. I was terrifically homesick and basically spent two years crying myself to sleep. Eventually, though, you get used to anything and more through boredom than resilience the tears diminished, and the only way I could show my displeasure at being sent there was by sucking at all of my subjects.

I was at Woolverstone from September 1974 until June 1978, a time when British pop music was going through one of its most radical upheavals. On my arrival, the sixth form dorms were forbidden to us juniors. But I did occasionally get a pass to go and visit cousin Stuart. There were few ways to denote one’s coolness and sophistication in a boys’ boarding school. Smokers had a certain bad boy cachet, but were ludicrously easy to expose as their blazers would always reek of the stuff when they came back from their hiding places. Cheesecloth shirts were the garment of choice for the sixth form Lotharios whose beautifully parted and feathered hair and icy stares concealed the fact that the constant chafing of their nipples must have been agonising. Then there were of course the mad bastards. These boys would be avoided by staff and pupils alike, and had a propensity for sudden explosions of irrational behaviour. Going to lessons in dressing gowns, openly smoking pipes, joining the gun club and on occasion fighting teachers, the fact that these ordinary seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys seemed like grown men to me only added to their cool mystique.

The greatest weapon most possessed, however, was their collection of long-playing albums. In 1974 progressive rock was the music of choice for your average hipster teen rebel about town, and the biggest band of the day was Pink Floyd. Nowhere was immune to the music of Dark Side of the Moon. Every single study boomed with the chords of ‘Money’ or ‘Great Gig in the Sky’. As a fan of chart pop music, I was intrigued. I’d never heard anything like this stuff. Songs rambled on for over ten minutes, with lengthy instrumental passages and lyrics that were vague, elliptical and full of mystic imagery. Being twelve, rootless and emotionally frail, I was of course drawn to these strange new sounds and inexorably in the winter of 1974 I tragically entered my musical wilderness years.

It turned out that Pink Floyd were just a gateway band. Oh sure, the Floyd sound really cool, man, but if you like them then you’ll bloody love Genesis! Or Greenslade, or King Crimson, or Curved Air, or Steve Hillage, or Van Der Graaf Generator! Rather than studying, my free time at school was spent in pursuit of ever more obscure bands. And with every new study that you were allowed into, there was yet another wild-eyed advocate of some new and unheard-of band. In order to ingratiate myself with these spotty, brushed-denim-clad arbiters of taste, I would always wax lyrical about how right they were and how brilliant the music was. But it was a false dawn. I was a teenager, and teenagers aren’t supposed to sit around listening to music and nodding sagely. We’re supposed to throw ourselves around like dervishes, uttering primal howls of delight, rage and lust. We should be drinking too much cheap cider and scrawling gory Quink ink tattoos into our arms with a compass. We should be completely frustrated and enraged by both everything and nothing all at the same time. In short we should be listening to The Sex Pistols.

Just before Christmas 1976 the nation was rent asunder when a slightly podgy guitarist from Shepherd’s Bush called an even podgier local news television presenter a ‘dirty fucking rotter’. The whole country was outraged, the media went crazy and punk rock was delivered mewling and bloody onto the dingy sheets of mid-seventies Britain. As the eye of punk rock’s storm was in London where most of Woolverstone’s pupils came from, so it made its way on to dormitory record players faster than the rest of the country. Chief among the proto punks were Lance and James Jowers. Hailing from West London, they came back to school after holidays with tales of the Roxy in Covent Garden and brilliant singles from bands like The Stranglers, The Clash, The Damned, Buzzcocks and The Jam and truly dodgy ones from Johnny Moped, Wayne County and Eater. The prog lads were being backed into a corner by the energetic new sounds of the punks. And having had all the fight smoothed out of them by listening to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and Tales from Topographic Oceans for the past three years they went belly up in less than a month.

The do-it-yourself ethos of the punks was taken up by two school bands. Lance Jowers was first with his combo Personal Problems, followed swiftly by Dan Gladwell with The Addicts. (Dan’s Addicts were nothing to do with the later and more successful Clockwork Orange obsessives who bore the same name.) These were the first punk bands that I saw; in fact, they were the first live bands that I saw full stop. Lance was stupidly good looking and had a brief flurry of success in the 1980s when his band 5TA were signed to MCA. But in the confines of that school assembly hall with his dog lead chain round his throat and ripped sleeveless T-shirt he was nothing less than a god.

It was in this year of punk that I wanted a piece of the action, and so borrowed a bass guitar from A-level student and Queen fan Clive Roberts and started to teach myself how to play. From my point of view I never ever fitted in with the hip Woolverstone punk crowd because I never had my hair cut by anybody other than my mum. The same loopy pudding bowl style was worn by me, my brother and my sister for over sixteen years. If I’d been an early fan of The Ramones, I might have got away with it. But I was never really cut out for rebellion: a hesitant nature and desire not to upset anybody borne from those early days in Barking made me risk averse.

The overriding positive that I took from the punk and new wave years was that I started to listen to the John Peel Show on ‘wonderful’ Radio 1. Like the sixth formers at my school, Peel had been a prog rock advocate who could now see that the cultural wind was changing and wasn’t about to get caught up in the storm. Over the space of a few months his show went from being a patchouli-scented bastion of all things delicate and ethereal to a one-stop shop for brash two-minute nuggets of teenage rebellion.

But Peel was much smarter than we were as kids. Whereas we saw punk as the new thing crushing all in its path, Peely understood that it was just the latest wave of youth culture breaking on our shores. He saw that characters like Johnny Rotten, Siouxsie Sioux and Joe Strummer stood shoulder to shoulder alongside the likes of Gene Vincent, Billie Holiday and Roy Orbison. So rather than giving his show over completely to the ill-mannered new youth phenomenon, he juxtaposed it with other musical forms to give it some context. Just as Don Letts, the deejay at the Roxy Club, was augmenting the fury of punk with the righteous indignation of dub reggae, so on our radios between ten and midnight John Peel was showing us a brave new world while reminding us of the debt it owed to earlier pioneers.

Listening to John Peel was like no other radio show I had ever heard. Gone was the artificial inflection of the voice and fake bonhomie. Gone were the constant trivial features and phone-in competitions and incessant time checks and jingles of the daytime output. Here was somebody who played music for one simple reason – because he actually liked the records. I genuinely thought that for some reason you weren’t allowed to do that when broadcasting.

Every deejay I had ever heard up until that point had played the music completely on autopilot. Their attitude seemed to be that everything was great. All the records were fabulous, life is fantastic, and how about that weather out there? Their shows hurtled along with a minimum of fuss, and these wireless giants were every bit as famous as the artists they were playing. They had big, talented, exciting and let’s not forget wacky personalities. They were on for their three-hour slot five days a week and of course you were going to listen to them because they were great! Then at the end of their show there would be a bit of the old cheeky banter with the guy doing the next great show, with all the same records you just heard only in a slightly different order, and wasn’t everything great, and how about that weather outside! And so it went, over and over and over again…

Once I had heard someone normal on the radio I was forever changed. A bloke who at least twice a week would play records at the wrong speed, and instead of making a zany joke about it to cover the foul-up would just mumble about his own incompetence and apologetically put it on at the right speed. A man who would often talk in affectionate tones about his family, especially his beloved wife. I recall the giddy excitement in his voice after the birth of one of his sons, Tom (one of whose whose middle names, and indeed those of his other three children, was a tribute to Liverpool FC). Also the anguish and occasional petulance he would exhibit when his beloved Liverpool lost a game. You couldn’t fail to be entranced by the genuine enthusiasm in his voice when he played a record fresh out of the envelope and, like us, was listening to it for the very first time. The moment when he described the single ‘The Word Girl’ by Scritti Politti as ‘achingly beautiful’ was the moment that I knew that being a deejay could be so much more than we were being given during the daytime.

John Peel is the reason that I said yes after I had sat in that office with my agent, Lesley Douglas and Jim Moir and they offered me my own breakfast radio show.