Friday, September 04, 2020
Thursday, September 03, 2020
The Greatest Living Englishman by Martin Newell (Autumn Girl Books 2020)
Young Jobless
I sat with a two-litre bottle of cider in one hand and a roll-up in the other, watching the video screen in my landlord Steve's living room. Roger Maynard, then a news presenter at BBC East in Norwich, was interviewing a young man. The young man, in his 20s, was dressed almost entirely in black, his thin face appearing more gaunt for a surfeit of smeared mascara. He lurched uneasily in his seat as he fielded the interviewer's questions. Did he think, asked Roger Maynard, that a record whose subject matter mentioned unemployment and drugs was relevant as an educational aid for youngsters? The young man stared vacantly at the camera: “Well it’s gotta be better than rock-climbing and Duke of Edinburgh Awards... annit?” he slurred. Then he laughed, lurching almost out of his seat.
Even I, by this time well-numbed with cider, was slightly shocked as I watched the video recording of my first live TV appearance.
Everyone, apparently, had seen it. The pub, so Steve said, had been a-buzz with it earlier. Even an uncle of mine in distant Buckinghamshire had witnessed it. Shortly afterwards, during the course of a telephone conversation, he told me quietly that he thought I’d let myself down. It hadn’t been the plan. I’d put a sharp black outfit together. A little bit rock’n’roll maybe, but smart-ish It was on the train to the Norwich studio that I noticed my throat was swollen, my head ached and I felt slightly other-worldly. The meet and greet person at the BBC showed me into the Green Room (which they still had in those days) pointed to a large drinks cabinet and gave me one of those, you-know-what-to-do gestures. No sooner had the door closed than I’d sprung briskly up and mixed myself a whisky mac. Then, quickly, another. Still no one came to collect me. So I had a third. I now felt confident, witty and erudite.
Thus began My So-Called Fucking TV Career. A few days earlier, my mum had telephoned me at 7.30am and said, “You’re in the Daily Mail. They say that a 'dole and drugs record’ written by a part-time washer-up has been sent out to hundreds of schools as an educational aid. And a Tory MP Nick Budgen, has condemned you publicly." She sounded rather more excited than alarmed about it. On Radio 1, the DJ Dave Lee Travis was playing ‘Young Jobless' at lunchtimes. The record company informed me that my disc had been C-listed, which meant ‘sporadic’ airplay. The drive-time DJ, Peter Powell, had played it too. For the next fortnight or so, I’d be washing up at the restaurant on a busy lunchtime session, and I’d suddenly hear Max Volume’s guitar riff chugging in, as my record came on.
“Hey, that’s my record again!” I’d squeal. The whole shift would come to a halt until it was finished. I was getting Radio 1 airplay. One evening they played it on Radio 4’s PM news show. I never heard it of course. In those days I only ever listened to pop music stations. Because of that particular news item, some high-up at EMI Records had also heard it.
The next thing you know, along with Kris and Stuart from Offstreet Records, I’m sitting upstairs at EMI’s Manchester Square HQ, negotiating a one-off, piss-poor, four per cent record and distribution deal. The record was hurriedly re- released on EMI's Liberty label. Now we were motoring.
We sealed it with a lukewarm bottle of Chablis, which I'd found while nosing around in their broken fridge, when instead I should have been listening to what was being said. In the bogs later, just along the corridor, I met Mensi, cheerfully ebullient singer of the Angelic Upstarts. “Do some fookin work, yer lazy bastids!” he yelled in broad Geordie, as we passed back through the typing pool together. On the way back up to the meeting room, finding myself on the wrong staircase, I met a few glamorous- looking New Romantic types: tablecloths over shoulders, leather trousers and big ’80s hair. They all had flutes of cold fizzy in their hands. I was informed that it was some kind of reception for Dexys Midnight Runners. And there's me, Kris and Stuart, crammed upstairs in an office with a paper cup of warm Chablis each and a song about the plight of Our Unemployed Yoof. Every expense spared, then.
Saturday, August 22, 2020
Old But Gold . . .
Prisoners Exercising pic.twitter.com/bjSTpTuxF1— Cold War Steve (@Coldwar_Steve) July 31, 2019
Don't mind me. Just clearing out my drafts.
The Nation’s Favourite – The True Adventures of Radio 1 by Simon Garfield (Faber and Faber 1999)
Chapter 2
The Weeping Truckdrivers
Steven Armstrong (Broadcasting Journalist): I remember a character in what I think was a Douglas Adams book, an American woman who comes to London, and the two things she notices most of all are that pizzas don't deliver - this was in the mid-eighties, before Domino's - and how bad the radio is here. She's listening to Radio 1 in her hotel room, and she's waiting for this comedy voice to stop talking and the DJ to return. But gradually it dawns on her - that was the DJ's normal voice.
I first listened to Radio 1 with my brother, taping the charts on Sunday evening. Recently I discovered a tape that I'd made at the time - Paul Nicholas's 'Grandma's Party' was in the charts. I have a mental picture of me and my brother crouching down holding a microphone to the radio speaker. We listened, of course, but Radio 1 in the eighties was just ridiculous. One incident that stands out was when there was all this tabloid furore about the Beastie Boys, and Simon Bates played a Run DMC track and then 'No Sleep 'til Brooklyn'. The impression he gave you was that he had done something that was so dangerous and so frightening, that it was tantamount to punching the prime minister.
All the daytime people were laughable characters, even Simon Mayo on the breakfast show'. Gary Davies with all these terrible single-entendres about his boxer shorts and his bit in the middle... It was as if the radio had been taken over by the people who were the guides on Club 18-30. Dave Lee Travis - the self-named Hairy Cornflake - he physically made me choke when I heard his voice. He had this stupid snooker game - I can't find the words to describe it. In the early nineties I had a long argument with the programme controller at Piccadilly Radio in Manchester, who was convinced that Dave Lee Travis was the greatest presenter in British radio. I was stunned into silence.
Dave Lee Travis (Disc Jockey - on air, 23 August 1986): Today we have the final of the current tournament of Give Us a Break, snooker on the radio. Contestants from Bath, Romford, Sheffield and Droitwich Spa. We'll have the tranogram, the dreaded cringe of course at twelve o'clock, and two featured albums, the new one from Daryl Hall, and the recent classic from Kid Creole and de Coconuts. So keep it here, as somebody once said. We have three hours of mayhem for you! [Plays Kid Creole.]
['Annie, I'm Not Your Daddy' fades out.] Methinks he doth protest too much! To get it out the way, I've been away. Between last week's show and this week's show 1 thought I'd take the only opportunity I had for a break, and I went over to Corfu, which is a bad place to go in the middle of August when it's extremely hot and the hotels don't have air-conditioning. So for some reason I've got a bit of laryngitis and I do apologize for that. [Plays a Eurythmics record.] That's the Eurythmics. Even after all these years I can't help being amused by the name. The Eurythmics! Wonderful.
Now then, last week you may recall that we set you up with a special clue for a two-word tranogram, and we referred to the behaviour of one Bruno Brookes at Alton Towers, saying he was having a go on all the dodgy rides and everything, and that this could well be a good description of him. Two words. We played 'Rip It Up', 'It's Over', 'Sundown', ‘Killer Queen', ‘Johnny Be Good', 'Our House', 'Call Me', 'Kissing With Confidence', 'Eyes Without a Face' and 'You Might Need Somebody', Put that all together, perfect description of Bruno Brookes Risk Jockey. A Risk Jockey! Wasn't that brilliant? We loved it. The first three out the bag were Pat Butler from Alton in Hampshire - oh dear, I don't like the name of your road, Spittlehatch, you've got to move, Pat, you've got to move out of there! David Walsh from South Shore, Blackpool, that's a big address. And Sue Coe, from Leamington Spa. Prizes on the way to you.
Harry Enfield (Comedian): Smashie and Nicey are in my opinion the best characters Paul and I have done together ... It seemed odd to me that, although millions of people listened to Radio 1 every day, no comedian had ever taken off their DJs before us. It had always struck Paul and me that there were two main types of DJs - those who loved music like John Peel and Alan Freeman, and those who loved the sound of their own voices, like DLT.
Radio 1 also struck us as a funny old place because, in 1990, when we started doing the DJs, the whole youth culture was ultra-modern, with the take-off of dance music and fashion-conscious, music-based magazines like Q, but Radio 1 was still dominated by DJs with seventies haircuts and cuddly cardigans, whose idea of a good record was Rolf Harris's Tie Me Kangaroo Down'.
Hardy Bucks
In my humble opinion, these are the best 33 seconds on YouTube. pic.twitter.com/cIEtt3znD2— Daniel (@DannyDutch) August 10, 2017
Wednesday, August 19, 2020
Tuesday, August 11, 2020
Sunday, August 09, 2020
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