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.
Corner Sounds
‘I Wanna Be Like You’ – Pookiesnackenburger
‘Ying Tong Song’ – The Goons
‘Angelina’ – Louis Prima
‘Double Barrel’ – Dave and Ansell Collins
‘ABC’ – The Jackson Five
‘Take Me Over’ – McKay
‘Roll With It’ – Star Turn
‘Flowers in the Rain’ – The Move
‘Intro/Sweet Jane’ – Lou Reed (from the Rock n Roll Animal LP)
‘Phoenix City’ – Perfect Thyroid
Chapter 3 The Golden Age of Wireless
These days it’s pretty much taken for granted that the breakfast show on any radio station is the most important show of the day. But why is that exactly, and how did it happen? Like anybody else facing such an all-encompassing question I googled it. Just typing in ‘breakfast radio’ yielded 32 million results. That might be a bit time-consuming. So I narrowed down my parameters a little and tried for ‘history of breakfast radio’. Yes! 16,400,000. Let’s narrow the field a little more: ‘history of breakfast radio in the UK’. 4,100,000. This was all well and good but I had a few specific questions about the form, which I’m not sure even the mighty Google could handle.
One of the most fascinating developments in broadcasting over the last twenty years is how many universities and colleges have started to focus their attention on training people for jobs in media in general, but radio in particular. Most people who I have encountered in radio were pulled towards it by a desire to work in the field, but at the time there were no formal qualifications as a radio presenter or producer. People would generally start by volunteering and then if they were good at their job and got noticed they’d be offered the odd paid shift, and on it would go. Several high-ranking editors and producers I have worked with over the years started their careers in just such a fashion.
One of the country’s leading facilities for learning about radio today is the Media School at Bournemouth University. Indeed the first time I visited there was to present one of the 6 Music breakfast show’s regular outside broadcasts from the student radio station. The night before I went with my producer Phil Wilding (of whom, much more later) to present one of our regular outside broadcasts from the student radio station. The night before, we went
