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
