I bought myself some thinking time by conveying to him my sympathy as well as trying to enlighten him as to the ticking time bomb that was the death knell of the tuck shop. I explained that the whole situation was a simple case of natural market forces at work and that the school tuck shop was way out of date and now way out of its depth. What I had precipitated was bound to happen sooner or later and was in fact already happening outside the school gates in the local newsagents.
I knew I was treading on thin ice and that he was entirely justified in his initial request for me to close business but I couldn’t resist chancing my arm. I’d hatched a plan. I decided to offer to cut him a deal. I would carry on trading but I would raise my prices so as not to undercut anyone anywhere. I would then donate my new additional profit to the school fund. I also ventured that this may well turn out to be more than the school fund had ever received in the past as I was moving considerably more units than the tuck shop ever had.
Now it was his turn to be stumped: on the face of it my offer, although admittedly audacious, was also entirely plausible.
He paused for a moment before realising that this was a ridiculous conversation and one that he didn’t need to have. I was a pupil and he was the headmaster; this was his turf and I was trying to muscle in on it. He told me to close down immediately.
Ultimately I had no problem with this—how could I? He was completely in the right and he was a nice man.
So the funny kid with the guerrilla sweet stall packed up his belongings, bade his farewells and left town—out of business and out of the education system for ever.
Top 10 Best DJs I Have Ever Heard
10 Mike Hollis (Radio Luxembourg, the great 208)
9 Mike Reed (Breakfast Show Radio 1)
8 Paul Locket (Piccadilly Radio)
7 Cuddly Dave (Piccadilly Radio)
6 Pete Baker (Piccadilly Radio)
5 Bob Harris (Radio 1 and 2)
4 Roger Scott (Radio 1 and 2)
3 Alan Freeman (Radio 1 and 2)
2 Steve Wright (Radio 1 and 2)
1…read on
My brother was a DJ. I knew this because he came home late most nights and had hefty black record cases with Roxy Music stickers on the side. He’s over ten years older than me. I was a mistake apparently—my mum was over forty when I arrived, very old for a new mother in those days. She says she travelled to the hospital to have me on the bus. I’m not sure if this is true but I’ve never liked buses since.
My brother David was not so much my hero but I did think he was cool—the chief responsibility of an elder brother. I wanted to be like him, I even wanted my bedroom to smell like his, which was bloody awful come to think of it—the thought of that stench now makes me want to gag. What is that smell in older boys’ bedrooms? Is it the smell of ‘anxiety’ so to speak; and why on earth did I find it so alluring? Maybe it just smelt older and older is what all kids want to be.
My brother seemed to be very happy with his life—something that always intrigued me until one Saturday morning when I found out perhaps why he was so content. I came downstairs and there was this gorgeous girl asleep on the sofa. She really was something else, dressed head to foot in a long, black, flowing lace dress with black stockings and black shoes—in fact everything about her was long except her hair, which was cropped short in a sexy chic kind of style. Long legs, long arms, a long neck, long fingers and long fingernails painted jet black. I didn’t know exactly how she’d come to be in our house but I did know she was an absolute babe.
It transpired that David had met this goddess as a result of his job as DJ at the Carlton Club, a popular nightspot in Warrington town centre situated over the top of Woolies just off the high street.
I made another mental note. Deejaying makes geeks more attractive to gorgeous women.
Both my brother and I have always looked a bit geeky although David did have a cool Fifties thing going on as a kid. Here’s a pic.
Other than him taking me to my first-ever rock concert—ELO, the Out of The Blue tour when I was thirteen, for which I will be eternally grateful—and what a ‘two’ nights that was,* David and I never did much together and we’ve never done much since. As with my sister; we all sort of live through Mum. We are a decent family but not a close family, something that isn’t helped by the fact that we all live miles apart: my sister Diane is in Yorkshire, whilst David currently lives in Australia and before that New Zealand for close to the last twenty years.
That said, however, it was definitely ‘our Dave’, as we call him, who set me off on the road to playing records and talking in between them as a way of earning a living.
Emulating my big brother deejaying in night clubs was a cool enough goal for me to aspire to as it was, but we were about to behold a whole new world of record-spinning possibilities as the explosion of independent commercial radio was just around the corner.
*David organised a trip through his work for a coach load of peeps to go and see ELO. He asked me did I want to go, to which the answer was of course yes. I had never been to any kind of live event before and ELO were my favourite band apart from The Beatles. The order has since swapped and if I had to die listening to one or the other—it would be ELO…probably ‘Sweet Talkin’ Woman’. We set off from St Helens but it was such a cold night the coach literally froze to a halt on the M6. We had to be properly rescued from the motorway along with hundreds of other people who had suffered the same fate; it was minus ten degrees or something ridiculous. As we had no way of getting home so we all slept on the floor of a local pub. I had never even been in a pub before, nor had I ever had whisky, which the landlady dished out free of charge. ‘Come on you need this,’ she urged me. It turned out that so many fans had failed to get to the concert that night the band put on an extra show a couple of nights later with all unused tickets still valid. The gig was truly amazing and to this date by far the best gig I have ever been to. Thank you brother. x.
Top 10 First Commercial Radio Stations in the UK
10 Radio Forth (22 May 1975)
9 Radio City (21 October 1974)
8 Radio Hallam (Sheffield) (1 October 1974)
7 Swansea Sound (30 September 1974)
6 Metro (15 July 1974)
5 Piccadilly (2 April 1974)
4 BRMB (19 December 1974)
3 Clyde (31 December 1973)
2 Capital (16 October 1973)
1 LBC (London Broadcasting Company) (8 October 1973)
Where we lived commercial radio took on the form of the magnificent Piccadilly Radio, broadcast live from Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester. ‘Piccadilly 261…on the medium wave,’ sang the jingle. It was funky, it was new, it had adverts and a jazzy coloured logo, which you could send off for in carsticker form—something we all did even though most of us didn’t have a car and ended up sticking them on our bedroom windows.
This was a radio station where everything was groovier than anything that had been