As technology advances, the amount of choice available to listeners seems almost limitless. With internet radio and features like the iPlayer, audiences are able to ‘time shift’ shows to a listening time that is convenient to them. If I’m in America in Boston, I get up and can listen again to that day’s Today show on Radio 4 five hours after it was broadcast. At home in the mornings I quite often listen to the previous week’s edition of God’s Jukebox from Radio 2. Has breakfast radio as we have known it been served notice?
‘My wife was a massive Wogan fan,’ says Sean, ‘but can’t stand Chris Evans. So when she saw him coming over the horizon she discovered internet radio. She comes from Liverpool so now through the internet radio she listens to Radio Merseyside. You’ve got stations that were only ever meant to broadcast to a local area but which, thanks to the internet, can be heard anywhere in the world. That’s the quantum change: breakfast radio is available to anybody anywhere.
‘I listen to a lot of Canadian radio on the internet. I listen to a brilliant NPR jazz station from New Jersey. I can dip into other people’s breakfast now, I’m listening to their reporting of the New York rush hour; it’s not my rush hour but I’m vicariously feeding off it in a way. I find it fascinating because with somebody else’s breakfast show you get a sense of the rhythm of the life of the place in a way that you would never get at any other time of the day. That’s the exciting thing. Why would I want a DAB when I’ve got 2,500 stations on my internet radio?’
So is the appeal of a breakfast radio show that it defines more than just the radio station?
‘In the morning we’re raw, we’re receptive, we are probably most ourselves at that time, and a good breakfast show understands that – maybe it doesn’t know it understands that, but intuitively it does.’
It’s interesting to note that even the earliest breakfast radio shows were partially informed by what was being done in the evening. That was pretty much my game plan for the 6 Music breakfast show: to take an evening radio specialist music format and tailor it for a breakfast audience.
If I had sat down with Sean Street before making my own breakfast show then I might have had a bit more consideration for the audience. A show of that kind, at that time of the day, was a difficult listen. The music was quite often ‘challenging’ to say the least at a time of the day when people might not want to be challenged. It’s the start of their day and they’ve been asleep, so do they really want to be woken up by ‘Ace of Spades’?
In retrospect I should have thought a little more about what I was doing and had a little more regard for the opinions of the audience as well as those of the BBC staffers guiding me. But in the isolated world of the stand-up comedian the only voice in your head that you trust is your own, and my time at 6 Music at least taught me that that voice can on occasion be extraordinarily unreliable.
But in 1978, on the brink of leaving boarding school and facing the time in my life when I would have to make some serious long-term decisions about my future, the idea of being a deejay was about as likely as me going on tour with Paul Weller or working on a hit comedy TV show for BBC2 or having a football column in The Times. It was time for me to knuckle down to grim reality, and lower those expectations.
Bournemouth Mix
‘On the Radio’ – The Concretes
‘Stateside Centre’ – Surfing Dave and The Absent Legends
‘Reasons to Be Cheerful (Part 3)’ – Ian Dury and The Blockheads
‘Limbo Jazz’ – Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins
‘Poison Ivy League’ – Elvis Presley
‘Rat Race’ – The Specials
‘Lady of the Sea’ – Seth Lakeman
‘Seaside Shuffle’ – Terry Dactyl and The Dinosaurs
‘I Can See Clearly Now’ – Jimmy Cliff
‘Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)’ – Baz Luhrmann
Unlike all of those British post-war rose-tinted views of school as ‘the happiest days of our lives’ I have to say that it was the day that I actually left boarding school that was the happiest day of mine. After scraping a few O levels, I attended Palmers sixth-form college. It was at this point in my life when I discovered girls and Jamaican ska almost simultaneously but under unrelated circumstances. After royally screwing up any chance of A levels, I took my meagre qualifications and found a job working for the Manpower Services Commission at Gray’s Jobcentre in Essex as a clerical officer on 1 July 1980, the paradox of this being that there weren’t any jobs.
Partially as a reaction to my newly confined life as a desk jockey, I became an unstoppable doodler. I was already a fan of comics and graphic novels and had rudimentary drawing skills of my own. Indeed I was on one occasion officially reprimanded for the state of my desk blotter, covered as it was with cartoon pigs, tanks, stick figures, pretty ladies and band logos. What little income I had was spent on comics, maintaining girlfriends, buying records and going to gigs. It was at one of these where I saw a bunch of poets, some of whom were so unbelievably dire, I decided to add ‘poetry’ to my extracurricular portfolio alongside ‘blotter cartoonist’. My rationale being, ‘If those idiots can do it then so can I…’
Under the name Porky the Poet, I started performing light-hearted political nonsense to partisan crowds in November 1983. Alongside such luminaries as Swift Nick and Kool Notes, I performed increasingly angry poems to increasingly angry audiences and even got a nice review in the NME. On 8 March 1984 I met Billy Bragg for the very first time and my life was changed forever. We had common ground in that we both came from Barking and shared a love of comics and West Ham. A year later, Billy invited me to be the opening act on his 1985 Jobs & Industry Tour, which allowed me to quit the civil service and start life properly. I will remain forever in his debt for that.
Between the winter of 1985 and the summer of 1990 I was employed by record label Go! Discs, who at the time were releasing Billy’s records. When I started there, the job description stretched no further than answering the phones and hanging about a bit. But over the years this gradually expanded and I found myself writing press releases, doing mail-outs and babysitting bands before ascending to the dizzy heights of regional press and radio officer. I was living the dream, sending copies of The La’s debut album to the Bournemouth Echo and Clyde FM.
But however cool this might sound, it’s showbusiness not showfriends, and my jaundiced view of life backstage in the world of music eventually sucked the joy out of it for me. The constant bickering and contractual wrangling, the petulance of the artists, the tedious jargon of plug and marketing all eventually got to be too much. When I left in the spring of 1990 to become a stand-up comedian I really couldn’t care if I never saw another record again.
Life threw me a wonderful if unexpected curveball when I quit Go! Discs and discovered that my girlfriend Shelley was pregnant. This caused an initial panic about what our prospects might be with her a pregnant primary school teacher and me an unemployed poet/comedian/ cartoonist. But we knuckled down and stuck to the game plan. I had nine months to try and crack the London comedy circuit, and crack it I did. Within a year I was a regular at clubs like the Comedy Store, Up the Creek, The T&C2, Ha Bloody Ha, the Banana, the Red Rose and the Meccano and I was making the same money I had been on at Go! The beauty part of being a comedian was that I only gigged at night, so when Shelley went back to teaching I had the luxury of five glorious years as a house husband raising my two daughters Emily and Molly.
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