As the tracks of my tears dried on my cheeks I remembered that the very show I had left nearly three years ago was currently in the hands of a fine broadcaster in the shape of Shaun Keaveney. A former alumnus of XFM, Keaveney was a laconic Northerner with a soothing voice and a snappy line in banter. Not for him the early morning histrionics of his peers. No, Keaveney had, if anything, an even more laid-back style than I did. I have to admit that when I was told he would be taking over the show I hadn’t heard him. But when I did tune in from time to time, he was funny, he knew his music, and was a cracking listen. As a member of the audience, my breakfast radio future would be kept safe in the bosom of the station I had launched, BBC 6 Music!
Then, just two months later, my inbox pinged with the arrival of an email from my mate Celine who worked at Guardian Online. ‘Hey, wanna do something for us on 6 Music? Gimme a bell…’
To be honest I wasn’t all that keen. I’d left and the station had taken a new direction. An ambitious young man called George Lamb had been given the mid-morning show. He was dead set on a television career but for some reason was approaching it via niche radio. He was an absurdly handsome West London hipster, whose interest in music seemed secondary. Despite this he picked up a whole new chunk of listeners whilst simultaneously drawing the extremely vocal ire of old regulars with his shouty shenanigans. He rapidly became 6 Music’s first Marmite deejay and was even regularly lampooned in the pages of Viz. You have to wonder at the logic of following the breakfast show with what was ostensibly another breakfast show, but to be fair if I knew how to run a radio station then I’d be doing that instead of writing this book.
In the wake of ‘Sachsgate’ and Lesley Douglas’s controversial departure from radio and 6 Music, Lamb’s employer and principal advocate was gone. He was quietly moved to a weekend show and the sassy and bright Lauren Laverne was given his slot. This went down very well with the majority of the audience as she was not only someone with a broad musical knowledge, but had been in a band, was a regular on BBC2’s Culture Show and the main host of the corporation’s annual Glastonbury coverage. The high points of her show were always when she strayed away from the playlist and introduced us to new sounds. Her obvious enthusiasm for the job is infectious. When I heard Lauren was joining 6 Music I couldn’t help but laugh as I had suggested her to Lesley Douglas as a presenter back at my very first meeting in 2001.
But I didn’t really understand why the Guardian wanted me to write about 6 Music, so I called Celine. After two rings she picked up.
‘Alright, girl, it’s Jupitus.’
‘Hey you, how are you? Missing frocking up for Hairspray?’
I reverted to my standard response to mates on the phone when I was doing fuck all.
‘Only the eyeliner really. Other than that I’m not bad. Trying to get going with that radio book I told you about…’
‘Well, it’s funny you should say that, we were wondering if you wanted to do a piece about 6 Music closing down?’
‘What?’
‘Oh no, haven’t you heard? Yeah, apparently Mark Thompson’s got some budget review they’ve been working on and they’re losing a load of online stuff. Asian Network’s going and so is 6…They’re announcing it officially next week.’
A mix of emotions welled up inside me. Even though I had nothing to do with the network any more, I had mates still working there. And it was a really really good radio station catering for an audience of licence-paying outsiders who had never had any kind of representation during the daytime radio schedules. At least, not since the original XFM sold out to GCAP. My head fell into my free hand and I ran a hand down my face and shouted in my kitchen, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake…’
The dog looked up, somewhat startled.
‘I know,’ Celine continued, ‘just as they got rid of George bloody Lamb and started to turn things round…’
First Wogan, and now this. I always knew radio was due for some radical changes but assumed they’d come from the competition posed by podcasts and internet radio. When 6 Music was launched I was hugely optimistic about its chances of success as there was no radio station like it. And now after spending over £40 million on running the station and building up an audience, and a year before the digital switchover, they were cutting them loose. Genius.
Radio was something that I had grown up with, and through a combination of sheer luck and the odd bit of conniving I had managed to do it for a living for five years. Now it appeared to be all changing for the worse. Wogan was doing weekends, 6 Music was on notice and I wasn’t on air any more.
I had been a Radio 1 listener since its launch in 1967. Broadcasters like Tony Blackburn, Dave Lee Travis and Jimmy Saville were known to millions through their daily shows as well as countless television appearances on Top of the Pops. So as I walked into a building that represented everything that I knew about radio, it is fair to say that I was a little overwhelmed. It was on a Saturday afternoon in the autumn of 1985 when, as a fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old, I wandered hesitantly into the reception of Egton House, the then headquarters of the nation’s favourite radio station.
The interview had been organised by the promoters of a gig I would be taking part in the following day called The Ranters Cup Final. East London’s legendary performance space, the Theatre Royal Stratford East, would be playing host to the aforementioned ‘Ranters’. Ranting Poetry was a briefly popular movement of poets, most of whom were absolutely terrible. This ragtag bunch of new ‘young’ performers would spew justifiably terrible things about the government of the day while simultaneously attempting to be funny about their personal lives. This might not have been quite so bad if they’d had the decency of sticking to iambic pentameter. At the time I was known as Porky the Poet, a name combining my habit of self-deprecation along with the self-delusion that I was any kind of poet.
Myself and another performer at the event, Bradford’s excellent Little Brother, had been selected to go on national radio in order to give the people a flavour of what they could expect from the gig, and hopefully in the process sell a few tickets. In the mid-1980s performance poetry was in the ascendancy. In the late seventies John Cooper Clark and Linton Kwesi Johnson had opened the doors for a whole new raft of performers in the post-punk years. The music papers gave glowing reviews of some of these new acts, which I can only assume is the reason that Radio 1 were interested. If it’s good enough for the NME then it’s good enough for us, seemed to be their modus operandi.
It was only when I had worked in radio myself that I began to understand the constant demand for content to fill the hours of airtime. Combine this with the fact that the promoters weren’t about to knock back some free national exposure and we were dispatched to the West End and a short walk north from Oxford Circus tube. Egton House was tucked away in a tiny mews off Portland Place to the side of Broadcasting House just behind All Souls Church. As we walked up to the very ordinary-looking doors, I was somewhat underwhelmed at what I saw.
In my imagination, the premises of the country’s top pop radio station had always been a vast, beautifully designed concrete, steel and glass affair, dense with exotic palms and ferns. As you wandered through the silently welcoming automatic doors, a bird of paradise would streak past you and perch on a nearby stone plinth. You would look away from its dazzling plumage and notice with delight that set upon that very same plinth was a shining bronze bust of Simon Bates, smiling beatifically. As you cast your gaze around the regally appointed lobby you would see a number of similar likenesses of the Radio 1 greats of the day: Gary Davies, Noel Edmonds, Bruno Brookes, DLT – The Hirsute Cornflake – the completely hilarious Adrian Juste…every few yards you would spy yet another broadcasting legend. The base of each of these monuments would be surrounded by the offerings of their loyal legions of fans: soft toys, underwear both unwashed and brand new, flowers, cakes and home-made