we go and…HEEEEEEYEEE! GOOOOOO-OD MORNING EVERYBODY YOU’RE LISTENING TO THEEEE BREEZE NINETY SEVEN POINT SEVEN AAAAAAAND IT’S TIME TO WELCOME A BIG BIG BIG BIG FRIEND OF THE SHOW, APPEARING AT THE QUEENS THEATRE ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT IIIIIIIIIIIIT’S MISTER PHI-I-ILL JEEE-YOOOW-PIDDUSS! HEY PHILL HOW’S IT GOING?’
How I have never physically beaten one of these fakes about the face and neck with the shitty radio station coffee mug that was in front of me, I’ll never know.
Do you think that there’s any psychological damage that you can do yourself by repeatedly using an artificial voice as part of your day-to-day work? I imagine not, or they’d have banged up Rory Bremner years ago. But these apparently troubled individuals are affecting an entirely constructed personality. They are pretending to be something they’re not, and in order to somehow facilitate this further they have decided that it would be a great idea to use the voice of a complete mental defective. Mindful of this fact, I decided that in my own case it might be an idea just to be myself and talk to people in calm and measured tones. After all, I wouldn’t want to have to quit suddenly due to the onset of schizophrenia or a bruised larynx.
To be brutally honest it felt like I was on a fool’s errand in even taking the job on. My own regular breakfast radio listening was restricted to just two stations out of dozens of contenders. I was either tuned to the steady procession of grim news coming out of Westminster and the Middle East on the Today programme on Radio 4, or in the event that I fancied something a little easier on the ears I would slide over to the wonderful Terry Wogan on Radio 2. These two shows for me represented the zenith of early-morning radio. And the reason they did so was that they were consistently good at what they did, and had both built up a reputation for excellence over decades of broadcasting. Mind you, the only reason I didn’t listen to anything else at breakfast time was that the kind of music radio I would want to listen to simply did not exist. What I wanted to listen to was a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of a show with the intelligent chat of Today, shackled to the humour and irreverence of Wogan, all bolted to the best bits of John Peel’s playlist. Christian O’Connell came very close to this, but the playlist at XFM was leaden, not to mention that the second I heard an advert I’d want to hurl the radio into a lit furnace.
As a music fan I had a collection which encompassed just about everything except heavy metal and progressive rock (and within the year even that would change). I loved the chaotic slalom of John Peel’s musical selections. I would giggle with glee when he’d dovetail techno with old rhythm & blues, or grindcore with country & western. My shorthand for this was the Peggy Lee/Ruts theory. I saw no reason at all why you shouldn’t play ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl’ and immediately follow it up with ‘Staring at the Rude Boys’. Surely any halfway decent radio show should thrive on just this kind of wilful eclecticism? Just because you play contrasting musical styles from decades apart is no reason people should tune out, and if they do, then bollocks to them. A good radio show should be for those with open ears as well as open minds. If somebody actually wants to hear the latest inane stadium-filling toss from bloody Coldplay and fucking Razorlight, then by all means they could listen to Radio 1. It’s a free country.
I began to get quite inspired by the notion of offering up some kind of alternative for listeners in the morning. At the same time I was seemingly unaware of the inherent contradiction of offering them ‘choice’ while at the same time denying them whatever I judged to be rubbish. Like so many before me, I envisioned myself as a revolutionary liberator but in the end turned out to be more of a benign dictator with a big CD box. My inner template was the driven farmer played by Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, and the words he heard in his head, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ I naively thought that if a radio programme like the one I imagined existed, then people would just eventually get to hear about it and in no time at all we’d be a massive hit. Oh yeah, I thought lots of crazy shit back then.
My personal vision for the show was simply to make a morning programme that me and my mates would listen to. I had a large group of friends who covered a wide age range so if I aimed the show at them then it should cover a potentially interesting audience. When I imagined the potential listeners for this new network, they seemed to be quite a disenfranchised bunch. They cared naught for the charts, but were keen on hearing new artists. They were also music enthusiasts, which would discount age as a specific demographic marker.
This was something that marketing people would have a dickens of a time dealing with, since their formulas tend to use age groupings or comparative income as defining factors. It was a very non-specific bunch whose radio listening habits I was hoping to change. And not just their radio habits: with them being music fans, the majority would already have a large and diverse mix of sounds filling their personal MP3 players. So in addition to dragging them screaming from their radio station of choice, I would have to tear them away from their very own music collections as well. I was about to become broadcasting’s answer to the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. ‘Sweeeeets…Lollipops…Gang of Four session tracks…Futureheads B-Sides…new Johnny Cash!’
Another of the initial misgivings I had about taking the job was the level of commitment in terms of time. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be working a five-day week all over again. The principal reason that I had got into performing in the first place was that office work really wasn’t my bag. And it’s not like I didn’t give it a fair shot – I was a clerical officer in the Manpower Services Commission for five years. And those five years were enough to make me realise that it wasn’t really the right environment for me to flourish in, unless judging performance on the huge improvement in my doodling skills.
So I called home and spoke to my wife Shelley and told her all about the job I’d just been offered. She quite rightly pointed out that we had always talked about me doing regular radio a bit later in life, the dream gig being a weekly show of some kind on Radio 2. But in the light of the new offer we didn’t take long to decide. The regularity of work and a steady income would be a refreshing change after the seasonal vagaries of life as a stand-up and TV performer. The fact that I would no longer be able to tour or do gigs was actually a bit of a bonus family-wise. I also told her about my idea to just do the show for two years, which also met with a resounding thumbs up. After agreeing with her that it would be nice to have some stability for a couple of years, I then somewhat foolishly added that I’d now have a perfect excuse to buy limitless CDs! On hearing this Mrs Jupitus started swearing profusely, and I pretended we were going into a tunnel and hung up.
Workers’ Playlist
‘Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend’ – John Cale
‘Theme from The Godfather/Al Capone’ – Jazz Jamaica
‘Get a Job’ – The Chordettes
‘Start’ – The Jam
‘Good Morning’ – The Beatles
‘Hitsville UK’ – The Clash
‘Rez’ – Underworld
‘Train Song’ – Holly Cole
‘What Do I Do Now?’ – Elvis Costello
‘A13, Trunk Road to the Sea’ – Billy Bragg
Chapter 2 The Boy in the Corner
As long as I can remember I have loved radio. A love which has become all the more bittersweet since I got the opportunity in the second half of my life to actually work in the medium. The actual time when the idea of radio was hard-wired into my consciousness was the 1960s. Commentators are wont to wax lyrical about this brisk little decade, perhaps best summed up in an episode of The Simpsons where Homer’s view on it was a concise and brilliant ‘Mmm…turbulent…’ Memories of it are sketchy as I was born in June 1962. I was a sixties ‘love child’ born to my mother Dorothy at Newport on the Isle of Wight. Having fallen pregnant with me, Mum was keen to avoid any trouble with her father,