sort of thing can often turn out to be nothing more than a cursory meet and greet. ‘Let us know if you have any ideas for a show, we’d really love to work with you!’ was quite often the end result of two hours on the trains and tube and sitting with a big grin slapped on your face in front of somebody who occasionally nodded. These speculative encounters mean that they get to put a tick in their managerial ‘job done’ box, but it feels like a colossal waste of time.
I met up with Addison in reception at Western House in Great Portland Street, just north of Oxford Circus in London’s glitzy West End, and we were whisked up to the first floor and Jim’s office.
I looked wide-eyed around the walls. There were photos of Jim arm in arm with various dignitaries and celebs. Awards for shows jostled for position with Ken Pyne cartoons from Private Eye, archly mocking Moir. There was a large coffee table in the centre of the room and a couple of standard-issue big managerial sofas and a vast desk behind which sat the commanding figure of Jim Moir himself. As I looked down at the coffee table I wondered how many people had been fired over its dark, forbidding surface. Had Jim ever had to arm-wrestle Wogan on it during contract negotiations? Also in on the meeting was Moir’s second-in-command at Radio 2, Lesley Douglas. A no-nonsense Geordie, throughout the time I knew her Douglas was passionate about just two things, radio and Bruce Springsteen.
While Ad sparred around with the two of them I sat and smiled to myself, and mentally prepared for the vague promises of the ‘We’d love to work with you sometime!’ chat. I couldn’t have been wider of the mark. After Ad had finished verbally knocking our hosts about, we took our seats and got down to business. Moir looked round at me.
‘Now then, we will be launching a brand new music radio station in the March of next year, and we would like you to be the host of the breakfast show.’
I took a slightly firmer grip of my coffee and cocked my head towards him in an inquisitive fashion, not unlike a puzzled Labrador.
‘The BBC are going to be starting a number of new digital radio services in partnership with existing stations,’ Jim thundered on. ‘Radio 4 will be launching one, as will Radio 1, and we will have one as well.’
I looked at the beaming face of Moir and mustered up all my intellectual reserves to come up with a trenchant response to his very kind offer.
‘Oh…right!’ were the only words I could muster.
‘Ah, the new digital services,’ I thought to myself. With the advances in technology, the BBC, like all broadcasters, would be slowly transferring all of its radio and television services to digital platforms. The digital switchover meant that everybody in the UK would be listening to radio and watching television on digital receivers by 2012. I really should have been more aware that this was happening as the BBC had used me to front a television campaign to promote this rapidly approaching technological wonder. I spent two days in a van and on location with Andy Parsons and Henry Naylor who played my hapless film crew. We were supposedly making a ‘fly on the wall’ documentary about this exciting new technology. The loose gag of the thing was that as we went from place to place we kept being caught by our unwitting subjects. The first day was spent shooting with Leslie Grantham, Sanjeev Baskar, Kulvinder Ghir and a couple of puppets. I had a fairly energetic time of it, jumping through hedges, falling off a ladder and getting wedged in a serving hatch.
On day two I was lucky enough to spend a few hours on a studio set with John Peel. Peely’s role involved him listening to a digital radio while he was taking a bath, while I, naturally enough, had to stick my head through a cat-flap in order to see what he was up to. As the army of technicians fussed around the set, I sat with John in the hospitality area, me in a rather nice Tonik Blue two-piece and John in a dressing gown and swimming trunks ready for his bath scene. As we sat there I did my level best to hide the obvious joy at finally meeting him. I thought a nice neutral opener would be to say how much my wife and I enjoyed listening to Home Truths. He sipped his red wine and sighed. I had the feeling I might have inadvertently touched a nerve.
‘Yes, it’s a good show, but I don’t know…’ He paused before going on. ‘They do too many of them. That’s the thing with the BBC, as soon as they find something that does well they always want more of it. I hardly get any time off because I’m always recording bloody Home Truths.’
John had been with the BBC since the late 1960s and had become one of the leading lights of change in music with the arrival of the punk scene in 1976. But one of the problems with staying loyal to the Corporation is that you can end up being completely taken for granted by management. Each new controller of Radio 1 didn’t seem to know what to do with him. At the same time, none of them had the balls to fire him because they knew just how much outcry there would be. The time slots of his show were shuffled around with little regard for the man who had championed so many bands throughout his career. So as time went on Peel’s shows became more and more marginalised. He was a kind of broadcasting equivalent of the ravens at the Tower of London. Home Truths, which aired from 1998 on Radio 4, was a programme driven solely by contributions from the listeners, and was presented by John. Within the course of one show the subject matter often veered from the side-splittingly hilarious to the tear-jerkingly tragic. But at the centre of it all was the avuncular Peel, who handled both, deftly. Having finally met him, it was somehow sad to think that he didn’t enjoy the show as much as we enjoyed listening to it.
In the van home later that night Andy Parsons pointed out that John was on air, so we got the driver to tune in to Radio 1. As the record finished Peel began to speak.
‘As you might imagine I am on occasion asked to do some quite unusual things in the name of “promoting” the BBC but I can reveal that I spent most of today sat in a bath of lukewarm water while Phill Jupitus stuck his head through a cat-flap.’
My first mention on Peel’s show, while only in passing, remains a favourite memory. Had I never listened to his shows as a child, I might not be sat in a prominent BBC executive’s office being offered a job as a deejay.
When you are presented with a deal of that stature, your thought processes start to accelerate and, somewhat unwisely, you do find your mind wandering out of the 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