Seize the Day Page 2

  Having had my pencil confiscated early on, I used charcoal from the fire to write a daily paper called the Jungle Drum, featuring the exploits of my fellow contestants. Only half a dozen issues were published, and where they are now heaven knows. The only remaining copies were on the stolen computer, so some oik had them before they were probably wiped and the laptop sold for fifteen quid to some dodgy mate. With other contestants’ partners, Eileen had come over to Australia and had been reassured, on the day they started ejecting, that I definitely wouldn’t be leaving the jungle. As it happens I did. I was never quite sure what went on behind the scenes, but who cares, it was all a bit of fun and a chance to raise some serious money for your charity. The media circus at the hotel were astounded when they discovered the amount of effort I’d put into the venture, without any of it being screened. The programme could portray you as it pleased and to the rest of the world it looked as though I simply hadn’t turned up. As we walked over the bridge towards the waiting cameras, Eileen gave forth with her feelings about the way I’d been edited. She didn’t know she could be heard telling the world exactly what she thought. I’ve stayed in touch with a few of the jungle crew. Charlie Brocket’s outdoor wedding to the lovely Harriet in the South of France was a delightful affair. The ceremony afforded the congregation far-reaching views to the sea.

  ‘Great view Charlie.’

  ‘It is now … I chopped down a load of trees.’

  ‘Very decent to do that just for us.’

  ‘I thought it’d be good to open up the vista.’

  ‘At the expense of your trees.’

  ‘Oh they weren’t my trees, they belong to the bloke who lives over that way.’

  Imagine a blithe wave of the arm there, readers.

  ‘Well … very decent of him then.’

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t know about it yet, he’s away on holiday.’

  Peter Andre’s wedding to Katie Price was an extraordinary affair at Highclere Castle, but nowhere near as celebrity-laden as predicted, with only a couple of us from I’m a Celebrity in attendance. As we know, it didn’t work out, but Pete has two lovely kids of his own, (three including Harvey, Katie’s son by Dwight Yorke) and is now happy with his new relationship.

  Another jungle chum turned up unexpectedly in Frinton-on-Sea. I had been asked by a TV company making a documentary about British tennis players for my opinion on the current David Cup squad and the game in general. We shot it at Frinton Lawn Tennis Club, but each time I got into full flow, some weird old woman kept interrupting. The director and I tried to tell her as politely as possible that we were recording, but she clearly failed to grasp the situation. She came back time and time again, during which time I learned that she was married to Derek and was staying in a caravan near the beach. All interesting stuff, but not relevant to the interview. Then she got up close and peeled off her prosthetic nose and vulcanised face. It was Jennie Bond. The long fingers of the jungle have a far-reaching effect.

  So how did someone with a simple, youthful passion for words and music find himself stranded in the oppressive heat of the Australian jungle with a disparate bunch of strangers, being watched twenty-four hours a day by most of Britain? I blame a man called Neil ffrench Blake. He started it.

  I’m not entirely sure that I’d come across anyone quite like this Blake cove before. He drank gin out of a cardboard cup, was once apprehended by the police for running through a Berkshire village at 3 a.m. dressed only in a pair of underpants and occasionally kept goal at Reading FC’s ground wearing sunglasses. That gives you some measure of the man. When I first knew him he was married to the Duke of St Albans’s daughter, but later, I believe, got hitched to a girl in the Vietnamese jungle – at least judging by his Christmas card that had them entwined round each other like lianas, peering out of rather dense foliage of a southern Asian nature.

  The man with two small ‘f’s was an enigma, a paradox, incisive, volatile, far-seeing, passionate and like myself, an adventurer, but above all, he gave me my break in radio. I hadn’t been looking for a break in radio, but he gave me one anyway. He knew in which direction I should be going … I didn’t. Without any real experience, except that most of us spend a certain part of our lives talking, he took me on despite my obvious apprehension. The reasons he gave were threefold and bizarre: ‘You’re very English, mildly eccentric and a damn good opening bowler.’ Sound common sense, you’ll agree, and a trinity of reasons he now strenuously denies. He retrospectively claims he took me on because of my talent. I know the truth!

  One may question, and not without good cause, the importance of having someone handy with a cricket ball on a radio station. In the case of 210 Thames Valley, the latest independent to go on air, it was because Neil had decided that the outfit should have a cricket team and a football team. This was a splendid arrangement, as it made it more like school and thus was a comfort zone as I ventured into an unknown and uncertain future. ffrench Blake (it feels so good to be able to start a sentence with a lower case letter) was a blend of head boy and headmaster, with the Marquis of Douro and News International’s Bert Hardy the school governors. It was Rupert Murdoch’s News International that had saved the station from extinction before it was even born, after the original financial backing failed to materialise and an attempt at raising £350,000 in £1 shares by public subscription had also came to naught. Murdoch’s large injection of dosh inspired others to follow suit, resulting in Thames Television and EMI taking 25 per cent between them. The promotional campaign for 210 Thames Valley was spearheaded by Graham King, who’d also masterminded the re-launch of The Sun newspaper.

  While thousands of young hopefuls may dream of being on the radio, to me, being offered a permanent job caused much consternation, as I considered myself a free spirit and shuddered at the thought of being constricted by employment. Paradoxically, at the time, any hint of security made me feel insecure and as I ventured hesitantly along the tunnel, I constantly looked over my shoulder at the reassuring light behind me. I could always turn back if I wanted to … it wasn’t too late. Of course I soon got used to this new life and subconsciously relaxed into it. It was like starting a new school – I was afraid of losing my individuality, whatever that was.

  The essentially middle-of-the-road (or MOR, as that musical genre is known in the industry) station went on air on 8 March 1976, the opening ceremony and ensuing show handled by the wonderful film buff and former Radio Two presenter Paul Hollingdale. Fellow presenter Steve Wright and I enjoyed a pupil–teacher relationship with Paul, whom we cast as the slightly stern form master who’d rebuke us, but with a twinkle in his eye and a tin of polish in his hand. He was forever in the studio, announcing that his mission was to polish it ‘to a high gleam’.

  Local radio was still relatively young but there was an increasing number of magazines dedicated to the world of radio, including Broadcast, Needletime and Radio Guide, to assist in the battle against the great rival television. When I started broadcasting, the most popular TV programmes were The Benny Hill Show, This Is Your Life and Man About the House, but in the daytime we didn’t have to worry about competition from the small screen, and breakfast television was still some years away.

  The feeling of camaraderie and teamwork at 210 was engineered brilliantly by NffB, with the result that a mix of seasoned hands and new boys pulled at least vaguely in the same direction. We felt that it was our station and we wanted to be there as much as we could, getting involved, throwing in ideas and as far as I was concerned, learning the craft. The new boys, Steve Wright and myself, were told to listen to the old guard and follow suit. Neither Steve nor I had broadcast professionally in our lives, Steve being a Southend lad who appeared to have done a bit of everything, from working in the BBC library to appearing in the crowd, as a boy, in the film Ferry Cross the Mersey. Little did we dream that we’d both end up on Radio One and that he’d go on to Radio Two, as back in 1976 we were a brace of raw upstarts while the rest were top presenters and
experienced professionals. Great though they were, we studiously avoided being directly influenced by them and had our own radical and off-the-wall ideas, for which we were fired by NffB at least twice a week. We swiftly became irreverent, slightly cocky and convinced that everything we did was outrageously humorous and that we were the first ones to do it. Despite, or perhaps because of, our attitude, we were committed, inventive and, dare one say it, a little ground-breaking. Even now Steve and I still get people approaching us who remember the Read and Wright Show with fondness.

  In 1976 there were only a few local radio stations, which meant that major artists felt it important to promote themselves and their latest offering in various outposts of the country. Of course, Reading was easy to get to from Heathrow and London, which made it fairly popular with both stars and record companies. It meant that I got to interview many great names from the world of music who up until that time had merely been a bunch of letters on a record label. David Cassidy arrived straight from the airport and the legendary Flying Burrito Brothers turned up in their tour bus on the off-chance of an interview. These days they wouldn’t get past the receptionist and no DJ would be allowed to interview anyone ‘on spec’ without prior agreement from the hierarchy, but I welcomed the Burritos with open arms and was later congratulated for the impromptu interview. Knowing your music history and the characters that fell unexpectedly into your lap was part of the game, which is why NffB beamed, ‘Brilliant, you knew all about them, it was a great interview … they were happy and I’m happy.’ I’d made an instant decision to change the show round to accommodate them, so I set the microphones up, got a balance, got them to play some live stuff and kept the chat fairly pacey. These days if you so much as think about changing even one track of the pre-programmed playlist you risk landing in the mire and being transported to the Slough of Despond. There was no Google to swiftly check their history either. You had to know it.

  When the chart-topping singing phenomenon (his own words) Demis Roussos came to see us, it was a hot day and Steve and I put some armchairs in the garden (oh yes, we had a garden), where, on this occasion, we intended to discuss the life, times and circumference of the Greek singer. Being a gargantuan twenty stones at the time, his great frame needed regular sustenance. ‘Cake,’ he boomed like an Athenian Brian Blessed. ‘No cake, no interview.’ The chances of any cake remaining on the premises for long with Read and Wright around were minimal, so we offered to send someone to buy the big man a slice. ‘Slice? I want a cake.’ A whole cake, one that would serve a family of six, with enough left over for supper. Desperate pleas over the radio led to a kind soul donating a large sponge she’d just made to the cause. He dined on it, that listener probably still dines out on it, and we got our interview.

  I really enjoyed interviewing, with guests such as the Shadows, Mary Hopkin, Lena Zavaroni, Showaddywaddy, Gene Pitney, the Bay City Rollers, Alvin Stardust, Alan Freeman and Johnny Mathis all providing different challenges. Marc Bolan particularly seemed to enjoy coming to 210, often contributing live jingles to my programme, which he would write, play and perform during the show. I also did some outside broadcasts with Marc as well as roistering in local hostelries, where we’d sing Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran songs until we were thrown out. He always talked about his love for those early rock & rollers and how much they’d influenced his songwriting and the tracks that gave him a string of number one records. Marc would always have his chauffeur sitting outside, which is something that would have irritated me no end. The thought that someone was sitting in a car at my behest, while I was inside eating and drinking wouldn’t have sat as comfortably with me as it did with him. Once I asked him why he didn’t drive himself, to which he replied that he thought it was too dangerous. Ironically, within a year he was to die in a road accident at twenty-nine, a sad waste of talent and the tragic end of a lovely man. I always think of him when driving across Barnes Common in west London, where the car in which he was a passenger hit a tree, fatally injuring him. It’s now many years since his death but without fail there are always fresh poems, photographs and flowers regularly pinned to the tree and I often notice one or two people looking at the statue that’s been erected there.

  Marianne Faithfull was another early interview, arriving in the studio in a black shiny mac, short skirt and long boots. Heady stuff for a shiny, eager disc jockey. She sat opposite me and became progressively more provocative as she put her boots on the desk and displayed her knickers. Smiling away to herself, I think she was enjoying turning up the heat and being humorously flirtatious with a raw broadcaster.

  Although I’d previously interviewed that legendary hit maker Cliff Richard on hospital radio in 1975, I did my first lengthy and professional interview with him a year later on Radio 210, when he was promoting his new album, I’m Nearly Famous. We ended up in the cover shot of a magazine, with me wearing my hair down to my shoulders and decked out in badges to promote the station, while Cliff sported a badge that plugged his record.

  Former Shadows bass player Jet Harris came to do an interview and bizarrely turned up again the following morning. ‘He’s back,’ I said to Neil. ‘What shall I do?’

  ‘Interview him again, he was bloody good yesterday.’

  It transpired that Jet too had been so happy with the way things had gone that he’d checked into a local pub, determined to return the next day. By lunchtime on the second day, the general feeling was that he might be going for three days in a row, but the once-blond James Dean lookalike suddenly leapt up with ‘My God, my God’, and began staggering towards the pub door. Wright and I came to the instant conclusion that the interviews had been seriously debilitating and he was on the verge of collapse, but it turned out that in all the excitement he’d forgotten that he’d left his dog in his caravan in Gloucestershire without food or drink for two days. A month or two later I produced a couple of tracks with Jet at Sun Studios. Reading, not Memphis. We recorded ‘Spanish Harlem’ and ‘Riders in the Sky’, the latter track sounding like the old Jet. I added some ghostly backing vocals and banged two blocks of wood together for the highly essential whiplash effect and the result was pretty good. Ten years earlier and we might have had a hit, but neither track was released, although ‘Riders in the Sky’ somehow escaped onto YouTube and has had 20,000-odd hits. Ah, if only YouTube hits counted as sales, how happy we’d all be.

  As a kid, there’d been a lot of records that I’d found inspirational, but I never linked them together until later. Many of them had been produced by the legendary Joe Meek and the best ones written by a chap called Geoff Goddard. I knew only a little about Geoff, but I discovered that he lived in the catchment area of our radio station and so, not surprisingly, put a call out. At length a very shy and reluctant Geoff turned up at the station, which is when I discovered that he had actually played the organ on the global multi-million-selling single ‘Telstar’. I came to know Geoff over the years, writing a couple of songs with him and hearing how, after Joe’s suicide, he never really wrote again except for the odd creative excursion. He told me how one of his songs was stolen from him and went to number one. He had the squeeze put on him and even Joe, who knew that Geoff had written it, failed to support him, with the result that the courts ordered him to desist from claiming ownership. The deception not only destroyed his will to write, but also left him with severe headaches for many years. I consider myself privileged to have written and recorded two songs with Geoff, ‘Flight 19’ and ‘Yesterday’s Heroes’. Geoff died in 2000 and I feel that, as he was probably my earliest influence in wanting to write songs, I should record here the fact that he was a truly great songwriter, a gifted musician and an unusual man. He worked in the refectory at Reading University, clearing away the plates at lunchtime and generally cleaning up. He didn’t have to do it, as he still made enough from his royalties, but he enjoyed the camaraderie and it gave him something to do. He was heavily into the spiritual world and confessed to me that he often left his tape machine runnin
g while he was asleep in case it picked up any alien or spirit voices. I still experience both joy and sadness when I listen to the two songs we wrote together and which feature Geoff’s voice. I feel proud to have known and worked with him and I hope the future brings belated recognition. In 2013 Reading University erected the first of their Red Plaques to Geoff in a ceremony that I hosted; two of the recipients of his great songs, John Leyton and Mike Berry, performed afterwards, so perhaps that recognition is beginning to come about.

  But back to Neil ffrench Blake’s outfit. At the time I remember being slightly peeved at having to interview non-music people, such as the local bin men’s leader during a strike, the organiser of the local cycling club, or a spokesman for the Thatcham Walkers … we wanted to play records! However, I now confess to being retrospectively grateful for the horizon-broadening opportunity. One of the most bizarre of those interviews was with the Duke of Wellington, the interview taking place while we had a putting competition. Had it not been for my stature, non-Gallic countenance and the fact that I didn’t stuff baguettes down my trousers whenever I marched on Russia, I’d have felt decidedly Napoleonic going head to head with Wellington. I would return for a further encounter at Stratfield Saye, the Wellington digs since 1815, almost 200 years after they moved in, for the BBC. I must have been damned impressive in 1976 to get that re-booking.

  Being on the radio didn’t mean that I stopped doing gigs with my guitar in various pubs and clubs, or that I stopped writing songs and poems. My first book of poems was stolen, presumably by mistake, when a miscreant entered the house I was sharing post-college. Unless the break-in was the work of a literary madman, I’m certain that my verses weren’t his main target. I was pretty peeved, though. Still am, I suppose; no one likes losing creative stuff. If some of those gems within, like ‘Autolycus’ Satchel’, ‘Trinitrotoluene Triolet’ and ‘The Last Journey of the Fuscous Gnomes’, ever turned up I’d probably be horrified at how ghastly they were. Luckily most of my diaries have survived, so I can vaguely see what I was up to. I recorded in my diary that for compering the first International Drag-Racing Show at Crystal Palace I trousered the princely sum of £25. I continued to play cricket for Tim Rice’s Heartaches, for whom I’d turned out since the team’s inception in 1973. I’d known Tim since 1968, when he and Andrew Lloyd Webber had been given a breathtaking advance of £200 each, in the hope that their writing bore fruit. I remember sitting with them in the Lloyd Webbers’ flat in west London as Jesus Christ Superstar came together, working on the PR for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and singing on the demos for one of their musicals that never came to fruition, Richard the Lionheart. Tim even sang backing vocals on my first ever single, which you can read all about in Chapter 8. I also turned out for the 210 cricket and football teams, for which NffB kept wicket and goal respectively and always in shades. Hey, we were in showbiz … that’s what you did. NffB was a hard taskmaster, once making me turn out for a match when I had chickenpox and a temperature of over 100.