Seize the Day Page 5

  I have never been a club person, but sometimes there was little else to do and if one or two of the others were going, I’d tag along. I avoided the girls who looked like girls, as they were generally men. Those that looked like men were also questionable I was told. A hell of a learning curve. The record company guys regularly flew out and occasionally fell foul of the previous rule, including one who actually got as far as his hotel with his new friend, only to discover when they were both between the coarse European sheets that he was handling a whole greengrocer’s shop. He thought he’d died and gone to Covent Garden. He was ahead of the game in getting three of his five a day. We were told by the hotel staff that he’d fled semi-naked into the night. We didn’t see him for some months after that.

  Don’t imagine that being a Radio Luxembourg DJ in the Duchy itself meant that everyone bought you a drink, slapped you on the back and wanted to be your best friend. With some it cut no ice at all. I was with a couple of friends one evening in one of the more pleasant bars when a chap informed me that I was sitting on his stool. Now we’d been there for at least an hour and this newcomer had just breezed in. I’m a friendly fellow, to which many will attest, but I’m also no pushover.

  ‘Sorry’ – we English always start with ‘sorry’, it sets the tone quite nicely – ‘but we’ve been here for an hour.’ There were plenty of other seats. I indicated this with a sweep of my hand.

  ‘Get off.’

  There was something in the no-nonsense manner of this guy that told me it might be sensible to ‘get off’. I got off. Most times I would feel a wimp at backing down, in fact most times I wouldn’t back down, but the tone of his voice and the cold, steely look in his eye told me there was no shame in taking silver in this particular event. My instinct proved to be correct. I was told later, in hushed tones, that he was a serious player who, with the help of the odd firearm, steam-rollered over anyone that got in his way. Good job I didn’t try to reason with him then. An opening gambit of ‘I say, old chap’, or ‘Come off it, old boy’ might have created a sudden vacancy at the radio station. Call me selfish if you like, and far be it for me to deny anyone a break in radio, but in this case it was justified. I’m sorry if you were next in line.

  If anything had ever kicked off, I wondered if he’d have remembered me. ‘Hey, buddy, I was the chair guy. You know, the one who gave up his seat for you? My seat is your seat, you know that. Any time.’ Our comradeship wasn’t put to the test. Thankfully I never saw him again.

  The longest-serving member of the team was Barry Alldis, an Australian who started at the station in 1956 and went on to become chief announcer. After a long spell on the BBC Light Programme and Radios 1 and 2, he returned to Radio Luxembourg in 1975. My very first show for ‘Luxy,’ as it was fondly known, was one that followed Barry’s. We’d all listened to him under the bedclothes, presenting the Top Twenty, and here he was … the Barry Alldis. I hung around while he pumped out those great catchphrases (everyone had catchphrases), ‘Your DJ, BA’ and ‘Whether at home or on the highway, thanks for tuning my way’. Bob Stewart also had a few choice lines. My favourite was ‘The clock on the wall says “that’s all”, it’s time for me to go, there ain’t no more of this here show’. I was also rather fascinated by Bob’s method of giving a time-check: ‘It’s three little ones east of midnight.’ Classic. Anyway, Barry welcomed me … and then left me to it. No technical help, no training, no advice – straight in at the deep end. The control panel was as complex as the flight deck of a 707.

  Barry was delightfully old school. I was alone in the office late one night and I heard the station output stop suddenly. Maybe it’s the speaker. No, not the speaker. Transmission breakdown? No. After two corridors and two flights of stone stairs I stuck my head round the door of the studio.

  ‘All OK, Barry?’

  He was on the phone but moved his mouth away to whisper. ‘Sure mate, sure. Just on a call.’

  ‘And that thing you’re waving around in your hand?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That record in your hand? Is that the one that’s meant to be playing?’

  Down went the phone, on went the record and live went a very embarrassed DJ in apologetic mode. Now, we’d make light of it. Claim idiocy or whatever. Someone of Barry’s vintage saw it as an unforgivable and unprofessional error.

  The Villa Louvigny was a spooky place at night. The Nazis had captured it during the war and used it to transmit William Joyce’s (Lord Haw-Haw’s) propaganda speeches. The broadcasts were recorded onto shellac and then transmitted, the records playing from the inside out, i.e. you placed the needle in the centre and it moved outwards. By the time I got there, the last of them was just about to disappear. Graffiti from French prisoners of war still adorned some of the walls. You didn’t want to be there alone in the dead of night.

  We tended to eat sometimes with a few of the expats that lived out there, including one guy called John Bond. One night he called the station during the show and invited me to a party. ‘Come on over when you’ve finished and bring your guitar.’

  ‘You want me to play?’

  ‘We all want you to play,’ he announced over the noise.

  I hadn’t been there more than a few weeks so it seemed a good way of meeting people. Collecting my guitar from the apartment, I scooted over to the address. John met me at the door and welcomed me like a long-lost brother. Inside there was a general introductory wave of the arm around the room and a drink was brought. They’d been partying for hours and clearly couldn’t wait for me to play. Nobody mentioned the radio, but I assumed they all listened to the German service or the French service, so they wouldn’t have a clue who I was. That was fine, but by now they were almost chanting for me to play. It sounded like ‘Hey Mick, Hey Mick, Hey Mick’, but only my old cricketing pals called me Mick and that was M-I-C. Locals, eh? Still I forgave them the pronunciation and sang a couple of songs. The disappointment was tangible. What had they expected? I didn’t know. But somehow I’d let them down.

  ‘Just play guitar solo,’ shouted one enthusiast. That wasn’t really my forte, but I managed to pick out a rather plodding twelve-bar blues. The dwindling audience seemed perplexed, though not as perplexed as me. Suddenly I wasn’t the life and soul of the party any more and decided to go home rather than look for explanations.

  ‘I’ll give you a lift,’ said the man who got me into this mess.

  I was surprised after the dismal failure of the gig. Safely in the car, I had to ask, ‘Was it that bad?’

  ‘I told them you were Eric Clapton.’

  ‘Whaaaat?’

  ‘I thought you might get away with it.’

  ‘Don’t they know what Eric looks like?’

  He shook his head. ‘I thought we might impress them.’

  No wonder they were disappointed. And of course they hadn’t been shouting ‘Hey Mick’ but ‘E-ric, E-ric, E-ric’. Years later, there were probably parents dotted around Luxembourg, telling their children, ‘I went to a party once where Eric Clapton played. He was rubbish.’

  Some DJs, like Bob Stewart, were very happy living in Luxembourg long-term, and of course, some of the guys had married local girls so felt more settled. I had no plans to stay. I had little furniture and I didn’t buy a car. Rather than embracing the local lifestyle, I flew back to England every weekend to play cricket. Looking at my career statistics, which were recently sent to me, I realised it probably cost me in the region of £50 a run … if I even got a bat. It seems that I became flannelled some seventy times for Heartaches CC, but was required to bat on only forty-nine occasions. Now either my more cavalier colleagues further up the order executed their shots with such style and panache that I wasn’t needed, or Tim Rice put me so low down the order that they might as well declare rather than waste everyone’s time on me traipsing to the crease. It’s hard to write those words without biting the bottom lip of reality and facing up to facts, but it has to be done. The statistically cathartic part sorted,
I can now turn to greater deeds. Tim put me in to bowl on no fewer than 319 occasions (319.1 actually, for the more fastidious statistician), during which I took a ‘very respectable’ (the Leader’s words, not mine) seventy wickets. This gave me an average of 17.61, with my best figures being 6-51 against the one of our regular foes, the Blues. Admittedly ‘Heartaches against the Blues,’ sounds so like a Loretta Lynn song that I fleetingly wondered whether she was fielding at long-stop for the opposition. Tim’s statistics also show that I took ten catches, ‘stunningly panther-like’, (my words of course) meaning that I took a catch around every ten matches. Before you start, that doesn’t mean that I dropped dozens of them. The Heartaches annual for 2014 records that I won my cap in 1975 and was Bowler of the Year in 1980. For three seasons I took more than ten wickets (once twenty) and still hold the record (with ‘Burly’ Johnny Chuter) for the tenth-wicket stand. Our seventy has not been beaten since that golden summer day in 1980 when we dug in against our oldest opponents, Heaths Gents. More on this golden sporting era can be found lurking within the boundary of Chapter 12.

  Any chance to jump on a plane to Blighty from Luxembourg and I took it. I jetted back for gigs when I could, as well as coming back to interview Peter Green for his new album. Much later I did Ned Sherrin’s radio show, Loose Ends, with Peter. He fell asleep. I was also allowed to return for the premiere of Evita and was invited to a dinner, where I found myself sitting opposite the then Radio One controller, Derek Chinnery. I thought it unbecoming to overdo the chat. So I underdid it. As the evening broke up and we all said our goodbyes, he shook my hand and gave me an enigmatic smile. ‘No doubt we’ll meet again soon.’ Maybe just a throwaway line. Maybe deliberately mischievous. Maybe not.

  I was also flying back to record Pop Quest for Yorkshire TV. It was such fun to have landed a national TV series as well as doing Luxembourg. It was a forerunner of my BBC One show Pop Quiz in many ways, only for young people, and each show featured an interview section where I chatted to someone in the heady world of showbiz. I had John Peel on and we discussed his record collection, Brian May demonstrated his intricate guitar techniques, and pioneering TV producer Jack Good talked about the early days of his music shows on television, Six-Five Special and Oh Boy!

  Flying over the green patchwork of Sussex every weekend made me realise just how much I loved England. That made me all the more determined to come home.

  After nine months of living in the Grand Duchy and as the Luxembourg leaves of 1978 began to turn from greng to brong (I was becoming moderately fluent) I had a phone call from my agent, Michael Cohen. On the strength of a programme that I’d done for 7-UP that someone had heard, Radio One wanted me to come over for a chat. I knew it could be something or nothing. My initial meeting was with the station’s head of music, Doreen Davies, who thankfully made me feel welcome and comfortable. I’d chipped a tooth playing cricket and was making an effort not to show the offending ivory, so I smiled very little. But Radio One was all about smiling, not guys with chipped dental displays. I must have looked, and sounded, a bit weird. Still, thirty minutes later, having appeared to have passed the first test, whatever it was, I was ushered in to see Derek Chinnery. Although I’d met him at the Evita launch, Derek wasn’t an easy man to read. With his distinguished bearing and horn-rimmed glasses – or should that be horn-rimmed bearing and distinguished glasses? – he was the epitome of BBC hierarchy.

  ‘We do have a vacancy.’ He made it sound as though I was applying for a job at the mill. I wasn’t sure what I was meant to say. He hadn’t offered it to me so I couldn’t presume. ‘You’re doing, what, five nights a week at Luxembourg?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You probably wouldn’t want the programme we need filling, then, it’s only one day a week.’

  If you’re confident that you can move up and play in a higher league, you go for it. If you’re unsure and feel that you’ve reached your level, you stick. I knew I could do gigs to make up the money and I also knew that I would almost certainly get a shot at standing in for holiday relief. I told him that I’d like it. I certainly didn’t fall to my knees with gratitude or trot out any old clichés about lifelong dreams. That wasn’t my style.

  I left feeling positive, but within an hour I received a call from Michael Cohen. ‘Do you want the Radio One job?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘I’ve just had Derek Chinnery on the phone. He thought you were rather matter-of-fact about it and asked whether you really wanted the show.’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘He assumed you had independent means as you had a totally different attitude to other broadcasters that he’d interviewed.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. He thought you were a dilettante.’

  The programme wasn’t even in London. In a sort of early broadcasting devolution, some forward-thinking executive had deemed it to be a worthy thing to have a couple of national programmes a week coming from Manchester. That wasn’t too bad. They put me up at the Grand and I could invite my grandmother down for the odd afternoon tea in one of the many hotels where she and my grandfather had tripped the light fantastic in the halcyon days of their youth. Actually they didn’t always dance together, as is borne out by a charming photograph of Granddad Mitchell taking to the floor with a different partner: pre-dating the lyric in Elvis Presley’s ‘Jailhouse Rock’, he was snapped in a ballroom in his black tie and tails, dancing with a wooden chair.

  Tony Hale, my producer in Manchester, greeted me as I arrived for my first show. ‘It’s not happening.’

  I knew it was all too good to be true. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Follow me. I’ll tell you in the office.’

  It was bad, I knew it. Something had gone wrong. Or maybe they had mulled it over and decided that I was, after all, a dilettante.

  ‘Lovely photograph of you in this morning’s paper,’ he smiled.

  Did I pick up a trace of irony? ‘Which paper?’

  ‘Oh, you haven’t seen it? The one with you and the very scantily clad model.’

  My mind whizzed back to a recent photo session I’d done on joining the station. Most of the shots were pretty normal until a semi-naked woman appeared. ‘It’s OK,’ said the Fleet Street photographer (we’ll call him George, because that was his name), ‘all the guys do shots with the girls.’ I wanted to refuse, but didn’t want to look like a puritanical wimp. So that was why I wasn’t doing the show. Derek Chinnery had seen it, called Tony Hale and it was all over before it started. I waited for the axe to fall.

  ‘There’s a strike. Until it’s resolved we can’t do any shows from here.’

  I smiled wanly. Well, I think it was wanly. I’d certainly expended too much energy being way off beam to have smiled more than wanly.

  Bizarrely I ended up hosting Top of the Pops before presenting a Radio One show, but it was only a short while before I was standing in on various daytime shows, eventually landing the Monday-to-Friday mid-evening slot before John Peel at 10. I loved that programme: bringing artists in for sessions, championing new singles and new groups as well as getting heavily involved with the music. I soon discovered that Radio One wasn’t simply about playing music and that some of us were cast in an ambassadorial role. One of my first forays to represent the station saw me heading off on a train to the north-east. It was a little like school. I was told to wear my BBC jacket, which rather embarrassingly had my name on it, so wear it I did along with trainers, jeans and a T-shirt. They told me it was casual and all I’d be doing was handing over the keys to a new Variety Club coach, the money having been raised by a recent Radio One football match at Roker Park. Easy. I’d joined a month or two after the charity match, so I wasn’t conversant with how it all worked, but nevertheless the trip didn’t appear to present much of a challenge.

  Within minutes of arriving it was clear that this was more than a cursory shake-of-the-hand, nod-of-the-head, back-on-the-train operation. It was a formal luncheon. The nu
mber of local mayors almost reached double figures and between them carried more chains than Jacob Marley. The ladies were dressed as if they were to be presented at court. I half-expected to see a fashionable Chihuahua or two pop out of the odd handbag. It was patently obvious that they’d expected a Noel Edmonds or a Tony Blackburn, and I was clearly an enormous disappointment. I was the new boy that nobody knew – I hadn’t actually done any Radio One shows yet. I hid my jeans under the gleaming white tablecloth as I took my place on the top table in the middle of a row of sharply creased trousers, but there was nowhere to hide my lack of celebrity. Initial embarrassment over, I’d tuck in, shut up, keep my head down and within an hour or two I’d be set free. My positivity was short lived. The speeches began. Even worse, one of them was mine. I had no idea until I heard my name. Well, that’s not strictly true, the mayor in question had totally forgotten my name, if indeed he was ever informed of it.

  ‘I’d like to call upon, er … er … the, er … Radio One representative … to, er, say a few words.’

  I wasn’t even a broadcaster, I was a ‘representative’ and had no name. I heard the introduction but initially failed to comprehend the fact that the entire room had fallen silent and were waiting for someone to say something. Cripes! It was me and they expected beguiling words of wit and wisdom. I was vaguely aware of getting to my feet and hearing myself speak. I hadn’t been at the fund-raising match, didn’t really know any of the other guys, hadn’t done any programme, had no funny Radio One stories and had only been announced as a ‘representative’. Hardly the stuff of which epoch-shattering speeches are made. I cannot recount a single word I said. I faintly recall an etymological whirligig spinning like a John Emburey off-break in my head, but whether the words came out in order I have no idea. Of the 400 or so overdressed and disappointed souls, at least one or two clapped as I fell back into my chair. For that, at least, I was grateful.