RADIO WALL OF SOUND

IN THE FURNACE that was Surfers Paradise on Australia’s Gold Coast, ten jungle-bound sacrificial lambs were introduced to each other. The only one I’d met before was John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten of Sex Pistols fame. I was aware of the unfortunate circumstances in which Charlie Brocket had found himself and that Razor Ruddock had ritually fallen on opponents on behalf of such clubs as Millwall, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur and Southampton, but some of the others were a bit of an enigma. Would Jordan lord it as a blancmange-chested page three model or pine for her horses as sweet Sussex girl Katie Price? Would Alex Best be mentally and physically battle scarred after her much-publicised bust up with George Best? Would ’90s pop star Peter Andre’s pecs have run to fat? Would Kerry McFadden have transmogrified from Atomic Kitten to Nuclear Kitten? Would royal correspondent Jennie Bond come on like the Queen? Would athlete Diane Modahl still be smarting over her infamous and unfair drugs ban?

My diary for 6 January 2004 reveals the more mundane matters of oil delivery, the installation of a new radiator and the revelation that I needed a new boiler. These are important January-type issues. Admittedly, no decent autobiography is complete without at least a smattering of pointless minutiae, lest it be assumed that life is one long bunfight at the OK Corral. In this case, though, it has its value, for there on the page, juxtaposed with the words ‘boiler’ and ‘radiator’, is the name Natalka Znak. To anyone finding my diary under a tree in the year 2099, it would almost certainly conjure up a potent mix of noms de plume, Eastern Bloc espionage and a James Bond conquest. In reality, and I use the word advisedly, Natalka was the head honcho for the TV series I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, and I had been summoned for a second time to the TV show’s HQ on the south bank of the Thames. I had all but wiped it from my mind, as I knew they must have seen hundreds of wacky showbiz folk, the bulk of whom they could eliminate to leave a suitably eclectic and disparate mix that would kill one another on sight in the name of television ratings. It smacks of showbiz cool to say that I dismissed it from my mind, but I’d read the hit list picked up from internal tabloid spies and assumed that the die was cast and the ultimate dramatis personae of Marxists, Boudiccas, pugilists and psychos had been assembled. Still the official word came that nothing had been decided and I was still on the shortest of shortlists.

Bracing myself, I knew that I was in for more grilling from the Gestapo on the ninth floor. If I was vaguely uncomfortable at this level of a high-rise block, how the hell could I fly to Australia and why was I prepared to answer questions if I had no intention of saying ‘yes’? To be honest, the importance of being picked pushed my fear of flying to a temporary hidey-hole at the rear of my brain. It was that old school throwback: it was no good being the reserve. No one remembered the reserve, however good a bloke he was and however unlucky he was not to get onto the pitch. ‘I was nearly there!’ ‘So what?’ Remember poor old Jimmy Greaves and the 1966 England World Cup squad? Well, you don’t have to, but it gives you the idea. Meetings and work on a promotional DVD for a potential film about pirate radio meant that I couldn’t dwell on even the possibility that I might have to fly to the other side of the world, even though I hadn’t flown for over ten years and had never been in a plane for longer than a nail-biting two hours. ‘Radio Cool’ was a gritty, humorous and hard-hitting script that didn’t see the light of day. When The Boat That Rocked came out, other potential offshore radio films were dead in the water.

Then came the interrogation.

‘What do your friends think of you?’

‘Well, I guess they all have different views, but I hope that they veer towards the “he’s a terrific chap … sex god … rippling muscles … loves animals … always smiling” camp.’

‘Are you a leader?’

‘Only if people want to be led. Sure, I’m an adventurer, wit and flag raiser but not a control freak.’

‘Are you good with your hands?’

‘Yes, with one of them, but only when it’s holding a pen or a tennis racquet.’

‘Is there anyone you don’t get on with?’

‘A poisonous snake, a deadly spider perhaps … nothing personal, just a hunch that we might not see eye to eye.’ Always good to bring the impending enemy into the conversation.

I felt a mixture of elation and nerves when the call came about Australia. I was going … I was in the team … part of the mix that I guess they hoped might kick off in some way … but the spectre of the silver bird awaited and I hadn’t taken to the air for over a decade! I called Paul McKenna. I wasn’t convinced, but if anyone could help, he just might.

‘Hypnotise me,’ I pleaded. ‘I’ll travel as a chicken doing Elvis impersonations. Anything.’

‘I don’t have to hypnotise you.’

‘It’s the only way I’ll get to the other side of the world.’

‘How scared are you, out of ten?’

I couldn’t say ten, although eleven was probably the right answer. ‘Nine.’

He took me through various routines for an hour while we sank a cup of tea or two and asked again. ‘What about now?’

It would have been rude to say nine again. ‘Err … eight?’

He saw through me, of course. ‘OK, you’ll be fine now.’

‘Really?’

‘You’ll have no problem.’

‘How much do I owe you?’

‘Nothing. I don’t charge mates.’

Top man. I left feeling I was still on eleven out of ten. What the hell was I going to do? Yet the following morning I went flat calm, like the Atlantic taking on the appearance of a mill pond. I was very relaxed and cool about the trip and almost looking forward to it. My girlfriend, Eileen, dropped me at Heathrow, convinced that I’d duck out of the airport in a pile of baggage and be back in St John’s Wood before her. I wasn’t. I flew to Bangkok, changed planes, continued to Sydney and changed again for Brisbane. I enjoyed every minute of it. I called Paul to thank him profusely and sang his praises to whoever would listen.

On arrival, after travelling for almost twenty-five hours, Razor Ruddock and I played tennis, having booked a coach to come and have a hit with us. The coach failed to materialise. The following day I raised the matter with the hotel.

‘Are you kidding?’

‘No, he didn’t turn up.’

‘Midday, you say?’

‘That’s right, twelve noon.’

‘Mad dogs and Englishmen,’ was his literary reply.

I traded him Coward for Coward. ‘But Englishmen detest a siesta…’

He shook his head and walked away as I gave him a parting shot from The Master: ‘…though the English are effete they’re quite impervious to heat.’

Another English tennis player, young Cliff Richard, had also materialised Down Under, having come to watch the Australian Open and support Gloria Hunniford, whose daughter Caron was living there, but far from well. I discovered later that they’d arrived at the hotel to say hello, but security was so tight that they were turned away. It turned out that we all had code names and if the incorrect name was given you didn’t get in. I seem to remember that we were all colours and my code name was Mr Red. Inventive stuff from the Antipodeans.

The luxury of the Versace Hotel didn’t prepare us for the jungle. Razor, Peter Andre, Charlie Brocket, John Lydon and I were taught the rudiments of survival by a delightfully grizzled and gnarled bushman. He took us out into the jungle for a day to get us acquainted with things that had the power to terminate our lives prematurely. I seem to recall that it was the brown snakes and black spiders that were the culprits in the killing fields … or was it the other way round? We learned to use a compass, had a crash course in Aboriginal tracking and were given tasks. Like making tea in the middle of the jungle.

‘Come on, guys, I’m thirsty,’ growled our guide, whose bare feet had so much matted hair that he resembled a hobbit. We made such a poor show of trying to light a fire that he shook his head in frustration and shooed us away. Within seconds he got a fair blaze going, erected two tripods out of sticks, bound them together and hung leaves between them that contained enough moisture for them not to burn. Amazing. Within minutes the ‘kettle’ was boiling.

‘Well, don’t just stand there, guys. I want a cup of tea, not hot water.’ Away we scuttled, to return with handfuls of likely-looking foliage. He dismissed our offerings. ‘Guys, guys … those are just leaves.’ He dipped into his pocket and extracted something that he tossed into the boiling water. ‘You can’t make it without a bloody teabag.’

We flew into camp in two choppers flying side by side (without Sondheim but with Jordan pressing her assets against the window of the neighbouring machine). A scary start, but as we yomped through dense jungle one of the crew watching from some hidey-hole was whisked away to hospital having come off second best against a snake. We victims meanwhile, had discovered a pile of ropes, pulleys and something that was a cross between a baby bouncer and slightly weird lederhosen, on a stony bluff that was clearly meant for us to leap off into the unknown and wipe out some of our number. I strapped, leapt and although not lethally damaged, found myself dangling 200 feet above the ground like a mobile circling from the ceiling of a kid’s bedroom. After a minute or two of garbled instruction from somewhere in the undergrowth I plummeted down at a rate of knots that would have given Japan’s elevator at Taipei 101 a decent run for its yen.

With its canopy of trees that blotted out most of the sun, the jungle had an oppressive atmosphere, which sent us scurrying to find the odd shaft of sunlight. To ward off ennui I made a backgammon set out of stones for Peter, Charlie and me, learned dozens of football chants from Razor and listened to Peter working on his song ‘Insania’. As the cigarette smokers were allowed something like half a dozen a day, I claimed that I had a biscuit habit and, surprisingly, succeeded in being allowed two ginger nuts every twenty-four hours. I considered this a major victory. When Jordan’s breast implants came up in conversation, she circumnavigated the questions by insisting that I had a look. ‘Well go on, push them up or you can’t see the scars.’ I wasn’t sure that I wanted to, but pushed anyway regardless of personal danger. I felt more like a doctor than anything else.

If there had been any cheating, then John, ever outspoken, would have exposed it. Well, there was acceptable cheating, as in Charlie concealing several miniatures of champers about his person or me stealing pencils, snapping them in half and hiding them – in my boot, wedged in my water bottle or in the braiding of Jordan’s hair. I felt this was justified as the powers that be refused to let me have both pencil and paper as my luxury; I could have one or the other. They also refused to let me take a guitar. Maybe they didn’t want several contestants shouting ‘I’m a celebrity … get me out of here!’ simultaneously.

My most exciting moment was climbing a sheer 300-foot waterfall. Kerry Katona and I had to navigate some 6 miles of jungle to arrive at our destination, but for her every step was fraught with danger.

‘It’s OK, come on,’ I said. ‘Just walk where I’ve walked.’

‘There might be snakes.’

‘That appears to be the name of the game.’

‘And spiders.’

‘Arachnids pretty much guaranteed, I’d say.’

‘I can’t go on.’

‘You can always go back.’

Neither appeared to be an option.

I’m still not certain how she managed the journey, but somehow we made it to the waterfall. Perched at the top was a treasure chest, which might contain something for starving jungle folk. All bets were off as to which one of us was to hold the check rope in case the climber fell. Up I went in full kit with thousands of tons of water hammering on my protective helmet and any other part of my body that was exposed. It was a tough climb, but I took it steadily. Returning to camp empty handed was not an option. I was about 150 feet up when I slipped. Without the incessant pounding water I might have managed to re-gain a foothold, but the force of nature was too great. This was where Kerry was to come into her own, checking my fall with the rope. I felt no check as my glasses smashed against the rock to keep my knees, hands and elbows company. I took a fair battering before coming to a dangling halt thanks to a quick-thinking cameraman grabbing the rope. Bob the medic spent almost an hour reviving, checking and testing Kerry, who declared that all she wanted to do was to go home and suck her babies’ toes. Understandable in the circumstances. As we’d apparently failed the task, commiserations were forthcoming.

‘Can I still do it?’ I asked.

‘You seriously want to climb again?’

‘Yes.’

I climbed the 300 feet, secured the chest, got back down with it and yomped the 10k back to camp. The worst of it was that, as far as I remember, there was nothing of any great consequence in the chest. A bit like life, some pessimists might say. Not so, us carpe diem boys.

Always inventive, I wrote a potted version of Oliver Twist to keep the camp amused and occupied. Charlie was the ‘toff who lived in the big ’ouse wot took Oliver in’. Razor, at eighteen stone, brought a new depth and dimension to the part of Oliver, while Jordan was Nancy and Peter Andre Bullseye, Bill Sykes’s dog. The latter scenario meant Jordan leading Peter around on a lead. You can text or email your captions and the most poignant will receive a slightly used 2004 Jordan calendar. John agreed to perform as Fagin, the former Sex Pistol disappearing into the bush and emerging with floral décor that made him look a little more Fagin-esque, singing ‘You can go but be back soon’. The show lasted for an hour. They didn’t screen any of it. Heathens.

Nor did they show the intriguing and in-depth conversation about Keats, Byron and Shelley between John and myself. The punk and the DJ discuss the Romantic Poets – fascinating TV, one might have thought. No, they wanted more salacious stuff than that. I spent a whole day writing out unusual words for a game of Call My Bluff, their meanings and the necessary false definitions, but when it came to it, the camp was bribed with chocolate brownies if they played a game instead where we felt each other’s bottoms and guessed who they belonged to. It was intellectual stuff, you must admit. A few years later when John’s group Public Image Ltd performed together for the first time in twenty years, he asked for me to do the chat, as it was going live around the world. ‘Mike and me should be running this country. We know what people want.’ We’d previously understood what was wanted in the jungle.

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 running 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.

Not only did I get flannelled up for cricket matches, but I also put in some hard batting and bowling practice at the Alf Gover indoor cricket school at Wandsworth. Alf, the one-time England and Surrey fast bowler, was still around then, having begun his career in the late ’20s, and was on hand to give invaluable advice to anyone who wished he could bowl as Gover himself had in the ’30s. His bowling action was once described as ‘a little disjointed and exciting; rather as if he were exchanging insults at extreme range with the conductor of an omnibus that had the legs of him by half a mile per hour’. Be that as it may, I was happy to be gleaning any words of wisdom from the man who’d taken four wickets in four balls against Worcestershire in 1935. My best for 210 was six wickets against the local police, but at the cost of many runs and an imagined persecution that lasted for my eighteen months at the radio station. In retrospect it was an unwise thing to do, but you can’t appeal against your own bowling, and one of the opposition subsequently booked me the following week for reversing all of 2 yards into a one-way street. The music press reported that I was robbed of a hat-trick against another local team, when rain stopped play after I’d taken two wickets in a row. It’s quite possible that I even wrote the piece myself. Many singers and musicians were drafted into the team on occasions, including Billy Ocean, Robin Sarstedt and members of Mud, Sailor, Kenny and Cockney Rebel.

Not content with having cricket and football teams, NffB took the station into the realms of pigeon-racing! A squad of the finest flyers were donated, including a brace from the country’s leading owner, Louis Massarella, and a fine specimen from the royal loft at King’s Lynn, owned by Her Majesty the Queen. We certainly had to be all-rounders to work at 210; there was no shirking. A surviving press release points out that Steve Wright and I had virtually become stunt men. During one outside broadcast I had to participate in golf, cricket, basketball, judo, bowls, gymnastics, table-tennis, weightlifting and roller skating, as well as scale a sheer wall commando style and sit on the bottom of a pool in a frogman’s outfit; terrific for a non-swimmer! (ffrench Blake was clearly flirting with the spirit world, as this would stand me in good stead for the jungle in the future.) Steve had to fly with the Rothmans Aerobatic Flyers! The boss also got me signed up as a member of the local drag-racing team, made Steve and me broadcast in drag (of another kind) for the Silver Jubilee and made me do a show from the back of an elephant. The animal and I clearly had an understanding, as there was not a hint of defecation. Eat your heart out, Blue Peter. The punishment didn’t stop there: during the Reading Rock Festival, Steve and I clocked up forty-one hours of on-site broadcasts.

On one occasion, after interviewing the much-vaunted teen group Flintlock, Steve Wright and I were invited to write some sketches for the programme in which they featured, Thames TV’s You Must Be Joking!, which later became Pauline’s Quirkes. With the aid of our younger listeners and the TV show’s producer Roger Price, who came up with the wheeze of getting us involved, we crafted live on air some material for the show, with Roger then inviting us on to take part. I don’t recall watching it, but I’m sure I didn’t miss much as we were a couple of amateurs alongside the talented on-air team that included the young Pauline Quirke, Linda Robson and Flintlock’s Mike Holoway. If I ever get my hands on the person that suggested the script that accompanied our appearances … it was a cringeworthy long-running gag over the misinterpretation of our names, Read and Wright. This’ll give you an idea, but I’ll trim it to about a hundredth of the actual length.

‘No, I’m Read, that’s Wright.’

‘He’s right.’

‘You just said you were Wright.’

‘I am.’

‘So you see we’ve both been right all along.’

There was also some kissing involved, which bizarrely got past the pre-watershed censors. Not, I hasten to add, between Wright and myself.

The press proclaimed this fun excursion into writing sketches for television via radio as the first-ever TV and radio link-up of its kind, but it was in the heyday of people claiming firsts. It was the aim of Flintlock’s guide and mentor, the omnipresent, blue-blazered Newton Wills, to establish them as the new Bay City Rollers. A handful of girls were always outside Thames TV to scream on demand and Newton was always whisking the boys away from interviews in the ‘Flintmobile’ to their ‘Flint Manor’ in the depths of the country. Both were figments of the fanciful but effusively charming Wills’s imagination, which, as a wonderful PR man, he had by the truckload. I remember introducing one of their concerts at Reading, which was meant to be live. When the tape, five-part harmonies included, began, the group were still some 5 or 6 feet away from the microphones and their instruments! They were good lads, though, and I guess it was all part of a learning curve with a good laugh thrown in; much like life really. (Whose life I’m not exactly sure.)

When we weren’t interviewing Flintlock, or Aerosmith in the cloying mud of the Reading Festival, the Read and Wright show would often broadcast from the roof or from the pavement outside the station, just because we felt like it. It was in amazement that we sat with tea and cake on the kerb and asked drivers to wave or hoot if they were listening to us. This was Neanderthal audience research at its finest and a quick fix for us, as it proved that someone was actually listening. We also had the habit of running out of the studio to listen to our own show going out on a transistor, again to prove to ourselves that we were really ‘on air’. Read and Wright were decidedly odd creatures. We also had a blast inventing a series of fictional characters that we then interviewed, doing all the voices ourselves. There was Greenfingers Hothouse, the station gardener with a cod Berkshire accent, Micky Striker, the Liverpudlian footballer who only ever scored off the pitch, and pop singer Zoot Furnace, who only ever mimed. The bizarre thing was that listeners would often turn up to get their autographs, imagining them to be real guests.

Evidence of the swiftly changing standards on radio are borne out by the fact that there was an almighty debate as to whether Greenfingers Hothouse should be allowed to say ‘dung’ on the wireless. We skirted round it for a bit, using ‘manure’ and ‘something that’s good for the roses’, until finally pushing out the barriers of decency and plunging headlong into the ‘dung’. Laughable now of course in an age where even a certain ratio of fellatio is considered laddish and de rigueur. Those sweet old-fashioned things Read and Wright always referred to the radio as the wireless and were apt to come up with catchphrases and non-station jingles as well as regularly junking commercials in favour of playing more records! That is now a sacking offence. We regularly used to add our two bits’ worth to existing on-air commercials, especially for some reason, the advertisement for Yellow Pages. We realised we’d done it once too often when NffB came bearing down on us like a rhinoceros with sciatica who’d just been told that his annual holiday to Bermuda had just been cancelled. It transpired that Mr Yellow Pages himself was heading in our direction and NffB was going to make damn sure that we were in the front line to take the flak. The ‘I’m going to watch you boys get a flogging’ sadistic smirk soon faded from Neil’s face as Mr Pages declared how many more enquiries they’d had in the area since we’d started fooling around with his commercial. We even had to record a re-enactment of us being naughty with the advertisement in question. Now as all naughty boys know, it’s hellishly difficult to be mischievous when the mischief is being condoned and I suspect that we fell rather short of our usual mark.

The motley collection of DJs on 210 gradually changed as members of the original team fell away. David English departed at an early stage. An actor, cricketer, Bee Gees manager and loveable bloke, he was wont to personalise the news, as will become clear in Chapter 12. The cool and laid-back evening jock Alan Symons, a former Radio Caroline DJ, disappeared over the horizon after NffB suspected him of imbibing certain substances on air. Alan defended his inability to string a cohesive sentence together by claiming that he’d got chapped lips! A bold attempt, but just not plausible enough. Australian broadcaster John Flower handed in his notice in grand style. He began by committing the treasonable action of reading out the schedule for other radio and TV stations that he felt would be a better option than listening to his show on 210. I daresay he was technically right, but that, as every DJ knows, is a firing squad offence, or at least transportation, which was almost certainly his goal, with a big pay cheque into the bargain. John soon got into full flow as more heinous wireless crimes followed, capped with a glorious once-in-a-lifetime offer to his listeners in which he invited them to ‘stick their heads up a dead bear’s bum’. Whether he was implying that there were so few listeners that their heads would collectively fit into said ursine orifice, or whether indeed he knew of such a bear, fit to grace a travelling Victorian freak show, I never actually found out. Needless to say, that was the last we heard of John Flower, the bear and that unique offer to the 210 listeners. 210 was a family. Tony Fox fixed anything and everything that needed fixing, Tony ‘Jogger’ Holden took the listeners jogging, those that is that weren’t having their heads extracted from the hind quarters of the bear, and Mike Matthews did his programme with a pipe full of something that smelled of thick black shag, with his Labrador asleep at his feet. The fastidious Paul Hollingdale, when not on air, would be busy yet again, ‘polishing the studios to an even higher gleam’, with a yellow duster and a can of furniture spray, while Vera the cleaning lady would interrupt any programme to vacuum the studios, whether the microphone was live or not: ‘I can’t hang around, I’ve got to get back to get Ron’s lunch on.’ 210 was a second home and a cosy microcosm of all that was fun, exciting and at times perplexing. That era of local radio has long gone, to be replaced by stations linked together by virtue of being owned by the same corporate, run by accountants and without a heart or soul.