IN EARLY DECEMBER 1980 I got a call from Mike Appleton. I knew Mike because a few years earlier I’d been working as radio and TV promotion man for the independent label Beserkley. Mike was the producer of The Old Grey Whistle Test, which had been the BBC’s ‘flagship’ rock magazine programme since its launch in 1971. Ever since then I had been watching it with my lip curled. This didn’t make me uniquely cynical. Most of the people of my acquaintance who reckoned they knew a thing or two about music, who worked in record shops or read the NME, might admire the people who were guests on the show but jealously reserved their right to sneer at all the people who put on the show.
When Mike Appleton rang me that day his call wasn’t a complete surprise. A week earlier, on a trip to New York, ostensibly to see the Police, I’d managed to get a ticket to see Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving. After the show they had a party in the bowling alley in the Garden and I had bumped into Mike there. Emboldened by drink I had told him that he ought to have me as one of the presenters on his programme. Now he was on the phone asking if I could come on the programme and ‘do the Christmas books’.
‘Doing the Christmas books’ was a standard seasonal item for any magazine programme, either on radio or TV, which had any kind of claim to ‘doing rock’. In those days the racket of publishing books about music was in its infancy so I wasn’t making a choice from the widest selection. Anyway I agreed I would do it, put the date in my recently acquired Filofax, and waited for the standard bike to arrive bearing the books I had to talk about.
The recording took place at Shepperton Studios, because there was no room for us at Television Centre. I don’t remember much in the way of detail other than the fact I was ill with nerves before doing the segment, which involved Annie Nightingale, who had been the presenter since Bob Harris left the show in 1978, gently guiding me through the items and ensuring that I didn’t make too much of an ass of myself. Following the recording I experienced a level of profound relief which was almost sexual. The best thing about telly, I quickly decided, was the feeling of having just done it.
Nonetheless I wasn’t immune to the seductive appeal of being on it again. Whistle Test was the only kind of programme that was ever going to ask me to take part. It was the only place on television where you were likely to see the kind of acts that were written about in the NME or talked up by the guys who worked in smart record shops. I was one of that generation who made sure I didn’t miss the appearances of favourites such as Little Feat, Ry Cooder, Richard Thompson, Tom Waits and Jackson Browne.
In those days Whistle Test performed the invaluable service of proving that the people who made the records did in fact actually exist. To hear Ry Cooder’s albums was one thing. To actually see him with that handkerchief on his head playing ‘Vigilante Man’ and accompanying himself on the mandolin, to note the fact that he had a glass eye (which was not the kind of thing that would ever come up in the course of six hundred words in the Melody Maker), was suddenly to be brought dramatically closer to him and his world.
The experience of first seeing your heroes on Whistle Test in the middle of the 1970s was different in a respect today’s TV viewers cannot possibly imagine. This was the only time you were going to see them. As soon as the four minutes of the performance were over it was very unlikely that you would ever get to see John Prine or the J. Geils Band, Harry Chapin or the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Judee Sill or Crazy Horse, the Climax Blues Band or the Sutherland Brothers and Quiver ever again. There was no home VCR in those days and certainly no YouTube. Once it was gone it was apparently gone.
This was the same no matter how high your status. There’s a wonderful clip of George Harrison visiting Granada TV in the late seventies and being taken into an edit suite to be shown an old clip of the Beatles doing ‘This Boy’ on a 1963 magazine show. He’s clearly never seen it before. What’s more, it’s clear he hasn’t seen his old group in a while either. It’s very touching to watch him watching himself because in those days it was a rare experience even for a Beatle to be able to retrieve something from what seemed like the distant past.
Hence the Whistle Test faithful would lean towards the screen and focus every last bit of their attention on the performance, making sure that they retained every last nuance for immediate replay in the cinema in the back of their heads. They watched the programme with the ferocious concentration of spies being given a secret formula to commit to memory. Then they went to work the following morning and complained about the inadequate words of Bob Harris or Annie Nightingale or whoever happened to be in the presenter’s hot seat. This seemed just the natural way of things. I hadn’t yet twigged that the viewer’s affection for the presenter is in inverse proportion to their own attachment to the subject. Also I hadn’t yet absorbed the core truth of all television, which is that the presenter is rarely to blame, but always ends up with all the egg on their face.
In my time as a plugger I’d had occasion to attend the recording of more than one music TV show. The first time I did so I realized another great truth of television: the requirements of the people making the programme will always supersede the requirements of the people they are making the programme about. In 1977 I’d delivered Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers to Top of the Pops. This experience left me full of admiration for those performers who had managed to overlook the surroundings of the studio – which managed to engender school play levels of inhibition – and project their songs beyond the heads of the technicians and the listless girls the BBC ticket unit had bussed in to reach the viewers at home in their living rooms. The playback Jonathan and his band were expected to mime to in the studio was so quiet you could hear the feet of the audience shuffling on the studio floor.
Whistle Test was different because here the bands played live. Bob and the interviewees might even smoke while talking. I’m sure I attended one recording where there were pints of lager alongside the ashtray on the coffee table. During this period I saw one interview with Keith Richards, an interview that taught me another truth about rock stars and television: the harder they try to look relaxed the more they betray the fact that they’re terrified. This certainly applies to Richards whose CGAF act is as considered as Dean Martin’s drunkenness or Dolly Parton’s chest. On this occasion Keith had arranged himself with one leg crossed over the other. This leg was nervously swinging as he spoke. Every time the leg swung back and forth his boot came into contact with the floor stand on which the microphone was capturing his words. Thus every sentence was metronomically punctuated with the boom of his cowboy boot on the metal. Keith was so deeply engaged in the effort of maintaining his screen of insouciance he didn’t know he was doing it and nobody in the studio felt sufficiently empowered to tell him to stop. At the same time nobody in the studio could think about anything else.
And of course – a further truth about television coming up – nobody expects anyone to say anything memorable on television. It’s a visual medium. You can get 90 per cent of the messaging content from the average TV programme with the sound turned right down. This certainly applied with Whistle Test. The viewers might have been listening to the sound of Keith, looking closely at his physical state of repair and wondering where on earth he got those boots, but they were not expecting much in the way of wisdom from him. (Think about it. All the most memorable quotes from rock stars come from press interviews. Here they’ve been painstakingly reconstructed by professional writers out of hours of rambling interview tape. For every rock star who can justifiably claim they’ve been injured by the misrepresentations of journalists there are a dozen who’ve been made to appear wiser and more articulate by those very misrepresentations.)
‘Doing the Christmas books’ in December 1980 was my first time in front of a TV camera and therefore my first acquaintance with the feeling of terrible vulnerability and aching self-consciousness that goes with it. If you think your conversational style is smooth, your sentences articulate and that you do not present as a bundle of distracting tics, nervous twitches and involuntary noises, then that simply means you have not yet been on TV. Being on TV is something any idiot can do but only a special handful of idiots can do well. They do it well because to them is vouchsafed the strange gift of being able to look as though they’re relaxed when in fact they’re in turmoil. The first time I saw myself on television I realized I didn’t have this gift.
We were watching at a friend’s house. When my segment came on I could only watch it from a position looking round the door from the hallway. I have hardly ever watched myself on TV since. When I am forced to do so I still position myself behind an item of stout furniture. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. The majority of talk show hosts are men. Note how they all position themselves behind a desk. This desk serves no practical purpose. It’s there to provide some cover for their genital area, the seat of all their feelings of insecurity.
The segment can’t have been a complete catastrophe because early in the following year Mike Appleton asked me back and suggested I should present a regular slot in the programme called ‘Newsdesk’. This would involve me sitting behind a desk, shuffling papers, reading out tour dates and, in May 1981, delivering a kind of obituary to Bob Marley. In those days there were only three channels of television in the United Kingdom and therefore there weren’t hundreds of programmes all queuing up to ‘do something’ on a story like Bob Marley.
Another consequence of there only being three channels of TV was that to be on TV at all was a very big deal. As soon as I started appearing on the programme regularly I joined the company not of the famous, but of the group of people who are mildly well-known among a certain group of people. As soon as I became a regular, any walk down any street was transformed into a kind of moving focus group through which I came to know the kind of people who watched Whistle Test.
This was a dedicated minority of people. Live music on television is quite hard work for the viewer. If you don’t happen to like the music they’re playing – and remember, nothing divides people like music – then most rock bands on TV just look like an unprepossessing bunch of blokes earnestly struggling with heavy machinery. For the casual viewer rock on TV is something that has no fringe benefits. Unlike most TV programmes, where at any given moment half of the audience will be made up of people who were looking for something else but have lingered because the presenter is physically attractive, a programme like Whistle Test was only watched by people who were prepared to endure a live set from Robin Trower, Randy California’s Spirit or some new band signed to A&M that nobody would ever hear from again, in order to watch two minutes of the new video from ABC over which the credits would inevitably roll. That group of people would therefore be at best a minority of a minority. That was doubly the case back in the days when all television speakers were tiny and tinny and the majority of musicians looked more like Maggie Bell than Beyoncé. Furthermore, a significant number of the viewers were likely to be asleep because in those days television still closed down overnight and therefore Whistle Test was sometimes the last thing between the snooker and the disappearing white dot.
I’ve just consulted the archives and I note that the guests on the programme when I first appeared were Jon Anderson of Yes and Fingerprintz. This kind of pairing was a classic example of Whistle Test booking, being an unsuccessful solo offshoot of an off-the-boil supergroup put together with some post-punk hopefuls from Scottish League Division Two. As soon as I began to do the programme regularly, first with Annie, then with Mark Ellen and Andy Kershaw, I was assailed by complaints from fans who wanted to know why their favourite act wasn’t on the programme and why this other act that they didn’t like or hadn’t heard of was. That was because there was a massive amount of politics involved. By the early eighties when I started doing the programme the hotter old acts didn’t want to do it because they felt that there was as much to lose as to gain in submitting to a live performance on a programme that was often broadcast live; similarly the hotter new acts often didn’t want to do it because they thought it was old hat, and also they weren’t confident they were good enough live to come over well.
In order to distinguish the programme from Top of the Pops Mike had always insisted that it be fronted by journalists. This at least meant that they could speak their own words rather than having them written by a researcher. The drawback of employing journalists is they like stories. Performers, on the other hand, don’t want to be treated like stories. They want to be treated as artists and stars. They do not warm to the idea of being part of a larger narrative. There is nothing more uncomfortable than standing in front of a band and making an amusing point about them. Actually there is. It’s doing it again because somebody has made a mistake the first time through. I once introduced Aswad in front of a live audience at the Nottingham Boat Club with what I thought was the quite good line ‘harder than this they do not come’. Roar from crowd. Band strikes up. Fifteen seconds later they have to stop and we do the whole thing again. And we do it four times, by which time my line was sounding about as spontaneous as a Theresa May stump speech. This may be why Jools Holland has prospered so long by confining his presenting duties to standing in front of a band, waving his arms around to indicate enthusiasm and restricting his actual opinions about them to the words ‘lovely’ and ‘wonderful’. People love him for it.
The key function of a TV presenter is to be a cheerleader, which places a great deal of importance on there being something worth cheering for. With Whistle Test there was a tendency to book acts who looked as though they ought to be good because they slotted into some established tradition but just didn’t have the distinctiveness to make it. There is something sad and retrospectively hilarious about being professionally obliged to big up an act that then doesn’t make it. It’s like John the Baptist repeatedly heralding the wrong Messiah. Trust me. This time. When I look back at the listings of the old programmes from the early eighties and realize that at one time I must have been the person who promised that the world would hear more of Kissing the Pink, Light of the World, Annabel Lamb, Cowboys International or Allez Allez, I feel like a best man who has presided at a series of weddings that all ended in divorce.
Little things stick in the memory. I remember John Martyn and Danny Thompson sniggering at the attempts of Carmel’s jazz combo to get their double bass in tune during the run-through. Musicians can be such bitches. I remember when we interviewed Kate Bush in the studio in Manchester she had hired a goods van on the train from Euston so she’d have room to rehearse her dancers. Musicians can get away with things nobody else can get away with. I remember the time Morrissey turned up during one of the Rock Around the Clock marathons with which we marked the bank holiday and was pressed into answering phone calls from viewers wishing to take part in the Video Vote. In those days even Morrissey did as he was told. I remember one studio show where the guests were Marillion and Wah! Musicians like to think they’re poles apart when in fact they’re blood brothers. In 1985 I remember Harvey Goldsmith coming into the studio to announce the dates for Bruce Springsteen’s tour live on the programme, which was a major slap in the face for the print media. I don’t recall introducing Fun Boy Three at the Regal Theatre in Hitchin but apparently I did. Thanks to YouTube all these shows live for ever and come back to haunt you.
The most interesting times I had with Whistle Test (the ‘Old’ and ‘Grey’ were officially dropped from the title during my tenure in a doomed attempt to improve the programme’s image) were on those occasions when we went overseas to film interviews. I tended to be the presenter invited to accompany Mike Appleton on these trips. Why did I get the nod? Maybe I’m a quick study. Thanks to Mike I ended up in many places I wouldn’t otherwise have found myself. One night I rode the mechanical bull in Gilley’s in Pasadena, ‘the biggest honky-tonk in Texas’. I spent a strange night in a park in Houston watching as Jean-Michel Jarre illuminated the skyline of the downtown business district during one of his inexplicable cityscape spectaculars. I spent the night in Central Park, back in the days before New York was safe, while Steve Van Zandt shot a scene for a film called Men Without Women which, as far as I know, never came out. At Mike’s behest I put on an electric blue Bugs Bunny suit for the mild amusement of a class of Japanese children in Tokyo. I went to the Limelight club in New York with U2 at the height of the go-go eighties, feeling like a character from a Jay McInerney book. I seemed to be the only person in this painstakingly desecrated church using the bathroom for its original purpose.
In between all this bacchanalia I was running magazines in the UK and returning to a suburban family life with young children. The week before I was due to fly to Barbados to interview Mick Jagger as part of a programme we were making about the Rolling Stones in 1985 I chose to give up smoking. On the flight over I was popping Nicorette chewing gum tablets with roughly the same regularity I had formerly smoked cigarettes. That’s what you did on long-haul flights in those days. When we arrived at the hotel in Bridgetown we went to the bar where Mike insisted we drink rum stingers. The following morning I woke to find that the combination of twenty Nicorettes and a tray of exceptionally strong drinks had conspired to entirely deprive me of my voice. This meant there was no question of me interviewing Mick the following day. The great man was told I had a cold and the interview was postponed for a couple of days during which time we managed to get tickets to see England being spanked by the West Indies in the deciding Test. At one point I found myself sitting next to Mick Jagger in the Sir Garfield Sobers Stand (the sainted Gary himself was sitting a few rows behind) when England batsman Mike Gatting came over to ask Mick whether he would like to join the boys for lunch in the pavilion. Being one of the few people in the world who had achieved sufficient eminence to be able to treat even that invitation as a bit of a bore, Mick apologetically indicated the brown paper package he had just been handed by his personal trainer and said, ‘I’m all right, thanks – I’ve brought my own sandwiches.’
You have to observe a special etiquette around very famous people. It’s the custom of Her Majesty the Queen never to say hello or goodbye. You can see why. The former would be superfluous. The latter would be a slight. Being the Queen she is the key element of every human interaction she’s involved with. Mick Jagger enjoys similar stature. Everybody who talks to Mick Jagger is thinking the same thing: I’m talking to fucking Mick Jagger. Same with Bob Dylan. And Paul McCartney. It’s a very short list.
Bob Dylan always says that when he looks through the window of a bar he sees the people inside enjoying themselves and wishes he could join in. The problem is he knows that once he goes in it will no longer be the same place. That’s a fearful burden to carry around. I’ve entered rooms alongside Mick Jagger. The intensity of attention, curiosity, lust, obsequiousness and envy that’s abruptly turned in his direction is quite something. No wonder these people develop a unique way of making their way through the world. Dylan pulls a hood over his head. When I interviewed him he said, ‘I could just disappear into a crowd.’ Macca walks the streets, responding to every greeting with a cheery thumbs-up but never ever stopping. Mick Jagger’s motto is ‘give them a glimmer’ – hence the working name he and Keith Richards adopted.
Interviewing rock stars on film puts you in the position of having to fake a kind of instant intimacy with them, an intimacy which can’t possibly be real because it hasn’t passed through the normal stages of friendship. You will know when you’re actually friends with a rock star. It will be when the two of you can spend time talking about something other than him. I can count the number of rock stars I have that kind of relationship with on the fingers of one hand. They sometimes say, ‘We should go for a drink some time.’ They probably think they mean it as they say it but really they don’t.
Sometimes it’s nice if they go to the trouble of pretending they’re your friend. I’ve interviewed Bruce Springsteen a few times. I spoke to him in Los Angeles in 1992. The first time we spoke that day was for television. Immediately afterwards we went to a quiet room to talk for print. Springsteen finds the process of being interviewed congenial. Maybe he finds it to be a kind of therapy. Hence he talks. And talks. Sometimes he does not know when to stop. For the interviewer two hours is a long time to spend nodding furiously and thinking what you might say next. It drains you. Hence it was me who called a halt to our chat after two hours.
The following day his manager said to me, ‘Did you not go for a drive? Bruce was going to take you for a drive.’ Hence I missed the opportunity to pretend he was my best mate for an hour.
If musicians think you’re a TV personality they treat you as somebody in the same racket they’re in. You’re not a civilian. You’re going to keep their secrets. What goes on tour stays on tour. This is a posture most TV personalities are more than happy to go along with. Since I’ve always regarded myself as a writer rather than a TV person this has led me into a number of situations where I’ve been uncomfortably aware of my compromised position.
I was occasionally there when things didn’t quite go according to plan, which is the kind of thing that journalists like but film makers don’t. I was involved in a film with Level 42 which was supposed to track their triumphal entry into the American market. The minute the album came out it was clear there was going to be no triumphal entry. There was going to be no Ed Sullivan moment. This made it far more interesting to me as a writer but there was no chance of any of it being reflected on film. In 1985 I found myself in a conference room at the Rolling Stones office in Cheyne Walk when Mick Jagger was told that Bill Wyman was planning to turn up at their party that night with his new girlfriend who was clearly underage. When I interviewed Springsteen in New York in late 1986 one of the crew told me he was breaking up with his wife. Even had I been able to confirm that, which didn’t become a fact for some months, I couldn’t write about it. When you’re making the film you’re part of the show rather than part of the caravan covering the show. And the show always has to end on a high note. TV has triumph in its very DNA, which is why so many programmes build towards the line ‘in the nick of time’. Journalism, on the other hand, craves ambiguity.
One of the last things I did for Whistle Test was serve as one of the presenters of Live Aid in the summer of 1985. I still stick to my belief that the reason it turned out to be such a success was that for once the English weather did us all a favour. If the sun hadn’t shone the pictures wouldn’t have been so attractive and the audience wouldn’t have grown during the day in the way it did. I remember the heat. I remember the feeling of almost hysterical excitement around the production. At one stage a voice from the production truck came over my earpiece and told me I was about to speak to the largest TV audience ever assembled. This, like most things TV producers say to presenters, is notable for being both impressive and absolutely no help at all.
The climax of my particular shift was the time I was talking to Bob Geldof. He was keen that the broadcast should be a fundraiser. The BBC was keen that this purpose would be secondary. Hence the strict protocol we had to follow every time we gave the audience details of how to donate: postal address first, banks second, credit card line third. Geldof had just finished his most recent round of table banging about the urgency of getting funds to these people. I tried to mollify him by suggesting we should give the appeal details.
‘First the address,’ I said, knowing what visuals would appear and in what order.
‘Fuck the address,’ he said in front of the world’s largest TV audience and the world’s most dismayed TV presenter.
Since that day I have met people all over the world who quote verbatim their memory of what he said. Their memory is always incorrect. I guess that’s the way myths work. People construct the reality that matches their dreams.
That was the moment at which the day took off. That was the instant that set in train the cult of personality that culminated in Geldof’s knighthood. That lit the blue touch paper that resulted in people in TV making entire careers on the basis that they had been involved in Live Aid. I can’t complain. There are many downsides to being on the TV but the upside is that more people know your name afterwards than before.
What you should never do, however, is overestimate how much they know. Twenty years after Live Aid a magazine sent me to Ethiopia to mark the anniversary. Touring the country it was immediately apparent that while Live Aid had done valuable work, both in raising money and in drawing attention to the crisis, a great deal of the heavy lifting had been done by governments and intergovernmental bodies such as the UN and EU. But nobody remembers them. In Britain it’s all the story of one man against the world. Talking to a bunch of farmers in Tigray who had survived the famine, I asked my interpreter, who worked for the relief organizations, to ask them if they had heard of Bob Geldof.
The interpreter turned to me and asked, ‘Who’s Bob Geldof?’
Let that be a lesson to all of us.