Good Morning Nantwich: Adventures in Breakfast Radio. Phill Jupitus

       Foreword by Lauren Laverne

      I first met Phill Jupitus when I was nineteen and a guest on Never Mind the Buzzcocks. I was in a band he liked at the time and, in exchange for a promotional badge for the defunct kids’ show No 73 (of which I had fond, childhood memories, and which he had visited during a stint as The Housmartins’ tour manager), I gave him a C90 of our unreleased demos. I probably would have given him the tape anyway, since he was the only person on the show who (a) liked my band and (b) had not laughed at the fact that I was wearing chopsticks in my hair and makeup purchased from an actual clown shop. But the badge sealed the deal – we became firm friends. That Jupes was happy to part with this small but significant artefact in pursuit of new music is also, I think, testament to his enthusiastic and eclectic attitude to the stuff. I can’t say I’ve come across that many people who can appreciate Vitalic’s electro face-melter La Rock 01, hit the stage with The Specials and belt out a show tune in full drag with equal ease.

      A few years after our initial meeting I had started presenting, which seemed (as it still does) like ludicrously well-paid fun. I didn’t know that Phill had recommended me to his boss, Lesley Douglas, for the show after his on BBC 6 Music. Clearly I didn’t get it. But I did get a gig covering Glastonbury festival with him, John Peel and Jo Wiley, and our first trip to Pilton was my introduction to the station. I agreed to pop in as a guest on Phill’s Monday morning show, to round off the festival before catching a lift back to London with him and his producer. I arrived at the small hotel function room, from which the outside broadcast was taking place, to find my friend and colleague minimally rested and maximally refreshed after a belter of a weekend. And so it was that the very same day I was introduced to 6 Music, I was re-introduced to driving after letting my licence lapse for some five years. Specifically, driving Phill’s automatic, left-hand-drive, tank-sized Jeep down the insanely busy M4 back to London while its owner slumbered in an ursine fashion on the back seat.

      Not long after that, I deputised when Phill took a few weeks’ holiday from his Breakfast Show slot. I was 23 at the time and had the kind of life where 5.00 a.m. is a time you’re still up, not a time you get up. It was a huge shock to the system, and after my stint was up my then-boyfriend-now-husband made me swear I would never take another breakfast job because I’d been such a nightmare to live with. Suffice to say, I did. It was supposed to be a holiday romance with Dame Radio, but she had seduced me with her silky intimacy, immediacy, ability to communicate directly and her stellar taste in music. Within a couple of years I was hosting the XFM breakfast show, some of the best broadcasting fun I’ve ever had, even though I started so early the audience for the first hour consisted exclusively of milkmen and adulterers.

      You see, TV is great – like being invited to a glitzy, ridiculous, gossipy party, packed to the rafters with fabulous people (OK, maybe not Countryfile, but you know what I mean…). Who wouldn’t want to get involved? Radio is the opposite. It is not for the popular. It is not pretty. There is an infamous story about a much-lauded TV presenter who arrived at the country’s biggest commercial station to start her new show and asked her producer, ‘Where’s my script?’ When she was informed that there was no script, this was radio and she was required to think of something to say, she turned on her Louboutined heel and ran like the wind, never to bother a popshield again. In essence, the job is sitting in a windowless room, clutching a foul-tasting beverage from an inevitably malfunctioning coffee machine, talking to yourself and occasionally putting a record on. Yet for some reason, for some of us, it’s bliss. And we know we aren’t talking to ourselves, not really. We’re talking to people like us. Radio is an industry largely run by oddballs and misfits, and specialist radio – like 6 Music – is the thick end of the nerd-wedge. To paraphrase Spinal Tap: There is none more geek. If you were ostracised, flushed, ridiculed and/or obsessed with music everybody else thought made you gay or a Satanist at any point during your school career, well…welcome home.

      It’s almost a decade since Phill introduced me to radio, and I haven’t been without a show of my own since. In fact, I currently occupy the 10–1 slot on BBC 6 Music that he suggested that Lesley Douglas give me all those years ago. It’s the most fun I’ve ever been paid to have. And the 6 Music audience are some of the cleverest, most interesting and hilarious people I have ever met. They also have impeccable taste. At the time of going to print the station’s future is uncertain, which seems unjust. There should be a place like 6 on the dial – somewhere idiosyncratic and surprising where you can hear Jarvis