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Eddy Says
Eddy Says: Sliding doors
By Eddy Temple-Morris | Published on Thursday 14 April 2011
Mary Anne is coming back. The news that one of my favourite broadcasters ever, and coincidentally one of my favourite human beings ever, Mary Anne Hobbs, is coming back to Xfm, cemented my view that the station has never sounded better. She’ll reinforce what I see as a Dream Team line-up.
First off, Mary Anne is, without doubt, one of the greatest radio DJs and envelope pushers of modern electronic music, and she was Best Woman at my ill-fated wedding. But I want to take a moment to biggup the other girls at Xfm, who I think are also dazzlingly talented. The brilliant Sunta Templeton, almost my namesake, who is going great guns, and pulling in serious numbers of listeners, and Lliana Bird, who I find utterly engaging at weekend. A good female presenter, on a station that’s perceived as quite blokey, is like gold dust, and we now have three veritable ingots.
But I digress, back to Mary Anne, my friend, old Radio 1 colleague and ‘godmother’ – without actually being Christian, or believing in God – to my beloved son, Tone.
Her coming back home to the station where she made her first radio broadcast, back when she was a rock journalist for Sounds Magazine (oh god, I miss the days when we had loads of music weeklies, myriad viewpoints and opinions, not just one, turgid and loathsome monopoly of dance-haters, misanthropes and unreadable indie axe-grinders) reminded me of an episode I had with Radio 1 around the turn of the century.
Many of you are acquainted with the story of how The Remix came into being, but this is the story of how The Remix almost didn’t materialise. Like that film ‘Sliding Doors’, all it takes is one tiny twist of circumstance for everything to work out utterly differently.
When I joined Radio 1 I was most definitely a ‘rocker’. I largely hated house music and loved my guitars. Over the next three years, as I’ve written here, characters like Liam Howlett, Mark Jones and James Lavelle changed the way I thought about music and opened my mind and my heart to so much more, but intrinsically I was a rock fan at that time, and the one show at Radio 1 that wasn’t really working at that time was ‘The Rock Show’.
I recall being inspired by KROQ in LA and Z100 in New York at that time, modern rock stations whose playlists were surprisingly eclectic. They talked over beds by The Chemical Brothers before they dropped Jane’s Addiction, Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana, not just the old rock standards. I remember Matthew Bannister, the inspirational Radio 1 Controller at the time, being concerned that ‘The Rock Show’ was a weak program, one that was floating, in the broadcasting doldrums, with no wind in her sails.
In order to give him some inspiration, I drafted a sheet of A4, much like I did for The Remix, an at-a-glance menu of what the show should sound like. A timeline, and a ‘band line’, with a sort of ‘geography line’, USA-UK balance on there too. I recall Matthew, who had seen umpteen proposals and heard lots of demos, said: “This is the sexiest pilot I’ve seen on the subject, and you’ve done it on one side of A4! Good work!”
I departed Radio 1 not long afterwards, bound for MTV and with my eyes opened to decks, mixers and Pro-Tools. The beleagured ‘Rock Show’ was still a lame horse on the station, and I heard, through the grapevine, that Radio 1 was putting the show out to tender: in other words, inviting independent broadcasters, as well as their own production department, to come up with an idea for the show.
My phone rang, ‘number withheld’. In those days I used to answer those. It turned out to be Radio 1’s Head of Production, who told me I’d been chosen as their man for the job. They said that pilots were coming in from various different companies, Red Dragon in Cardiff was having a go, so was Kerrang!, of course, and Wise Buddah, old Radio 1 ham Mark Goodier’s company, had recruited Phil Alexander, then editor of Kerrang! and legendary rock writer, for its bite at this cherry.
I remember feeling pretty chuffed that I’d been approached by the Radio 1 team themselves, but also slightly uncomfortable that it was for ‘The Rock Show’, as my tastes had widened such a great deal, and it was synths and not guitars that were really turning me on at that time. I also felt they were missing a trick, in that Ian Camfield was the ultimate rock authority and consummate genre figurehead, despite his tender years.
Still, I agreed to do a pilot for them and threw myself into it with gusto.
The first pilot was a zoo format show, with an old skool metalhead, Jim Parsons, my genius producer at MTV, who had lived and breathed heavy metal all his life, cut from the same cloth as Mr Camfield. I was also aware that rock was too geezer heavy, so asked a young Canadian girl rock-plugger called Sherie to join us. Rock fans have always, for me, been self aware piss takers with great senses of humour, so I also recruited a ‘funny guy’, one of those hilarious rock characters, in the form of an irresistible chap called Diamond Dave who was the road manager for Northern Irish legends Therapy? at the time.
We recorded the pilot at Radio 1, a forward thinking, modern rock format. Interestingly ‘The Superchunk’ was devised as a 30 minute mix of more dancey rock tunes and remixes: NIN, Pitchshifter, Apollo 440, Gravity Kills, Silverchair, that kind of thing. The jingle I always used for The Superchunk on Xfm was the same jingle I used on the Radio 1 pilot.
It was a gorgeous, star studded affair. I managed to get an exclusive AC/DC sounding track off Stereophonics, an interview with Skin from Skunk Anansie, and all through the show I teased the fact that David Lee Roth was coming into the studio. The very last link, with the excitement levels built up to the point of rupture, the studio door opened and in walked David Lee Roth, to the astonished gawps of everybody in there. He sat down.
“Please tell everybody who you are and what you do for a living?” I politely enquired.
“My name is Dave Lee Roth”, he said, in a broad South East England accent, adding with a knowing smile: “And I’m a licenced cab driver, from Essex”.
He was totally for real, I’d found a cabbie called Dave Lee Roth, and while everybody in the studio hooted with laughter, I announced a weekly competition where anyone named after a famous rock god could come in and receive the entire back catalogue of that artist. I appealed for a carpenter called Jimmy Page, or a brickie called James Hendrix, or perhaps a double glazing salesman called Bruce Dickinson, appealing for them to come in and say hello, as I handed over the entire Van Halen back catalogue to Dave, from Ilford.
Feedback came pretty quickly after all the pilots were in. It had become “a one horse race”. They didn’t like the other pilots, and asked if I could do one more, but on my own, to see if I could carry the show myself, without any of the ‘entourage’. I gladly obliged, they said: “Great, we love it, we just have to think about the scheduling now, we’ll call you when it’s sorted”.
At the time I was really busy on MTV every day, as well as doing this godawful show on Channel 5 called ‘The Pepsi Chart’, so I didn’t really think too much about it. Weeks went by. Months. I ran into one of the Stereophonics, who asked me how the pilot went, I think it was dear Stuart.
“I don’t know”, I confessed. “It all went weirdly quiet”.
My then manager emailed the powers that be at Radio 1 and asked what was happening. After a few days they got an awkward sounding email from the Head Of Production saying they were having “scheduling difficulties”. A few days after that, an email arrived from the same person, forwarding an email from the MD which read: “We loved the pilots and while Eddy is clearly the man for the job, a scheduling issue means we have to ask Mary Anne to do the ‘Rock Show’, thank you”.
I thought it was slightly odd, for two reasons. Firstly Mary Anne had never been discussed as an option. There were those other pilots, including the one from Wise Buddah, which Mary Anne was part of at the time, but it had, according to Radio 1, “become a one horse race”. Also, at the time, Mary Anne’s ‘Breezeblock’ show was on fire, my favourite show on the station – there were two of them actually, introducing loads of us to the charms of Wall Of Sound, Skint, Mo’ Wax, etc. Mary Anne used to be a rock journalist but had segued naturally into one of those ex-rockers coming at dance music with fresh ideas and a more open minded outlook. I called her.
“Don’t be DAFT!” She said. “Why the fuck would they give ME the ‘Rock Show’? I’ll sort this out, hang on…”
A day or two later, and I got a sheepish call from her: “Eddy I can’t believe this, but they’ve told me I HAVE to turn one of my Breezeblocks into a rock show. I’m really unhappy about this but they’ve put me in a position where if I don’t do it, I’ll lose both shows… I’m so sorry but I can’t turn them down!”
I adore Mary Anne and wished her every success, more gutted for her losing a beloved ‘Breezeblock’ than I was at not getting ‘The Rock Show’. Like I said, I was already incredibly busy at that time, and just discovering the joy of decks, and dance music, so I was sort of glad I wasn’t going to paint myself into a corner, genre-wise. I just got on with my MTV show, that was picking up a massive audience for its afternoon timeslot, and I didn’t think about that Radio 1 rock show for years. No worries. No regrets. No looking back.
A few years later and I found myself back at the BBC, asked in for a meeting about their approach to music on the web, as I’d become a bit of an authority in those early days when nobody had broadband. The legendary BBC boss Trevor Dann, who’d previously been Uber Head Of Programming at Radio 1, a man I’d always had respect for (he got Chris Evans to do his first, amazing show, on GLR when he was PD there in the early 90s) had asked me in.
The first thing he said after “hello” was: “So… I was looking forward to being your boss. Wasn’t it funny how that rock show panned out? Did you ever find out what happened?’
“No,” I said. “I never gave it another thought!”
“Ooooooo”, he teased. “Let me tell you, it’s just too good to keep to myself”.
He confirmed that I “had the job” and they were just thinking about where to put it, when Mark Goodier lost his ‘Weekend Breakfast Show’. According to Dann, Goodier went to Andy Parfitt, by then the Radio 1 Controller and one of his best friends, and persuaded him to give the ‘Rock Show’ to Wise Buddah, his ailing production company, to offset the loss of his presenter job.
Apparently the deal was done there and then, and it was decided Mary Anne, as one Wise Buddah’s stable of DJs, would be asked to do it. Goodier had a knack for surrounding himself with high calibre people; Wise Buddah employed some of the best people in radio at that time. Mark was an excellent judge of professional radio characters, even if his own character was loathsome.
But the moral of the ‘Sliding Doors’ story: You never know what life will throw at you, and what may on the surface of things seem like something negative, may actually be something incredibly positive in disguise. If Mark hadn’t done the dirty on me, and I’d got that rock show, I’d have never done ‘The Remix’, never supported the Prodigy, or Pendulum on tour, never become involved with The Secret Garden Party, never played in the main room of Manumission, never started Ibiza Rocks, never met the amazing Tom Bellamy and we’d never have started Losers.
I always thought if I ran into Goodier again I’d offer to buy him a bottle of champagne to say thanks, but right now I’m so happy about Mary Anne coming back to Xfm, and Justin Lee Collins too, I might have to crack a bottle open without Mark around to dampen my spirits.
Good times!
Eddy x
