Last week Eddy wrote about Snow Patrol. This week he tackles another band who can, shall we say, rub people up the wrong way. With their new album just released, Coldplay hate is back on the up. But, asks Eddy, why do bands like Snow Patrol and Coldplay attract such strong negative reactions? Are people genuinely that offended by the music they create, or is there some other reason for this bile?

Funny that after last week’s piece about the early days of Snow Patrol (thank you very much for all the positive comments on that!), I ended up watching ‘Later… with Jools Holland’, which was last week book ended by Coldplay, and I was reminded of a nice little story involving Chris Martin and Co.

It was the year 2000, and I’d just got what would be my last properly salaried job, Head Of Programming for Done & Dusted, a fantastic production company specialising in huge, televised gigs from Robbie Williams to The Prodigy. They wanted me to come up with ideas for quirky, edgy TV music shows and pilot them on the web, which was just starting to catch on in those days. One of the numerous things we piloted online was a music and entertainment show that was made entirely in my flat.

One of the strands of this show was to get bands in to be interviewed on the sofa in my sitting room (the same scuzzy orange one that Gary Lightbody sat on in last week’s anecdote) and to play a live version of one of their songs, but only with the instruments they found in that room. These included my Takamine acoustic guitar, my tiny Pignose electric guitar with a speaker in the body, and various Fisher Price baby instruments that belonged to my son Tone, then only few months old, such as a tiny one and a half octave ‘piano’, a kazoo, and a blue ‘shaky egg’ shaker.

The basic idea was that a band would be invited to my flat, I’d make them tea or coffee, and they’d bring biscuits. Them bringing the biscuits, we thought, would get the interview started – my theory was, and still is, that you can tell a lot about a person simply by what biscuits they choose. We needed to make a pilot edition, so we booked a band we liked, who’d had an independent single out and had just signed to EMI, but who were still waiting to have that elusive hit. That band was Coldplay.

The TV crew brought with them so many lights that my little flat turned into a blinding electronic alien womb, covered in cables. I think I’m still paying the electric bill from that day. The band turned up with nice manager Phil, and apologised for the absence of one, it was their drummer, Will Champion, who had tragically just lost one of his parents that week. But the rest of them were there, all smiles and wonder, the novelty of it all still reflected in their wide eyes.

Chris was slack jawed and looked around, like a kid who’d just been let into the Cadbury’s factory. His blazing eyes came to rest on the one side of the entire room that was covered, floor to ceiling, in CDs and vinyl. Then he looked at my decks and mixer set up, on a mad bit of furniture I’d inherited from my MTV days. He looked at me and said almost the same thing that Mike Myers said in ‘Wayne’s World’ when he saw Rob Lowe’s flat. Something like, “I’m so gonna get a place like this when I move out of my parents’ house!”

The band sat down, I made a round of hotties and the interview began, with them offering their biscuits to go with the tea. Chris revealed his choice first and handed them over with a big grin. Cadbury’s Boasters. I remarked that this was the choice of a confident man, a quality choice, a buttery biscuit with reassuring chunks of chocolate and nuts. Chris laughed and we all started to gel in the interview.

I can’t remember what guitarist Jonny Buckland whipped out, but Guy Berryman made me hoot when he gingerly handed over a pack of pink wafer biscuits. I obviously ribbed him a bit about that being the most light-loafered biscuit ever and the rest of the band joined in, clearly used to this vein of humour and bass player piss-taking.

I found all three of them delightful and Chris to be charming, erudite, intelligent and both self-aware and self-deprecatory. The interview was a real pleasure and passed off in such a good natured way that when it came time to do the live track, in the absence of Will, they asked me to play the shaky egg.

The song they chose was ‘Yellow’, their next single, a track I was already in love with, and the tune that would prove to be their breakthrough hit. Guy played the bass line on my Takamine, Jonny played that gorgeous bendy-string guitar line on my electric Pignose, which sounded the dog’s bollocks as I recall. Chris played Tone’s tiny piano and I sat on percussion duties with my plastic egg.

When it was all over, Chris shook my hand and said, looking at his manager, then back to me: “That was great, I’m really glad we did this”.

The next time I saw Chris, it was backstage at Glastonbury and he was a fully-fledged popstar with a few hits under his belt, an ascension that has continued and always warmed my heart, thinking back to that eager young guy sitting on my sofa.

I’ve ended up defending Coldplay ever since, to friends, colleagues, girlfriends, total strangers in bars. I can see why they rub people up the wrong way, when I saw them on ‘Later…’, I was reminded that Chris has a way of dancing that brings to mind that mad uncle that every quality wedding has. But still, I find his enthusiasm infectious and he is an undeniably great singer with enviable pitching.

Snow Patrol too have a similar tendency to infuriate people. I’m often shocked how much these bands are such a focus of hatred. “Oh but they’re so mediocre”, the detractors say. “They can’t rock!” Or even, “I’d rather boil my own head than see them play”.

But surely you’d never go and see a band like Coldplay if you wanted to rock. But that doesn’t mean there’s no reason to go and see them at all. Life is a rich and splendid tapestry, with so many shades of colour and texture, why cut one route of entertainment off in favour of another?

I love Snow Patrol AND I love Tool.
I love Coldplay AND I love Deftones.
I love Embrace AND I love Nine Inch Nails.

For some reason, a lot of people seem to find this weird. Or at least that’s what they say. Whatever, the disproportionate hatred that these ‘nice’ bands get still makes me slightly suspicious.

Yes, when bands become successful they always get that much more hate. Yes, some people feel they cannot publicly like a certain band because they feel that band is not cool enough to suit their image or job. Yes, these bands occupy a middle ground, a path of least resistance, and some people don’t like that. But I just get the feeling there’s too much hate out there, and that the negative side of the imbalance doth protest too much.

I think there’s more to this than the simple fact that the universe is in perfect balance. That for everyone who loves something, there is someone who hates that same thing. I truly feel that bands like Coldplay and Snow Patrol act like putting a mirror up to people. It’s not as simple as being the case that nice people like these bands and horrid people don’t. I think it’s deeper than that. Nice bands have some horrid fans, just as noisy, dark bands have some utterly lovely ones.

I read some horridness towards Snow Patrol from Manics bassist Nicky Wire recently. But I know Nicky to be an extremely nice man, very clever and well informed, well read and extremely affable with it. So when Nicky says: “Snow Patrol are the most boring band in Britain”, while I’m no psychologist, it occurs to me that maybe Nicky, deep down, feels bored himself and that the Patrol diss may have been a form of projection.

Bands like these are so utterly nice, and deal in such uplifting melody, and can tackle melancholia with such a beautifully light touch. So, if you take personal feelings about people involved out of the equation, what’s not to like about Coldplay or Snow Patrol? I suspect that most people who say they hate these bands are not hateful people, they are just people who are in some way, deep in their own self, unhappy.

I am both notoriously happy and painfully honest, to the point of annoyance, I’m told. I’m also completely devoid of any sense of coolness. That leaves me free to love any band that reach me on any level. Therefore the sense of unbridled joy I experienced last Thursday night when I saw Snow Patrol live for the first time since they were famous, was intoxicating, as enthralling and mesmeric as the darkest Tool or Nine Inch Nails gig. The flipside of the same coin, if you will.

I’m not trying to convert everyone here. I understand, to the core of my Zoroastrian roots, that some people need to dislike these bands for the universe to work properly. I’m just asking a question, and it’s a question that demands unflinching honesty and self-awareness: Do you truly, honestly, deeply, dislike a band like that because of something in front of you, or do you dislike that band because of something inside you?

X eddy

Everyone has to start out somewhere, and for most people in the music world that somewhere is just this side of the poverty line. How long you stay there, grafting away seven days a week for little return, has very little to do with talent and a lot to do with luck. And even those bands who appear to be “overnight sensations” have often spent months, maybe years, in that waiting zone. But, usually, the really talented people do make it, if they are willing to persist, and except favours where they can. This week, Eddy recalls how he once befriended one such musician, a certain Gary Lightbody, whose story should inspire all the newer artists currently sitting in that waiting area.

We all have our weaknesses. Musical weaknesses that is – artists we love unconditionally which may not quite fit in the genre hole we are more usually associated with. I remember when I was at Radio 1, we sometimes joked about some of our colleagues’ weaknesses – with John Peel it was The Undertones, obviously, while Andy Kershaw’s was Bruce Springsteen. I suppose John Kennedy’s weakness might be Razorlight, but I’ve never broached this subject with him! But everybody, no matter how cool, or how street, has one. Or, in my case, several. Those who know me well will know that my main weakness through the latter part of the 90s was Snow Patrol. I have always loved that band, or, more honestly, that man. Gary Lightbody.

When I first heard their demo, Snow Patrol were called Polar Bear, and my friend Mark Jones (not to be confused with Wall Of Sound MJ) had signed them to his little West London label, Jeepster. Their offices were overlooking the same park I lived on.

Mark was officially the most honest man in the UK record industry, confirmed by a hilarious poll conducted by the now defunct SKY Magazine. They sent a blank demo tape to every major label in the UK and then tracked the responses they got over the next several months, posting the results on a double page spread. Almost every label responded, but some took six months to do so, and in almost every case they received the same stock letter: “Thank you for your demo, we’re sorry but it’s not what we’re looking for at the moment”. Only two labels responded by pointing out that the tape was blank. Out of those two, only one got back within a week. Actually, he got back within 24 hours. That was Mark Jones, then a junior A&R man at Polydor.

Jeepster was a great little label, and Snow Patrol a great little band. I quickly became their number one public fan. Colin Murray liked them too, and I played them to Zane, who also fell in love with them, although he may not admit that publicly now for fear of a knock on his door and a wag of the finger from the Cool Police!

In the early days, I must have seen Snow Patrol play, I don’t know, the lion’s share of 20 times. In every case, I saw them play to a crowd (if you can call that few people ‘a crowd’) of anywhere between five and possibly 75 people. I remember one gig where I was practically alone, in a big student venue in London. Tumbleweed was blowing across the venue and a lone church bell could be heard in the distance, yet even at this gig, with just me and a handful of other people, one or two of whom clearly didn’t know why they were there, I could hear utter brilliance, and untapped and under-appreciated genius. And not just while the songs were playing.

In between every tune, Gary, like a professional stand up comedian, would speak, inform, entertain, cajole and self-deprecate in the most utterly charming way. I remember feeling ashamed that I was on telly every day and he wasn’t. I felt that HE should be presenting my MTV show, and that I was just getting in the way of somebody truly talented.

In the end, through the love and support of many, but particularly the wonderful Jim Chancellor at Fiction Records, and our mutual friend Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee, Snow Patrol made it. And then some. Their third album, ‘Final Straw’, became the indie version of ‘Thriller’, with so many hit singles coming off it that, for a time, Snow Patrol were undeniably the biggest band in the UK. Worldwide success duly followed. Even the doubters and haters couldn’t stop them, it was like a landslide.

And there had been plenty of doubters and haters prior to that album’s success. I recall one hilarious-in-retrospect conversation with Xfm’s then music programmer (the same guy who tried to stop the rise of Kasabian, a story I wrote about in one of the very first Eddy Says columns). I told him how brilliant I thought ‘Final Straw’ was, and how convinced I was it could finally break Snow Patrol as a band. He disagreed, telling me he was unlikely to support the record on daytime Xfm because “Eddy, there are no singles on this album”. Bless him. That is right up there with “The Beatles? Naah, not what we’re looking for at the moment” or “The internet? Don’t think it’ll catch on mate”. Though he went to Radio 1 and is doing very well there.

So, anyway, my weakness became the biggest band in the country. And, as is often the case when little bands I take under my wing have hits, we sort of fell out of touch, but I always followed Gary’s career, and every once in a while we’d meet up at a DJ gig, or he’d get Losers to do a Snow Patrol remix, something I’m massively grateful for.

Every time I heard a new Snow Patrol track on the radio I’d think back to those tumbleweed gigs, or their tiny, rusty, Transit van and the battered gear it contained, and I’d smile broadly with a sense that the universe was working right. And a few times over the years, I will confess to getting a little misty-eyed when I heard yet another massive song of theirs on the radio.

I have more weaknesses now and I’m hoping the same thing will happen to them in the future, but the Patrol have been popping up in my life quite a lot again recently, in random ways. First, out of nowhere, Gary sent me a sweet message saying he’d love to catch up and play me his new album, and hear what Losers were up to, and so that’s what we did. And I can report that the new Snow Patrol album is an epic piece of work. It was recorded in LA, and you can really hear America rubbing off on it, but in a good way. I think it’s the best thing they’ve done since ‘Final Straw’.

And on Sunday, the Patrol entered my consciousness again, in an indirect way. I went for a lovely Sunday lunch and invited a few local muso mates to have a South London convergence, a hook up of like-minded souls. One of them has made one of my favourite albums of this year, another tore the roof off the Remix Bubble in July with a rampant techno set, and the other is a brilliant producer and guitarist in one of my favourite bands. None of them knew each other, with me being the only common thread. At one point, one of them, who I know is really skint, offered to buy me a drink, and I refused. He was slightly offended at first, but I explained to him why via an anecdote, which I’ll share with you now.

I told him that, years ago, I think around 1998-99, Gary Lightbody was sitting on my shitty, dark orange, IKEA sofa, for the umpteenth time, having just eaten a dinner, having a beer and a post-dinner-social-spliff, something most of us partook in back in those days. He looked at me with a pained expression and said: “Eddy, I feel terrible. I’m always coming round here, and being fed by you and your Mrs, always drinking your beer, always rolling your weed, this is just too much, I want to contribute towards all this!”

“Gary”, I reassured him. “What’s happening here is very simple. At this moment in time, I am earning a great deal more than you. I’m not earning very much, but the sad fact is, that at this current point in time, it’s probably more than twice or three times what you’re earning in a year. So I’m not going to let you buy me a drink, or pay for dinner, because one day the tables will turn, and – believe me on this – there will come a day when you will be earning so much more than me, that it isn’t even funny. When that day comes, buy me dinner”. I meant that metaphorically of course – I could have been saying “let me remix one of your records” or “give me a sneak preview of your new album”. With all that in mind, I told my new neighbour that I’d pay for his drink, and his lunch, and one day, he could reciprocate, in some way, same as I told Gary all that time ago.

And then, with Gary and his band so much back in my mind, and again out of the blue, today I got an email from Snow Patrol’s manager asking if I wanted to come and see the band play this Thursday at The Forum. I told her I’d love to go. Then it occurred to me that I’ve never actually seen Snow Patrol play a gig since they became famous. I’m scratching my head and wondering how this could have happened, but there it is. I suppose I got busy having a child, a divorce, a custody battle, building a house, losing a house, gaining custody of a child etc while Gary got busy being an A-listed, globe-trotting musical phenomenon, so I suppose it’s not that surprising I’ve never seen them play since the turn of the millennium.

I’m aware that there are people who read this column who have ‘made it’ and are currently at the top of their respective games. But I know newer artists read this too. And to you guys, and I know it’s a bit of a cheesy story, but I say remember Gary and where he was, for years, before the big time came his way. Keep your head up. Keep doing what you do. Accept favours when they come your way from friends who recognise your talent. And have faith in yourself and don’t give up. You don’t have to make it as big as Gary to be happy, or to be ‘successful’. You could, like me, just get by doing something you really love, and be astonishingly, infectiously and gloriously happy, like I am. Bottom line. Keep the faith. Use the force. One day your ship will come in.

Meanwhile, on Thursday I’ll be seeing Snow Patrol play in front of a comparatively huge crowd. Something I have never, ever seen. I have only ever cried at three gigs, but I suspect that by shortly after 9pm on Thursday night, that number will have crept up to four.

X eddy

After a very, very busy week, presenting and producing no less than three different radio shows, Eddy looks back at some particularly good co-host guests this weekend, a combination that truly demonstrated the ethos of The Remix – a great new(ish) band in Officers and a legend in the form of Adam F. And with co-hosts the topic for the day, Eddy previews some of the guests he’s got lined up for the rest of the year.

Last week was so bursting at the seams that I’m afraid I’ve been remiss with Eddy Says this week. Normally I’d think about it throughout the week and have a topic to write about sorted by now, but the past few days have been extraordinarily occupied.

I had to produce and present a bi-monthly show, called Wired, for Air New Zealand, then plan, produce and present two more, both for Xfm – my usual Remix show, and a further show on Saturday, filling in for an on-leave Mary Anne Hobbs. And, as most of you know, I’m also a single dad with custody of an amazing eleven year old boy. These days he usually stays with his mum at weekends, but this weekend he was with me. So, as you can see, it’s been a bit hectic over the last seven days. Not that I’m complaining, of course!

Some shows really do stand out as extra special. I don’t know what it is, something in the air, the water, the guests, or our collective frames of mind, but some shows I really feel on fire, and last Friday’s show was a particular joy to present. It was great to see Officers and hear them really come of age. They occupy a place in UK music that’s almost unique, a British version of Nine Inch Nails, who come close to the brilliance of their inspiration.

I also felt last Friday’s show really embodied its own ethos – to champion new music and to balance that with the odd legend – and this week it was Adam F who supplied that equilibrium. Hearing him talk as enthusiastically as a teenager about Knife Party making him feel like smashing his studio with a giant axe was a joy to hear. He reminded me of myself, and the proud fact that neither of us, no matter what happens, will ever stop being fanatical music lovers. This is a state of mind I’ve written about here before and will mention again no doubt, it is part of the glue that holds and keeps us together.

Which reminds me, presenting Mary Anne’s show was an equally massive pleasure, not least because that one was done with the help of another brilliant, eclectic and enthusiastic champion of new music, Hervé. Funnily enough, Adam and I had bigged him up not 24 hours previously, then he and I were eyeball to eyeball, sharing music with each other and many of you. Doing Mary Anne’s show was a fantastic chance to delve deeper into electronic music and give some well deserved ‘mainstream’ airtime to artists usually reserved more for night-time. And I must thank True Tiger and CRST for doing mixes for the show, at a moment’s notice.

This is a very long winded way of saying that I haven’t got anything of massive import to say this week, except that – having waxed lyrical about my recent co-host guests on Xfm (all of which you can listen again to right now on the RadioPlayer) – perhaps I could share with you details of some of the co-hosts still to come, because we’ve got some great people booked in. And again, it’s a marvellous and reflective balance of new artists and the odd legend, the star spangled fuel that has kept the home fires of The Remix burning for nearly twelve years.

So, coming up in the next few weeks:

High Contrast – Lincoln is booked to come in next week and provide the sprinkling of legend stardust that has kept us flying for so long.

Ayah Marar – I love Twitter. The other day I was writing Ayah’s name on my playlist for the gajillionth time, then I thought: “Hang on, I wonder if she’s on Twitter”. Two clicks later I’d found her, reminded her we met when Calvin Harris headlined The Remix Stage at Big Reunion a few years ago (she sang ‘Flashback’ from my Album Of The Year at that time, and was part of his live band) and invited her to come in and co-host the show. A matter of minutes later and Ayah and I were conversing, with Paul Pendulum interjecting and publicly throwing love her way, then a plot was hatched and she was booked, within minutes of my first random thought. There are definitely not enough girls that really rock in dance music, and it’ll be awesome to show some support for, and to hang out with, one of our finest.

Shock One – Karl, from Perth, used to be in a metal band with the boys from Pendulum. They’ve known each other since they were kids, and it shows. His music is stunning, and I can’t wait to see what he’ll bring to the table for an hour of Xfm airtime that will probably wake up the dead.

Those guys are all coming in over the next few weeks, then we can look forward to the following, whom I’ve asked to come in, who’ve all said yes, but I’ve not confirmed a date as yet:

Tom Vek: This has been a long time coming. No radio show in the UK has shown the unconditional love for Tom that The Remix on Xfm has over the years. We kept the fires burning while he dropped off everybody’s radar in between the debut and sophomore albums.

MJ Cole: UK garage’s most important and influential producer and someone I have massive admiration for. His first job in music was with a mutual friend, Vini Medley from Sound Of The Underground, who went onto establish Botchit & Scarper and Emotif Records, a trail-blazer of UK future-electronica.

Richard Russell: Boss of XL Recordings and as such one of the most fascinating characters in the UK music industry. He signed The Prodigy right through to Adele and I mentioned him reverentially here in Eddy Says when I wrote about the art of A&R. I can’t wait to meet him and shoot the shit over the Xfm airwaves.

If all these come to fruition this year, then, my gosh, we’ll be all the way through to Christmas, and my Bombs Of The Year show, all so fast that my head is spinning just thinking about that. Then looking forward to another year and the horizon which will bring us next year’s Skrillex, next year’s SBTRKT, or next year’s Nero.

So, there you go, lots to look forward to – and don’t forget, you can hear the Remix on Friday at 10pm, or again on Sunday at the same time, on Xfm, or at anytime during the week via the RadioPlayer. And while I’m hear talking about things to look forward to, don’t forget to spread the word about Brixton Electric and the Get Loaded night every Friday.

They are championing new music there in much the same way as the Remix has, and in the words of Dan Le Sac, who DJed at the launch party: “This place has massive potential, the drinks are so cheap in there, and they’ve got really interesting DJs and new bands, as soon as people realise it’s cheaper to get a pint or a short in there than it is in a local pub, then they’ll see the crowds they deserve”.

This week, reflecting what I’ve said above, is a heady cocktail of new artists topped off by a legend… we have Remix hero Jon Carter playing a Monkey Mafia DJ set. Watching that while clutching a pint that cost you less than your local boozer is my definition of happy days.

And friends of mine don’t even pay to get in, so get in touch via the usual ways, via Twitter or my Facebook pages here and here and let’s give Jon the crowd he deserves.

X Eddy

As our politicians’ summer holiday draws to a close, each of the major parties in turn gets together to talk about how great they are and how well they’re all doing. Last week it was the turn of the Conservatives, who held their conference in Manchester.

Various controversial things were said, but in the music world it was not what was said but rather what was played that set tongues wagging. This week, Eddy asks if it’s right that politicians can align themselves with a piece of music without the songwriter’s knowledge.

So, another year, another Tory conference, one of those things that I’d never normally pay any attention to. The words ‘Tory Party Conference’ have the same lure, the same attractiveness for me as ‘Hitler Appreciation Social’ or ‘Jehovah’s Witness Cheese And Wine Evening’. But last week, on Wednesday night, while working on my playlist for Friday’s show and farting about on Twitter, I saw ‘New Radicals’ trending. Now, I’m on record as saying that ‘You Only Get What You Give’ is an example of pop songwriting perfection, so I had a look. It turned out the Tory party had used the track at their conference, one of that shower of bastards walked on, or off, stage to it.

My first thought was one of utter horror, like my mojo had been sucked out. If this tune is now associated with the Tory bell-ends, I can’t play it when I DJ any more. It’s been the personal highlight of many a ‘wedding set’ at a festival, so I was dismayed.

Then I saw Primal Scream trending, seemingly for the same reason. Had a Tory really taken to the stage to the sound of ‘Rocks’? Surely not. Well, as it happened, no they hadn’t, someone (not The Primals, they’re even less likely to be watching a Tory Conference than me, unless, perhaps, a bomb had exploded there) had got it wrong. Though, so eager were the band to distance themselves from any association with Cameron and his chronies, they’d issued a disgusted statement before that fact became clear. In the end it turned out to be The Dandy Warhols that had been usurped by the Tories, to add a little glamour to the most dull event of the British year.

While seeing this all unfold on Twitter made my evening that much more entertaining, there’s a back-story to all this that perplexes me greatly.

First, the Conservative Party doesn’t need to get permission before using any songs at their events. They can ruin tracks like ‘You Only Get What You Give’ for a whole generation without even giving the artist a heads up. This is because music played at a party political conference is covered by the same ‘blanket licence’ as a football match, shopping centre or local pub. All those organisations need a licence from two separate rights bodies in order to play music – PPL and PRS – so money exchanges hands, but they don’t need to get permission from any one artist or songwriter before using their music.

In most scenarios this is sensible – and it’s a similar blanket licence which means I don’t have to phone every single artist for permission before I play their records on Xfm, but at the same time I know they’ll get some pennies (or pounds) from the station’s owners for gloriously filling some of our airtime. But surely it’s different if its a political party using a track? I mean, if McDonalds wanted to use a New Radicals song in an advert there’s no blanket licence that can help them, they’d have to ask the band’s record label, music publisher and – assuming they’d got a decent record and publishing contract – the band themselves. But for many artists being played at the Tories’ big bash – on live TV in front of the world – is worse even than being synced into a McDonalds ad. Surely the blanket licensing rules should be changed?

Though, and this brings me to my second even more worrying point, would that change have actually rescued New Radicals and the Dandy Warhols? Possibly not, because I have a suspicion the Tories did actually ask the two bands’ record companies before using their songs, even though copyright law says they don’t have to. Possibly because they are aware nearly every band in the world is likely to take to Twitter or Facebook and point out all the Conservative Party’s many flaws if their music is used without advance warning.

The reason I suspect this is because I was once on tour with (one of my favourite bands) Delays, several years ago, and on day two a message came through from their manager to the effect that Tory Reichstag had called asking for permission to use their sublime track ‘Wanderlust’ at their conference that year. The band, who have staunch socialist roots, all howled “no fucking way” in unison. But I said: “Hang on a minute… why don’t you say yes, but only for the part of the song that goes ‘you don’t listen’”. And amid the howls of happy laughter that’s what was relayed to management and hopefully to the Clearance-Oberst who’d made the request.

So if Delays were asked then, why wouldn’t Gregg Alexander of New Radicals and Courtney Taylor-Taylor of the Dandy Warhols be asked now? Did both these artists give the all clear when they got a phone call from their manager telling them the British equivalent of the Tea Party brigade wanted to use their songs at a big televised party? Or is it more likely that the record companies who released these two records – both multi-national majors, unlike the London-based indie Delays were signed to at the time – chose not to pass on the message, instead looking forward to the few pounds in royalties they could expect to receive from Cameron and his mates?

We know for certain Taylor-Taylor had no idea his song was being used, because – again thanks to Twitter – he soon discovered what had happened and responded via his website. He was disgusted, as I’m sure 99% of the people reading this would have been had their song been hijacked without their permission by an organisation that you would not cross the street to piss on if its members were collectively on fire. Yet Courtney isn’t the first and won’t be the last to experience such disgust, when the system allows political parties to use songs at events without specific permission, and when – even if the parties do approach the major music companies who distribute a song – said companies give the green light without consulting their artists and songwriters.

So we’re relying on politicians and major music companies here, what are we to do? Except, hang on, what about the BBC? Because the cursory thumbs up we are assuming Tory HQ was given by the New Radicals and Dandy Warhols’ labels or publishers only applied to the room where the conference was taking place. But the association the wider public then makes between the song and the Tories comes about because the conference is filmed, by the BBC, and that footage is broadcast, in prime time, to a massive audience via BBC News. TV in the UK is also covered by a blanket licence, so under law the BBC only has to fill in a few PPL and PRS forms after the fact, and pass a few pounds over to the collecting societies. But – when unfair political association is involved – couldn’t and shouldn’t they do a check with the artists first?

All in all, a right little comedy of errors. Perhaps there’s nothing we can really do about this – or, more to the point, any campaign that involved getting Tories, major labels and BBC bigwigs on side possibly isn’t worth pursuing, but I’m just shining a little light on it now, just in case there are any people out there who think that Courtney Taylor-Taylor or his band The Dandy Warhols (or Gregg from New Radicals) would ever condone such a rampant abuse of their music by a political organisation.

The only up side of all this is that it gives great artists like Courtney the opportunity to issue statements like the one he posted last week, and which I’ve included in its entirity below. I have to say I adore the guy, we got on like a house on fire the numerous times I interviewed him or his band on TV and radio in the late 90s and early noughties, and I admire the fact that he’s an artist that is zen enough to be impartial, balanced and never take a side. I’m not strong enough to do that.

eddy X

Take it away Courtney:

WTF? Where do I bitch about this? I’ll tear their fuggin heads off. Well maybe not but this happened to us in an Arkansas gubernatorial race and it makes me super angry. And then I wanna puke.

Why don’t these assholes have right-wing bands make them some right-wing music for their right-wing jerk off politics? Oh, because right wing people aren’t creative, visionary or any fun to be around. Nor are they productive or even introspective about it. Wait, I live in Portland, Oregon… neither are left-wingers come to think of it.

Jesus, I tend to really dislike ANY people who take sides in politics. It is the single greatest contributor to getting nothing done. Fuck “politics”. What a joke. I give my charitable donations to people who get on a plane themselves and go to Haiti or Africa and help other people. Do you? NEVER to a political machine. I like to get shit done. You do too.

Fuck, now I’m pissed off.

Courtney Taylor-Taylor

We’re used to Welsh people now. They’re all over the place these days. Eddy Temple-Morris is one. As is that Steve Jones fella. You remember him, don’t you? Off of the ‘T4’. Wandering around, looking all buff with his silky Welsh tones drifting about the place. Not any more though. Not now he’s gone to America to present ‘X-Factor USA’. Americans don’t want Welsh Steve, they want British Steve, who walks about looking all buff with his Welsh tones jostling for position with some other voice not his own.

I don’t normally watch ‘X-Factor’. Like Stephen Fry, I find the emotions it exploits – awkwardness and embarrassment – over-rated as entertainment vehicles. But last Saturday night, before I left for a 1-3am DJ set in London, I was forced to switch on the US version of the show after seeing Steve Jones trending on Twitter.

Among some tweets that were just a massive release of hormones, and a sizable number along the lines of “this guy is going to annoy me”, the vast majority all said the same thing: “What happened to Steve Jones’ voice?!” Somebody in the Jones camp has obviously stuck their oar in and encouraged Steve to lose his Welsh accent as he moves to American TV, which is a crying shame, because he’s clearly struggling as a result, adding to an already awkward situation with a voice that he seems to have borrowed off somebody else.

I know Steve from years back, when we both worked at the marvellously named Pop Factory in South Wales. The former fizzy pop factory, where they had once made drinks like Corona Fizzy Orange and Dandelion & Burdock, was enterprisingly converted into a TV production facility by a brilliant producer/director called Emyr Afan, who I’d worked with before. Emyr made use of European and UK governmental funding to help launch a creative oasis in a relative desert, the Rhondda Valley in South Wales. While there, I presented two series of a great little show called ‘This Way Up’ on ITV1 Wales, the show on which I had that excruciating experience with Muse.

Emyr was not only great at seeing the potential for development in an area crying out for it, he was also very canny at spotting talent and giving it the chance to develop. The other two presenters working at The Pop Factory at that time were Steve Jones, possibly the best looking man ever to grace a cathode ray tube (or Liquid Crystal Display), and the magnificently over-endowed Alex Jones, now of ‘The One Show’.

Steve was, in those days, so young, so naïve, so buttock clenchingly thick, but so lovely with it, that you wouldn’t want him any other way. He really was one of the nicest guys you could ever hope to meet, and the fact that he could only dream of beating anyone over the age of eleven at Scrabble only made him more lovable. Somehow, being super intelligent just wouldn’t be fair with Steve, he’s just too good looking, as if the gods who were giving out looks asked him to skip the brains queue and stay for a triple helping of what they had to offer.

So, anyway, back to last Saturday night, and the curious case of Steve’s missing voice. The poor boy has obviously been leant on by someone, because you can bet your bottom dollar this wasn’t Steve’s idea. So WHY do you think they did this?

Could it be that in the wake of Cole-gate, the show’s broadcaster Fox is paranoid about alienating US audiences who are unable to understand a regional British accent? If so, they’re doing themselves and Steve a disservice. Because while Cole’s Geordie twang might take a little getting used to for those not already familiar with it, the Welsh accent only makes words easier to understand. It’s a very well pronounced variety of the English tongue, probably the easiest to understand of any.

Of course we’ve already been through all this, and out the other side, here in the UK. Many decades ago regional accents were simply not allowed on TV. Everybody had to speak like Harry Enfield’s hilarious character, Mr Cholmondley-Warner (pron. Chumley-Warner). By the noughties, things had swung to the other extreme, and posh accents got no voiceover work at all, you had to speak like the dude who does ‘Big Brother’ – “Porl, Jern and Meyk oor in tha smerking aaairea…”

That said, as voices moved from posh to regional on British telly, in the 1990s probably, it did sometimes feel like the Welsh accent was the one being left behind. Perhaps that was linked to the fact people from Wales were increasingly the victims of what I call ‘internal racism’ within England. Because, of course, in the UK the bias against regional accents was never to do with whether or not people could understand what was being said, but was more about the preconception viewers – and TV bosses – would form about someone based simply on how they spoke.

When I was growing up it was the Irish who were the butt of every joke in England, which I found mystifying. Without the Irish, things would be very different in this country. For starters we’d all be speaking French now if it wasn’t for Arthur Wellesley, The Duke Of Wellington. His victory over Napoleon at Waterloo insured English independence, yet the history books (written mostly by English men) seem to conveniently gloss over the fact he was Irish. But as Ireland gentrified through the 1980′s the pisstake-pendulum swung over the Irish Sea and seemed to get stuck over Cardigan Bay.

I was born in Cardiff, and my great uncles, on my father’s side, played rugby for Wales. As a person of Welsh heritage I’ve long sensed an undercurrent of ‘internal racism’ against the Welsh. And up until the marvellous Huw Edwards first read the BBC Six O’Clock News in 1999, there were no Welsh voices in the mainstream public eye. The last flirtation the UK had had with a Welshman was fairly disastrous. Poor Neil Kinnock, both Welsh AND ginger. He may as well have publicly poured petrol over himself and struck a match.

Things do seem to have got better recently, with Huw getting the most coveted news reading position in the country on the BBC News At Ten, and the aforementioned Alex Jones being groomed for chat show stardom via morning TV. But this Steve Jones thing has got me thinking about this all over again. I really do hope the edict for Steve to adopt a more neutral voice on American TV didn’t come from the UK-end of the ‘X-Factor’ operation, from some English person deciding that the Welsh accent sounds too stupid for a US audience. Did Simon Cowell stand there, with his daft flat-top hair and trousers pulled up to his hideous moobs, and tell the most gorgeous man on TV to lose the Welsh accent?

And even if the ruling did come from US TV bosses, while that might be less surprising, it’s still a stupid rule. With an increasing number of British TV presenters popping up on shows over there, surely even American viewers would welcome a bit of variety in how those people speak. Though, I suppose, the decision – whoever made it – has had an upside for the all new ‘X-Factor USA’ on this side of the Atlantic. Because Steve’s attempts to cover his natural accent sound so ridiculous at times, everyone is talking about it, and therefore the show. To the extent that even I ended up watching a bit of the programme. And I even heard my marvellous Xfm colleague Dan O’Connell talking about Steve’s voice, and its unknown whereabouts, last week.

But if this is a battle that can’t be won, if all British TV presenters are going to be asked to neutralise their accents if they want to work in the States, no matter how bizarre it makes them sound, well here’s an idea: why not just make them all do their best New York private detective impression and be done with it? Or maybe, for international promotional purposes, all Brits – you and me included – should have to mask their true voices.

And then we could swing back right the other way and have Mr Cholmondley-Warner presenting every show on TV… “Helloo, end hwelcome to thee ‘Hex-Fector’, en engaging end edifying televisual progrum thet discarvers telent in the most hunlikely uf pleeces”.

You know, come to think of it, I’d watch that.

X eddy

Live TV is an unpredictable thing. Sure, you can plan things to an extent, but once the camera is rolling no one really knows what might occur to knock things off course. Though, actually, this is not a tale of a live TV broadcast going wrong, as such. The broadcast itself went off without any obvious hitches. It’s just that two minutes from the end, the presenter, a Mr Eddy Temple-Morris, quietly broke his neck.

Whenever I’m tired, stressed, or hold my neck still for any length of time, I can hear it crunch when I move my head. It’s horrible, off-putting, and really annoying – calcium rubbing against calcium – but how it happened is so bizarre, it sounds like it was written for a sitcom.

The year was 1998, and Alton Towers had approached MTV with an idea to broadcast my show, ‘Up For It’, live from the park, in celebration of its latest, greatest ride, Oblivion. They wanted me to be the first person to ride this thrilling new rollercoaster, and to do it live on the telly. It sounded like fun to me; I relished the change in normal routine, and have always been a fan of outside broadcasts in general.

After Zane Lowe (my sidekick in those days), producer Paul and I had gone through how we planned to tackle this ride televisually, and how we were going to fill two hours of live TV with, essentially, a two minute ride, I found a quiet spot to work on the script.

We’d decided to build the whole show up to the ride, and to have us all, the whole team, get on Oblivion for the last shot of the show. The Production Manager at the time approached me holding a bright orange beanie hat with the Oblivion logo front and centre. He said that the Alton Towers’ people wanted me to wear this hat on the ride, at the end of the programme. I was busy writing, so didn’t give it much thought and just said “yeah, OK”, and when it came time for the ride, I put it on, as requested.

Now would be a good time to explain, for those who’ve never been on it, how Oblivion works: Your seat is winched up high, over 100 feet above the ground, then you are pivoted forward, so you face downwards, looking at a big tunnel below you, then you are dropped. The almost freefall rollercoaster accelerates very quickly to around 70mph, hurtles into the tunnel, then banks up and to the left, as I recall from my one and only ride.

I loved rollercoasters, I still do, so I was properly excited and happy to be going on this ride. Zane and I did our job of building the excitement up to a crescendo at the tail of the show. When the time came we all rushed up excitedly to the embarkation point, cameras following us all the while, for our thrilling ride and the climax of the show. I’d put the promotional beanie hat on, and I was ready to roll.

We sat down. We were lashed down. Then it began. I was wild eyed with excitement and the smile I wore threatened to rupture my cheeks. Somewhere, somebody pushed a button and we were released over the Staffordshire countryside.

The couple of seconds of almost freefalling were breathtaking. Then, as we hurtled towards the massive hole in the ground and the coaster reached its terminal velocity, the inevitable happened: My hat blew off. No, not my hat, the hat they suggested I wear. Of course it did. I was face first at 70mph. Only superglue or a chin-strap would keep a hat on anyone at 70mph.

So, I did what anybody would do in the split second after realising their hat had blown off. Imagine it. I thought ‘fuck!’ and looked up, involuntarily. At that precise moment the rollercaster bottomed out and banked sharply. The G-force at this moment was stupendous as the carriage suddenly whipped upward, transferring all that energy to my neck.

It was all over so quickly. The show was still live and as we pulled into the terminus the cameras were still rolling for the goodbye link, a very quick one, which I did ably, still buzzing on the double adrenal rush of both live TV and a joyfully exciting rollercoaster ride.

As soon as the red light went off on the camera, I stood up and started to feel really strange. I remember Huse, one of the team, and Zane, saying: “Come on Eddy, let’s go again!” Their smiles were broad and their eyes were on fire.

Before we’d gone on the ride, I couldn’t wait, and was totally up for going as many times as I could get away with, but at that precise moment, as the boys asked me that normally rhetorical question “go again?”, I remember feeling puzzled, really bizarre, and distracted. I said “No…” in an oddly distant way, and let the crew hoop off back onto the ride.

I walked away, in a kind of trance, handed my microphone back to the sound guy and just walked away, all I knew was that I had to get home. That was my only thought. Later I would discover that at this point I was in shock, but at the time all I knew was I wanted the safety of home as soon as I could get there. I didn’t say goodbye to anyone, I just left, stunned, dazed and a little confused. I drove silently down the motorway, keeping my head and neck very still, and got home. In those days I would have smoked a spliff and then gone to bed.

When I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t move. I was, literally, paralysed. This was now becoming very scary. My legs worked fine but the whole top half of my body was petrified. I somehow got out of bed, into a cab and off to St Marys Paddington A&E, where they gave me an X-ray and, after a quick look, said my neck was not actually broken but that I had horrible whiplash. They gave me some drugs to make me feel better. They didn’t make me feel bette. So I ended up going to a private spine specialist to get a second opinion.

He took four X-rays, one from each quadrant, and examined them closely. One shot, taken from the side, revealed what had happened. The whiplash was so bad that the ‘fin’ at the rear of my spine, at the point they call C7, had smashed into the one next to it, and the tip had broken off. So my neck was broken, just not all the way through, thankfully. It took a long time to get functioning properly again, years even, and to this day, it’s still not really better, and never will be – that crunching sound when I move my neck comes and goes depending on how I use it.

I spent over £5,000 on physical therapy at the time to get back to a level of normality. It was a lot of money, and the specialist treating me suggested I sue MTV to get my money back, on the grounds that their Production Manager had been negligent in making me wear that hat without any thought for the consequences. So that’s what I did, with a recommended law firm, comically named Reid Minty.

As it happened the lawyers’ name was rather apt, as the whole situation became a little bit ridiculous. In this scenario, in America let’s say, I would have expected a six or even seven figure sum. Unfortunately for me, the way the British system works is loaded in favour of the corporate defendants, in this case MTV and Alton Towers, who teamed up to fight me. Because I had gone home straight away, and not reported my accident to anyone on site, they argued that I must have left Alton Towers fit and well and then broken my neck at home, or perhaps, they said, on the way home in an unreported car accident!

The fact that neither MTV nor Alton Towers had ever made me aware of any health and safety person, or office, to report my injuries too was irrelevant. It was astonishing, but my lawyer advised me that I could actually LOSE the case and should therefore settle out of court. I was gobsmacked at how hideously unfair it was looking.

There were two possible settlements. One of a more substantial sum, with my not being able to say anything to anyone about the case, or a payment of around £30,000 but with no gagging order. They took the second option. My legal costs were £25,000 and my medical costs were a little over £5000, so I came out with less than nothing in the end. Just this painful and expensive story, and the legal right to be able to tell it to whomever I choose.

In retrospect I should have gone to court, I think. We never made it there, but I’ve been to court six times since, facing the same scenario, ie where my opponents were lying to the judge and I just wanted the truth to come out. I’ve found all the courts and judges I’ve faced to be exactly how they should be, great at getting the truth out. And all six times I’ve won.

The last two times I even represented myself, because my solicitors had already taken all my savings with their fees. Which is possibly the conclusion to all this, and pretty much every story that involves the legal profession and having your day in court: Whatever you fight over, there is only one winner. The lawyer.

X eddy

Everyone loves a bit of rivalry. So much so that lines are often drawn on the most ridiculous and arbitrary of terms. In London, East hates West and North hates South. That’s just the way it is, and Londoners on any one side can give you endless reasons why those who live at the opposite end of the compass are terrible people who live in awful surroundings. So, in the spirit of promoting togetherness in the capital, Eddy invites you, wherever you’re from, to join him at his new club night in Brixton.

Are you North or are you South? Are you left bank or right bank? These geographical dividing points are so definite, so defining, and the tribal boundaries they mark run oh-so-deep.

I grew up a North West Londoner, first in Notting Hill, back when it was rough, in the late 60s and early 70s, then Hampstead, before it went really posh. After that, I’ve lived, over the years, in places as diverse as Fulham, Angel, W10, Brockley, Archway and Balham.

The first flat I bought was in Westbourne Park, where I spent a happy decade on one of the most infamous sprawls in West London, The Trellick Estate. Even under constant threat by car burning London-Irish hoodies, I mostly loved it. And, more to the point, in those days I felt mildly threatened every time I had to go to South London.

“Oh no, not Brixton Academy again…”

Whenever something happened south of the river that meant myself or any of my mates had to cross the water, eyes would roll. We would cross the Thames with fear and trepidation, our knuckles white around our steering wheels or handlebars.

My next move was disastrous. I moved into North London and bought a flat in Archway, to be closer to my girlfriend, two streets away, then we split up the week after I moved in.

To compound the awkwardness of living two streets away from your ex and driving past her flat every day, I was unlucky enough to move in above the most horrid neighbour you could ever imagine. Proper neighbour from hell stuff. Yet my fear of South London was still overriding, even though I started regularly hanging out, and going out, in and around Clapham and Brixton the following year.

So much so that when I finally did move south of the river, it wasn’t because the area had any lure, it was for one simple reason: schooling. My overriding concern by this time was Tone, my gorgeous eleven year old boy, of whom I have what used to be termed ‘custody’, after an acrimonious and buttock clenchingly expensive court battle. The school he went to in Archway, deemed “outstanding” by the government inspectors, was teaching bible parables as history, and brainwashing its kids into thinking that, for example, Adam and Eve were the first actual people on earth.

This sickened us both and I started looking and asking around about schools in other neighbourhoods. My quest lead me to Clapham Manor School and, to cut a long story short, Tone ended up there, and soon became happy, focussed and engaged. He had a blinding last year and a half of primary school, under an amazing staff.

During this time I’ve fallen in love with South London. All of the xenophobic feeling I had, instilled into me over the years by North and West Londoners, vaporised over a short time. My prejudices were all unfounded and my fears unwarranted. I personally found Brixton, Clapham and that area around Brockwell Park to be my favourite place to live of all the places I’ve ever lived.

I found the landscape greener, and I’ve found people to be so friendly that I’m now cursing all those people that misinformed me, and I regret the fear I had of the Sexy South. I feel like I’ve been missing out on some kind of secret for years. I’ve laughed inwardly that the prejudice and misinformation might actually originate from South Londoners who don’t want the secret to get out.

I’ve just come out of the most stressful period of my life, moving to a catchment area the size of a postage stamp to get Tone considered for a place at a really good secondary school. We’ve now settled, very happily, in Herne Hill/North Dulwich and are charmed by Brockwell Park, Dulwich Village, Sydenham Woods, and I really ‘get’ Brixton now.

I’m not getting all evangelical about it, this is just a personal thing. The Sexy South is, for me, by far the nicest place to live of all the neighbourhoods I’ve lived in. And over the years, that’s a lot of hoods. I’m not saying all you North Londoners should move South – many of my favourite places and people remain north of the River Thames – I’m just saying don’t believe the geo-haters that spread propaganda and misinformation about South London. Keep an open mind and don’t be afraid to come down and hang out – that alone changed my life for the better.

Which brings me neatly and happily to the main point of this piece: the return of Remix Night. It’s happening. But it’s not called Remix Night for this incarnation. I’ve been asked to be resident at an exciting new WEEKLY night in October, and it’s right on my new doorstep: The Fridge in Brixton.

You may have read that this legendary London venue is reopening its doors under the new name of Electric Brixton, after being lovingly restored to its Victorian glory, with a mission statement to fill the gap vacated by The Astoria.

Friday nights at Electric, from October, will be taken over by Get Loaded, the team who brought you The Gallery at Turnmills, and who went on to launch Get Loaded In The Park (on Clapham Common), Get Loaded In The Dark (that brilliant New Years Eve night at Brixton Academy) and The SW4 Weekender that saw Pendulum lock horns with Tiesto, also on Clapham Common. The point is, they have become something of a South London brand and, now I’m a South London resident, I’m doubly delighted to have been asked to do this. We’ll be entertaining some of our favourite DJs, producers and bands over the next few months, while we see if a night like this, at a venue that holds 1500, can work somewhere like Brixton.

We’re keeping ticket prices low, and pledging support to lots of new bands and upcoming DJ producers. We’ll be recording sets, for those that want that, and playing key tracks on The Remix on Xfm, as ‘live tracks’. I’ll even do my show live from there once in a while.

Logistically, it works out fine, as I always finish my show at 1am (the last hour is always pre-recorded) so I can play the last set from 1.30-ish til 3am each week.

I’ve had so many emails and tweets asking when the clubnight is starting again. So, I wanted to write about it here to let you all know. But I’ve put it in the context of this Naughty North vs Sexy South piece, because I don’t want anyone to feel as though they can’t come because it’s in Brixton. The Victoria line is bullet train quick and there are loads of nightbuses too. Plus it’s actually surprisingly central – it’s a stone’s throw to Elephant And Castle and therefore Shoreditch, my old clubnight stomping ground, is really a lot closer than I’d ever imagined.

So, there you go. New club night, every Friday. And I don’t ever want to hear any North Londoners saying: “Brixton… aaaaah no, I can’t be arsed to go to South London”. Brixton is a fantastic place, and I think the relaunched Fridge will really help cement the neighbourhood as one of London’s best, most vibrant and beloved entertainment hubs.

X eddy

Get Loaded at Electric Brixton (formerly The Fridge)

7 Oct (launch night): Shake Aletti (live), Dan Le Sac, Foamo, Eddy Temple-Morris
14 Oct: Retro/Grade (DJ set), Eddy Temple-Morris
21 Oct: Kry Wolf, Monkey Mafia (DJ set), Eddy Temple-Morris
28 Oct: Tropics (live), Disclosure (live), Duffstep (live AV show), Eddy Temple-Morris

Tickets: £6 before 11.30pm, £8 after 11.30pm, £5 NUS

This week, Eddy Temple-Morris asks when and why it became acceptable to mock people simply for the colour of their hair. Can we trace back through history to the exact point in time when the strawberry blonde, the auburn, the, well, ginger people of the world started to be picked on? And are we on the verge of a world where, as in Victorian England, to be flame-haired is considered the height of cool?

I emerged from the Charing Cross Road exit of Leicester Square station, as usual, at around 11.45am one Thursday, to record the last hour of my show, when I was effectively hit by a lightning bolt. I saw a girl so beautiful, so utterly bewitching that I was stopped in my tracks. My jaw slackened and, in an uncharacteristic way, I just stood and stared. My body froze and only my neck swivelled as she crossed the street and sashayed into China Town.

She was the most gorgeous specimen of human being I’ve laid eyes on for years, dressed in black, like a James Bond girl, with fairy tale length hair swishing in the light breeze, and the hair, was bright, flamboyant, unmistakably, undeniably, ginger.

Other people were gobsmacked, too. I could see other guys’ necks swivelling in her direction. But if it had been a man, I thought, it would only be a matter of time before somebody shouted “GIIINGERRRRRRR!” at him.

Having this astonishing looking woman cross my path illuminated the ridiculousness of the whole ‘ginger’ thing. My mind went back to school days, and a poor, unfortunate kid called Steve, who was ridiculed for the simple fact that his hair was red. I got to thinking, when did it become OK to take the piss out of ginger people in that way? If it were for skin colour it would be called racism. Was there a point in history, a line after which this became acceptable?

At the same school where poor Steve was ridiculed with names like ‘copper-knob’, I studied history of art. During my studies I was taught about the British Victorian art movement, The Pre-Raphaelites, and loved a lot of what I saw from that collective. They almost worshipped red hair, their paintings were romantic, and often featured willowy, pale and beautiful women much like the girl I’d seen that day, all of whom were depicted with ginger hair.

The Pre-Raphaelites connected with society at the time and their paintings became the height of trendiness. In other words, just over a hundred years ago, being ginger was considered not only very cool, but the absolute zenith of beauty.

So, given these Pre-Raphaelite women were the paragon of loveliness, I was interested to know what went wrong, when and why? I did a little digging around, and still haven’t really found a definitive answer, but discovered some interesting things along the way.

Some historians trace ginger bashing to Roman times, and the Empire’s loathing of the people north of Hadrian’s Wall. Others find that hard to swallow and instead trace the gingerism, probably more plausibly, to the beginnings of Jacobite England, when (ironically the most famous ginger) monarch Liz The First died childless, making James VI of Scotland the King of England. No surprise, some of the English resented this unfortunately wispy haired ginger man from north of the border.

Still, I very much doubt that a flame-haired man, or woman, walking down an average high street would have incurred the now familiar sing-song taunt of ‘GINNNGE-ER-RRRRRR!’ from a random passer by on an ox-drawn cart.

Hundreds of years later, and the First World War, ‘Ginger’ was a totally innocent name for some men. The interesting thing was the absence of malice at this point. It was just a name, like ‘Chalkie’ for somebody who’s surname was White or ‘Lofty’ for someone tall.

The point at which malice entered the equation, according to a swift poll I conducted on Facebook, was the mid 1970s. That was the earliest anybody I know could remember that it was acceptable to take the piss, in a more cruel way, out of people with red hair.

The current state of play doesn’t look good for gingers, from Catherine Tate’s hilarious Russett Lodge sketch, to South Park’s typically unashamed announcement that ginger people have no soul, which gave rise to one of the internet’s funniest over-reactions, to more recent and twisted MIA video. And all this even though some of the coolest people in the world are ginger!

I wonder if Josh Homme, from Queen’s Of The Stone Age has ever been shouted at in the street? Or Damian Lewis, the blisteringly cool British actor most famous for his brilliantly authentic portrayal of an American platoon commander in ‘Band Of Brothers’. I talked to ginger friends and colleagues about it. Interestingly, many of them, including Photek, one of the coolest producers to ever push a fader, suggested the piss-taking had made them stronger, more resilient, or even more rebellious.

History proves these things to be cyclical, so if you’re a ginger-hater, careful, because the wheel could be close to turning full circle.

As the Labour Party rebranded ‘New Labour’ in the 90s, I can see the dawning of a ‘New Ginger’ movement, where people’s perceptions will shift and the possession of red hair will no longer be a handicap but a benefit. In fact, the backlash has already begun, thanks to Tim Minchin.

But I think there’s an even better candidate for the figurehead of such a movement. Someone younger, who can lead simply by being effortlessly cool. That person is on X-posure with John Kennedy tonight on Xfm from 10pm. His name is Ed Sheeran, and he’s been given a day pass from Russet Lodge to go through his debut album track-by-track with my colleague.

Joking aside, I love everything this man has done so far. And you can find out why I think his sound is so exciting by tuning into 104.9FM in London, 97.7FM in Manchester, Sky channel 113, or by logging on to Xfm.co.uk tonight.

X eddy

I do get stopped by people quite regularly. Sometimes in the street, or mostly at gigs, in clubs, or at festivals. It’s always positive, and I always appreciate people reaching out and letting me know how they feel about me or my show (or even this column – I was massively chuffed to be enthusiastically accosted in Leicester Square by a charming man who ignored all the usual strings to my bow and bigged me up for ‘Eddy Says’ – a first for me).

Amongst the random things I’m told on these occasions, the thing that crops up the most, and I’m utterly delighted every time I hear this, is: “You opened my eyes to dance music” or “I didn’t think I liked dance music til I listened to your show” or “I thought I was a rocker, now I’m a rocking raver!”

You get the picture. I never get bored of hearing this, and there’s something else I keep hearing, not as much as the above, but I do hear it frequently, and I think the two things are definitely linked:

“Big beat turned me on to dance music”.

I hear it again and again, and I find it fascinating. While helping persuade Jon Carter to reform Monkey Mafia, I made a few comments about it on Twitter, and had a deluge of big beat love from so many people, including some real heavy-hitters. The likes of Alex Metric, Hervé, Infadels, DJ Nerm, Pathaan, Tomb Crew and lots more all professed a love for the ‘breezeblock beats’, as we used to call them in the roaring 90s, with a doff of the cap to Pete Tong, who coined that phrase.
I remember being a fresh faced 20-something at Radio 1, loving my rock music and being suspicious of house music in general. In those days I didn’t really see drum n bass as coming under the umbrella phrase ‘dance music’ – it rocked so much that I didn’t consider it part of what was defined as ‘dance music’ back then. At that time, ‘dance’ was largely inhabited, both at the cutting edge, in journalism and in its consumption, by purists. Almost all of these people were part of, or had witnessed first hand, the rave explosion of the late 80s and 90s, and their tastes were locked into that four to the floor kick-drum pattern.

I’d not long arrived back on terra firma after losing my mind at the Manumission closing party, when the previously mentioned Andy Mckay – the man in charge of the back room at the king of all Ibiza clubs – called a meeting to plan what was happening in Manumission’s ‘Music Box’ the following season.

My manager, my promoter and I met up with Andy, and he told us how he loved what I’d done in the back room at that year’s closing party, and what we were doing with Remix Night back in London, getting indie-dance crossover acts to play live and DJ. He wanted to do more and needed a name for it. Straight away I suggested Ibiza Rocks. “Dance Rocks” was the strapline of my Xfm show and the name of my compilation album, and it just seemed like the perfect name for this.

“You can own the island”, I said.

“Hmmm”, came Andy’s reply. “I’m not sure, I have a brand to protect. I think perhaps it should be called ‘Manumission Rocks’”.

“No no no”, I insisted. “Like it or not, Manumission, as a brand, is on the wane with the genre it’s attached to. Here you have a chance to create a new brand to take forwards, that could grow wings and fly on its own!”

“Still not sure”, he said. “Let me have a think about it”.

My manager and promoter both agreed ‘Ibiza Rocks’ as a name was a great idea and said so at that initial meeting. And the next time we met, Andy too said it had grown on him, and he even presented us with some logos he’d had knocked up. Guitars in the shape of the island, that kind of thing. The brilliant plectrum logo still used today came a bit later.

It was agreed that I would ‘host’ the first year, working in tandem with Andy’s office in booking bands and DJs. I’d try to get mates rates to help get things going, and together we’d make this the best year ever in the back room of the greatest club in the world, a club within a club, a brand within a brand.

So, I got on the phone to my mates. There were a few key people I wanted to get involved. Adam Freeland was first on the list, because he’d had a terrible time when he’d played Manumission once before, years previously. Two tunes into his set, the Spanish owner of Privilege, the club where Manumission took place (and not Mike or Claire from Manumission, I must stress) came barrelling up to the booth and exclaimed: “THIS IS NOT HOUSE MUSIC!” To emphasise his point, he jabbed his finger towards the twelve-inch on the turntable as if it was a freshly laid dog turd.

He took the needle off the record and, in front of the stunned crowd and even more stunned superstar DJ, ushered Adam away from the booth, to be replaced by a Spanish resident quick-smart. Adam had never returned to Ibiza. I’m not surprised. He was made to feel as welcome as a pork pie at a bar mitzvah.

Similarly, I wanted Barry Ashworth on board. He had played Ibiza regularly, way back at the start of the island’s notoriety, when things were more ‘Balearic’ and DJs were playing more random good music, with less emphasis on strict 4/4 house.

And, of course, I wanted to involve Zane Lowe as well. I can recall Andy’s eyes lighting up when I mentioned he was my friend and I could hook them up.

So I booked all three of them, along with other friends, like The Freestylers with MC Sirreal, and The Breakfastaz, all Remix Show stalwarts at the time. Meanwhile the Manumission office booked Babyshambles to play the launch party, and some other Remix-friendly acts like Hard Fi and Tom Vek. Summer approached and we were ready to go. All good.

Except, on opening night poor Andy had the look of a man asked to lick his own elbows.

“Eddy”, he gasped. “It’s Pete Doherty… he’s asked for crack and smack ON HIS RIDER! I don’t know what to do, he’s refuses to play unless we come up with… with this stuff”. He scratched his head. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin looking!”

Whether or not he personally succeeded in that hunt I never found out, but someone certainly managed to get hold of the two drugs not generally associated with Ibiza’s party vibe. Later that evening, there was Pete Doherty sucking on a miniature brandy bottle filled with wire wool, the foul, burnt plasticky clouds of crack smoke all around him and his vile cronies. Pete must have learned, presumably the hard way, that it was better not to be in possession of Class A controlled substances and to instead have them stashed with his entourage. Consequently he was being spoon fed lumps of crack by one of his mates.

It was a loathsome scene and it depressed me so much I had to leave. I was the first person, ever, to interview Pete Doherty. The distance between that bright eyed, bushy tailed, sparklingly intelligent teenager and this hollow, washed out shadow of his former self was just too much for me to bear. I ended up a single dad with custody of my son because his mum got into that stuff, the smell of crack just depresses me and makes me feel sick.

The gig was awful. Doherty couldn’t remember his own lyrics, and kept tripping up on his own microphone cable. There was, however, still a palpable feeling of excitement, of the birth of something new and exciting, as well as a turning point in the cultural history of this island – an ‘I was there moment’, as I like to call them.

Conversely, it felt like Pete Doherty was at rock bottom of a downward spiral, and this could be the last gig he played before he was found slumped on a hotel floor, his heart finally having an ‘I’ve had enough of this’ moment. A thousand paparazzi and gutter journalists were presumably delighted that this was not to be, giving them something to snap and write a stream of bollocks about ever since.

But, all that said, that something infamous did kick off a first Ibiza Rocks season full of much happier memories.

For starters, the time when somebody fooled Adam Freeland into eating a space cake. The poor boy lost the plot halfway through his set and I had to finish it for him. He actually got lost in the DJ booth, a space the size of a sofa! At this stage of my life I’d given everything up, even coffee, and my drug of choice to get me through to 9am was a single vodka and Coca-Cola. The enormous hit of caffeine right there would power me through, wide eyed, until breakfast time and even the aftershow on the terrace at Space.

When Barry Ashworth returned, predictably, he ended up staying awake for three days. I kept bumping into him after I’d slept another night, and he’d still be going hard at it with James Lavelle or another of the other ‘big boys’. Baz was in his element and clearly overjoyed to be back in Ibiza. Mid-way through our one-on-one set in the Music Box, I was hunched over my bag, flicking through my vinyl (nice historical yardstick there, I was still using vinyl, but haven’t done for years now) looking for the next tune, when I felt a god awful whack on my back. It gave me a massive shock, knocking the wind out of me. It was Barry. His body had finally given up, mid tune, and he had simply passed out. I finished alone, with a few savvy people in the crowd signalling: “Where’s Barry?”

There was something about that place that turned even the most normally clean living, sensible DJs into monsters with rolling eyes, puking backstage before, during or after their sets. I have some very funny images scorched into my memory from that season. You’d be surprised who fell from grace after being there for a few hours! I should possibly be in the Guinness Book Of Records as the first ever resident of Manumission who got through an entire season without taking any Class A drugs. Even if I wanted to, I was being drug tested in a hideous court room custody battle at that time, and the reason I have custody of Tone is the simple fact that both my annual drugs tests during that period were clean and normal.

All in all, that first season had been a great success, and Ibiza Rocks had arrived. Sadly, and this has happened before, and will happen again, my generosity proved to be my downfall. I noticed the way Andy’s eyes went ‘kerching’ when I first introduced him to Zane. If nothing else, Andy knows which side his bread is buttered, and when it launched for year two, the website had changed from “Ibiza Rocks hosted by Eddy Temple-Morris” to “hosted by Zane Lowe”. I enquired why and it was awkwardly changed to “Zane Lowe and Eddy Temple-Morris”, but I was only booked for two or three shows that year. One of the insiders told me it was Zane’s management (not my biggest fans, shall we say) and Radio 1 who said they wanted Zane in and me out. Of course, Andy knew who was more valuable to him.

No call came at all the next year, so I ended up doing my own night, Dance Rocks, at Es Paradis. My manager showed me a vile email she got from Andy, along the lines of “You can’t use the name ‘Dance Rocks’ – I own the word ‘rocks’ on Ibiza”. My manager reminded him that it was me who’d given him the name in the first place, something I’d done with nothing but love and no strings attached. This possibly made him nervous, as the night was now heavily sponsored and he was in bed with Radio 1; certainly a story went round that he, or someone at NME, had come up with the name. This was odd, as there were two witnesses to my giving it to him, and like I said, I had no agenda. I was at the time totally in love with Manumission and the island of Ibiza, a love affair that has never stopped.

It’s such a massive shame my personal involvement ended so sourly, but I’m glad Ibiza Rocks worked, and that it went from strength to strength, and even more so that Doorly ended up as a resident: he’s one of my favourite DJs and a lovely man. After telling Andy he would “own the island” and encouraging him to start his own brand, I remember showing him pirated Ibiza Rocks t-shirts from San Antonio market. People were already adorning themselves, voluntarily, with his new brand.

So, there you have it, my friends: the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the birth of Ibiza Rocks, my part in it, and the silly reason why I’m never asked to play there any more. It all seems unbelievable looking back, and I know there will be people saying “if you’re nice, you’ll always get fucked over”, but I disagree. I think it’s entirely possible to get through this business with your head held high and with your sleep patterns largely uninterrupted. It’d just be nice if, occasionally, people were less suspicious and just see a person and what they do for what it is.

In the words of my favourite lyricist, Scroobius Pip: “Some people are just nice”.

X eddy

Continuing where we left off last week, I was really excited and more than a bit honoured to be asked to play in the back room of the greatest club night on Earth, as Manumission undoubtedly was.

I’d never even been to Ibiza before that summer. For me and my sort, the so called White Isle was the home of straight up house music and very little else, and as a well documented loather of that style of music, and a lover of The Prodigy, drum n bass, breakbeats and leftfield dance tracks, I had, unsurprisingly, never been asked to play there.

After a wide-eyed journey from the airport to Privilege, where Manumission took place at the time, slack-jawed at all those massive billboards advertising nights with huge DJs (the best one was blank, but for the words “Reserved for Sander Kleinenberg’s ego”, which I thought was borderline self-deprecatory genius), we went for a very late dinner and then on to the club, where the closing party was well underway. The place was rammed. Having said that, Privilege was so vast that even with 10,000 people in there, it was easier than most clubs to get around.

I was shown to the DJ booth in the Coco Loco room and looked down over the heaving crowd. I was slightly nervous. I didn’t want to clear the floor with my first tune. So I thought I’d play relatively safe at the top: I recall the first record I dropped was Tiefschwarz’s remix of Spektrum’s ‘Kinda New’.

It worked, and now I could start to push them a bit. Adam Freeland’s mixes of Nirvana and White Stripes rolled out, that old bootleg mix ‘Skanktuary’, which samples ‘She Sells Sanctuary’ by The Cult. I noticed that during these unofficial remixes, whenever the mix went back to the original sample, the crowd reacted euphorically, hundreds of hands shot roofwards and the room lit up with the reflected light from a thousand smiles. So I mixed in The Cult’s original and the room went bananas.

Halfway through the set, one of the Manumission PRs came over and asked how I was, and if I needed some drinks.

“I’m shattered but very happy, thank you”, I said. “I’ve been up since seven o’clock yesterday morning”. It was now nearly 6am the next day.

The PR ricocheted off somewhere and bounced back a few minutes later with a bottle of vodka, some mixers, and a crumpled up Rizla paper, which he placed on the record deck with a knowing smirk, adding: “This’ll sort you out”.

I’ve booked many a DJ whose first question on arrival is “do you have any drugs?” I’m bound to add that I’ve never, ever asked for drugs from a promoter. It just gives you a bad rep. But that night felt extraordinary. I felt like a famous gladiator in the last years of the Roman Empire, and you know what they say: “When in Rome…”

I waited until my set was over and snorted up the probably quite generous contents of that crumpled cigarette paper, and exited the booth to watch Manumission’s mesmerising 6am main show. As The Greatest Show On Earth unfolded before my eyes, I sensed something was not right. A wave of panic hit me and my heart started racing upwards in tempo. Like the end of the first Indiana Jones film, when the German soldiers watch the Ark Of The Covenant being opened, it starts off as the most beautiful thing they have ever seen, then like the flick of a switch, turns to pure horror. My night suddenly turned into unprecedented despair. Oh my god, I thought, I’m going to die in Manumission. My son’s face flashed before me and I had images of newspaper cuttings, little paragraphs at the bottom corner of inner pages, that read, ‘Radio DJ found dead in superclub’.

I went back to the now empty back room DJ booth and panicked, sweating like a galley slave. I rinsed out my nostrils and drank water, but that was just shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. I was in trouble. A second wave of panic hit me as the name of Manumission’s main press guy flashed up on my vibrating phone. I was supposed to be interviewing the club’s main resident DJ. The full horror of my position engulfed me. The embarrassment of the situation simply added another layer of panic to my already maxed-out nervous system. Like a spitfire pilot with a bullet riddled cylinder block and all dials in the red, needles bending against the stopping pin, I went into a tailspin. I spent the next hour or so avoiding the PR’s increasingly frequent calls, and playing a game of cat and mouse in this enormous venue.

I ended up backstage, losing myself in the area where all the dancers were milling about. Some of the most beautiful buttocks I will ever lay eyes on jiggled past me at eye level as I sat on some steps, oblivious, with my head in my hands. I even stuck my head in the dancer’s shower, to cool it down. Grease-painted faces looked at me as they sashayed past, all too busy to give me any more than a cursory glance. They must have seen this time and time again – another week, another casualty, business as usual.

After what was probably about an hour of cat and mouse, I decided to answer the phone this time and lay the PR’s mind to rest. I asked them to meet me outside, where I sat down in the broad daylight and came clean.

The PR was very understanding and explained that the drugs were much stronger here, and that they’d assumed I’d know to take less than normal. They had forgotten I was an Ibiza rookie, and didn’t know me well enough to know how green around the gills I was with a drug that many DJs treat with the same normality as a cup of tea.

I’ve never been more than a once-in-a-blue-moon partaker of Class A drugs and consequently my resistance is much less than more frequent users. A lightweight. Panda blood not tiger blood, as I wrote here a while back. That was the last line of coke I ever took. And just writing this made my heart beat a lot faster and a slight echo of that panic reverberate around my head. As I sat outside that morning in Ibiza, listening to the muffled beats from inside the club, my body seemed to absorb and draw strength from the increasing sunrays, like a knackered Superman, my strength returned and I started to feel like a more normal, albeit wobbly, version of myself.

I pulled my shit together and headed backstage with the PR. Not long after, with the interview in the can and nobody any the wiser, I looked back at the day and night with a mixture of shame and triumph. But the positive side still stood out stronger.

I’d dropped rock and drum n bass on a crowd that had never heard it in that space, and it worked. The first Pendulum tune ever to be dropped in Ibiza made those massive speakers wobble like they had never wobbled before, and half of that crowd almost exploded with gratitude. Nirvana, Blur, Franz Ferdinand, Led Zep had all been thrown out in the mix, and I’d had one of the best sets of my life. The joy on the face of that crowd had not gone unnoticed by the Manumission bigwigs. There was a definite sense that a spark had been struck in a massive tinderbox of very dry kindling.

Next time: Rock arrives at the island of house. The return of Adam Freeland to the club that had previously thrown him off the decks after two tunes. Barry Ashworth celebrates his return to The White Isle by staying awake for three days straight. And Pete Doherty wants some smack to go with his crack. The incredible roller-coaster of how Ibiza Rocks started continues with its first year in existence.

X eddy

My phone lit up. It was my pal Jamie, who worked at Warner Music promotions. “Eddy”, he said, sounding quite excited, “I want to take you to Ibiza for one night, we’re going to Manumission!” It turned out Goldie Lookin Chain had been booked to play the Music Box (one of two ‘back rooms’ at Manumission). Jamie wanted to say thank you for all the support I’d given GLC. “I’m booking us each a room at Pikes, it’s a great little boutique hotel where they shot ‘Club Tropicana’ for Wham!”

I recalled, alongside the whiteness and the tightness of all the Speedos in that video, a charming hacienda style villa that served as location for one of the 1980s most sunkissed and mullet-tastic video moments, and accepted Jamie’s kind invitation.

Most of all though, I wanted to go to Manumission. I’d read about it, seen pictures, heard the stories of DJs being paid in drugs or girls, passing out mid set and having the likes of Jon Carter superglue dildos to their foreheads. This was a place of true legend, and I wanted to see it with my own eyes. Hopefully without feeling the taught, dry pull of rapidly drying adhesive on my own forehead.

At that time Manumission was located at Privilege, “the biggest club in the world”. More like an airport terminal in size, this enormous hanger easily played host to 10,000 people, but it was only Manumission who could regularly fill it.

When we arrived, I thought I’d walked through a time portal to the last days of the Roman Empire, to one of Caligula’s notorious parties. Beautiful, lithe dancers, male and female, with elaborate and freakish animal costumes, were peppered through the wide-eyed crowd. Gymnasts and acrobats arced gracefully, way above our heads, suspended from the rafters. They sliced through the air, above the outstretched arms of thousands upon thousands of Brits, Italians, French, Americans, Canadians, all agog at this astonishing spectacle. This was, without a doubt, the eighth wonder of the modern world.

The DJ booth in the main room was circular and suspended, as if by magic, above a swimming pool. It had a whiff of the Bond villain about it. The booth looked out onto a multi-level area, cleverly zoned so that, when it was busy, it put you in eye contact with around 8000 people in front of you. There were two ‘back rooms’, each the size of a normal nightclub, one or two thousand capacity each. The Coco Loco was a more intimate party room, decorated more like a bonkers bar, and the Music Box, as its name suggests, was an oblong gig space, which acted as a sort of thoroughfare between the Coco Loco and the main room.

This was where they had started booking the odd band to do a PA or even a live performance. The lovely Mike McKay and Claire Davies, the famous faces of Manumission, took care of the main room and the awesome spectacle. Mike’s little brother, Andy McKay, was in charge of this back room, and was adopting a much more progressive music policy, much like I’d been doing at Remix Night for years.

GLC, en mass, did their hilarious set to the delight of most Brits and the bewilderment of most others, then Ivan Smaaghe from Black Strobe took to the decks, obligatory cigarette between his lips, eyes black as a panda’s, looking like a heroin addict but with that innate sense of garlic coolness. He played for what seemed like an age, and the crowd just politely jiggled and bobbled about, none of us knowing what on earth the tunes were.

I moaned about it being “too cool”. Nobody had their hands in the air, people were just jostling around the floor, happy, but not euphoric. I audibly remarked that if I was up there, playing tunes that people know, that the crowd would be reacting very differently, and what a shame it was that the atmosphere in the room was so calm and reserved. It felt like a tinderbox, waiting for a spark. Ivan, for all his undeniably sexy, tres-cool Frenchness, was not igniting the room in the same way as the resident was smashing the main room with Jacques Lu Conte’s mix of The Killers’ ‘Mr Brightside’.

At around 5.50am, the crowd in the Music Box started to thin out. I thought this was odd, as this is prime time on Ibiza, people tend to arrive at 3 or 4am. The reason for the crowds decimation became apparent in the main room. It was time for the six o’clock performance of the twice nightly routine, where every dancer, gymnast and acrobat sashayed into a well choreographed spectacle of truly biblical proportions.

Mike and Claire put their hearts and souls into that night, they poured so much love and money into it, in the same spirit as The Secret Garden Party. Clearly they could have made much more money, by toning down the theatrics and having fewer people retained, but it was the theatre and the sheer numbers of beautiful people on, around and above the stage that made the experience so vivid.

When I got back to London, I raved about the experience on the Xfm show, and within days somebody I know forwarded me an interview that Andy McKay had given an Ibizan magazine or radio station. The interviewer was prying as to whom they were booking for the next season, was it Fatboy Slim? Andy said he’d “be more interested in getting Eddy Temple-Morris from Xfm, because that would send a signal that the island was changing and opening up to a whole new crowd”.

I sent the interview to my agent and within hours I’d been booked to play the closing party for that season, the very next week. My love affair with the island of Ibiza was just beginning.

Next time: Fear and loathing on the White Isle, the start of Ibiza Rocks and end of Manumission at Privilege – the story continues…

X eddy

So, carrying on where we left off last week, I got Zane Lowe his first job in UK media and things were going swimmingly. Unfortunately, I got a new boss not long afterwards, who was one of the biggest bell-ends I’ve ever worked with. We’ll call him Herbert.

He was one of the MTV Networks Europe people, whom I’d locked horns with months earlier while still working at MTV News, when Princess Diana died and he wanted us to cover the funeral. I pointed out that on the day she died, MTV was the only channel not hysterically covering the story. That day I watched MTV more than I’d ever watched the channel, just to get away from the collective madness precipitated by Diana’s untimely death.

He insisted we had to do it, and work unpaid on a Saturday. Money wasn’t the issue for me. As the only person on the team from Wales, I said: “She’s not MY princess, fuck this, we should be providing an alternative to the funeral! We should be programming music for people to get AWAY from the collective lunacy surrounding this shockingly over-rated and over scrutinised Sloane Ranger”.

We became enemies there and then.

Sometime later I heard other things that didn’t change my mind about him. In a meeting with Xfm bosses back in the day, this guy proudly talked about discovering Zane when he was at MTV. The Xfm bosses stopped him and said: “That’s odd. We didn’t think you were working at MTV UK when Eddy Temple-Morris got Zane hired…”

Cue uncomfortable silence.

So, this horrid little man joined MTV UK with Zane already in situ, and his first big idea was the beginning of the end for me. He saw the massive viewing figures we’d managed to get in a graveyard slot and his eyes seemed to go ‘ker-ching’. He wanted to move the show to the biggest studio, stick it in a prime-time slot, and cash in. I told him he would ruin the show. That there was no need to move it.

The whole charm of ‘Up For It’ was its immediacy, one camera that follows the ball. The unique set up meant it was spectacularly off the cuff. It was its spontaneity that made it so special. We did funny little acoustic sessions and made the best use of the space.

We even had a boyband competition in there – I put five 90s boybands through mental and physical tests in this cupboard-sized space. We had to be resourceful. With not enough room to swing a gerbil, I just took a brass rubbing of the abdominal muscles of whomever each band nominated as their ‘physical’ representative.

I put another through an intelligence test, which was, in itself, a glorious deconstruction of showbiz and how some people in it were thicker than pigshit.

“What’s the capital of Wales?”

“Ummm… Scotland?”

Grand Royal Magazine (the Beastie Boys mag) had recently come out and first coined the phrase ‘mullet’ in reference to hair. It made me laugh so much that I went on a mission to popularise the word with the ‘Wall Of Mullets’ feature in that little studio. People from all over the UK, Ireland and New Zealand, deluged me with pictures of their relatives with daft hair. It was childish, stupid, inane, but hilariously so, and struck a massive chord with a staggering number of children. Job done, as ordered.

Everyone from LL Cool J to The Super Furry Animals came on the show, with the Daf and Gruff, from one of my favourite bands in the world, famously telling me to go finger my grandmother at around 3pm on a children’s channel. It was a show that sailed close to the wind, but it was love it or hate it – and it was those things in equal measure – it worked in that space and should have stayed in that space.

Herbert didn’t listen. Now I’d have a director, he said, a vision mixer, full gallery, multi cameras. I’d have to have a script prepared the day before, and let the director know what I’d say, when I’d say it, and where I’d be standing when I said it, seven hours before transmission. Everything that was good about the show was hollowed out. The set. The ad libbing. The ricketty crapness that made it so special, so different from everything else around, was the blueprint for shows like ‘Gonzo’.

The death of ‘Up For It’ was relatively slow, it took two series. They wanted to do another but, and they HATED this, I asked for it to be stopped.

“You can’t stop an MTV series”, whined Herbert. “You’re a presenter, presenters don’t stop a series, we do!”

At the time I could feel Zane desperate to do his own thing, itching to get out of my shadow, and quite rightly too, he was far too good to be anyone’s sidekick, and I wanted him to spread his wings and fly. I loved the guy and still do.

“Read my lips”, I told Herbert and the assembled MTV brass. “This is the last series, I am not doing another. Give Zane his own show and I’ll come up with another idea”.

And with that, ‘Up For It’ gave up its ghost, and Zane went on to do ‘Brand:New’, and then joined Xfm to present the early evening show, which was brilliant. And you probably know the rest of the Zane story.

But back to me. One of Herbert’s cronies in the building was a director who was as ambitious as he was mediocre. We had a really important meeting scheduled one day. He didn’t show up. Let’s call him Alfonse.

“Where’s Alfonse?” I asked the guy who sat next to him.

“He’s gone to meet his dealer” was the reply.

I’d always despised the cocaine culture that was so prevalent at MTV in the late 90s. This man was the kind of director always more concerned with where his next gram came from than the job in hand. I fired off an angry and expletive email, demanding to know where he was.

He replied the next day with this: “I was in the building, I’m sorry our paths did not cross. Don’t swear on email, it’s against company policy”.

A red mist descended over my eyes at that point. The one thing that really gets me is lying. My next email began thus, verbatim: “Fuck company policy and fuck you, you lying cokehead, you were never in the building…”

Rather than manning or fessing up, the director took the email to Viacom Human Recources (Viacom own MTV) and demanded the letter and law of company policy. Sending an expletive-filled email to a colleague was a sackable offence, so I was called in by the same guy who I’d pleaded to previously to hire Zane and was told that I was “with great regret, being suspended indefinitely”.

Interestingly, he said that the content of my email was entirely correct – Alfonse was clearly a liar, and a cokehead – but the rules were the rules, and he had used them to his advantage, and my boss’s boss’s “hands were tied”.

I went straight to Human Resources, gave them my pass and my dongle, with the words “Here’s my badge and my gun” (come on, how often do you get that opportunity?), and followed the exit sign for the final time, with all the nice people in the building close to tears and all the MTV cocaine mafia punching the air with delight.

It turned out to be a blessing in disguise, not least because by that point I’d worked out that the lovely Lindsay, who did my make up before I went on air, was being paid £120 per edition, while I was being paid £90 to conceive, co-produce, write and present the show.

They had really got their money’s worth out of me, but what I got was an avalanche of requests to DJ – at clubs, gigs, festivals – and so my odyssey as a working DJ and remixer began. And Xfm was not far away, and there Zipper would wonderfully return my initial favour by paving my way at X.

Looking back on the decade after the MTV episode, I really cannot complain, as Calvin Harris pointed out in a tweet to me the other day: “Stop your crying, we have the best job in the world!”

He’s absolutely spot on.

X eddy

I still get emails every week from ecstatic fans of this little show I used to do on MTV UK. People stumble onto me on Facebook and Twitter, remember the happy days of their youth, belting home from school early to watch me in the afternoon, and they get in touch, always positively. I’m delighted and amazed to say. One of the resulting questions I’m asked more than any other is “Why did you stop doing ‘Up For It’/MTV?”. It’s too long story for a tweet, so here’s the full scoop.

When I arrived at MTV, fresh faced and dough eyed, from Radio 1 – as I wrote about recently, in a kind of prequel to this piece – I was put into MTV News, because they hadn’t figured out what to do with me. Edith Bowman and I were the talking heads and there were a handful of people assembling ‘news’.

It was a broadcasting joke. The MTV News team, at that time, consisted of two or three nice but hapless journos who didn’t know or care a jot about anything musical. They had teletext on the screen and a little radio tuned into Radio 1. THAT, my friends, was the sum total of their UK news gathering operation. They waited, like seagulls for a fishing boat, on the nightly feed from MTV USA, where they might actually glean a story or two that hadn’t been in the UK public domain already.

While I was there, MTV UK News broke two stories. Just two. I got them both, through random connections: We broke Charlotte Hatherley joining Ash because I knew their manager, and The KLF daubing “What the fuck is going on?” in massive letters on the Southbank, because one of their crew called me while they were doing it.

Months later, when my soul was all but sucked out by that pitiful news studio lozenge, I thankfully got a call from the boss to say she had a two hour slot in the afternoon, 2pm-4pm, which was branded as ‘Up For It’ – a really 90s thing, full of Britpop and logos that looked like The Jam’s or Oasis’s. She said I had to come up with an idea for a “radio show on the telly, to get kids watching” – that’s what they wanted more than anything – children! – and she had zero budget to do this. I’d get 500 quid for a set, no studio (that cost money), no director, no expensive cameras, no production of any sort. When she said zero, she meant it.

So, I put my head together with Jim Parsons, Head Of Production at the time, a veritable production genius and one of the best people I’ve ever worked with. He suggested we use ‘the flat’ at MTV, a little bedsit in the bowels of the building from its TV-AM days, where important breakfast telly presenters used to stay the night if they needed to be there really early. It’s the room where, it is widely reputed, Ulrika-ka-ka-ka Jonson got her first showbiz break.

We used a staff camera person with a mini DV camera, just one, and had the pipes going from the camera straight to the transmission suite (TX), thereby cutting out the need for a gallery, director, vision mixer, any of the usual shit. I just gave a subtle signal and the guys in TX would roll in the next video. I just had to give them a loose bullet point script and running order by lunchtime.

I organised the set, and took the 500 squid to The Flying Duck Company in Greenwich, and spent it on one of those cheesy 1970s bars (it looked like a drum kit), plus a few bits to hang on the walls, a kitsch guitar, flying ducks, gold phone, and map of the UK and Eire.

The production/jingles I did myself with my friend Andrew Paresi, who I’d met at Radio 1, when he was Kevin Greening’s gag man (he later became Major Holdups on the Zoe Ball Breakfast Show).

Andrew used to drum for Morrissey and David Bowie, and looked hilarious too, so I filmed him with his top off, drumming and pulling stupid faces and shouting the names of features. Then I painted names of other features on big cards and filmed random school-kids, tramps, alcoholics and passers by in Camden, holding the cards and saying the feature names.

Production done, for nothing. Somewhere, some company will have charged some telly station thousands to do pretty much exactly the same thing.

When ‘Up For It’ went on air, it was the only show that was truly live. All the others were pre-recorded or had a substantial delay between filming and transmission. This gave me a unique opportunity to react quickly. I could take the piss out of ad breaks, promos, anything, and do it right there and then. One camera just followed me around this tiny little room. “Just follow the ball”, I remember somebody saying at the time. I like that. Go where the ball goes.

At first, that 2pm-4pm slot on MTV UK rated zero. According to the official figures, so few people watched MTV at that time of the afternoon, that it didn’t even register a viewership.

Zero budget, zero viewers.

But within a few months ‘Up For It’ was cropping up in MTV’s ten most watched programmes. Soon afterwards, it reached the top. It regularly went toe to toe with huge shows that had massive resources thrown at them, it was a raging success on every level. People were talking about it. Half hated it, and thought it was the worst thing on telly ever, but the other half loved it, and almost worshipped it.

That was the point at which I learned the valuable lesson that for every person who loves you, there is somebody who hates you.

The show hit its peak when Melody Maker, the much missed old rival to NME, ran a cover piece called ‘Reasons Why Britain Is Great in 1998′. Reason number two was “Up For It Live on MTV”.

This was balanced out by Select magazine, who named me “the most annoying man on British television”. For a few years afterwards I ended the list of great quotes from famous people on my CV with “The most…* (Select Magazine)”, then in small print at the bottom, I put “*…annoying man on television”.

I had, almost overnight, become a flesh and blood version of Marmite.

Almost a year later and I hadn’t taken a holiday, because “nobody there could do this show while I was away”, I was told. They confirmed I had to find a new presenter to fill in for me, somebody who could do a show like this, and do it for next to nothing (for that reason they couldn’t ask Richard Blackwood or any of the other comedians working elsewhere on MTV, who were all paid properly while I was on a producer’s contract).

That’s when my boss Christine and I looked at a pile of VHS cassettes that had come her way, full of young, eager, TV hopefuls. We began to make our way through the tapes. There were some buttock clenchingly shit ones, and one quite funny scottish guy who I remember saying: “Radiohead, or for our Scottish viewers RADIOHEED”.

In amongst this pile was a demo by a young Kiwi, who’d interviewed some real heavyweights in New Zealand. He stood head and shoulders above all the others. His tape blew both of us away. At the time he worked in a record shop in Notting Hill. His name was Alexander Zane Lowe.

“He’s the guy!” I said, upon watching his demo. “We HAVE to hire him”.

“Good luck with that”, said Christine, knowing that Mikkiel, our automaton boss, would not abide the hiring of anyone not from the UK. He didn’t want anything to distract from the newly launched station’s UK-based status. Ironically, the show actually aired in New Zealand, twelve hours after it went out in the UK, but I wasn’t allowed to mention the fact, because it “diluted the UK message”. Tossers. One day I thought “fuck it, I’m going to mention it”. I ignored the gagging order and started talking directly to our viewers in New Zealand, then the floodgates opened. We got hundreds of emails every day. And this was 1998; most people didn’t even have email then.

I walked into Mikkiel’s office and showed him the tape.

“No”, he said. “I’m not having a New Zealander on my channel”.

He was adamant.

I had to turn him.

I pleaded, at one point I was on my knees: “You HAVE to hire this guy, I’m going fucking crazy here, you won’t let me take a holiday, Edith is on news, Donna Air can’t string a sentence together, even if she dedicated both her brain cells to the task, Blackwood, Justin LC, Coxy, all too expensive…”

I pleaded, ranted, persuaded and cajoled him. It was like reasoning with a shark, but I wasn’t going to leave that office until he relented.

I persisted.

He resisted.

I persisted.

He began to relent.

Eventually he gave in.

I got my holiday, and Zane got his first break in the UK as my sidekick, happy days.

And that’s how I started at MTV, though it doesn’t answer the question about how it all ended. I’ll answer that in the second part of ‘The rise and fall of ‘Up For It’ on MTV’.

X eddy

At the most enjoyable dinner party for years the other night, I was reminded of this little anecdote, which forms part three of my ‘Drukqs’ series.

The year that Jay-Z headlined Glastonbury, my agent managed to get me an amazing slot at the festival, up against the greatest rapper ever, on Saturday night, in the cavernous East Dance Tent.

Afterwards, I hooked up with a wonderful and dear old friend, who was a singer when we met in the 1980s, and is now a botanist/chemist and writer. He was always into his drugs, deeply into them, to the point where he’d go off to Mexico and hang out with Hopi Indian shamans to try mescaline, or drop everything and stay with a tribe in the Amazon so he could experiment with iowaska, the most potent hallucinogen known to man. A voracious reader, he would no sooner have digested a book about some kind of drug and its effect on culture, as he would be ingesting the drug itself and writing about it for some left field publication like The Fortean Times.

To cut a long story short, he’d made a tincture of magic mushrooms (psylocybe simolenceata or liberty caps to some) in his laboratory. The last time a magic mushroom had passed my lips was once, a decade earlier. So, I thought in the euphoria of the moment, it was time to reacquaint myself.

In doing so, I made a terrible mistake. A classic. I couldn’t feel anything an hour or two later so asked for another, then almost immediately got hit hard by the first wave. In a nutshell, I ended up in that casualty tent near the Stone Circle, tended by a nun and my friend, who talked me round for hours after the second wave hit and knocked me for six. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I truly thought my time had come; I was a shivering, gibbering wreck until sunrise. The horror. Never again.

But that’s the just the background story to this tale. A week later, I was on an EasyJet flight to Ibiza, all was well, we had just taken off and were climbing to that point where the engines relax slightly while the plane levels its trajectory.

At that moment I was hit by a wave of panic. My heart rate leapt, instantly, to high drum n bass tempo, and this feeling of utter hopelessness engulfed me. My mind raced and questioned itself. ‘I haven’t had a drink, I’m not stoned, I haven’t had any caffeine, I gave up cocaine years ago, what’s going on?!’ I was at a total loss as the darkness took over. I was hyperventilating, trapped in the window seat. I pushed the button I never push, after which a jolly faced EasyJet girl approached, and I said something like: “I know this sounds weird but something is happening to me, but I don’t know what, I’m having some sort of attack, I’m so sorry but I think I’m going to faint”.

I know we all slag off EasyJet and Ryanair all the time, but to their credit, the stewardess was so understanding and comforting. “Come up to the front of the plane”, she said. “I’ll get you some water and look after you”.

I followed her to the front and sat down in one of the cabin crew fold out chairs. Once there, still feeling cataclysmic, she gave me a bottle of water, the only thing I’ve ever had on an EasyJet plane which didn’t cost ten times its ground value, and reassured me that everything would be OK, and if I needed anything to just ask.

My head was in my hands. I was so shocked, embarrassed and confused. After a while I looked up at the line of Speedy Boarders in the front row. The nearest one to me was a corpulent looking middle aged man with his wife and kids.

“Are you OK?’ he inquired. “You look like you’re having a rough time of it”.

I was still breathing heavily, my heart rate was bananas.

“I think (gasp) I’m having some kind of (gasp) panic attack (gasp) but I don’t know why”.

“Oh dear, I’ve had some experience of these things. I might have something that’ll help you in my bag”. He pointed to the overhead locker.

“Gosh, really? Do you have a beta blocker, or something?”

“Yes!” He said. “That’s exactly what I’ve got, I use them all the time”.

“Are you a stockbroker?” I asked, with as much of a smile as I could muster.

“Ha ha”, he retorted. “Very good. Close, I’m a banker, these things are one of the tools of the trade”, he quipped as he stood up and rummaged around his posh, soft, leather bag.

He gave me a beta blocker (if you’re unfamiliar, it’s a relatively benign drug that snooker players and marksmen use to help combat nerves, jitters, trembling of the hand, and to bring down the heartbeat in a very mellow, non-invasive way) and chatted to me, helping take my mind off the situation.

Slowly but surely my heart beat slowed down and I went from a pale green/grey colour to the traditional dark flesh tone.

All was well that ended well, but I was still very anxious about what had happened and more importantly, WHY. I just couldn’t work it out. Then a week or so later, and I told a good friend about the episode, and he instantly said: “It was the mushrooms, you had a flashback”.

Then it dawned on me… of course… it made total sense. I’d had such a similar feeling of total desolation, but much less virulent than the previous week. These things can echo. My conscious mind had not led me to this conclusion at the time, so my fear of the unknown probably made it worse.

I spoke about it to a well known DJ friend who never flies. Turns out he has mild agoraphobia and had an attack on a plane once, which was enough to put him off for life. After that little episode I can understand why, it is totally and utterly horrible being in that situation, surrounded by prying eyes, in a steel tube at 30,000 feet, but if it ever happens to you, just get the following message read out on the tannoy:

“If there is a stockbroker or banker on board, please could they make themselves known to the cabin crew… thank you”.

X eddy

I’ve been thinking about something Andy Weatherall said when he came in for that co-host recently.

We were talking about dubstep, I played him Skrillex, and as soon as I said that Sonny (aka Skrillex) used to be in a metal band, his back straightened and he went straight into ‘purist mode’ and exclaimed: “There lies the problem for me”. He said that there was “no dub” in there, and that it was symptomatic of what was wrong with the genre, that too many people were coming to it from somewhere else (ie not Croydon!) and from too many random musical spheres, suggesting that the genre’s integrity was being usurped.

I have a massive amount of respect for Andy Weatherall, he’s one of the special ones, a Remix Hall Of Famer, someone whose hand-print I’d immortalise in bronze on the pavement of Leicester Square if I was in charge. But Andy is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a purist, and as such we find ourselves on opposite sides of the tracks.

I have always been ‘impure’. I came at dance music from rock, in the days where it was almost unheard of to confess a love of both. In the early to mid 90s, when I was discovering all these beats, I remember the purists telling me that all the stuff I loved (big beat/drum n bass) was shit and all the stuff I thought was boring (minimal/house/trance) was where it was at.

I understand the purists point of view. I do. But for me, it’s the same point of view, in principle, as The Kennel Club, and their obsession for only pure breeds (the Crufts organisers even once had members in common with the eugenics movement, before Hitler’s passion for eugenics put all that rubbish out of fashion).

For me, it’s the impurity, the dilution, that makes something better. It works genealogically: the more mixed the genepool, generally speaking, the better the result. My blood has been in-the-mix since I was conceived, my son even more so, so I’m there on a deep level. Everything about me is mixed and diluted from a cellular level upward.

Take dubstep. The bleepy, dubby, early beginnings of that genre, with a whole bunch of producers who didn’t really know what they were doing (production-wise) gave rise to an amazing genre. But the best music, for my money, came when people from other genres with better technical skills, brought their production panache to the table and took the genre to a new level.

I wrote about this a couple of years back, in the context of admiring how a lot of breakbeat producers had dusted themselves off after the death of their beloved genre and come back brighter. You only have to look at the likes of Nero, Chase & Status, SkisM, High Rankin, DJ Fresh and Pixelfist to see that new blood from a different genre is exactly what is needed to bring a new slant, an improvement to something that already exists.

If purists had their way, we would have no conflict, but we would also have no progress. One gives rise to the other.

I’ve always been about the grey areas. I’ve been waving the ‘Dance That Rocks’ flag for eleven years on Xfm now. It drifts in and out of fashion, but the point is my whole schtick is sullied, in the eyes of the purist. Fusion of genres, grey areas, middle ground, has always been frowned upon by the musically eugenic, but that has almost always been the parts of music that turn me on the most.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not dissing purity, or those that love it. What I am saying is that love of something pure and original is a wonderful thing, but if your love for that becomes so all consuming that your eyes cannot ever leave it and appreciate beauty elsewhere, then surely your life will be comparatively less interesting?

In most things, art, politics, architecture, pretty much anything you can think of, there is an established status quo. There is a line drawn by those involved that says ‘anything outside this line is not pure and therefore not as good’. I challenge that point of view vigorously. Without somebody challenging the way things are, then those things stagnate. It is the very conflict itself that drives us forward, so I say to you, embrace the conflict, love it, for that provides inspiration and variation.

The eclectic DJs like Hervé, Utah Saints, DJ Fresh and myself have long loved playing lots of different BPMs in our sets. Electro, drum n bass and dubstep can all live very happily together in almost any set we play, and while I will always show respect for a trailblazer, it is those who dissect, dilute, and challenge that I admire even more.

X eddy

My younger listeners at Xfm will probably be unaware that I used to be on the telly every day. But not a week goes by when I don’t get ecstatic, very flattering emails from random grown ups who used to watch me on MTV when they were kids. One of the questions I’m asked most often is, predictably: “How did you become a TV presenter?”

If you’re asking this question then I fear the answer is probably not the one you’re looking for, but here is the truth of it…

The year was 1997 and I was very happy at Radio 1, heading up the incredible team that made the jingles, sweepers, promos, all the little bits of audio glue that held the station together. We were lucky enough to be nominated for a Sony Award (the Oscars of radio in the UK), so I found myself at the Awards ceremony, where I bumped into an old colleague, Christine Boare.

Christine was an unusually brilliant and hard working radio producer. She’d presided over Jo Whiley and Steve Lamacq, who presented the ‘Evening Session’. When I’d arrived at Radio 1, the Evening Session was the only show I listened to regularly, and it was by far the best show on the station (this is before Westwood or Mary Anne had arrived). But by 1997, Christine had been quite rightly head-hunted by MTV Networks Europe. She had been nominated for an award too, for a really good documentary about Oasis I think, which she made just before she left for a new job as Head Of something at MTV. So, our paths crossed, in swish evening wear.

“How’s it going Christine, you look well?” I greeted her.

“Good, Eddy”, she replied. “It’s getting really busy, we’re about to launch a new MTV channel, we’re regionalising: MTV UK”.

“What, really?! So you’re getting rid of all those Euro-babe models with massive cleavages who tell us what gigs we should see…?” It was a quirk of the station at the time that the presenters clearly weren’t attending any of the gigs they recommended.

“Yep, they’re ALL going to MTV Europe and we’re getting British people to present our shows, people who know their onions, people who’ve been in bands, you know, people…” She paused slightly and looked me up and down. “People like YOU, actually. How would you like to be a presenter?”

“Oh not me Christine, I’m happy doing my thing”, I said, dismissing the idea. “I’m no presenter, anyway. You know how I roll, I produce. I don’t have a big enough ego to step up!”

“But you write scripts for Mark Goodier, Chris Evans, Nicky Campbell, and the like that make them sound like they know their shit”, she replied. “How hard could it be to just read your own scripts?”

“Oh I don’t know, I just never saw myself as a turn…”

She pushed on with the idea: “I think you’d be really good, your just the kind of off-the-wall character that we need… you’re super knowledgeable about music and you’ve got a great voice, you should do a screen test!”

We bantered and caught up with each other’s professional and personal lives before saying bye bye. And, as far as I was concerned, I didn’t give what we’d discussed any more thought.

The next day, the answer-phone in my little Radio 1 studio-come-office was flashing red.

“Hello, my name is Howie”, came a voice from the tinny speaker. “I work for MTV Talent Acquisition. Christine Boare asked me to give you a call and set up a screen test, please call me back asap on this number”.

I was a mixture of stunned, bemused and flattered. Eventually I just thought ‘what the hell?’ and called the number, curiouser and curiouser. It was arranged that I’d go to MTV’s studios at Hawley Crescent in Camden later that week.

I was still unsure of the whole thing, but having made that call I didn’t want to let Christine down. I always had a massive amount of respect for her. At Radio 1 in the mid-90s, shortly after I joined, I’d go around all the studios and offices every night, delivering scripts and trailers and stuff, long after everyone had left for the night. The only person I’d ever find working was Christine, another burner of the midnight oil. She always impressed me with her dedication, thoroughness, passion and constant flow of ideas and improvements.

But nevertheless, for the rest of that week I got on with my job and completely ignored the upcoming screen test. For starters, this whole thing had reaffirmed in my head that I didn’t really want to leave Radio 1, and anyway, how difficult could the screen test be once I got there? The few bits of MTV I’d seen involved some gorgeous Euro-babe, with English as a second language, clearly reading a script written for her by a producer, off an autocue. I surely wouldn’t be asked to do any more than this in a screen test for MTV.

Along came Thursday, and I finished my last bit of production for that day, a radio edit of a Nine Inch Nails track for the Rock Show to play, and I got on my bike (I rode a motorcycle every day in those days) and set off for Camden.

The Hawley Crescent studios, in the old TVAM building by Camden Lock, are a fabulous location. I walked into this very grand looking and modern reception, and was soon greeted by this Howie dude, along with a camera man, and ushered towards the studio. But then we walked straight past the studio, which immediately confused me, and into the bowels of the building, only to emerge at the back, by the canal lock itself, where Howie turned to me and said “stop”.

“Are we not going to the studio then?” I asked.

“No, we’re doing it right here”, he said. “Back against the wall, Ben here will point this camera at you, and you just say something…”

“You what? Say something?!” I blurted. “I thought I was here to read an autocue, I don’t have anything prepared!”

“That’s OK”, he replied, nonchalantly. “Just pretend you’re a VJ and you’ve just played a video”.

“OK, I can do that”, I thought. My edit of Nine Inch Nails still fresh in my mind, I went on a bit of a rant about NIN and what a god Trent Reznor is.

“Great”, said Howie. “Now do another”.

Britain, at the time, was in the grip of Oasis v Blur fever, so I pretended to play an Oasis and a Blur video, and I sided with Oasis. I always did. I probably did a loose-limbed impression of Liam, and another of Damon, with whistling esses.

“Good, thanks”, he said. “Now, just in case they can use you for news, can you do something ‘newsie’?”

“Um, I dunno. I’m no journalist…”

“Music news”, he added. “Just do a link about festivals or something cos they’re all coming up”.

So I did as asked and went on a little tirade about the festivals I loved and hated and portaloos, and sunburn. I remember being very honest, quite irreverent and a bit ‘ranty’. I really didn’t give a fuck – as far as I was concerned this was still just a case of me fulfilling a flattering gesture made by a former colleague – and you could probably tell that by my attitude: really open, nothing to lose, very conversational and relaxed at the same time.

Howie thanked me. He didn’t use the phrase ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’ but it was something very similar. It was June, and he said they wouldn’t have an opening until at least September. I said that was fine and I wasn’t in any hurry to leave Radio 1, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.

So, I thought, I had at least four months to wait for the phone call to say I wasn’t their cup of tea. Actually, I didn’t have to wait four days let alone months. 48 hours later I got a frantic call from Christine.

“Eddy, everybody here has gone mental over your screen test!” She shouted. “It’s gone right to the top, the Head Of Everything is saying we have to hire you, right now!”

“No way!” I shouted back.

“I’m not kidding, they want you to go to Matthew’s office and resign RIGHT NOW”, she continued, referring to Matthew Bannister, my then boss. “We’re about to launch this new channel, we’ve got lots of exciting new talent already signed up and we want you to be one of them!”

“You want me to be a PRESENTER?!” What she was saying still not quite sinking in.

“Yes!” She said. “A producer-presenter. Same money as you’re on now, plus a little bit more. You’ll be freelance, so you’ll take more home. Do it, Eddy!”

“Fuck”, I paused. I could feel the excitement in her voice and it was very infectious. I didn’t want to leave Radio 1, but at the same time I could feel that this was a genuinely brilliant opportunity. “OK”, I said. “I’ll do it!”

Thinking about it, I’d sort of done all I could do at Radio 1 by this point anyway. I was being outshone by Jeremy Godfrey, whom I’d stolen from Virgin. Together, we had totally changed Radio 1′s on air sound from a horrific 1970s vibe to a much more modern, edgier sound that was more in keeping with its new feel.

I went up to Matthew Bannister’s office and told him what had happened. He listened, Sage-like, thought about what I said and replied: “As your boss, I don’t want you to go. I really value you as part of my team. But as your friend: GO. NOW! It’s an amazing opportunity! I’m proud of you and I look forward to welcoming you back at a grossly inflated salary”.

I laughed. What a brilliant thing to say. Matthew always had the right words at the right time, he was a true leader of men and the most inspiring boss I’ve ever had.

So, I left Radio 1 to become part of a presenter team that included the following then still new and not very well known faces: Sara Cox, Paul Tonkinson, Justin Lee Collins, Armstrong & Miller, Edith Bowman, Donna Air, Richard Blackwood and Cat Deeley. There would be a lot of laughs, some tears and some really good times. I would meet some of the best people I’ve ever worked with and I would meet by far the worst. The next year would be an incredible rollercoaster ride and one which I’ll save for another time.

What I’d like you to take away from this story is that sometimes people can smell your desperation, and it’s not an attractive aroma. Obviously, this isn’t true for everything, but a lot of the time, with jobs, with people you fancy, with the flat or house you desire, if they think you don’t want it, then they want you that much more.

Realistically, if you’re going for a job, you’ll probably want it really badly. Pretending NOT to want it will be really difficult. I was just really lucky to be in a position where I genuinely didn’t give a fuck. But just try to relax and enjoy your interview or demo, or whatever it is. Be natural, be YOU, and play it cool.

In the concise words of Mr Tinchy Stryder, from a recent tweet: “There is nothing uglier than desperation”.

X eddy

Right now, young people across the UK are thinking about facing the big bad world, as their education draws to an end and they wonder what they’re going to do with what they’ve got. It’s a jungle out there, so I thought this might be of use to some of you.

This week, I helped out a couple of kids from a secondary school near me who were taking part in this cool initiative where they are taught about CVs and interviews, and then despatched off to do mock interviews with real people in their place of work. These two wannabe music producers came in to Global Radio, where I mock interviewed them for a prospective job as a producer at Global’s music publishing company, where you would work with the likes of Ellie Goulding.

The first one, let’s call him Sam (that’s not his real name), arrived on the dot. Punctuality is so important for these things, as they’re usually stacked like dominoes and if one is late then they’re all late.

Sam was so nervous, his hands were shaking and his voice quivering. He just couldn’t relax, until the moment, some 20 minutes later, when I said “interview over, let’s see how you did”. At this point he visibly changed, sat back in his chair, exhaled deeply, and smiled for the first time. I chatted to him a bit and learned more about his true character in the next two minutes than I did in the entire interview.

Sam’s CV looked good, name in bold at the top, in big letters. I instantly remembered it, that’s good, but he made the cardinal error. A whopper of a spelling mistake. In these days when CVs are created in computer programs that actually tell you a word looks wrong, a spelling mistake is unforgivable. How could I trust you to register a song with PRS so that it gets its royalties when you can’t even get your own CV right?

If I’m being honest, I initially struggled to remember the name of candidate two because, unlike Sam, the words in bold at the top of his CV were ‘Personal Details’ and that’s what stuck in my head. I do remember it now, but if I had reams of CVs and was looking for a reason to weed some out, this might have been for the chop simply because I couldn’t see his name! But let’s call candidate number two Jon.

Now, Jon sat back in his chair, splayed his legs out like he’d been there a hundred times, and smiled from the off. I liked that. Because he was relaxed, he enjoyed it, and so did I. Sam was so uncomfortable that the interview had been slightly awkward. I know it’s easier said than done, to suggest you enjoy an interview, but try to focus on the fact you’re at a company that does something which is fascinating and inspiring to you, ask questions, enjoy it, get involved, smile-like-you-mean-it!

Jon’s CV didn’t look as good but had more info and a brilliant paragraph at the end. I’ll get to that in a second, but first my tip is this: don’t put your GCSE or A Level grades on your CV, just put what subjects you got, so people can see, at a glance, that you’re well rounded academically. Grades are pointless because, as has been widely reported, marking is so generous and the exams so easy these days that everybody gets A grades, so they mean nothing any more.

But Jon’s last paragraph was brilliant. Headed ‘Goals And Ambitions’, it basically said he wanted to go on a particular music production course, because it’s the best one, but that first he wanted to take a year off and travel the world, to give him something to write about and enrich his life experience. This showed me he was self aware, intelligent and thoughtful. He would have got the job for that one line.

That reminded me of a useful little story: Back when I had a proper job, when I was ‘Head Of’ something, hiring and firing for a Big Production Company, I had to find a director. I narrowed the candidates down to two. The first one was qualified right up the wazoo. Every orifice had an acronym coming out of it. He’d been to college, masters, post grad, courses left right and centre, he could not have been any more qualified if he’d been Stephen Spielberg’s teacher. The other candidate had lived. He’d travelled, he’d been around the world, met people, had a totally different ‘education’ – the University Of Life. He was so much more interesting, affable, entertaining. I gave the second guy the job.

The first candidate was surprised and called me to ask what he’d done wrong in the interview. I told him this: “You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re a nice guy, you got everything going for you, except the fact that you’ve been in some form of institution your whole life. Forget about more courses or qualifications, what you need is a round-the-world ticket, just go, meet people, see things, experience life first hand, then and only then can you be in a position to properly document it, film it, or write about”.

I’ve no idea whether he took my advice to heart but I sincerely hope that within a few weeks of it he was on a beach in Thailand, a beer in one hand a spliff in the other and giggling with a German girl, a Swedish girl and a random guy from New Zealand.

Of course, there are individuals and jobs for whom the qualifications are paramount, but if you want to impress somebody like me in an interview, you won’t do it with a certificate or a few letters after your name, you’ll do it with your demeanour, your smile, your enthusiasm and awareness of both yourself and the world around you.

Whatever you choose to do, I wish you the best of luck. Now fuck off around the world and talk to me in a year or two!

X eddy

I thought you might find it interesting to have some insider knowledge as to how radio station audience figures, in this country, are decided, and why, in my opinion, and the opinion of many of my colleagues in the industry, they simply don’t reflect reality.

The ‘audience figures’ for each radio station in the UK are decreed by a company called RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research). In order to derive these figures, this is what they do in this digital age, this brave new world where we can hold a mobile phone up to a speaker and have it tell us the name of the song that is playing, in this era where we can send the contents of an entire library to someone in a matter of seconds, this, my friends, is how RAJAR do it: They take a ‘representative sample’ of the UK population (one thousand people chosen at random, we are told) and they give them each a diary.

Yes. An actual diary. Paper, bound with glue and thread, maybe a nice bit of cardboard on the outside. I don’t know, I’ve never seen one. You’re probably thinking I’ve never been given one because I have a show on one of these UK stations and therefore my filling in this diary would compromise the actual figures, on account of my understandable bias. That would stand to reason, and I’d agree entirely, but you’d be wrong again to think it. The only person I’ve ever known to have been given one of these diaries was the Chairman of a local radio station in the Midlands.

RAJAR evidently don’t check these key people’s jobs or concerns. Even though he listened to Radio 4 in the morning and BBC Local radio most days, he, of course filled his diary with the name of his local commercial station, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and, of course, the station had consistently great audience figures at that time.

Now, young people, the youth of today, I’m talking to you now. You might be confused at this point. A diary is like this book sort of thing, but with blank pages which you have to fill in yourself using a pen (it’s like your finger on an iPhone but has ink in it).

Sorry for the patronisation, but I’m just trying to make a point here. Young people don’t give a shit about diaries and pens. They know how to work computers, they know better than all the rest of us. It’s hardly outrageous to assume, therefore, that the system is stacked against any radio stations that target people under 35.

Surprise surprise, the biggest radio station in the country is Radio 2. An ‘oldies’ station, listened to by people more comfortable with a diary than a blog. Classic FM does great, too. I’m sure they’re wonderful stations, they sound good on the few occasions my ears accidentally bump into them, but it’s safe to assume that both these stations are targeting the kind of people who would be both familiar with the concept of filling in a daily diary, and having the time and inclination to do so.

So why has nothing been done about this, the greatest and most ridiculous anachronism in broadcasting? Interestingly, nobody is challenging the status quo (except Kelvin McKenzie, formerly of Talk Sport, who has been shouting about this for years, though less loudly since he stepped back from radio) because everybody has something to lose.

Good old Auntie Beeb is fine with the prehistoric system, because Radios 2, 4, 5 and the local stations all benefit from it. Global Radio, which owns Xfm, Capital, Heart, Classic FM and many others, don’t want to kick up a fuss either, because Classic FM does great and I presume nobody wants to rock the boat too much in these uncertain times.

It’s only stations like Xfm, Radio 1, 6Music (less so the latter because it has an older audience profile) and the like that suffer, so much so, everyone in the industry accepts they have more listeners than their official figures.

Of course, the BBC doesn’t officially care about such things, its remit is to provide a public service paid for by each one of us, irrespective of audience figures, in so far as there is no link between the numbers of listeners and revenue. But commercial radio lives and dies by these figures.

To understand the deep effects these numbers have on a radio station, consider this: My friend Zane at Radio 1 will have a posse of people to help put his show together. Meanwhile, the likes of John Kennedy, Ian Camfield and myself are producer, presenter, researcher, assistant, engineer and teaboy rolled into one.

The only reason for this is money. Xfm cannot charge advertisers for any listeners other than the ‘official’ ones that RAJAR says are listening to us, even though we know there are more. Therefore, the advertising income from the station cannot justify giving any of its shows the benefit of hired help. I’m going off on a slight tangent here, but the lovely Marsha Shandur was tweeting away the night of the Sony Awards (UK radio’s version of The Oscars) earlier this year, pointing out how it’s criminal that John Kennedy is overlooked year upon year, because it’s never taken into account that he puts that incredible, content-filled show together entirely alone. If the playing field were level, then it wouldn’t be just the BBC laying siege to Moss Bros’ suit hire department the morning of the Sonys.

In the last RAJAR sweep I saw, the boss’s boss assured us that more diaries then ever before had gone out, giving a slightly fairer analysis of the true picture out there, and as if by magic, Xfm’s audience figures shot up to near our all time high. And there is now talk of putting these old paper diaries online.

These are a positive steps in the right direction, though I can’t help feeling as if they are just baby steps when what we need is a leap. Will people entering diaries online make much of a difference? Not if it isn’t equalled by a bigger more diverse sample group. Now the system is going online, there is no excuse to keep the survey so low. Bring the numbers up, bring the accuracy up with them. Then, and only then, we’ll really know who’s listening to what. Bring it on.

X eddy

Playing tracks by artists discovered by John Kennedy while standing in for him on ‘X-posure’ recently, and the reaction that he and I generate by doing so, got me thinking about the unique way that in this country (in many areas, but I’m talking about music here) success is deemed failure.

John told me that when he first played The Ting Tings, he’d never had a stronger and more positive reaction to a record. Within six months of playing this demo of ‘Great DJ’ he was receiving nothing but hate mail for playing the same tune.

I witnessed this myself with bands like Snow Patrol, Kasabian and Scissor Sisters, all of whose demos I was the first person to get behind, and I’m thinking, with some dismay, that by the same token, it’s probably only a matter of time before I start getting vitriolic emails about Fenech-Soler.

“Fail miserably… achieve greatly!” exclaims John F Kennedy in one of the hugely entertaining zombie levels of ‘Call Of Duty: Black Ops’. I’m not altogether sure what he means and what the correct context of that quote was, but I apply it to this examination because it reflects something I think most of us, if we’re honest about it, have felt in the past.

Perhaps it’s just something that comes with the territory of being a teenager, of being insecure, but we all know that those feelings don’t always seep away, and are not always replaced by the wisdom that comes with age.

My own experience is still vivid in my mind. If we rewind the clock to the beginning of the 80s, and the first band that I fell in love with, to the point of rupture, was Japan. I remember the joy of feeling part of a special gang, I suppose the feeling of exclusivity, almost superiority, was intoxicating. They were MY band. Well, mine along with my mates Andy and Bruce. I remember how our joy turned to despair when ‘Ghosts’ suddenly appeared on ‘Top Of The Pops’. I had a feeling of emptiness, of abandonment, like I’d had a kick in the nuts from my mum on her way out of the door for the last time.

It didn’t take me long to feel ashamed of begrudging my favourite band their moment of success. It wasn’t long before I was in a band, and in a position to appreciate things from the other side.

I’ve talked to many other musicians about this and there seems to be a general consensus that it’s a ‘British’ thing, that success is actually failure. Viewed from one angle, its a character trait that I find quite endearing, that we are a nation that loves a loser. America loathes losers, they are a nation that breeds winners, and drums into their kids from an early age that winning is the goal, the aim, the reason for being in the race.

When I was at school, while competitiveness was encouraged, so was a more rounded ethos of ‘it’s not the winning it’s the taking part’, a concept that has always fascinated me, and why I called my production outfit and now band, Losers. Losers are just glad to be in the game, not allowing their happiness to be dependent on the outcome of anything. Adopting this name was a reaction against the George Bush politics of the day and against the loathsome, money-obsessed individuals I’ve worked with or been friends with in the past.

In my life, I’ve become wary of my happiness being dependent on an outcome, it’s one of the reasons I’ve ended up so unerringly positive, and a state of mind I’d recommend to anyone.

But this grossly negative outlook of sneering at success, is it really a uniquely British thing? I’d welcome some input from other cultures and countries, to see if this is more to do with age than geography. Is it maybe a northern European thing? We get less light per year and its been proven that our endorphin levels are lower than our counterparts somewhere like Spain, and consequently our outlook is darker and more cynical.

Like I said, there is the positive side to it, the love-a-loser ethos that sets us apart from our transatlantic cousins, but this healthy celebration of the underdog is just one part of a complicated equation. I think that, if were honest with ourselves, we’d have to admit that begrudging the success of someone we love, is more of a playing out of our own insecurity, than an assessment of their failure.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could love the loser, but then not have a problem if that loser becomes a winner, in some way?

If an underdog beats a favourite, in say the FA Cup, this success is celebrated, so I know it’s within our sphere of experience to be and to act bigger. So when, say, Auction, that amazing five-piece from Croydon who played live on ‘X-posure’ on my last day holding the fort for John Kennedy, when they become hugely successful, and they will, just remember they haven’t changed, and neither should we.

X eddy