Free Seize the Day by Mike Read Page B

man responsible for such songs as ‘Puppet on a String’ and ‘Congratulations’ and Billy told this story against himself. Just about to complete on the deal, Billy turned upat Bill’s office, pointed a sawn-off shotgun at him and demanded £25,000 in cash before he’d sign the contract. Billy played the tough guy, but he met his match with Bill, who took the gun from him, threw it out of the window and told him to leave … Glaswegian style! (i.e. forcibly and just possibly, although who am I to say, with some persuasive use of the forehead.) He left. Well, you would.
    At the end of 1980 Radio One did a week out in Birmingham, with John Peel and me holding the fort at Broadcasting House. I was just handing over to John, when a call came through asking me to race up to Birmingham as Dave Lee Travis, who’d been doing the breakfast show for a couple of years by that time, was under the weather. It was already ten o’clock and I had nothing except the clothes I was wearing – no doubt some iconic fashion items that became dated three weeks later. Nevertheless I headed off, but only got as far as St John’s Wood before my car plunged into a large unlit hole in the road where it wheezed like a newly discovered Mesolithic creature and gave up the ghost. I ran back to Broadcasting House, phoned the AA and tried to call for a car.
    ‘Don’t do that, it’s ridiculously expensive,’ said John. ‘I’ll take you up there.’
    What a decent fellow. By the time we left it was past midnight and we didn’t pull into Birmingham until sometime after two o’clock. That colourful wiz(z)ard Roy Wood was at the hotel when we arrived, so there were late-night drinks all round and just two hours’ sleep until being prised out of bed to present the breakfast show. It was a pattern I’d get used to.
    I took over the breakfast show during the first week of 1981, but it wasn’t all accolades and bouquets. I was and always have been a music lover and as such have always been passionate about it, so what was more natural in my new slot than to keep playing the artists that I’d played in the evening? If music’s good it’s good, at any time of day. Obviously I used a modicum of common sense in tandem with what was perceived as my maverick attitude, but was pulled up about itweek after week. DLT had been relatively disco orientated, but I was the guy who’d cobbled together the first punk top twenty, four years earlier, at least if I could find enough records to fill twenty places, and I was keen to incorporate new musical genres. I was strongly advised to knuckle down and play the more conventional music that people were used to at breakfast or possibly lose the gig, but I soldiered on with the groups and artists that I liked, and gradually they became more acceptable as ‘daytime’ music for the station.
    It was a bumpy few months. By playing what was deemed to be ‘night-time music’ I was made to feel as though I was practising the dark arts.

CHAPTER 3
ON MY RADIO
    I LOVED EVERY MINUTE of my stint on the breakfast show. Those five shows a week are enough for some, but as well as two weekly TV shows, (
Pop Quiz
and
Saturday Superstore
) and
Top of the Pops
every few weeks, I hosted the review programme
Round Table
(aka
Singled Out
) and for periods
Chart Quiz
and
Pop of the Form. Singled Out
threw up so many giants of music on a weekly basis there is simply no room for all the stories. One rather odd show, though, was with Pamela Stephenson and Brian Setzer from the Stray Cats. While Brian and I were deep in conversation dissecting some new release, Pamela slipped under the table and undid our trousers. How we struggled. ‘Stop,’ I drawled slowly, without much conviction. The ratings did an about-turn as people tuned in to the audio romp. After another edition of the show, Phil Everly told me that he was staying in Walton-on-Thames that night, a mile down the road from my house. I was having a few people round for