I am a radio broadcasting specialist with a track record in senior management and consultancy, creating and implementing successful, innovative launch and turnaround strategies for large-scale radio stations in emerging markets to connect with audiences through market analysis, consumer research, innovation and strong team leadership.
10+ years’ overseas radio market experience: Cambodia, India, Lithuania, Estonia, Germany, Czech Republic, Latvia, Hungary, Russia, Israel.
• Management and leadership of creative teams of 60+ personnel in multi-country operations • Hiring, training and mentoring of unskilled radio production, presentation and management staff • Experienced journalist and sub-editor, with 1,000+ published articles in consumer/trade magazines and two books • 1,000’s of hours’ experience training/capacity building in radio skills • Managed budgets of £1m+, skilled in accounts, budgeting, spreadsheets • Planned and executed 100+ market research projects for radio, converting insights into action • Business analyst of research, strategy, audience ratings and financial performance of UK radio broadcast market, quoted on radio/TV/press
• Created the station format, image and sound of Radio City, India’s very first commercial radio FM network, leading and training a young team without prior radio experience (for Star TV) • Re-launched Radio 7 Moscow with a new format, new image and new direction, improving its market ranking from 35rd to 3rd (for Metromedia International) • Launched Radio Juventus as Hungary’s first national commercial radio station with a format and station sound previously unheard in the market (for Metromedia International) • Created Cambodia’s first live phone-in show, first youth programme and first to use digital audio editing at state radio and a women’s radio station (for BBC World Service Trust) • Transformed KISS FM London from a small pirate radio station into the UK’s first commercial youth radio station with 1m+ weekly reach within first six months on-air (for shareholders EMAP + Virgin)
Had I been born a century earlier, I suspect my parents would have bundled me off to climb up the insides of neighbourhood chimneys for a few farthings. Things then would have turned out much worse for me, as my mother’s guidance for childrearing was apparently forged by her half-dozen visits accompanying me to 1964’s ‘Mary Poppins’ at the Camberley Odeon. As Julie Andrews had seen nothing immoral about grubby children being pressganged into Dick van Dyke’s happy posse of sweeps, the film seemed to convince my mother that offspring were meant to be seen (working) rather than heard (playing).
Some kids embark upon a paper round once they have learnt to ride a bike. Others help out in the neighbourhood shop for pocket money. Visiting a mini-mart to pay your newspaper bill, you would rightly be surprised to find a child of single-digit age and less than three feet tall stocking shelves. Apparently not my parents! As soon as I could walk, my father was taking me with him in his ostentatious American car to survey local properties whose owners required renovations or extensions. Initially I was charged with holding the end of his long roll-out, wind-up tape measure at the far end of large rooms [see blog]. Before long, I was sketching out on paper the floorplan of buildings and noting their dimensions. Later on, I was calculating floor areas using the long multiplication my father had evidently failed to pay attention to before quitting his education aged fourteen from a Dickensian school he would show me on School Lane, just along from Ron Francis’ long-time photographic studio.
Thanks to an apprenticeship and ‘night school’, my father became a qualified quantity surveyor who passed as an architect by appending ‘AFS ARIBA’ to his name on business cards printed by Southwell Press [see blog]. In his school-hut office in the back garden behind our garage, my first administrative task was to maintain his professional periodicals such as ‘Architects Journal’ in strict date order. Soon he would teach me how to transfer Letraset from large sheets onto architectural drawings. I could calculate the relevant scale for plonking images of furniture, white goods and American-styled human figures onto the tracing paper plans masking-taped to his drawing board. If we did not have the necessary sheet, I would locate it within the huge, well-thumbed ring-bound Letraset catalogue and my father would then walk down to ‘Camberley Stationers’ on the High Street to buy it on account.
Whilst my father was self-employed at home, my mother worked as bookkeeper for a local garage 290 yards away that serviced vehicles, hired out a fleet of coaches and owned the town’s only petrol station on the busy A30 London Road. She would regularly bring her wide accounts ledgers home, set them out on our kitchen table alongside a paper-roll adding machine and require my services to help ‘balance the books’ and calculate the weekly payroll [see blog]. At my school, some classmates were still struggling with basic addition whilst I was already adept at calculating Income Tax and National Insurance deductions for a local company’s workforce.
After leaving school at sixteen without a Certificate, my mother had enrolled for some kind of local secretarial course which led to our home having a manual typewriter and shorthand texts. I taught myself to type and was soon faster and more accurate than my mother. If my parents had to fill out a form, I would type it for them. After my brother was born, his name had to be added to their passports alongside mine, so I typed the application form to be mailed to the Passport Office in Little Venice. When the passports were returned, I was so proud to see that the civil servants had merely cut out the paper on which I had typed my brother’s details and glued it onto a spare page. My handiwork!
Without realising what was happening, I became our family’s ‘administrator’ merely because I excelled at reading, writing and arithmetic. When there were Christmas cards to send to my father’s clients, it was my job to write addresses on dozens of envelopes. When there were letters to be sent to the Council, Inland Revenue or DHSS, I was tasked with typing them and their respective envelopes. After my parents gave me a ‘Kodak Instamatic 126’ camera for my birthday in 1964, I also became the family’s photographer, carefully sticking hundreds of square pics in a photo album and labelling them with precise dates, locations and names. (Decades later, my brother stole this treasured album from our mother’s home before emigrating [see blog], leaving me now without a single family photo, despite having been our family’s only photographer then.)
If I had been a teenager when pressganged into this family work, perhaps I could be accused of some collusion. But I was still under ten years old when all this happened. Other kids in my class went home to spend evenings playing worry-free games in their back gardens, while I returned home to yet another round of administrative tasks. My cleverness was being mercilessly exploited by two un-clever parents who had left school without an examination pass between them. I had no idea why I was clever. I often wondered whether I was truly the offspring of the adults I was being forced to live with. Had I been swapped, accidentally or deliberately, at birth? However, my birth certificate said I had been born at home. How was my DNA related to theirs? During my early years, I had a mop of blonde hair. But neither parent was blonde. I had blue eyes. But neither of my parents had blue eyes. Having watched 1960’s American sci-fi series screened on British television, I even pondered whether aliens had planted me with this suburban family. Was I the boy who fell to earth?
As the years progressed, my parents’ grip over my life tightened. At age eleven, having passed the compulsory ‘Eleven Plus’ exam, I was entitled to join the one grammar school in Camberley, adjacent to the infant/junior school I had attended for six years. Instead, my parents chose to send me to a grammar school twelve miles away at the opposite end of the county, the outcome of my father’s desire to impress a potential business partner [see blog]. I was not even consulted for my opinion before being condemned to spend hours travelling on public transport for the next seven years. I would never again see my many junior school friends.
After my father switched to renting a town centre office, I was additionally charged with calculating, typing and sending out client invoices, statements and reminders on his newly purchased ‘IBM 72’ electric typewriter. I was also required to spend days making photocopies and dyeline prints for my fathers’ clients in a darkened unventilated room, damaging my health irreparably [see blog]. When my father diversified into property speculation with a new business partner, my expertise in maths was required to figure out the potential profits of buying local businesses and redeveloping them with blocks of flats [see blog]. Though not yet a teenager, my calculations would determine whether projects worth millions could prove viable for my father’s latest business, which I had been required to name (‘IMIC Properties Limited’) even though I was still too young to be one of its directors. It was crazy.
The upside of all this work for my ‘family business’ was that, once their tasks were completed, my parents left me alone to pursue my own interests without interference. My mother could not be bothered to divert to Camberley’s only Post Office at the far end of the London Road from the town centre so, while she shopped, I would walk there and cash her fortnightly ‘Family Allowance’ vouchers from the booklet sent by the government. The postal staff knew me by sight because, from the time I could barely peer over their counter, I had been sending and receiving many more letters than my parents. My ‘pocket money’ comprised this useful cash that my mother would let me keep.
During childhood, I developed a wide range of interests that I maintained … until the fateful day in 1972 when my father deserted his family and abandoned his three children, leaving us to grow up in chaotic deprivation [see blog]. After that, I had neither the time nor the money to pursue anything beyond day-to-day survival. After that, I lived an even more isolated existence away from friends and extended family. These unwelcomed losses were initiated in 1968 when my parents relocated to a new housing estate on the edge of town. I was now three miles from my grandparents who, having lived next door almost my entire life, had generously provided the childrearing skills to which my parents seemed oblivious. I was now three miles away from the neighbourhood kids on our street with whom I had played regularly on the roads leading to Barossa Common [see blog]. I was now three miles away from the junior school I would attend for one further year which, until then, had been a short solo ride away on buses 1, 2 or 3c of the Aldershot & District Traction Company Limited. I now had no friends living within miles. I needed a lift to get to school.
In our home on Kings Ride, my parents had bought me a metal full-size pedal-powered go-kart with a handbrake that could travel so fast that it would have proven dangerous to meet a pedestrian on our narrow pavements. Instead, I would drive it along the road outside our house when there was little traffic around, pursued by my neighbourhood mates on their bikes. Sometimes a double decker bus would unexpectedly pass in the opposite direction and you could see the passengers stare out its windows in disbelief. My parents never told me not to play in the traffic and not once was I stopped or told off by passing adults.
My earliest hobby was ten-pin bowling. My parents’ plan since their marriage was to emigrate to Canada, despite knowing nobody there nor having visited the country [see blog]. That was the reason my brother and I were given what they believed were common North American names. That was why my father taught himself to ice skate by practising surreptitiously each winter on the frozen lake of the Sandhurst Royal Military Academy. That was why, every Saturday morning, my parents drove to the nearest bowling alley in Wokingham to practice, accompanied by me. I was tall for my age and soon became sufficiently accomplished to be asked to join Wokingham’s junior bowling team. Every Saturday morning, I would don my team bowling shirt and either compete at Wokingham or our team would be driven from there by coach to an away match at Heathrow, Brighton or one of the few towns that had a bowling alley. One birthday, my parents bought me my own bowling ball with my name engraved next to the finger holes and a ‘mod’ black and white bowling bag in which to carry it.
I became a manic stamp collector, initially steaming off the stamps on my family’s incoming mail and later visiting the regular Stampex exhibition in the Central Hall at Westminster. My weekly visits to the local library were useful to consult the Stanley Gibbons stamp catalogues in the reference section upstairs. Before long, I had saved enough pocket money to buy my own copies, along with a special stamp album that had spaces to mount every British stamp ever issued. I would write to a stamp dealer in Much Wenlock, enclosing a Postal Order bought from the Post Office to purchase all sorts of strange and wonderful stamps from countries around the world. Every occasion a new set of commemorative stamps was issued, I would traipse down to the Post Office, stick them on the associated special envelope and send it to myself as a ‘First Day Cover’. I even saved up to buy Britain’s first stamp, the 1840 ‘Penny Black’.
My maternal grandfather had sown the seeds of my fascination with the radio medium. I loved listening to music radio stations and discovered I could hear stations from all over Europe on an ordinary portable radio. In my early years, I would comb my parents’ and grandparents’ daily newspapers for any stories about radio, cut them out and stick them in a series of scrapbooks I maintained. Then I would enter every competition I heard announced on radio and, as my knowledge of popular music was good, send in postcard entries. I won quite a few contests on ‘BBC Radio London’ after it opened in 1970, usually with prizes of vinyl albums (such as the debut of the amazing group Batti Mamzelle). Despite my dozens of entries, I never won anything from national ‘BBC Radio One’ after its launch in 1967. However, I did win some albums (including ‘King Tubby Meets The Upsetter At The Grass Roots Of Dub’) from Tommy Vance’s Saturday ‘TV On Reggae’ show with Raymondo (alias Ray Edwards) on London’s ‘Capital Radio’ in the early 70’s.
I badgered my parents into buying me a Trio 9R59DS radio receiver so I could listen to more radio stations from further away on the shortwave band. Due to my fear of heights, I persuaded schoolfriend Jeremy Mitchell to climb trees at each end of our garden to hang as an antenna a long piece of copper wire I had bought from my grandfather in the ironmonger shop ‘Dolton Bournes & Dolton’ on the High Street, his workplace following the closure of Camberley’s timber yards [see blog]. I bought the thick annual ‘World Radio & Television Handbook’ so that I could find the address of every radio station I heard in order to write to them. I was sending off dozens of letters a month and receiving all sorts of packages in return – programme schedules, postcards, badges, playlists, magazines, books and pennants. The postman often was carrying so much mail to deliver to me alone that he would knock on our front door rather than try and fit it all in our wall-mounted post-box.
I subscribed to monthly Roneo-ed newsletters that shared information about distant radio stations that could be heard and I would send the editors my lists for publication of new ones I had heard recently. I even travelled by train on my own to a meeting organised by some of these radio fans (‘DX-ers’) held in Reading one weekend but, sat amongst men who were twice and three times my age, I was too intimidated to utter a word. However, my listening taught me to identify languages from around the world and to understand the geography of continents. I can still recall the names of many of the oddball radio stations I heard, such as Austria’s ‘Der Schulungssender des Österreichischen Bundesheeres’ on 6221kHz. I think this global knowledge was the reason I managed an ‘A’ grade for my Geography O-level. It also gave me motivation to one day visit some of the faraway places whose radio I had listened to and whose citizens I had corresponded with.
As well as being an enthusiastic radio listener, I was also interested in the technical aspects of the medium. One Christmas in the 1960’s, I asked my parents for a junior home electronic kit that taught me about resistors, capacitors, circuit boards and to build basic projects. A few years later, I would accompany my aforementioned school friend Jeremy on trips to ancient Edgware Road shops to buy second-hand electronic parts so that we could build our own valve-powered radio transmitter to launch an AM pirate radio station. We possessed some suitable circuit diagrams from hobby magazines and were inspired by weekend London pirate stations we had heard.
Starting with technical books held in the upstairs reference section of Camberley library, I studied the theories of how radio transmitters, receivers and antennas functioned and their practical applications. This led me to a correspondence course to take the ‘RAE’ radio amateur examination that would allow me to communicate on the airwaves with other radio ‘hams’. For a small charge, I was mailed study notes by post, learnt them, wrote answers to a set of questions and sent them back. If my responses were correct, I would be mailed the next unit of the course. It could be a rather laborious process at times, but there was nowhere locally I could undertake the necessary training to take this exam.
One of my less technical interests was launching helium-filled balloons from our back garden, attached to postcards asking the finder to write to me with the location it had landed. Most of these efforts disappeared without a trace but occasionally I would receive a card from somewhere in West Europe that one had reached, a few of whom I started writing to regularly as pen pals. I think it reflected my early notion that there must be a bigger world out there beyond the suburban town where my mother’s family had lived for generations. It was a symptom of my alienation from my parents and the quest for an existence that promised more than small-town living. I already felt I did not belong there and I was seeking somewhere else where I might feel more at home (“going where the weather suits my clothes”).
One of the properties my father had insisted I help him measure to prepare for some rebuilding work was the future Lakeside Country Club in Frimley Green to be launched in 1971. We met its owner, musician Bob Potter, to whom I explained my interest in learning music studio production. He also ran the Bob Potter Studio in nearby Mytchett and invited me to attend a forthcoming recording session there by jazz duo John Dankworth and Cleo Laine whom I had seen on television. Although I was not (yet) a fan of jazz, this seemed to be a great opportunity to understand the basics of music recording techniques. I enthusiastically accepted the invitation and looked forward to that visit.
I was a regular customer of the large toy shop on Princess Street where I saved up to buy Airfix plastic model kits and multiple little pots of Humbrol paint, taking them home to assemble whilst trying not to glue my fingers together. Aircraft models appealed most, perhaps because my parents occasionally took me to Heathrow Airport on weekends to stand on the open observation platform of the new Queen’s Building with a free map showing airline logos so that we could identify planes taking off and landing. I built and carefully painted a Fokker DR1, Harrier ‘Jump Jet’ and Gloster Whittle, adding the transfer markings provided with each kit. I was yet to travel on a plane so aircraft seemed exciting and other-worldly.
I had started buying soul and reggae records in 1969, initially from Dykes record shop on the corner of Park Street and Princess Street where a line of soundproofed listening booths along the right-hand wall permitted visitors to request from the shop assistant an audio preview of a single or album before deciding whether to purchase it. Within a few years, I was making Saturday solo trips to London to buy imported soul records unavailable in Camberley from Contempo Records on Hanway Street and imported reggae from the many stalls in and around Granville Arcade in Brixton [see blog]. Though my termly green cardboard train season ticket to commute to school only reached as far east as Egham [see blog], I would continue on the same line to Waterloo station, flash my pass hurriedly at the gate and then only have to pay the minimal Tube fares to travel around London. Sometimes I might go further to visit the many reggae shops in Harlesden or to Lord Koos’ outlet for hard-to-find releases.
In early 1972, My father impulsively booked a holiday in Jamaica for our whole family so I made plans to explore its reggae haunts I knew about while the rest of them would be lounging on the beach [see blog]. We had recently visited Spain for a short family holiday which had proven an unmitigated disaster [see blog] so I considered it more productive for me to set personal objectives to achieve on this holiday, putting as much distance as possible between me and my troublesome father.
A significant reason I had developed so many interests was because, throughout my years at infant and junior schools, no classmates lived anywhere near our home. As the eldest child, neither did I have siblings with whom to play. Then, for two years, my parents spent every weekend on the plot of land the opposite side of town where they were building their dream house. They took my younger brother with them but always left me at home alone the entire weekend. I was never bored as I had developed so many interests that I could pursue. I was perfectly happy in my own company, particularly as my parents demonstrated little interest in me even when they were present. If I wanted interaction, I would go next door and play dominoes for hours with my grandfather on his wooden dining table, notching up our scores with matchsticks on his ancient cribbage board.
Two subsequent events ruined this equilibrium in which I had existed during my early years. Firstly, the move to our new house on the edge of town two miles from Camberley town centre. Until then, I had been only a short unaccompanied walk away from the shops, municipal library and railway station. Now I needed a lift from my parents because the two bus routes 39b and 34a from our new location ran only hourly and two-hourly respectively during peak times. Neither was there a single shop near our new home.
Secondly, my father’s departure four years later left my mother without a car [see blog] or the resources initially to buy one. The impact was two-fold: I was stranded on an outlying housing estate without transport; and the money to support my interests was no longer available. I still visited the Post Office, though less regularly than before, as it was now three miles away instead of a brisk walk. I would cash the Family Allowance vouchers there but now the money had to be passed to my mother to support us because my father was deliberately denying his family any financial help.
It was not just the lack of money that changed my life going forward. Having unexpectedly had additional responsibilities as our family’s ‘eldest child’ thrust upon me, I could no longer find sufficient hours in the day to pursue my own interests. Until then, I had spent most of my childhood in my own company whilst my siblings were under the eye of one or other of my parents. From now on, because my mother was at work every weekday from morning ‘til night, I was left with my younger brother and sister whenever I was home from school. I had become the family babysitter, supervising a nine-year old and one-year old for hours on end. This was not how I had anticipated my teenage years would be spent from age thirteen to eighteen.
There was no gradual change in my life. In the weeks before my father left us, I was still busy with my own interests. Then, suddenly, everything had to be dropped. My go-kart was never used again. My bowling ball remained in its 1960’s two-tone bag to this day, kept as a reminder of a now distant past when I once scored over 200 in a competition game. I was not given the chance to say farewell to my bowling team friends because I never returned to Wokingham bowling alley. My various stamp albums were placed in a large plastic shopping bag, never to be examined again. My plans to build a radio transmitter with school friend Jeremy came to nothing, as did our electronics buying trips to Edgware Road. Although I was close to completing the radio amateur correspondence course, I abruptly ended the monthly correspondence because now I would never have been able to afford the equipment even if I gained a licence.
Correspondence with overseas pen pals came to a sudden halt due to my lack of time. Bob Potter’s invitation to attend a recording session would never be fulfilled because my father now disowned me and was hellbent on doing everything he could to disrupt my future, despite my childhood having been spent working for his various businesses. I never again bought or assembled another Airfix model kit, let alone visited Camberley’s toy shop. Regular record-buying trips to London had to be curtailed because, without parental transport, buses from our home to the railway station were unreliable outside of weekday daytime hours. Besides, my pocket money had all but disappeared, sacrificed to more essential needs. My much-anticipated visit to Jamaica was scotched when my father changed the names on our family’s four tickets to that of his new mistress and unknown flunkies [see blog].
What activities was I left with? My radio listening continued because I already had the equipment and it was a free pastime. As a much-needed escape from my family responsibilities, at weekends I would sometimes stay up all night listening to faraway stations. I tried for months to receive a North American station on Medium Wave and my perseverance paid off during the early hours when I distinctly heard ‘CJON 930’ in St John’s, Newfoundland. Encouraged, I soon heard ‘Radio Demerara 760’ from British Guyana and ‘Radio Rebelde 670’ from Cuba. I knew even then that I wanted a career in radio.
I also continued my long running passion for music. I discovered that, instead of visiting London to buy reggae records, I could save money by writing directly to the UK record companies that issued them, claiming to be a record shop named ‘Channel One’ (copied from the recording studio I idolised in Maxfield Avenue, Kingston, Jamaica). Whereas in shops an album would cost £2.15, I could buy the same record ‘wholesale’ for a little over half that price. A typed letter and accompanying Postal Order proved sufficient to convince them to send me the desired albums, often accompanied by marketing materials, their catalogues, additional album sleeves and free promotional copies of singles. I was never asked difficult questions about my fake record shop bizarrely located on a suburban Camberley housing development.
There was no time then to think too deeply about these myriad changes to our family’s existence. We just had to cope with the way things were now. I never complained. It is only in retrospect that I understand how much of my youth was taken away from me by my parents. I never spoke to anyone at school about these changes or the responsibilities foisted upon me at such an early age. I tried to carry on as if everything was fine and that nothing significant had changed. But it had. I was no longer the youthful kid with diverse interests that I had been until now. I had been forced to become an adult though I was only just a teenager. Worse, I felt I would never have complete control over my destiny now that I was tied inextricably to my family’s immediate needs, but continuing into the longer term as well. My life had undergone significant change soon after the day in 1971 when my sister was born … a change that would unexpectedly impact my life from then on.
Thursdays meant a trip to the newsagent to purchase that week’s ‘New Musical Express’ and a dash back to my college room to read the issue cover-to-cover and then tackle the latest ‘NME crossword’. It was a weekly head-to-head contest between me and fellow Collingwood first-year student Keith Miller to prove our superior knowledge of popular music. I was no crossword fanatic. I had no competitive streak. However, I was sufficiently motivated to demonstrate there was one subject in which I had expertise, my university academic course and student life having quickly proven a major personal disappointment.
Both my friend Keith and I were fish out of water. We had both arrived at Durham University from state schools, me from Surrey and Keith from Essex. 95% of our fellow students had arrived from private schools and looked down their posh noses at us, just as they probably did their nannies, servants and chauffeurs [see blog]. We were invisible to them. We were not worth the time of day. They were loud, arrogant and domineering. We were the little people that they had been put on earth to lord it over. It must have proven a worse experience for Keith than for me. He appeared to be the only visible minority in our college of three hundred students. He was regularly ribbed by colleagues for having achieved a GCE certificate in ‘African Drumming’ at school.
Aside from my NME crossword years (1976-1978), I have never been a competitive person. In secondary school classes, I never shot my hand up in the air in order to prove to teachers or my mates how superior I must be. Graham Taylor, our Physical Education teacher, resented me because I had no interest in ‘winning’ at the ‘Games’ he forced upon us every Wednesday afternoon for seven years [see blog]. I tried to avoid his team sports. He once sent me to race in a Surrey County athletics championship where I demonstrated no interest in winning against other schools. My termly school reports criticised me for not participating more in class and not speaking up at the slightest opportunity. Was ‘taciturn’ an appropriate adjective for our headmaster to write about a boy whose results in many subjects were amongst the top five of his year of sixty students? Feeling under attack from such judgemental adults, I responded by engaging even less.
At the time, I failed to comprehend that my secondary school’s objective was not to turn its boy students into well rounded individuals, as experienced previously at my wonderful primary school on a Camberley council estate [see blog]. Although this grammar school operated within the state education sector, it emulated the British private school system, aiming to produce self-important ‘leaders’ who could confidently dominate any room they entered and shout loudly amongst their peers about their breeding and supposed superiority. In that endeavour, I was already a lost cause. It was not that I lacked self-confidence. One school report had even labelled me “a tower of strength”. It was just that I felt no need to wear my abilities loudly on my sleeve. Perhaps that was because my parents showed no interest in whether I performed well or badly at school. I was never called upon to show off at home that I was ‘clever’. Besides, I thought actions were supposed to speak louder than words. On that score, my term and exam results spoke for themselves. My motivation to do well came purely from inside me, not from my parents, family or peers.
At the end of my first year at Strode’s School, I was somewhat surprised to be awarded three School Prizes. As if to prove that British society was not founded on meritocracy, these book token prizes [see blog] were rarely given to students who had scored the highest examination or classwork results. Rather, they seemed to be determined by the whim of each subject teacher. This was proven by me being awarded the first-year ‘Religious Knowledge’ prize, despite having never read the Bible, having no belief in God and having attended church only once in my life [see blog]. During the first term of my second year, an event was held in the school hall to formally award boys the prizes they had won, dragging them onto the stage to receive a book token. It was called ‘Speech Day’ even though it was only the staff who made speeches. Parents were invited to watch their bright young things be acclaimed as ‘special’. That year, neither I nor my disinterested parents chose to attend.
One year later, things turned out different. I had been awarded no second-year School Prize. This outcome did not bother me. It merely confirmed my suspicion that the prize criteria were wholly subjective since my exam and classwork rankings in some subjects had improved over the previous year. Exactly how could I have achieved first place in Mathematics during the academic year but fail to be awarded that subject prize? Maybe the school was displeased with my demonstrated deficit of competitive spirit. Maybe me and my parents’ absence from last year’s ceremony had been grudgefully noted. Maybe the school had merely concluded that I was an ‘unworthy’ student as, during my remaining five years, I was awarded no prize.
The other difference that second year was that, despite my lack of prize, I attended Speech Day with my father. There was no compulsion for us to be present. I was confused that a father who took zero interest in his son’s education had unilaterally decided we both attend. I had explained to him that I was not receiving a prize that year but he remained firm. It felt very strange. This was the only occasion on which my father visited my school during my entire seven years there. He parked his ridiculously ostentatious American sports car [see blog] on the playground outside the main hall in which we sat together during a ceremony lasting several hours, me completely befuddled about why we were both there.
I had absolutely no inkling then that this one day would change the rest of my life. Not because of Speech Day. Not because of my school. Not because of me. Not even because of my father. Or even the silly car he had driven frighteningly fast and dangerously to and from the event. So what happened? The clue was in the absence of my mother that day at that event. Where was she and what was she doing?
To understand her absence, it proves necessary to go back in time thirteen years and 173 days to the occasion my mother gave birth to her first child in a semi-detached council house on the Old Dean Estate. I have no knowledge about the circumstances of that arrival because my mother refused to elucidate, except to accuse her husband of absenteeism because he was visiting a mistress due to give birth imminently to his child. Within months, my parents and their new baby were evicted for non-payment of rent, due to my father having unilaterally purchased an unaffordable car to impress his mistress. If my mother’s father had not bailed them out with accommodation, they would have become homeless.
Five years and 217 days later, my mother gave birth to her second child in Farnham Hospital, a facility Camberley (population 33,770) still lacked. During her absence, she entrusted childcare of her firstborn to her husband, despite him having never shown any paternal feelings for his offspring. Luckily, my mother’s parents now lived next door and ended up feeding and entertaining their grandson during his mother’s absence. Did her husband drive his son daily to the state infant school on Old Dean Estate he had started three months earlier, as asked? No, but he did warn his son not to admit this absenteeism to his mother when she returned a week later. Did he visit his wife in hospital? Not once. Was he busy with yet another mistress? Who knows.
Take a further leap forward in time to where my story started – Speech Day at my school in 1971 and the absence of my mother. Where was she? She was in hospital giving birth to her third child that day. My father would have done anything to avoid being alongside her in hospital, even if it meant him attending a function at my school for the first and last time. It proved convenient for him to be 21 miles and a 53-minute drive away from his wife on that day, armed with a suitably fatherly excuse, having demonstrated a sudden interest in my schooling. In retrospect, my two parents were already moving along divergent paths, that day merely widening the gulf between them and soon leading to the breakup of our now three-child family.
My mother had grown up during the War in a two-up, two-down suburban semi-detached house, sharing a bedroom with two older sisters in a loving working-class family. Together, the three children had shared homemade girly pastimes in an era before they had radio or television. They lived on a quiet residential street in a house with a large back garden, surviving the War with produce grown in their father’s well-maintained allotment at the top end of Barossa Road where he raised chickens. It had been an idyllic childhood, despite having to occasionally hide under the wooden dining table when the German bombers arrived to attack adjacent Sandhurst Royal Military Academy [see blog].
My father was raised in a household filled with anger and violence. His brutal father beat his wife and his two sons, for none of whom he ever demonstrated love or affection. He knocked his wife down the stairs which killed her. A significant part of my father’s attraction to my mother and her family was that they were everything that he was not. She had loving parents, she had attended grammar school, she was beautiful and radiated a youthful, confident optimism. He had left school at age fourteen with few prospects and was desperate to escape the hell of his parents’ home. When the couple eventually married, once my father returned from Army conscription to the Suez Canal, my mother’s father refused to attend their Registry Office ceremony, believing that his much-loved youngest daughter deserved a partner with better prospects from a less abusive family.
When my mother became pregnant the first time in 1957, she hoped to have a girl with whom she could relive all the girly activities she had enjoyed with her sisters. She was disappointed to give birth to a boy. She persevered anyway, teaching me to knit, to sew, to bake cakes in the kitchen with her and to cut out clothes patterns with pinking shears. She passed down to me her and her sisters’ 1930’s childhood books such as ‘Heidi’, ‘Black Beauty’ and ‘Anne of Green Gables’. But I showed no interest in dressing up, sculpting elaborate hair-do’s or playing with makeup. I was a disappointment. As the youngest of three sisters, she had never experienced a baby in her household. She had no idea how to raise a boy, so she left me to my own devices most of the time, failing to instruct me in personal hygiene [see blog] or the three R’s. Our home possessed few books, but I consumed cover-to-cover the huge piles of 1960’s women’s magazine titles my mother bought, teaching myself to read and write. Once old enough to walk out by myself, the nearby local municipal library in Knoll Road became my saviour [see blog].
Five years later, after my mother gave birth to another boy, her sense of disappointment was even more self-evident. She committed even less effort to raising him than she had her firstborn, allowing him to grow up barely literate or numerate. He ran away regularly from primary school, showed destructive/self-destructive, violent tendencies and barely spoke to his older brother, despite them sharing a bedroom for six years. Much later in life, he was treated for addiction and was divorced by his wife. In the words of the song [Epic EPC7632]:
“One child grows up to be somebody who just loves to learn. Another child grows up to be somebody who just loves to burn.”
Eight years later, my mother unexpectedly became pregnant for a third time. I learned this from hearing my parents arguing at night in their bedroom adjacent to mine. My mother wanted to keep the baby, hoping finally to have the girl she had always desired (there now being an 87% chance). My father was insisting she have an abortion. The arguments became more heated. Soon my mother refused to leave the house for a week due to a huge bruise across the right side of her face. On another occasion, she locked herself in the toilet, only for her husband to kick a hole in the wooden toilet door. The door remained that way for the next decade as a visual reminder of his violent behaviour.
My mother eventually won the argument and her third child, a girl, was born whilst I was sat with my father in the school hall, enduring Speech Day presentations. He took no interest in his newly arrived daughter nor, by extension, in her mother. Approaching the age of forty, he was riding a middle-age wave of selfish indulgence, fuelled by cash profits from dodgy property deals he was making with his new business partner, a local second-hand car dealer not afraid to employ mafia-style pressure tactics [see blog]. Flush with money for the first time since leaving school, he could at last satisfy his craving for fast sports cars, dinner parties, restaurant meals and foreign holidays. He took me with him on a flimsy pretext to Florida for a week, only to abandon me alone in a motel whilst he practiced a playboy lifestyle [see blog].
Within months, after increasingly unexplained and lengthening absences, my father walked away from his family altogether to pursue the hedonistic lifestyle he had evidently desired all along [see blog]. I did not miss him because he had played almost no role in my upbringing. He no longer had to pretend publicly that he loved his family. Instead, he decided to do everything possible to cause us pain and suffering, just as his parents had done to each other, to him and his brother. He now took zero responsibility for his former family, fighting in the courts not to provide financial support. He broke into our house and stole everything of value, including the car he had given my mother and most of her jewellery [see blog]. Our lives would never be the same.
During the months leading up to his departure, my father had been regularly playing on the living room stereo a vinyl single he had bought by The Fifth Dimension called ‘One Less Bell to Answer’ [Bell BLL1137] whose lyrics included:
“I only know that since he left My life’s so empty Though I try to forget It just can’t be done Each time the doorbell rings I still run I don’t know how in the world To stop thinking of him ‘Coz I still love him so I end each day the way I start out Crying my heart out”
Only in retrospect did I realise these words represented the pain my father had been planning for some time to inflict upon his wife. During the previous two decades, she had ignored his regular philandering. Now, having finally gained the daughter she had long desired, he was determined to make her pay. He secretly visited each of her relatives and friends to convince them that his wife had done something heinous that had forced him to leave her and their three children. Most ignored his pleas but some, notably my mother’s older sister Sheila, bought his lies and refused contact with my mother for decades [see blog]. The outcome was that my mother became isolated, lacking moral support she should have received from the people in Camberley she had known her entire life. Meanwhile, my father set up home on an affluent private estate with a runaway teenage bride who had lived only a few doors away from us [see blog].
My mother could not adjust to our changed circumstances. Until the day she died half a century later (or, more accurately, until the day my father died eight years before her), she continued to believe that her husband would one day knock on her front door and come back to her. He never did. Her father having disapproved so publicly of her marriage choice, she had tried to do everything to prove him wrong, even ignoring the mistresses my father had accumulated over many years and the unknown children he had sired. The remainder of my mother’s life was lived in a sad, darkened interregnum in which she awaited a resumption of her pre-1971 ‘happy family’ married lifestyle. It never happened.
Although her daughter was not yet one year old, my mother was forced to take two jobs to generate income to feed her family because her spiteful husband was paying nothing. Her full-time day job was as bookkeeper for British Car Auctions in Frimley. Her evening job was cleaning offices in Yorktown. Her retired parents, who stuck by her, looked after my baby sister during weekday daytimes. Year after year from that moment, all my mother seemed to do was work to try and make ends meet. Having lost her own car to her husband’s new mistress, she had to borrow her father’s 1963 Austin Cambridge car just to get to work. Fortunately, my eight-year-old brother’s school was within walking distance of our home.
Although she possessed the skills to administer her new single-parent life, the result of having previously been employed in bank and accounts offices, my mother now abdicated all responsibility for her affairs. Almost all of the mail she now received were bills, red reminders and threats of court action. Not only did she refuse to open them, she would stuff them all into a drawer in the living room, never to be retrieved. Out of sight, out of mind. Neither was this a temporary reaction to her struggling situation. Until the day she died half a century later, she refused to deal with any paperwork she received or was required to action. It was a blatant refusal to adapt to a life in which her household budgets and accounts needed to be balanced, paradoxically the very work she performed for her employer five days a week.
Not once did my mother ever ask me to take on the responsibility of managing her affairs. She could not have cared less. I realised that her strategy was irresponsible and would doubtless drive our family into disaster. Unopened letters stuffed into a drawer would inevitably lead to court actions, debt collectors and bailiffs. My mother would lose her jobs. We would lose our home. Me and my siblings would be placed into care. We would all have to change schools. Perhaps that was the exact outcome that my cruel father wanted. I was the oldest child of our family. I was clever. I had already received more formal education than any of our relatives. I was barely fourteen. By default, I had become the ‘head’ of the family, a role I had never wanted but which was now thrust upon me.
Within months of my attendance at my school’s Speech Day alongside my father, my whole world was turned upside down. My supposedly carefree teenage years and adolescence were taken away from me. I was suddenly a young adult. Never again would I observe my life as similar to that of my peers. I had responsibilities. Huge responsibilities. My own personal ambitions had to be subsumed to the struggle for mere survival of our family unit. There was nobody with whom I could share this responsibility or even explain the tasks I now had to do. My schoolfriends would never have understood. School staff were already unsympathetic towards me, having sent me home occasionally for wearing the wrong colour socks, the wrong colour shoes, slip-on’s instead of lace-ups and having hair touching my collar [see blog].
Events that took place on that one day, 7 October 1971, events over which I had no control would impact the entirety of my life. I did not realise it then. At the time, I thought I was simply doing ‘the right thing’ whilst those around me seemed hellbent on doing ‘the wrong thing’. I had no idea that a life of making small personal sacrifices as a teenager would lead to making bigger and bigger sacrifices as the years passed and end up stealing away so many opportunities to satisfy my own life.
After my father walked out and disowned his family, I could have just ignored the consequences and retreated into my own world, as my younger brother chose to do. But I was old enough and wise enough to understand the outcome of that route. Our circumstances would fall into irreparable disaster and we might all be split up and sent to children’s homes. Our mother might be imprisoned for unpaid debts. I decided to do my best to stop those disasters happening. Nobody else was there to help. It was me alone who had to try and keep us all together. So I tried.
In January 1985, I had arrived in Israel to work as a DJ on a radio station, but this was no ordinary radio. The studios of ‘The Voice of Peace’ were on a ship anchored permanently in the Mediterranean Sea [see blog]. Aware of my interest in cutting edge music, the station’s popular breakfast DJ Dave Asher (who had been living in Israel for some time) [see blog] played me a recent 12-inch single ‘Galbi’ by a young Israeli singer of Yemeni origin named Ofra Haza. It was a traditional Yemeni song, re-mixed and cut up into a state-of-the-art club tune that sounded to me like a new, exciting ‘Middle East meets West’ genre. I wanted to find out more, but the terrible winter storms and shortage of DJ staff meant that I was stuck working on the ship for the next three months.
Eventually, during my first shore leave, I visited the Tel Aviv office of the small independent record company ‘Hed Arzi’ that had produced the Ofra Haza single. They were baffled that a British DJ would be so interested in one of their worst selling record releases, and particularly one that seemed to have such minimal mainstream potential. They humoured me and let me sit at a desk in their office, penning handwritten letters to radio DJ’s and record labels that I knew back in the UK, sent by airmail along with the single and related album ‘Yemenite Songs’.
Within a month, I had received replies from John Peel at ‘BBC Radio One’ and Charlie Gillett at London’s market leader ‘Capital Radio’, both saying that they had played Ofra’s record on their shows and had received enquiries asking where the record could be purchased. During my next shore leave, I returned to Hed Arzi, whose staff were amazed that their song had been played on national radio in the UK. They introduced me to Ofra and her manager for the first time. I wrote again to several UK record labels and one of them, ‘Globestyle’ owned by ‘Ace Records’, was convinced sufficiently by the airplay to release both the single and the album [see blog].
I returned to the UK at the end of 1985 and spent the next two years trying to convince everyone I knew of Ofra’s talent. By 1987, I had given away so many copies of her records to music industry people that Ace Records’ Roger Armstrong said I would be given one last free box. By chance, I had recently been invited to attend a monthly staff meeting of London pirate station KISS FM (at the London School of Economics) [see blog] and, as a last resort, I distributed copies of Ofra’s records from this last box to some of the station’s DJs, mailed from my part-time job with ‘Rough Trade Records’ director Scott Piering. Simultaneously, I attended monthly meetings in a London pub of music industry personnel who created the new genre ‘world music’ and marketed it for the first time in the UK [see blog].
KISS FM DJ’s Jonathan More and Matt Black, recording together as ‘Coldcut’, had already enjoyed underground success with some highly original cut-up singles on their ‘Ahead Of Our Time’ label. They liked the Ofra Haza songs so much that they cut up one of them into their homemade remix of US rappers Eric B & Rakim’s latest single ‘Paid In Full’. ‘Island Records’ in the UK released this remix without seeking Eric B’s prior approval, and without clearing the Ofra Haza sample. By the end of 1987, the single had reached number 15 in the UK singles chart, giving Eric B his first British hit and earning significant royalties for the Israeli record company because a third of the track featured Ofra’s voice, a fact I knew because Roger Armstrong had asked me to time the recording with a stopwatch in order to negotiate his appropriate share of royalties from Island Records.
More than anything, the chart success of that Eric B remix stimulated huge public interest in Ofra Haza’s voice beyond the narrower market for the new ‘world music’ genre. In early 1988, I organised interviews for a promotional visit to the UK, shepherding Ofra Haza and her manager Bezalel Aloni to BBC Radio 1, the BBC World Service and London commercial radio stations. Ace Records re-issued Ofra’s ‘Im Nin Alu’ single, which quickly garnered radio airplay this time, despite it being sung in a strange, foreign language. However, the public demand for the single was so great that the independent label had difficulty fulfilling orders, so it licensed the track to ‘Warner Brothers/WEA’. After an initial meeting with the major label at which I passed on all the press coverage I had achieved to date, my direct involvement with Ofra Haza ended abruptly, just as she was invited back to the UK to perform on BBC1 TV show ‘Top of The Pops.’ I had asked Warner to keep me updated but it never did.
After the success of this single internationally, the Israeli record label invited me to London’s ‘Sarm West’ Studios, where the follow-up single ‘Shaday’ was being mixed. It was evident that none of the Warner Brothers personnel involved had any understanding of the unique charm of Ofra’s Yemeni music in the international marketplace. Ofra’s controlling manager was far too keen to turn her into a mainstream pop singer, which is exactly how the public perceived her in Israel. As a result, the follow-up single bombed and, sadly, it seemed then as if Ofra was consigned to be a one-hit wonder as a result of poor career guidance.
In 2000, I was shocked to learn of Ofra’s death at the age of 42 from AIDS-related organ failure. I emailed the family in Israel, asking to attend the funeral, but received no response. Two years later, an Israeli ‘Channel 2’ television film crew came to London and filmed an interview about my role in creating their country’s most successful international pop star [for 70-minute ‘The Life & Death of Ofra Haza’]. They had just filmed a similar interview with John Peel at his home, during which he impressed them by producing my handwritten letter that had accompanied the Ofra records I had initially sent him from Israel seventeen years earlier. The interviewer asked me if I had made a fortune from ‘discovering’ Ofra Haza for the international market. I laughed. All I had ever received was one cheque for £200 from Ace Records in 1988 to reimburse my expenses for taxis, refreshments and food during Ofra’s initial London promotional visit. Neither Hed Arzi, nor Ace Records, nor Haza’s estate have communicated with me since.
Ofra’s incredible voice lives on through the music she recorded, although I am always reminded of the parts of her life that had been unbelievably tragic. The crucial roles of the late John Peel and Charlie Gillett in her international success should not be forgotten. Ofra Haza’s music arrived in the Western world at a time when the public welcomed sounds that challenged their expectations. We are musically much the poorer for the loss of Ofra, and of John and Charlie, from our world.
[Green Productions in Israel has just completed a video documentary ‘One Song’ in Hebrew that narrates the story in detail for the first time of how ‘In Nin Alu’ became an unlikely pop chart hit.]
July 1989. I had just broken up with my girlfriend of three years, after a particularly bitter confrontation that had shocked me profoundly. Since Easter, London’s rail and underground system had suffered a series of one-day strikes that had brought the city to a complete standstill once a week. On returning home one evening to the flat we shared, I had found a note informing me that me she was staying overnight with a friend because she was working the late shift in her job and thought the following day’s strike would prevent her from getting home.
However, that evening, I happened to notice that the packet of condoms stored in the bathroom cabinet had been disturbed and, on inspection, I found that several of them were missing. When she returned the next day, I confronted my girlfriend with this evidence and she admitted she had spent the night with a work colleague who was still in his teens, and with whom she had planned to have sex using my condoms. Later, I discovered that my girlfriend had been harbouring sexual desires towards this work colleague for at least the previous year of our relationship, and that she had specifically asked her employer to change her shift pattern so that the two of them could spend the night together.
I was outraged that she had deceived and cheated on me so blatantly. I told her that our relationship ended there and then. However, she refused to move out of the flat that we shared as joint tenants, so the two of us were now living together in a horrible atmosphere. I no longer wanted anything to do with her, but she refused to get out and go her separate way. It felt as if a complete stranger had suddenly invaded my living space, so I tried to stay out of the flat as much as possible, since I could no longer trust her to tell me the truth about anything.
December 1989. I bought a last-minute return air ticket to The Gambia for £199 and spent three weeks there, enjoying a fascinating and restful time, lazing in the sun on a beautiful sandy beach. The holiday proved to be the ideal antidote to both the pressures of the KISS FM licence application [see blog] and the continuing antagonism I was suffering from my former girlfriend, who was still refusing to move out of our flat.
Blearily reaching home, I noticed that the flat’s front door no longer seemed to have a curtain across the inside of its window. I turned the key, went inside, and realised that many other things were missing as well. In the kitchen, the wooden dining table had vanished, the saucepan stand and vegetable rack had gone, and there was very little cutlery to be found. There was a note in my former girlfriend’s handwriting that I did not need to read to understand what had happened. She had finally left the flat during the three weeks I had been away, but she had taken much of the contents of our home with her.
I cautiously opened the door to the spare room, to find that shelf units, a filing cabinet and a writing desk had gone. In the bedroom, the double bed was still there, probably because it was too large to remove easily as I had assembled it within the room. More shelving had gone and two bedside tables were no longer there. I was mightily relieved to find that my stereo system and record collection looked untouched. Then, opening the door to the living room, I was amazed to find that the entire room had been totally stripped bare. There was no longer a carpet, curtains or furniture – not even a lampshade. The room was completely empty, the only remaining fittings being the curtain track and a bare light bulb swinging from the ceiling in the centre of the room.
I was far too tired after the long journey, and too pleased with my restful holiday, to immediately become angry about the situation. This flat had been the first unfurnished rented accommodation I had taken in London, and I had invested all my savings in redecorating the place and purchasing all its contents. For the first few months living there, my lack of funds had left the place almost bare and I had slept on a mattress on uncarpeted floorboards. Now, most of the household items I had built up over the last few years had gone. I returned to the kitchen and decided to read the note from my former girlfriend. It started: “I have moved out. Things that were jointly purchased, divided as follows …” Then it listed several household items. However, the list bore little relation to the items that had disappeared from the flat, and the note quickly became irrational and bitter: “I have taken the kitchen table since you always wanted to chuck it out.” Predictably, she had not left me either a forwarding address or phone number.
There was no fresh milk in the flat which might have enabled me to find solace in a much-needed cup of tea, so I crawled into bed, tried to forget about the loss of so many of the flat’s contents, and fell asleep. It was late at night, already early Saturday morning, and I realised that I would have to spend the next day sorting out exactly what I had lost and what I was going to do about the situation.
It was only just daylight when I suddenly realised that the phone was ringing. It seemed to take me ages to drag my weary body out of bed, as the phone continued to ring long and hard. Who on earth would want to phone me at this early hour on a Saturday morning [see blog]? I toyed with the notion that it might be my former girlfriend, who seemed determined to inflict as much hurt on me as possible, despite our relationship having ended abruptly through her own infidelity and lies.
The first thing I needed to do was to secure the flat properly, since my former girlfriend still had two sets of keys for the front door. The last thing I wanted her to do was to return while I was out and remove anything further that might take her fancy. Unfortunately, opening the door to the hallway cupboard, I found that all the useful household tools had already gone with her. There was no ladder, no iron, no ironing board, no painting implements and, most importantly, no screwdrivers, chisels, hacksaws or drill.
That day, and during the months that followed, I experienced the same disappointment on many occasions when I looked around the flat for things I used to own. Just when I needed a particular implement for some household maintenance or repair job, I would find it missing and have to buy a replacement at the local hardware shop. To add insult to injury, my former girlfriend had even taken the £24 do-it-yourself manual we had purchased to help us maintain the flat.
That Saturday, once I had purchased a new set of screwdrivers, I set about removing and replacing the front door locks to the flat. My next-door neighbour emerged to find out what was necessitating all the hammering and chiselling on a Saturday morning. I explained that my former girlfriend had removed much of the flat’s contents while I had been away. He told me he had seen her and some helpers spend the better part of a day shifting everything down four flights of stairs and into a large van parked outside. To him, it had simply looked as if she was moving out. Of course, he had had no idea who owned most of the goods that were being carried away.
January 1990. After my former girlfriend moved out of the flat we had shared, I now had to meet the monthly rent payment of £280 by myself. She had also left me several bills to settle – the quarterly telephone bill now due was £138, the highest amount I had ever had to pay, and the quarterly electric bill of £66 was also due. I owed £572 Income Tax to Inland Revenue for the 1987/88 tax year, and my season ticket for daily train travel to the KISS FM office in Finsbury Park was costing me £68 a month.
During the previous month, I had been forced to spend considerable sums replacing necessary household items that had disappeared along with my former girlfriend. A kitchen table, crockery, cutlery, an iron, an ironing board, lampshades and curtains were amongst the items I had already bought. The living room was still completely bare, exactly as my ex-partner had left it. Until now, I had had neither the time nor the money to even start replacing its former contents. If I was now not going to be paid at all for my work for KISS FM in January, another broken promise, I would certainly not have the means to buy the remaining household essentials.
Weeks later, I received a letter from my landlord concerning its planned renovations to the block of flats. I went into what remained of my home office to check the appropriate suspended file in my four-drawer filing cabinet, only to find it was empty. My girlfriend must have taken the rental contract with her. But why? It was I who had found the flat advertised in the ‘Willesden Chronicle’, I who had made an appointment with the landlord, I who had been interviewed, I who had provided references and I who had signed the contract. Just when I needed to check the fine print of MY document, it had been stolen away.
One Saturday, I walked into a record shop in Harrow and found my former girlfriend there, casually checking out albums. Although I remained so angry about her behaviour that I could have balled her out, I realised that my immediate priority must be to respond appropriately to the landlord’s letter. I asked her why she had stolen the rental contract, explained that I needed it for urgent correspondence with the landlord and asked her to return it. She refused point blank. All I could do was storm off.
One weekday evening, I returned from work by London Underground and, alighting at West Harrow station, I spied my former girlfriend disembark from the same train ahead of me on the platform. I followed her at a distance as she walked out the station and entered the front door of a large Georgian terraced house on Vaughan Road only a short distance away. It made me wonder if her secret plan all along had been to persuade her wealthy parents to buy this house for her and her new teenage lover so that she could then fill it with the household items stolen from the flat we had shared. She seemed to have been leading like a gypsy queen in a fairytale.
For a very long time, her betrayal shook my trust in people to the foundation. Neither was this the first such occasion. After a similarly lengthy relationship during my early 20’s in Durham, my then girlfriend had woken up one morning and announced unexpectedly and without explanation that she would be moving out of our shared home [see blog]. You begin to question whether there must be something wrong with you when your partners repeatedly and unexpectedly desert you.
The scarily personal aspect of my latest girlfriend’s actions was that their cruelty copied so precisely the blueprint of betrayal and inexplicably hateful revenge inflicted upon me by my own father seventeen years previously. He had walked out on his family when I was fourteen to shack up with a teenage girlfriend, leaving my mother to raise three children on her own [see blog]. Not only did he sever all links with his offspring, he then refused to pay for our upkeep and celebrated my sixteenth birthday by convincing Farnham court that day that my maintenance payment be reduced to £1 per year [see blog]. Not only did he starve his family financially, he repeatedly broke into our home and took away almost everything we owned [see blog]. Until the day he died, I never forgave him for stealing my treasured vinyl records purchased with pocket money. You try and recover from such a betrayal … and then the same thing happens all over again.
Girl, there’s a star in the book of liars by your name.
Since we last spoke before Xmas, I have made a move …. to Phnom Penh. I am writing this sitting on a hotel balcony overlooking the Mekong River. How did this happen? Nearly two years ago, when I was living in Brighton, I was interviewed by the BBC World Service Trust for a job managing their projects in Africa and Asia. I didn’t get the job but they said they would get back to me if something suitable came up. I heard nothing more until the week before Xmas, when a message was left on my voicemail asking me to call the BBC office about a possible consultancy job in the New Year. Apparently, they had contacted Owen [Leach, former colleague at Star TV India and Metromedia International Inc.] to track down where I was now, he had told them about my job at the Radio Authority, which they found was closed, so they tried Ofcom. They wanted me to go to Cambodia as early as possible in 2004 to support their project there that was partnered with three Phnom Penh radio stations. Could I spare two or three months? [see blog]
Only a week earlier, my line manager at Ofcom (who too transferred from the Radio Authority) had told me that I would have no work to do during the first quarter of the year and that “there is nothing for you to contribute to” with regard to Ofcom’s strategic review of the whole radio licensing process. So I asked if I could take unpaid leave to do the BBC work. My request was refused. I asked if I could take paid leave to do the work, since I had eight weeks of holiday accrued that had to be taken by year-end 2004. My request was refused. Suddenly, I was told that there were essential tasks that I would be needed to work upon during the first quarter of the year. I was also told that, when the radio licensing regime restarted in the second quarter, it would be essential for me to be there. So when could I take the vacation to which I was entitled? I received no answer. I thought long and hard about the options open to me. I had applied for all sorts of jobs internally with Ofcom that were more suited to my skills (in departments dealing with audience research, market intelligence, policy & strategy), but no one had offered me anything. The prospect of spending at least three months sitting at my desk doing nothing (just like my job at the Radio Authority) whilst the new Ofcom radio licensing strategy was being decided by others did not appeal to me. I had already spent a year doing almost nothing. So I quit. [see blog]
A week later, I was heading for Cambodia. I arrived here on Tuesday of last week without even had a meeting with the BBC World Service in London. They sent me the airline tickets, a contract and a certificate of health insurance. I am here initially for two months, but which is likely to be extended to three months. They are paying for my hotel bill at a very nice, newly built ‘boutique’ hotel owned by two French businessmen. My room is huge. The hotel has wireless internet access and a modern restaurant. They have contracted me as a consultant (their first, so the contract is numbered WST 001), but the manager in London says that, if the work is successful, I should get further work out of the BBC. He has been very honest and admitted that I am helping them out of a large hole. The project is paid for by the UK government Department for International Development (DfID) who want results by their year-end this April before they will renew funding for 2004/5. My job is to produce the required results. The pay isn’t great (£750/week + US$100/week pocket money) which they have admitted, but they say they are eking it out of the existing budget, as a consultant was not budgeted for.
The BBC set up an office here last year (there is no BBC Phnom Penh correspondent) which now employs around 40 people. It is in a beautiful colonial villa next door to the British Embassy. It has everything you could want – drivers, computers, mobile phones, photocopiers, etc and the essential air conditioning. There are several UK staff here – the project manager is an ex-‘Panorama’ filmmaker, the head of radio is an ex-World Service studio manager, the head of TV was executive producer of ‘EastEnders’. I had no briefing before I left as to what I was expected to do here, so I have spent this weekend reading all the BBC documents about the project, and now have a better idea. The BBC is shifting its strategy from simply making the odd programme or series to be broadcast in developing countries towards a more holistic approach of training staff of existing radio stations in developing markets (i.e. Cambodia) to be market leaders. But the BBC doesn’t have any staff who can do that because existing staff are used to having huge BBC resources available to them to achieve even simple objectives. Small-scale cheap commercial radio is simply not their forte. Even a simple phone-in, in BBC terms, is thought to need a staff of at least 5 full-time people for a single weekly show. The BBC has signed contracts with three stations here to deliver a mixture of pre-recorded spots, phone-in shows and management training (combined with hardware purchase) that will make these stations market leaders. There are 18 stations in Phnom Penh. My job is the training. Money is almost no object. DfID has given the BBC £3.3m for 3 years, not only for radio but also for the production of a two episode/week soap for TV. [see blog]
Phnom Penh isn’t as basic as I expected. True, there is no public transport or taxis, but every fifth vehicle is a 4-wheel drive and there are internet cafes on every corner. Although it’s the winter, it is very hot and dusty here, particularly in the middle of the day when the city closes down for a daily two-hour siesta. There are fewer shops than India and no corner convenience stores. I have just found the nearest supermarket to my hotel this morning, which is almost a mile away, but was surprised to find it took credit cards. There are no ATM’s in Cambodia. Everything is denominated here in US dollars as the local currency is worthless. The city is filled with Westerners as there are so many aid projects here of one sort or another. There is a daily English-language newspaper and an English radio station (‘Love FM’), despite the fact that very few Cambodians speak English. All shop signs and road signs are in Khmer and English because of the sheer number of aid workers here. The city is laid out in the Parisian style by the French with wide boulevards (though the traffic travels in both directions on both sides of the street) and vast gardens that stretch down to the river. Lots of Buddhist temples everywhere. Not so much outright poverty as Mumbai, but then Phnom Penh is a small city and there is no apparent rural-to-urban drift. Most people that survived Pol Pot lived in the countryside and stayed there. [see blog]
Anyway, enough of me. Let me know how things are going. I have intermittent wireless internet access at the hotel, and more reliable internet access at the office. If your itinerary passes this end of the world, please drop in. I’m sitting here eating mince pies (made in Australia) that I bought from the supermarket and thinking about ordering a pizza delivery tonight. Sometimes I wonder if I am really in Cambodia at all (although the endless karaoke phone-in shows on all radio stations remind me that I am not somewhere ‘normal’) [see blog]. Our only worry at the moment is that King Sihanouk has left for China to have a serious operation and, if he were not to survive, there is no succession plan in place and the likelihood of a people’s revolution because parliament has never been recalled since the last election. Oh, and the chicken flu that has arrived here Friday from Vietnam and Thailand. Apart from that, things are fine.
FIRST YEAR. I had landed in a ‘one-bookshop town’. The lone academic book retailer in Durham City was bizarrely named ‘SPCK’, aka the ‘Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge’ founded in 1698 by English clergyman Thomas Bray. Naturally, it was packed with books about religion. If you desired a tome documenting the life of Saint Cuthbert on the island of Lindisfarne, then Bob was definitely your uncle. However, if you wanted books to study more mundane contemporary subjects, you were dispatched to considerably shorter shelves at the rear of the premises or up on the first floor.
The Durham University economics department had given me the booklist for my first year. I rushed to SPCK the same day and found that none of the required books were in stock. Could I order them? I was told it would take at least three months for delivery, maybe longer. By then, I would be almost half way through my first year. The same booklist had been given to almost a hundred other freshers because first-year economics turned out to be a ‘unit’ that could be studied as a ‘minor’ alongside ‘major’ subjects. Out of the university’s population of four thousand, a hundred students must all have been chasing the same required materials. Despite this, SPCK staff had gazed at my list as if it was the first time they had seen anything like it.
I visited the university library on Palace Green, next to the hugely imposing cathedral, and looked through the dozens of well-thumbed index cards stored in banks of long drawers. Though multiple copies of the books I needed were catalogued, they all proved to be absent from the relevant Dewey Decimal shelves. I had to fill out handwritten triplicate forms to request they be reserved for me once they were returned to the library. When might that be? The librarian said it was impossible to tell because borrowers often kept books well beyond their return date and there was no way to force them back. Fines were imposed but students simply paid them in absentia of sanctions. Library staff had no suggestions about how I could obtain academic books compulsory for the subject I had arrived to study.
Then I recalled that, whilst attending the ‘Societies Day’ for freshers held in the concrete brutalist student union building, Dunelm House, I had noticed signs for a bookshop. I returned there and found at the end of a long corridor a large, high-ceiling room stacked with second-hand books. The economics section turned out to be small and useless. The shop’s stock bore no relation to academic need. It was merely a marketplace where students could sell books they no longer needed for a few pence. I browsed the other sections and stumbled across an unknown book from 1964 titled ‘Understanding Media’ by someone called Marshall McLuhan. It was the first academic book purchase that spoke to my passion for radio, broadcasting and media. However, having failed to discover a university offering such a degree course, I had had to instead choose ‘economics’ as it was my best subject at school.
I took McLuhan’s book to the checkout where a tiny woman in her fifties checked the price on the inside cover and charged me. She took my cash and placed it on the little shelf above the drawer of her cash register, joining piles of coins already assembled in the same place. I asked for a receipt, as was my habit, but she said it was not possible. Not only did it appear strange that she had not put my cash in the cash register, but neither had she rung up my purchase. I understood straight away that her actions were, er, wrong. Having been required to help run my father’s business for a decade [see blog], I knew that every financial transaction had to be recorded on the ‘till roll’ of a cash register and then reconciled at the end of the day with the money in the drawer. The equation is: cash in till minus float must equal daily till roll. Many childhood evenings had been spent sat around our tiny kitchen table doing these precise tasks for the bookkeeping my mother brought home from her workplace [see blog].
During that first year in Durham, I revisited the Dunelm House bookshop dozens of times, never finding the economics books I sought, but secretly observing the same elderly shop manager when students either bought or sold books. She did occasionally ring up some of these transactions on her cash register, though the majority followed the pattern of my initial book purchase, neither rung up on the cash register, nor the money deposited within. Beside the till, I would see her write in biro the value of each covert transaction in a tiny notebook. These actions were all being accomplished in plain sight within a bustling shop. Evidently, nobody must ever have challenged her as to why she was operating such a system.
Maybe I am too observant for my own good, but it was self-evident to me that she was ‘on the take’. After the shop closed at the end of each day, all she had to do was total that day’s transactions written in her notebook and walk out with that same amount of cash, in the knowledge that the till roll would reconcile with the cash in the cash register. It was the simplest retail scam and, being the only person employed in the shop, the easiest to pull off. There were no debit card or credit card transactions to confuse the issue. What perplexed me was that nobody else had seemed to notice what she was doing day in day out.
I sailed through that first year using a ring binder of fulsome notes I had made at school for economics A-level and so passed the Durham exam in June without ever having found the requisite texts on my booklist. This was a testimony to the abilities of my school economics teacher, Mr Hodges [see blog]. However, I only just scraped a pass on my economic history paper, having opted not to study history at school because my brain proved unable to learn and recite the long lists of dates, names and locations that the subject required. My first year at Durham was immensely disappointing because I had learnt absolutely nothing that I did not already know about economics. Furthermore, my student life there had been nothing like I had anticipated a university would be.
After the end of the final term, I remained in Durham a few weeks to help the student editor of the 1977 Durham Student Handbook, Tony Jenkins, who had asked me to prepare articles for inclusion in the publication, ready to be sent for printing at City Printers in nearby Chester-Le-Street. Just as I was about to leave Durham to start my regular holiday job working in the bowels of the Associated Examining Board office in Aldershot, I received via internal mail the carbon copies of request slips I had filled out eight months earlier at the university library, informing me that the course books I had requested had finally been returned. I failed to comprehend how a Durham undergraduate was meant to study and learn if they were unable to obtain the necessary books.
SECOND YEAR. Durham had been the only university not offering a student radio station to which I had applied through UCCA. Despite having received unconditional offers from Warwick, Lancaster, Keele and Loughborough, I chose Durham because I was told it had a better ‘reputation’ for future job prospects. To console myself at its lack of opportunities to practice radio, at the start of my first year I had volunteered at the student newspaper ‘Palatinate’, despite having never previously written anything for publication. I enjoyed working in its small office in Dunelm House, though it had proven a culture shock to be surrounded by loud, brash upper-class students who dominated the editorial team [see blog]. My skills were uniquely practical because, unlike my posh peers, I could already type copy quickly and accurately on an IBM Golfball typewriter, plus I had experience in design and layout from working on my father’s architectural plans. When the newspaper editor post was advertised in my third term, I stood for election but was terribly disappointed at the student council meeting that my candidacy was not supported by outgoing incumbent George Alagiah. Evidently, I did not possess the ‘right stuff’ that oozed from him and his posh team. Having invested so much time and skills within the student publication, I made the difficult decision to walk away entirely.
Instead, from the beginning of my second year, I volunteered to attend the Finance Committee of Durham Students’ Union [DSU] where I was soon appointed ‘secretary’, taking minutes of weekly meetings and preparing its agendas. The committee was chaired by Kate Foster, the Union’s full-time sabbatical ‘Deputy President (Finance)’ with whom I quickly developed a good working relationship. Foster was a friendly, quietly confident introvert, the opposite of the ‘media types’ who had dominated the student newspaper. My knowledge of accounts and business gained from working for my parents from such an early age proved relevant and useful in understanding the Union’s financial issues. Unexpectedly, none of my first-hand knowledge of real-world finance was being developed by the highly theoretical and dull economics course I was studying [see blog]. Worse for my academic success, I had no better luck in obtaining the requisite books cited by the second-year reading list than I had experienced in my initial year.
In the third term of my second year, I shared my long-held observations about the practices in the Student Union’s second-hand bookshop with Foster, who was ultimately responsible for ‘DSU Services’. We both stood in the bookshop and observed the woman at the till openly taking money from students but not ringing it up on the cash register. Kay must have been so used to operating in this way that she had no qualms about anybody observing her ‘skimming’ of the shop’s revenues. Foster agreed that this employee’s behaviour was totally unacceptable. After questioning, the woman was sacked immediately. Until a replacement manager could be appointed, the bookshop was manned/womaned by student volunteers.
I felt no guilt about my role in getting Kay sacked. I had no qualms about this elderly woman losing her job. Yes, the majority of Durham University students she had served in the bookshop came from families that probably had more money than sense. But Kay was no ‘Robin Hood’ character redistributing her customers’ wealth to the poor. She had stolen the Student Union’s earnings for herself. The amounts might have appeared minor, compared to most middle- and upper-class white-collar crimes which, ironically, were more likely to have been committed by the families of her customers. But during the years that she worked in this job, she must have accumulated significant sums tax-free. Not enough to buy a yacht, certainly, but sufficient to take some nice vacations and purchase new three-piece suites.
Since that day when, at twenty, I was involved in my first sacking (of a woman who would have been almost three times my age), one mystery has remained unsolved in my mind. Though I never learnt when the Union’s bookshop first opened, I do know that the Dunelm House building opened in 1966 (with a concert by the Thelonius Monk Quartet to whose music, by remarkable coincidence, I am listening whilst writing this). It appeared to me that Kay might have worked alone in that bookshop for at least a decade. How many students had passed through that shop during that time. Tens of thousands? How many ‘Deputy President (Finance)’ officers before Kate Foster had managed Kay’s employment during all those years. At least ten? Yet none of those students who bought or sold a book and must have witnessed what Kay was doing at her cash register ever seemed to conclude that something inherently ‘wrong’ and ‘unlawful’ was taking place?
Only after having arrived at Durham did I discover that 95% of its students had come from private schools. My new environment where I was surrounded by ‘affluent’ people was a shock for which I had not been prepared. They behaved like nothing I had seen before. They already seemed to know each other, they moved in ‘brigades’ that were named things like ‘green wellies’, ‘god squad’ and ‘rah-rahs’ and they ignored anyone who was evidently not ‘one of them’. You would never have found any of these privileged offspring working behind the cash register of a shop as Kay had done for years. Neither did they feel the need to understand how accounts or business functioned. Their families employed accountants to handle such grunt work, even as some still employed servants in their grand homes. None of them apparently had the faintest notion that the working class ‘townie’ taking their cash in the Dunelm House bookshop was so obviously stealing part of it.
THEN & NOW. I am reminded of a more recent incident from 2022 when then UK prime minister Rishi Sunak staged a public relations stunt at a petrol station where he filled his car with petrol. He attempted to pay at the cash desk by placing his debit card under the barcode reader, instead of the payment reader, evidently having never previously made a ‘contactless’ payment. Then it transpired that the modest red Kia car he had filled with petrol was not his but belonged to an employee of the petrol station. Had he even ever filled his own (unseen) luxury car with petrol before? As ever, the privileged betray themselves by attempting to demonstrate mundane tasks they have never HAD to do themselves.
It might be imagined that my own experience of class divergence at Durham University half a century ago must belong to a bygone era. Surely, ‘things’ have moved on since then? Mmmmmm. But perhaps it has always been, and will always be, this way. The privileged class has always run Britain, has always controlled opportunities for themselves and they are hardly going to sacrifice glittering outcomes to which they feel entitled to help the rest of us who have no access or right to their immense resources and social connections. We only inhabit their world on sufferance. Durham has always been a ‘finishing school’ for posh kids not clever enough to get into Oxbridge, where they can continue the ‘fun’ they enjoyed at their private schools, find a suitable wife from their own class and bag a lucrative job as a barrister, politician, newspaper editor or some such [see blog].
Back in 1968, a letter from Ian S White of Durham’s (all-male) Grey College was published in the student newspaper Palatinate under the heading ‘Elitist Students?’ It criticised “the elitism of so many students, the feeling that they are somehow special and that they must not therefore associate with the ‘townies’. […] At the moment, the will, on the part of the University, does not seem to be present.”
That ‘will’ for change within the university was always a pipe dream. From the time in 1963 when Durham demerged from Newcastle University, it was purposefully designed“to provide for the North of England a Collegiate University, one in which the undergraduate experience would be essentially the same, though simpler (and less expensive) than that afforded by Oxford and Cambridge in the South.” This strategy was doggedly pursued from 1963 until his death in 1984 by ex-Army university registrar Ian Graham who“sought out also a large number [of students] whose names were known to him through his acquaintances in the schools or among previous generations of students.” Graham excelled at populating ‘his’ university with this old (private) school tie/old boy network that would eventually span generations of Britain’s most elite and privileged dynasties. [see blog]
What about after 1984? Whilst seeking a photo online of the DSU bookshop, I accidentally stumbled across a 2024 article in Palatinate by English student Stella Fenwick:
“When I arrived in Durham, I was faced with the fact that, for half of the year, this little northern city is transformed into a cacophony of London accents, and vastly different educational backgrounds compared to anyone I had met before. […] Though we may relish the prestige of being second to Oxbridge, we must confront the disproportionate number of privately-educated students accepted to these universities. […] We are promised by novels and shows that we will ‘find ourselves’ at university, but for many this moment never comes. The broken promise, which we believe is broken only by ourselves, leaves us feeling inferior to the people that have experienced Durham in the Instagram-able, Oxford-like way.”
It is simultaneously so sad and so outrageous that the experience of ‘higher education’ for us non-privileged students, who should benefit from it the most, still remains tainted at Durham by the behaviours and attitudes of the privileged elite who have always overwhelmingly dominated university cohorts.
I imagine that, had I not intervened, Kay might have continued working in that bookshop and stealing cash until the day she dropped dead … impervious because, amazingly, both her student managers and her student clientele had absolutely no clue how the day-to-day world of commerce functions below their own rarefied strata of British society.
The UK commercial radio industry has grown dramatically since the first station launched in 1973. The history of the industry can usefully be divided into two chapters:
1. 1973 to 1990
At the beginning of this period, local commercial radio stations were opened only in the UK’s biggest cities and then, in the 1980’s, new stations were launched in smaller cities and in largely rural counties. The regime was characterised by the word ‘monopoly’, as only one commercial station was licensed in each location (London was the only exception, with two stations licensed with very different formats). Each station broadcast its programmes simultaneously on the AM and FM wavebands, enabling it to reach the maximum possible audience in its coverage area. Each station’s success depended upon its ability to attract listeners away from national and local BBC stations, and its ability to attract advertising to the new radio medium and away from competitors such as the local press and regional television.
Listening figures to local commercial stations were generally very high. They were new, exciting and offered something more local and less stuffy than BBC stations. Because each local station was a separate local company, run by a local Board and financed by local shareholders, each station cultivated its ‘localness’ to the maximum in order to attract listeners. London’s ‘Capital Radio’ was a prime example of the success such a strategy could have. Using the slogan ‘In Tune With London’, every day the station used its converted red double-decker bus to visit a different London location, handing out stickers and leaflets, as well as offering listeners the opportunity to meet presenters and request songs. These ‘personal contact’ strategies paid enormous dividends and generated substantial loyalty between listeners and their local station. By the 1980’s, they were supplemented by community outreach projects and charity fundraising marathons. ‘Capital Radio’ had a JobCentre branch and a flat share information service in its foyer [see blog], which became young Londoners’ first means of finding accommodation in the city.
By the end of the 1980’s, local commercial radio was a big success with listeners and had developed a loyal following across two generations of listeners, giving it substantial audience figures across a wide variety of ages. Up and down the country was a range of fiercely individualistic, quirky stations, each with their own name, each with their own ‘star’ presenters, and each adopting their own idiosyncratic music format. By now, each had woven itself into the fabric of its community and was as much a part of local life as the town’s football team or the local bakery chain.
The one aspect of local commercial radio that proved problematic was stations’ inability to surpass their 2% share of total UK advertising expenditure. This percentage stubbornly refused to grow, even during times of an advertising boom and radio became known within the advertising industry as the ‘2% medium’. It was viewed as an ‘extra’ to be added to media campaign plans in times of boom, but quickly struck off when the economy was not so good. As a result, advertising revenues fluctuated enormously during downturns in the economic cycle and one local station was even forced into liquidation.
Radio’s main problems in attracting national advertising were:
• Even all the stations added together did not cover the whole UK
• Because each station was independently owned, buying a campaign on all existing stations was a labour-intensive task
• Station advertising rates and packages varied hugely, more dependent upon stations’ ability to extract such prices from local advertisers than any standard cost per thousand
• Station formats varied as much as their names, so that some stations delivered considerably older or more female-orientated audiences than others.
Because national advertising was so problematic, the majority of advertising sold on local commercial stations was derived from local businesses. By the late 1980’s, local radio had proved its effectiveness at marketing local products to local listeners, and a bond had been forged between local business owners and the local sales teams of stations that was the economic lifeline of these broadcasters.
At the same time, by the late 1980’s, complacency started to infiltrate local radio that resulted directly from stations’ lack of competition for listeners and lack of competition for local advertisers. Stations started to work less hard than they used to in order to please both their audience and their local business community. The government’s regulator released stations from having to fulfil many of their community obligations. Instead of seeing that work as an intrinsic part of their loyalty-building strategy, stations such as ‘Capital Radio’ closed their Community Department overnight [see blog]. At the same time, stations had their eye on merging with nearby stations to increase profitability, or arranging stock market flotations to generate capital for acquisitions. Several stations diversified into all sorts of businesses from theatres to restaurants, seeing themselves as ‘entertainment’ rather than purely ‘radio’ companies. In the 1980’s, anything that involved making money seemed a good idea.
For the first time in its history, the late 1980’s saw ‘Capital Radio’ suffering declining audiences and, like other local commercial stations, it had no idea what to do about the problem. It had only ever competed against the BBC for audiences and, only then, back in its very early days. Since then, it had always taken its audience for granted and simply presumed that listeners would never turn to any other station. All the local stations still enjoyed a monopoly over commercial radio advertising in their patch. It was something they felt they had a right to. The 1980’s economy was booming. Everyone was getting rich quick.
2. 1990 to now
The existing radio stations received their first major shock when the regulator suddenly licensed a range of ‘incremental’ stations in areas that already had existing local stations. This was the first time that the so-called ‘heritage’ stations had ever faced competition from newcomers. For example, in London, ‘Capital Radio’ lost audience straight away to ‘Melody Radio’ (targeting older people), ‘KISS FM’ (young people), ‘Jazz FM’ (wealthy middle-aged people) and ‘Choice FM’ (the Afro-Caribbean community). Suddenly, the audience that ‘Capital’ had taken for granted for so long was deserting it in droves for stations that sounded new, fresh, innovative and in touch with London, something that ‘Capital’ had done less and less of in recent years.
The second shock came when the regulator licensed three national commercial radio stations, a full thirty years after local commercial stations had been introduced. The industry had been arguing for years that it could never break through the 2% barrier (of all advertising spend) unless businesses and agencies were able to offer clients a proper ‘national’ opportunity to book a single campaign across the whole UK. New national commercial stations could offer such a deal and give the existing local radio stations a chance to share in radio’s enhanced visibility. As a compromise, the new stations were deliberately introduced in such a way so as not to impact local commercial radio audiences too greatly. The national ‘popular music’ station was to be confined to the poor-quality AM waveband, while only a minority-interest music station would be allowed the coveted national FM slot.
The third shock came when, having seen the success achieved by some of the specialist music stations that were part of the ‘incremental’ experiment, the regulator decided to roll out a programme of many more new local stations in more areas with existing ‘heritage’ stations. Thus, the 1990’s heralded the biggest and fastest expansion of radio stations the UK had ever seen, immediately after a period of relatively slow industry growth in the 1980’s. The shock of moving from a stagnant period of complacency to suddenly being immersed in a highly competitive situation where they had to fight for both listeners and advertisers proved a wake-up call for many local stations. What followed still has a considerable impact on the radio landscape of today. The radio industry underwent a fundamental re-structuring that included:
a. The emergence of radio groups
A limited amount of consolidation had occurred during the 1980’s, largely based on regional geography, whereby groups were formed from the combination of several local stations in a region (i.e. Midlands Radio Group Ltd, Suffolk Group Radio Ltd). As early as 1985, GWR Radio Ltd started a series of acquisitions based on the simple motivation that ‘big is better’ and the trend continued throughout the 1990’s with stations bought and sold for greater and greater sums of money.
b. The entry of media groups
Starting in 1990, large cross-media groups such as EMAP plc, Virgin Group Ltd and Chrysalis plc bought their way into the radio industry, acquiring a mix of heritage stations and newly launched stations. This substantially increased the sale prices of local stations.
c. National advertising
The launch of the three national radio stations had the desired effect of attracting national advertisers and agency media buyers to radio for the first time. With local stations now consolidated into fewer groups, it became easier to buy campaigns through a single selling point to run on stations across a region or regions. Both the national and local stations benefited from the influx of national revenues.
d. Cost cutting
In an industry where costs are mostly ‘fixed costs’ and revenues are almost infinitely ‘variable’, GWR Group pioneered the strategy of cutting costs to the bone at the many stations it acquired. According to GWR CEO Ralph Bernard: “It became very evident that if you don’t have size, you don’t have the ability to do things and you are forever trying to find the money to fix leaks, literally.” GWR’s policy of implementing economies of scale across its stations led to the centralisation of many tasks.
e. Local advertising
As stations became incorporated within larger and groups, national advertising became of more and more importance to their owners. The bedrock of local radio, local advertisers, soon became serviced by regional rather than local sales teams, until eventually they were serviced hardly at all from a national sales office. As a result, local advertising revenues became less and less important to groups that were growing bigger and bigger.
f. London agencies
With the rise of youth brands in the marketplace, and the evident success of London youth station ‘KISS FM’ [see blog] in creating a commercial focus for a demographic that had never before been served by commercial radio, London advertising agencies suddenly wanted to buy campaigns on stations that delivered 15- to 34-year-olds. Faced with both local and national competition for audiences and revenues for the first time, local heritage stations suddenly started chasing a younger audience. As a result, the middle-aged audience that had been loyal to their local commercial stations for many years started to drift away (mainly to ‘BBC Radio Two’), alienated by stations playing too much dance and rap music.
g. ‘BBC Radio One’
Although the turn of the 1990’s had been a scary time for local heritage stations as they suddenly faced competition in their own areas from competing commercial stations for the first time, they were all helped immeasurably by the BBC’s decision to change drastically the programming of its most popular station, ‘Radio One’. Until then, this station had a remarkably large audience of diverse ages that overshadowed local commercial stations in most regions of the country. As a direct result of the BBC’s bizarre volte-face, between 1992 and 1994 five million listeners left ‘Radio One’ and most sought refuge in local commercial radio. These latter stations’ audiences suddenly boomed and they became the most listened to in their markets, without having to change or do anything different. The BBC had unintentionally saved their backsides.
h. Lack of investment
With audiences growing hugely because of the demise of ‘BBC Radio One’; with revenues booming because of the ability to sell national advertising on larger and larger groups of stations; and with stock market values of radio groups buoyed by the industry’s breakout from its former position as the ‘2% medium’, group owners were quick to redistribute their substantial profits to shareholders. After a relatively lean period in the 1980’s, ‘radio’ was suddenly riding on a ‘high’ in the financial community. Ignoring the fact that their product had only become popular as a haven of last resort for listeners fleeing ‘Radio One’, group owners invested almost none of their lucky profits back into the development, improvement or update of their product.
i. Networked programmes
Instead, station owners sought ways to cut even further the fixed costs of their station operations. Led by GWR Group plc, groups persuaded the regulator to let them network some programmes from a central production studio, instead of each of their stations producing all of its own content. In a lengthy process of attrition, by bullying a regulatory agency that lacked any long-term strategic plan for the industry, group owners were allowed piece by piece to extract the ‘localness’ from their local stations. Local voices, local station names, local celebrities, local music, local content and local news all became sidetracked or dispensed with by many group-owned stations.
j. The rise of brands
Led by EMAP plc, which championed the notion that nationally recognisable brands were preferable to local identities, many local radio stations were stripped of the very characteristics that had made them ‘local’ in the first place. In an attempt to make their product controlled, homogenous and universal, the largest radio groups invested considerable sums in state-of-the-art technology that enabled stations up and down the country to be playing exactly the same record at exactly the same time, appended at the end of the song by a jingle that said ‘Coventry’ or ‘Newcastle’ as appropriate, depending upon the station’s location.
k. Format convergence
Although the listener is now offered a considerably wider choice of commercial radio stations in most local markets than was the case in the 1980’s, the industry is plagued with competitors who are all trying to move towards the same middle ground [see blog]. In yet another war of attrition that the regulator has lost again and again, many stations have stretched the definition of their prescribed programme formats to (and often beyond) their limits. This has created a situation where stations that are (by the regulator’s definition) meant to be complementary are in fact found to be competing for the same audience demographic and for the same advertisers in the very same market, by playing exactly the same music. This leads to substantial market ‘cannibalisation’ whereby competitors merely steal audience from each other, rather than attract listeners from the biggest competitor, the BBC.
l. The decline of the music industry
Commercial radio in the UK, modelled on ‘BBC Radio One’, has always relied upon the universal popularity of ‘popular music’ to be the cornerstone of its programmes’ appeal. Until around 1990, almost everyone in the UK had a common notion of what a ‘pop hit’ was. But from the time that ‘Radio One’ refused to play the first ‘house music’ record that reached Number One in the singles chart, it was obvious that such communal experiences were on their way out. The subsequent rise of ‘dance’ music amongst young people polarised popular music and led to a substantially fractured music market. Now, the market for singles is all but dead, CD sales are at an all-time low, and the cult of ‘celebrity’ has replaced the cult of ‘pop stars’. Frankly, commercial radio stations have almost no idea any more what music they should play to attract listeners.
September 1989. The other information I needed was a copy of the finished KISS FM application form from the last bid [for a London FM commercial radio licence – see blog], and a copy of the huge appendix that had accompanied it. [Pirate radio station co-founder Gordon] McNamee pulled out his own private copies from a shelf unit alongside his desk, and told me that my need for these last remaining copies of the documents was greater than his at that moment in time. I took both documents and started flicking through them on the train journey home, hoping they might offer me some inspiration.
The application looked pristine, as if it had been completely untouched. Then I came across the page that outlined KISS FM’s intended staff structure, showing each job in the company and how much it would be paid. In pencil, McNamee had scribbled out two of the station’s seventy-seven staff positions. One was the programme director, a position created specifically for [application co-ordinator] Dave Cash, but which was no longer required since he had dropped out of the bid. That change was understandable. However, the other post McNamee had crossed out was the station’s programme controller, the job for which I had been earmarked. No new posts had been added to the diagram, no jobs had been re-titled and no other amendments had been made. It was clear that, in the new scheme, Dave Cash and I no longer held positions within the company. These changes left KISS FM’s head of music, Lindsay Wesker, reporting directly to McNamee, who now acted as both the company’s managing director and programme director.
I was shocked to have found out accidentally that I seemed already to have been ousted from the KISS FM master plan. What should I do? During the weeks and months that followed, McNamee made no mention of this revised staffing structure, so I started to forget about its implications. Maybe these had been mere doodlings that McNamee had made immediately after the failure of the first licence application. I had no idea.
It was only much, much later I would learn that these scribbles held far more significance for my future than ever I could have imagined at the time.
May 1990. [McNamee’s personal assistant] Rosee Laurence had been busy for weeks, organising a surprise thirtieth birthday party for McNamee at Flynns nightclub in London’s West End. She had printed and distributed specially printed invitation cards to everyone involved in KISS FM and to the media contacts the station had built up over five years. Laurence asked me if I would make a speech at the event, trumpeting McNamee’s successes and congratulating him on behalf of everyone involved in the station. I was very reticent as I had always hated making public speeches. However, Laurence insisted that I should make the speech, though she agreed that I could share the task with KISS FM DJ Dean Savonne, who was one of McNamee’s oldest friends.
On the evening of 10 May 1990, several hundred people gathered inside Flynns club to see McNamee arrive in the company of his parents, who had pretended they were taking him out for a meal to celebrate his birthday. As he was shepherded through the front door, the whole room burst into a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday,’ followed by tribute speeches from Savonne and me, along with a brief introduction by KISS FM financial director Martin Strivens. The whole event was rather flamboyant, worsened by McNamee’s expression of blank surprise at the huge welcome he had been given. Mentorn Films was present with cameras and floodlights to commit the whole event to videotape for inclusion in the documentary about KISS FM. This made the evening much more of a media spectacle than a private birthday celebration.
That evening, and the next day in the office, it was obvious that McNamee was not at all pleased by Laurence’s organisation of the surprise event. He showed no gratitude and acted as grumpily as he had ever done in our company. I had given him a pair of solid silver cufflinks as a birthday present, though he had hardly even thanked me for the most expensive gift I had ever bought for anyone. The only thing that seemed to concern him was Mentorn’s filming of the event [for a Channel 4 TV documentary]. His mood did not improve until he had persuaded the company to agree not to use any footage from that evening in its documentary. It appeared that, because McNamee had been unable to rehearse his performance for the surprise birthday party, he did not want to be seen on film as he really was – a moody, often grumpy, man who seemed to like to feel in control of people around him and who liked to appear sufficiently powerful to make them jump to his commands.
September 1990. Eight days after KISS FM’s arrival on the airwaves [having won a London radio licence on its second attempt – see blog], the station staged a huge public launch party in the form of a daytime open-air concert on Highbury Fields, only a few hundred metres away from the Holloway Road office. Although publicity for this event had initially been very slow, by the beginning of the month the event had gathered a momentum that seemed impossible to stop. Naturally, the station had promoted the concert extensively on-air during its first week, and new acts were being added to the all-star line-up on a daily basis.
Driving into work that Sunday morning, my journey came to a standstill a mile from the office. Cars had already been parked along the roads leading to the event, and the pavements were jammed with people walking to the event. It took me an hour to travel the final mile to the radio station, a distance that usually only took a matter of minutes, even in the weekday rush hour. Suddenly, it was brought home to me very clearly how enormous KISS FM’s listenership must be after only a week. At the radio station, everybody was excited because we could look out of the office window at the back of the building and see, literally, thousands of people teeming into Highbury Fields. These were our listeners! For the last week, we had been broadcasting into the ether above London, never knowing whether more than a few hundred people were listening to us. But here was the proof. If any one event made the entire KISS FM staff believe that the station was already a success, it was the sight of all those people who had decided to spend a sunny September day with us … just because we had invited them.
Although most of the day’s activities were taking place at Highbury Fields, the KISS FM building was also very busy. The entire floor used by the programming department had been turned into a changing room for the artists to use. This proved very convenient for us to grab interviews with each of them before they went on-stage. Sufficient material was gathered during that one day to make dozens of editions of ‘The Word’ programme over the following few weeks. I went downstairs to the production studio and found a very fraught Lyn Champion, head of talks, in animated conversation on the phone. She put the phone down and told me that Gordon McNamee had been calling her, demanding that she put on-air a live link from the Highbury Fields stage. I was surprised. During all the preparations, McNamee had not mentioned to me anything about a live link-up.
Investigating further, I found that McNamee had unilaterally arranged for the station’s engineering contractor to set up a microwave radio link from the event stage to the studio, without informing us. Champion was very concerned that the quality of the audio received from the stage was so awful that it did not bear transmission on the radio. I listened too and, indeed, it sounded like someone playing a stereo system very loudly in a bathroom. The quality was appalling and would sound exactly that way coming out of listeners’ radios. I felt that it would do neither the station, nor the artists who happened to be performing at the time, any service to broadcast such poor-quality sound. Besides, I was not sure that KISS FM had even sought permission from any of the artists to relay their live performances to the whole of London.
I contacted McNamee on his mobile phone at the event and told him that, after listening to the microwave link, I agreed with Champion that the sound quality was too poor to put on-air. McNamee exploded with anger and called me every swear word under the sun. However, I refused to lose my temper and told him that, from where I was standing in the studio, the quality would sound dreadful for the stations’ listeners, a fact that he would not be able to appreciate himself, being at the event. Everybody in the studio had agreed upon this – Champion, me and the DJ on-air at the time. It would be crazy to put something on-air that sounded so bad. McNamee raged at me some more and then the phone line went dead.
I imagined that McNamee might turn up at the studio and put the live link on-air himself, but maybe he was too busy enjoying the privileges of the VIP Enclosure he had organised backstage at Highbury Fields. I never saw McNamee visit the station studios that day, but I realised that I would bear the brunt of his bitterness at some point in the future, so I would not have escaped unscathed.
More importantly than putting the event on-air, by mid-afternoon the police and transport authorities were asking the station to broadcast appeals asking people not to try and travel to the event because the area could not cope with more visitors. I happily obliged. These announcements only served to reinforce in the minds of our listeners the power that the station was able to wield after only one week on-air.
At the very end of the day, when the crowds had finally dispersed happy and fulfilled, I cleared up the debris that the artists had left in their ‘dressing room’ and drove a mile or so down the road to the after-event party that had been organised. There were bouncers on the door of the venue, to whom I identified myself as a KISS FM staff member and showed my ID card. They made me wait … and wait … and wait. Then, one of them came back and told me that I was not on their list of approved guests. I told them that I must be. I worked for KISS FM and this was the radio station’s party. They insisted that I was not one of the invited guests of whom they had been made aware. I realised that there was little point in getting angry with two very large bouncers that KISS FM had contracted for the event. The only person I knew that would be inside the event with a mobile phone was McNamee. This was not a good time to ask him a favour. Instead, I drove home frustrated and angry at my exclusion.
December 1990. After the failure of the second [in-store] radio station at the Trocadero [shopping centre], McNamee busied himself with the organisation of a staff party to celebrate KISS FM’s one hundredth day on-air. On the evening of Sunday 9 December 1990, the station’s entire staff, accompanied by members of the board and several journalists, filled The Underworld club in Camden, a venue that was only a few yards away from KISS FM’s first office in Greenland Street. The event was an updated version of the annual KISS FM awards ceremony that had started in the station’s pirate days. McNamee thoroughly enjoyed taking the role of circus ringmaster for the night and, just like the Oscars event, he announced the short-listed candidates for what seemed like a never-ending succession of prizes.
Some of the awards were serious in nature – David Rodigan won ‘Best Daytime Show,’ Tee Harris won ‘Best Specialist Show,’ and Paul Anderson won the prize for ‘Best Mixer.’ There were also many joke awards with which McNamee could thoroughly enjoy embarrassing his staff – Sonia Fraser won the ‘Biggest Flirt Award,’ and Malcolm Cox won KISS FM’s ‘Worst Dancer Award.’ During several hours of ceremonies, McNamee ensured that just about everybody at the station was either nominated or won an award. After a stage show in which three members of the programming department dressed up to present a skit on stage of a soul song by The Supremes, the guests were left to mingle, accompanied by music selected by former LWR DJ Elayne who had been hired for the night.
It was an enjoyable evening and a good way for everybody to relax after three months of hard work. Once the awards section of the evening was over, several of the staff from my department came up to me, one by one, to express surprise that I had not been mentioned at all in McNamee’s ceremony or been nominated for any prize. One concerned member of my team expressed outright indignation that I had not even been thanked for my contribution to the station’s successful launch. “Have you not worked harder than anybody to make this whole thing work?” she asked.
I shrugged off these comments as if I was not bothered about my complete omission from the night’s events. But I too could not have helped but notice that McNamee had left me out. I was not at all surprised. McNamee usually made no bones about snubbing in public those former colleagues who had fallen from his favour. That night, everybody celebrated the fact that KISS FM had already won 750,000 listeners. McNamee seemed to be celebrating the fact that he did not need my services anymore.
June 1991. I knew that, whatever story McNamee had told the press about the reasons for my dismissal [see blog], I could be sure that the reasons he must have offered to the company’s board to ensure my sudden departure were probably much more lurid and fantastic. I dreaded to think what McNamee might have been saying, in confidence, to colleagues within the radio industry about what dreadful deeds I was supposed to have committed at KISS FM before he had found me out. Was there anything that McNamee would not do to try and destroy my reputation?
That question was answered three weeks after my dismissal. I received a phone call late one evening from Daniel Nathan, a colleague in radio whom I had employed at KISS FM temporarily to help train the DJs. The two of us regularly exchanged news about developments within the industry. At the end of the conversation, Nathan asked me how I had reacted to the newspaper report about my dismissal. “What report?” I asked him, knowing that the media trade magazines had already run out of steam with the story. He went away for a while and returned to the phone with the Independent On Sunday newspaper in which he had seen the article.
Under the headline ‘KISS FM Keeps Status Quo,’ the report said: “KISS FM, London’s hippest radio station, has fought off an attempt to take it into the mainstream of pop music. But the former pirate has dismissed its head of programming after he suggested that ‘the radical sound of young London,’ as KISS calls itself, ditch the soul, Latin, house R&B, rare groove, salsa, blues, hip hop, reggae and bhangra music styles that made its name. Grant Goddard, head of programming at KISS, was sacked by the managing director, Gordon McNamee, after proposing to dismiss the weekend disc jockeys and play more commercial music to compete with Capital Radio.”
I could not believe the ‘story’ that Nathan was reading to me over the phone, but the article continued: “While a soured Mr Goddard fed the trade press stories of a crisis – ‘Struggling KISS Goes Mainstream’ declared the magazine Broadcast – Mr McNamee, or Gordon Mac as he is known, had gone to Spain for a rest. By the time he returned, the rumour was that Virgin, the principal shareholder, was selling out to the publishing company EMAP, who were to install a rock music supremo to win new listeners. ‘That’s all rubbish,’ said Mac yesterday. ‘We’re not about to start playing pop music, although of course we are interested in taking listeners from other stations, including Capital.’“
The article continued with a glowing biography of McNamee, trumpeting his abilities, accompanied by his photo. I could not believe what Nathan had just read to me down the phone line. This was the first national newspaper to pick up the story of my dismissal, but the newspaper had made no attempt to discover my side of the story. Furthermore, McNamee’s lies had surely reached their zenith in this article. And the journalist had peppered the article with inaccuracies – Virgin was not the principal shareholder in KISS FM. EMAP, far from buying the radio station, already had a substantial stake in it. I was absolutely livid and was determined to do something about it.
Once I found the relevant issue of The Independent On Sunday in my local library the next day, I noticed that the article had been written by Martin Wroe. The name was familiar to me because Wroe had written regularly about KISS FM since January 1988, when a piece in The Independent, entitled ‘Pirates Who Storm The Open Airwaves,’ had been accompanied by a photo of McNamee standing in the pirate KISS FM studio. Wroe’s first article had offered a glowing account of “Gordon Mac, the twenty-seven year old North London entrepreneur who controls KISS FM.” In at least four further articles about the station, Wroe had described McNamee as “a hip young media mogul” and had referred to “the excellent audience figures of KISS FM.” If I had wanted to choose someone to write a positive account of recent events at KISS FM, who better to ask than a journalist, on a national newspaper, who had never said a negative word about me?
I was incensed that Wroe had made no attempt to contact me to discover my side of the story, despite the fact that the article had been published three weeks after my dismissal. Every other journalist who had written about my exit from KISS FM had at least spoken to me about the story, even if they had not believed my version of events. Wroe had written a straightforward character assassination piece, much as McNamee might have wanted. Just when I thought McNamee had finished sticking the knife into my back publicly, he had played his trump card.
September 1991. However, it was not until three months after Wroe’s article had been published that the newspaper printed a full retraction and apologised for Martin Wroe’s wholesale inaccuracies.
Having answered the front door, its frame was filled by the 11pm silhouette of a large black man wearing overalls and carrying a toolbox. The only words I could discern from his Southern drawl were ‘air con’. Aha! He must have arrived to fix the air conditioning malfunction of which I had alerted the reception desk an hour earlier. He lumbered in and set to work while I continued to watch television.
“You on your own here, sir?” he asked whilst precariously balancing on a chair to grope the insides of the wall-mounted unit. Nobody had ever called me ‘sir’ before. I was a fourteen-year-old boy. He was at least three times my age.
“I am staying here with my dad,” I replied matter-of-factly. Was I meant to call him ‘sir’ too? He looked at me quizzically, seemingly not having comprehended my response. It suddenly dawned that, though Brits know American vocabulary from their TV and movies, Americans understand almost no British English.
“My father,” I clarified. “I am staying here with my father. But he has gone out this evening.”
“D’ya know when your pa gonna return, sir?” the man asked. I shook my head. I was not being coy. I did not know.
It took about a quarter-hour for the man to persuade the air conditioning to function again. Now, whenever I watch Robert De Niro fighting air ducts in ‘Brazil’, I am reminded of that maintenance man. Before he left, he kindly warned me:
“You’s be careful now, sir. And don’t you answer the door to anyone tonight as long as you is alone.”
I thanked him and continued watching television. My parents had raised me on the numerous 1960’s American shows broadcast in Britain, many of which were years old, so it was heavenly to binge on new episodes of familiar shows and those unknown to me. I had bought that week’s ‘TV Guide’ from the reception desk and was thrilled to discover shows like ‘Love American Style’ and ‘Room 222’ on ABC that made me laugh out loud, stretched out on my motel bed.
The late film that night was ‘The Magus’, a baffling watch despite the presence of Michael Caine and Anthony Quinn. Because American TV networks cut off movie credits, I had no idea that it was a critically mauled adaptation of a 1965 John Fowles novel. Back home, a female librarian at Camberley Civic Library had suggested I borrow Fowles’ 1963 debut ‘The Collector’, perhaps not realising from my height that I was only ten years old then, not a suitable age to read a harrowing account of a lonely young man kidnaping a girl and locking her in his cellar until she dies. For years after, I could not supress regular nightmares about this scenario … in which I was the young man.
A decade hence, university friend and housemate John Chandler would insist I read the paperback of ‘The Magus’. Despite the disappointment of the film, Fowles’ book proved to be riveting and not to give me nightmares. It remains one of my favourite reads, alongside another of John’s recommendations, Ursula Le Guinn’s 1974 novel ‘The Dispossessed’. I digress.
So where was my father that evening? I had no idea. He had left me in our motel room and driven away our hire car, promising to be back later. I eventually crawled into bed. He did not reappear until the next morning, offering neither explanation nor apology. As a teenage boy accustomed to parental indifference [see blog], I failed to recognise how irresponsible was his behaviour. Had the ‘Red Carpet Inn’ in Daytona Beach burnt to the ground that night with me inside, how would he have explained his decision to abandon me overnight 4,286 miles from home?
This whole father/son trip had been a bizarre undertaking from its outset. Unencumbered by prior discussion with me or my mother, he had visited a travel agency in Egham and booked a package tour to Florida for me and he alone, omitting our three other family members. My mother was understandably furious. My form tutor at school was furious as it meant me missing lessons for a week during term time and, henceforth, I was never awarded another School Prize [see blog]. Our first long-haul trip was ostensibly booked to witness the launch of the final Apollo rocket from Cape Kennedy. For years I had been a fanatic of the ‘space race’, following every event in detail and even corresponding with NASA for a primary school project. But my father was not.
Our father/son relationship could best be described as ‘business-like’. As soon as I could walk, my father had pressganged me into his one-man quantity surveyor business [see blog], me initially holding the end of his lengthy roll-out tape measure at properties, but more recently calculating returns on potential property developments [see blog]. Was this trip meant to be the reward for my decade’s unpaid service? My father had never seemed, er, fatherly to me. I do not recall him ever sitting me on his knee, holding my hand, hugging me or even reading me a book. When there was something he wanted to do that disinterested my mother, I was merely a handy substitute. Hence, despite my few years, I accompanied him to Camberley Odeon to watch ‘One Million Years B.C.’ in 1966 (aged eight), ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘Planet of The Apes’ in 1968 (ten) and ‘Vanishing Point’ in 1971 (thirteen), the latter supported by a violent B-movie western in which a woman is stalked and raped by cowboys. Parental guidance, what’s that?
In the months between my father booking this trip and our departure, his behaviour had become more and more erratic, abandoning our family home for days on end without explanation. At the same time, he had become increasingly violent towards my mother, then caring for my months-old sister whom he had never wanted. Even though he had already indulged in purchasing a new American Motors Javelin sports car, he replaced it with an even more expensive and ostentatious two-seater ‘AMX’ model that resembled the drag racing cars he insisted on taking me to watch on weekends at nearby Blackbushe Airport. Was he experiencing some kind of mid-life crisis?
Whilst driving around Daytona Beach, I had noticed us pass a record shop which I wanted to visit. Having purchased my first soul single in 1969, I since had used pocket money to regularly buy imported American soul records from ‘Record Corner’ in Balham and ‘Contempo Records’ in Hanway Street. We stopped by the store and I bought some recent soul singles I had heard played on ‘American Forces Network’ Frankfurt, audible evenings in the UK on 873kHz AM, songs which had not yet been released at home: ‘Me and Mrs Jones’ by Billy Paul [Philadelphia International ZS7 3521], ‘One Life To Live’ by The Manhattans [Deluxe 45-139] and ‘Baby Sitter’ by Betty Wright [Alston A-4614].
After witnessing the delayed but spectacular night-time launch of Apollo 17 from the bonnet of our hire car, parked amongst hundreds of similar spectators, we caught our flight home from Melbourne airport. I felt sick and delirious that entire journey, unaware I was suffering sunstroke, my father having never considered providing me ‘sun creme’ or a hat during hours spent strolling together along the Florida shoreline for him to ogle bikini girls. Before our arrival home, he told me not to tell my mother about his unexplained overnight disappearances, our day of arrival having been the only night he had slept in his motel bed.
My silence made no difference because, only weeks later, my father left his family for good, similarly without explanation. Had the Florida trip been his clumsy way of bidding me farewell? Or had it been an experiment for him to explore a potential alternate lifestyle unencumbered by his wife and three children? Whatever it was, I did not miss him for one minute. All he had ever done was utilise my skills for his own ends. I did not shed one tear. For the previous fourteen years, he had only been present in my life when there had been some task I could do for him … rather than with him. Never had he demonstrated a genuine interest in his children.
Before he finally left, the few times he was at home, my father would play repeatedly the ‘Baby Sitter’ single we had brought back from Daytona Beach. It was a song in the Southern soul storytelling mould in which singer Betty Wright hires a teenage babysitter to look after her child, later discovering the girl has ‘stolen’ her man. The lyrics relate:
“This sixteen-year-old chick walked in
With her skirt up to her waist
She had a truckload of you-know-what
And all of it in place.”
Wright learnt the lesson after her man left:
“I should have been aware
Of the babysitter
I should have known from the junk, yeah
She was a man-getter.”
I felt it was a bit of a novelty song, nowhere near as classy as Wright’s 1971 ‘Clean Up Woman’ single [Alston A-4601] which I had purchased as an import single and loved. I had no idea why her new song seemed to resonate so strongly with my father until …
The day after my father left us, there was an unexpected knock on our front door. It was our friendly neighbour Mark Anthony who lived three houses along our cul-de-sac. He was visibly upset because his young bride had disappeared the day before without explanation. Had she contacted my mother, since we were the only family she knew on our street, the couple having only recently moved there? No, explained my mother, but my father had disappeared the same day. Oh dear! It seemed that my forty-one-year-old father had run away with Mark’s nineteen-year-old wife Suzie. She may never have been our family’s babysitter but she did resemble the girl in the song. I suddenly realised why my father had identified with its lyrics. He had abandoned us for a teenager. Was that how he had spent his nights in Florida?
During the months that followed, my father tried his utmost to destroy his family. While we were out, he would break into our home and steal as much as he could drive away of our possessions [see blog]. I lost a large number of soul records I had bought with my pocket money, many of which were irreplaceable and in which he had shown no previous interest. Amongst them was the ‘Baby Sitter’ single.
Years later, on the run from Court Orders requiring back-payment of thousands of pounds to my mother for the maintenance of his children, he fled to America. Eventually, the US Immigration Service caught up with him and expelled this ‘illegal alien’ back to the UK from Everton (population 133) in Arkansas where he had been confident/stupid enough in 1985 to register a business named ‘Andre Associates Inc’ with an address there at ‘Route 3, Box 68’, as well as a corporation of the same name in 1986 at ‘1608 Avalon Place, Fort Myers, Florida’. Extradited back to home soil, he disappeared again to Wales and then Christchurch. He never did pay his debts to us.
Upon his death in 2013, following who knows how many more failed marriages, my father left a handwritten will that bequeathed the bulk of his estate to my younger brother, along with his “collection of soul LP, CD, cassette music”. This was my apparent non-reward for having passed a decade working in my father’s business, whereas my brother had contributed not one day. I hope my brother has enjoyed listening to old records I had eked out of my teenage pocket money. Oh, I almost forgot, he had never shown any interest in soul music. To add insult to injury, my brother did not invite me to my father’s funeral, nor my sister, nor our mother. Evidently, he is the son of his father!
[I was reminded of these events whilst compiling my Spotify playlist of 2000+ 1970’s soul, funk and disco recordings from the catalogue of Miami’s ‘T.K. Records’, home to Betty Wright, George McCrae and KC & The Sunshine Band, amongst others. Naturally, it includes ‘Baby Sitter’.]
Another day, another meeting. Though this one was most unusual. Not a word had been spoken during the past hour. I was sat in the basement Meetings Room. I had a pile of papers in front of me to discuss. I had thoroughly prepared. However, after arriving early, I was still the only person present. My boss had insisted upon this meeting. So where was she? There was no phone call or message to inform of a delay. One really is the loneliest number. Having waited an hour, I returned to my desk upstairs in the team office. Strangely, nothing would ever be mentioned to me about that meeting. It was as if it had never not happened.
Once is an accident. Twice might be a coincidence. Three times is an act of passive aggression. This should have been the last of three meetings demanded of me in an email from my boss’ personal assistant. Their purpose was to brief Claire Enders about the processes by which British radio stations make payments to songwriters for playing their music. She was to be grilled as an ‘Expert Witness’ during a landmark hearing of the obscure ‘Copyright Tribunal’ that had all the trappings of a court proceeding. However, she never arrived for any of those three meetings, never explained her absences and no subsequent attempt was made to reschedule them. For three hours across three days, I had been waiting in vain. The email to me had read:
“We have put in the diary 1pm on Wednesday 13th September for you to spend the afternoon with Grant. We have also blocked off 10th/11th October for your second session with Grant.”
Claire Enders had responded to me and two colleagues who were tackling non-radio issues:
“The initial format I would favour is seminars each w GG [me], JB and AE to outline the key issues covered by each and how we have dealt w them. I will take notes. Ideally, each of GG, JB and AE should this week prepare a set of materials for the topic covered which includes all pleadings and relevant points and witness statements divided by topic. I will then read the materials then expect to be quizzed by each of GG, JB and AE on each topic until I am word perfect. Plse copy this to GG Thank you Plse don’t forget that either GG or JB need to be in court with me for my evidence (two full days) and either one will have to have an encyclopedic grasp of our three reports in order to assist.”
After our September meeting had become the first unexplained no-show, the timing of two further dates arrived by email: “GG in for 9th October 3pm, 10th October 1.30pm”.
Why had it fallen upon me to tutor the ‘star witness’ of the defence team? I had been hired by Enders Analysis that April to research and write analyses for its subscribers about the British radio industry [see blog]. However, by year end, I had found no time to write anything for publication. Instead, I was waylaid once my employer discovered that I seemed to be the only person in the office who understood the intricacies of music copyright. I was surrounded there by ‘analysts’ who wrote reams about their specialist media industries but who seemed scarcely to have sullied their hands working on the ‘shopfloor’ of sectors they professed to understand intimately.
I was different from them. They knew it, I knew it. They were posh. I was not. They had been privately educated. I had been born in a council house. My knowledge of the radio industry had been amassed from working my way up from ground zero, fuelled by a childhood thirst for knowledge about broadcasting. I was still at junior school [see blog] when I created multiple scrapbooks filled with newspaper articles about radio, scissored and UHU-ed from my parents’ and grandparents’ daily newspapers. I was still at secondary school [see blog] when I presented weekly music programmes on multiple London pirate radio stations, as well as producing identification jingles played across their output.
In 1980, my first paying job was at Newcastle commercial radio station ‘Metro Radio’ [see blog] whose declining ratings I turned around using my knowledge of pop music, my study of American music radio playlist systems and my economics training. One of my additional responsibilities as acting head of music was to correlate the reporting to copyright agencies of all the music played. Every presenter of every programme was required by law to handwrite A4 forms that recorded for each record played its song title, its artist, its record label, catalogue number and the duration in minutes and seconds it was used on-air. Around 300 songs played each day resulted in dozens of scrappy pages that regularly contained only partial information and blank spaces. A replacement computer system had been promised but never appeared. The forms had to be dispatched to three British statutory music copyright agencies: PPL, PRS and MCPS.
Some presenters hated this ‘extra’ work. They would put off doing the paperwork until their live show had finished, then forget and zoom off, instead piling all the records they had played in their locker, along with the blank forms and a vague promise to do it ‘later’. Much of the station’s record library ended up locked away for weeks in presenters’ lockers bursting with vinyl unavailable for airplay. When pressed to complete forms weeks later, they would have no memory of which track they had played from an album or its on-air duration so, naturally, they just made it up. From my perspective, any completed form – however inaccurate – was better than none at all and would reduce the grief I received from copyright agencies about missing data amongst the reams of paper submitted. It was chaotic. Did any artist or songwriter ever get paid the correct amount by the radio station using their works?
In 1990, prior to launching London’s KISS FM [see blog], I had to create a reporting system from scratch for the music it played. I was the only management team member who even understood our legal copyright obligations. Again, the promised computer system never arrived. I appointed one team member, Myrna McHugh, to co-ordinate the paper-based administration and, during our busiest times of the year, the workload required her to supervise a team of ‘temps’ hired to collate the voluminous information. The station regularly played ‘mixes’, ‘dubplates’ and ‘white label’ records whose copyright details were particularly challenging to determine.
In 2001, working in India on the launch of its first commercial FM radio station ‘Radio City’ [see blog], I met with the country’s copyright agencies to understand how to create a system to report the music played. Though our station was owned by Rupert Murdoch’s ‘Star TV’ business, I invited our competitors, including ‘The Times of India’ newspaper, to my presentation in a Mumbai hotel conference room to explain how music copyright functions and the legal requirements with which all our newly licensed radio stations would have to comply. I was pleased to be teaching my acquired knowledge to others.
By the time I joined Enders Analysis in 2006, my three-decade media career had also taken me to work at radio stations in Israel, Russia, Hungary, Germany, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Estonia [see pdf].
I stumbled into my latest job just when a music copyright dispute was about to be heard before the Copyright Tribunal. The earliest wave of American online music streaming businesses had launched in Britain and disputed how much they should have to pay for the music they played to their subscribers. Their argument was simple: claiming their business model was no different from existing British commercial broadcast AM/FM radio stations, such as London’s ‘Capital Radio’, so they should pay the same low rates. However, those rates had been agreed in 1973 when commercial radio was first licensed in Britain, an era when it was unimaginable that consumers would someday request and hear specific songs via the internet.
The songwriters, represented by the Performing Rights Society (PRS), disputed the argument of these online businesses who added no ‘radio station’ value in the form of presenters, information, news and features to their non-stop back-to-back music. PRS had hired Enders Analysis to provide data and arguments to win its case. Claire Enders would appear before the Tribunal as an Expert Witness for PRS. During the months leading up to the Tribunal hearing this case, my role was to refine those arguments and to research/analyse the radio and music streaming markets to provide documented evidence. Some of this work I have subsequently published, such as ‘The Differences Between Traditional Terrestrial Broadcast Radio and Internet Radio’ and ‘Audio Podcasts and The Market for Podcasting’ (23 and 35 pages respectively).
I recall that one day, waiting at the Lebanon Road tram stop, a ‘Eureka’ moment made me realise that a document I had earlier found online undermined the argument presented by the music streaming companies that their product was ‘radio’. I contacted PRS and, working with its lawyers at Denton Wilde Sapte [see blog], we jointly developed a cohesive case backed by evidence to present in writing prior to the commencement of Tribunal hearings on 28 September 2006.
It was 5 December 2006 when Claire Enders was called as an Expert Witness before the Tribunal. I was sat in the front row on the lefthand side, between the PRS lawyers and their barrister, while the American internet team were on the opposing benches. Throughout the Tribunal, I would follow carefully the proceedings and write thoughts on Post-it notes passed to the lawyers who then made suggestions to their barrister. Enders faced me from the witness box a few metres away to the left of the Bench of three elderly judges. It resembled one of those courtroom scenes so beloved of television dramas. Enders was pressed by the barrister for the streaming services as to her expertise in the radio industry:
Kenneth Steinthal [New York Bar representing MusicNet, Yahoo!, AOL, RealNetworks, Napster and Sony]: “What exactly did you do to analyse the webcasting business before submitting your first witness statement?”
Claire Enders [Expert witness for PRS]: “In preparation of it?”
Steinthal: “Yes.”
Enders: “In preparation of it, the radio specialist I have on the team, who is called Grant Goddard, and I discussed, you know, what we were looking for, and in particular we looked at a large number of webcasts. We did a lot of internet research into the various models. We looked at what had been written about them in the US. It was also part of the job to look at how the different services behaved, you know, actually experiencing them.”
Enders: “My colleague, Grant Goddard, spends a lot of time analysing various web-based phenomena, as do many of my team, and so we listened to them and looked at how they behaved and so forth. So a lot of desk-based research and experimenting with the services themselves.”
Steinthal: “Can we separate what your colleagues did from what you did and ask you to focus on what you personally did to analyse the webcasting industry?”
Enders: “I personally spent time on ‘Yahoo!’ and ‘AOL’.” […]
Steinthal: “Other than spending time on ‘Yahoo!’ and ‘AOL’ to get a sense of what those services were comprised of and looking at ‘Shoutcast’, again focusing on what you did to analyse the webcasting market, what else did you do, if anything?”
Enders: “I also read the — I am sorry, I am not a lawyer, but the various documents that had been prepared by the various parties, various legal documents making various claims about their industry — about the specific aspects of both ‘iTunes’ with the MNO’s and so forth so. I am sorry, I think those are called pleadings, but there are other documents that have different names. So I was trying to understand what the issues were between the two sides.”
Steinthal: “Did you interview anyone engaged in webcasting?”
Enders: “I did not do so personally.”
Steinthal: “Is there anything else you did, other than what you have just testified to, to ready yourself for preparing your first report in May 2006?”
Enders: “No.”
Steinthal: “Other than your experience in connection with the potential ‘EMI’ interest in ‘Viva’ and in ‘Classic FM’ in the early 90’s, do you have any first-hand experience in broadcast radio?”
Enders: “It depends what you call first-hand, because I have always been an analyst and a strategist, so that — I am not an operations person. I have not run a station or anything, I just analyse business models. So, by that nature, one is always a bit removed from the coalface, if I may say.” […]
Steinthal: “Prior to this case, had you had any experience with respect to the licensing by MCPS or PRS of either terrestrial radio stations or internet radio stations?”
Enders: “No.” […]
Steinthal: “… I am trying to find out whether you did anything other than looking at the industry reports, for example, and talking to your colleagues as you testified earlier in doing –”
Enders: “Desk research, we did a lot of desk research.”
Steinthal: “Excuse me?”
Enders: “We did a lot of desk research, looking for – searching for information online.”
Steinthal: “Anything else that you did to inform yourself, to make the comparison that you made in your various reports between terrestrial radio and webcasting?”
Enders: “Other than looking at websites and doing desk research and listening to the stations themselves and so forth?”
Steinthal: “Right.”
Enders: “No.”
It was 11.35 on the morning of the first of day of testimony by Claire Enders. We had only started at 10.30. For the remainder of that long day and all of the next, I put on a poker face whilst cringing inside at my boss’ difficulty providing detailed answers to questions fired at her about the British radio industry. She had undoubtedly read my documents for the Tribunal, but why had she not been prepared to meet me so that I could share my acquired knowledge and expertise? Why the reluctance to fulfil face-to-face meetings she herself had demanded? Enders’ apparent view was that I toiled at “the coalface” whilst she was “not an operations person” but worked to “just analyse business models”, a latter-day Ian MacGregor to my underground mining activity. She and I never spoke about her performance those two days.
After twenty days of hearings, it took until 19 July 2007 for the judges to publish their 91-page verdict. It noted criticisms voiced during the hearings that Enders was “a commentator or a highly-paid industry observer rather than being a lively participant in any relevant field”. However, it did highlight that “in particular, she gave evidence to refute the suggestion that webcasting [‘streaming’ in today’s parlance] and commercial broadcast music [‘radio’] should be regarded as comparable products”, the argument I had successfully proven.
Overall, the judges’ verdict on Claire Enders’ performance as an Expert Witness was hardly positive:
“Even taking into account Ms Enders’ inexperience in this jurisdiction, her performance as an expert was, we thought, rather uninspiring. Her reports (which comprised a fulsome lever arch file of evidence together with numerous lever arch volumes of exhibits thereto) consisted to a large extent of data which had indeed been sourced by others, sometimes by a team which she herself led and the reliability of whose work she (often unquestioningly) relied on – only to find it wanting on closer examination. We certainly sympathise with the impossibility of mastering everything within so large a corpus of material. Nonetheless, on a number of key issues, she seemed confused, occasionally inaccurate and, more importantly, sometimes unable to provide reasons for the assumptions upon which her evidence was based. Surprisingly, she had not actually read the New JOL [‘New Joint Online Agreement’] but relied on a summary thereof. We do not wish to give the impression however that Ms Enders’ evidence was misleading; it was not. But we were not greatly assisted by it.”
Nevertheless, our client PRS and its legal team at Denton Wilde Sapte were very pleased with the Tribunal’s outcome. They invited me to participate in celebratory drinks after work in a Fleet Street members club. As the only Enders Analysis employee to have sat between them on the legal front bench throughout the proceedings, I had been impressed by their professionalism and gratitude for my contributions. My work had made a difference. Henceforth, music streaming businesses operating in Britain would be required to make considerably greater payments (‘royalties’) to songwriters whose music they were using. Not merely songwriters within Britain but throughout the world. The business model of American music streaming services operating in the UK would necessarily have to change.
In a subsequent presentation ‘Online Radio: The UK Business Model‘ I made in 2012 to the ‘Music 4.3: Smart Radio’ conference in London, I noted how this Tribunal had determined music streamers’ costs for using songs would be much more expensive than rates paid by UK commercial radio stations. The Tribunal had decided that “the per play rates in [online] agreements for pure webcasting [music streaming] are approximately six times those … under the [commercial radio] agreement.” The reason it gave was that “the Tribunal was of the view that independent commercial radio offered quite a different service to an [online streamed] ‘music, music, music’ service”.
As the Tribunal verdict had produced a ‘win’ for PRS, Enders Analysis offered to pay for myself and my work colleagues to share a celebratory afternoon outing. I should not have been surprised that they chose to take ‘afternoon tea’ at the Savoy Hotel in the Strand, a venue for the rich and privileged I had heard of but never coveted. My younger posher colleagues enjoyed themselves at “London’s most famous hotel”. I would have much preferred to spend an evening at the Jah Shaka reggae sound system.
The Tribunal verdict noted that Enders Analysis had charged its client PRS £750,000 for “preparing their reports” though additionally there were “VAT [at 20%] and charges for [Claire Enders’] attendance at the hearing”. The judges concluded that “incurring expert fees of this order of magnitude (and even taking into account […] the substantial sums of money at stake) was, in our view, seriously disproportionate”. Enders Analysis’ billing to PRS had likely exceeded one million pounds.
Within only a few years, most of the American ‘applicants’ who had forced this costly Tribunal – Yahoo!, AOL, RealNetworks, Napster and Sony – exited the UK music streaming market, each having spent millions on legal fees and their own bevy of Expert Witness submissions and expenses. It demonstrated what a ‘black hole’ exists for American online start-ups who seem to have unlimited money to try to push their way into countries around the world on their own terms, using their own lawyers to argue the unarguable and to attempt to stomp on overseas legal precedents.
My first nine months at Enders Analysis had been diverted into full-time work on this legal case instead of writing media analyses for its subscribers. Regardless, I had been pleased to utilise my ‘expert’ knowledge of music copyright gained over decades on the radio industry shopfloor. One day at work, Claire Enders stopped me on the office staircase, thanked me for my work on the Tribunal and unexpectedly offered me a bonus which I gratefully accepted. It may have been no more than a few percentage points of her ginormous fee but, combined with accumulated savings from my and my wife’s salaries, it provided us a deposit for the purchase in 2007 of our first home … at the age of forty-nine.
It was the first and last bonus I received in any workplace.
Grant Goddard : radio broadcasting expert : media analyst : writer/author 