On the Mic - Surrey Life - June 2013

My last Surrey Life column for a while. Full archive below...

Everybody loves music. If you told someone you didn’t, they would think you were odd. The problem is with radio it attracts people who love music a bit too much.

I was brought up in the days when records were a scant resource. Pocket money would just about stretch to one single a week, and if you didn’t own it, you had to work hard to find it. 

For me, this meant switching on the radio and waiting forever to hear a favourite song, or kneeling next to the single speaker at the front of our tiny telly, recording Top of the Pops on the internal microphone of the mono cassette recorder I was given for my 8th birthday. 

The quality was bad enough at the best of times, but the audience whooping and clapping during Don't You Want Me by the Human League on the 1981 TotP Christmas Special rendered my recording completely unlistenable. Not that it still rankles or anything.

Youthful obsessions with Adam and the Ants, Duran Duran and The Cure gave way to a wider appreciation of pop made in the pre-punk era. 

By the mid-nineties I was working at my university’s student radio station. Britpop was in its heyday, promotional budgets were huge and student radio programmers gathered substantial crumbs. Once I would spend cumulative hours in record shops agonising over which album I would buy each month. Now I was being sent every record by every new band and getting into any gig I wanted for free.

When I sauntered through the doors of my first professional radio station, I thought I knew pretty much everything there was to know about music, and I thought it wouldn’t be long before I got the chance to share my enthusiasm with the station’s listeners.

It’s a perfectly natural impulse. People who work in radio want to play their favourite records on the radio. Listeners expect and understand this because, given the chance, they would do exactly the same. It’s the perennial appeal of Desert Island Discs.

Unfortunately (and this has been a slow learning curve for me), just because I have the privilege of working in radio, I don’t have the right to commandeer precious airtime to inflict my tedious musical enthusiasms on people. With good reason. 

Very few presenters choose any, let alone all of the songs they play, save a knowledgeable few with excellent taste and, often, very small audiences.

The music policy at BBC Surrey is based on selecting the very best and/or most popular songs in existence, sprinkled with a fair bit of new stuff. But you’ll hear as much Bowie, Beatles and Beach Boys as you will Adele, Paloma Faith and Stooshe. 

Whilst it’s extremely unlikely we’ll play anything to scare the horses (unless you are tuned to master horse-scarer Phil Jackson and his new music show on Saturday nights) that doesn’t mean bland, benign rubbish. 

Obviously I’d love to hear more Adam and the Ants. But would you?

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May 2013 - on supermarkets

April 2013 - on The Invasion of the Coffee Shops

March 2013 - There was NO column in March 2013...

February 2013 - on turning 40

January 2013 - why January should be about headaches, mild depression and whisky

December 2012 - on doing more stand up comedy

November 2012 - on stopping doing weekday breakfast

October 2012 - on trying to engage brain and mouth on air

September 2012 - on my BBC microphone

August 2012 - on the Olympics

July 2012 - on being on holiday with three small children

June 2012 - on joining a gym

May 2012 - on making live radio

April 2012 - on being ill

On being asked to write a column for Surrey Life magazine

Leicester, a tale of modern times...

I met a man today in a jeweller's shop in Leicester. His father had been banished from Uganda by Idi Amin in the early seventies.

He told me his family settled in Leicester because Leicester City Council placed an advert in their national paper in Uganda telling Indians they were not welcome in Leicester, and that there was nothing for them there.

The jeweller told me that was why so many Indians expelled from Uganda decided to settle in Leicester. The city must have something worth hiding if the council were so keen to take out an advert in a foreign newspaper actively discouraging them.

"Is that true?" I asked, incredulously.

"Yes!" he laughed.

The jeweller's father, who gave his son his trade, arrived in Britain in 1972 with nothing but £50 in his pocket. He asked his wife to give him all the jewellery she owned so he could start a business. 

By the time he retired he had three jewellery shops on Leicester's so-called Golden Mile. The senior jeweller gave two of the shops to his brothers and the remaining shop to his son. The shop I was in had £600,000 worth of stock on display. They melt down gold in the tatty back office. The senior jeweller is still alive, as is his wife. She drives a Bentley. 

The jeweller's son told me how the trade has changed in recent years. When Leicester had a hosiery industry, the Indian factory girls would come in at the end of the week and buy tiny amounts of gold to wear (and as an investment) for £20 or £30 pounds a time. The owners of corner shops, usually frugal people, would occasionally give their daughters £2000 in the run up to Diwali and tell them to buy some jewellery for themselves.

The hosiery factories are long since closed, and the supermarkets have taken over the corner shops, sucking money out of the community.

The jeweller still sells, but is also often buying scrap gold, melting it down and trading it by the gramme. Since the recession began, the rising gold price has outstripped the stock market and the housing market to become more valuable than ever.

As a result most jewellers on the Golden Mile operate in shops protected by airlock doors, security cameras, smoke cannisters, bullet-proof glass, guard dogs and panic buttons. 

A couple of years ago gangs of masked robbers would regularly travel up (mainly from Birmingham) to attack the shops on the Golden Mile, charging in with axes and sledgehammers to break the glass cabinets.

"People are desperate" said the jeweller.

There haven't been any armed robberies so far this year. The police now regularly patrol the Golden Mile, the shop owners meet regularly to discuss security and the expensive new defences put in place appear to be holding.

"The police and council are taking an interest in our situation because we're the only businesses left round here paying any tax!" he jokes

He is a smartly-dressed man, and, as you might expect, wears a fair bit of gold on his fingers. 

When we part, he turns to deal with something in his shop, and I see how frayed the back of his suit is.

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