Still Whispering After All These Years, page 22
Patrick had been caught up in the atmosphere of the show and joined me at GLR almost every night. He was amazingly in tune with what I was trying to do and began to organize sessions for the programme, all done in his spare time. He liaised with the record and promotion companies to get some of my favourite musicians into the studio to talk and play live and organized sessions from the bright and brilliant Dave Matthews and the venerable Dr John. Tom Paxton, Christy Moore, Mary Chapin Carpenter, The Hamsters, Lynn Miles, Bruce Cockburn, The Hellecasters, Dar Williams and Judie Tzuke all did sets on the show, often bringing friends into the studio, joining the team and helping to create a kind of club atmosphere on air. The ‘feel’ really did communicate to the listeners, who seemed to sense how much we were enjoying it all. It was fabulous to be in the middle of one of those sessions, mixing a two-track sound on the antiquated BBC desk for Fairport Convention, Peter Frampton, Paul Rodgers or Iris DeMent, amazed at how lucky I was to be doing this job. Richard Thompson and June Tabor provided the night that best defined the whole vibe.
Patrick is the biggest Richard Thompson fan I’ve ever met. He knew every lyric of every song and was visibly nervous on the night Richard came in to play live. Patrick took up a seat just to the right of the microphone and there must have been at least a dozen people in the studio while Richard was performing, warm applause greeting every number. He was midway through ‘Beeswing’ when he stopped singing, having apparently forgotten the lyrics to the song, repeating the chord a couple of times while he sorted out the next line in his mind. Exactly on cue, Patrick sang it for him, Richard picking up from him again a few words on. The look of pride on Patrick’s face was a picture as everyone burst into applause. At the end of the set, everyone moved through to the production room to join June Tabor, who was appearing later that evening. As I watched through the glass, she and Richard began to rehearse together and when she came through to join me, Richard came back in to accompany her for a magical, impromptu performance.
I loved the freedom to be able to spend an hour or so with artists in this way and we subsequently featured Steve Earle, Jackson Browne, Lou Reed, John Hiatt and blues legend Jimmy Rogers in interview and ‘unplugged’ specials. And it was on air at GLR that I celebrated my twenty-fifth anniversary, the first major milestone in my broadcasting career. Time Out advertised the event as follows:
They reckon his musical tastes make Phil Collins sound like Iron Maiden. They say he lurks somewhere between low cred and no cred. They misread his urbanity as showbiz phoniness. And such stories probably led to his axing from the new, youth-orientated Radio Wonderful. But they’re all wrong. Bob Harris arouses irrational affection in these quarters and fortunately for us fans, the Whisperer has found a natural home at GLR. Monday’s show marks his 25th year of jockery, his ginger whiskers gently wagging to the usual mix of live session and more new music than he played on 1FM, so don’t mention AOR. Happy birthday, Bobby.
My three-year-old son, Miles, sat with me for most of the evening at the broadcast desk, fascinated by everything, behaving impeccably and occasionally munching on the microphone-shaped cake baked specially for the occasion. My daughters Miri and Emily were there, Miri with her new baby daughter, Marnie, my first grandchild, who was four months old. The Team was in, Fish, ex-lead singer of Marillion, turned up and Robyn Hitchcock and James Reyne played live sets. I was particularly pleased that James was there because his song ‘Take A Giant Step’ was very important to us. Not only had it been one of the great anthems of the Radio 1 overnight shows, but the title had also, in a funny way, been symbolic, an inspiration to Trudie and me as we addressed the ongoing problems in our financial life. Take A Giant Step, then another. Be positive and just keep going.
Two weeks later on 2nd September 1994, our second son, Dylan, was born – our sunny baby – a happy, smiling, loving boy, blessed with the deepest of voices. Before he could speak he would express his general contentment with life with a resonant, growling gurgle.
When we moved into our Oxfordshire farmhouse we did so on the understanding that it was a long-lease arrangement, but shortly after I started on GLR, the landlords changed their minds. Their daughter was getting married and they were giving her the house as a wedding present. We were given two months’ notice to leave and had to be out by 4th January 1995, so we began the process of looking at properties day after day, a joyless experience. With virtually no money we couldn’t afford anywhere big enough to house the music room that was essential for my work, yet so many of the smaller houses we saw seemed so dark, damp and depressing – and the closer we got to Christmas, the more desperate we became.
Finally, we found the house we live in now, situated in south Oxfordshire, set in the privacy of a large garden and perfect for the children, a world-within-a-world environment. I knew it was exactly right for us and it provided an immediate spur to my determination to work our way out of our financial troubles.
Having failed in his attempt to strip me of my record collection, Bruno was now pursuing a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy. Trudie and I had both signed the original agreement with him regarding the loan and he now singled out Trudie and hit her for the money. I’m still perplexed as to why he thought we’d ever be able to write him a cheque for £130,000, just like that. The only possible explanation was that maybe he thought the Harrods chairman would fund us. Mohamed had called me in a few times to discuss plans to start a Harrods record label and build a £20-million studio on the roof. I advised him against the idea. He later bought a radio station instead and sank his millions into Fulham Football Club, but he was never going to bail us out. Trudie and I truly didn’t have the resources to pay the loan in full and in the spring of 1995, Bruno issued Trudie with a bankruptcy order. Twelve months later I went under too.
In some ways bankruptcy came as a relief. At least we could draw a line and begin again, but it was a bleak and difficult experience, one that profoundly affected the day-to-day running of our life. You have to declare yourself the whole time and it’s impossible to get any credit of any description. It took us a while to get even a personal bank account again and the restrictions on us were draconian. We weren’t allowed a cheque card or charge card and the account would be closed if we went one penny into the red. Almost everything had to be done in cash and several times we went through periods of up to two or three weeks when we didn’t have enough money to go food shopping. It was a strange feeling, heading up to London sometimes, maybe to an important meeting or lunch, knowing that in my pocket I had only the fiver Trudie had somehow managed to squeeze out of the housekeeping money. Avoiding my round became a reluctant art form, new clothes were exclusively for the children, holidays were completely out of the question. But I never doubted that we’d come through it all.
My illness had taught me to take things on, to address the difficult issues and try to overcome them. The tougher our problems became, the more I was determined to fight back. ‘Don’t you worry, Trudie,’ I kept saying to her. ‘I’ve got this really strong feeling everything’s going to be alright.’
‘Ah ... listen to you, you bloody old hippie,’ was her usual reply. ‘You don’t have to deal with the practicalities of life. You creative people, you’re all the same. What’s it like on Cloud 9 then?’
Despite my optimism, things did get really bad. The worry of our financial plight caused Trudie to have a miscarriage in the summer of 1996. I was at home looking after the children while she recovered in hospital when a reporter from the Daily Mail turned up on our doorstep, wanting some quotes about my bankruptcy! (I didn’t particularly resent him being there. But let’s face it, who would ever want to DO that job?) I invited him in and he sat at our kitchen table, bombarding me with questions about our money problems while I tried to pacify toddler Dylan, missing his mummy and crying on my lap. At that very moment Jude Howells phoned from GLR, and was very sympathetic when I described the scene. ‘Just tell him to fuck off,’ she advised. I think the guy actually took pity on us because the paper didn’t carry the story, we were relieved that there was very little coverage in the newspapers of our stigmatized state.
We’d slipped several thousand pounds behind with the rent and were getting really scared about what was going to happen. If we lost the house we knew we’d go under and the landlords were beginning to threaten the possibility. We had only a few days left to raise the money when, out of the blue, a £6000 cheque arrived from the BBC for sales of Whistle Test to distant territories around the world. We couldn’t believe it when we opened the envelope. It was the turning point for us.
The first hint of Trudie’s impending miscarriage had happened in Somerset, on an otherwise wonderful summer weekend. I’d turned 50 a few weeks earlier and, with her brother Brandon approaching his thirtieth birthday, we decided to pool resources and have a combined 80 years bash, lavish not an option. Family and friends joined us for a most wonderful picnic in lovely evening sunshine, by the lake in Stourhead Gardens, followed by a game of cricket on the local ground on the Sunday afternoon, organized by Trudie’s older brother, Justin. My Mum and Dad drove down from Norfolk for the weekend and Miri, her then-partner, Rob, and their daughter, Marnie, arrived from London.
The centrepiece of the picnic spread was a huge cake, made by Trudie’s sister Grace, in the shape of a record player, with a big chocolate arm resting on a replica of a 7-inch single. Grace was there with her husband, Lewis, and their children, Max and Agnes. Trudie’s little sister Jo was giggling with her gaggle of girlfriends while Robin, Trudie’s patient uncle, enjoyed another glass of red wine with grandmother Jane on that peaceful, balmy evening. Trudie’s great friend, Fiona Ronaldson, was there and, at the centre of it all, were Trudie’s parents, Simon and Angela Myerscough-Walker.
The first thing you notice about Simon is that the thumb and two fingers of his right hand are missing, the legacy of an encounter with a 19-millimetre cannon shell in the post-war Sussex countryside when he was twelve. He’d been exploring near the rusting wreck of a German fighter plane and picked the thing up to have a look. The explosion killed his little brother and detonated bits of shrapnel into his body. He spent the next two years of his life in and out of hospital for surgery and repair, an experience that probably explains his amazing resilience.
His father, Raymond, was the definitive bohemian, living the life of an artist at odds with the real world. A qualified architect and teacher, skilled in the art of ‘perspectives’ (a rare and valuable ability to create a drawing of a finished building from the plans), he’d turned his back on the prospect of wealth and conformity and decamped to the countryside, where the family lived variously in a marquee in the middle of the Sussex Downs, in a small farmhouse in the middle of a 50,000-acre forest and in a caravan miles from anywhere. Together with his sister and brothers, Simon never attended school, their father preferring the virtues of home education and freedom of spirit. As soon as he was old enough, Simon began working on the local farms.
Simon and Angela met in their teens and have hardly been separated for more than a day since. Angela is one of the most capable women I’ve ever met and, side by side, she and Simon have invested their life in farming, gradually building up to the dairy business they and Brandon were running when I first met the family. Since then, as for all farmers, times for the Myerscoughs have been very tough.
In our case, there were signs that things were beginning to improve as offers of work slowly started to trickle in. Satellite television music channel VH1 transmitted a Whistle Test Weekend, 48 hours of nonstop studio and film material, to mark the programme’s twenty-fifth anniversary, an event promoted by a poster campaign that featured a particularly alluring photograph of my good self, all long hair and faraway smile, emblazoned with the slogan ‘The best of the Whistle Test, the worst of Whispering Bob’s tank tops’.
Many of the old team gathered to reminisce in front of the cameras with Mike Appleton, Mark Ellen, Andy Kershaw, David Hepworth, Trevor Dann and myself holed up in a studio for a few hours, exchanging stories and anecdotes about our time with the show. Billy Bragg, Robyn Hitchcock and Rick Wright from Pink Floyd added their thoughts during an evening touched by a genuine sense of camaraderie between us all. I put together a ‘My Top 10’ for the channel and was invited by programme manager Mike Kaufman to present the late-night Nightfly video music show for a few weeks while regular host Tommy Vance was away. Building those programmes was fantastic fun and I really enjoyed being on television again.
VH1 were broadcasting from the old TVAM building near Camden Lock in northwest London, acquired by parent company MTV and transformed from an already radical space into a kind of futuristic pop music amusement arcade, the studios and work areas linked by stainless steel stairs and bridges. I was halfway through a programme one morning when the lights went up and we were all asked to stop filming. Mariah Carey had turned up for an appearance on MTV.
The forecourt had been cleared so she could park her trailer, in which she sat ensconced for almost three hours. She’d insisted that all staff be brought outside to applaud her into the building and there was a lot of ‘she’s leaving the trailer, everybody get outside’ followed by ‘er ... no she’s not, everyone back in again’ going on during that time. Work virtually ground to a stop with the constant interruptions as she kept the staff on tenterhooks. The delay was caused, it transpired, by her desire for canine company.
‘I want to be interviewed cuddling a cute little puppy,’ she is reported to have said. ‘Puppies,’ she directed the people from her record company. ‘Get me puppies!’
All available pedigree mutts having been corralled from local pet shops and God knows where else, she finally flounced triumphantly from her trailer, through the building and onto the dimly lit studio set. There she arranged herself on the bed where she was to do her ‘intimate’ interview, pouting provocatively as she stroked the orange puppy nestling on her lap. The demonstration of single-minded star behaviour was awesome, a relentless, self-obsession-fired promotional momentum that later propelled her into the richest recording contract in music business history, reportedly worth £20 million an album.
A few days later I compered the Guildford Festival, somewhat more down to earth. I introduced Big Country, Eddi Reader and the return to the stage of the legendary Peter Green, making only his second appearance in front of an audience after an absence of more than 25 years. At the height of his powers with Fleetwood Mac he’d been one of the most confident, powerful and expressive guitarists in the world, able instinctively to fuse his traditional blues playing with the band’s British rock style. He’d written some of the most distinctive and moving songs of the era, a string of hits including the awesome ‘The Green Manalishi’, which was climbing into the charts when he left the band in 1970. The pressure of fame and expectation was too much for him, however, and the psychological and mental problems that ensued led to him shutting down on music altogether. At one point he grew his fingernails so long that he was unable to play and a pathological reluctance to appear in public had only recently been overcome. Watching him on stage that night he looked bewildered and frightened, like a big, shaggy rabbit in the glare of the spotlights. His voice sounded shot and he was leaning so heavily on the other members of the group that I thought his talent was all but lost. But, as the set dragged towards what seemed likely to be a wearisome close, he located unexpected resources of energy and launched into a version of Don Nix’s ‘Going Down’, good enough to evoke the images of glory days gone by, laced with intuitive licks and a driving groove. He even got a thumbs-up from Eric Clapton, dressed in black and standing almost unnoticed in the shadows at the side of the stage.
I briefly returned to Radio Oxford, in its new guise as Thames Valley FM, to do a three-hour show on Sunday afternoons, Motorcycle Alan and good friend and team member Graham Brown would come in with me most weeks to help out on the phones. Fairport Convention, Sam Brown and local band The Unbelievable Truth did sessions for us and Trudie would often bring Miles and Dylan in for the last half hour so they could get the feel of the studio and see where their dad was doing his work. The children never blinked an eyelid at hearing me on the radio, although Miles would occasionally get frustrated that I was programme building or writing yet again, just at the time he wanted a game of football – all part of the joys of working from home.
I was delighted to discover that my GLR programmes were beginning to find an audience at Radio 2. Some of the programme producers started phoning, telling me they were listening in the car driving home after work and enquiring as to the source of some of the tracks I was playing. It was becoming clear that the station was about to undergo some changes and I was eventually invited to record a pilot programme at Broadcasting House and a Rock Show pilot with producer Robin Valk at Pebble Mill and both tapes were submitted to the Radio 2 controller, Frances Line, at the same time. Both were rejected. ‘Bob Harris. Isn’t he a Rock Jock?’ she queried, but the announcement that Jim Moir was to be Frances’s successor gave me renewed hope that there might be a place for me on the network after all.
I’d met Jim a number of times at Television Centre when he was Head of Light Entertainment on BBC1. We’d always got on well and he’d once told me that he was a fan. Soon he was on the phone, inviting me to lunch to talk about doing some programmes for Radio 2 and I asked if I could bring Phil Swern with me. Following our enjoyable partnership at Radio 1, Phil and I had vowed to continue working together whenever we could and this seemed the ideal opportunity to reunite. I also thought that Phil was probably more in tune with the ‘sound’ of Radio 2 than I was at that time and that he’d be able to smooth off some of the rough edges my musical tastes had acquired.
