I was working as a waitress…

I was working as a waitress in Brighton’s veggie cafe Food for Friends, getting off with kitchen porters, drinking too much and with no idea what to do with my life, when our regular customer Ijeoma - who I never charged if I could help it - asked if I spoke French and could I interpret for an interview she was doing with a Senegalese musician for Festival Radio? That was fun, so I got involved.

I trained at the Community Radio Open Workshop - CROW, and learned the hard way not to bitch about people near an open microphone (still feel terrible about that). Then my partner in broadcasting crime Louise and I were given the job of interviewing our mates about their drug use, for one-minute infomercials - the acid trip that wouldn’t end, the DJ with three kidneys who thought it helped her take more E’s, sex on cocaine… That made it on to Radio 1 too, our first outing up to London.

It was a great time for freebies, which made up for the less than glamorous studio facilities at the run down former Phoenix Brewery. However most of them were wasted on me. Like the time we were backstage at Glastonbury and I just moaned about some pricks shouting all night. They were Robbie Williams and Oasis. I’d never heard of them. Then Festival went up to Edinburgh, where I once pretended to be a Swedish woman massaging Graham Norton when the real masseuse they had booked for the show didn’t turn up. He was worried about the ethics of it, but really the crime was my terrible accent.

At our London broadcast in 1993, co-producer Birgitte Johnson and I made a show called The Naked City with recycled tape, recording links on the top deck of buses, and interviewing 80s pop stars for Traffic Island Discs. Well, it seemed funny at the time. Surprisingly it even won a ‘Sony’ - then radio’s top annual award. We would run into the studio as soon as Jenny Eclair and Mark Lamarr had finished their mid morning show, always remembering just too late that Mark’s headphones were covered in sticky pomade. Festival Radio, you saved me from a lifetime of waitressing - and led me to a lifetime of telling other people’s stories instead.

Thank you.