…and you stupid bastards voted for them

“F*ck the Tories, f*ck the Nazis. They’re all the same thing anyway and some of you stupid bastards voted for them.”

These were the words of my presenter as Festival Radio took to the air in May ’93, just after a local election. The ON/U Sound Show was my induction into producing alongside my own Night Train overnight ambient/experimental show and the CROW Show, Festival’s pre-recorded community access program.

My show with Bobby Marshall began on time, taking over from Andy Weatherall or Carl Cox in a sweaty basement in Wellesley House. I didn’t know what a producer did really, having come from years of being a local BBC roving reporter interviewing bands, and though I had been trained well by Steve Barker on BBC Radio Lancashire, and contributed to Turn It Up on BBC  Radio Sussex, this was a very different set up.

Bobby arrived twenty minutes into the show and I had started without him. I had a large ON/U record collection myself and had made a lot of jingles from samples, including short stabs and long ones with ‘tails’ to cross fade into tunes. As it turned out these saved my skin, as Bobby wandered in asking ‘what do you like to drink Doug?’ tipping a bag of studio cassettes onto the mixer and standing in the middle of the empty studio with a solitary high mike stand, ready to talk.

So the political “Fuck the Tories” point was instantly reported to the Radio Authority, and suddenly the show I was in charge of had the potential to take the station off air and lose our license.

Signs went up round the whole studio. DO NOT EXPRESS POLITICAL OPINIONS ON AIR! Week two, and Bobby arrived fashionably very late again, with a litre and a half bottle of white wine and plonked it on the mixing desk with another bag of cassettes. Having already been in the studio for over half an hour, and on air for twenty minutes again, I had a plan in mind, just in case...

“Second track on side A please Doug, and open the mike...” – Bobby along with everyone else had been warned, so his stance should have been a little more broadcast friendly right..?

So as I frantically played a stream of ON/U samples, cued the next tune up and opened the mike for Bobby I also had an aux send ready on the desk to put his voice through an effects unit laden with ON/U sounding echo and reverb. This was just as well because Bobby’s toned down version this week was. “If you’re a Nazi, you’re wrong, and deserve to die.”

As no-one complained that week I concluded my plan had worked, and only I had heard these words, and proceeded to glug guiltily away on my studio banned bottle of wine. This was not the BBC.

Making it through all four of those superb shows, full of never heard studio gems from Adrian Sherwood, this was a huge learning curve and a massive joy (in hindsight). The confidence I gained being in the deep end with Bobby Marshall gave me a gift I have used to this day. Prepare for the worst, be flexible and do my absolute best.

Bt the end of show four, Bobby thanked ‘his producer’ on air and I literally thought someone else had been working on the show behind my back. I had no idea what a producer even was back then, and making jingles, juggling cassettes and attempting to coral ON/U Sound’s road manager seemed just what needed to be done.

I am very grateful for the doors Festival Radio opened for me. Years of teaching radio production in universities, and later course leading/training and station managing in Manchester and Salford could not have happened had I not built on this month of broadcast back in ’92. I knew after this I could deal with anything.

Apart from Captain Sensible’s show... but that’s someone else’s story.