The Last Temptation Of Annie Nightinggale

ANNIE ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN . . .?
"It's Annie on One from four till 6:30am," she opens. "You're up for it? Stay up for it!" Welcome to Annie-World, direct from the BBC's Great Portland Street complex. I'd imagined I'd be stepping into a tech-feast equivalent of Todd Terry's brain, neuron-buzzing with enough gadgets to get you wetting your cryosuit.

But there are just four adjoining studios — three of them in darkness. And from here the Radio One crew — or most of them at least — rotate through twenty-four hours. Mark & Lard do it from Manchester, but come down in real-time through ISDN and then go out from here, while through a glass darkly Zoe Ball's studio waits. A poster mock-up over her console admonishes her to "Keep It Slow Zo". And there are rows of pigeon-holes labelled John Peel, Andy Kershaw, Judge Jules, Dave (Roll Another Fat One) Pierce, Pete Tong, and Annie — each one crammed with mysterious communications.

Prior to the show we talk in the producer's suite, as Carl Cox unwinds a trickymixology of relentless beats in the background. Annie Nightingale, face familiar from TV, voice recognisable from 30 years of broadcasting, is Radio One's First Lady. Literally.

"This Sunday morning slot is a bit mad, I know," she gets in first. "But, believe it or not, it's very, very good, cos all the DJs listen. All over the country they're out there driving back from their gigs. They play one club at 2am, then drive over the M62 to play somewhere else. And as they're driving, they listen to the radio. I'm on till six-thirty, and there's no other national dance programme on, so it's a great audience but very critical. What makes me nervous is that they phone in if I make mistakes. Chemical Brothers. All of them. Whoever's on tour. It don't half keep you on your toes! It's madness . . ."

Music is a very slight thing. An arrangement of sound in sequences that we find pleasing. Nothing more. Yet it dominates our lives. Disc jockeys have always been the interface between music and audience, albeit that the DJ's job description has changed and evolved considerably across the years Annie Nightingale's been doing it, all the way from Smashey & Nicey through to Armand Van Helden. So what's it take to do it well?

"I think to do it you've got to be honest about it. I would have to be."

Does it help to be a show-off?

"Well, being interviewed is a bit like undergoing psychotherapy. People ask me strange questions I've never been asked before. Like that one," she teases. "But I'll tell you, I'm an Aries, and there are an awful lot of Aries at the BBC and in broadcasting in general going back to my early contemporaries — Nicky Campbell, David Frost, Michael Parkinson, Johnny Walker, Bob Harris, Janice Long, Paul Gambaccini, Philip Schofield — same day as me, April 1st — and Chris Evans! It's very odd. Way over the national average. But when I tell people I'm actually a very shy person they go 'ah, come off it' — but it is possible to be a combination of both shy and brash at the same time. The thing about Aries is that they are kind-of quite mouthy . . . but it's all a cover!"

So I'm here increasing your Woman-On-The-Edge-Of-A-Nervous-Breakdown pre-show paranoia?

"Naw, that's alright. Don't worry."

During Radio One's 1970s peak years, smug Daredevil of Discdom Tony Blackburn and Hairy Cornflake Dave Lee Travis were national celebrities. And they had mass audiences largely because there was no competition. Now it's different. With so many commercial stations, each one has had to develop its own smaller, more specialised niche identity — including the BBC.

Nearly six years ago, Matthew Bannister undertook his Night Of The Long Knives to reinvent Radio One, losing Europe's Most Listened-To Radio Station millions of listeners in the process. Famous DJs left, nursing more grudges than Lonely High Court Judges, and no-one liked the new ones. Chris Evans arrived — his chaos and eventual departure cost the station dear, leaving Radio One showing all the symptoms of a well-loved institution in the throes of terminal decline. Yet it survived. And survives.

On the wall of this production studio there's a map showing a geo-breakdown of "What's Going On" headed "RADIO ONE: NATIONAL RELATIONS". Sub-headings go from red hot-zones marked THEY LOVE US (Cornwall, Scotland, North Yorkshire), through FLIRTING (Wales), into THEY'RE HAVING SECOND THOUGHTS to the cool blue TRIAL SEPARATION IN PROGRESS (Northern Ireland and most of London — significantly, regions with the densest waveband competition). Alan Partridge may well protest "I'm a national broadcaster trapped in the body of a regional disc jockey", but hey, we're all part of niche-broadcasting now, aren't we?

"But we are quite well-focused," Annie argues back. "Radio One breaks the new bands. We break new music. Then commercial stations come along and cream it off. But that's what we're here for. A friend of mine on the local Brighton station plays by format — a record from the '60s, the '70s, the '80s, then one from now. But never anything that's not already very successful. They daren't. They have advertisers to deliver audiences to. So I feel quite proud of what we're doing here. I'm not here to plug the BBC, but we've got such a worldwide reputation for being innovative, and maybe if there was a similar set-up in other countries, with somewhere for talent to develop independent of commercial pressure, then you might get great sounds coming out of Malaysia. But there just isn't that infrastructure to do it."

Radio, says Annie, is an "intimate phone-call performance". No batteries required. She's wearing a chill-out blue, low-cut, lace-edged underskirt kind of thing which producer Claire Slevin calls her "strumpet dress". Less sex kitten, more cool Bagpuss. But this is radio. She could broadcast naked.

"This show plays new music, but every bit has to entertain," she observes. "And the people who're listening are quite shy about phoning in. So you suggest a topical subject, something to actually think about, and it makes it easier for them. You can then turn their calls into dreadful little stories to fit around the tunes, rather than phone-ins saying 'WAAAAH! I'm having a GREAT GREAT night!!!'."

And phone-in voices get lured through the desk into a strange magical cyberland where, freed of identity, nationality or gender, they can be as weird as they want to be.

"Cos that's more funny," she attempts to explain. "That goes back to my journalistic background again. Ha! But schadenfreude (delight in another's misfortune) is such a wonderful word isn't it? And sometimes it inspires. Sometimes not. So we'll see. You never know. Anyway, now I've got to go and do it. I've got to get into the studio. Get the feel of what's going on. See if it's all working."

Once she's in the studio, Claire and Natasha (wo)man the phones, filtering out the loonies while jotting down possibles for Annie's attention. She then reads them out on air, interpreting them for maximum punch-line potential, delivering them like a pro. Well, not like a pro. She is the pro who sets the standards against which comparisons must be made. She dances barefoot beyond the glass, acts out the stories she's relating theatrically — head-in-hands despair, hand-on-brow deep thoughts — then she jack-in-the-boxes up indicating wildly to Claire some urgent technical requirement or perhaps just another in a long line of coffees.

LAST NIGHT A DJ SAVED MY LIFE
Annie Nightingale's autobiography, Wicked Speed, stylishly dressed in its pseudo-Warhol sleeve, is not a kiss-and-tell book, she says. Ah-shucks. Neither is it an exercise in "name-dropping". Doh! Actually, it's her second foray between literary covers, following Chase The Fade (Blandford Press 1982). But unlike, say, Mark Radcliffe's book Showbusiness, which is punchlined with anecdotes and one-liners, this is a more personal history in which, nevertheless, kisses are kissed, while names and other substances inevitably get dropped. How could it be otherwise? Irvine (with an 'e') Welsh — the guy who thefted Trainspotting from the anoraks and gifted it to the loved-up trendies — writes a story-flavoured intro to which the cool funky tones of Annie's radio show provide the soundtrack. To the fucked-up adolescent Welsh-protagonist she's more than a DJ, she's a "surrogate cool big sister with healing powers". She's "a voice from the speakers distinctively different from the flatulent sounds of the loud, boring, thick and egotistical men who strafe the airwaves". Yeah and thrice-yeah.

To teenage Annie, trapped in Brighton, the '60s was not so much a generation, more an escape committee who saw rock 'n' roll as the force that would change the world. And music was to be her magic one-way ticket out of suburbia. From a "Spin With Me" record-review column in the Brighton Evening Argus, through a fortuitous Beatles interview as early as '62 (determined to strike an impression she confronts Lennon with "so, John, you're the difficult one, then?", to which the lovably comedic mop-top instantly retorts "Eh?"), she got to broadcast for local BBC West from an unmanned studio inside the architectural weirdness of the Brighton Pavilion.

That, in turn, led to fronting yoof-TV's That's For Me, a 13-week cross-over companion to the big Mod cult show Ready Steady Go, and then less credibly to a stint as bimbo game-show hostess for Sing A Song Of Sixpence, a kind of no-hoper Name-That-Tune vehicle for some-time actor Ronan O'Casey whose best-remembered role is as the corpse in Blow Up. Remember the shows? No. Neither do I. But she was also writing weekly columns for Fab and Honey, and in a period when Pop-journalism was dismissed as strictly fluff for the kids, she got to write for the tabloid Daily Sketch too, providing limitless access to the intimate lives of the Rock-ristocracy. Here, we find the relentless madness of Keith Moon, a confusingly stoned encounter with LSD-tripping Roger McGuinn and pretentious git Jim Morrison, and sessions of agonised conscience-searching over whether she should breach a confidence and leak an exclusive about the still-secret John & Yoko affair. Fortunately, they upfront it themselves before she has a chance to commit herself.

Radio One, it seems, has always been with us. Yet it was first foisted upon a reluctant Auntie Beeb in 1967 as a political sop by the Labour government responsible for banning Pirate radio. And it proved equally resistant to the idea of employing female DJs ("a Radio One job seemed to require me to own a dick!" says Annie), until she sneaked in under the guise of gender tokenism, as part of a sounds-of-the-70s intake alongside Noel Edmonds.

She's cool. She's real. She's the new John Peel. Well not exactly, but against the odds (check out her list of surviving contemporaries) she hung on in there, successfully surfing from one generation to the next, in a precarious profession that's left innumerable corpses along the way: DJs unable to change, unwilling to adapt or embrace new styles.

"Yeah, I know. It's so strange," she muses in genuine puzzlement. "Perhaps they didn't want to change or adapt?"

When Whispering Bob Harris ducked out of presenting Punk on TV's Whistle Test, Annie stepped in. Then she did Live Aid and advised Simon Le Bon to marry Yasmin. And he did. She film-documented a Police world tour, calling off in Japan where groupies refused to give head claiming it was illegal! Then she discovered House. And Ibiza, where she ended up DJ-ing at a party which had been going on for "1000 years".

Along the way she also got Radio One-One-Wonderful commissions taking her into the Cold War Soviet Union, and to Iran, Cuba and Romania. Annie's travels show that by now rock 'n' roll really had become a force that changed the world. Behind the then-Iron Curtain she discovered a samizdat underground in which western influences — with imported pop at the top of the agenda — was helping undermine and ultimately destroy those totalitarian regimes.

"Yes, in all those countries but particularly in Romania — television, communications and technology achieved that," she remarks. "You could not keep those people down. A lot of people are saying that in Communist Yugoslavia all the old grudges now coming back lethally to the surface in Kosovo and elsewhere were all held down, that the things that are happening there now weren't allowed then. I'm not saying the old regimes were good or bad. It's all so complicated but, I'll tell you something which I'm absolutely gobsmacked about. There's a club called Lush! in Portrush, Northern Ireland, where all the Catholics and Protestants are dancing together. Those clubbers are doing more to sort out the Troubles than any Peace Process. And that's fantastic. That's why I'm so keen on the '90s. Because there is this idealistic thing. There's a young DJ called Adam Freeland. There's a photo of him in my book. And he's always saying 'you've got to change the world' and it's marvellous to have that attitude. It's very important not to get cynical, defeated, and stuff like that. Maybe I'm ludicrously naive . . .?"

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF ANNIE NIGHTINGALE . . .?
Annie slides seamlessly on-air with Rhinôçérôse's "Machine Pour Les Oreilles", then Freddy Fresh's "It's About The Groove". As the Dance Anthems groove deepens, she programmes new white-label club mixes of standards like the Stone Roses' "Fools Gold", Chemical Brothers' "Life Is Sweet" and even Prodigy's "Climbatize", cutting them with a long Funky Monkey mix, Barry Adamson, PFN and a Way-Out-West mix of JDI's "Asian Vibes". Then she follows all that with a trailer for the now-legendary Todd Terry . . .

"Music's very healthy at the moment," she asserts. "But there are dips. There are times like the pre-Acid House mid-'80s, when things were pretty dull — but it's always there if you look for it. House changed the sound of music completely. It just did. It's been around now for a good ten-to-twelve years, perhaps not always on the overground, but you've still got the big clubs — Cream, Ministry Of Sound and the like — they will be with us for a long time yet. It's not always easy. There aren't fortunes to be made DJ-ing, unless you suddenly break really big. But then again, what happens is that when something comes along like Speed Garage, people jump on it too quickly and kill it. Suddenly you see it TV-advertised as The Best Speed Garage In The World Ever . . . Vol. 3 and you go WHAAAATTTT!?!?!? It's bizarre, they over-expose it too quickly before it's properly developed, and that just kills it. It's one or the other, you know?"

Three Decades Of Annie On One. Perhaps Dance is the Last Temptation of Annie Nightingale? Maybe not. But Dance now makes up a good 60% of the charts, even though the inky Rock press are cutting back on their Dance, because they prefer quotable Stars they can splash across covers. Britpop was ideal for that. Whereas Dance is the antithesis of the Star system. It's all about anonymity, cult credibility and style-elitism.

"This is the point, absolutely," Annie agrees. "This is the problem. DJs are not Sexy Rock Gods. They're mostly very quiet blokes. In the clubs they generally want to be left alone, because they've got to concentrate on what they're doing. It's more about having both good musical and engineering skills. Whereas people do want an Oasis. They want someone to look up to. They like heroes. I agree. But there is a very big dance press, great thick magazines like Mixmag, and now Ministry which is quite a commercial enterprise. And DJ and Music — there's loads of them. The market seems to be able to support quite a few, but then again, it all splits down to so many sub-genres.

Like there's this new sub-genre that I'm trying to help at the moment called Nu-Skool-Breaks [she spells it out]. It's quite funky. I don't really know where it's come from, but you'll hear it here tonight. It's beginning to get quite international, but they need help. Everybody's looking for the Next Big Thing. People don't know where it's all going. Fortunately, I get all this stuff. And I do listen to it!"

Kevin Greening slouches stylishly in for some off-mike pre-hand-over bonding with Annie. While through a glass darkly Zoe Ball's studio waits.

Wicked Speed by Annie Nightingale, with an introduction by Irvine Welsh, is published by Sidgwick & Jackson, priced £15.99.