Reader’s Digest

FLA 10: Peter Curran (14/08/2022)

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I am forever telling Peter Curran that the BBC’s Greater London Radio, for which he presented daily shows for most of the 1990s, is probably my favourite pop radio station of all time. Even though I only lived in London for the last three years of its existence. You never knew what record it would play next, always a compliment in my book.

 

In Peter’s thirty-year broadcasting career, notably for GLR and BBC Radio 4, he has interviewed an estimated 10,000 people. As well as narrating and producing documentaries on a variety of subjects, and producing a wealth of audiobooks, he has teamed up with the playwright, director and former stand-up Patrick Marber for eight series (so far) of Radio 4’s very funny nocturnal conversation, Bunk Bed. Peter has also been a drummer in rock bands, most enduringly for PiG in the late 70s and for much of the 80s.

 

One afternoon, and evening, in June 2022, we chatted over Zoom about his career and musical tastes. And here’s some of what we discussed – beginning with what was playing in the Curran family home back in 1960s and 1970s north Belfast.

 

 

—-

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Growing up, we had lots of Frank Sinatra, and my mum was a big fan of Neil Diamond, but my parents were also cursed with Music for Pleasure and Top of the Pops albums, which cost a pound. Myself and my five sisters would buy them for Christmas, and my parents would manage to summon a smile as they tore open the wrapper of another ageing crooner from the 1950s bought from the bargain bucket. That was basically how their Christmases were spent.

 

But they had some quite interesting records – they had this Reader’s Digest box set which I suppose a lot of families might have had in the 60s. There were albums called Music for Dining, Music for Cocktails, Music for Relaxing, Music for Mornings. It was sort of pre-Brian Eno kind of ambient music for absolutely every moment of your day [Laughs].

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That’s how Music for Airports must have got its title! And on Spotify, you get all these mood playlists now: Chillout. Music for Running. Not a million miles away from these Reader’s Digest records.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Yes. They were definitely selling a kind of aspirational lifestyle. The covers were very vivid: women in these wasp-waisted skirts and men in these lounge suits, smoking a fag. So it was a combination of reassuring people who were worried that they maybe didn’t have the ‘right’ furniture or the ‘right’ carpets or the ‘right’ food or whatever. A bit like an Abigail’s Party vibe – by sticking on this album, it would suddenly create the mood for cocktails, and then you’d change it over for your dinner. And then I suppose at the end of the night you’d play Music for Relaxing.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Previous guest David Quantick’s parents were also in the Reader’s Digest book and record club. So there was clearly a wave of… well, okay, there was you, there was David, that’s two households. [Laughter]

 —-

FIRST: DAVID BOWIE: Aladdin Sane (1973, RCA)

Extract: ‘Time’

PETER CURRAN

This was the first album I bought without adult supervision, I was 13, and I was just enchanted. The cover was so sexy, he was this sort of androgynous creature, obviously nude, and they airbrushed out his privates. And then I put it on, and it was just a seductive, strange place. It had echoes of stuff I’d heard as a kid on old black and white films that my parents would watch, a bit Jacques Brel, sort of German Weimar, you know, that sort of piano. A little bit ‘Lili Marlene’. And yet there was this alien-looking character doing this with crunching guitar riffs and lyrics of soiled glamour.    

 

It’s funny how the lyrics have developed over the years, why it’s always been with me, sort of my whole life because I didn’t understand fully what he was writing about until later on. That first track, ‘Watch That Man’. ‘There was an old-fashioned band of married men/Looking up to me for encouragement…’ I just thought, Wow, wouldn’t it be brilliant to have [that] instead of adults giving you orders? Looking up to you to give you encouragement. It just sounded an impossibly powerful world.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m trying to imagine what it would have been like to hear at the age of 13, because I didn’t hear this for a long time. My version of Bowie in the 80s was a very different thing, and I always feel slightly fraudulent in that I can never quite call myself a Bowie fan, because that would suggest I had this moment of revelation and I didn’t really have that. Only in the 90s did I properly investigate, and Low is my big one, but obviously all the 70s stuff is fascinating – and actually the 90s stuff too.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Everyone talks about their moment of first seeing David Bowie on telly, but mine isn’t the usual one of him and Mick Ronson putting their arms around each other. It was a bit later – I was watching Top of the Pops [BBC1, 18/05/1973] and there was a specially recorded video for ‘Drive-In Saturday’ which has disappeared. I’ve never seen it again, I’ve searched for it. But I remember these incredible Californian bright colours, all saturated and bleeding into each other, and a boy looking very pale in the back of convertible. And there might even have been a TV in the car or a video player. ‘Like the video films we saw’? Nobody had a clue what those would have been.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

When you were just saying now about all the little motifs from films and old music, I suddenly realised when I was listening to the title track – is Mike Garson in his piano solo referencing ‘Rhapsody in Blue’? There’s one bit where he gets really close to it. You know the bit?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Yeah, yeah.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Maybe that’s something all Bowie superfans already have discussed into the ground…

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Because it was recorded in between American tours, and the songs were written on American tours, I think when he got Mike Garson in the studio, he wasn’t sure what he wanted him to do. He wanted him to do something and I think he started doing this sort of, you know, tasteful jazz Blues American songbook accompaniment. Which was quite sort of slinky, and then [buck daft] with the improv stuff at sort of Bowie’s behest. I suppose the other thing was, it was one of those records that was quite subversive because the surface shimmered a bit but there was much dirtier stuff, more interesting stuff musically and lyrically underneath it.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It feels like a really tense record, moreso than Ziggy Stardust, to me, although maybe that’s just hindsight, the thought that he might not do this kind of thing for much longer, and move on to something else.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

It’s all about what it’s like to be a rock star. He’s now officially David Bowie Superstar, and there’s the sex and drugs and he’s already sounding jaded even though he’d been ultra-famous for not that long.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You’re not supposed to do that in a pop group, really – once you start writing about ‘being on tour’…

 

 

PETER CURRAN

But I think it was sort of the role play. The fact that he was playing a role could have entitled him so you don’t know if it’s Aladdin Sane… I think Bowie described it as ‘Ziggy goes to Hollywood’. So in a way, yeah, it’s through the prism of this rockstar character, but also through him as well.

 

I mean ‘Cracked Actor’ was the rudest song. For me, at 13 years old. ‘I’m stiff on my legend… crack, baby crack’. It’s really, really rude. But you could just see that this is why he wanted to be a star. It’s so full of arousal but also insincerity. ‘Before you start professing that you’re knocking me dead.’ It’s like these amazing things are happening, and yet he’s really cynical about why people are doing these things.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I wonder if it’s partly because he had those years before he was famous. I wonder, had he become a big star at 17, would he have been able to write that? He knew what it had been like to be obscure before ‘Space Oddity’ – and actually even after ‘Space Oddity’. For a couple of years, there weren’t any more hits.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Yeah, as my friend and colleague Patrick Marber remarked, he had these try-outs, everything from folk to English whimsy and psychedelia, which all failed, and then suddenly in ten years just knocked out these classics, one after the other.

 

I remember speaking to Lindsay Kemp, the great mime artist, designer and choreographer. He was a huge influence on Bowie and he was saying that he really got that ‘time is not on my side’ idea that he and Bowie had talked about. You know, the fleeting nature that the art’s what people will remember, you will be dead comparatively soon, compared to how long your art might last. So make the art matter.

 

But the song ‘Time’ itself – I’m still kind of marvelling at it. You know, he’s waiting in the wings – it’s dramatic. It starts with that little piano – when you expect Liza Minnelli to come on in a spotlight for Cabaret, that sort of burlesque-ish parody, that barrelhouse piano.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Well, in fact, Cabaret had just happened, hadn’t it? The film, that was ‘72 so that would fit in terms of influence.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Aladdin Sane is connective tissue to so many other musical and cultural references. Even just the song ‘Time’, aside from the rudeness: ‘Time, in quaaludes and red wine/Demanding Billy Dolls/And other friends of mine.’ I didn’t know what that meant for years until I read about the New York Dolls, and discovered that Billy Dolls is a reference to the death of their drummer Billy Murcia (1951–72).

 

But it also connects with the artist I’ve loved since I was a little kid and that’s Elvis. I love the way Bowie does an Elvis impersonation. Because ‘Time’, aside from the deeper meditation, it’s about standing at the side of the stage, waiting: ‘We should be on by now.’ But in the line before that, he goes [Elvis voice], ‘Well, I looked at my watch/It’s at 9:25/I think, oh god/[Dylan voice] I’m still A-live.’ So he references Elvis and Dylan. To know that Bowie was still a massive fan of the artists he loved, and wanted to do nods to them, even though he was being looked up to as a great artist himself.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The early 70s seems to establish that first wave of postmodern pop music, drawing on its own back catalogue and creating something new out of it. It’s made me think of the first Roxy Music LP, and the opening track (‘Re-Make/Re-Model’) where it stops dead, and there’s the ‘Day Tripper’ bass riff. And then it stops again and there’s Andy Mackay on sax quoting ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ and then, there’s a little bit of the ‘Peter Gunn’ riff. And Bowie does something similar in drawing on this archive from his formative years.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

The playfulness of Bowie doing an Elvis impersonation – I know lots of people have done it since, but that was the first time – apart from on ‘Donald Where’s Your Troosers’ by Andy Stewart – the gold standard. And when you’re a kid, you think artists are all individual and very distinct from each other – yet here’s what felt like this lovely fraternal nod.

 

And I must mention Mick Ronson here, his musical director and guitarist on the album. the sound of his guitar was just out of this world – particularly on ‘Cracked Actor’. That sort of distorted grunt, like an old Spitfire engine starting up… I’m going to use a terrible phrase Justin, and will only use it once, but in terms of melodic rock, he was just an absolute screamer on guitar. He was brilliant – did all the arrangements and produced most of Lou Reed’s Transformer album too, and died skint because he got no share of the proceeds from his incredible work with Bowie.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m sure you’re still a big Bowie fan, but have you dipped in and out over the years?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Unfortunately, I’m one of those tedious people who thinks that Tin Machine were awful. But his late flourish was fantastic, and the last album, Blackstar, was amazing. I’d heard he was really ill. But it was quite something, for this arch stylist to go out with just a bigger heart and a more soulful impact than many artists would ever manage. His philosophy and soul was writ large. What a way to sign out.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s almost forgotten now that there was this two-day window, when Blackstar came out, and Bowie was still alive. I’m glad I got to hear it (only once, admittedly) while he was still around. And I didn’t immediately clock its full significance, even though I knew he wasn’t well. But because there’d been The Next Day, which I’d also liked, I still somehow didn’t think of this one as The Last One. I wasn’t listening as closely as I probably should have been. But it meant, that waking up on that Monday morning (11/01/2016), it was like, Jesus Christ. Especially because it had just been his birthday.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Just having those few days to hear it with him still on the planet was beautiful, you know – rather than being overburdened with the epitaph.

 

 

—–

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Going back to your teenage years, presumably, you were going to see gigs in Belfast?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Absolutely, that sense of occasion and coming together. I mean, that certainly existed in Belfast, you would literally go and see anybody. I think the first band I saw was Dr Feelgood, when I was fifteen. [Ulster Hall, 19/10/1976] A guy in my class’s father ran a little print shop in Belfast and I think we’re at a safe enough distance now to say that his big brother who worked there would run off another sheet of tickets which were not to be resold, but were discreetly handed out to friends and family… [Laughter]… So we saw a lot of people at a heavy discount.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You’re fifteen, you haven’t got a lot of money…

 

 

PETER CURRAN

And it was a very limited number! He wasn’t doing it as a racket. But in Belfast, during the Troubles, at a time when you were swivel-eyed most of the time, avoiding particular streets or parts of town, a gig was like this anonymous communion, it was ironically quasi-religious. There was nothing hippyish about it, though. You could come together.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You also had a new commercial radio station in Belfast: Downtown Radio. Did that cater for new bands, because I’m just wondering how you started on that itinerary as a drummer?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

In about 1978, there was suddenly lots of really interesting music – Gang of Four, and Public Image Limited, particularly – so I took to the kitchen stools with a pair of drumsticks, and joined a friend who was quite an accomplished singer, and piano player, and a 14-year-old bass player, so we formed a band, called PiG, and various other people joined and left. But our first live performance came out of sending a demo to Downtown Radio. They used to have a DJ called Davy Sims, who’s still on the go, and who subsequently became a production executive. He used to have a show where he’d get local bands sending in tapes for session. He was kind of a cross between John Peel and Mike Read, which is more appetising than it sounds.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In PiG, you all had names ending in Pig. Something Pig. You were Deadly Pig, right?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

That was our homage to the Ramones, who we loved. So we also just used Pig like a surname. We were nothing if not derivative, Justin! But we got to be in the same room as some great bands, regardless of our own failings, musically. We got some support gigs because we played virtually for free. We got to support Dexys Midnight Runners when they played Belfast [Queen’s University, 07/03/1980], and we had to share a dressing room with them. We were spotty teen herberts and there were all these men in there…

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That’s the other thing, there were a lot of them in Dexys Midnight Runners.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

There were nine or ten of them, but even though they were only a few years older than us, they were definitely men. I just remember the sight of Big Jim Patterson, the trombone player, just putting a bottle of Bushmills Whiskey to his mouth, and taking a couple of hefty glugs. And they were so intense. That was the shocking thing. We were just shuffling in the corner, like we were outside the headmaster’s office or something. But with them, the room crackled with the degree of focus – they were going out to play, there was no messing around, and there was just this fantastic, visceral, athletic musical performance. And at that moment, you realise: We are never gonna be a band like that. That is a band.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Are there any PiG recordings online? I couldn’t find any. It’s the hardest band name in the world to Google. You can’t even put ‘PiG John Peel’ into Google, because obviously Peel had the nickname ‘The Pig’ for his wife – on the grounds that she snorted when she laughed.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Well, we were fairly well aware of that, and also that he loved Public Image, and we loved Public Image.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

How would you describe the sound of the group? Did it change over time?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

It changed a lot. I’ll give you a sort of timeline. A bit like Public Image; a bit like a punky Ben Folds Five; a kind of Jam-type band; and then into a Chic/Talking Heads area.

And then into a kind of amorphous, undistinguished, noodly… we had a brilliant flute and keyboard player. The closest we ever got [to making it] – I went to see Geoff Travis at Rough Trade because he got one of our demos, and he used the deathless phrase, ‘Are you determined to keep that singer?’ And out of misguided loyalty we said, ‘Yeah, we certainly are.’

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And you kept going quite a while.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Yeah, we had lots of different line-ups. It was just a nice way of seeing the world, playing the Edinburgh Festival, doing the music for a few plays, so it was just thrilling, playing live music. That strange weightlessness – suddenly, you feel that if you’re on stage playing with people, space and time open up and you can walk around inside seconds… it’s a lovely kind of suspended reality. Even you know, if you’re sweating your guts out behind a drum kit in some stinky pub in West London, like the Fulham Greyhound.

 

After PiG split up, around 1986, I was asked by Terry Bickers to play drums in a new band called The House of Love. They weren’t even called that at the time; they’d just started. I was living in Brixton, in Coldharbour Lane, and they were rehearsing in a kind of clothing warehouse down the bottom of the road. Maybe this is the reason why they asked me – I was the convenient drummer! I turned them down, and it was probably a lucky escape really, although I really loved Terry and some of the music was great.

—-

LAST: BIG THIEF: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (Big Thief/4AD Records, 2022)

Extract: ‘Change’

JUSTIN LEWIS

I didn’t know this at all. It’s one of these times where I discover a new group, to me, and find they’ve made five albums.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

I was in a similar position. It’s got an infuriating title but it’s a lovely album. They recorded it in, I think, four different contrasting places around the United States, and they would check into studios or cabins, and try and be fed by the atmosphere and the vibe of the place, and allow that to inform the songs. You get different shades of America in it and I just like the way it’s quite inventive and innocent, without being twee.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

When I first put it on, I was thinking, ‘Oh this is quite folky, sounds a bit Nanci Griffith, quite nice’, and then the next track is not that, it’s a bit scuzzier, and then the track after that is a bit more countrified, almost with a kind of cajun influence… So when you just said now about its different recording locations, that makes sense, because it’s not just different styles, they actually sound different. 

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Absolutely. It reflects those different (I’m going to use that terrible word) ‘textures’, that location can bring. You normally don’t get that on an album, but it’s very distinctive here. They went to small, intimate, downbeat places. There was one in Colorado, one in New York – and I can’t remember the other two locations, but there were different recording engineers, so they brought their own [identity] to the overall sound.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So how did you come across it, and how do you find new music generally?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

A lot of stuff is by chance. Just reading about bands in the traditional manner. To be honest, I think I was slightly ruined by playing songs on the radio for 10 years every day – that it became an actual job. I mean, the fan is still there, and I’m still buying music. But I don’t do it with the sort of zeal that I once had because I don’t have to be across everything.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

They strike me as exactly the sort of group that Greater London Radio would have gone for, back in the day [PC agrees]. What were your beginnings at GLR like, back in ‘91?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

I was Tommy Vance’s programme assistant on drivetime, lighting his cigars, and so on, and then the first regular gig I got was doing the classic rock show in the evenings, sitting in for a few people. But instead of concentrating on the job in hand, I would flip a switch so I could overhear the feed from downstairs in the basement studio. And down there, Chris Morris would be editing together his GLR show, with all the brilliant cut-up interviews, and archive and music. Unprofessional of me, but what a thrill.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And then, you moved to Sunday nights – I think on one edition you had both some lot called Radiohead doing an early session, and some bloke called Tim Berners-Lee – and then it was daytime. I didn’t live in London then, I was way too late for the era where it was Chris Evans and Danny Baker and Chris Morris, although Baker had come back to GLR by ’97… but you were a key part of that daytime schedule right through the 90s. It was Gideon Coe at breakfast, Robert Elms mid-morning, Fi Glover and then Andi Oliver after lunch, and you at drivetime.

 

And as a station in general, you had a very eclectic and unusual music policy. This was pre-6Music, and even pre-XFM for a while, but I remember one afternoon you came out of the 4pm bulletin with your first record which was a Pixies record, ‘Gigantic’, and it was still quite a shock to hear that on daytime radio. This doesn’t sound extraordinary anymore because 6Music do this kind of thing all the time now, but in 1997, it still did. And even the playlisted records were interesting; it felt like a complement to Radio 1, which I also liked.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

The playlist was an A, B and C-list, and we’d only have to play two playlist records an hour.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

My god, was that all?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Yeah, we were allowed to pick the rest of the rest of the records ourselves.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Even only a decade later, that had flipped round completely. I remember Adam Buxton being asked about his 6Music Saturday show with Joe Cornish, and he said, ‘We get two free choices an hour.’ Even Mark and Lard on Radio 1 afternoons used to have a jingle voiced by Kylie Minogue which announced, ‘Mark and Lard. At least four good records a show!’ In other words: four records they could choose themselves. But it’s nice to hear that with GLR, it wasn’t an artificially adventurous set up, it sounded like you really could bring in a box of records spontaneously and play mostly what you wanted.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Absolutely. When I started off at GLR, I was bringing in and playing my own records from home, because they didn’t have a lot of them in the library. I wasn’t exactly youthful when I started, but believe it or not, I was seen as having a more youthful kind of collection than most of the other people there. So I had the advantage of having comparatively young people’s records that weren’t in the charts: new wave, electronic, reggae, disco, indie or experimental.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was always a little surprised GLR didn’t do better with the listening figures, because I assumed people wanted to hear that variety of music. But I have a feeling that most people really do prefer to hear the same songs. One theory I have now is that people like singing in the car to songs they know.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Yeah, with life being so unpredictable, you want the comfort of familiarity. And also, GLR didn’t fit the template of BBC local radio, so when it died [March 2000], it rebranded and there was a lot less music, more chat and phone-ins. And the figures went up. BBC London gets around half a million now, has done for years, and GLR was more like… 300,000, and that was when they were the only game in town. But unfortunately, the BBC didn’t appreciate who was listening to it. As well as the music, the current affairs and local news aspect was really strong. GLR should have been a kind of exception to the norm in BBC terms, in terms of the local radio rule. 

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Bearing in mind, I didn’t really hear GLR till 1997 when I moved to London, so I only heard the last three years.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

You were very kind to give it the time of day! [Laughs]

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

But what I liked particularly was the way it said: Here’s a city where lots of things are happening every day. It felt like Time Out: arts, music, comedy, films. But it didn’t assume you had lots of money, so even though you couldn’t go to everything, you felt like you were being given a sample of what London was like that day. The interviews were diverting enough so that even if you didn’t manage to get that book or you didn’t get to the exhibition or the play, you got some insight anyway. I bought a lot of books out of the interviews in your programme. And it actually sounded like you had all read the books.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

I think the station wore its duties as a public service broadcaster quite lightly, but at the same time was very aware of listeners. I certainly saw myself as a fan of music and films and books, so could act as a conduit for the listener who might be into the same sort of things. It was civilised stalking of people whose work I was fascinated by. What a thrill to provide a service of getting to be in the same room as these wonderful artists and creators.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Did you get a sense of who your audience was?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

There’s no point in pretending not to blow the trumpet. Lots of guests who came in said they listened to the shows. There was Peter Cook, Terry Jones, Derek Griffiths from Play School, and Hugh Laurie. The first time I interviewed Michael Palin, a total hero from childhood so I was almost trembling, he said, ‘I’m one of your regular listeners.’ [Laughs]

 

And when GLR was threatened with closure (1999), Michael was really kind. He agreed to be the subject of this Time Out campaign to get well-known people to champion it all. It was a lovely sort of endorsement, especially because it was our duty to do playful, well-researched interviews with people and celebrate their work. Despite our small listenership, we could sometimes get big names because we appreciated what they did.

—–

ANYTHING: THE O’JAYS: Back Stabbers (1972, Philadelphia International)

Extract: ‘When the World’s at Peace’

PETER CURRAN

I was nineteen, and I was working in America, as a maintenance man in motels, in Wildwood, New Jersey. One of the motels was called the Bristol Plaza and it was run by this lovely old Jewish couple, Sam and Clara, who still had their numbers from the concentration camp stamped on their arms, and they actually met when they were teenagers, and the camp was liberated just before they would have died. So Sam was very lively and very aware of how life is fleeting, and so he was always shouting at people to hurry up.

 

I worked alongside a guy called Julius who was a Vietnam vet, and as a Black guy who grew up in Chicago, he had quite an interesting take on American pride in the military and stuff. He had been in the underwater demolition squad and so there were a few interesting tales there, but he and I used to stand for hours folding towels in the laundry for the motel. He introduced me to The O’Jays’ music. We had this little cassette player and I would bring cassettes and play him music and he played me music. And he would play me ‘long hair music’ as he called it. And I’d be, ‘I didn’t think you’d be into hippy stuff!’ – but no… ‘Long hair music, like Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and stuff’, because classical composers had long hair. [Laughter]

 

He was brilliant. He introduced me to The O’Jays’ music and he played me this album. It’s fantastic for lots of reasons. For people who don’t know it, it’s got a few hits: the title track, and ‘Love Train’. It’s got Gamble and Huff songwriting and production – that Philadelphia soul sound, very lush strings, different from the Detroit Motown sound. There’s an element of the Philadelphia sound that was ‘leisure songs’, but this album created the illusion of lush, sumptuous soul records that you could get down to with ‘your lady’, or leave for a loved one to listen to. To really understand how you felt, but couldn’t put into words. And you imagine tonnes and tonnes of people doing that when that album came out.

 

It came out just after What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye and some of the songs have that same concern about racial violence and inner-city deprivation and so forth, but also you get the broken-hearted loverman stuff as well. Eddie Levert, the lead singer, had been a big fan of Mario Lanza when he was a kid, and he once said, ‘I’m going to hold the notes till their whole heart breaks’ in tribute to Mario Lanza. I love that.

 

The way they break down the vocals into stabs and yelps is quite arresting, even worrying – and obviously a lot of it is technique – but it really brings you up short. It’s so courageous to not just keep the song rolling along, keep the arrangement going, keep the orchestra going. I love when they hit upon some repetitive vocal phrase that can work: here it is again, here it is again. Eddie Levert does this ‘The song is moving on, but no, I’m staying to reiterate this phrase, I’m gonna reiterate this phrase, I’m gonna bang it home…’. It becomes this powerful, mini-mantra in the middle of a song, and it takes such confidence to be able to do that. Never did anyone wallow with such power and broken-heartedness as Eddie Levert and his co-conspirators in the O’Jays.

 

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

With Bunk Bed, in the grand tradition of radio comedy shows, you have a catchphrase of sorts. But instead of ‘Can I do you now, sir?’ or ‘Stop messing about’, it’s you or Patrick saying to the other, ‘I’ve got something to play you on my phone.’ [Laughter] It’s a really interesting approach, surprising the other person and surprising the listener too. ‘What’s it going to be this time? Kingsley Amis on Monitor? “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols?’ It feels like the one element of the programme that you can pre-plan.

 

PETER CURRAN

I do love the archive element. It’s good stimulation for us, and good for the listener, just to widen the frame of the conversation. If I play Patrick something he won’t have heard it before, and I won’t have heard what he plays me. Sometimes, it dies horribly and prompts nothing except a sort of grunt, but in fact even the grunt of dissatisfaction works and so we leave it in the edit. I remember playing Patrick ‘There Ain’t No Pleasing You’ by Chas and Dave, and I suddenly said, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind, that isn’t producing a sense of delight’, and then he goes on to dig into that and is superbly condescending about it… That kind of loss of confidence and belief is always a joy to witness, if not experience!

 

It’s just an interesting way of sharing strange stuff with the listener, but also we’re genuinely sharing it with each other because it’ll hopefully prompt something and we never know. I think that’s the thing ‘cause because it is improvised.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And as you’ve said, you can’t see each other’s expressions because you’re in the dark. One of my favourite moments in it comes when Patrick plays you ‘Cinderella Rockefella’ by Esther and Abi Ofarim, a number one hit from 1968, and I enjoy that about 30 seconds in, you say, ‘Yes, I think we’ve got the idea there.’ [Laughter] I think you said your parents had this record.

 

PETER CURRAN

That’s right. There’s a really horrific video of them miming the song, while touring around the West End of London, Piccadilly Circus, with bowler hats and doormen, and this faded swinging London air. When Patrick played it to me, I felt a certain terrible heaviness, even though I was lying in the bed. I felt like I had a weight on top of me.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s very difficult to feel relaxed to that record, isn’t it? I first heard it in the early 80s, I was 11, and we were on holiday in Snowdonia in a camper van, and this was on… it must have been Radio 2. And I can remember hearing it and thinking, ‘I want to get out, but we’re in a moving vehicle.’ [Laughter]

—-

Bunk Bed‘s eleventh and final series was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 during February and March 2025. Most of its episodes can still be heard on BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/b060cdyj. From time to time, Peter and Patrick have been joined by some special guests on the spare mattress, who have included Kathy Burke, Cate Blanchett, Harry Shearer, Don Warrington, Jane Horrocks, Andi Oliver, Rhys Ifans, Benjamin Zephaniah, and Guy Garvey & Rachael Stirling.

Peter is the founder and executive producer of Foghorn Productions, and its website has links to several of its other documentaries and series.

Peter continues to work on BBC Radio 4 regularly, via Pick of the Week, Saturday Live and various documentaries. In March 2025, his hour-long collaboration with Tony Phillips, No Blacks No Irish, about the history of the notorious ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’ sign was broadcast as part of the excellent Archive on 4 series. You can find that here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0028kwb

You can follow Peter on Twitter at @curranradio. He can also be found on Bluesky at @petercurran1.bsky.social.

—-

FLA 10 Playlist

Peter Curran

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: DAVID BOWIE: ‘Time’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDP9jLwzh0g

Track 2: DAVID BOWIE: ‘Drive-In Saturday’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WABWNOEwC9A

Track 3: ROXY MUSIC: ‘Re-Make/Re-Model’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-zSnO7sbXg

Track 4: ANDY STEWART: ‘Donald Where’s Your Troosers’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ7Izh2dOUM

Track 5: DR FEELGOOD: ‘She Does it Right’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDFshGOUb-g

Track 6: DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS: ‘There There My Dear’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZwWnXuB_eg

Track 7: BIG THIEF: ‘Change’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTIzsTv1ENY

Track 8: BIG THIEF: ‘Time Escaping’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkIvGej2WyI

Track 9: PIXIES: ‘Gigantic’ (Single Version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0id6tY9AY8

Track 10: THE O’JAYS: ‘When the World’s At Peace’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dP3ik52Gqg

Track 11: THE O’JAYS: ‘Back Stabbers’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRyh2s1oWwM

Track 12: PETER CURRAN AND PATRICK MARBER:

‘Bunk Bed: Series 4 Episode 1 – HG Wells’: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b091wb3b

 

FLA 6: David Quantick (10/07/2022)

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The Emmy-award winning David Quantick began writing for a living in the early 1980s, shortly after studying law at the University of London, and has barely stopped since. For thirteen years, he was at the New Musical Express, where he originated a torrent of reviews, articles and thinkpieces. There, his association with the late Steven Wells on such anarchic, hilarious columns as ‘Ride the Lizard!’ led to feedback from a young BBC radio producer called Armando Iannucci. Over thirty years after the astonishing On the Hour for Radio 4, David has continued to be a part of Armando’s writing team on such internationally acclaimed television projects as The Thick of It, Veep and most recently Avenue 5.

Frankly, David has written so much, there isn’t room to list it all: sketches for Spitting Image and The Fast Show, the first-ever internet sitcom (2000’s The Junkies, written with Jane Bussmann), Chris Morris’s Brass Eye and Blue Jam, and ten years of Harry Hill’s TV Burp, amongst many, many other things.

 

In recent years, David has turned to novel writing – his seventh novel, Ricky’s Hand, is out now – as well as writing the screenplay for the 2021 romcom feature film Book of Love, starring Sam Claflin and Verónica Echequi.

 

I have been a fan of David’s work since the 80s, and have since got to know him a little bit too, so was delighted when he agreed to join me on First Last Anything to discuss his love of music. And so, one morning in May 2022, he told me about his formative years in Plymouth and Exmouth, the appeal of K-pop, and how to review a new pop record. We hope you enjoy it.

 

 

—

 

 

DAVID QUANTICK

In the 60s, at first we didn’t have a record player, and then at some point, we got a Dansette from our neighbours Pam and Tony. For me, it was quite an influential thing because the records that came with it were some novelty singles: ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’, ‘Seven Little Girls Kissing and Hugging with Fred’, and there were some Val Doonican albums with novelty songs on like ‘Slattery’s Mounted Foot’ and ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’. But there were also two Goon Show albums, Best of the Goons, volumes one and two, my first exposure to recorded music.

 

Meanwhile, my dad used to love opera. We didn’t have any in the house, but he used to go a lot to the opera, and used to say it was rubbish if it was in English. If you could understand the words, it was no good. And he also used to go to musicals. He worked in London just after World War II, so he saw an amazing amount of original British productions of things like South Pacific and Oklahoma!

 

But what really takes me right back to my childhood is Nat King Cole. We had an album called The Nat King Cole Story, and it had links narrated by, I think, Brian Matthew. I still love Nat King Cole’s voice.

 

Later on, my parents were in the Readers Digest book and record club, so we had lots of Readers Digest box sets – country music, pop music, bit of classical. They liked Howard Keel, the light opera singer – and they liked The Carpenters, although my parents hated the fuzz guitar solo on ‘Goodbye to Love’ – I think they just thought it was a bit much.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That solo’s like something invading from a different world.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

It does work for me, but it is a bit like having Jimi Hendrix on the Nat King Cole record.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

‘Yesterday Once More’ by The Carpenters is, I think, the first pop song I remember being a current, new record. Round about 1973. It’s weird to have, as one’s first-hand memory of pop music, a song that’s about nostalgia.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

The first like that I remember is ‘Hello Dolly!’ by Louis Armstrong, followed by ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, and that would have been on the BBC Light Programme. I would have been very little. 1964. Yeah, and I also remember my first TV musical memory – because we never watched Top of the Pops – was seeing John and Yoko getting off an aeroplane on the news [1969], wearing white suits like characters in The Champions.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What do you remember about school music lessons?

 

DAVID QUANTICK

There was ‘banging things at primary school’. The BBC used to do these schools radio programmes called Time and Tune – there’d be an accompanying magazine and you’d play along with xylophones. The one I remember was basically making space sounds.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Time and Tune ran for years. We had that at infants school. A different story project every term. This sounds like it might have been ‘Journey into Space’ (first broadcast, spring 1965, repeated spring 1968).

 

DAVID QUANTICK

For years, with the Carpenters, I was convinced that the song we practised in the Time and Tune lessons was ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’ (1977), but obviously, as I would realise later on in life, that would have been impossible.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And did you learn any musical instruments?

 

DAVID QUANTICK

When I was briefly at public school, I had piano lessons and the teacher asked if I was left-handed. I had oboe lessons and I got the cleaning feather stuck in that thing. I bought an acoustic guitar from the Burlington catalogue, the less famous version of the Freemans catalogue. And I think it was the obligatory Kay acoustic, because Kay made all the guitars that poor people had, and I couldn’t tune it. So I gave that up. That was my musical education as a child.

 

 —-

FIRST: WINGS: ‘Mull of Kintyre’ (1977, single, Parlophone)

JUSTIN LEWIS

So, the first single you ever bought. I think at the time the best-selling single there had ever been in Britain. Two million sales.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

Yeah, it outsold ‘She Loves You’ which made Macca very happy and Lennon less so. There was a great lie that I told for many years. When people asked me my first single, I used to tell them it was ‘Airport’ by the Motors, which was the second single I bought.

 

I had a school friend called Ewan, and whenever I talk about The Beatles, he still likes to say how embarrassing it was that I was a Beatles fan at school in the sixth form. This was just after punk, it was 1978, the Sid Vicious era of the Sex Pistols, Sham 69…  Now, we have this world of Beatles obsession and Beatles podcasts and remixes and all that. But back then… it wasn’t that the Beatles were loathed, but they were considered ‘boring’. They were summed up by ‘the Red and the Blue albums’, no-one had any of the other albums, and ELO had come along and stolen their crown and shat on it… Liking the Beatles, as I did, was just so naff. Ralph Wiggum would have liked The Beatles in 1978. And owning ‘Mull of Kintyre’ was even worse, I think.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

When I was first obsessed with pop music in the early 80s, Lennon had just died, so there was still a lot of ‘John’s the best Beatle’, but my other big obsession was TV comedy, and it soon became clear that Paul McCartney had become the whipping boy in comedy for everything that was square in pop music. I think that only really started to move on when he collaborated with Elvis Costello at the end of the decade [on Costello’s Spike and McCartney’s Flowers in the Dirt]. Costello did this interview where he just went, ‘Why’s everyone so rude about McCartney? He’s written more great songs than almost anyone else.’ I’m paraphrasing, but that kind of thing.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

Flowers in the Dirt was interesting, not just for having Costello, but it marked the beginning of McCartney just going, Fuck it, I’m not gonna do records that sound like everybody else. Then there’s the production shift. Every so often now, he’ll do a record with Nigel Godrich or Mark Ronson, but he’s basically saying, ‘I’ll just do what I want.’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I wondered if Anthology (1995–96) was what really cemented The Beatles, because they’ve never really gone away since then. In the 70s, when I was a child, I don’t really remember hearing The Beatles on the radio. They might well have been played, but I just don’t remember it.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

It’s like if you went to a disco, as they were called then, a student disco, or a 60s night, you’d never hear The Beatles, even though some of their records are real stompers, like ‘Got to Get You Into My Life’ or ‘Get Back’… But you couldn’t play a Beatles record because it stands out too much, it’s like entering a lion in a cat show. It just doesn’t work in that context, even though in a real sixties disco, you would have followed the Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’ with ‘Day Tripper’ or whatever. I would love to see, actually, a transcript of a real 1966 DJ’s setlist. If there ever was such a thing.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And you rarely, if ever, get the Beatles on multi-artist compilation albums.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

No, absolutely, and that’s why [Starsound’s] ‘Stars on 45’ (1981) was such a hit because you could go to a disco and dance to The Beatles. I mean, the legals were probably quite powerful on Beatles stuff on compilations. Like it’s weird when you watch a film and there’s a Beatles song in it. ‘How the hell did they clear that?’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Just going back to ‘Mull of Kintyre’. You’d have been sixteen when it came out, and that does seem – if you don’t mind my saying, given what a massive fan of pop music you are – quite a late start for a first single. I mean, presumably, you were borrowing stuff from friends, or taping stuff off the radio – was there a record library?

 

DAVID QUANTICK

No, I didn’t have any of that. I liked comedy. As I say, it was rare for me to watch Top of the Pops, though I remember Alice Cooper’s ‘School’s Out’ because obviously I was at school. Queen’s ‘Killer Queen’ seemed a bit like a Gilbert and Sullivan or a Noël Coward song. But I would enjoy the Wurzels, the comedy records. I didn’t get rock. I literally didn’t. I preferred classical music. And I had some albums: Dark Side of the Moon which sounded amazing, and I had a Mike Oldfield box set which I loved…

 

I had changed schools a couple of times, felt a bit isolated, didn’t have a lot of friends, stayed in a lot. But then in the sixth form a couple of other kids came from different schools, and I became friends with them. They were popular kids and they liked punk and they liked John Peel. So I kind of skipped the entire history of rock music. I was hearing The Clash for the first time at the same time as I was hearing Motown for the first time.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So when people talk about punk as ‘year zero’, you actually experienced it like that, because in a sense, you had no reference points. Or if you did, they were all from different areas of culture.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

Yeah. It was easy to get into punk and I started to understand riffs and why ‘dang-dang-dang’ was good, but I also like categories, and it was easy to spot what was punk. Olivia Newton-John wasn’t punk. The Dickies were. You felt a bit cool because you didn’t like disco – though obviously now I love disco. These were my new friends, and I liked what they my new friends liked.

 

And you could go to Lawes Radio which was a local music shop in Exmouth, selling radios and electronic equipment, but they subscribed to the indie chart so they would have Crass singles in the window display. And they were really nice people, but they knew they couldn’t compete with [WH]Smiths. They had a ‘30p Box’ that seemed to be crammed with early XTC singles.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

One of the aims of this series is to emphasise how record collections, especially early on, are almost accidents, because they’re based on how much money you have at that moment. What have the shops even got in stock? You might go to the shop expecting to buy Record X and they haven’t got it, but they have got record Y which is a bit cheaper. And also they’ve got that thing in the 10p bin which looks interesting. You’re buying a lot of things on a whim, you’re not curating it – that terrible word.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

It’s probably a bit more random. I would buy things that I’d heard, and I’d be embarrassed later. I had a single by a band called The Autographs called ‘While I’m Still Young’ (1978), which is great. It was a Mickie Most-concocted punk band, and it came on – I think – yellow vinyl.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m not familiar with this one! The mention of Mickie Most suggests it was on RAK Records.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

I think it was RAK, yeah. 30p. And I’d heard it on Roundtable, on Radio 1, and I loved it because I didn’t know any better. Of course I got rid of it when I realised… no-one ever told me to get rid of it, but I did. Now I look it up online and it’s not revered but it’s well-respected glam punk… It’s great. ‘While I’m Still Young’ – sung by some men who weren’t still young.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Knowing you a little bit, and hearing you on various podcasts and interviews talking about your early forays into writing, it occurs to me that you got into music journalism in the 80s, not directly because of music, but because it provided you with an outlet to write what you wanted. Because a lot of your background was liking comedy and novelists. And when you went to, particularly, the NME, in those days, you could write about authors, or cult films, or anything really. Didn’t you review the singles in the NME once as a Flann O’Brien parody?

 

DAVID QUANTICK

No, I wrote the gossip column as The Brother from Cruiskeen Lawn. It’s easy to parody. It’s basically: ‘This morning such and such happened’ and the other bloke who’s Flann O’Brien is going, ‘Is that a fact?’ So it’s a really good structure. I think we got one letter accusing the anonymous gossip column writer of racism. Because of course, there was no context, I didn’t explain this.

 

But it was great because you had to fill a weekly paper, all this space. The Thrills! section was meant to be interviews with up-and-coming bands, but there weren’t enough of those, so me and Stuart Maconie and Andrew Collins would fill it with comedy.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Somebody circulated on Twitter recently that Rock Family Trees parody the three of you worked on. An epic, incredible piece of work.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

They let us do anything then. And Stuart and Andrew were seconds away from being on Naked City on Channel 4 as columnists [co-hosted by the teenage Caitlin Moran], and I was a writer on that. But I hadn’t really fitted in at the NME in the 1980s, I hadn’t really liked the music. Then there was a sort of golden age when Alan Lewis and Danny Kelly were editing it [1987–92] – and I became friends with Andrew and Stuart. It was this wonderful thing when the NME was funny. You could write parodies, fake interviews. Working with Steven Wells [aka Swells] as well – we had two pages a week to write anything, which ended up with us working for Armando Iannucci.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, apparently the piece he spotted was about classical music and how all stringed instruments are different-sized guitars. Like the cello is in fact a massive guitar.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

I’m always convinced that got us the job writing for On the Hour. Maybe because Armando didn’t like rock! Just to trot out my favourite cliché: the NME was ‘Cambridge for losers’. There’s a reason why me and Steven were one of the few writing teams in comedy who didn’t have an Oxbridge or public school education. And that’s because of Armando, you know – the back door route.

 

—

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I saw you write the phrase ‘Nostalgia isn’t reviewing’ recently. As a reviewer, do you think your first impression of a record should be the one you stick with, regardless of whether you change your mind later?

 

DAVID QUANTICK

In real life, if you buy a record, and you play it, you love it because it’s by your favourite band, but you don’t really like it yet, because it’s a load of new music to take in. But you keep playing it, and generally the more you play it, the more you love it. You might even go back and play a record you hated but, because you’ve heard it every day, you love it.

 

But in terms of writing a review for a new record, you’ve only got your first impression. Your job is to try and imagine what you will think of it in the future, having heard it once. You’re livetweeting, to use a modern phrase, playing a record for the first time. What it sounds like compared to other things. Where does it fit in? And if you revisit an old review from a weekly music paper, there should be references in it that you won’t understand now. Like HERE COME THE HORSES or something. Because there should be references to where it fits that week ‘in June 89’. What I loathe, by the way, about Wikipedia, is they say things about old records like ‘allmusic.com gave it three stars’. Who cares? I want to know what Melody Maker said at the time.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

When I was about 18, in the late 80s, I probably spent more on music magazines than on records. Lots of the reviews was stuff you wouldn’t hear about, unless you happened to hear Radio 1 at the right moment, so you had to rely on a critic to convey what it might be like. That review had to work on the page as a piece of writing.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

I would have little rules when reviewing. I would always try and describe the music, but also name some of the songs, and maybe some lyrics, to give people something to hold on to. And I’d make comparisons, so say, the Wonder Stuff’s ‘Size of a Cow’: ‘It sounds like crusties doing Madness.’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Which were useful, especially with records that Radio 1 might not play.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

With most of the NME bands, you could hear it on John Peel or the Evening Session. But when I started at the NME [1983], I got to interview the bands who nobody else wanted. Eddie and Sunshine, for instance, who were great. Or a bloke who’d been in Pilot. Records nobody else wanted to review. These were records you wouldn’t hear on John Peel. I reviewed Nikki Sudden records, because I’d liked Swell Maps, and they’re now re-evaluated as classic indie, but he wouldn’t get an interview in the NME because he was ‘five years ago’ and John Peel wouldn’t play it. Because he was like pre-Primal Scream. He was trying to make 60s rock music in an indie studio.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

For me, as a young person, there was also Saturday morning TV, or stuff in the afternoons. Which you don’t get anymore. And you could get quite unlikely bands in there because the music bookers have to fill the space, and so you could get quite leftfield music on kids’ TV. I once saw Pere Ubu acting as the musical interlude on Roland Rat – The Series [BBC1, 25/07/1988].

 

DAVID QUANTICK

I remember seeing Buzzcocks on a Saturday morning show, doing ‘Are Everything’.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think that might have been Fun Factory [Granada, 1980].

 

DAVID QUANTICK

I also remember going with my friends Miaow, Cath Carroll’s band, to Alton Towers where I think they were filming Hold Tight! [ITV’s quiz and music show for children filmed at a theme park. This was the last episode, TX 23/09/1987.] It was a really weird day because I met Graham Stark from Peter Sellers’ stuff, who was sitting in a car (‘Are you Graham Stark?’ ‘Yes I am’) and Miaow were on, and Thomas Lear was on who’d been on Mute Records in the early 80s. It was more NME than the NME.

 

—-

LAST: PSY: ‘Gangnam Style’ (2012, single, YG)

JUSTIN LEWIS

I don’t notice lots of people my age championing K-pop, but you very much do.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

Like millions of people who aren’t sixteen, the obvious entry point with K-pop for me, about ten years ago, was ‘Gangnam Style’ by PSY. I love a novelty record, which stands out and isn’t like anything else. And then I discovered that I really liked K-pop, because bands like Girls’ Generation of Wonder Girls had taken the Girls Aloud template: largely five-piece female bands with really good dancefloor singles, and really great choruses.

 

Then I was writing a book set in the world of K-pop, which gave me excuses to immerse myself in Korean culture: movies, books, history, North and South. I also became obsessed with North Korean music – which is something we won’t go into now, but one of my proud moments was watching that Michael Palin series about North Korea. He was in a cafeteria there, and I recognised the song that was on in the background. It was ‘Let’s Work’ by the Moranbong Band. That made my day.

 

Then my wife Jenna really got into K-pop, we watch K-dramas together, and she’s a massive BTS fan, an expert in fact. I’m less a fan of BTS as a group, but their solo stuff… they were a rap crew but in various rap teams and their solo mixtapes are astonishing. They’re downloadable for free. If you just put ‘BTS solo mixtapes’ in Google, you can get the one by Agust D which is actually Suga from BTS. There’s a brilliant song called ‘Daechwita’ which I can’t pronounce.

 

This is quite common now, but about four years ago, I went into HMV in Maidstone, and I was shocked to see a separate K-pop section in there. All these big boxes, costing £30, containing a CD, often just an EP and photos and notebooks and stuff. My wife tells me that BTS get in trouble with the charts for that because including promotional material makes your album non-eligible for chart status. The sales of CDs are not counted. Also, BTS have released their new hits compilation with four unreleased demos on CD, which is doing the fans’ nuts in because they haven’t got CD players – because they’re kids.

 

But because of these K-pop boxes, they don’t integrate into the rest of the shop, and it makes K-pop look separate in the way that The Beatles were.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What’s your perception of how British media treats K-pop?

 

DAVID QUANTICK

I’ve seen two approaches. The NME one, which is the current way of treating everything in the same breathless news way. And there’s the way the posh broadsheets treat it, which is like the sniffy way they used to treat pop. I’ve seen reviews of BLACKPINK and I start screaming at the computer. They don’t mention that none of the tracks from the last EP are on the album. They don’t mention the multiracial mixed line-up of the band. All they do is write, ‘I don’t really like this kind of music, but it reminds me a bit of something I do remember from the 90s’. It’s like reviewing The Osmonds. The sneer is back.

 

But what really gets on my nerves is that television still makes these documentaries where a light entertainment presenter goes to Seoul and has some weird food and says a few words of Korean and then goes to a karaoke bar… It just drives me absolutely spare. We’re still doing the funny foreigner approach?!

 

I like K-pop, not just for me to keep up with new music, but also because I find, due to my age and the circles I move in, that you’re always being dragged down by the hands of the dead. It’s so much easier for me to fill my iTunes with old stuff. I just bought a Bryan Ferry live album in 2020 in which he perfectly recreates some songs from fifty years ago. I just bought some Luxuria because I hadn’t heard much Howard Devoto stuff. I’m constantly buying old music that’s nice to have on the computer, but really I would like the percentage to be reversed: to buy 5 per cent old music, and 95 per cent new music.

 

But when you listen to the average pop single now, if you take off the vocals, it sounds like something John Peel would have played in 1983. Cutting things up, raps, post-post-post-sampling, post-post-Pop Will Eat Itself. Pop music now is NUTS. What I’ve been recently doing is driving around with Radio 1 on, and the records stop sounding the same when you hear them all together in a bunch.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Radio 1’s great at the moment, I think.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

The DJs are generally quite funny and, at worst, unobtrusive. An afternoon with Radio 1 is quite interesting these days. Yeah, there’s a lot of generic stuff, but even so.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

My two favourite radio stations now are Radio 1 and Radio 3 and although they’re entirely different in presentation, I like that both stations are playing about 80 per cent stuff I don’t already know. Radio 2 drives me up the wall a bit. They have a habit of turning records you used to love into wallpaper.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

If you turned on Radio 2, now, any time, what’s playing? What’s the record? I’ll tell you mine.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It feels like it should be ‘We Built This City’.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

See for me, it’s ‘You Keep It All In’ by The Beautiful South. I’ve got no evidence for this.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In the early 90s, when Radio 2 was still quite MOR, it felt like any time it came out of a news bulletin, they’d start the next hour with ‘Going Loco Down in Acapulco’ by the Four Tops. [Laughter]

 —

ANYTHING: PADDY MCALOON: ‘I’m 49’ (2003, from I Trawl the Megahertz, Liberty Records, reissued under Prefab Sprout name, 2019, Sony Music)

JUSTIN LEWIS

Was this Paddy McAloon solo record a big surprise to you, given how different it was from usual Prefab Sprout records?

 

DAVID QUANTICK

It wasn’t a big surprise because I’d got used to the idea of artists doing something completely different and there were loads of reasons for Paddy doing it, to do with his health.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Now reissued under the Prefab Sprout name.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

That repetition of ‘I’m 49, divorced’. The way Paddy had slowed the voice down to make it sound more melancholic. It was like a Gavin Bryars record.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It really is reminiscent of ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me’.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

With Prefab Sprout, I hadn’t really been a fan. I liked some odd songs by them, ‘Cruel’, stuff on Swoon, the first album. But it sounded a bit old school – corporate and irritating at the same time. Like I loathe Steely Dan and that kind of jazzy pop. But then I heard ‘I’m 49’ and it was brilliant. Makes me like Prefab Sprout a bit more.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

At one point on ‘I’m 49’, in this mass of sampled voices from radio phone-ins, there’s a sample of someone going ‘What’s wrong?’ Which I thought sounded not unlike your voice, strangely enough. Turns out it was apparently Jimmy Young [then of Radio 2, doing the Jeremy Vine phone-in slot]. And it also makes me think of Chris Morris’s Blue Jam series on Radio 1, which of course you wrote on, and I don’t know if Paddy had heard that. That mixture of comforting music and disturbing voices.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

It reminds me of Different Trains by Steve Reich as well. The voices cutting in like a countermelody. But with I Trawl the Megahertz as a whole, I’m a bit like the person who went to see David Bowie in 1970, just so they could hear ‘Space Oddity’. I play ‘I’m 49’, but I don’t really play the rest of the record.

 

It’s so out of character, for Paddy McAloon to do something that’s not song based, because he’s such a song obsessive. It’s obviously to do with the way he felt at that point. Middle-aged pop stars either ignoring it like Mick Jagger, or to start eating yourself like Bowie referencing himself on The Buddha of Suburbia. Or McCartney making Britpop with the Flaming Pie album. But what Paddy McAloon does here is express the way I felt about being middle-aged. Ironically now, because that was 20 years ago. But now it’s a really brilliant, really effective piece of music. The whole record, you only need that slowed down sample of a man saying, ‘I’m 49, divorced.’

 

—

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There’s a new film you’ve written, Book of Love, and the composers have actually soundtracked your film with original songs. They didn’t just choose stuff from a back catalogue of hits. What was it like having your screenplay as a sort of jumping off point for their work?

 

DAVID QUANTICK

It was really nice to have a soundtrack. I had no consultation at all with the composers, because once they started making this film which was in Mexico and I couldn’t go, I was kind of outside the process. When I was writing the screenplay, I had different music in mind, a lot of reggaeton. But I love the soundtrack we’ve got. It’s an odd mix, but it works quite well because you know, it’s British and Mexican, and romantic and comedy as well. Romcoms are weird because you know it’s a comedy but it’s also a ‘rom’ so you have to have romantic scenes.

 

I do sometimes listen to music when I’m writing. With my novel, All My Colors, which was meant to be a Stephen King pastiche set in the 80s, I just listened to the Stranger Things soundtrack and that just led me to John Carpenter. When I wrote another novel, Night Train, that was fun because I listened to train songs, and none of the songs have got anything to do with each other except that they’re all about trains and quite a lot of them go dig-dig-dig-dig-dig.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Obviously you’ve also been a song lyricist – Spitting Image as far back as the 80s, and more recently 15 Minute Musical (for Radio 4) and other things too. What’s your approach to writing musical lyrical parody?

 

DAVID QUANTICK

I don’t know what my approach is. Brevity. It’s restrictions, really. With 15 Minute Musical, there was one, which sounds insane now… about Julian Assange being in the Embassy and it was set to a pastiche of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

 

When I wrote lyrics for Spitting Image songs, I wrote a song parodying U2, ‘I Still Don’t Know What I’m On About’ [1987], Bono talking in meaningless phrases. I wrote that solely for the one line, ‘You can change the world, but you can’t change the world.’

 

And I’m really pleased I wrote a rejected Pet Shop Boys parody for Spitting Image. When I told Neil Tennant the lyric, he claimed to be entertained. ‘Let’s run away together if we’re willing/Those eclairs are never a shilling.’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Very good.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

As they’ve written at least two songs in which Neil Tennant tells somebody else that they should run away together.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

‘Two Divided by Zero’ and…

 

DAVID QUANTICK

‘One More Chance’.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m presuming with the songs, like the sketches, you weren’t on the writing team, you just sent stuff in as a freelancer.

 

DAVID QUANTICK

Yeah, I remember being invited up to the studio by the producer, Geoffrey Perkins, who kindly paid the train fare, and I went to see the U2 item being filmed. So I met the Bono puppet – and I was quite impressed, because they’d only just made it. They hadn’t done many groups because once you’ve made an Edge puppet, what the fuck do you do with it?

 

And that connection with Geoffrey led me to a weird period when I was a music suggester for Saturday Live and Friday Night Live, the Ben Elton vehicles. Geoffrey and the other producer, Geoff Posner, said, ‘You’re a music journalist. We don’t really know what bands to get.’ It was great, because their idea of a new band was not mine, and not the NME’s, so I would suggest people like The Pogues and Simply Red. I think I got a credit and fifty quid, something like that.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You’ve got a family now, obviously. Do your kids introduce you to music you’ve not heard before yet?

 

DAVID QUANTICK

They like The Beatles and they’re starting to like BTS. They really like The Wombles. That’s probably me pushing a bit because I know Mike Batt and I wanted to show off that I know Mike Batt.

 

But one of the things I loved about writing on TV Burp was that Harry Hill had older children, and was pretty up on the pop scene, and he would drop a lot of references to contemporary hits into his work, and it was nice because it wasn’t just indie. Working in comedy in the 90s for me, because I was a music journalist, all the stand-ups would make me mixtapes. And it was horrible because they just made me NME-type tapes. Don’t ever talk to a stand-up about their music collection, because it’s all fucking Pavement.

 ——

David Quantick’s novel Ricky’s Hand was published in August 2022 by Titan Books.

Book of Love can currently be streamed at NOW TV Cinema and Amazon Prime. It triumphed at the Imaagen Awards 2022, winning Best Primetime Movie.

The second series of Avenue 5 began airing on Sky in the UK in autumn 2022.

David has now written three series of BBC Radio 4’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane Austen? starring Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. In both 2023 and 2024, it won the British Comedy Guide’s Award for Best Radio Sitcom.

In late 2024, he began co-hosting The Old Fools, a very funny podcast series with fellow comedy writer Ian Martin and special guests every week. You can listen to it at Apple here, or wherever you listen to podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-old-fools/id1774465485  

For tons more on David’s life, career and news, as well as regular new short stories, his website is at davidquantick.com

You can follow him on Bluesky at @quantick.bsky.social

—-

FLA Playlist 6

David Quantick

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: THE GOONS: ‘Ying Tong Song’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33-fVsL5Kdc

Track 2: NAT ‘KING’ COLE: ‘Dance Ballerina Dance’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rlsy4te7jY4

Track 3: CARPENTERS: ‘Goodbye to Love’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YarvI9eCa8Q

Track 4: WINGS: ‘Mull of Kintyre’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Plhtk_XJqhM

Track 5: THE MOTORS: ‘Airport’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS7dnNVidjA

Track 6: THE AUTOGRAPHS: ‘While I’m Still Young’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5xBh8ELOfY

Track 7: MIAOW: ‘Break the Code’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gzX2kNa7O4

Track 8: BUZZCOCKS: ‘Are Everything’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNX59sdaPcw

Track 9: PSY: ‘Gangnam Style’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGc_NfiTxng

Track 10: AGUST D: ‘Daechwita’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TWQg4z9Ic8

Track 11: BLACKPINK: ‘DDU-DU DDU-DU’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHNzOHi8sJs

Track 12: PADDY McALOON [now credited to Prefab Sprout]: ‘I’m 49’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cenwtYd7HFo

Track 13: PETER EJ LEE, MICHAEL KNOWLES, JENNIFER KNOWLES: ‘Book of Love’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCg3PQuTNzw&list=PLyW-9UYLk9O2fSb_HYzGfl45t771DSTvD

Track 14: RED ONE, DADDY YANKEE, FRENCH MONTANA AND DINAH JANE: ‘Boom Boom’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a4gHAiXo7E