Alan Lawrie with Gavin McCoy
Enjoy Alan’s interview with the one and only Gavin McCoy, this time on the other end of the microphone.
Gavin: ‘It’s the Samaritans, how can I help you?’
Alan: ‘Not Battersea Dogs Home, I’ve got the wrong number…’
(Both fall about laughing not having been in touch for ten, fifteen years or more)
OK, Gavin, I am going to test you with this. It’s about the book, it’s not about Steve Cooper, it’s not about working in Denmark, nor working for IDEA. What it is, I am following the story “Great Idea”, about people who started out as a DJ, did international work, and then went on to other things. Some of these stories are absolutely amazing, really are good stuff. Now, I know you have some very readable stories. So, what happened with your career when you left the Scandinavian scene and went into radio.
I know you did all those voice impersonations and that’s very much what I want to hear about. So, tell me…
Well, it’s interesting because I had been working in Kristiansand (Norway) until the day I came back to England. I was loving every minute of my life there, but I secretly aspired to being a radio DJ, having cut my teeth on mobile and disco work. As it happened, a radio station in Wolverhampton advertised for DJs in Record Mirror or something. So, I sent off a tape which I had made in the disco; I had previously done some work for Radio Oxford, years before going on the road. Lo and behold they said come and see us, I did and after a brief interview they said you’ve got the job, this was 1976. You are going to be the mid-afternoon guy, which was fantastic. Interestingly, the money they gave me for professional radio working in the West Midlands, was less, far less than I was getting on the road in Scandinavia. So, there was a bit of a drop in income and with working on radio came far more responsibility, far more to do and it was far more demanding, so professional radio was quite a tradeoff to start with. So, between you and me (and all you readers...!) I absolutely hated the area, and I was a kind of an alien in that area as well. All the time I was just wishing I could be closer to my home in Oxford. Happily, after a short period of time, I got a job in Reading, at Radio 210. Such a lovely station, lovely people just down the road from where I lived and where actually, I met my wife to be, Ingrid, who was working in Reading as a teacher. So those bits fell into place quite quickly. I stayed in 210 for eight years. I was working alongside famous names like Bob Harris, Mike Read, Steve Wright and quite a few of the prominent names today who cut their teeth in this little radio station in Reading.
Steve Wright and I hit it off straight away, he had a comedic sense of humour, so did I, we all mucked around leaving each other ridiculous, hilarious messages, pretending to be somebody else on our answering machines and stuff. Just crazy stuff to see what we could get away with. Sometimes, when we did phone in shows on the air, if there were no calls coming in, Steve would say to me ‘call me up and pretend to be a caller’. We became quite adept at doing various voices, either crazy voices or serious voices, as phone contributors to each other’s shows, that’s where the voices developed and looking back it was like being at school and I was the class comedian. So, I was always imitating the teachers, imitating the politicians all that stuff. It was kind of second nature for me to do different voices. Well, Steve eventually got his lucky break and went from Radio 210 to Radio Luxembourg. There was a connection there because the commercial production manager at Radio 210, a guy called Dickie Swainson, had been the programme controller of one of the pirates, I think it was Radio London or Radio Caroline, back in the 60s. He became the programme controller at Radio Luxembourg so, very quickly what followed was, he recruited several people from 210 in Reading, to go and work at Hertford Street in London and thus to Luxembourg, to go on air and be presenters. There must have been five or six people who went from 210 to Radio Luxembourg. Then eventually, Steve was recruited by Radio One. Luxy in those days was a great launching ground for careers, and I am sure we know many of the guys on Luxy who ended up on Radio One. Steve was offered a weekend show, then was given his famous, ‘Steve Wright in the afternoon show’. At the same time in America, there was a famous guy Rick Dees, who was very popular, and who had a similar kind of a show, a zoo’s show. Characters on the phone coming in and out. To enhance the comedy, someone would pretend to be June the coach, or Larry the hairdresser or something like that. So, Steve said, ‘would you do some voices for me one day?’ and, I said, ‘yeah, sure, of course’. He said I can pay you for it, and shortly afterwards I got a contract from BBC Light Entertainment which was like seven pages long and I never, ever read it.
Every day I would be doing these voices, and believe it or not, I would get more for ten minutes worth of work on BBC National Radio than I did for my entire show on commercial radio which was four hours long. So, I didn’t say no to that, then just before 2 o’clock when Steve started each day, they’d say to me ‘What are you going to do?” So, I’d have a look at the day’s newspaper, find a little story about something that happened on the news and find someone that I was going to be. I said I am going to be a camp hairdresser. One of the characters I did for many years was Gervais the Hairdresser. If you listen to Alan Carr nowadays, how he laughs, basically, it was Alan Carr before Alan Carr had been born, very camp, very expressive, very OTT. So, I launched into that voice and people loved it; I experimented a with a few more different characters, some stuck and became kind of cult characters. I wrote and performed all the material for Gervais you know, for example his parting words every time he had been on, was the expression, ‘keep your tongue out’, he’d say it in a very camp voice. I was on a bus and overheard people say goodbye to each other and one of them would say ‘Keep Your Tongue Out’! I thought, bloody hell, I can’t believe that somebody’s using my expression. There were more like that.
Another character I did was, Sid the Manager, he was supposed to be Steve’s shambolic manager. A lot of these people are based on observations of real people by the way. So, I did that character who had a squeaky, irritating, protesting voice, who phoned in daily. I did another character called Fred Crosswell, a cinema manager and this was in the pre-internet days, when you had to phone the cinema to find out what film was on or look in your local newspapers. Imagine, all this was before the internet, back late 70s early 80s. This was probably around Radio One’s Hey Day, which went on for decades. Then I did a posh voice called Malcolm from the Arts Council, he was very pretentious. Every day I would sit in a studio or at home and would very quickly have to go from one character to the next. Quite frankly, it was like being schizophrenic. Even at the radio stations that I worked, they knew I did this, and very often I’d have an audience of people coming in to see me doing these changes of character and go from one thing to another. What would happen is, we would record these things about 5 or 10 to two, before Steve started on the air. No run throughs, no rehearsal. Steve didn’t know what I was going to do until I opened my mouth so, his response was absolutely genuine. Then the time would be ticking away until his show started, some days it would go really well, and we’d give it all out in ten minutes. Other days I’d trip over some words and have to start again so there was a degree of danger because it all had to be finished by 2 o’ clock. Quite often I’d be in a silly mood, and I’d put in some very rude bits, which the tech operators recording this would hear and they’d be falling around laughing, but Steve would get annoyed because I was wasting time leading up to going on air. Looking back, I would say they were fantastic fun times and some of the outtakes we made in those days, screwing it up, getting it wrong, saying rude and offensive stuff by today’s standards, are still on tape in the BBC’s secret archives. They get played at Christmas parties and by today’s standards are absolutely non-politically correct. We had a load of fun doing it.
So, anyone reading this book, will realise that YOU are behind it, I remember listening to the station.
Yes, it’s interesting because now and then I have to produce a CV of stuff I have done in the past and very often people would say “I had no idea that was YOU!”, we used to love those characters. Sid, the manager, and Gervais the Hairdresser were real people. Some people thought Steve did those impersonations. No, he didn’t, there were a nucleus of about four people who did the voices. Peter Dickson, who is a very famous voice over guy and I, probably did 99% of the characters. Such good fun and it paid well. It was exciting because I would do it and an hour or so later, I would hear it on air and would laugh at the silly stuff that I did. Some people must have a script written down, but I would just have a little guideline. If you look on You Tube for Sid the Manager, or Gervais the Hairdresser, or Steve Wright’s characters, you can hear how it went.
Let me tell you an exciting thing that happened once. One day Steve said to me, “I’ve got Paul McCartney coming in later” and he said, “would you come on the air live?”. I never ever did live stuff on the air, but I did this time. The telephone rings and he said, “Paul, it’s Sid, the Manager on the line”. (I actually have this on a cassette with McCartney’s name scrawled across it) I said to Paul, remember me? It’s Sid the Manager, I used to be a doorman at the Cavern Club, you owe me five quid.” McCartney played along with it all the way. He just said, “Oh Yes, Sid”, and carried on the banter. Paul was a great fan of the show, so even Paul McCartney knew the characters and he played along with this phone dialogue.
How long did the fun last with Steve Wright?
It was ongoing, the voices went on for about twenty years, even when he went on to the Breakfast Show on Radio One, I did the same stuff there. He’s on Radio Two now but no longer does those characters but interestingly, in addition to the character voices I have always been the announcer voice on his shows, and I still do them now.
(In September 2022 the BBC axed his show to the fury of his legions of fans and listeners. Baffling, why change a winning formula? His shows were immensely popular)
These days, semi-retired, I have a home studio, I record imaging voices for productions for radio stations all around the world, from the Caribbean, USA, Australia, Netherlands, and Norway. You know, the little things like branding for stations. Still do that work every single day of the week. Ever since I reached that so-called ‘retirement age’ I’ve never worked so much. I had this vision, like a lot of people do, of lazing around, drinking coffee, reading a book and assuming things would slow down but the truth is the opposite. I love the stimulus of creativity and doing something I am proud of every day. That’s what keeps you going, sitting down with a blank sheet of paper, and thinking I will capture those thoughts and write them down. I don’t think about myself as a pensioner. When I hear about pensioners on TV, they are talking about someone else. I am only 37 years old!
Do you still have a love of music?
Absolutely. Whenever I hear a song from a certain era I automatically think of where I was working at the time. I might hear “Love Train” by the OJAYS, now that was a Dance Floor filler at the Fregatten Hotel in Kristiansand. Having played millions of songs as a radio personality on the air and in discotheques, my emotional connection always goes back to Motown, the Philly Sound and Atlantic Soul so, if it’s Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual healing’, all that great music still resonates with me.
So, Gavin, any regrets?
You know, interestingly, during the toughest times of radio, like on breakfast shows on big stations up and down the country, Essex FM 210 Reading, quite stressful, I would very often think, bloody Hell, I wish I was back in Scandinavia again, because you start work at 8 pm, finish at midnight and have a great social life. The best part of it was when in Kristiansand, my friends Trevor White and Pip Hammond would be working in a hotel down the road and Richard White would be at the Phoenix Hotel in Arendal.
So, there would be English disc jockeys there along the coast from Mandal and one of them would have a car so, we would meet up and mess around all day long, talking about this that and the other; those days were fantastic. You know, at the toughest times on radio I would think to myself what the hell am I doing this for? I could have twice as much money, no pressure, all the freedom in the world and enjoying a foreign country…so that was often a regret. Then looking back, I was driven to getting a job on radio, but I could have waited another couple of years really and saved a bit more money and had a bit more fun.
(That idyllic, dream working lifestyle, didn’t last long Gavin. Licences in Norway extended, so DJs worked up to 3 am. Days per week were cut back, Quizzes, Live Sport on the big screen, Karaoke etc. changed the importance of entertainment through the DJ, not only in Norway but throughout Europe.) Back to the interview!
So, what was your absolute high? I would have thought it was your fun with Steve Wright.
Yes, he’s still my best mate now, I’m having lunch with him tomorrow. We’ve been best friends for forty odd years. From being on air as a presenter, I became Head of Music, the Deputy Programme Controller, then off on a management career where I became Head of Capital Gold in London. I was also Head of Smooth Radio in London and Head of presentation for Saga’s National Prime Time Radio. So, you see, the second half of my career was in Management. Then technology and everything changed around me. Very often they would say things like ‘We are not going to continue our radio station in London, we are moving to Manchester’ and I was thinking I don’t really want to go to Manchester, I want to be in the Southeast or whatever. The Radio industry changed very quickly because of the introduction of technology. Then along came the takeovers. The independence of small, radio station disappeared. Everything was run from Head Office and there was consolidation, back biting, pressure and all those things that came with it.
You know what would happen, on a Friday we would be told a new company was taking over the radio station and then on Monday we would get a memo saying “Dear Staff, just to reassure you we love everything you are doing; we are very happy to take over Radio “Whatever it was” …blah blah. Don’t worry, everybody’s job is secure”, which would be posted on the noticeboard on Friday, and then on Monday there would be another notice that said, “Dear Staff, we are going to talk to everyone today about redundancies”. You know, shrinking the numbers of the staff, and that happened so many times with the consolidation of the radio industry. You’d go home on a Friday night and wonder if you still had a job on the Monday. So, my big regret then would be, if you put all your faith in one employer you are making a big mistake. You’ve got to diversify and have some other income stream.
You’ve proved that you are still doing what you love to do from your home studio.
I don’t have to work, I don’t need the income, but I do need the stimulus, the challenge, and the excitement. I absolutely love sitting here in my home radio studio, making stuff and the challenge of someone saying could you make me this and two days later I would play it to them, and they say wow that’s fantastic. That’s better than I thought it would be.
Looking back, I will always be in your debt, Alan. There were great gigs and dream venues like Fregatten Hotel, then on the other side, shitty venues with shitty managers. That’s how it was!
I will always remember your stay at Liseleje Strand Hotel, (North Sjaelland, Denmark.) …and that awful manager.
That was my low spot. Not only now, but it was one of those places that was not busy, as they were doing renovations to the club and to get to my bedroom I had to climb over a big pile of rubble. In my bedroom, there was no running water. The toilet? If I wanted a wee in the middle of the night, I had to get up and get fully dressed again, climb back over that big pile of rubbish, open the door to this disco venue say at twelve o clock at night, I had to walk through this public area to get to the loos in this venue. The Discotheque was downstairs. The DJ booth had two layers of thick glass, so you had no contact with the guests and when you spoke into the microphone it sounded like speech in a swimming pool, as if you had a hand over your mouth and the music was like that as well.
From there the only was UP!
Thank you, Gavin - that’s a great interview, “Long May You Run”.
Keep Your Tongue Out, Alan!