Seize the Day Read Online Free

time had merely been a bunch of letters on a record label. David Cassidy arrived straight from the airport and the legendary Flying Burrito Brothers turned up in their tour bus on the off-chance of an interview. These days they wouldn’t get past the receptionist and no DJ would be allowed to interview anyone ‘on spec’ without prior agreement from the hierarchy, but I welcomed the Burritos with open arms and was later congratulated for the impromptu interview. Knowing your music history and the characters that fell unexpectedly into your lap was part of the game, which is why NffB beamed, ‘Brilliant, you knew all about them, it was a great interview … they were happy and I’m happy.’ I’d made an instant decision to change the show round to accommodate them, so I set the microphones up, got a balance, got them to play some live stuff and kept the chat fairly pacey. These days if you so much as think about changing even one track of the pre-programmed playlist you risk landing in the mire and being transported to the Slough of Despond. There was no Google to swiftly check their history either. You had to know it.
    When the chart-topping singing phenomenon (his own words)Demis Roussos came to see us, it was a hot day and Steve and I put some armchairs in the garden (oh yes, we had a garden), where, on this occasion, we intended to discuss the life, times and circumference of the Greek singer. Being a gargantuan twenty stones at the time, his great frame needed regular sustenance. ‘Cake,’ he boomed like an Athenian Brian Blessed. ‘No cake, no interview.’ The chances of any cake remaining on the premises for long with Read and Wright around were minimal, so we offered to send someone to buy the big man a slice. ‘Slice? I want a cake.’ A whole cake, one that would serve a family of six, with enough left over for supper. Desperate pleas over the radio led to a kind soul donating a large sponge she’d just made to the cause. He dined on it, that listener probably still dines out on it, and we got our interview.
    I really enjoyed interviewing, with guests such as the Shadows, Mary Hopkin, Lena Zavaroni, Showaddywaddy, Gene Pitney, the Bay City Rollers, Alvin Stardust, Alan Freeman and Johnny Mathis all providing different challenges. Marc Bolan particularly seemed to enjoy coming to 210, often contributing live jingles to my programme, which he would write, play and perform during the show. I also did some outside broadcasts with Marc as well as roistering in local hostelries, where we’d sing Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran songs until we were thrown out. He always talked about his love for those early rock & rollers and how much they’d influenced his songwriting and the tracks that gave him a string of number one records. Marc would always have his chauffeur sitting outside, which is something that would have irritated me no end. The thought that someone was sitting in a car at my behest, while I was inside eating and drinking wouldn’t have sat as comfortably with me as it did with him. Once I asked him why he didn’t drive himself, to which he replied that he thought it was too dangerous. Ironically, within a year he was to die in a road accident at twenty-nine, a sad waste of talent and the tragic end of a lovely man. I always think of him when driving across Barnes Common in west London, where the car in which he was apassenger hit a tree, fatally injuring him. It’s now many years since his death but without fail there are always fresh poems, photographs and flowers regularly pinned to the tree and I often notice one or two people looking at the statue that’s been erected there.
    Marianne Faithfull was another early interview, arriving in the studio in a black shiny mac, short skirt and long boots. Heady stuff for a shiny, eager disc jockey. She sat opposite me and became progressively more provocative as she put her boots on the desk and displayed her knickers. Smiling away to herself, I think