FLA 10: Peter Curran

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.

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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]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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]

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