DEAR reader, let me assure you that in all the years I’ve been interviewing people for The Herald Magazine I have never once arranged one of said interviews while standing at a urinal.
But it turns out that’s the location where Paul Gambaccini set up a Rolling Stone magazine cover story with Elton John. This was one of the revelations disclosed on 50 Years of Paul Gambaccini last Sunday night on Radio 2.
On that particular occasion the singer told Gambaccini to call his publicist Helen Walters whilst, as the DJ delicately described it, “in full flow”.
This was back in 1973, the same year Gambaccini started his career on Radio 1. Walters’ husband John - later best known as John Peel’s producer - was the man who gave him the job, thus kickstarting a career in radio that has stretched over five decades.
50 Years of Paul Gambaccini was a celebration of that anniversary; a chummy two-hour interview with fellow DJ - and his successor as Pick of the Pops presenter - Steve Wright.
The result was very much about Gambo the broadcaster - he’s been known as Gambo since school it turns out - rather than the man. The public Gambo, if you like.
Curiously enough, though, it’s hard to square Gambaccini’s radio persona with the three DJs he told Wright were his mentors - the aforementioned John Peel, Alan “Fluff” Freeman and Kenny Everett.
He has none of the flamboyance of the latter two, nor the wilful otherness of the former. Gambo has always been a dry, rather unshowy broadcaster. That said, he has always brought an attention to detail and a breadth of knowledge of both music and culture that stretched beyond most DJs.
Wright - or rather his producers - had looked out the first trailer Gambaccini recorded when he first started presenting Pick of the Pops. In it the DJ said of the programme: “It began in 65 with the soul of Johnson’s Great Society, a soundtrack between Kennedy and the War …”
It is, let’s face it, rather difficult to imagine any other Radio 2 DJ offering that particular exegesis.
At the end of the show, looking back on his 50 years, Gambo quoted the playwright Arthur Miller, speaking on the opening night of Death of a Salesman: “All that remains are memories of voices in the air. That’s not nothing.”
A better summary of the solace of radio is hard to imagine.
Talking of Elton John … On Radio 4’s This Cultural Life his songwriting partner Bernie Taupin was Jonathan Wilson’s latest guest (Saturday & Monday).
It’s possible that I came away from it knowing more about the singer than Taupin himself. That moment in the 1970s when Elton stuck his head in the gas oven came up. Taupin called it a cry for help.
“I remember walking in and going ‘what are you doing?'” Taupin told Wilson. “And then his fiancee walked in, just rolled her eyes and walked out. It was pretty much pantomime.”
“Did you know he was gay?” Wilson asked. “Oh yes, absolutely.”
How so? “Well he made a pass at me and it was kind of comical. He just put a hand on my leg and I kind of laughed it off … He was very conflicted at the time. Because of his background and being very dominated by his father.
"This was the guy who wouldn’t let him wear hush puppies. I think that is why he became so flamboyant later on because it was a blowback at being repressed as a child.”
Where was Taupin in all this? Watching westerns, listening to Marty Robbins and reading Somerset Maugham. But he did pull the curtains back a little at the end.
“I’m not a professional songwriter,” Taupin suggested. “Is it in The Third Man that the character says: ‘I’m just a hack writer who falls in love with girls and drinks too much’? Well, I don’t drink too much and I don’t fall in love with girls anymore, I’ve been married for 20 years, but … Maybe that’s what I was at one point in time.”
Finally, on Monday morning on 5 Live Naga Munchetty revealed that we all consume an average of grams of plastic a week, about the weight of a credit card. Yum.
According to Dr Nabil Hajji, technical director of toxicology at the Water Research Centre, microplastics have already been found “in our muscles, our brain and our blood. Everywhere.”
That’s a Cronenbergian body horror movie in waiting right there.
Listen Out For: Legend: the Story
Joni Mitchell turns 80 on November 7. What better reason to celebrate her outsized talent? SInger/songwriter Jesca Hoop does the honours.
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