DRIVER SO DOPEY
A DAFT motorist, allegedly on cocaine and marijuana, was arrested after crashing his car outside a police station in Maidenhead, Berks.
I RECKON Ricky Wilson is wasted. Being just a pop star, I mean.
Half an hour on the phone with the Kaiser Chiefs frontman and my day feels 10 times brighter.
We’re meant to be chatting about a new thing Ricky’s done for CBBC, going out tomorrow morning as part of its Celebrity Supply Teacher series, where he gives kids an art lesson.
And, yes, obviously we do talk about that. Art is a passion of his, something he taught for real in the early 2000s at Leeds College of Art and Design. “But obviously that didn’t last very long, Mike,” he reminds me, “because I became an international pop star.
“I’m not putting down the teaching profession, but international pop stardom somehow had more of a draw for me.”
But we also drift from topic to topic, touching on lockdown’s upside,
Tony Blackburn and shaving your dog.
The dog in this case is Reedus, the I Predict A Riot singer’s labradoodle. “We couldn’t get him groomed so last week we shaved him ourselves,” Ricky tells me. “Never again. It took three hours. And he ended up looking like he was destitute.
“Still, you have to find the positives. He was quite a handsome dog, and now no-one’ll want to steal him…”
Three hours is also how long Ricky, 42, regularly spends nattering online with veteran DJ Blackburn, 77, for their podcast Pop Detectives. “That’s always a bright bit of my week, talking with Tony for that long – although obviously we edit it down – about absolutely nothing,” he says. Ricky admits lockdown has forced him to reflect on his band, saying: “Even when you’ve got the best job in the world, you can get used to it. And that’s what I’d done. “It’s been a time to think about whether I’ve been carrying on just because I didn’t know how to do anything else or because I really wanted to. I’ve realised I still really want to. But I’ve also come to realise it’s not as important to me as I thought.”
So no chance of Ricky returning to the classroom? “Oh, I’d be an awful teacher!” he chuckles. “I’d just be desperate for the kids to like me. I’d be one of those teachers who, when I was at school, I thought was really sad.”
● Ricky’s episode of Celebrity Supply Teacher will air on CBBC tomorrow morning at 9.25am.