Annie Nightingale: 'If I can play what I like and say what I like, that’s the dream'
It’s an hour past midnight on a humid Wednesday in July, and a set of future rave classics is being broadcast simultaneously on Radio 1, 1Xtra and the BBC Asian Network. The choices are pulsating and fast, including a new track by producers Tiga and Hudson Mohawke, and a remix of House Arrest by Sofi Tukker and Gorgon City, a drum-andbass-fuelled track which feels intense enough to wake the dead.
Then the DJ cuts in, her voice husky and hurried, but also disarmingly polite. She has picked these tracks herself, and several include colourful language, so she needs to issue a warning, given this is the BBC. “There may be some adult themes in this show, so if you think you might be offended you can find another, I’m sure,” she explains. “You might like to hear me on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 this week for instance, on Sounds.”
To which the casual listener might naturally respond: I’m sorry, what?
On Desert Island Discs, the same DJ picks Ethel Merman’s Some People, a 1959 film song with lyrics that inspired her when she was a teenager (“Some people can get a thrill/Knitting sweaters and sitting still/That’s OK for some people/Who don’t know they’re alive”, it begins). There’s also Sid Vicious’s raucous version of My Way, and John Lennon’s Instant Karma. Incredibly, Lennon used to record trails for this same DJ’s early shows, which began half a century ago.
She may now permanently wear sunglasses (green with grey lenses, bought from an Italian airport years ago for 18 euros: “God, I wish I’d bought another pair”), and she has much bigger, gothier hair, but Annie Nightingale CBE is still a Radio 1 presenter. She turned 80 in April. How on earth is she still broadcasting on the BBC’s youth station? “You tell me!” she says, warmly, a day after her show. “I can’t bloody believe it. I thought I’d last a year.”
Nightingale is sitting on a white leather sofa in her red-brick west London mansion flat: a very 90s rock’n’roll setup. She wears a bright orange smock, white beaten-up Converse, and a blue medical mask (I sit at a distance for our two hours together, and wear one too). A copy of Vogue, bottles of chilled water, a bleeping phone and her laptop perch on a table in front of her. Equipment that’s helped her record Annie Nightingale Presents… during lockdown is piled up nearby. She talks 20 to the dozen, apologising often for her enthusiasm.
We’re here to discuss Nightingale’s new memoir, Hey Hi Hello, celebrating her 50 years as a Radio 1 DJ (she’s was Radio 1’s first female to boot). It’s a skittish, eccentric but entertaining read, mixing reflections and transcriptions of interviews with people as far apart in time as Marc Bolan and Little Simz, with Nightingale often popping up at pivotal moments in pop culture. This makes her sound a Zelig-like chancer, but she’s anything but. She stands out rather than blends in.
She’s devoid of ego, for starters, and is sweetly self-mocking. Take the moment in her book in which she recounts being on the BBC current affairs programme This Week in 2015, promoting a compilation of her favourite tracks for the Ministry of Sound label. Andrew Neil, Michael Portillo and Alan Johnson wear sunglasses to mimic her, which plays rather meanly on screen. Not that Annie cared. “Taking the piss,” she writes in her book. “Fair enough.”
Unlike many of her DJ contemporaries, she’s never hosted a highprofile daily show – and that was her choice. “From day one, I chose the records I wanted to play, and stuck to it ever since,” she says in the book. “I wasn’t there for the ‘exposure’.” I preferred the evenings, where I wouldn’t have to introduce playlist tunes I didn’t like. That would have been like lying to me.”
Remarkably, she was also a divorced mum of two kids when she began broadcasting in 1970, “terrified” that the implosion of the Beatles meant the end of counterculture (she knows from personal experience that didn’t happen: she later became deeply involved in the acid house scene, and has supported other genres that started underground, like grime and trap).She’s never wanted to be down with the kids, she insists. “Of course not! That would be dreadful. But if I can play what I like and say what I like and encourage the young to do the same, then that’s the dream to me.”
Anne Avril Nightingale was born in Osterley, Middlesex, seven months after the start of the second world war, and brought up in nearby suburban Twickenham. Her father, Cecil, had been made to take over his family’s wallpaper business, and hated every minute of it. Her mother, Celia, had been offered the chance to train with the famous chiropodist Dr Scholl in America in her youth, but her family forbade her to go. “They became round pegs in square holes. They were denied what they really wanted to do. That had a massive impact on me.”
Being an only child is fundamental to Nightingale’s personality. She had to reach out to make friends, and she enjoyed being a part of different gangs (which she still does, she says, only now these are pockets of people in different international cities who she’s met through her musical travels).
Her outward-looking nature also went against the experiences of the many suburban women she lived alongside. “They were so competitive with each other, and so isolated – all they had to look forward to was a new washing machine. Very early on, I remember thinking, hang on, this isn’t fantastic.” A small Bakelite wireless bought for Nightingale by her father gave her a glimpse of distant worlds through Radio Luxembourg. By her late teens, she was also partying with jazz-loving beatniks at Eel Pie Island, less than a mile down the road.
Nightingale talks passionately about what ignited pop culture in the 60s – she’s especially interested in the delight in surrealism, which came from The Goon Show and Anthony Newley’s sitcom The Strange Worldof Gurney Slade(a big influence on one of her heroes, David Bowie). “There was a real anti-authority spirit about it, but it was also full of joy.”
Then there was the raving. “That’s when rave culture really began, and it doesn’t get talked about enough. We’d drive out somewhere, dance to records all night, go to sleep on the floor – never in couples, it was very innocent – wake up, clear up, and start playing records again.” She especially enjoyed raves in seaside towns, where they’d often sleep under piers. “We loved those nights, as they were free. We couldn’t afford any hotels.”
She was naive about drugs back then, but in the book discusses their effect on pop culture, albeit with sensible, quiet reservation. She talks about not mentioning taking acid, for instance, until someone asked her. She replied, yes. “Because if you say ‘no’ you’re a liar, and it’s not nice.”
She trained as a journalist, and by the mid-1960s had moved to Brighton to work at the local newspaper, the Argus, as a reporter. She covered court reporting, council meetings, and once interviewed a young Sean Connery at a local Wimpy. Here, she also met Ready Steady Go! producer Vicki Wickham, who is still a close friend, backstage at a Dusty Springfield gig. Wickham recruited her as a presenter for her first stint on TV, in a shortrunning TV show,That’s For Me. Later, Nightingale had a pop column at the Argus, Spin With Me, through which she got to know bands well, including the Beatles. (She’s still in touch with Paul McCartney, and wrote the essay for his album reissue of Tugof War and Pipesof Peace in 2015. He also called Annie live on air when she was presenting Old Grey Whistle Test the night after John Lennon died, to get her to pass on thanks to their fans on behalf of him, Yoko, George and Ringo.)
As a regular at Apple’s HQ in Savile Row, Nightingale knew her journalism credentials were compromised: she was much keener on getting across new music that she loved than “stitching people up”, as she calls it. She knew that John and Yoko were dating before it went public; she even went to an Apple Christmas party, where they were dressed as Mr and Mrs Claus, dishing out presents. By this point, she had two children, Alex and Lucy, who are a no-go area for discussion today (her son, Alex, is only mentioned in the book briefly: he used to manage Primal Scream, and now is the live agent for the Chemical Brothers and Saint Etienne). “There’s nothing bad – we get on great – but I’d rather not go into it – they didn’t ask to be in the public eye,” she explains.
She nevertheless mentions her divorce from their father, though not his name, briefly in the book: “My home life had unravelled. I needed to work for a living like never before.” He was the Welsh journalist Gordon Thomas, a cousin of Dylan Thomas who wrote about intelligence and espionage. Nightingale’s second marriage, in the late 70s, to singer/actor Binky Baker, also ended in divorce – Baker’s claims to fame include an anti-DJ comedy single, Toe Knee Black Burn, released on Stiff Records, and a role as “Dodgy Geezer” in 2000 Brit thriller, Gangster No1.
When Radio 1 launched in 1967 with its all-male DJ roster, Nightingale was desperate to join the station, but they didn’t actively look for a female presenter for three years. DJs were viewed as husband substitutes for bored housewives; it was only the Beatles’ press officer Derek Taylor vouching for her, she says, that got her the job, despite her “trying to kick the door down myself”.
She had a disastrous first day, including a moment when a record she was playing ground slowly to a halt. “I was confronted with a bunch of male engineers in the glass booth beside me, waiting if not willing me to fail,” she writes in the first chapter of her book. The attitudes back then still annoy her. “I had trained as a journalist. I had TV experience. I read recently that Richard Hammond was given his first go when he was 17. I had to wait until I was 30!” But she brushed it off, and cracked on – even though she had to take her kids with her to work, and let them run up and down the stairs when she was on air. “It was a way of spending weekend time with them. It wouldn’t happen now, but it was what it was.”
Nightingale’s career moved sharply with the times after that, but her kindness towards colleagues, viewers and listeners also stood her in good stead. She became the main presenter of The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1978, championing Ian Dury, Public Image and the Damned; her co-presenter the writer David Hepworth, who later became a prominent name in magazine publishing, says: “She could not possibly have been nicer or more welcoming to me when I started out.”
Journalist Mark Ellen, who stood in for Nightingale on her Radio 1 Sunday night request show a few years later, read out her fan mail on air, and was “really touched” by listeners’ devotion to her. “Many letters came from teenage goths muttering darkly about the agony of romance, the irksome nature of the outside world, and how much they adored Bauhaus, Soft Cell, the Cure, the Banshees and chocolate biscuits,” he tells me. “They thought of Annie as an eternally sympathetic figurehead who understood what they were going through, a sort of fabulous and unreconstructed goth auntie. They absolutely adored her.”
In the early 1990s, Nightingale found similar kinship with fans who loved acid house, Andrew Weatherall and Underworld; the latter remain one of her all-time favourite acts. She considers their musical direction of Danny Bpyle’s 2012 Olympic opening ceremony the pinnacle of British pop culture. “To have these eccentrics appearing live – like Mike Oldfield, then Dizzee Rascal doing Bonkers a few miles away from where he grew up – I was blown away by it. I kept imagining what they’d gone through, fighting off people who wanted the opposite of this eccentric, brilliant thing.” She bumped into Boyle a while later, and asked if they’d had to battle for it. “He said, yes, every inch of the way. I knew they did. Ha! We always do.”
Nightingale is as political as she can be under the terms of a BBC contract. In her memoir she recalls meeting Tony Blair at a 2002 Radio 1 Christmas party, and haranguing him about how junior doctors were being treated in the NHS (six years earlier, she’d had her leg broken badly in Cuba after being mugged, an injury that has had a longterm effect on her physical health). “I thought I’d get into serious trouble for that, but, you know, when you are in that position, and he’s going round the room, getting closer and closer, I’m thinking, Annie, what kind of person are you? For God’s sake, he’s our representative! Tell him. So I did.” It sounds like he was excited to meet her, having long been a fan. “I blindsided him a bit. He wanted to be a rock star, really, didn’t he?”
Nightingale also played in Romania with Jesus Jones in 1990, just after the revolution (“music had been banned there for years – I was in tears all the time”), and today, she’s passionate about Black Lives Matter. She thinks often about her show being broadcast on 1Xtra and the BBC Asian Network, and she’s had emotional conversations with people of colour who have helped her in hospital about how her music has moved them. “But I’m furious about how many of them have been treated during the pandemic,” she adds. “The lack of PPE in the hospitals for them,
and the fear. It’s unacceptable. I wish I could do more.”
She’s also “desperately worried” about how Covid-19 will affect youth culture in the future. “It’s particularly devastating for young people. Their whole lives ahead of them, all the potential of their creativity, all up in the air. We should trust young people, because when we have done in the past, like in the 1960s and the 1990s… well, we’ve all reaped the benefits. I experienced the attitude of those times, that feeling that young people could create this fabulous new world together.They still can, if we help them.”
And she’s determined to keep on doing so, as her 80s press on. She doesn’t remotely care about people who are confused by her either. “I’d say: ‘Would you say to David Attenborough he shouldn’t be doing wildlife films any more? His expertise and knowledge are turned up to 11, and so are mine.” She laughs. “Although I’m a freak, I admit!”
More than anything, she says, she wants to know what’s coming next. “I always have. I always will. I want to know where we’re going to go.”
• Hey Hi Hello by Annie Nightingale is published on 3 September by White Rabbit (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free p&p on orders over £15
My parents were denied what they really wanted to do. That had a massive impact on me