chrismoyles.net
- Mon Jan 05, 2004 7:18 am
#240888
You can read the following interview with Chris in today's Guardian (the original is online here).
The Guardian, Monday January 5, 2004, Emma Brockes
I arrive at Radio 1 just as Sara Cox is leaving; a lone paparazzo snaps her getting into a cab. I'm here to meet her successor, Chris Moyles, who starts on the breakfast show today but will not, it is safe to say, excite quite the same interest in the showbiz press. The 29-year-old from Leeds is, in his own words, just a bloke who comes on the radio, and that's the bizarre thing - I'm the saviour of Radio 1 but I don't go to showbiz parties. Moyles slumps in his chair, gruff and sarcastic, a tone which, he complains, is lost on most critics. This is how he has come to be characterised in the press as, as he puts it, an egotistical, racist, homophobic, bigoted, sexist scumbag who surrounds himself with sycophants who laugh at his every word and agree with everything he says.
The bravado conceals an almost childlike level of physical diffidence. In the first half of the interview, Moyles scuffs his Prada trainers (I treated myself), swivels his doleful eyes and distends his lower lip like Scooby Doo. Unlike his more glamorous peers, Moyles is a proper radio geek, doing hospital radio at 14, volunteering on his local station Radio Aire at 15, then scoring his first paid job at Topshop in-house radio in Leeds when he left school at 16. In 1997 he joined Radio 1 from Capital FM and, along with Cox, went on to generate more complaints than any other DJ at the station. Moyles' afternoon show followed the vintage zoo format; he and his mate Comedy Dave goofed on each other's jokes, bitched through the papers (Look at her! She's got a face like two-day-old pizza) and devised sketches and parodies, for example, the recent weatherman skit on Jus' A Rascal by Dizzee Rascal:
Checkin out the weather - will it be hot
Am I gonna wear a T-shirt or not?
Looking out the window ain't being funny
Need to know if it's going to be sunny
It'd be a dream come true for me
To do the weather on the BBC
Standing there all dressed in leather
I'll be the * king of weather
(Chorus: He's just a rascil, Ian McGaskill ... and so on.)
At the centre of it all was Moyles' monstrous ego, all expressions of which carried the subtext, I'm a lardy bloke with nothing to boast about. It isn't an entirely disingenuous joke; Moyles has a big head, of course, but, like Chris Evans, must suffer the occasional twinge from working in broadcasting and not looking like Jamie Theakston. He has the aggression of the geek made good and when Cox's ratings on breakfast plummeted, Moyles shot his mouth off in interviews about his suitability for the job. I could absolutely kick anybody's arse on breakfast, ever, he said. Now that he's got the job, he says sheepishly: It's been a bit blown out of proportion. I mean it is my dream job, but I never thought I'd get it. I was really happy on afternoons. It only came up in interviews and out of bravado I would say things like, 'Ahhh, I'm better than her, I'm better than everyone, they should give it to me!'
Sara Cox got pretty wound up about that, didn't she? Sometimes it peed her off. But generally she was OK. We get on all right. She rang me when she found out about the changes, and said, 'I think it'll be all right.' This sounds lukewarm. But she's got bigger fish to fry now that she's going to be ... a mummy. So. She's all right with it. I think it's actually worked out well for her.
Moyles told Andy Parfitt, the Radio 1 controller, that he would only take the job on his own terms. Not in a stamp-my-foot, ego way, but in the sense that it wouldn't be worth doing it if they were going to say, 'We want you to do the breakfast show but obviously you can't do what you do now, you can't talk as long, and you can't say this or that, and you have to play more records.' I said, 'You need to be able to trust that I'm not going to drop you in the shit.' And Andy said, 'No, I've already thought about that.' I've proved to him that I'm not just some maverick little upstart disc jockey from Leeds.
Moyles' dad is a postman - a 'communications engineer', bless him - his mother, from Dublin, a housewife who would drive through the snow or get up in the middle of the night to collect him from his early radio gigs. He was brought up Catholic and still prays occasionally, but would like to get properly back into it, like exercise. Moyles went through a period of eating only pizzas and Chinese takeaways. His physical health is something that getting up at 4am will naturally address - no more late nights on the razz; his spiritual health he plans to rebuild by going to church. One, he says, because I should; two, just in case all that is real. You don't want to get up there and find Him going, 'Ah, couldn't be arsed to go to church, could you?' And it would make my mum happy.
Both parents are grafters and when Moyles bought his house in south London, his father took him aside and said, Don't say you've been lucky, son. You've worked hard for this. Moyles replied, Don't get me wrong, I worked my bollocks off to get here and I'm working harder to make sure I don't get fired. But I've also been lucky. I know DJs who work much harder than me - they really prep, constantly working on their show - and for whatever reason, they'll never be national.
He feels weird when he goes back to Leeds. Lots of his childhood friends are married with children, whereas Moyles has absolutely no intention of getting married. I've got no one I desire to get married to at the moment. He has a theory about London life: You can sit in a pub with someone who's 10 years younger than you and 10 years older than you and you can all join in the same conversation. It's almost as if, from the moment you start working in this industry in London, time stands still. No one gets any older. He looks at his mates back home and without wanting to sound patronising, thinks: why aren't you screaming? Then he feels guilty for looking down on them. I've got a mate who was living with some woman that he wasn't happy with and had a crappy little job that he didn't really like, and I said, 'You know, you could just move. You could just dump her, cut your losses and go and live in Norwich, or Glasgow, or anywhere.' And he went, 'Why would I want to do that?' And I'm like, 'Because if you're not happy ... ' And he said, 'But I am, I'm all right. I don't like my job, it's a bit crappy, but it's easy.' Moyles looks completely bewildered.
When he was 25, he had a small, age-related breakdown, when he woke up and shat myself, because I'd always been the youngest wherever I worked and I'd always been good for my age. I got to Capital and was very young, got to Radio 1 and was one of the youngest DJs ever on the station, and then I was 25 and thought, 'Shit, I'm not 21 any more.' And I've still got a hang-up about age, I really do. I'm glad I got the breakfast show before I was 30.
I wonder what he was like, the 16-year-old DJ holding the fort at Topshop? It was, he says, the defining experience that turned him from what he calls a a normal pop-a-doodle-do disc jockey into something flashier. He was on air all day and obliged to follow a strict format. Between 5 and 5.30 you'd be playing love songs and reading out what was on TV; between 11 and 12 you'd do a golden hour and read horoscopes, and it was just like, 'Who's this for? It's just rubbish.' So I started playing around a little bit. You can sit there all day going, 'Yes indeedy, pop-a-doodle-do, it's 10 past 11 in Topshop and Top Man.' But then the staff have to listen to it all day, so why not talk to them? Make them laugh. It made me try and mess around a bit more.
Under Sara Cox, the breakfast show lost half a million listeners, falling for the first time to just below 10 million. Moyles sees this as a reflection of the downward trend in most listening figures: The more choice there is, the smaller the slices of the cake get. He doesn't expect to reverse it, or at least, has learned enough from his gobby outbursts of the past to recognise the dangers of boasting on the record. He wants his team in at half past five, although the show doesn't start until seven.
Moyles is noncommittal about his music tastes. I like what I like. I'm sorry that's ever so vague. I don't like reggae and I don't like heavy metal or hard rock. But I can pretty much buy into anything bar that. The only record to have offended him last year is the Pop Idol single Happy Christmas (War Is Over). The record company is making money out of 11 losers who got kicked off a show because they couldn't sing as well as the winner, singing a John Lennon classic, which he wrote to make a point. When I first heard about it I thought, 'Well, the money's obviously going to go to charity.' It's not. It's going into someone's pocket and I can't believe it. I wouldn't have a problem if they did Merry Christmas Everyone. But taking that song, which has a sentiment behind it - whoever's responsible should be ashamed of themselves. I'm quite angry about that. May they burn in hell.
Simon Cowell? I guess. That Simon Fuller will have had a hand in it as well.
Moyles sees his biggest rival in the morning as Terry Wogan on Radio 2 - He's really talented - and is relieved that later this year, Chris Tarrant is being replaced on Capital FM's breakfast show by Johnny Vaughan. I'd rather go up against Johnny Vaughan than Chris Tarrant. That'll do me quite happily, thank you very much. Johnny doesn't bother me at all. My main competition in London will be Kiss for the young kids, and Heart, I suppose. Because it's such a powerful force, even though Jono's a bit rubbish.
And no, he says, he's not sexist, or any of the other things people who don't get sarcasm accuse him of. If a girl rings up and I'm like, 'Hello, me darling,' I'm not being like Duncan from Blue going 'Awight, babe?' It's a gag. He is aware that there's only so long this jaunty attitude can last without him turning into Dave Lee Travis or Alan Freeman. A few months ago, Moyles' sidekick Comedy Dave got married. That's the first sign of, 'Oh shit, maybe we do have to grow up a bit.' I don't want to be the sad loser guy who's 59 years old going, 'Yo! Yo! Where are my denims?' But at the same time, you are what you are. I've got a tiny bit more maturing to do. But pretty much, that's it for me. I'm stuffed for life.
The Breakfast Show is on Radio 1 weekdays from 7am to 10am.
The Guardian, Monday January 5, 2004, Emma Brockes
I arrive at Radio 1 just as Sara Cox is leaving; a lone paparazzo snaps her getting into a cab. I'm here to meet her successor, Chris Moyles, who starts on the breakfast show today but will not, it is safe to say, excite quite the same interest in the showbiz press. The 29-year-old from Leeds is, in his own words, just a bloke who comes on the radio, and that's the bizarre thing - I'm the saviour of Radio 1 but I don't go to showbiz parties. Moyles slumps in his chair, gruff and sarcastic, a tone which, he complains, is lost on most critics. This is how he has come to be characterised in the press as, as he puts it, an egotistical, racist, homophobic, bigoted, sexist scumbag who surrounds himself with sycophants who laugh at his every word and agree with everything he says.
The bravado conceals an almost childlike level of physical diffidence. In the first half of the interview, Moyles scuffs his Prada trainers (I treated myself), swivels his doleful eyes and distends his lower lip like Scooby Doo. Unlike his more glamorous peers, Moyles is a proper radio geek, doing hospital radio at 14, volunteering on his local station Radio Aire at 15, then scoring his first paid job at Topshop in-house radio in Leeds when he left school at 16. In 1997 he joined Radio 1 from Capital FM and, along with Cox, went on to generate more complaints than any other DJ at the station. Moyles' afternoon show followed the vintage zoo format; he and his mate Comedy Dave goofed on each other's jokes, bitched through the papers (Look at her! She's got a face like two-day-old pizza) and devised sketches and parodies, for example, the recent weatherman skit on Jus' A Rascal by Dizzee Rascal:
Checkin out the weather - will it be hot
Am I gonna wear a T-shirt or not?
Looking out the window ain't being funny
Need to know if it's going to be sunny
It'd be a dream come true for me
To do the weather on the BBC
Standing there all dressed in leather
I'll be the * king of weather
(Chorus: He's just a rascil, Ian McGaskill ... and so on.)
At the centre of it all was Moyles' monstrous ego, all expressions of which carried the subtext, I'm a lardy bloke with nothing to boast about. It isn't an entirely disingenuous joke; Moyles has a big head, of course, but, like Chris Evans, must suffer the occasional twinge from working in broadcasting and not looking like Jamie Theakston. He has the aggression of the geek made good and when Cox's ratings on breakfast plummeted, Moyles shot his mouth off in interviews about his suitability for the job. I could absolutely kick anybody's arse on breakfast, ever, he said. Now that he's got the job, he says sheepishly: It's been a bit blown out of proportion. I mean it is my dream job, but I never thought I'd get it. I was really happy on afternoons. It only came up in interviews and out of bravado I would say things like, 'Ahhh, I'm better than her, I'm better than everyone, they should give it to me!'
Sara Cox got pretty wound up about that, didn't she? Sometimes it peed her off. But generally she was OK. We get on all right. She rang me when she found out about the changes, and said, 'I think it'll be all right.' This sounds lukewarm. But she's got bigger fish to fry now that she's going to be ... a mummy. So. She's all right with it. I think it's actually worked out well for her.
Moyles told Andy Parfitt, the Radio 1 controller, that he would only take the job on his own terms. Not in a stamp-my-foot, ego way, but in the sense that it wouldn't be worth doing it if they were going to say, 'We want you to do the breakfast show but obviously you can't do what you do now, you can't talk as long, and you can't say this or that, and you have to play more records.' I said, 'You need to be able to trust that I'm not going to drop you in the shit.' And Andy said, 'No, I've already thought about that.' I've proved to him that I'm not just some maverick little upstart disc jockey from Leeds.
Moyles' dad is a postman - a 'communications engineer', bless him - his mother, from Dublin, a housewife who would drive through the snow or get up in the middle of the night to collect him from his early radio gigs. He was brought up Catholic and still prays occasionally, but would like to get properly back into it, like exercise. Moyles went through a period of eating only pizzas and Chinese takeaways. His physical health is something that getting up at 4am will naturally address - no more late nights on the razz; his spiritual health he plans to rebuild by going to church. One, he says, because I should; two, just in case all that is real. You don't want to get up there and find Him going, 'Ah, couldn't be arsed to go to church, could you?' And it would make my mum happy.
Both parents are grafters and when Moyles bought his house in south London, his father took him aside and said, Don't say you've been lucky, son. You've worked hard for this. Moyles replied, Don't get me wrong, I worked my bollocks off to get here and I'm working harder to make sure I don't get fired. But I've also been lucky. I know DJs who work much harder than me - they really prep, constantly working on their show - and for whatever reason, they'll never be national.
He feels weird when he goes back to Leeds. Lots of his childhood friends are married with children, whereas Moyles has absolutely no intention of getting married. I've got no one I desire to get married to at the moment. He has a theory about London life: You can sit in a pub with someone who's 10 years younger than you and 10 years older than you and you can all join in the same conversation. It's almost as if, from the moment you start working in this industry in London, time stands still. No one gets any older. He looks at his mates back home and without wanting to sound patronising, thinks: why aren't you screaming? Then he feels guilty for looking down on them. I've got a mate who was living with some woman that he wasn't happy with and had a crappy little job that he didn't really like, and I said, 'You know, you could just move. You could just dump her, cut your losses and go and live in Norwich, or Glasgow, or anywhere.' And he went, 'Why would I want to do that?' And I'm like, 'Because if you're not happy ... ' And he said, 'But I am, I'm all right. I don't like my job, it's a bit crappy, but it's easy.' Moyles looks completely bewildered.
When he was 25, he had a small, age-related breakdown, when he woke up and shat myself, because I'd always been the youngest wherever I worked and I'd always been good for my age. I got to Capital and was very young, got to Radio 1 and was one of the youngest DJs ever on the station, and then I was 25 and thought, 'Shit, I'm not 21 any more.' And I've still got a hang-up about age, I really do. I'm glad I got the breakfast show before I was 30.
I wonder what he was like, the 16-year-old DJ holding the fort at Topshop? It was, he says, the defining experience that turned him from what he calls a a normal pop-a-doodle-do disc jockey into something flashier. He was on air all day and obliged to follow a strict format. Between 5 and 5.30 you'd be playing love songs and reading out what was on TV; between 11 and 12 you'd do a golden hour and read horoscopes, and it was just like, 'Who's this for? It's just rubbish.' So I started playing around a little bit. You can sit there all day going, 'Yes indeedy, pop-a-doodle-do, it's 10 past 11 in Topshop and Top Man.' But then the staff have to listen to it all day, so why not talk to them? Make them laugh. It made me try and mess around a bit more.
Under Sara Cox, the breakfast show lost half a million listeners, falling for the first time to just below 10 million. Moyles sees this as a reflection of the downward trend in most listening figures: The more choice there is, the smaller the slices of the cake get. He doesn't expect to reverse it, or at least, has learned enough from his gobby outbursts of the past to recognise the dangers of boasting on the record. He wants his team in at half past five, although the show doesn't start until seven.
Moyles is noncommittal about his music tastes. I like what I like. I'm sorry that's ever so vague. I don't like reggae and I don't like heavy metal or hard rock. But I can pretty much buy into anything bar that. The only record to have offended him last year is the Pop Idol single Happy Christmas (War Is Over). The record company is making money out of 11 losers who got kicked off a show because they couldn't sing as well as the winner, singing a John Lennon classic, which he wrote to make a point. When I first heard about it I thought, 'Well, the money's obviously going to go to charity.' It's not. It's going into someone's pocket and I can't believe it. I wouldn't have a problem if they did Merry Christmas Everyone. But taking that song, which has a sentiment behind it - whoever's responsible should be ashamed of themselves. I'm quite angry about that. May they burn in hell.
Simon Cowell? I guess. That Simon Fuller will have had a hand in it as well.
Moyles sees his biggest rival in the morning as Terry Wogan on Radio 2 - He's really talented - and is relieved that later this year, Chris Tarrant is being replaced on Capital FM's breakfast show by Johnny Vaughan. I'd rather go up against Johnny Vaughan than Chris Tarrant. That'll do me quite happily, thank you very much. Johnny doesn't bother me at all. My main competition in London will be Kiss for the young kids, and Heart, I suppose. Because it's such a powerful force, even though Jono's a bit rubbish.
And no, he says, he's not sexist, or any of the other things people who don't get sarcasm accuse him of. If a girl rings up and I'm like, 'Hello, me darling,' I'm not being like Duncan from Blue going 'Awight, babe?' It's a gag. He is aware that there's only so long this jaunty attitude can last without him turning into Dave Lee Travis or Alan Freeman. A few months ago, Moyles' sidekick Comedy Dave got married. That's the first sign of, 'Oh shit, maybe we do have to grow up a bit.' I don't want to be the sad loser guy who's 59 years old going, 'Yo! Yo! Where are my denims?' But at the same time, you are what you are. I've got a tiny bit more maturing to do. But pretty much, that's it for me. I'm stuffed for life.
The Breakfast Show is on Radio 1 weekdays from 7am to 10am.
