![]() ![]() “I wasn’t there for the ‘exposure’.” I preferred the evenings, where I wouldn’t have to introduce playlist tunes I didn’t like. “From day one, I chose the records I wanted to play, and stuck to it ever since,” she says in the book. Unlike many of her DJ contemporaries, she’s never hosted a high-profile daily show – and that was her choice. “Taking the piss,” she writes in her book. Andrew Neil, Michael Portillo and Alan Johnson wear sunglasses to mimic her, which plays rather meanly on screen. 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. She’s devoid of ego, for starters, and is sweetly self-mocking. This makes her sound a Zelig-like chancer, but she’s anything but. 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. 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). My parents were denied what they really wanted to do. ![]() She talks 20 to the dozen, apologising often for her enthusiasm. Equipment that’s helped her record Annie Nightingale Presents… during lockdown is piled up nearby. A copy of Vogue, bottles of chilled water, a bleeping phone and her laptop perch on a table in front of her. 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). Nightingale is sitting on a white leather sofa in her red-brick west London mansion flat: a very 90s rock’n’roll setup. How on earth is she still broadcasting on the BBC’s youth station? “You tell me!” she says, warmly, a day after her show. ![]() 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. Incredibly, Lennon used to record trails for this same DJ’s early shows, which began half a century ago. There’s also Sid Vicious’s raucous version of My Way, and John Lennon’s Instant Karma. 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). To which the casual listener might naturally respond: I’m sorry, what? ![]()
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