Authors: Lucian Randall
Back home with a degree in zoology, Morris took a job in Cambridge’s thriving main market. Andy’s Records had started on a single stall, but while they kept the original pitch where Morris worked, they had become a major company that was on the verge of establishing itself as a dominant chain of shops in the east of England. If you wanted to work on the stall, you had to be a graduate and have a broad knowledge of music. It was a rite of passage for musicians on the busy Cambridge scene, Morris himself among them.
Andy’s working day required an odd mix of the cerebral and brute force. It was a long journey in from Buckden, and the market started at 7 a.m. each day, which felt earlier to the staff on a weekend when they’d been out the night before. They would all pull on steel-toe boots and set about unloading the records as fast as possible. Box after box, thousands of records, from a truck that could hold seven and a half tons. It was non-stop all day. The punters knew their stuff and the staff needed to be able to chat on their level, field their questions, find out their interests and get them into new artists. All the while they knew that even at the end of a good day the extensive supply of vinyl would be largely undiminished and would if anything be looking rather heavier as it waited to be reloaded.
Staff bonded through a studenty take on the relentless black humour and mockery that characterized market trader life. On bustling shopping days, the area was a favoured hunting ground for TV and radio crews soliciting public opinion. Whenever they were in earshot, the staff would all shout something rude for the microphones. ‘Knob!’ was Morris’s favourite.
It wasn’t long before he found himself the focus of that special trader humour. He had sold the last copy of an album by The Clash and, making a note to reorder it, misread ‘Litho in Canada’ as some kind of live album, when it referred to the place of manufacture. This passed as a hilarious comedy opportunity for his workmates, and Morris became known as ‘Litho’. But he always joined in with the general banter and, if he was quieter and more considered than the other staff, he was as willing to do the physical work as anyone.
Market life inspired a sketch in the first episode of
On the Hour
. ‘There’s been mixed reaction to the news that pedestrians are to be banned from Cambridge city centre,’ reported Morris. ‘The council ruling follows concern over congestion in the city’s increasingly crowded streets. Market traders are up in arms, claiming that already recession-hit trade will dry up completely if no one is allowed to walk within half a mile of their stalls. But the council are unrepentant. “There’s no pleasing these tossers,” said a spokesman this morning. “You clear the streets so they can unload their vans and they turn around and crap in your face.”’
15
When Morris left Andy’s, he was presented with a history of lithography from an academic bookshop in town.
Morris was himself active in local bands. He played funky bass in the Exploding Hamsters, made up of students from the university, a slick, brass- and percussion-led dance outfit. In a similar vein were Somewhere in the Foreign Office, with trumpet, trombone, guitar and two lead singers, a bunch of young, talented musicians out for a good time and loosely kept in check by Mark Graham, who at almost thirty was able to pull seniority on most of them. The band’s finest hour came through their agent, who specialized in military gigs and booked their uptempo rhythms into RAF, USAF and Royal Navy bases in the very north of England and in Scotland – including Marham, Lossiemouth, Faslane and Swinderby. They set up in the canteen while the chairs and tables were cleared away and,
Spinal Tap
-style, frequently played to an audience as small as thirty, one of whom could be relied on to loudly request ‘Freebird’ while the rest sat with their feet up. None of the musicians took the project too seriously. Singer Steve Breeze kept his fellow musicians amused by telling the audience they were off on an arena tour but just doing a few warm-up gigs first. Morris and the other band members would try not to crack up as the base personnel appeared to take everything at face value.
All ten of the group crammed into a Fiat Ducato van with their equipment and tents, the budget not stretching to hotels. Being constrained to canvas led to some unforgettable moments, like the big beach fire under the aurora borealis on the coast of Scotland and a night at a hippie commune called Findhorn. The band were allowed to stay, even though they confessed the next gig was at a nuclear base, on the understanding that they promised to beam ‘psychic rays of love’ to the military staff on the base.
There were no egos on the road – everyone got on well, acted as their own roadie and made up rude songs for the long journeys, when they weren’t playing Thomas Dolby’s ‘I Scare Myself’, a favourite from 1984’s
The Flat Earth
. They shared a sense of humour influenced by the Pythons and the ubiquitous filth of Derek and Clive. Chris would bring out his impersonations of Jagger and Richards in which he was joined by Steve Breeze.
Morris generally stuck to bass duties in the band, though he was able to turn his hand to a number of different instruments. He was beginning to find himself as a young man. The acne he’d suffered was clearing up, though Morris seemed to Mark Graham to be capable of being quite sensitive – ‘I just remember him being a happy soul,’ says Graham.
Morris was popular and always surrounded by girls at the gigs. ‘He had a sort of animal charm about him,’ says Steve Breeze. ‘The whole thing about him was his magnetism. It was quite strange for a guy who was a really nice bloke.’ It was a carefree time, with no real responsibilities. But the band knew there were too many of them to have a realistic chance of making a living; they were too talented to wait around and they drifted apart, finally concluding with one last festival gig.
Over the summer of 1984 Morris got a gig playing bass for the Cambridge Footlights Revue. The four-piece band featured a number of different drummers and Cambridge students Hugh Levinson and Roy Margolis. With his red-spotted necktie, which he said was a family heirloom, Morris fitted in well with the university crowd and could easily have passed for one of its posher members. The show they accompanied, directed by Nick Hancock and featuring Steve Punt, was called
The Story So Far
, a series of sketches with the common theme of a setting in a futuristic Britain led by a president. The band swiftly got to grips with the repertoire, and doing a proper sixty-date tour of the country was another blast of fun for Morris. If churning out the same numbers got a little dull on some nights, the musicians would amuse themselves by swapping instruments or trying to make the cast corpse by wearing wigs and delivering comic asides during scene changes, and Morris was invariably at the centre of the mischief. He would make up nonsense words and phrases, which he dropped randomly into conversations, and was particularly fond of impersonating a cast member who sang with a noticeably warbly vibrato.
The climax of the tour was at the Edinburgh Festival for a three-week run, which was sold out despite a very bad review in
The Scotsman
. The glory of the Footlights had faded somewhat since a high point in 1981 when Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie had been principal members and taken a career-launching show to Edinburgh which included Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery. But it was still a prestigious name, and some of the 1984 cast members were very aware of being in the boiler room of comedy and were determined to make it. They swapped notes with Footlights alumni Slattery and Neil Mullarkey and would sit around plotting strategies and having intense discussions about what constituted a joke.
Not Chris Morris. He showed no interest in using the festival or the band as a way of getting into comedy. He was enjoying just being the hired musical help for the summer. Morris’s former university housemate Caroline Leddy was also at the festival. She performed in The Millies with Richard Vranch, Donna McPhail and Jo Unwin – who almost a decade later would become Morris’s partner. But as early as that trip to Edinburgh, Chris confessed to his Footlights friends that he had ‘a thing’ about Unwin, and all agreed she looked particularly spectacular on stage in The Millies when she and Leddy came out in slinky catsuits. The seats in the venue were just loose chairs arranged in ranks, and Morris, startled by the vision, shifted his chair sharply and fell over backwards.
But the Footlights tour would be Morris’s last major musical adventure. His interest was beginning to be diverted elsewhere. Back in Cambridge, he contributed bass and ideas to Steve Breeze’s main project, a band signed to RCA. Morris just didn’t have the time for the sessions in Breeze’s mum’s garage. His replacement was Neill MacColl, half-brother of Kirsty.
Morris’s attention had been diverted to Radio Cambridgeshire, where Somewhere in the Foreign Office’s other singer, Jane Edwards, had been working since the station started back in May 1982. Underfunded and staffed by just twenty, Radio Cambridgeshire was already struggling. Edwards worked there casually, more for fun than anything else, just another outlet for a creative musician. She worked on
Stop It I Like It
, hosted by a presenter named Nick Barraclough and broadcast from the station’s radio car, as well as making up silly things in the studio. As Somewhere . . . started their Scottish adventure, she heard she’d got the chance to play with the founders of Squeeze and knew that she couldn’t continue with the radio work.
Morris was impressed by the way she juggled a music career with radio and liked the idea of doing something similar himself. Jane offered to introduce him to the station. She’d already got jobs there for sixth-form college friends Rachel Sherman and Dawn Burford. None of them was paid, and it was all rather basic work, but for young people exploring their options it felt like a great creative freedom. It was arranged that Morris would spend an early morning watching Nick Barraclough and his breakfast team.
Barraclough was a smart, talented broadcaster who was passionate about his folk and country-based music. Articulate and warm, he had been brought up locally and played professionally in bands for ten years before making his radio debut with Radio Cambridgeshire. He regularly had people in on work experience but the arrival of Chris Morris was memorable. For the whole morning Morris sat in, Barraclough felt he was being watched with unnerving intensity. Most young hopefuls concentrated for a maximum of fifteen minutes before the glamour of BBC local radio wore off and they began to fidget, glaze over or read the morning papers. But as they chatted after the show, Morris quizzed Barraclough on certain techniques he’d observed. He was soon invited back. Nick was an encouraging figure who liked to see what people could do, and Morris demonstrated attractive qualities – he was bright, eager to learn and young. In other words, cheap.
Well-spoken Morris was soon recording ‘packages’ – two- or three-minute local stories. It was something like an apprenticeship. He read the news, made documentaries and learned how to edit. Everything was on quarter-inch tape, which would be marked with a wax chinagraph pencil before a razor blade was used to cut the tape and it was spliced back together – the basis of all the techniques he would use, from building up basic packages to later more complicated editing for comic effect. And until digital technology took it all on to computer, it was the only way of doing things. ‘You could sit in that station all night and just fiddle about in the production area, turn tapes around, speeding stuff up and down,’ says Nick Barraclough. ‘Frankly, the technical side of radio is easy, if you’ve got common sense. But to do it the way that Chris did it, to
think
of it . . .’ The process of editing was physically demanding. Robert Katz, who later wrote with Morris, creates a vivid image of how advanced his skills would become when they worked together in London, talking of an obsessive approach to the art of editing: ‘the sheer complexity of his audio montage style used only analogue technology. Sometimes his fingers would be covered in dried blood the next day.’
Dawn Burford had taken over from Jane Edwards in the radio car and Morris joined as her driving partner, working out how everything functioned and checking for overhead power lines so that the cumbersome telescopic aerial was extended up to something like twenty or thirty feet without causing unnecessary electrocution to either of them. His progress at the station was monitored by its managing editor, Ian Masters, and Morris was taken on as a freelance with rolling short-term contracts of around three months.
The greatest chunk of output at the station was chokingly parochial, and there wasn’t enough of it. The BBC provided funding for only six hours of broadcast time and, in order for the fledgling station to have any chance to establish itself, it needed to stay on air from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. It was not unusual for staff to work an eighteen-hour shift, which was if nothing else an opportunity for someone starting out to find inventive ways of creating programmes of a higher quality than the budget allowed. Morris, absorbed in the work, regularly stayed into the small hours.
He graduated to presenting a drive-time show, having begun to fill in for absentees after six months at Radio Cambridgeshire: ‘I can remember tuning in one Christmas time,’ says Ian Masters, ‘listening to him and thinking, Yeah, that was good. That was a good show. This boy will go somewhere providing he perseveres and is willing to step along the hard way.’
Morris got to know his way around the studio so well that presenters would come to him for tech support before they went to the BBC engineers. Colleague Jonathan Amos remembers Morris using rather unorthodox methods to solve a problem during an outside broadcast one freezing February. ‘The mast on the radio froze solid – it couldn’t be raised to send a signal back to base,’ he says. ‘Legend has it that Morris climbed up on the top of the vehicle and pissed on the mast to release it.’ He was also beginning to pick up on the gulf between news and every other type of programme. ‘News regard themselves as the anointed ones, the real reason for the existence of the radio station,’ says Nick Barraclough, ‘and they see local radio as news bulletins with some waffle in between. So they were incredibly puffed up, self-important . . . and Chris was watching.’