Kiz Durrani: So, it's the 31st of May 2024 and we're here at Riverside Studios with Chris Cowey.
Chris, I'm just going to start by asking you a few questions and get your recollections of your time here at Riverside Studios.
Chris Cowey: Of course.
So, we look forward to hearing about that. Just wondering whether you could tell us initially about how you first became involved with Riverside Studios.
As you can probably tell by my North East accent, I'm not a London native. So, I had no kind of knowledge of Riverside Studios before I came here. I came here when I finished working on The Tube, a Channel 4 music show in Newcastle. And, as soon as I went freelance, most of my work was taking place in London. So, I was instantly actively looking for studios because the very first thing we did was going to be a big five hour long, kind of music marathon to celebrate Island Record’s 25th anniversary, which we did at the new four walls Pinewood Studios.
But in that kind of search for a studio, Riverside was one of the places that I looked at. And as an executive producer and director looking for a studio, looking for, if you like, the home of a TV show or a project is vitally important. And when I came to have a look around Riverside, it wasn't big enough to do what we wanted to do at Pinewood. And, you know, there's usually a direct correlation between the bigger the studio, the further outside London it is. But, Riverside for me really kind of hit the sweet spot between being big enough - it wasn't big enough for that particular show - but I was impressed by the vibe, the fact that it's right next to the Thames, the fact that it had a great pub opposite, and it was kind of friendly and efficient at the same time. Although I think at that point that there were some improvements going on because I think, you know, like a lot of TV and performing arts facilities, the fortunes go up and down like the level of the Thames.
So, I think at that point, and I'm talking, let me give you a year here, I'm talking around late eighties, early nineties. So, I think my perception was that Riverside needed a little bit of TLC and a little bit of glamming up. But there was no doubt that the facility was great, that the studio was of a decent size. So that was kind of me making a mental note of what a good place Riverside was.
Cut to, I guess much later, I think I possibly did the odd shoot, you know, kind of one off, relatively small-scale shoots in Riverside in the interim. But when I started at the BBC, obviously a lot of the BBC staffers I started off with at Elstree with Top of the Pops in 1997, there was a lot of talk at the BBC, especially with the kind of old school staff, that Riverside had been used extensive extensively by the BBC over the years and had had a good reputation, so there was a kind of warm and fuzzy glow around it. And every time we're going to do any show, Riverside always had..., you know, there was always a good argument to use it because of its location, fantastic for travel. If you've got Americans coming in and landing at Heathrow, Hammersmith is a great place to be. If you're based in kind of central London, it's about as central as studios get, except for the BBC and ITV ones, which were always more expensive, and more hassle, because you kind of have to take on a load of staff as well and so the overheads get massive. But yeah, Riverside always had to me that kind of vibe of being almost like a friendly neighbourhood studio, you know, a kind of a friendly space, and a safe space before people even used the term safe space, for workers and performers alike.
And, because it was here, there was no need for all that kind of massive infrastructure because you're right in urban London. So, there was talk about Riverside and it always came up as an option to do shoots. But my big move was Top of the Pops had been at Elstree for a number of years before I started. When I started in 1997 and we were in the process of looking at redesigning the studio, having a new look and feel to it because I’d inherited the old logo and the old studio from my predecessor, and I wanted to improve it on every level. So, at the same time, a couple of years into my tenure at Top of the Pops, there were a couple of things that happened. The studio we were using shared a gallery with EastEnders so that meant there were certain days when we either couldn't record or had to be very quiet because there were soap actors in the next studio. And also, my office, which was in the kind of tower block at Elstree, was under threat because Casualty had their eye on it to turn it into a hospital and it still is a hospital these days and EastEnders went to more nights a week. So, I was approached by some high ups at the BBC who said, would you consider moving? I said, well, I would consider moving, but I'd like somewhere purpose built because I want to build a new set, you know, relaunch new logo, etc etc, And my initial plan, that I cooked up with BBC Worldwide was to move into the then mothballed Hammersmith Palais, which I think at the time was called Po Na Na and I wanted to have a big neon Top of the Pops sign outside and have the whole place converted into a kind of permanent studio which meant that if, you know, Madonna was only available on a Tuesday night, she could fly into Heathrow, come and do the show. I'd fill the place with locals and we could have, you know, radio DJs doing banging house tunes and so on. But I had a full and frank exchange of views with the senior BBC executive, shan't mention any names, Alan Yentob, and he said, well, we want the sexy shows to come back to Television Centre because, you know, BBC Resources need that work and the studios need the work. So, after a lot of debate, I agreed to go back to Television Centre but, of course, I wanted to get my pound of flesh out of the BBC and have them convert one of their famous tea bars into a star bar for me and do a whole load of conversions, upgrade the cameras, upgrade the gallery, upgrade the studio floor, upgrade the lighting rig, everything. I mean, it was kind of a lot to do so, to balance out the inconvenience that I had from moving office and moving Studio, I managed to persuade the BBC to do a lot of work, which meant that Top of the Pops would have been technically homeless, for a long time.
So, I decided to do two things. One was to take the show on the road to do a tour because it had never been outside of, well, it started, I think the first six weeks or so of its life in January 1964 was based in a disused church in Manchester, Dickinson Road in Manchester. And then, of course, it moved here and was, you know, presumably recorded in Lime Grove and TV Centre and all over the place and eventually Elstree.
So, I thought taking it on the road would be an interesting thing to do because, in the summer, the ratings tend to go down because any teenager worth their salt is probably outside, doing what teenagers do. So, taking it on the road actually was really interesting because we went to all the major regional cities in the UK. And the ratings actually went up that summer because of the interest in it.
Then, of course, we still had a - you know, it's a show that runs 52 weeks of the year - Christmas show. We also made Top of the Pops 2. I'd gone into the BBC with a plan to expand the show internationally because historically it wasn't sold anywhere. In fact, the BPI, British Phonographic Industries who represent the record companies had an embargo on the show being sold anywhere. So, having just made the Brit Awards with the BPI in the British music industry, I suggested we had a meeting, got together and agreed terms to sell it abroad, which we did.
So, it went in a very short space of time from 0 to 120 odd territories worldwide, which was amazing, but that was a big mouth to feed. Also, the BBC were expanding. We were doing shows on what would eventually become BBC 3. We were doing Top of the Pops 2. We were doing a Saturday morning kids show called Top of the Pops Plus and there were also the international ones, so I would be recording extra versions for Germany, France, Italy, Spain, wherever. So that was a big mouth to feed.
So, we needed a studio, and Riverside ticked all the boxes. I knew it, I knew we could make it work there. I knew that technically it could work; I knew that you wouldn't get any qualms from artists coming to Hammersmith cos it's so handy. You know, a lot of them live not that far away and I'd always felt it just had a great vibe here, you know, right across the board, the staff in it. It was that sweet spot between TV and arty type people and rock and roll type people, you know it just really worked together. And, for me, I think it's difficult to see as a viewer, but TV shows, to me it’s very important that you get the esprit de corps. And you get a great vibe because I think it's important to keep and, there's a lot of people working on a TV show, it's really important to keep all of those people happy, it's important to keep all of my team happy. It's important to keep the audience happy. And if everyone is feeling good and there's a good vibe about the place, then there's an extra indefinable 10% or more comes through the screen in terms of their performance. So, I was always absolutely meticulous about making sure that all was right in the world, you know that it worked as a space, and of course, it has to work technically. So, we moved into Riverside and it was slightly shoehorned in the Riverside I have to confess, but, you know, with all that infrastructure and you know, the fact that I, I mean even little things like if I wanted to get away from it, there was a little a little walled bit that was right next to the river, before the place was redone and upgraded. And there was always a gaggle of, you know, wild fowl there, waiting to be fed bits of pie or whatever.
And that was just a great place to kind of sit and sort of ground yourself and get away from the TV madness every now again. So, maybe it's one of those old hippie water sign things, but it's just great being next to water. You know, being a Sunderland boy born and bred next to the sea and next to the river, it's just great being next to water, very calming, very soothing.
And, of course, I spent many a happy hour in the Chancellor's [pub] across the road because it was the nineties and it was rock and roll in the music business and people work hard and relax hard. So the pub was an important element to it. And the whole thing just absolutely went like a charm and, in fact, I know that the previous programme that I'd done before I started the BBC was a show called The White Room that we did in various West studios and Ealing and I think we might have shot some stuff here at Riverside, but I can't actually definitively recollect what it was.
But when I was doing The White Room, the broadcaster Chris Evans used to come, cos he was an old mate and he used to come and sit in the truck nearly every week, cos he was obviously planning TFI Friday at the time. And so, I think it was fair enough, that he kind of ripped off a lot of the stuff that we did for TFI and so that was great that, in a sense in TV terms, put Riverside well and truly back on the map because it was a big deal every week for Channel 4. Not as good as the ratings I got for my programmes of course [laughs], but still a good show.
So, we had a good..., as I remember, it was around about six months, but that's doing a programme every single week and we'd normally rehearse all day and then shoot everything in a two-hour window. I think the most I ever did was 16 separate pieces of music, 16 separate acts. Because, as I say, I was covering for the domestic Top of the Pops show and Top of the Pops 2 and all the international versions, so it was a really big mouth to feed.
And you had to be really efficient to do that because one of the things that I changed about Top of the Pops was doing a lot more live music rather than backing tracks just because I hate miming, I think it seems like a bit of a cheat, so I want to have the real thing. So, there were a lot of great acts coming in and we did a lot of great music, and I just knew it would work there.
We did have a non-Top of the Pops bit that we recorded here. I got a call, it was a weekend, and it was a bit crazy and I got a call from Paul McGuinness, U2’s manager asked me if I could help out. I said, Oh, what's the trouble? He said, well, the band are doing a thing for American Network TV called 9/11 A Tribute to Heroes because it was a telethon, a fundraiser for the victims of 9/11, particularly the emergency services and, you know, the massive, tragic loss of life that they had, because of that.
So obviously, I was very keen to help and it was U2, you know, we'd worked together a lot in the past, from back in The Tube days and so they were old mates and they said, is there any chance we could come to Riverside and record some stuff? I said, well, we're not working at the weekend, it's kind of, it's empty, it's dead. And then I got a call from Sting to say he wanted to do something as well. So, and of course, he's from the North East, like me, and we go back a long way. So, I said OK, so I frantically phoned around a lot of management people at the BBC. It was the weekend, couldn't get hold of any of them so I said, forget it, let's just do it and we'll worry about the cost afterwards because, you know, obviously, even though it's for charity, you know, there are always costs somewhere, not only Riverside but all the staff etc etc that we had to bring in.
So anyway, we did it. And we did a couple of songs with U2 and a couple of songs with Sting and I remember the kind of fun bit is, when U2 had done their bit, Bono said, can we have a look? And the Americans were waiting for us to send the thing over via satellite, they had satellite time booked so I'd made sure I'd recorded everything and we just had to look back to make, because it was live, just had to make sure that we didn't need to do anything to it.
And we looked through it and I turned around to Bono, I said, it might be a bit like the kind of Rattle and Hum thing that you guys did but because it's for 9/11, A Tribute to Heroes, I think this should be black and white. So, we had a discussion about it and the Americans wanted me to send the colour version over as well. And I said, I don't think we should do that because they'll probably want to show the colour one and I really think it should be black and white. So that's what we did, we sent them the black and white version only.
And we did Fragile as well with Sting and festooned the set with candles so that was really atmospheric as well. Dave Stewart also turned up and performed with U2 and we satellited all the footage over, as soon as we'd done it, no time to edit or anything, I always wanted to kind of have a live, spontaneous performance, you know, so not only were the bands performing live, I was kind of performing live by doing a live cut.
And it worked incredibly well, so much so that I think the show won a Grammy and the American executive producer went over to accept it and name checked me and Riverside in the award speech. I didn't get a cop, I didn't get a share of the award but mentioned in dispatches. So that's my kind of real standout moment from my time here. Because, you know, you don't get any bigger than U2 and Sting and you don't get any bigger event than an American coast to coast network telethon and award winning as well. So that's a big feather in the cap for me, Riverside and everyone involved and that was a particularly poignant moment and a great moment.
Was that a long enough answer? [laughs] That's it. Cut. End.
Riverside Studios is physically quite a different space to how you probably remember it, things have changed. Just thinking back, just recollecting how things were when you were based here, what was it like in terms of what it sounded like and what it felt like to be in the space and even what it smelt like?
Yeah, it was, it had clearly been there for a long time and, you know, there were bits that needed a lick of paint or whatever, but television studios, it's always presenting the public with a kind of a gorgeous, pristine thing. And the thing is, if you've got a blank canvas and most TV studios are a blank canvas, you know, there are kind of high end BBC studios that still have what look like old mattresses stuck to the wall with chicken wire over them and that's what a lot of TV studios look like because you build the environment within that. So for me, as long as the space is good and as long as it has sufficiently load bearing roof, I mean, you could tell that it was an old school type of venue because you've got to take into account the load bearing of the roof with lighting rigs and set and all sorts of things, but it really felt informal and relaxed and I particularly liked that.
One of the disadvantages, if you like, of going to somewhere like Television Centre and why I was resistant to that is because the great thing about Television Centre is it's got all that kind of history. To me also, conversely, the bad thing about Television Centre, it's got all that history and I don't like, you know, I try and treat every show that I do like as if it's the first one I've ever made, you know, I've got that kind of enthusiasm of an Andrex puppy about it. And to me, the kind of formality and the infrastructure around a big studio complex can be offputting, particularly to artists, and it can seem a bit daunting but Riverside always felt really friendly. It felt at home. You didn't feel kind of overawed by, although it's a historic place, it wasn't a landmark building or anything like that, it was just like a big shed with some facilities. But within that, it just had a great vibe.
It felt like a little undiscovered treasure that unless you were going to look for it, you wouldn't, you know, it's not on a main road, you don't get a lot of passing trade as you do now that the whole riverside has opened up and and people can walk past it and there's a bar and there's a restaurant and it's got a really welcoming vibe. It was the type of place that was just a building and, once you got inside, wow, it's a television studio as well and I love the fact that there were other arts things always went on in the space, you know, it wasn't just a television studio.
A lot of BBC and ITV studios are purely for that high tech thing where you've got lots of cameras, lots of lights, lots of technicians and it's next in, out and Riverside didn't feel like that, it felt more like a personal touch and that is quite difficult to achieve, certainly in facilities in London. A lot of them seem more like operating theatres than places to perform your art but Riverside always had that feeling of an arts centre. I mean, yes, of course, it was down at heel. It had been going for a long time and, you know, like a lot of spaces that are involved in arts unfortunately it suffered, I think, from years of under investment, and needed that upgrade, needed that TLC.
But, to me, none of that matters really. What matters is we can make everything look gorgeous on the screen. We can make it look like a perfect party palace. But outside of that, what's more important is that you can get on and do what you want to do with everyone with a smile on their face, everyone feeling happy and moving in the same direction. So for me, it was a real advantage to have that kind of art centre vibe about it, if that makes any sense, whatever an art centre vibe is, it certainly felt like it had that.
But, you know, it was everything down to, it just felt like a really, really good fit for for me to come in here and do pop groups.
I think you've answered my next question. You've talked about how relaxed and friendly the environment was here and the fact that the Riverside Studios had a wider arts programming to it. Is there anything else that you can think of that you would regard as being distinctive or unique about Riverside Studios?
I love the fact that there was always a sense of, almost a vibe of drama and theatre around the place because I knew it was used as a kind of a studio theatre space. There's always been that kind of arts centre vibe to it and, before I ever worked in television, in fact, the very first time I came to London as a 16 year old from a mining village south of Sunderland was to do a season with the National Youth Theatre and so theatre was my first love.
So it always felt, you know, I'm always a bit suspicious of places that are too television, that are too sanitised and too technical because, at the end of the day, all the technology I think should be a given and television pictures have changed over the years but if you've got an old black and white recording of Aretha Franklin singing Respect and nearly all of it is in a tight shot of her face, of her head and there's only probably two or three shots during the course of the whole thing, it doesn't matter, it's eliciting the performance which is the important thing.
So for me, the vibe, the atmosphere, the taste and feel and smell of the place is way more important than it being plush, slick and loaded with technology because that's not what it's about. There's a bit of that but, to me, it's that indefinable thing of the vibe, the atmosphere, the fact that you've got a space that is conducive to really good performance. That's the important thing about Riverside, that’s for me the crux of it and I think you know the area that it's in and the situation, right next to the beautiful Thames and you can see bridges and you can see wildlife and you can see Oxford and Cambridge boat crews bumping up and down practising and you know the whole thing. It just feels like, you know, just down the road, you've got the old Craven Cottage Fulham Football ground. It's a bit like that, it's kind of classic. It's old school and I think that vibe is just incredibly important and indefinable. It's difficult, you know, when people send you the spec of a studio, it's difficult to say in the glossy brochure what the vibe is going to be. But the vibe is everything. That, for me, is far and away the most important thing. Everything else - you can throw technology and stuff, you can hire stuff in, you can do all that, you can hire people, you can get that in but the vibe, the feel of the place is really hard to pin down, it's indefinable but for me it's 99% of the battle. It's really important and there is absolutely no doubt that that was and still is Riverside Studios’ biggest asset. Put that on the brochure! [laughs].
Thinking about your own personal involvement with Riverside Studios, what sort of impact has Riverside had on your own life and career?
Riverside is kind of like an old mate that you ring up every now and again, when you need a bit of help or a bit of advice and, because I live not far from here now, it's kind of, it's part of my neighbourhood and so it's important. And I think, you know, the joy of the way the place has been upgraded, Riverside have managed to do it without, I think, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's probably more open to the local community now, just being out there in the foyer today, a cup of coffee and watching a bunch of people having fun in there in the space.
I was also gobsmacked to see that Mark Allen's photographic exhibition is still up there which includes a lot of Top of the Pops photographs. And when Mark was, I hired Mark as a kind of staff photographer, first of all for the White Room, I think he might have worked on the Brit Awards when I did that as well. And I got him to do Top of the Pops because the BBC publicity department would only let me have a photographer once a month, so I told them that that was not really suitable for me. So I got Mark in there every week and the result is, you can see a lot of the results in the exhibition. And when I came for the preview for the exhibition, I was gobsmacked to see two photographs, there's a picture of me with my feet on the desk in classic casual manner.
So, yeah, it's an important place. I would hate to think that I wouldn't be doing a lot more things here because I would use this facility, this studio, these studios again at the drop of a hat.
Just again, thinking about your time here, can you think about, or talk about, some of your most memorable colleagues?
Colleagues? Wow. Probably the colleague who is most synonymous, and who I always picture when I think about my time at Riverside is Clive Taylor, who was my stage manager, who'd worked with me from back in The Tube days. And we're still really good mates and, he doesn't get out much these days, but he came to Mark Allen's exhibition. And he is a great big bear of a man, in fact, quite a lot of the year looks like Santa Claus cos he's now got white hair and a big white beard.
But Clive is the guy who I think .... he ran the show. You know, he would be the person who probably persuaded me to come to Riverside in the first place. And, while I kind of swan in and looked good by, you know, exec producing and therefore taking care of the content and then coming in and shooting the show, I get the kind of glam fun bit, Clive would be the one who did all the hard work. So he would be working on getting all the equipment in and out, working out a schedule where you get lighting in, then you get the set in and then you get the cameras in. Then you get the artist in, you know, he works out all that difficult stuff. And he would have been the person who worked most closely with the staff here at Riverside. And I just swan in, like young Mr Grace from Are You Being Served and saying, “you're all doing very well” but, yeah, big Clive Taylor is Mr Riverside.
But actually, on my team at Top of the Pops, when I started, I got rid of, or thanked for their interest, a lot of the old kind of BBC stagers who were a bit kind of tweedy jacket, leather elbows for me and got a much more kind of rock and roll team in. And that rock and roll team, of course, were very used to working in theatre and doing live shows. So again, they were all really happy to be here at Riverside, you know, the chippies and everyone and also being outside of, you know, the apron strings of the BBC was really good because we established a lot of great working practices. We had a great esprit de corps in the team and we were able to kind of really bond and it was great preparation for going to Television Centre because it meant that we were a much closer, much more tight knit team and we'd worked out all the bugs in the system. So, by the time we got to Television Centre, we'd hit the ground running.
So not just for me, but for all the people that I worked with, Riverside was a hugely important place. And, of course, because we're not miles away and we're not having to worry about getting back home, because we're right in the heart of Hammersmith, then people would work that bit longer and work that bit harder because we probably wouldn't be dashing off afterwards, we’re going over to the pub and we'd either eat here in Riverside or we eat in the pub or there were a couple of other places around you can go to, easy to walk up to King Street or somewhere, if you need to do anything else, so yeah, it felt very very self-contained and that means that you have more time to spend on being creative and ironing out problems and making the show as good as it could be. And, you know, just spending time with your colleagues and working together and it just brought us all closer together.
So by the time we got to Television Centre, we were like a real band of brothers and sisters.
And you mentioned that, in the course of working here, you had exposure to the wider arts and exhibitions that were taking place here. Are there any particular performances or exhibitions that you consumed, let's put it that way, that are memorable to you?
I have a vague memory of coming to see someone in a studio doing something, I can't remember what it was, because I mean, it was just such a brutal, I suppose, a brutal schedule doing Top of the Pops. And, of course, when other things were in the space because, you know, it was a music show and we made a lot of noise, a lot of noise, even on rehearsal days we made a lot of noise, so we tended to be here when other things weren't, if you know what I mean, so no, I don't really remember other performances although I'm sure there were, I have vague recollections of coming in to see other things that were going on, but nothing I could put a name to. It's kind of a warm and fuzzy glow of joy, but not distinct enough.
You've mentioned Hammersmith a couple of times as the setting for Riverside Studios and I think you mentioned that you're still based nearby. How has Hammersmith as an area changed in the time since you were first working here?
Well, Hammersmith is great when the bridge is open and it can be a bit of a pain when it's not. But, I mean, Hammersmith is one of those, I think quite funky places that, that people often say London's made up of lots of villages. Hammersmith is a town, you know, it's not a little village like Hampstead or Dulwich where I lived for 20 years, it's a proper town. And, yeah, I really like Hammersmith. You know, it's got everything a boy could need apart from a John Lewis [laughs]. And the transport links are fantastic. I mean, I'm working at a company called 1185 films at the moment, in fact, pretty permanently and that's based in Farringdon. So, it's Hammersmith and City Line straight to Farringdon and, if I get bored and want to vary it, I can change it, Paddington on Elizabeth line. So it's great for transport, great for communications. And it’s got a vibe, it’s a real place, you know, and it's quite a sizable place, if you go up the end of King Street, you’re almost into Chiswick and all the way down to where I am, Fulham Palace Road. You know that there's a lot of area there, great little parks. Hammersmith is just such a funky place. And of course you’ve got the Thames.
In the time that you were here, how were audiences from within the local community involved? Was there much work with young people from within the neighbourhood?
Yeah, one of the things that I did when I started Top of the Pops was put the audience limit up to18. One, because I thought it looked better in the show so should be aspirational, it shouldn't be a kids’ show, it should be, obviously a lot of kids would watch Top of the Pops - 12,13,14. But I wanted it to be aspirational and also safety and insurance and all that. I wanted to have the audience 18 and over and be able to give them a drink if they wanted one.
So, again, BBC audience services were of great help with those audiences but I didn't want it to be like it had been before I started. I didn't want it to be like rent a crowd, I didn't want it to be, you know, the children of BBC accountants being in there, I wanted it to be real people. And being in such a heavily populated urban area like Hammersmith and, you know, it's kind of Shepherd's Bush and all the surrounding area, it's really easy to get an audience and the audiences were great here. They were really enthusiastic and it's another one of those things about going into a facility which feels more friendly than the ultra professional, you know, almost sanitised studios that you would often get, so the audience came in feeling, probably drunk [laughs]. But actually they came in with a laid back attitude that they were in a friendly place, that they were there to be entertained, not that they were there to be like cattle to be herded around, to make a shot look better. And I always like to try and oversubscribe the studio audience as much as possible because I'd rather we had a really good quorum that would make a lot of noise and the cameras were almost fighting to get through the crowds which is what we did on The Tube up in Newcastle and I wanted to recreate that.
And that was one of the things that Hammersmith was really good for - the catchment area and the vibe and the feel of Riverside Studios created a great vibe in the studio. So the audiences were great, really enthusiastic, and diversity has always been incredibly important to me. It would be obviously ridiculous to have so many hip hop and soul and particularly black American acts where most of the audience are white Anglo Saxon Protestant, middle class kids, that's ridiculous. So, I was always, always, even before you had a gun to your head and you had to do it to tick a box, I was always really, really heavy on making sure that the audiences were as diverse as the performers that appeared on it. I think that should be a given.
What elements of the old Riverside studios do you think are missing today?
Yeah, the bit where I could sit outside and feed the ducks. I loved that and of course, the Chancellor's has been upgraded a bit and is the latest trendy place to go and buy a pizza if you're 17. And before it was kind of an old man's pub. I think we used to play darts in there and all sorts of stuff, I miss that a little bit but it's still a great pub. And I think one of the great things about the new Riverside, if you like, is that it feels much more open to the public with a good restaurant and the riverside side is virtually a glass wall, so people feel that they can come in and I think that's really important.
But being kind of secluded and being able to focus on work was also great so, you know, it's progress but maybe, if you're working as a in “TV professional” it's sometimes better to be able to divorce yourself from all that and keep the dirty public out of the way. But no, that’s really niggling, that’s trying to find something that is .... it’s a change, whether it’s an improvement or not is a moot point. But, you know what, I love the old Riverside and I love the new Riverside even more, I think.
What difference, if any, do you think the Riverside has made?
I think that probably the golden years in the history of Riverside are still to come. I would definitely like to think that because it’s now had a really good makeover and has kind of patched all the things that weren’t necessarily working that well and I think that obviously TFI was a real highlight at Riverside and I think my relatively short spell here doing Top of the Pops was a real highlight. But I think it’s, I mean I’m working right now, I’m working on a whole range of programmes as well as still doing what I’ve always done, I keep doing concerts and will be doing more. But, in terms of the studio space, there’s a number of ideas that I’m working on and, while I’m working on them, I’m thinking mmm, yeah Riverside, that would work really well there.
So I would like to think that the real highlights are still yet to come and I think that before the end of this year, I think I’ll be back here talking to someone behind the desk, talking about budgets and availability and all that, because there are certain shows that I’m involved in making that I would definitely want to be here first, before I would go anywhere else with them. Without signing a contract of course!
A couple more questions quickly if I may? You mentioned The Chancellors pub just across the road from here and, as you mentioned, it’s taken on a new form recently, become a very popular pizza takeway and restaurant as well and you mentioned that you’d spent quite a bit of time in there when you were working here. What sort of memories do you have, any particularly memorable experiences?
Well, one of the great things about it was that, if say someone from a band or road crew or whatever had gone missing, you knew they’d probably be at the Chancellors because that was the kind of rock n’ roll lifestyle, so that was really easy, just to find people and just to be able to have the place there – we would say go there and we’ll give you a shout when we need you and it was quite nice that people could relax in the process as well. But I think, I went to the Chancellors just a few weeks ago and, while it’s different and the clientele were very different, you know, old guys drinking pints has been replaced by lots of delightful young people drinking non-alcoholic things because they’re there for the pizza and they want to take a picture and put it on Instagram, so the clientele is incredibly different. But it’s still the Chancellors and, you know what, the way pubs have been closed and turned into banks or branches of Poundland, I think it’s great that it’s still there. Thankfully it is still there and the whole of the riverside walk which you can do now, you know, there are so many really nice restaurants and a lot of the old pubs are still there because people love to go for a drink near the river. The two that I like to keep quiet about, which are my two favourite ones, are the Chancellors and the Black Lion Tavern, which is much further up towards Chiswick because, again, one of the joys of this place is that a lot of the media companies are in and around Hammersmith and Chiswick and the environs and so the studio is slap bang in the middle of a lot of TV land.
So yeah, the Chancellors has changed but it will change again and it will move with the times, it will move with the vibe and I can see the vibe changing if, let’s say for instance, I shoot some big rock band, Foo Fighters at Riverside, let’s say I’m doing that then, for that night, the clientele in the pub would be leather jackets, long hair (oh I’ve got a leather jacket and long hair!). Yeah, it would be your rock type of gang and, conversely, if you put an R&B or a hip hop band on then it’ll be a different crowd so, very much like back in the day when I was doing The Tube, the facility at Tyne Tees on City Road was right next to the river Tyne, there was a pub called the Egypt Cottage literally next door and across the road was a pub called the Rose & Crown and, it sounds weird to say how important a pub is to an area but it is, it’s not just about drinking, it’s about it being a social hub, it’s about having that cohesion, it’s about having a safe space to go to and talk and discuss things and iron out ideas and, with The Tube, the Rose & Crown and the Egypt Cottage were a vital part of the show. And I think, coming here to Riverside, the Chancellors is like the annexe across the road, it’s like the staff bar, it’s a great facility to have whether you drink alcohol or not and I know that a lot less people do drink alcohol or seem to drink alcohol less these days. But that’s fine, pubs have met that demand so yeah, Chancellors, I think if anything, let’s just build a tunnel from Riverside directly into the Chancellors so we can jump the queue of instagrammers getting pizza.
The way young people consume music and experience music has changed quite a bit since the 90s, it’s much more diffuse now and got much more in the way of options. They’ve all got their own privately curated selection in music. How do you see things in that sense going in the future?
You’ve just accidentally stumbled on one of my big table bashing subjects and you’re going to regret it [laughs]. I think that there are a lot of things that happened over the last few years, digital revolution being one of the biggest ones, I call it digital revolution because that’s just a catch all term for a load of stuff. As a byproduct of all that, one of the things that has happened is that music has become, because of, first the Walkman and right through to the smartphone and headphones, has become a much more solitary experience and not the shared experience that it used to be back in the day. It would be people gathering around a dance set with a pile of vinyl and listening to it as a shared experience and that went on through the 60s, 70s, 80s and even the 90s to a large extent. However, music and people getting together to enjoy music, whether that’s a band or recorded music being played, people getting together in the same space to enjoy music and dance if they want to, or freak out or play air guitar, whatever they want to do, I think that is a basic human need, I think it happened in pre-historic humans, almost certainly, and you can still see it going on all over the world in, you know, I was going to say primitive tribes but that sounds a bit of a put down but you know what I mean.
And I think one of things that happened at the same time is that because of partly government legislations, because of nimbies in flats and apartments that get built near venues, police numbers have been cut, so therefore when somebody is going for a license at a magistrate, police will routinely object because they haven’t got the staff to cover it and there’s an automatic assumption that, if you’re going to play music to a bunch of people, that they’re going to get together and do drugs, they’re going to do all sorts of horrible things. Well, I don’t see anybody stopping football matches and, whenever you get a lot of people together, especially young people, well there will be the odd little fracas but that’s perfectly normal and that should be expected. You know, we haven’t banned drinking, and I think it’s a really really important basic fundamental human need for people to get together and it’s gone through the post-war thing where you see archive of people in dance halls and there’s like, hundreds of them on the dance floor. And they can barely even move but they still manage to avoid each other, you know, right through rave culture, through Saturday Night Fever, discos, through punk, through everything and it’s not good enough for that to only happen to young people at something like Glastonbury or a big festival, it needs to be much more than that. And I think Riverside is one of the places, thankfully, where you can potentially still do that. But of course it also has to be a safe space and it has to be well run and it has to be well done and it has to be corralled, it has to be policed with a small p, but I think it’s incredibly important and I think we have to nurture and keep spaces where you can do that because it’s crucial, I think it’s a basic human need. And, in fact some of the shows I’m developing now are about that very subject. I’ll happily tell you more when they come to fruition but there’s a number of shows that I’m looking at that are designed to look at and dissect and address, and maybe even redress, that balance because, to me, I think it would be negligent if we didn’t have those spaces for people to come together in and enjoy music. And I think Riverside is right up there, certainly as far as London is concerned, because it doesn’t have to be a nightclub, it doesn’t have to be that kind of cattle market thing, it’s not necessarily about meeting your future partner or having casual sex or whatever, it’s about just coming together to enjoy the music and enjoy each other, and enjoy each other enjoying the music and please let us not ever take that away from society but, it seems that, as a society, we’re making a damn good effort to try and do that and that’s one of the many reasons why Riverside is important and powerful and should last another 100 years.
Thank you, Chris. Is there anything else that you might want to cover that we haven’t already?
I’ll probably think of millions of things once we’ve stopped. Obviously, this project is an oral history and therefore it’ll never stop. It’ll keep going and hopefully I’ll be back here before the end of the year writing another chapter.
I really enjoyed that. Appreciate that, thank you so much.
Good, thank you!
