“If this gets out, we’re screwed,” my boss told me. Actually, I have paraphrased because at least one expletive was guaranteed in this man’s every sentence.
He looked very worried. I was baffled. I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
“I don’t just mean ME,” he added in response to my bafflement that maybe he mistook for insouciance. “I mean YOU too, everyone in this building, this entire business. We are all f……” I will stop there. You can probably guess his favourite expletive.
He thrust the inside pages from a Sunday tabloid newspaper across his desk and indicated I should read. It was a large news story about an apparently notorious drug dealer involved in sundry nefarious activities who had just been nabbed by ‘the law’. I had never heard of him. I was still completely baffled.
“Without these people, we wouldn’t be here,” my boss explained with deliberate ambiguity. I ran a lightning-fast Poirot-style drawing room denouement through my mind:
- Surmise the newspaper suspect is genuinely criminal
- I had never met him
- I had done nothing criminal
- My boss is evidently freaking out
- Maybe HE is mixed up with this criminal
- Maybe HE has done something illegal
- Something SO illegal that it would close down our business which, Hercule indicates, is licensed by the British government.
Oh dear. Will I still have a job tomorrow?
This was not how I had anticipated my regular Monday morning eight o’clock drop-in to my boss’ penthouse office. He looked more than worried. He looked scared stiff. As if the Metropolitan Police might come knocking on his office door within the next hour. I had recently watched horrified as certain of his sacked employees had been frogmarched out of the building by a security guard upon this man’s cruel orders. Perhaps the boot was about to pass to the other foot, this time with the addition of handcuffs and a blue flashing light outside on Holloway Road.
He took the newspaper back from me, turned it back around and sat there in silence, staring at the article. He chose to elucidate nothing further for a full minute, so I bade him farewell, got up, closed his door behind me and returned to my own office downstairs. It was the strangest start to my week. I was left just as baffled. My boss never said another word to me about this incident. He did not need to. Its significance was betrayed by his changed demeanour from that day onwards. Gone was the happy-go-lucky faux bonhomie he had always oozed. From now on, he would behave as if a gunman might burst into the room and shoot him at point-blank range.
In previous years, it had been evident to those of us working for London pirate radio station ‘KISS 94 FM’ that there were dodgy things going on under our noses in its open-plan Finsbury Park first-floor office. Unlike its competitors who mostly attempted 24/7 radio services, our station had only broadcast from Friday to Sunday. How come rivals had been regularly raided and shut down by the government, or sometimes by their enemies, whereas KISS had been so rarely, if ever, forced off-air? Press articles had regularly alleged that violence, industrial sabotage and criminal activity were rife within London’s pirate radio business. Some involved criticised this as the perfect fabricated excuse for the authorities to raid illegal stations, close them and prosecute their operators. But was there some fire behind this convenient smokescreen?
Every week, KISS had held numerous rammed club nights in venues across London, collecting the door money in cash. Hundreds of pounds, thousands on busy holiday weekends, would be counted out and bundled up on an office desk, to be dispatched out the office front door in the hands of station co-founder Gordon McNamee’s personal assistant, Rosee Laurence. Those substantial cash revenues did not appear to be reflected in the subsequent published accounts of McNamee’s company, Goodfoot Promotions Limited. Where that cash went I never knew. I had realised that, despite my training in economics and accountancy, it was best not to ask or get involved in the financial labyrinth of this illegal radio station.
McNamee regularly described his business style as “ducking and diving”, defined by the Cambridge dictionary as “the action of cleverly doing everything you can in order to succeed, or to avoid a situation, even when this may not be completely acceptable or honest.” For those familiar with the popular 1980’s British television sitcom ‘Only Fools and Horses’, McNamee would have fitted right in with its cast. His gift was his East End gab. He could persuade almost anybody to do almost anything … that would ultimately benefit himself. Running one of the dozens of London pirate stations had at least corralled a useful boundary to his ruthlessness. However, that limitation evaporated once he hit the radio jackpot.
What happened next was all my fault. After KISS FM’s first attempt to win a legal London radio licence had failed, McNamee slumped into lethargic depression and paralysed inaction. I stepped up to the challenge of initial defeat by instigating a lobbying campaign with co-worker Heddi Greenwood to persuade the government to advertise further radio licences (which succeeded) and, then, by managing and writing a second licence application (which succeeded against all odds). To achieve this, I had to make the difficult decision to sacrifice my job editing a new monthly black music magazine ‘Free!’ that I had just founded. My motivation was my long involvement in London pirate radio during two decades, since when I had dreamt of Britain’s first legal black music radio station. Eventually, I made that happen.
However, once the licence had been won, McNamee’s demeanour changed significantly. Newly attired in a sharp Paul Smith suit and shirt, he set out to hobnob amongst bigwigs with money whom he convinced that the station’s application had succeeded due to HIS entrepreneurial skills. Although he had only five GCSE certificates to his name (amongst them woodwork and technical drawing) and was barely literate, having “bummed out of school most of the time”, his ego started to believe the ‘rags to riches’ story that press profiles were painting around him. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s 1980’s propaganda promised that any East End barrow boy could ‘get rich quick’ through hard work in London’s financial and corporate sectors. It was the era of ‘loadsamoney’ when huge advertising billboards posted around London promoted local talk radio station ‘LBC’ with the slogan ‘GREED IS GOOD’ in massive letters.
Whereas pirate era meetings had previously been held within our open-plan office, McNamee now held them privately elsewhere with who knew whom and with outcomes unknown. He had always convinced the press that the pirate KISS FM was a ‘collective’ of its DJ’s even though it now seemed to operate more than ever as his fiefdom (KISS FM DJ Jazzie B’s “be an asset to the collective” lyric proved similarly shallow). Secrecy became endemic. McNamee’s domestic arrangements had always been sketchy, which I had presumed was the product of his ‘wife plus mistress’ private life. But he had progressed from being cagey to obsessively clandestine.
Weeks before the now legal KISS 100 FM launched, McNamee insisted I visit his new home for a Sunday business meeting and lunch. However, its address was apparently so confidential that I could only be told it by phone as I stepped into a taxi at the start of my long journey from one end of London to the other. I had to swear on my life that I would never share its location with anyone. Upon my late arrival (after the taxi ran out of petrol), I entered an expansive Edwardian house in Dulwich filled with expensive stuff, including huge blown-up photos of McNamee on walls throughout. The place was a shrine to both the man’s ego and the decadence favoured by the nouveau riche. I had to hide my disgust, as I had yet to be rewarded for my work winning KISS FM its licence. I was living in a damp suburban top floor flat without central heating.
It was galling to see McNamee showing off such opulence even before our new radio station had launched. Where had he got the money to buy this home? Where had he got the money to buy £90,000 of share capital in the newly created ‘KISS FM Radio Limited’ company that would be operating the licence? No explanations were offered to any of us who had been involved in our supposedly ‘collective’ enterprise – now HIS business – before it had won the licence. I had been promised rewards (shares, a bonus, an immediate salary) for my efforts winning the licence, none of which McNamee honoured. He was proven to be a cold-hearted liar in his treatment of me. There must have been others whose talents he exploited and later discarded.
I never knew if the Monday morning ‘criminal’ incident in his office was connected somehow to these apparent financial shenanigans that had suddenly made him ‘rich’. What I do know is that McNamee was never the same again. After Easter, he started to work a bare minimum of hours at the station. My office overlooked the private car park to the rear of the building so that, every morning, I would hear him arrive at precisely nine o’clock in the morning and then leave at precisely five o’clock in the afternoon. During the day, McNamee was no longer seen around the building. Apart from his presence at meetings, I rarely saw him to talk to any more. There was a lot of whispering around the building that things were going very badly for him.
Whenever I had to visit the top floor to see McNamee in his office, he would usually be sat behind his desk, doing nothing in particular. Often not, he would be staring at the latest share prices on the Teletext pages of his huge colour television. He seemed obsessed with the notion that he was some kind of entrepreneurial whiz-kid. He even started comparing himself in conversation to Richard Branson, the boss of the Virgin empire. Often, I would find him listening to old soul or jazz-funk records in his office, rather than to KISS FM. It seemed as if he was barricading himself into his corner office on the top floor, trying to ignore the realities of the radio station that were going on around him.
He clearly lacked the management skills to make the station a successful business, having appointed as departmental managers ‘outsiders’ who failed to understand our unique radio product and who all failed to meet their targets. I was the only ‘insider’ to head a department and became the only manager to meet my target (one million listeners per week by end of Year One) some six months early. Consumed by his own failings, I could see McNamee grow to despise me for my success. At one stage, he even told me: “Do you know what I hate about you, Grant? You’ve got the answers to every bloody question. And they are always bloody right.”
What he failed to grasp was that my expertise was derived from education, training and experience. I had not been born on a council estate with it. Unlike him, I had been involved in the radio business for two decades. Unlike him, I had implemented a (then) radical music policy that had turned around the fortunes of a large British commercial radio station (Metro Radio, Newcastle) a decade earlier. Unlike him, I had managed people since the 1970’s. Unlike him, I may not have possessed the gab, but I had a range of skills that were necessary to launch a successful radio station from scratch … and that is exactly what I did. Inevitably, having managed the station to ratings success, I was deemed no longer necessary to McNamee’s increasingly paranoid behaviour and was ejected without an ounce of gratitude. Then he slandered me in a national newspaper, bizarrely accusing ME of ruining HIS radio station!
Jump forward to June 2024. The same Gordon McNamee was honoured with the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for “services to music”. It seems totally appropriate that it was bestowed upon him by the most corrupt, dishonest self-serving British government observed in my lifetime, run by a Prime Minister and staff convicted on 126 occasions of breaking COVID lockdown laws they themselves had legislated. Many current Tory politicians still idolise Margaret Thatcher and the ‘policies’ that helped her dominate 1980’s British politics. In 2022, Prime Minister and former Goldman Sachs banker Rishi Sunak had even asked on camera a homeless man if finance was a business he would “like to get into”, a scary echo of that Thatcher propaganda.
During my media career, I have had to work for a clutch of bosses whose activities appeared somewhat non-legal, several of whom were eventually prosecuted, two of whom were sent to jail. That is a sad reflection on the calibre of people who rise to the heights of British business where ‘meritocracy’ seems to have been labelled a dirty word … by those who are already installed on top.
[See also ‘KISS FM: From Radical Radio To Big Business: The Inside Story Of A London Pirate Radio Station’s Path To Success’ by Grant Goddard, Radio Books, 2011, 528 pages]
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