I've bumped into a few celebrities in my time. Once or twice, I've spoken to them.
Generally, I make an arse of myself.
Lowlights include being rudely blanked by the gorgeous Sophie Ellis Bextor at Reading '98, being slowly squashed on a sofa by the Sugababes' enormous manager during a live broadcast and so being unable to say anything, and making a drunken knob of myself whilst in a pub with Chris Moyles, Comedy Dave, Will and several other Radio One people.
I seem to be unable to stop it happening.
One occasion crowns the lot of them though. The worst thing about it was the esteem in which I held the celebrity concerned. I loved his voice and the music of his band, their songs meant a huge amount to me and some still do. I had followed them from their first single...I bought all the albums, even when the light of their stardom had dimmed so drastically that they reached the point where I, as a lowly student radio presenter, could get an interview.
You might never have heard of them. The band was Gene, the singer was Martin Rossiter. I was only roped into the interview at the last minute by my radio station's Head of Music, who knew I liked them.
I was ecstatic.
I was chuffed.
I was nervous as all hell.
The interview took place in the back rooms of The Colosseum in Coventry. We had the station's minidisc recorder charged and ready, and as an ex-Head of Production, I knew that the quality of the interview was going to be needle-sharp. This wasn't going to be one of those student radio interviews that everyone gets really excited about only to find, afterwards, that as a matter of fact, you can't tell that it's Jason Donovan at all because the girl who was interviewing him got overexcited and forgot to turn the microphone on.
Oh no.
Crystal clear quality.
Everything seemed to be going well. Andy and I were a few questions into a total of fifteen or so, and Martin, while obviously a bit narked to be asked deep questions about his artistic intent by students, was opening up nicely.
Then we ran out of questions, which was a bit awkward. Something Andy and I had been discussing in the car on the way to the interview popped into my mind.
Me: Martin, there has always been a lot of comparison between yourselves and the musical sound of The Smiths and Morrisey himself. How do you respond to these comments?
Martin Rossiter: Well, I've never let those get to me to be honest. I love his music and he's been an enormous influence.
Me: That's great. You know, to answer the...well, something that might have come across as a bit of criticism, maybe, with a complete and open acceptance that that is what you've set out to do. Yeah. That's great.
There was an another pause at this point. If I had been producing the interview afterwards, I would have edited it out for being too long.
Martin Rossiter: Are you American or something?
Andy: Stu, he's being sarcastic.
You can imagine my attempted recovery.
Just know that it failed.
So it's probably just as well that on the final night of the Isle of Wight Festival earlier this year, when the Counting Crows effectively played my high school, I was only able to buy the lead singer a drink by mobile phone, because he was eight miles away on a ferry at the time.
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