Disgusting Bliss by Lucian Randall Read Free Book Online

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