The problem with writing a memoir, found Nick Grimshaw as he started his, was that it meant facing himself. Throughout his career, first on telly and in the gossip pages, then through 14 years at BBC Radio 1 (six of which were presenting the breakfast show), he’s found success by offering a bit of a laugh, ordering pizzas for hungover guests, asking pals like Adele to answer the phones. “Lols.” And skating over this life of light relief, he realised he’d asked plenty of questions of other people, but hardly a single one of himself.
When he told friends he was writing a book, most of them quickly asked if they could come to the party. But one, Drew, asked why. Why was he writing about himself? Why was it important? Grimshaw (“Grimmy” to friends, which include, by default, his audiences, who come up to him on the street and start talking as though they’re midway through a conversation) chuckled, awkwardly. I’ll tell you why, Drew sighed, eventually. It’s important, he said, “because you, as a queer, weird kid hanging around with your elderly neighbours, obsessed with music, had laser-sharp vision of what you wanted to do with your life. And then… you actually did it.”
Down from Oldham for a football match with his dad one day, little Nick persuaded him to detour so he could look through the windows of the Radio 1 offices, because when he grew up that was where he wanted to present the breakfast show. “For all the little queer kids feeling left out in suburbia, feeling not at the centre of the party, they can make their own party. They need to know that life is what you make it. And you made it what you wanted.” Grimshaw, for once, was speechless.
Pig and Stinky Blob the dogs greet me at the door, and follow us ecstatically through into the kitchen, where Grimshaw’s partner, choreographer Meshach Henry, is making coffee. They’ve lit scented candles, Grimshaw explains over the roar of the radio, “because I cooked a burger for breakfast!” It’s a protein-diet thing (“bit rank”) and, at 38, one of the changes he’s recently made to his previously boozy, schmoozy life. Because, yes, this is a man who first became famous in the early 2000s for being papped falling out of parties with friends like Harry Styles and Kate Moss, a man who would present his breakfast show after staying out all night, his hangover kicking in as most people were settling down to work. “The straight-through crew,” as Styles put it. “Thinking about those party years,” says Grimshaw, “it slightly gives me the ick today. Falling asleep at work, or needing someone to go and get me a kebab and a Coca-Cola, or not having a shower, or interviewing someone without doing any research. That’s making me feel anxious! But I guess it was… of its time?”
The other day he called a friend from back then, designer Henry Holland, one of many pals who became successful as models or pop stars. “He agreed, nobody ever spoke about careers, or thought what we looked like. No one sat in the pub with a business plan! But we didn’t have Instagram. Maybe we were in the moment. We weren’t taking pictures, and that sort of stops the flow, doesn’t it? I don’t know what it was in the air, or in the drinks. It seemed like quite a limitless time, like anything could happen. And it also felt like the lines were blurred – celebrities didn’t seem as perfect as they do now. So it wasn’t weird for Sadie Frost to be in the pub with a smelly MTV intern like me.” They became friends, of course – he’s now godfather to Frost and Jude Law’s son. He stretches in his velvet armchair. The house has its own Instagram account, a record of Grimshaw’s love of design. Over there is a marble coffee table and a Keith Haring print, over here a Memphis piece once owned by David Bowie. “My friend Aimee said, ‘Do you think he blew rails from it?’” We nod solemnly.
One morning in the breakfast show studio, while a record was playing, Russell Brand leaned in and asked if Grimshaw would meditate with him after the show. “He was like, ‘I really think you should.’ I didn’t. Partly because I thought my family would think I’d lost it. I’m a bit conscious of doing anything they’ll think is ‘too London’.” Things that are too London for the Grimshaws include, but are not limited to, yoga, oat milk, therapy and drinking a glass of water. In lockdown, though, battling with anxiety, he signed up to do a meditation course and as it approached he realised something. He found the prospect more daunting than judging The X Factor or doing the radio show. The prospect of sitting alone with himself, and no one watching. All these worries plait themselves into the otherwise extremely starry stories he tells in his book.
There was the time, for instance, Lady Gaga met his parents, Pete and Eileen, and asked his dad to check if the gaffer tape on her nipples was straight. “Daddy, am I all covered up correctly?” “Yer all right love,” he replied. Eileen, concerned, asked if she might be cold. There was the time, shortly after he’d moved to London to work at MTV, that Amy Winehouse ran up and befriended him in the street. There was the party at Kate Moss’s, when he called over a dressing-gowned neighbour from a nearby balcony and it turned out to be George Michael. He also describes the feeling when listening figures dropped: “My Terrible Personality Is Ruining Great Britain,” and his gorgeous relationship with his family, and their nonsense, and their support, and their skill at having a laugh.
In 2020, he cycled across Namibia for Comic Relief. Around a campfire as they prepared to set off, he told his fellow celebrities he’d “been to a spin class recently – it can’t be harder than spin with a hangover”. Cut to Grimshaw having a fit, going into toxic shock from heat exhaustion after cycling for eight hours in “oven-like” temperatures. “Ugh,” he thought, as, hours later they injected him with Valium, “I’m going to die on telly and it’s going to look like I’ve done it for attention.”
Such is his jolly tone that it’s easy to dance across his anecdotes avoiding emotional pot holes, like the extreme enduring fear sparked from watching Edward Scissorhands as a “soft lad” growing up, or his father’s death or, as he puts it, describing an early appointment with a therapist. “Once we’d done trauma, mourning, gay guilt, regular guilt and Catholic guilt, we got on to the easy-breezy ‘Oh yeah, btw forgot to mention, I’m absolutely terrified of being alone.” He used to laugh at “the wild notion” of a relationship. “I wasn’t wearing my gay cape with pride,” he writes, “I was sort of wearing it underneath ‘straight clothes’ and letting a flash out every now and then… You spend long enough listening to shit about gays and even as one, you start to believe it.”
So, instead, he concentrated on work, and mates, and cocktails with flashing straws and light-up fish, and then, one Thursday morning in 2018, he finished his final breakfast show, went out to celebrate, and by Friday he was in love. This year, Mesh proposed – they’re talking about adopting kids. For now, the dogs will do.
Daily Mail reporters have sneered at Grimshaw’s “knack for befriending the famous”, saying his only skill is as a “world-class networker”. They’re incurious, though, about why these stars are drawn to him, something which becomes clear after five minutes in the jangly warmth of his company. When he left Radio 1 (“because I’ve worked there for 14 years and interviewed literally every- body. Twice”), Annie Mac (the co-host on his first radio show) said, “something like, ‘You never know who he’s going to bring if he meets you for lunch. It might be his auntie, or neighbour, or a pop star, or three,’” He laughs. “I always want people,” whether listeners to the show, or his mum and aunts in a room of celebrities, “to feel included and welcome. At school, I never had a set of friends. I sort of bumped around different groups, flipped between them. I wasn’t a girl. But the boys didn’t see me as one of them, I wasn’t an ultra lad. So I felt like I didn’t fit in.” He shrugs.
As Drew pointed out, he made his own party. It’s a party that has grown to encompass a jolly podcast with Angela Hartnett, and Celebrity Gogglebox, in which he curls up on the sofa in a tracksuit with his niece, Liv, and chats shit about the telly while eating crisps (“You can’t put a rabbi in a hot-tub,” “Do you know what gets rid of ghosts? Put the big light on, they don’t like that,” etc), plus radio shows and The X Factor, so as well as your Kate Mosses and your Alexa Chungs, his guests are everyone who’s watching. All of us.
It turned out that Grimshaw took to meditating extremely well. “Yes,” he boasts, “I had visions!” Turned out, too, that he suited therapy, despite it being maybe a bit too London. “I’d speak about the fear I was going to be murdered in the house, that Edward Scissorhands thing, this feeling of looking over my shoulder. I think that’s from being at school as well, and feeling a bit gay, which meant I had to be vigilant.”
What else do they discuss? “Guilt, about the idea of not doing anything. And then general anxiety, panic attacks – trying to be ‘present’, and grounded. We talked about Ireland, my mum’s roots. I’d thought what ‘made me’ maybe, was being on the radio. But that’s not who I am. That was my job. When I’m sitting here, and I’m not on the radio, I’m learning how not to be anxious, how to feel content.” Thinking about what he wants to do next, though, still makes him shiver. “It makes me feel a bit weird, if I think about it. It’s like, ‘You had one dream in your life, and you’ve achieved it. So like, sit down now.’”
It was something witchy, he thinks sometimes, the fact that he got this rare job he’d focused on since he was a little kid. And then other times, “Well, pop music was something I really liked. And I didn’t like anything else.” He shrugs again, dramatically. “You know the feeling when you watch The One Show, and pop out to walk the dogs and you see in other houses, they’re watching The One Show, too? I love that feeling. So I’m trying to figure out what that is, that universal feeling, like with the radio, that shared experience.” When he’s found that feeling, he’ll know what he wants to do next. Something for everyone, something like an embrace.
Outside, a car is waiting to take him to a studio, but he is deliberately ignoring the time. He finds having his photo taken difficult for the same reason he found it tricky writing the book. “You know, when you have to think about yourself… out of yourself? Why is the book important? What will people think of how I look in this picture? Whereas when I’m doing my job, I’m inside myself.” There were two things he was particularly nervous about including in the book. The first was the drinking. “I didn’t want to look like I was saying, ‘Go and get wasted!’ But I realised it was a process – those nights out were helping me feel part of something, and making me feel accepting of gay me. When I was younger, nights out dampened some pain and suffering that I was feeling. But it’s quite exposing to write all that, because while a lot of the nights out were really fun” (he’d pick up the free papers in the morning as a chronicle of what he’d been doing the night before, pap pictures of him and his mates staggering into a cab) “, some of the nights were really sad.”
The second thing he was worried about was the idea it was his celebrity career that validated him. “When I was at school, I was super conscious of how I spoke or how my hands moved or what my references were. So work did validate me, but not because I got attention. It was because I was allowed, and encouraged, to be myself.” The book is his latest invitation to his noisy, cosy party, one that he’s determined to continue beyond Radio 1, all of us part of the straight-through crew. He’s clear, the party’s not over. “But it is quite scary to achieve your dream,” he says quietly. “Because now I’ve got to have a whole new one.”
Men’s fashion editor: Helen Seamons; grooming by Christopher Gatt using Oribe haircare and MAC cosmetics; fashion assistant Roz Donoghue; photographer’s assistant Jomile Kazlauskaite
Soft Lad by Nick Grimshaw is published on 27 October (£20, Hodder & Stoughton) and available for pre-order now. Order it for £17.40 at guardianbookshop.com
