When the Hulbert Brothers ruled the airwaves

I'd wanted to present radio show for as long as I can remember. Just like I always wanted to be a writer, always wanted to act, always wanted to be in musicals. Yeah you heard right. I'm still waiting for my moment on the stage - casting directors, I'm AVAILABLE - but for a few years, somehow, I did present a radio show.

I think was 1999, when it started. I had a boring job working in a bank at the time, but my friend Andy was vastly better connected than I was, and knew people that did all kinds of interesting things. Go for a drink with him and you might just go home having become a reviewer for a new Manchester music magazine. That happened, once. And then, another time, he told me he'd been asked to host a music show on a new station called Radio Space, which would broadcast from the newly minted Northern Quarter for six week runs. Would I like to present it with him? Well, would I ever. See paragraph one, line one.

But we needed an idea for a show – something more than just 'two blokes arsing about and playing some records they like'. As it happens it was a fecund period for American alternative music – bands like Flaming Lips, Pavement and many less well known but almost as good – and Andy suggested we play American music only. So we had our theme. Now we just needed a name for the show.

'I want to call the show 'Kasey Keller Creamed my Fender!' he announced one day, seemingly out of the blue. The name - apparently concerning Leicester City's American goalkeeper in an imaginary car smash - was, he explained, simply the most American sounding sentence he could think of.

As the big day approached we were so nervous that we literally scripted the whole show from start to finish, right down to the last 'that was' and 'this is'. We also recorded all the songs onto a single minidisc. That way we wouldn't have to put in CDs and press the play button – obviously a highly technical task that only the most experienced DJs should attempt. We were so thrilled to get through the first show unscathed that we went home and listened to the whole thing two or three times straight. In truth, though, it was dire: monotone and listless.

There was one good bit: the indie celebrity guest of the week. Of course we couldn't get any actual celebrities, so Andy would 'interview' American indie musicians by asking questions then playing bits of their records. For example, he would say, 'so, Jonathan Donahue of Mercury Rev, I believe you've been having a spot of bother with your garden. Would you like to tell us a bit about that?'

'HOLES,' replied the voice of Donahue, singing the first song on the band's acclaimed Deserter's Songs album, 'dug by little moles'...

And so on.

Somehow we made it to the end of the run without humiliating ourselves. It was an exceptionally low bar we'd set for ourselves, but still, we cleared it.

Before long, Radio Space came back for another run in a new venue, and, mystifyingly, they were prepared to have us back. The 'American only' concept was dead in the water by now, though - we'd exhausted our modest CD collections and run out of American music to play. After all, there are only so many Guided by Voices album tracks the public will tolerate before it loses patience with you. So we put our minds to thinking of a new idea. It took time and it wasn't easy, but eventually we came up with an exciting concept: two blokes arsing around and playing some records they like. I know, right? 

We got ourselves a new name, too. Not long before a friend had memorably recalled an elderly relative describing someone as 'so ugly they could be one of the Hulbert Brothers'. Who they, you ask? The Hulbert Brothers were Claude Hulbert and his brother Jack, British character actors of the 30s and 40s. And, as the elderly relative correctly (if uncharitably) stated, neither of them was exactly Paul Newman. We decided in a heartbeat to disgrace their fading memory by taking their name as our own. Well, it seemed appropriate.

So had a name, and a concept. And we also had a friend who knew how to get us online – a rare thing in those days. That meant that all the people who didn't listen to the show could now also not look at the website. But the thing was, we really wanted to do a studio webcam. The idea was literally nothing would ever happen except that once a day one of us would be lying in a pool of blood with the other standing over the body with a spade.

Over the next year Radio Space broadcast from various Northern Quarter venues. And, slowly but surely, we threw off our old inhibitions. Those scripts and pre-programmed minidiscs became a thing of the past, and new features came thick and fast. Well, we called them features. One, League of Wales, simply involved us shouting the words 'League of Wales' to loud electronic music, then reading out that week's results, claiming to have secured the exclusive international rights to do so.

A third member joined the show – our friend Joe, who would read his poems. Other friends recorded jingles, or were enlisted as contestants in our phone in quiz New Belgium, Old Belgium. All this led to a convivial atmosphere, but we'd usually forget to give any context or explanation for whatever running joke we were talking about. We were certainly having fun now, though whether listeners were is another matter.

Sometimes we'd pretend to be proper radio people and almost get away with it. American indie labels, especially, would happily set us up with interviews, little knowing how vanishingly small our audience was. We once arranged with some lo-fi singer's label to call him during the show. When we tried, though, we realised that the station manager had blocked international calls. Embarrassingly, we had to ask the musician to call us at his own expense, which may well have alerted him to the fact that we weren't the well connected influencers we'd let them believe we were. On another occasion we interviewed the lead singer from an American band called Beachwood Sparks. The chorus of their single at the time went 'you take the gold and I’ll take the forest'. Andy suggested to him that the song should be used by a sports channel during the build up of a clash between Wolverhampton Wanderers (who play in gold coloured kit) and Nottingham Forest. He looked as baffled as you might expect.

For a time we were on directly before Inspiral Carpets man Clint Boon, who had actual fans called the Boon Army. Now, you'd imagine that might have brought us a whole bunch of new listeners in the shape of Boon fans tuning in early for his show. Unfortunately not. It was almost as if he had trained his army to avoid us with military precision. Boon himself was often amused by our pre-prepared sketches and scripts. Not the actual content, you understand, just the fact that we'd put in so much effort for so little return. 'Wow,' he said once to me. 'You guys put A LOT of work into your show. I would do that myself but I'm just too busy'. Had a life, he meant.

Radio Space soon ran its course. For Boon it was the springboard to a long and successful radio career on a proper radio station. And did he think to take his old mates, the Hulbert Brothers, with him? Of course not. He had his professional reputation to think of.

So the Hulbert Brothers went on extended hiatus, and it seemed the dream was over. Until, that is, Andy called with surprising news: we'd been offered a new home at All FM, the Levenshulme-based community station. The only possible explanation was that the people there had never heard us. What would they think when they did?

Andy was worried. 'This time we need to get serious. We need new material,' he said, calling an emergency meeting. We threw around ideas but they were falling flat – they lacked inspiration. The air grew tense. Finally, a breakthrough. I happened to mention that my daughter's nursery was called Small Wonders, which reminded me of David Bowie's similarly titled drum and bass single. An hour later we had created Little Wonders, a soap opera about a children's day care centre managed by the Thin White Duke himself (to be voiced by both of us, terrible impressions and all). Our work was done; the meeting ended with us celebrating the show's inevitable success.

And after that we were on All FM every two weeks for the next year or two - me, Andy and Joe. As time went on we eased off on the wacky features, calmed it all down a bit. Meanwhile Andy was becoming adept at working the studio, and even started producing other shows. I realised something remarkable had happened. We were – whisper it – getting better. Quite good, even.

But there was a hitch: the station manager didn’t rate us, and his scheduling seemed almost malicious. We found ourselves sandwiched between some kids playing dubstep and a reggae DJ called Romantic Juggla. Not much footfall there. Still, I like to imagine there's a rasta out there who once stumbled across us and still likes himself a bit of Neutral Milk Hotel.

TS Eliot famously said that when the end comes it isn't with a bang but with a whimper. For us the end was laughably tragic. In the studio we noticed the that the new schedule had been left around, and we weren't anywhere on it. Oh, we said. There was no point protesting – we knew the game was up. On our last night there was nobody else in the studio. We thought we’d go out in the most childish way possible, by playing all the songs we knew with swearing in. But nobody was listening - nobody cared. So we went out to a fast food joint to toast the end of something great. And that was how the world ended for the Hulbert Brothers: not with a Big Mac but with a Wimpy.

I like to think we could have still been something, but hey, life got in the way. It has a habit of doing that. Still, if I did somehow inspire one single person to listen to the Essex Green it would probably be the best thing I ever did.