Radio DJ and TV Presenter
KISS 100 Radio Station

RICKIE AND MELVIN

00:00:04 Rickie: Okay. So hi. I’m Rickie. I work on the Kiss 100 Breakfast Show with Melvin, Mondays to Fridays six ’til nine in the morning and I’m also a presenter for the news on MTV News as well.

Melvin: He’s very good at that as well.

Rickie: Thanks, Melv.

Melvin: No problem, brother.

00:00:19 Melvin: I wanted to be the British Michael Jackson.

Rickie: I knew you were going to say that.

Melvin: Well that’s all…as a kid all I used to do was just watch Michael Jackson videos and do routines for family parties. My mum would be like, ‘Melvin, come down and do a quick routine for us’. I’d get a pound coin at the end, I thought that was good living. So I realised I couldn’t be the British Michael Jackson because I couldn’t really dance and I couldn’t really sing, but I knew I wanted to perform. And my mum’s quite strict so she was like, ‘I want you to go to university. I understand that you really like doing drama, but why don’t you kind of try and merge the two together’, which is kind of where the media stuff came in. So I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.

00:00:56 Rickie: I was kind of split up until I did my GCSEs whether I was going to go down the sports route because I was quite good at sports at school. I was into football, basketball, cricket, tennis, like pretty much every sport you can think of. So when I got to like the crossroads of, you know, moving from school to college, I had to make a decision about whether I was going to, you know, take the sports route and maybe become a PE teacher or something like that, or a fitness instructor or go down the media route. It was either do something that I was really, really good at, or do something that I was really, really passionate about. So I decided to go down the passion route because I wanted to love what I did rather than just doing something just because I thought I was half decent at it.

00:01:32 Rickie: We’ve known each other since we were eighteen.

Melvin: Yeah.

Rickie: We’re both twenty eight now so a good ten years. We met each other at the start of university, literally the first night that we all moved into our halls of residence and I saw Melvin and a couple of other people across the dance floor and just thought, ‘I’m just going to go and introduce myself’. So I just went across and just went, ‘Hi, I’m Rickie’, introduced myself and we’ve been mates ever since, literally.

00:01:52 Melvin: It’s interesting because when I started a uni, like I did like a really theory based course called media practices, and it’s kind of like, stuff like introduction to MIF and like looking at broadcasting and it was a minor in radio and then I met Rickie and he was doing a similar course called media practices, media performance.

Rickie: Media performance, yeah.

Melvin: And he was like, kind of, when he kind of learned about my personality and stuff like that, he said, ‘look, why don’t you kind of like look into my course? It’s more practical. You get to look at TV, you get to look at like making your own shows for radio’. And I thought, ‘Okay. I’ll give it a try’. So I kind of switched onto his course and it worked really well because I was much better suited to it and with the minor in radio I got to kind of like be kind of get in-depth experience in radio.

00:02:39 Melvin: There was a few periods, I think. It’s really strange for me because I remember being really happy for Rickie but being quite sad at the same time, because I remember when you was doing work experience, I was thinking, ‘Rickie’s meeting all these people in the industry and he’s getting and he’s getting to work at the BBC and Kiss and stuff’, and I remember feeling like, ‘what am I doing?’ I remember thinking, all of the time I used to think to myself, ‘well what am I doing?’ So that time when he called me up and he says, ‘look, there’s this like little position to do freelance work’, I remember thinking, ‘this is like a massive opportunity for me and I have to take it’. And then we got signed and then met all these people but no-one gave you the chance because they didn’t know who you were.

00:03:16 Rickie: Yeah.

Melvin: They didn’t really care who you were. ‘Okay, we need this show, we need two budding guys to do it’. ‘Oh, we’ll just get someone else to do it’.

Rickie: Was it Ann and Dick?

Melvin: Ann and Dick. They’re really good. They’ve had the experience so it was like…although you were put in front of all these people, it didn’t really mean anything. I remember thinking, ‘what’s the point like? How do you get experience without experience?’ So those were the two low points. So again, when Kiss came through and then they were like, ‘we’ll give you the opportunity to do weekend breakfast’, that was like, ‘Okay. Cool’.

00:03:45 Rickie: When you’re kind of still doing your degree and stuff, it feels like a massive mountain that you have to climb to kind of reach, you know, your dreams, and it didn’t really feel like it was possible at the time. It just felt like a dream basically. But as you kind of…if you take it step by step, and just take it one step at a time and you get there, you get there in the end. Just take it one step at a time. One hurdle, get that bit out of the way, you know, do your bit of work experience, get that out the way and just keep on progressing, you do actually get there eventually.