How Nick Grimshaw captivates the capital from dusk till dawn

Over lunch in Kensington, I’m interviewing Nick Grimshaw... Correction: I was interviewing Nick Grimshaw. Ten minutes into our conversation, he has dashed outside to do an impromptu live phone interview. Such is life in Grimmy’s world. In the past few months he has hosted BBC Radio 1 live from Glastonbury, after nipping over to Paris for an hour to attend the Louis Vuitton men’s show; presented the Big Weekend festival in Glasgow where Coldplay and One Direction headlined; put together a new album of his regular radio slot The Nixtape; started planning the fourth series of his BBC Three panel show Sweat the Small Stuff; and organised his 30th birthday party. He has pulled all of this off while rising at 5.30am every weekday to present the BBC Radio 1 Breakfast Show, ad-libbing for three hours of youth-centric banter, and simultaneously being BFF to half of celebrity London, including Kate Moss, Alexa Chung, Pixie Geldof and Harry Styles. It’s all a tightly scheduled balancing act in which he only has to turn up and be... Grimmy.

Today, he is fresh off the plane from ‘Beefa’, as he calls it, where the Radio 1 team has been based for a week to cover the San Antonio club scene at its hedonistic zenith. It’s not surprising that when he returns to the table he looks rather frazzled. His trademark Beavis and Butt-head quiff has collapsed like a novice-made soufflé, his skinny jeans have been traded for a more cocooning loose fit, and his usual wonky grin is less forthcoming. But his almighty gob is still functioning. When I apologise for the in-depth questioning after such a heavy week, he replies, ‘Oh no! I’m self-obsessed, my favourite thing is talking about myself.’ He says he couldn’t sleep last night: ‘I was so paranoid that my alarm wouldn’t go off this morning and it would be so classic that on the day after Ibiza, my bosses would think, “Oh, he’s still there, still out clubbing.” Last year we went out and we pulled an all-nighter. So this year I was conscious we couldn’t do it again. It’s only funny once.’ Surprise number one: Grimmy is a bit of a worrier.

To be honest, I started the interview already a little peeved with him. After all, I’m a member of the over-25s so pointedly excluded from the breakfast show when he was hired to replace the then 38-year-old Chris Moyles in September 2012. His mission: to lower the listener age group to 16- to 25-year-olds in an attempt to lure the YouTube generation back to traditional media formats. As an exiled thirty-something, I tend to dismiss anything aiming its arrow at the heart of ‘yoof’, using a lexicon of hashtags, emoticons, LOLs and general ‘sick-ness’, as just ENC: Emperor’s New Clothes. But after 15 minutes of chitchat, it’s impossible not to start liking Grimmy. He’s witty, low-key and genuine — not the annoying gag-a-minute Jonathan Ross-style show-off I was expecting. Nor, he insists, is he a habitual partier any more: he has been called the ‘youth equivalent of Nicky Haslam’ for his alleged omnipresence on the London scene. ‘It’s just whenever I go out, I always get caught,’ he says. ‘These days, I get anxious if I have two glasses of wine. I don’t want to be known for going out and getting drunk rather than my radio show. I go to bed at 9.30pm on weeknights.’

I point out, rather rudely, that today he has crow’s-feet. There’s a potential for irony that the demands of a breakfast youth show might cause him to age prematurely. He laughs good-naturedly. ‘I went into Kiehl’s the other day and the shop assistant said: “You need this.” It was called Powerful Wrinkle Reducing Cream. What a bitch!’ Sadie Frost’s sister Jade gives him acupuncture for wrinkles. I wonder if he’s feeling the pressure to stay professionally young. There is, after all, a second layer of irony: he is now, at 30, ‘way’ too old to listen to his own show. Does he worry that he is next in line for the guillotine? ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he says with the elongated vowels of a Leeds accent. He is, in fact, from Manchester — he doesn’t know why he ended up with the Yorkshire inflection. ‘I don’t think it’s about me pretending I’m a teenager, it’s more about having a grasp of what’s going on in pop culture and not wanging on too much about old songs...’ He denies that acts such as Robbie Williams and Kylie have been blacklisted purely because of their age. ‘We played Foo Fighters today. And I mean how old is David Guetta? 50?’ (He’s 46.) Grimmy hung out with Sadie Frost and Fran Cutler in Ibiza. His older friends (they’re 49 and 51) give him faith, he says, that ‘I’m not going to end up being the oldest person at the party’.

There might be another reason behind his newly emerged ‘laughter lines’. With Grimmy at the helm, the BBC Radio 1 Breakfast Show dropped one million listeners in three months in 2013. He’s been clawing back his audience ever since. In February, he gained 700,000 listeners. In March, he lost 500,000. In August, it was up by 100,000 again. There is big stuff to sweat about. ‘I really panicked at first,’ he says. ‘It was really bad, even though my bosses said, “This is what’s meant to happen.” ’ At first, he got a twitch in his eye due to anxiety. ‘I still have nightmares about buttons not working or guests not turning up.’

It’s 7am a few days later and, bleary-eyed, I meet Grimmy at Radio 1 for the breakfast show. Today, his quiff has been re-erected to its full height, making his silhouette in dark spray-on jeans and an oversized shirtdress gravity-defyingly top-heavy. He stands at the DJ booth, meandering through a series of ‘topics’: more ‘Beefa’ anecdotes — he jokes that ‘they’ve erected a statue of Kate Moss in San Antonio as a warning to clubbers’; his obsession with YouTube sensation Tish; and his upcoming attempt to enter the Guinness Book of World Records for the most number of people twerking. The Nixtape session, a mixture of old and new music for the last hour of the show, starts with The Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’. It’s all rather full-on for 9am. ‘He’s always relentlessly chirpy in the mornings,’ sighs one of his team.

Grimmy’s buoyancy is the key ingredient of both his shows and his amassing of friends-slash-connections. In his life, work and play have merged into one. ‘Grimmy never wants the fun to end, he always keeps it rolling over,’ says one of his best friends, and co-writer on Sweat the Small Stuff, Aimee Phillips. ‘When he did the BBC night-time slot [from 10pm to 12am in 2008], people like Harry Styles would just turn up alone at 11pm at night to do the show. It ended up with everyone saying, “Why haven’t you asked me on?” ’

One of those people was Kate Moss, who made a rare speaking appearance on the breakfast show last year. ‘Kate was the one who came up with the idea for Call or Delete when we were on holiday together,’ says Grimmy of the show format in which celebrities are dared to make a prank call or delete a number from their phone. ‘Kate came on because she knows that I’m not going to suddenly say, “Tell us what you think about being really thin and a role model.” ’ Grimmy’s ‘soft’ interviews are great celebrity PR: they make his guests look self-deprecating and likeable. ‘We got Naomi Campbell to phone ahead to a club and demand for a manatee to be there on her arrival,’ he chuckles. The effect doesn’t work on everyone: ‘I turned up at Angelina Jolie’s hotel suite to do an interview and she looked at me like I’d just come into her house uninvited. She’s so cold. I don’t like fake nice either. Will Smith is fake nice. I loved Miley Cyrus who just came into the studio and started burping.’

But isn’t there a fine line between work and play with his celebrity friends? Has anything accidentally slipped out? ‘I don’t think so. Well, when I did the Teen Awards last year I hosted it with Rita Ora and she kept farting all day in rehearsals. So I said that the next day on the radio. She was like: “Grimmy, you can’t say that in front of six million people!” ’

Grimmy has an endless zeal for disposable celebrity minutiae. I wonder if he ever finds it a little vacuous. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m still genuinely fascinated with celebrity culture. I have a very short attention span, so I guess that’s why I’m good at that stuff.’ Does he have an in-depth knowledge of another subject: archaeology? Egyptology? ‘Err. No. I’m really boring. I just love Twitter.’ But doesn’t he feel it’s all a little trivial next to the BBC journalists reporting on Iraq and Gaza in the same building? He slightly misses my point. ‘I think at Radio 1 we champion new music and I think that’s really important.’ He pauses. ‘Jeremy Paxman hates the show. He’s always complaining that he has to listen to it in the lifts.’

He continues: ‘I think my dad thought my job was trivial before I was at the BBC. If I interview someone like David Beckham now, he’s like “Wow”. He likes the fact that it’s the BBC. But otherwise, he wouldn’t know who Beyoncé was if she came and sat in his living room. He once moved my jacket off the sofa and I said, “Dad, it’s Marc Jacobs!” And he said, “Who the bloody ’ell is Mark Jacob and why have you got his jacket?” ’ Grimmy is very fond of his dad and mum, he took them to an interview with Lady Gaga once. ‘She performed, and when the music stopped and everyone was silent [my dad] said loudly: “Is that a bloke?” ’

Born in Moss Side, Manchester, Grimmy grew up in Oldham in a family of chatterboxes: his dad Peter, a marketing executive, his mum Eileen, a former insurance broker, and his older siblings, Andy, now 43 and a band manager, and Jane, a 41-year-old financial director. The baby of the family, Grimmy says he was constantly vying for attention. ‘I used to dress up as Tina Turner when I was six. I got less attention when the football was on because everyone in my family is a die-hard Man United fan. I remember one time putting on every single necklace that my mum had, Y-fronts and boots, and dancing in front of the TV.’