When Nick Grimshaw was called in to see the controller of Radio 1 one Tuesday morning at the start of July, he genuinely believed something was wrong. "I've never really had a meeting with Ben Cooper before," he says, "so I thought I must be in trouble."
If it seems a little strange that the station's boss has never had a meeting with one of its best-known "turns", well, perhaps it shouldn't. Grimshaw isn't a controversial DJ, the kind who criticises the BBC on-air or makes remarks that get the complaints flooding in and Ofcom issuing reprimands. Besides, his show was tucked away at night-time, in the 10pm–midnight slot once occupied by John Peel. They seem to just leave him to get on with providing what the Radio 1 website insists on referring to, a little dispiritingly, as "late night music and LOLs". But he'd been doing a bit of holiday cover for daytime DJs, and he has a tendency to, as he puts it, "ramble on": he recently treated the nation to a nine-minute oration on the shortcomings of Madonna's gig at Hyde Park.
Instead of telling him off, Cooper offered him the biggest job on the station: the breakfast show, currently the home of Chris Moyles. It wasn't just Grimshaw who was surprised. The papers had suggested his name was entered in a three-horse race, but most people assumed it would go to either Fearne Cotton, who's better-known, or Greg James, the drivetime DJ who'd been open about his ambitions in the press. Grimshaw hadn't said anything but, he smiles, it's the job he's wanted "since I was 10 or 11… It was never, 'I want to work in radio', it was always, 'I want to do the Radio 1 breakfast show.' I remember my mum and dad being like, 'Um, that's quite precise, is there nothing else?' But when I was little, I always thought that it sounded like the free-est and funniest that radio can be."
Nevertheless, he admits to a degree of trepidation. Even in an internet world, the Radio 1 breakfast show is still incontrovertibly a Big Deal: at the height of Moyles' success, nearly eight million people listened to it every day. To compound matters, Moyles has lost a million listeners since then and too many of the ones that hung around are over 30, much to the chagrin of the BBC Trust, which wants Radio 1 to concentrate on 15-29-year-olds. A lot rests on the skinny shoulders of the 28-year-old currently sitting in an east London photo studio, worrying aloud if the cold sore on his nose – the result of a course of powerful antibiotics – makes him look as if he's been sniffing poppers. "Some days I'm like, they wouldn't have asked if they didn't think I could do it. I've been doing radio for years and it's just a different time of day." He nods. "And then some days I have absolute prang-outs of fear where I'm like, Oh. My. God. What am I going to talk about?"
He was stressed by the level of media attention that followed the announcement. Moyles took him out for a drink, told him to get used to it, then invited him on the show the next morning as a guest and abandoned him live on air, walking out of the studio with his entourage. When Grimshaw went on holiday to Ibiza shortly afterwards, he found himself sleeping for 20 hours a night: "All my friends were like, great, thanks for coming." He chuckles.
It is, he concedes, not a job without its drawbacks. There are the hours you have to keep, which aren't really commensurate with the lifestyle of someone who enjoys an evening out. "I'll have to get up at half-five, which isn't that crazy, is it?" he asks, wincing slightly. "I mean, there are people who work all day and get up and go to the gym at that time. I've definitely seen people running in the park at 6am," he adds. "When I'm going home."
Furthermore, ever since Tony Blackburn kicked off proceedings in 1967, the Radio 1 breakfast show has garnered a reputation for sending its DJs barmy. Listeners of an age sufficient to preclude you from presenting the breakfast show – among the reasons given for Moyles' departure was that he's 38, too old for Radio 1's youthful demographic – should remember the increasingly unlistenable megalomania of Chris Evans in the mid-90s. Listeners of a more mature vintage still may recall Blackburn, so haunted by losing the breakfast show and the collapse of his marriage that he kept playing Chicago's If You Leave Me Now over and over again on air; or Mike Read, with his moral crusade against Frankie Goes To Hollywood and peculiar attitude to celebrity, characterised by the late John Peel as "complaining that he couldn't go anywhere without being recognised, when he'd go everywhere in a tartan suit carrying a guitar, so he would have attracted attention in a lunatic asylum". Grimshaw saw a documentary about former breakfast show hosts once, he says: "They went and visited them, and they were all mad. I bet it does that to you, the sleep deprivation. I saw Lisa Snowdon recently, who does Capital's breakfast show. I said, are you tired all day? She said, yeah. I said, are you irritable? She said, all the time. I was like, oh no, what have I done?"
Luckily, sage advice on his new job was to hand, albeit from an unlikely source. "When I got the job, Kate Moss said to me" – he drops into a London accent – "'What you wanna do, darling, is do what I do. Sometimes I go to work. Sometimes I go to work hungover. Sometimes I don't turn up at all. People love that. They don't know what to expect.'" He snorts with laughter. "I said, 'Kate, that's what Chris Evans did.' 'Exactly, darling, everybody loved Chris Evans.' I said, 'Kate, they sacked him.'"
This, you could argue, is a typical Grimshaw anecdote. It's drily funny, a little self-deprecating, told in a slightly camp Oldham accent, and it features one of his seemingly fathomless array of celebrity friends. They sometimes turn up on his radio show, having apparently just dropped in for a chat: Alexa Chung or Agyness Deyn or even Harry Styles, teenage vocalist with boyband One Direction and connoisseur of the more mature lady, with whom Grimshaw apparently enjoys "lads' shopping trips". ("To Liberty." He laughs. "It's really very laddy in Liberty, Alexis.") But initially at least today, I get the feeling he's making a concerted effort not to appear as if he's dropping names. He mentions going to Ibiza with a friend of his "who's really anti-dance music and hates Ibiza", who later turns out to be Pixie Geldof. He says he worries that people think he's got on because of who he knows, rather than his talents, that he's better known as a certain kind of starlet's gay bff than as a broadcaster. "It's probably been a hindrance because people just think you're an idiot who goes out. That's people's perception of you. They're making an idea of you before actually listening to you on the radio."
On the one hand, you do wonder precisely how much of a hindrance it's been, given that he's just landed the most high-profile job in British radio. Even before that, his career seemed to be progressing at quite an astonishing pace. After what one TV executive called "the easiest recruitment of a presenter we've ever had", he's spent five years dominating Channel 4's yoof TV output, fronting the kind of shows that require him to interview rapper Nicki Minaj while dressed as her – "Nicki Grimaj," he laughs – or go fishing for crabs with singer Jason Derülo. On the other, you see what he means. On air, he's funny and engaging and enthusiastic, with the casual air of the natural broadcaster: with the best will in the world, it seems unlikely that Radio 1 would gift him the biggest job on the station on the grounds that he knows Pixie Geldof. Neverthless, when he got the breakfast show job, one tabloid printed a feature headlined Who Is Nick Grimshaw?, answering the question by printing a selection of paparazzi photos of him with different celebrities: fashion designer Henry Holland, Florence of + The Machine fame, Lily Allen, Kelly Osbourne, Sadie Frost, Noel Fielding. "They said I got a first at university as well, though," he says, hopefully.
It was a world into which he was unexpectedly catapulted while he was still a student in Liverpool. He'd gone to university to do business and media studies, the former a sop to his father, who wasn't terribly enamoured of his son's ambitions in the music business. "My dad's quite old school, he didn't have me until he was 43. He was born and bred in Manchester, and for that generation, there weren't that many jobs, I guess, in media in Manchester. So me saying, I want to go and work in radio or music was like saying I want to go and be a stripper on Mars. He was like, if you do media studies, I'm not paying for it. So we compromised on business and media studies. I got a first in the communications and media side, and I literally couldn't pass the business studies side. Macro-economics I sat seven times. I still don't know what it means. On my sixth resit I got 20%. I was like, Oh. My. God. I'm actually getting worse at it."
He had a show on student radio: at one point, he and a friend hounded and pestered until they were allowed to present the breakfast show, before realising they'd talked their way into the worst job on the station "because literally no students are up in the morning". He laughs. "I remember once having a record listenership of seven." One day, his guests were an indie DJ duo called Queens Of Noize, with whom he struck up a friendship. "I ended up going out with them that night, having a full-on bonding night out with them, came home with a haircut and a bill for someone's window that I broke. I just loved them."
As it turned out, Queens Of Noize were enormously well-connected. "After that, whenever they came to Liverpool, we'd always hang out. They'd come and pick me up at uni and have Graham Coxon from Blur or Pete Doherty with them." That sounds quite intimidating to me, but Grimshaw says not: the only times he can think of when he got starstruck was when he first met Kate Moss ("Because she looks like Kate Moss, you know, with the fag and the drink, wearing a fur") and when he recently went to a party in a Hackney pub and discovered Jay-Z and Beyoncé were there, the latter, a little improbably, dancing and "drinking pints of cider. Well, not pints, but Bulmers, you know, bottles of cider. She was definitely having cider with ice in it. I was trying not to stare at her. I was like, no way."
After university, he got a job at a radio plugging company in Manchester, but one of the Queens Of Noize, Mairead, told him to leave, come to London, live in her flat and help run their club. "I don't know if it was glamorous, because it was quite a dingy club in Camden, but they did know everybody," he says. "Florence was like our friend who got on the kitchen worktops and sang annoyingly loudly at every party we went to, and now she sings at the Grammys. Henry was making little T-shirts and now he does fashion shows with Rihanna. It was never like, I'm going to latch on to these and I'll make friends with them. I've had the same group of friends since I moved to London, people that went to the Queens Of Noize's club night, because that's where I made my friends. I didn't know anyone in London apart from them."
Perhaps people concentrate on his famous friends because so little is known about Grimshaw himself. For someone who's never off the TV and radio, he cuts a rather enigmatic figure, rarely giving interviews: "I don't guard my privacy, but I don't really see the point in doing press if there's nothing to talk about. You don't want to be in the paper for the sake of it." His personal life seems slightly mysterious, largely because it appears to be nonexistent. One page of a fan website is given to trying to decipher whether or not he's gay – "the truth is that no one really knows because he's not directly answered that question," it puzzles, before adding hastily, "we all love 'Grimmy' either way!" – today, at least, he seems happy to acknowledge that he is. But he's never really had a relationship, he says. "I've just not met anyone that I thought oh, I really like you that much. I work so much, when I do go out, I'd rather go out with my friends. I rather do that than, like, go out on the prowl. I literally can't think of anything worse."
It just seems a bit of a waste, I say, given that he's young and handsome and famous. "It does, doesn't it?" He thinks for a minute, before suggesting he'd "really like to go out with Frank Ocean", the R&B singer who outed himself as bisexual earlier this year. He thinks again. "I think he might be whiny, though. Like, why have you not called me? He might be a bit wet. I think I'm just forcing that Frank thing." He laughs. "You see, as soon as I decide, I talk myself out of it."
In contrast to the press that suggested Radio 1 was desperate for a radical change first thing in the morning, Grimshaw says he thinks he might have got the breakfast job because "I'm not too far away from Moyles. I think we both can waffle and both are obviously northern, and I think we're both quite warm and can talk about anything. I thought all the papers were quite negative about him and I think he's amazing."
But, quite aside from the fact that he's a gay man taking over from a DJ with an unfortunate habit of using the word "gay" as an insult, there's no doubt that Grimshaw is a DJ of a rather different stripe from his predecessor. For one thing, he's exceptionally charming, which even the most vociferous Moyles fan might be forced to concede was not chief among the self-styled Saviour Of Radio 1's attributes. For another, while Moyles often gives the impression that the records on his show are a mere hindrance, getting in the way of the more important sound of his voice, Grimshaw is a genuine music fan, always out at gigs, willing to risk the wrath of his night-time audience by playing Rihanna tracks "because they're sick – just because little girls like them, it doesn't mean it's not good music".
Before he takes over the breakfast show, he's going to head up to Edinburgh to present a week of programmes from the festival. "I wanted to get my mate Scottee on the show, he's a performance artist," he says, handing me his iPhone. It is showing a YouTube video of Scottee. He is a large man in a floral dress and what looks like a pregnancy bump, lip-synching to I Just Want To Make Love To You. He strips off the top half of the dress, gives birth to a two-litre bottle of cola, which he then pretends to fellate, before sticking Mentos in his mouth and trying to drink the cola with predictable results. For some reason, Radio 1 weren't keen on having Scottee on the programme. "They said he's too weird." Grimshaw laughs. Then he heads off to arrange his 28th birthday party, from which Kate Moss will emerge in the early hours, into a wall of paparazzi, looking noticeably the worse for wear.
• Nick Grimshaw's Radio 1 breakfast show starts on 24 September. Photographed wearing jumper, £318, by Carven, from Matches. Styling: Simon Chilvers. Stylist's assistant: Alex Christodoulou. Grooming: Kevin Fortune using Sisley and L'Oréal Techni Art.
