Katie Puckrik and Johnny Cash
The first months of 1994 found me slogging through East Village snow drifts in New York City. I was living in a friend of a friend's sublet in Alphabet City, which was just then finding its tentative way from smackhead rookery to bourgie boutiqueland. Those cold, chaotic streets mirrored my internal landscape: the demise of a long love affair had left me enervated and unmoored. I was also jobless, with my first big TV presenting job on Channel 4's pop culture car crash The Word now in my rear view mirror.
I felt terror and hope in equal measures, and the friction between the two was an accelerant that spurred me forward, however painfully. A lucky break and a new agent put me in the room with MTV, who were looking for hosts to cover that summer's 25th anniversary of Woodstock. My audition task was to improvise an on-the-spot interview with a musician from the NYC band Betty. By some fairy godmother twist of fate, the musician turned out to be Amy Ziff, a friend from back in my hometown carousing days at D.C.'s 9:30 Club. Our rapport was camera-ready, and I left that room on a high, a new career in a new town.
My agent now had the idea I was some kind of audition savant, and encouraged by my one-for-one success at MTV, took the plunge and sent me to Los Angeles to do the rounds for pilot season. I holed up in the dog-eared edge of Beverly Hills at a motel recommended by my LA buddies Sparks (who will play the 6 Music Festival in Glasgow later this month), and fielded scripts from all the proposed new television dramas and comedies, from Chicago Hope to Friends. (I was asked to read for the role of hippy-flake Friend Phoebe.)
Despite my agent's belief in my chutzpah, charm, and God-given effervescence, she (and God) had overlooked one thing: I wasn't actually an actor. I mean, I'm a hambone and an unmitigated show poodle, which technically puts me only two acting classes away from an Oscar, but at that time I hadn't had the two acting classes. To this day I shudder at the memory of my Friends audition, my zinger delivery falling flat, splat against the dead eyes of the assembled producers and writers.
Fortunately, I had my August Woodstock job to buoy me, but before that, another rock'n'roll dream materialized: I was booked by Channel 4 to present the very first televised Glastonbury Festival, along with my now 6 Music fellow presenters Mark Radcliffe and Marc Riley, and Mark Kermode.
And so it was that the Marks and I found ourselves cavorting across warm, moonlit fields in June 1994, surrounded by the icons and young lions and lionesses of popular music. There, deep in the ancient heart of England's prettiest prettiness, I was struck by the blissful realisation that the snow drifts and terror had truly receded. The full goddess moon shone into my midsummer eyes, and I knew I was going to be all right.
Katie Puckrik is a presenter for Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ 6 Music
- to Katie Puckrik Sits In on 6 Music's 1994 Day, Friday 3 March from 1pm.