A memoir full of great radio stories: Jonesy launches new book

Amanda Keller paid out on Jonesy about his punctuation:

“A few more commas would have been nice,” she quipped at Jonesy’s book launch tonight.

David Campbell told radioinfo: “He’s such a really fun guy… they asked me would I roast him. I’m like would I roast him, then I thought yeah actually, I have a few things I could get off my chest.”

Jonesy’s son also paid out on his dad, saying the book is full of radio stories… “the ones we have heard every week through our whole lives.”

Jonesy took it all with a laugh and a big smile, proud to have launched his new book, 50 Shades of Fifty – A Really Reliable Memoir, published by New Holland Publishers.

When his friends were finished paying out on Jonesy at his book launch function at Edition Book Bar in Ultimo Sydney, they all agreed, Brendan Jones is one of the nicest guys in radio and his new book is a good read. It tells stories from his early days in radio, to his first day on air at ARN when he nearly got fired, and his award winning partnership with breakfast co-host Amanda Keller.

 
Is that a centrefold, asks Larry Emdur?

 

Keller, in her foreword to the book wrote about Jonesy, saying:

Brendan Jones is a walking anecdote. Hilarious and perverse things just seem to happen to him. I tell him he’s like the cartoon character Ginger Meggs, who lurched from one crazy incident to another without ever being implicated in the fallout!

Whether he’s falling asleep as a drunk teen underneath the wrong house, or accidentally pushing a pyjama-clad elderly neighbour down a muddy hill, he gets away with it because he’s so damn likeable.

I met Jonesy on his first day at Triple M. Everyone just loved him. His boyish ‘gooberness’ was at odds with the leather jacket, the bike, the boots. He’s a giant softy, but his friends have names like Emu, Ferret, Animal and Batman…

Short of being in prison, there aren’t many people in the world with whom you can share a tiny room day in day out for 12 years… He’s a rare beast in the media. Where many are inner city elites pretending to be the everyman, Jonesy is the real deal. He lives a truly suburban life. He drinks at the pub, he goes to the footy, and when he’s not on his bike he falls asleep on the train. He is the first person I’ve ever met who uses the word ‘drongo’ in real life.

Like all best friends we squabble. We’ve even fought underwater while training to break a world record. But most of all we’ve laughed.

One of my favourite things in the world is watching him guffaw and spray tea from his nose all over the radio panel. (Don’t tell the techs!)

The book begins: “Life is not unlike a radio show. On a radio show, everything is broken up into quarter-hour listening. Every radio show should have one good bit each half hour, one great bit every hour one killer bit each day and one mind-blowing bit each week…”

Each chapter is a song title:
 

‘I remember when I was young, the world had just begun and I was happy’
‘Who listens to the radio? That’s what I’d like to know’
‘I’m gonna hit the highway like a battering ram on a silver black phantom bike’
‘Radio, someone still loves you’
‘I’ve got the music in me, I’ve got the music in me’ and so on through the book.


 

50 Shades of Fifty – A Really Reliable Memoir is published by New Holland and available now.

 

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