I spent 90 minutes with the former Radio 1 DJ Dave Lee Travis last Thursday and I don’t think there is a part of my body that he didn’t grope. He fondled my foot, inched his hands up my thighs, tried to make me sit on his lap and kissed me. He copped a feel of my hips when I foolishly asked for a tour of his studio, stroked my chin and my back and gave me a full body hug as I left.
...I am distracted by the huge semi-nude portraits of women in his kitchen and sitting room. The place ripples with nipples, thighs, lips and hips. There’s a half-body sculpture of buttocks, thong and legs near the fridge, opposite a chalk board with “poo bags and Nurofen” written in capitals. Christ.
...He had up to 40m listeners when he did the World Service, but all I can see now is an off-duty druid, with sheepy hair and a flowery shirt and bits of jewellery and tinted glasses, like Jimmy Savile. Why do all DJs end up looking like Jimmy Savile?
Apparently he’s been doing photographs for nearly 50 years. He spots girls down the pub or at concerts. “I’ll give them a card and say: look, call me when you’re ready, talk to your parents . . .” Their parents? “I like to make sure everyone knows what’s going on,” he says. One of them is 14 and very pretty, “which is why I took that shot of her face. I would not do anything else, obviously”. There’s also a Hollyoaks actress in a tuxedo and a picture of Sting’s niece, Jeri-Marie Sumner.
He met her in a marquee. “I saw this female coming towards me and I was absolutely magnetised,” he says. He asked if she would like to be photographed and when she came over he suggested she “just lose the clothing”.
He relaxes his subjects by saying, “This is not a pornography empire, we’re not trying to get you to strip off for the sake of stripping off. There is an area of photography that is very beautiful, without it being terrible or disgusting or making people feel awkward.” His wife, Marianne, helps out.
...“The secret of a happy marriage,” he says, putting both hands on my knee and massaging, “is never look at another woman or touch her knees! That’s the secret of a happy marriage.”
Is he always this flirty, I gasp. Marianne says, “Oh yes.” He admits he was a terrible tease when he was on television. “Who was it? The newsreader. Foreignish name. I was sat next to her talking and I said, do you mind, and I grabbed her knee.” Why? “Cos it put a smile on her face,” he says.
“It put a smile on yours as well,” says Marianne drily.
Has he ever been slapped? “No.”
Sometimes women have surprised him. He once walked into a gathering and saw a girl who was “ever so cute, so I just put my arms round her and lifted her off the floor. I felt her hands come round and grab me in the crotch” — obviously he acts the whole thing out — “and I thought, okay! And slowly lowered her to the ground. She was still holding onto me when she turned round and said, sorry, my husband does that to me!” He roars with laughter.
The whole thing is mad — mad as cornflakes. I constantly forget my questions and giggle and blush out of horror and fear, but this seems only to encourage him. At one point he says, “Come here”, and grabs me and pushes me onto his knee on the sofa and gives me a kiss and goes, “How nice was that! You’re awfully nice.”
...Marianne goes to open the door and the photographer comes in. Travis is now holding my hand. I explain to the photographer that Travis is very tactile. He grins and strokes my upper arm, sliding his finger all the way down, over my wrist, over my hand, right to the end of my fingers. He says, “If you f*** me over, I’m telling you, that’ll be the last time”, whereupon I say, how on earth could I f*** him over? We’ve been through everything clearly, he’s sneered at my questions and slagged off my recording equipment and pretended I’m not allowed to see his studio or his car — a white Corvette Stingray 1981, “the Beast” — and now this...
