In case you haven’t checked out the talks we recorded at our Mixcloud Curates London event (hosted in collaboration with Convergence Festival), we thought we’d highlight some of the choice quotes from the sessions. Have a read, then have a listen, there were some great discussions about the role of radio today, music scenes from over the years and what it’s like to tour on a shoe string.
Mary Anne Hobbs in conversation with Dan Deacon
Dan Deacon – “I was into video games but I kind of lost interest in video games really quickly when I found computer music software. It became my number one hobby, I’d be sitting in school and instead of being like ‘uhh I can’t wait to get home and play DOOM or Wolfenstein’ I was like ‘I can’t wait to go home and see how many layers of bassoon I can add before the computer crashes’”
(On finding a gigantic, rack-mount oscillator) “I’d never really played an instrument that I was instantly in love with. It was a really bizarre feeling. I fell in love with sine waves and started researching as much as possible, knowing that they don’t truly exist, there are no true sine waves in nature but I had a sine wave generator. It was kind of just like having like a unicorn but if I thought about it too hard the unicorn would disappear.”
(On feeding himself on a 60 day tour) “I didn’t have $30 a day to spend on three meals. I’d be lucky if I was getting paid $45 a show to split with the person I was on tour with. So I went into the grocery store and I bought 60 cans of beans and 60 cans of corn and 60 rice cakes and 60 servings of peanut butter and I was like ‘This will be my meal everyday for the next 60 days. I know nothing about the necessity of calories or saturated or unsaturated fats or vitamins or nutrients, I’m sure there’s vitamins in whiskey! I’ve been drinking a ton of that.’”
(On interacting with his fans during his live shows) “There is no show without an audience, the audience is the show. They’re a vital element to the show just as much as the sound, the light, the songs etc. There’s certain things you can do with a large group of people that you can’t do with anything else, and the audience is the one thing that’s changing night to night when you’re on tour. So I really like thinking of the audience as collaborators and as an additional element of the composition, and I also really like thinking about how audiences don’t think of themselves as ‘we’, it’s ‘I’. Everyone’s sitting in the crowd as an individual who happens to be in the group, while people on stage think of the audience as one collective, sort of like hive minecraft.”
Radio Renaissance: Radar Radio
Ben Fairclough (what happens at Radar Radio on any given day) – “Risky Roadz came to Novelist’s 19th birthday set. Nov hosted a set and they did a show on Radar which was absolutely crazy, absolutely popped off and then everyone partied outside and Risky Roadz filmed it as their comeback cypher outside, and there was Skepta, all the Boy Better Know guys and Big Zuu.”
Ben Fairclough (on what Radar Radio looks for in presenters) – “It’s the personality, it’s the willingness to learn, a great music taste first and foremost. The classic Radar Radio motto is ‘You’ll have a place here if you have a good taste in music and if you’re not a dickhead.’”
Jade Avia (on the difference between commercial radio and Radar Radio) – “I’ve interviewed some of the biggest people and I can tell you that some of the best interviews that I’ve had, ever, have been on Radar because they’ve been so f•••••• real!”
Gabriel Szatan – “It’s hard to do what Radar do in that you are creating a conducive environment where people feel completely free to do what they want. If the Internet is written in ink and everyone is concerned about the trail they leave, no one thinks about that at Radar. People are having their progressions and their upswing in their careers being marked week on week.”
Radio Renaissance: Soho Radio
Dan Gray (on representing the Soho area): “It’s not just music, we want to represent Soho, so we have a lot of the gay community, we have theatre, we have lots of food and talk based shows and it’s growing and growing each week.”
Rob Da Bank (on online radio stations): “I know that online you might start off with a smaller listenership but it’s 2016 and it makes no odds. I’ve reached a point in my life where I’d rather have 50 people that really care about music listening than 500,000, it’s about the quality more than the quantity…well I hope it’s not just 50.”
Eddy Temple-Morris (his days on Radio 1 and breaking the first Jungle record): “When I was at Radio 1 I was at the legendary playlist meeting and in the early days I took ‘Goldie – Inner City Life’ to that meeting. I could see it was about to kick off, the amount of resistance that was in that room when I played this record, I’ll never forget Simon Mayo’s producer’s face..he looked like I’d just done a turd right in front of him. He was completely outraged that I was even suggesting that this tune should be playlisted, but I played it and it divided the room right down the middle. I had to do a very passionate speech in order for that, I had to get that room on my side and I did, and that got c-listed. This was the first Jungle record to ever be playlisted on any station anywhere in the world.”
Radio Renaissance: Mi-Soul Radio
Gordon Mac – “There was this huge gap in the marketplace for a radio station. So I went out, myself and George Power who was one of the first black promotors of black clubs and Tosca, we got together and created KISS FM.”
George Kay (On Choice FM) – “We did it the way we wanted to do it. Because of the way we went we actually broke quite a few records in the UK, we broke En Vogue’s Hold On, which was huge hit in 1990.”
Jumpin Jack Frost – “Britain is a melting pot of cultures, people from all different backgrounds and classes and creeds, we all live together in this island and it’s unique. If you go anywhere else in the world everything is separated but in England we all grew up together… This music Jungle/DnB it was born out of me having friends that are into reggae, me having friends who are into soul, me having friends that are rockers, me having friends that are punks and you have this melting pot of music that’s come together and created this music. It’s basically the only music built in England that has been exported into the world, the only music.”