Mary Anne Hobbs - Part 2 (of 2)
© Brian David Stevens
Continued from part 1. We left Mary Anne having just been headhunted by Radio 1, following a confrontational interview with the station’s Head of Production on her XFM show…
It’s hard to imagine an NME journalist nowadays not being so briefed in brand relationships and who they should kowtow to at Radio 1 that they would do that, let alone be allowed to…
Well there are more programmes that overlap now. Back then it was Peel at Radio 1 who was on my radar and literally nobody else, nothing else there had any relevance to me. So yeah that’s the story. Anyway, I’d come out of that culture, so I was very feisty when I first came to Radio 1, also because I’d come from this very male-dominated culture at the NME where everyone was so well-educated and I had left school at sixteen and gone to work at an egg-packing factory with no A-levels or qualifications of any sort. This was the era of Stuart Maconie, David Quantick, Danny Kelly, James Brown, Andrew Collins, Steve Lamacque, the list goes on: very very intelligent and educated men. So if you wanted to cut the mustard with them, if you wanted to roll with them at the NME in that era, which was a brilliant era of simultaneously “Madchester” happening in Manchester and the whole grunge thing – I wrote the first ever cover story for Nirvana, I wrote the first ever cover story for Happy Mondays, it was really amazing times, amazing times. But it was a tough environment for women to operate in without a doubt. Danny Kelly who was the editor would openly speak about how he was a boy’s boy, and that’s what he wanted on his team, so you had to be doubly good to really be in a position that I was where I was writing major cover stories and working on the news desk when news was really news and wasn’t just press releases. You really really had to shine. And it was that era where everything was just that much more confrontational – so when I came to Radio 1 that was the culture I’d come out of.
So anyway this one time [giggles] with Peel… [again, drifts off for a second] ahhh God, I could tell you so many amazing Peel stories, amazing stories, I could tell you Peel stories all day… but… [regains thread] but yes, I remember this one time that John Birt was having this dinner for all the really top, high-ranking presenters in the BBC, and Zoe Ball was meant to be going to it as she was the breakfast show presenter of the day, and Peel was too. But then Zoe got really ill, so Matthew Bannister said “oh let’s send Mary Anne instead, that’ll be a really good idea…” - I couldn’t fucking believe it to be honest. I was sat between Peter Sissons and Jeremy Paxman – who is my total idol, and I spent the whole lunch speaking to about angling and stuff like that [she confesses later that she had spent ages reading up on angling, knowing that it was Paxman’s main leisure activity]. But all the big guns were there – Jeremy Clarkson was there, who’s the woman who does the gameshow? Anne Robinson? Yeah, Anne Robinson was there… The Crimewatch guy Nick… um… Ross, Terry Wogan was there, Peter Sissons, Paxman, John Birt, obviously, all the really really big guns, all the biggest BBC guns. And I remember as we walked up to this dinner Peel fixed me with a look, and said “Mary Anne.”
He said: “I know you have some incredibly interesting opinions about things and you love to express them at high volume on a frequent basis.” [laughs] He said to me: “if you never again listen to a single thing that I say to you once in your entire life, will you just please listen to me today.” He said: “whatever you do, please just don’t open your mouth at this dinner. Your job will be to smile sweetly.” And he said: “when the cheese course comes around, I will be about to fall asleep and drop off into my plate. You will see me nod and begin to fall forward. Your job will be to kick me sharply under the table until I wake up again.” And he said “And THAT. Is. IT.” and gave me that look [she mimics a fearsome, brook-no-argument stare]. And he was, of course, absolutely right, because I was just this grimy little rookie at Radio 1, I didn’t know anything, I was just some jumped-up little NME upstart at that point. And I was like a little Rotten incarnate at that point, because that’s what you had to be – and his advice couldn’t have been more absolute, because you have to give the floor to the likes of Paxman and Clarkson and Wogan and you have to allow the big guns to just do their thing, you know the public schoolboys and all that, to just roll it out, and it was fascinating to just watch it play out. But I remember sure as shot, Peel was drinking some really fabulous red wine, and sure as shot I could see his eyes starting to become really heavy as desert came, and sure as shot just as the cheese came I could see a little tilt of the body and see his head nod and so I was just booting him under the table to keep him awake, and yeah it was completely brilliant.
But yeah I made really good friends with Jeremy Paxman for a while after that. I became extremely good friends with him, and we had quite a lot of banter about life, the universe and everything. I made him a mixtape actually: he told me the last record he’d bought was a James album so I said “oh God I think we can do a little better than that” and so I put a mixtape together and sent it over to his office at TV centre or wherever – this is about ten years ago now, I suppose. It had everything from classic Motown to avant-garde Warp tracks, Autechre and suchlike through to truly eccenrtic electronics from Ochre records, and he really liked it all. But when we would see each other in the BBC we would have a lot of extremely entertaining banter where he would tell me what was going on in current affairs and philosophy and I would tell him what was going on in the world of heavy metal – because I was doing the rock show at the time – and motorbike racing. But yeah, he was the most fun, I mean God, just an extremely inspirational character, and I feel very lucky that I had that dialogue with him for a couple of years after that lunch because it’s just a really really fascinating insight into the world of politics and current affairs from someone who’s just at the peak of his game…
He’s someone that never gives anything away in interviews himself, almost the opposite of Peel in that regard, who was very open…
Yeah. His emails were almost like Twitter before Twitter – they were always very short and very succinct, and his use of language was just awesome. I used to look at his language and think he doesn’t waste a single word, and in any message he’d send you couldn’t remove a single word because the sentence wouldn’t actually make sense. He’s just fantastically astute and I really was grateful for an opportunity to have a bit of dialogue with him, an absolutely incredible man.
But I’m still thinking of absolutely tons of Peel stories. Peel was defiant, definitely, but for all the right reasons. I remember we did this show years ago, we were together at Glastonbury, we used to do double-headers together at Glastonbury which were some of my favourite shows I ever did in my entire life. It was the year REM were headlining, maybe about ten years ago or something, and Michael Stipe was being helicoptered in. It was really funny because a little bit earlier on Peel had been wandering around the fields and had bumped into Stuart from Mogwai. Now Mogwai had just had their first EP out and it was their very first festival appearance if I recall – they’d literally done a couple of tours and that was it. Me and Peel were both big fans, but Mogwai were that big [holds fingers infinitesimally close together] – they were a fascinating young band and quite revolutionary in their outlook but they had the stature of mosquitoes. But yes, we saw an amazingly, recklessly drunken Stuart from Mogwai that afternoon and we said to him “oh pop in on the show, we’re going to be doing the show a bit later on together”. And I remember Peel saying… we were on air together and suddenly there was this huge kerfuffle, Michael Stipe’s helicopter had landed some short time ago and all this kerfuffle was going on.
So in comes Stipe’s PA, and said to Anita who was Peel’s producer at the time [strident voice] “Michael isn’t giving any interviews on site but he’s requested that he’s interviewed by John Peel on this programme.” So Anita communicated this to us, and she looked at Peel, and he said “er… can you just give us a couple of minutes Anita, I’m just going to discuss this with Mary Anne.” She said “sure, sure” and closed the door, and he said “what do you think about REM? Do you want to do this? Should we?” And I said “I couldn’t give a toss about REM to be honest with you – why do you say that?” So he said [sighs wearily] “ahh I really don’t want to do this” and he said “you know, the last time I interviewed Michael Stipe he made me look like a fucking… like an absolute wanker!” I said “why’s that?” He said “well when the microphone was down he chatted away to me perfectly naturally and happily and we spoke about all kinds of things – but as soon as the mic was on he gave me one word answers and made me look like an absolute cunt.” He said “you know me, I hate doing interviews at the best of times” - which he did, in spite of the fact that he was amazingly good at them: he was just very uncomfortable doing them. But he was just absolutely apoplectic about the fact that Michael Stipe had made him look foolish on air basically, because he wasn’t speak to him properly and wouldn’t answer him properly – so he said “well I would only have done this if you wanted to do it, after all they’re headlining Glastonbury and if you’d desperately wanted to do this then we could have done it, you know that I would grant you that” and I was just “yeah yeah” [laughs]. But he said “you promise me you’re not bothered” and I said “no no I couldn’t give a shit what Michael Stipe has to say, I’m just not interested.”
So he summoned Anita back in the room and said [mock imperious] “yeeess… well, can you tell Michael Stipe’s PA that we’re dreadfully sorry but we can’t possibly fit him in this afternoon because we have Stuart from Mogwai passing by. And it was just completely the most fabulous moment, just brilliant, you can’t imagine the difference of stature – Michael Stipe the biggest global superstar of that era, and Stuart from Mogwai who’s literally just put his first EP out… but that was just so typically Peel, so defiant but for all the right reasons, because Mogwai really were just about the most exciting band on the planet at that point and Michael Stipe wouldn’t have given us anything. So we got a wonderful interview with Stuart and Mogwai then went on to become a really awesomely influential band so it was defiant but for exactly the right reasons.
What is leaping out about all the characters you’re mentioning – Peel, Lydon, Paxman, Chris Morris, Bowie – is that they are all people who use humour and a sense of the ridiculous as a vital part of what they do.
Oh totally. What’s really interesting about Chris Morris – actually I’ve met him only once in person… My manager also manages him and she had a birthday party – this is legendary – right about the time that Brass Eye was on TV. I just adore Morris, absolutely adore him, this is well know, and at this party I’d had a few drinks and I did literally pin him to a wall the entire night. But what was really interesting about it was, like Paxman, you’d imagine that with one lash of the tongue Morris could reduce you to rubble. But actually quite the opposite is true: he’s very, very funny but very modest and actually genuinely really interested to know what your reaction is. I remember just laughing absolutely hysterically with him like two kids about his Noel Edmonds sketch, you know the one where he’s gone insane and shot all the guests at a dinner party and is now on the roof, and they’re doing it as a newsflash…
And Chris Morris knew that I was just this ultra-committed fan, and I talked to him about the minutiae of Brass Eye for hours, literally hours, pinned him in this corner and he didn’t get to speak to anyone for hours because I completely monopolised him and wanted to ask him about every tiny aspect of Brass Eye. But he was genuinely fascinated by what my response to things was and whether or not I thought each aspect of what he’d done was funny in the same way he did. And I was completely disarmed by what a charming and modest and fantastically funny he was – just like Paxman: Paxman is enormously intelligent but so warm and giving when you get to know him a little bit, wonderfully modest about what he does and wonderfully self-effacing and really interested to hear the perspective of someone who is a fan, not for the flattery but for the insight into the mechanics of what is or isn’t witty or funny or interesting. Not in any kind of egocentric way but in the sense of being actually interested in connecting with what you think. I love those kind of men, they’re awesome, just awesome.
The other thing that connects these people is that they are individualists, and it seems like you identify with that having had to make your own way in life from an early age. But how does that fit in with belonging to subcultures or scenes, whether that be punk rock and metal early on, or dubstep nowadays?
That’s really interesting, actually: the way I’ve always been correlates to what happens generally now with this current generation. What I see as one of the most exciting things about the advent of MySpace and the globalisation of the underground as we know it is that now individual artists can and have become the masters of their own destiny completely. And that’s been a really amazing thing to watch for me, because I always felt that so many artists previously, even in the kind of more credible independent networks, structures whatever they may be, have been in the position where they have so often compromised in terms of what’s expected of them creatively and what’s been expected of them in terms of sales returns, in terms of hit singles, in terms of press coverage – a lot of control is taken away from them with other agencies deciding what artwork, what edits, what singles, what remixes, how the album will be structured, making all kinds of creative decisions for and on behalf of artists that the artists have no control over whatsoever. What’s happening, certainly with dubstep being a fantastic, sustainable model for this and for how an entire scene can operate without patronage from the wider industry at large: that is a miraculous and revolutionary thing for me to see. And you know this for me, I look at it as a brand new model – I think, Jesus Christ, look at what in the space of three years has become from a tiny micro-scene with sometimes literally ten people at a rave, has become this enormous global international concern, and yet still absolutely retain 100% control of what they are doing. And those empires that began as the most unbelievably tiny concerns, be it DMZ or Tectonic recordings or Hyperdub, are expanding literally month-by-month on a global basis.
Hardly anyone imagined that was possible though. In 2006 when I interviewed Kode 9, he said with certainty “none of us are going to be giving up our day jobs”…
Yeah, and look how it is in 2009, it’s absolutely incredible. And for me, what I enjoy, at this point, is belonging to that kind of community that are able to now define themselves, and I suppose it’s something that I could never have conceived of before the past two to three years and the real opening up of MySpace – it’s changed everthing, hasn’t it, completely. It’s almost a miracle to me, it really is the great leveller isn’t it, because it reduces the degrees of separation between people to nothing, literally nothing. And you can reach out to anybody you want, anywhere in the world, at any time of day – as long as you’ve got an internet connection – and that is an amazing thing. And I feel a sort of a sense of belonging to this community of people who do have completely separate and highly individual identities that they are completely in charge of, and I feel more a part of belonging on a global basis to a whole community who are now able to do that, they’re not reliant on other forces to find themselves.
It’s kind of interesting in a way, I still think of this as a tabloid media thing, but also to a degree a few years ago before the advent of MySpace, with the print media in general – say, the specialist music magazines, the specialist film magazines, whatever it may be – as an artist or as an individual who is a creator, the way you are portrayed to the world is 100% reliant on a third party, that being a journalist’s representation. And sometimes, if for whatever reason people get a particular impression of you, that is then replicated over and over and over again, because obviously journalists will go back and read a prior piece to do their research, and then an idea becomes almost a clichéd idea of what you are as a character, what defines you as a character. And even a few years ago artists had no way to redress that themselves – there weren’t blogs, there wasn’t anything like MySpace, or like Twitter where you could actually post for yourself; you were entirely reliant on a third party to define you as a character and tell the world who you were because you didn’t have any way or means of doing that by yourself really. You could do it through your art, but in the first person you didn’t have any way to do it yourself, did you?
Except for those very few characters like, say, Bowie, who is hyper-articulate and makes people want to listen to his every utterance…
But even Bowie’s been through periods where he’s been portrayed terribly, say in the Tin Machine period, where he was really misrepresented and portrayed as just really really conceited and difficult and egocentric and all the rest of it – whereas all he was really doing was just trying out a new idea that didn’t run particularly smoothly. But the way he was portrayed during that particular era by the media, I remember as being just really really objectionable. Some of the things he did as a joke like wearing that “I’m With Tin Machine” t-shirt on Top Of The Pops or whatever were completely misconstrued.
It’s true – he copped a lot of the flak for the 80s rockstar ego thing, the Sting, Bono thing, when actually he was doing something more interesting with it…
That’s right. But with this belonging thing, it’s really strange, it’s [sighs] …when I was a kid there wasn’t a punk scene in Garstang, it was remote, it was happening elsewhere, but the it was the ideology with which you identified really strongly. Obviously the rock scene I was involved with much more seriously, in the first person, the electronic scene similarly – although the electronic scene is strange because I interact with far more people in a virtual sense. I spend most of my life effectively existing in a virtual environment – the real environment is far removed from me a lot, which is why I like to do the specials [one-off shows introducing particularly local scenes] because you get to actually go to Bristol, go to L.A., it’s completely different, it’s really really different, once you centre yourself in a place even for a few days, it’s amazing what will gravitate towards you, it’s just incredible. But most of my life I live in a virtual environment, which is quite strange when I really think about it – I think, I wonder if I’ll end up like the guy from the film Pi, and just go completely mad, trying to solve the riddle of the underground.
Or, funnily enough, Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth, surrounded by screens…
Yeah… yeah… [thoughtful, slightly troubled look, then hit by a sudden thought] Bowie’s great, though, he’s very similar actually because he’s very inquisitive, very self-critical, disarming, absolutely fascinating man, fully prepared to admit where his pitfalls are… But yeah I think it’s incredibly strange in this day and age, partly because – it’s kind of interesting, I spend ten hours plus a day listening to music and online in my tiny office in Sheffield which is about half the size of this room [the room we are in is not large by any means] with a desk and the walls are stuck with Post-It notes and ideas and maps and drawings and sketches and all sorts of stuff that appeals to me and I just stick it all over the walls. But I do spend all my time online, it’s interesting that I rarely actually have a telephone conversation – even now, sitting here having spoken to you for two hours my voice is hoarse because I don’t speak to anyone normally, I’m not used to it. It’s weird!
How do you deal with that? I find myself constantly dissipated by having too many windows and too many conversations open at once – nothing’s real unless a deadline is looming… I find face-to-face contact with people is absolutely necessary because it gives me some co-ordinates in reality.
I tend to have… it’s almost like spinning plates, isn’t it? When I wake up in the morning, to an infinite point it’s like spinning plates and you have to run round keeping them all in the air at all times, and I’ve got 50,000 things on the go at the same time because I can’t seem to finish one at any time – because it’s often like it’s a conversation or a dialogue or something that involves several stages, so you can’t just begin and end it, you have to keep it in the air for some time. But it’s also about sustaining important relationships isn’t it? With people that you never see in real life, you never ever ever ever see, ever – so you have to speak to them online… it’s odd because you have a lot of really really meaningful relationships with people who are central and important to your life, and often they’re just… they’re people that you never meet or you might see them once a year, or it might be years before you actually meet them for the first time. It’s truly bizarre.
It’s odd that this has been the next step on from how the rave generation learned to build that sort of structure for relationships from driving 200 miles across the country for a night out and meeting people in an other-worldly state of mind… it was very detached from traditional ways of forming bonds but those bonds became a tangible and real part of the structure of people’s lives.
True – like online relationships emerge from the virtual to become part of your “real” life… but going back to what you said about real people, seeing people face-to-face, do you think that’s necessary for good mental health?
I don’t know if it’s about healthy or unhealthy, it’s a question of is it what you want or need at that time, I guess…
It’s just really interesting. From my perspective I know that I’m addicted to my Mac, I’m fully addictive. If I leave the house – I force myself to go to Starbucks every day, and it takes me half an hour to walk there and back… I do go to the gym first thing in the morning, too, but I have to force myself to go to Starbucks in the middle of the day because otherwise I can and do just sit at my Mac for eight, ten hours straight, I just love it. And when I’m not on it, I’m tormented by it, and I’ve got my iPhone so there’s nothing I can’t do except download music, although I can see what’s come in at least, if someone’s sent me music I’ll know. There is no question whatsoever that I have compulsive, addictive problems with computers, but also that my whole life is inside my Mac – it is, really, and more and more so too, in a way it didn’t even used to be two or three years ago, but it totally is now. Now, I go to my P.O. box and there’s a fraction of the mail that used to be there – I’m sure that’s true for you too isn’t it? Physical things are… they don’t exist any more.
I interviewed Armand Van Helden a while ago, a fascinating character and the quintessential New Yorker, and he said that New Yorkers, since 9/11, everyone’s got an escape plan. Everyone’s got things stripped down so they’re ready to go – and for him, he’s got it so his life’s on a memory stick. The quote was “throw the clothes in the bag, throw the hard drive in the bag and you’re good to go”.
I was thinking the other day – this is kind of related as well – I was thinking, isn’t it amazing how we all depend so completely on this highly complex technology but we have absolutely no idea how any of it works. None. I mean a few years ago you would have a basic knowledge of how shit worked in your life, you would know how stuff works – you might not be able to fix it, but you would have a basic idea of how it works. But now I think, more and more and more and more so, we are relinquishing our entire lives to systems that we have no understanding of whatsoever, we have not the faintest idea how any of these things work but we are 100% dependent on them in terms of having removed so many physical things from our lives. For me now, more than ever, everything exists online in a virtual environment – I spend more time in a virtual environment than in the real world. The real world is where I sit – my chair is there, but my head is not in that world. It’s bizarre because I don’t know how any of this works or how I would function if it didn’t for any reason.
You’re a practical person though – you fixed up buses, you ride bikes.
Yeah well that’s exactly what I was thinking – I’ll think, well you would know if the sparkplugs needed cleaning or if the fanbelt was broken or the distributor cap was loose. A few years ago you would roughly know the bones of stuff, if you owned something you would roughly know how it worked – I could change wheels on motorbikes or change a chain or if a clutch cable snapped fix a new one. You would know how something works. Now, I look at my iPhone and think, when I touch the screen how does it know what to do? When I get a new piece of technology I ask these questions all the time and nobody knows the answer at all! They haven’t got the faintest idea. And it’s kind of strange that we’re in this space as a species now where there’s a tiny handful of people – tiny, a microcosm – who actually know how this stuff works, yet most of the world, practically the whole world except chunks of Africa, rely on it every single day. It’s weird, it just feels strange.
Going back to this sense of belonging, you are now a vital part of dubstep and the other electronic music that goes with it, you are part of its growth – but you’ve come to that through media networks and through your position on the radio…
Yes. The thing with that, you probably find this with your writing too, and this is something again that Peel taught me, is that you have to be incredibly consistent over a considerable period of time really, haven’t you? You have got to earn people’s trust – and that’s on both sides: it’s the trust of the artists that you’re representing and it’s the trust of the listeners that if they give their precious time to you – which as we’ve just discussed is more and more precious every moment – if they give two hours of their time to you every week, you’re going to deliver something to them that’s going to blow their mind on a regular basis, or those people are going to fall away and find another conduit. And they will. And I think that’s as much a part of it as anything else, and I think after time, people do begin to really trust you – and it’s a fantastically rewarding feeling for me.
Just recently I did the West Coast Rocks special off my own back: there was no budget to do it from the BBC so I did it off my own back – I bought the video camera to go and make the film, I did everything, I went out to L.A. and San Fransisco completely under my own steam because I could feel that there was an incredible momentum building out there and I wanted to capture some of the energy of that in a similar sort of way to Dubstep Wars [Hobbs’s early 2006 showcase programme which is generally accepted to be the key moment that broke dubstep internationally], I could feel a flashpoint approach, you could feel that sense of community and momentum building and I felt like I had to see this, I had to go and see what is happening out there and experience it first hand.
And it was a massive undertaking for me to do it all myself, to make the film and to make and edit the show all within a week of getting back - with all the new compliance issues as well [post Ross/Brand scandal], because we’d recorded all these live sets out in the states and they needed to be complied, the films needed to be complied etc etc. There was ten hours of live sets from the clubs, and of course I had mountains of CDs to go through when I got back and links to tunes, even more, as you can imagine, inteviews and just acres and acres of raw material to get through and pull together to make the specials – but I was just delighted, I’m always delighted in the aftermath because the response was just phenomenal, right across the world.
Flying Lotus [aka Steven Ellison, the lynchpin of the Los Angeles and global off-beam hip hop scene] hit me up on AIM [instant messenger] and said the following week at Low End Theory [the club at the heart of the scene] every single person was talking about how much they loved the show. Even though it’s their scene and they’re right in the thick of it, it’s almost like when somebody else comes along and collects everything that’s wonderful about it and creates some sort of editorial structure around that and puts it on a BBC network, he said people are so excited, and even more so with what’s happening and the connections that are being made in the aftermath of that, and it’s just so rewarding for me to see that. But I think it is, it’s hard-won – you must know it as a writer as well, you feel that after a certain amount of time people begin to trust you, they know that you’re going to get the story right, and the readers trust you as well, because you’re consistent and they know you’re going to put the work in, they know you’re really passionately committed to what you do as a journalist. I see it in you, I’ve always known that about you as an individual, but I see it even more now with Twitter, I see your constant engagement with music and how your brain works and I see how passionate you are: the second you see something that’s amazing you instantly want to share it and draw attention to it.
Thankyou. Twitter has helped me immensely, and I think it absolutely represents even more what you were saying about MySpace removing the degrees of separation between people. I am able to earn that trust with people – but also piss people off – much more quickly now. It’s almost like I was waiting for the right technology to come along to be able to do that, in fact, to get an audience. Even when I worked at The Face which was supposed to be hugely eclectic and about the love of the new, other people’s agendas took over and severely limited what I could draw attention to and celebrate – and you have to learn a different filter for each employer. But with Twitter the filter is purely your own, and if you’re talking to an audience beyond just your friendship circles with it, it’s rewarding and exposing at the same time.
Well it is all about that now, it’s about dialogue, about fitting the dialogue to the particular set of circumstances you find yourself in. For me, my life is about dialogue and it’s about making that the most effective it can be, I suppose. And I see that in you, and when I see you’ve written something on Twitter I trust what you’ve written and am interested in what your opinion is, because you’ve put yourself out there consistently.
As a journalist, it becomes even more important to be conscious of this when you get into discussions where people are taking sides. Once there is disagreement, you have to look at what you’ve put out there and ask, actually what do I think? And what is the coherent viewpoint, if any, that I’ve put out there.
You’re right, and I guess there is a gap in the market, a holy grail even, for something that helps you find that thread in what you put online. MySpace is too complex, Twitter is too short, blogs are too linear and self-involved, I don’t really like blogs – there needs to be a medium that can actually work each way…
I agree about blogs, as it happens. I feel I should love them, and I have massive respect for a lot of bloggers like Martin Clark and Chantelle Fiddy, but something about the format in general seems conducive to becoming a circle-jerk, the same few people commenting on each other’s posts…
Yeah it becomes kind of insular, very much so. It’s interesting because the BBC want me to have a blog, but I don’t put anything on it except the show details because it just doesn’t attract me. I do read a few, I read Martin’s and Chantelle’s, absolutely – but there’s something about the format that’s unsexy, there’s nothing that really grabs me, the same with Facebook, I think this is just going to be long [she uses the teen slang, meaning “unnecessarily long-winded” or “a bind” unselfconsciously] and it doesn’t do anything for me, whereas Twitter does because it’s much, much more user-friendly.
When you’re dealing with a large contact list, something like Twitter does allow you to constantly remind people of your existence and be reminded of theirs. It’s almost the only way to deal with so many people.
It’s strange isn’t it – we used to ring each other and arrange the time and place to meet, “I’ll see you Friday night at the Dog & Duck”, and you could only see or speak to people on the phone. Or you’d even arrange to call! “Be in at six o’clock and I’ll call you!” So we used to speak to each other, which was considered remote, or see each other face-to-face and those were the only two types of direct interaction. And the ways in which we can interact in these very complex, and as you say quite dispersed, forms of social interaction are so diverse – and when you are involved in language, the ways in which you choose your words in each different format and communicating with each different audience or recipient, or under the control of different employers or media establishments, it’s bizarre, it’s really strange. I was talking to someone the other day, and they were taking the mickey out of me because I still only really type with one hand, I just do “A”s with the other hand, “A”s and “E”s and that’s it, and they said “God can you not type with two hands”, and I said no, because when I was at school my mum had said “ugh, what do you want to learn to type for, typing’s for if you want to become a secretary” - and it was considered extremely lowly, wasn’t it, to learn how to type? But I think now, wow, imagine if could actually touch-type how much smoother my life might run, things would go so much faster.
It’s really interesting the way that on AIM [instant messenger] you speak differently again, you speak just one, two, three words in a sentence. You can’t write as such, sentence structure goes out of the window, sometimes you just write single words, one under the other – chk-chk -chk-chk [she mimes a list appearing rapidly] – to make impact or whatever. And there are all these ways that you manipulate dialogue for all these social scenarios in this quite detailed way, while on the other hand we’ve become more and more removed from one another… But maybe that’s why clubbing, especially on the underground level, has become more and more significant these days and why the clubs are still so well-attended – because it’s one of the few places you can still go and see everyone you know there in the flesh, because everyone is so locked into their own little relationships with their Mac, their PC, their iPhone. You really truly think “oh wicked, it’s DMZ [key dubstep club night in Brixton], I will actually see twenty people I know and we’ll actually chat, fanastic, I’d better get on a train and go!”. I mean otherwise you might not see anyone for weeks – obviously I DJ a lot but often then I’m in a completely alien territory where I don’t know anyone there, not even the promoter or anything so it’s different. You’re among people but you don’t know them, that’s another kind of alienation in its own right.
Hmm, yes – and do you think that’s why underground, electronic music causes so much bafflement or even antagonism in people who don’t attend these kind of events? Because they simply can’t understand the affection that one associates with seeing one’s peer group in a social situation soundtracked by this music?
That’s very possible, very possible indeed, and I guess it’s also hard to see how the extremity of the music isn’t just for its own sake but is a part of that. Not to say that it’s all extreme, but there are some things that make more sense in those circumstances. People will slag off the Aphex Twin, say; they’ll say, what the fuck’s he trying to do, he’s taking the piss – but he’s the only person who will even attempt some of the things he does sonically. People would go “oh this record’s shit” and you’d go, well no, it’s a series of experiments with sound and how that effects people on quite a large scale. I remember I was reading this brilliant thing about how he made a track and he’d gone to the trouble of recording sub-bass notes in an anechoic chamber, a padded room that has literally no reverberation, and I thought, well, why not? I thought I would love to know what that purity of sound sounds like, and it’s on his record to find out – something that literally nobody else has ever done – and it’s now one of my favourite tracks. I love the fact that he can have a strange idea, want to try it out, and think “I’m the Aphex Twin, I can”. There’s so few people doing that, if there’s one person in the universe who’s willing to try that then it’s great – and of course it’s part genius and part dreadful on occasion, but you wouldn’t get the genius if you didn’t go through the failed experiments, the dreadful bits, to get it. It’s a process. That goes for a lot of the best of the artists I work with right now, whether it’s Ras G or Kode 9 or Rustie or Ben Frost who is this incredible Australian guy who makes these vast sheets of noise that are somehow totally gripping and totally musical – they are all willing to fail and willing to go wrong in the pursuit of having a creative experience that nobody in the universe has ever had and then completely blowing away their audience by sharing that new thing with them.
And do you feel the need to chase that innovation? I mean most of those artists you just mentioned, and the Californian scene you were discussing earlier, are already kind of a step on again from dubstep…
Well yes, absolutely, it goes with the territory that I have my ears open every second of every minute of every day looking for something that’s going to make my jaw drop, is going to make me want to drop everything and go and find out who made that and what their circumstances are and how I can be involved and how I can expose what they are doing to an interested audience. But that doesn’t mean abandoning what’s past necessarily – all the figures we’ve mentioned today are more or less examples of people who don’t stagnate, who themselves keep innovating and innovating, or enquiring and enquiring. It’s not like every time I find something new I love it invalidates what’s come before.
Things do change, though, and this is something I always say to younger artists I spend time with: enjoy what you’ve got, because if you are successful it is going to change, and you are inevitably going to leave behind the things you most love about what you are doing. If you’re smart and care enough, you can go on to create new adventures and things to believe in beyond your wildest dreams, you’ll see the world and meet wonderful and incredible people, but you will never again have that first flush of excitement of sharing with your friends the thrill of making your own music and your own scene.
I would say that to people at FWD» and DMZ when I first started going – because immediately I could see, even if they couldn’t that this was music that was going to have a global reach – I would say, “what you have here now, where you all see one another every week or every month, the same faces sharing the experience of hearing each mindblowing new dubplate together: this is incredibly precious, appreciate this”. And of course now, the main players are all tear-arseing across the world, and their paths only cross when they are DJing together, and as I DJ as well and get involved in events I share a little of that with them. There is still a sense of a massive effort for everyone to go to DMZ every two months, and those friendships all continue, but it will never again be the same as when they were all building the scene together in the same room every week.
Of course, in a sense they didn’t need telling – these are smart and creative people and even if they didn’t want to admit it to themselves for fear of sending their egos out of control, they had a natural sense of what they had and what its potential was. And these are people who… well, take Loefah and Pokes [DJ/co-promoter and MC respectively at DMZ]: when I met them, they were working in this yard, warehouse type thing, putting decals on the side of commercial vehicles – you know, the lettering on the sides of vans. They were working insane hours every day, in the absolute freezing fucking cold quite often, working until their hands were numb, dizzy half the time from the chemicals in these transfers they were putting on, and then going home and making music or planning the club – and this was the focus and the dedication they had to what they were doing, and so when the weekend of DMZ would come and they would see the crowd and the passion and dedication to the music that those people had, then of course they appreciated what they had.
And yes, there is a sadness in it for me I guess. I’m telling the guys at Brainfeeder in LA these same things now – appreciate what you have right now while you still have the opportunity to be together on this regular basis and celebrate what you have achieved. You will achieve so, so much more, but by then you will be all going in your own directions as artists and as people, travelling the world and doing your own thing. So appreciate it now. And as I say that to them, I know that I will be moving on too, I will be finding other sounds and other scenes as the music itself moves on. That was something else Peel told me: there’s a lot of saying goodbye in this job, because if you do it right, you are dealing with the people and artists who will move on and change. And as they do, and as the scenes change, even if they are people and places and memories that are very precious to you, you have to say goodbye to very, very many of them.
That’s quite a bittersweet feeling, then?
It is, but it is also how life is. And there is always the pride that you feel in what those people have achieved, and there is always something new to discover.
