Tag Archives: radio

Internet Radio

As a very part time musician composer producer kind of person it is difficult to find the time to produce music and the th frustration comes of actually trying to find anyone to play it/ listen to it/ feedback; hate it love it buy it. Over the last few years I have been involved with a Twitter/ X based music scene, where generally unsigned artists making slightly avantgarde or non totally commercial electronic music inhabit. BBC Introducing was one space, but that is an increasingly singer songwriter gateway into radio airplay. In my genre of melodic not quite dance electronica a really supportive network of likeminded artists exists, supporting each others mainly part time hobbies. Names like Kiffie, Signal Committee, Trevas, Mothloop, and myself Inochi seem to constantly appear, as if by magic, on the same internet radio shows. I have no idea of listening figures for some of the shows we are played on but it definitely warms the cockles of your creative heart. I mean what is musicking all about anyway? Making your fortune, heading off into the sunset with a banana daiquiri on a Caribbean beach. Possibly. But really, for me its about having an existence which includes music at the forefront, not making a living, but providing some feedback and support, acknowledgement that you have a place on same airwaves.

Big up to Radio Wigwam, Big Satsuma Radio and Trust the Doc internet radio shows who are all playing Inochi tracks this weekend. We are all listening and playing music this weekend in recognition of the epoch changing British poet Benjamin Zephaniah, who so sadly passed yesterday, 7th December 2023.

Reincarnation

Watching Top of the Pops at 7pm on a Thursday evening in the 1980s. There were only 3 channels, or 2 if you were from a strictly English middle class background and banned from watching the sin of ITV, where adverts and common accents prevailed. Friday mornings saw avid discussion of the latest fashion, moves, sounds, tribes drily piped into our homes by John Peel or his overly smiley fellow presenters. Peel was an instigator, someone who broke the norm but was high profile, someone you could get behind and follow.

There were other Radio 1 DJs in the UK such as Annie Nightingale, David “Kid” Jensen, and Janice Long who were also important but less resonant. Without Peel these DJ’s might not have successfully traversed mainstream and underground arenas. One person centrifugally centred, orbits spinning right round baby right around his beloved Liverpool.

On 25th October 2004 John Peel died at the same moment that my youngest daughter was whizzing into the world, catapulted out and almost immediately tying herself in knots by an overly long umbilical cord. as is tradition, I kept a copy of the newspaper from her birth day, splashed with news of Peel’s untimely death. An icon who had informed the music tastes of millions, defined genres, was gone at the same moment my lovely new daughter was born. I’m sure she will have as much impact but in a different way.

Radio DJ John Peel sitting at his desk in Liverpool