Thursday night is my favourite night of the week. Always has been – even when I was a teenager. Thursdays meant it was training for high-jump at Sale Harriers. Oh when I was able to soar through the air and land elegantly on my back on the crash mats… But I digress. Again.
Now, Thursdays are my night for the radio. I host a show called The Unsigned Side, which is purely about unsigned music. I’ve been doing the show for over a year on and off – well, mainly off because of the blooming technical issues – but it’s back now. Since the middle of January, I’ve only missed one show and that was purely because it was the female shaped monsters birthday.
The show is fraught with technical issues. A couple of weeks ago, the female shaped monster pulled the microphone out of the computer so I could no longer speak to the listeners (not such a bad thing but sometimes I need to talk to introduce a band). On valentines night the broadcasting app just upped and died half way through the show. Did I mention I do the show from my living room, in my pyjamas half of the time? Oh, the glamorous life of a DJ on a tiny radio station with no budget playing music by bands who aren’t mainstream – and you know what? I bloody well love it.
The other week I was watching the Brit Awards, and becoming more and more disillusioned as the ceremony went on. Where was the controversy? Where were the mad Yorkshire men throwing buckets of water over politicians or mooning very famous weirdos on stage? Where were the calls to arms by some Northern brothers? No where. Apart from the idiotic fat man in a suit shock horror swearing before the watershed – which lets face it – was probably scripted anyway.
While award after award was given away to none-de-script mainstream clones, my rantyness bubbled over and I started naming who the radio show would give the same award to. Except the radio show doesn’t have a budget or a sponsor and certainly doesn’t have ludicrous spotty effigies of Britannia to give away to clutter up a deserving mantelpiece. The problem is that while I think what I’m writing at the time is irreverent nonsense, someone else thinks ‘actually, she could be on with something there’, and so my tongue in cheek announcements were given meaning and taken seriously by the people who I lauded.
So tomorrows show is all about those 10 none award winners. I’ve done a couple of interviews and have got all the music ready. I just now need to make sure I know enough about each of the bands who have ‘won’ absolutely nothing, apart from some airplay on an internet radio show that very few people listen to anyway…
Hilariously, on the shows’ Facebook page, someone’s asked if I wanted any publicity on a status update. I think people who like the page, who don’t listen to the show, seem to think that it’s a proper show. You know, in a studio, with a budget. I replied that we always appreciate people talking about the show and sharing links and things, and his reply seemed a little huffy. The thing is, I’ve worked really hard at getting every single one of those likes on that page. I tweet about it, I Facebook about it, I email people about it, harass bands and managers to send me their music to play – all in my spare time. When the monsters are at school or in bed is my few minutes to promote the show. I wouldn’t want to pay someone else to do that, no matter how good they are at it because my way is working. I know the show inside out, I know what the listeners want and I know how to feed them updates. It’s part of knowing how to tailor PR to the product. I’d be worried that this guy (whose spelling wasn’t even spot on), wouldn’t get that. Or that he’d try to sell the show out and post irrelevant bollocks about cats, ‘keep calm’, pictures of Willy Wonka looking pensive or pictures of Sean Bean stating that one does not simply ask an independent radio show to squander money on unknown PR.
Anyway, moving on…
If you’re around tomorrow night, tune in to http://mixlr.com/sfr for a couple of hours of excellent music and random ranting.
Diary Of A Faker 