Songs discovered via BBC Radio 6Music
I love it so much, I even pay my license fee - because I’m a mug! (June 2024)
This post focuses on songs I've first discovered whilst listening to BBC Radio 6Music. It seemed sensible to make it the first post of this nonsense project, as the child-like fantasies of having my own radio show was what drove me to start this newsletter in the first place. The BBC ain't perfect, but 6Music makes me feel very lucky that we have such a wonderful dedicated resource for music that doesn’t make it to the mainstream, and am in constant disbelief that it hasn't collapsed along with everything else good in British society.
As will become a common theme no doubt, I don’t really talk about any of the actual music, but mainly just ramble about different parts of my life, and gently slag off most of the 6Music DJ crew. Play the jingle!
Heartbreak - Bonobo & Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs
Every morning, my partner Caroline and I are awoken by the Mackem lilts of Lauren Laverne. The “waking-by-radio” system was something I adopted around COVID, when I would lie listening to the World Service for ages, whilst wondering what the point of getting up was. There was normally a programme about the chair making industry in Guinea-Bissau or the growth of the canal boat tourism industry in Suriname or whatever, and I would lie there loving every minute. Then the Ukraine war happened and it was too depressing to listen to the World Service, so we shifted to 6Music; our ostrich heads very much stuck into the sand of Lauren Laverne’s breakfast show.
We’ve come to deeply love Lauren, who embodies an appropriate level of positivity for a radio presenter that is genuinely infectious and relatively un-irritating (as much as someone can be at 7.30am). Her lovely soothing voice balanced with a sensible optimism is a comparably decent way to start the day, and its got to the point where I wake up sad when she’s not there and they have a guest presenter. She also plays some broadly quite accessible music that you actually want to listen to when you first wake up, and doesn’t normally slip into the very 6Music habit of playing 3am drugs music before midday. No one is perfect, and dear Lauren does sometimes fall into this trap and puts on something that causes me to have Glastonbury flashbacks
(Side note: I understand there is vast appreciation to be had for what I’m facetiously terming “3am drugs music” outside of the Big Night Out setting. However, listening to some industrial techno is something I could without before I’ve had my morning coffee, even if it is “fresh out of Transnistria”. I always find you’re lulled into a false sense of security by the softly-spoken DJ, who will give the track a hippie-slanted introduction about how it makes them feel “restorative” or something, and then the music starts and it sounds like someone taking an angle grinder to a bike rack. One the music has finished, it returns to the DJ and they’re like “mmm yeah, that was so beautiful”. C’mon mate).
BUT, this time, the joke was on me! This grade-A banger came on from Bonobo and T.E.E.D and made me wish the sun was starting to come up in a field in the West Country and I was on the precipice of a mid-level mental health crisis.
For a similar vibe and story, see “La Perla” by Sofia Kourtesis.
Movin’ On - WITCH
Another very cutesy radio-based tradition Caroline and I have is popping the radio on on a weekend morning whilst we have a nice big breakfast. On Saturdays, Radcliffe & Maconie give way to Huey Morgan; a man who has bizarrely has forged a career as a respected music person, despite being a founding member of the American rap-rock band, “Fun Lovin’ Criminals”.
Huey falls into another fun category of 6Music DJ, which can be summarised as: Bit Of A Melt, But With Good Music Taste. Again, he embodies the time-warp confusion of his fellow DJs, by the fact that as he sits in his studio he actually thinks he’s at a house party in The Bronx in the 1970s, and talks at his listeners as such. All while I’m trying to eat some hash browns.
But goddammit that guy plays some good tunes. It broadly revolves around the sort of hip-hop/jazz/funk vortex; an area I have extremely limited knowledge of, and as such I rarely seek out independently. But this is why I like 6Music - because you learn stuff!
Anyway, one morning, he stuck on this absolute colossus of a colossal banger from a Zambian funk colossus called WITCH. Apparently WITCH were big in the 70s but then it all fell apart. But apparently they’re now back! Zambian funk! What a life. What a world. We are so blessed.
Is this Love? - Pip Blom (feat. Alex Kapranos)
As with all radio stations, 6Music has their songs that they have to play: the A, B and C playlists. These are basically just songs that have recently been released and the label presumably is trying to push into people’s ears, and some bod at the BBC decides which ones are going to be pushed harder than others. I don’t really understand the economics of this and why this is the norm, but that’s the way it is.
A facet of this is that, over a short period (say, one month), at certain times of day (normally peak times) you tend to hear the same songs over and over again. This isn’t something I necessarily have a problem with, but in some instances it can mean you end up frequently hearing stuff which you consider to be utter garbage (immediately thoughts go to the COVID years, when it felt like “The Mysterines” and “The Blinders” played every hour of every day for about several decades).
Thankfully, this song was an exception. I was vaguely aware of Dutch band Pip Blom as something the Spotify algorithm pushed on me occasionally, but this is just a great indie pop banger. Plus, the sweet surprise of hearing the Franz Ferdinand frontman’s inimitable vocal tones popping up added a fun little nostalgic element to the song (as well as just sounding really cool).
My Blood - Pom Poko
Another 6Music DJ who falls into the “bit of a melt” category is Marc Riley (though I would probably argue Riley is actually more of a “knobhead” than a melt). He was a source of mirth and entertainment during the COVID era when living in Homerton with my glorious former housemates, Sam and Dan. Converging back on the kitchen/living room/co-working space of our fifth floor flat in Homerton around 7pm - after a couple of hours of much-needed alone time in our respective rooms - there were always three things on the menu: a feed, some FIFA, and taking the piss out of Marc Riley.
I should precursor this with the fact that Marc Riley seems like a very nice man, and it is only with affection that we mock. There are just some quite funny facets of his show that leave him wide open: his forced charisma, his long boring talks about his past as the bass player in The Fall (which he referred to constantly), quite unexciting regular features (e.g. “What band is on my t-shirt tonight?” - no one cares, Marc!), and the fact he played song by Warmduscher at every possible opportunity (which, to be fair, was quite good).
Indeed, once again, the joke was on me (or in this case, us). Much like Huey Morgan, Marc has got great music taste. Whereas Huey provided me with genres I don’t regularly listen to, Marc churned out the White Guys With Guitars music that made us all go “hell yeah!” in unison.
As such, he was integral in our discovery of Norwegian art rock band, Pom Poko, who are magnificent. They are a bunch of kids who met at jazz school who have created some fast-paced wonders that genuinely sounded different to a lot of other stuff in the taxonomy of guitar stuff. Thanks Marc, I pissing love you.
King Creosote - Blue Marbled Elm Trees
When I was doing my Masters, I got an internship: just one day a week at this little NGO. By “little” I mean genuinely little. There were four staff, and we all crammed into this room that didn’t have any windows near Kings Cross. Realising this was some quite poor working conditions and that most of them lived within a 15 minute bike ride from one another in south London, at least once a week they would all decamp to someone’s house for what they called ‘pop-up office’, or “poffice” for short. Everyone crowded around someone’s kitchen table with their laptops. I remember eating quite a lot of toast and not really understanding what was going on.
More often than not, poffice took place at The Boss’ house. Being quite a cultured person, The Boss had various radios dotted around the house, all of which were playing Radio 4. Radio in the kitchen: listen to Women’s Hour whilst chopping an onion. In the bathroom: listen to Gardeners Question Time whilst having a poo.
I didn’t find Radio 4 super interesting, but I did liked the practice, so this is something I’ve stolen and occasionally do now. After the alarm goes off, something I just leave the radio on in the bedroom - because I’m crazy! But seriously, I like it because it presents the possibility you’ll encounter some song you haven’t heard before. I also like it because I like the idea of my children talking in 2052 and saying that they grew up in a house that was “filled with music”; and that really took the edge off given the ground floor was underwater and everything was on fire.
This happens very rarely, truth be told - but finding just one song makes it worth it. One day when working from home and looking for a distraction, I wandered in there to do some needless chore or fetch an ointment of some kind. I heard this King Creosote song (who I’d never heard of) and I thought it was lovely. It led me onto the album Diamond Mine he did with John Hopkins, which is an extremely beautiful album. When I’m listening to I feel glad I’ve wasted hours of electricity on an unlistened to radio.
For a similar story, see “Greyhound” by Collard.
Sports Team - Stanton
Given the consequent relationship I’ve developed with the band Sports Team, it seems difficult to believe that I encountered them on the off-chance. A general theme with the music I found via 6Music is that they are artists from a genre I don’t normally listen to. The Spotify algorithm pushes me so many White Men with Guitars that it always seems unlikely that the radio is capable of producing anything within that genre that Daniel Ek hasn’t forced me to listen to.
I remember sitting in our first flat in Hackney with Sam and Dan when we heard this song. I can’t remember the context exactly; there’s a high chance the radio was on in the background whilst some FIFA was being played. Sports Team came on and one of them said, “this sounds like Parquet Courts”. I didn’t know who Parquet Courts were, but I was digging it. I can’t remember what song it was exactly, but it was definitely something from their 2018 era. Stanton is a massive banger and still the song they finish all their live shows with, despite not appearing on either of their “proper” albums, so you should listen to it anyway.
Sports Team will always hold a special place in my heart. They are basically a bunch of middle class kids from Cambridge University, but the way they go at their music with a sense of fun and an absence of artistic pretension was something that I loved dearly, singing silly songs about motorways and Kent coastal towns - and still do love. A lot of people probably dislike them for the same reason (fair play), but I think it’s just quite inspiring that you could conceivably forge an entire musical output based on the broad premise of “arsing about”. God bless them.
Ghostpoet - Immigrant Boogie
Now this one is really harking back to my early 6Music listening days! I think it was around 2017 and I had not long moved to London for the first time. I moved to the wonderful area of Tooting and lived a naive, financially draining life, trying to balance the following things: the highest rent I’d ever paid and have ever paid since, a £12 a day commute from Clapham to Woking, and a long-distance relationship… all on the princely sum of £23k a year! During this time I had a very pointless job with a big charity I didn’t like much, spent half my life on trains up north trying to maintain a relationship, whilst refusing to get help for my quite apparent depression. I was also probably still a bit upset about Brexit and Trump. Great times!
In the early days of this job, I figured I could save some money by just not bothering to go to the office, and working from my very overpriced room when I couldn’t be bothered to go in (read: depression). Everyone else seemed to work from home all the time, so I couldn’t see a reason why I shouldn’t. After several months of doing this without anyone noticing, it transpired that I wasn’t actually allowed to do this without a “flexible working arrangement” (waves hands dismissively). So, I was forced into Surrey more regularly, wearing my professional fake smile to the conservative NGO drones that surrounded me, feeling sense of existential dread; doing a very junior role trying to get people in more senior roles to do things they had no incentive to do. Great times!
Anyway, before all that happened, I turned on the radio one morning as I relaxed into another pointless day WFH. I’m pretty sure it was Lauren Laverne, and she was interviewing someone called “Ghostpoet”, who had written this song about the demonisation of people coming across the channel in small boats - called Immigrant Boogie. He was really cool and spoke really well, and the song was an interesting approach to social consciousness - a style I hadn’t really heard before. This style of subtly expressing opposition to certain social issues is something I quite like (and was shortly before people IDLES became a thing and just shouted “NHSSSSSSS” in all their songs, which was an approach I liked less).
All in all, it was really good, and a rare positive in what - in hindsight - was a fairly shitty time in my life. His earlier album Shedding Skin from 2015 is an absolute masterpiece and you should seek it out.
Trombone Shorty - Backatown
This is a very recent one that came through my earholes off the back of a radio show by Femi Koleoso, who is the drummer for Ezra Collective, amongst others. For my shame, I only really started being interested in Ezra Collective after they won the Mercury Prize last year. The timing was serendipitous however, as I was entering (and remain in) a bit of a low-key jazzwanker phase, so their music gave me an entry point into a genre that is big and intimidating.
Anyway, it's not an Ezra song I’m talking about here. Rather, Femi did a few shows on 6Music covering for Guy Garvey (the guy from Elbow), who normally does one on Sunday. This isn’t normally a time when I listen to radio (because I’m sooooooooo busy), but I had the fortune to be in the flat when he was doing his thing in May of this year.
By all accounts, Femi Koleoso seems an extremely cool, nice and engaging man, and I’ve since developed a minor fanboy interest in his work. His radio shows were just a nice mix of jazzy funky fun stuff, where he would spotlight songs which use particular instruments - in this case, the trombone. I haven’t engaged any further with Mr Shorty’s work as of yet, but if you too want to start the journey to becoming a pretentious prick like me, maybe you could check them out.