Gary was available to join me
for The Sunday Alternative yesterday which
put me in a good mood regarding the show. In the morning I was still in a
fairly bad mood regarding this whole business with Trent Sound, and having
received an email on Saturday (yes I checked my emails on a Saturday, I can’t
be the only one who does that) that I had to reply to by noon yesterday only to
not hear another word on the subject felt like a kick in the teeth that I
couldn’t recover from. I drafted an
email to a small collection of my radio colleagues (and I like to think of as
friends) with my intention to quit Trent Sound at Christmas with the NottinghamLIVE Christmas special on December 18th
and The Sunday Alternative special on December
22nd being my final live shows, (with a pre-recorded ‘best of the year’s live
sessions’ edition of NottinghamLIVE
going out on Christmas night in our usual Wednesday time slot).
I was glad to have Gary back
with me in the co-pilot’s chair, as I always maintain that I do a better show
if I have someone with me to bounce off, and Gary is the co-host that I have
felt the most comfortable with. Having said that, it took a while for us to
find our footing which is probably due to the fact that we not only haven’t
worked together for a while but also we haven’t seen each other for a few weeks
due to Gary’s school teacher commitments. It did take a while for us to get out
of first gear, but once we did we fell right back into the swing of it and managed
to riff on some rather offensive musings regarding Jimmy Savile and Rolf
Harris.
One thing that we did do which
might possibly come to something was get in touch with a rocker from the olden
days. We were having a conversation about how the big clubs in Nottingham use
local acts as support for big visiting names, based on having seen Luxury
Stranger open for Spear of Destiny earlier this week. Not only is it easier and
cheaper than travelling with a support act, but also it is a good thing for
local bands to be given a big audience that might not have otherwise seen them.
This reminded me of the band Little Angels, whom I think might have invented
the concept by advertising for local bands to support them on a UK tour.
Amazingly this happened before the Internet became a thing, so I assume that it
was done by process of sending tapes in by post. I can’t imagine even the most
desperate band being arsed with such a drawn out procedure nowadays, what with
all the ability to just send links. I’ve spoken before about the first time I received
a CD in the post from a band and I thought they were the worst kind of show
off. This will have been at the time of blank CDs costing several thousand
pounds each and having to do them in a studio; the notion of buying a pack of a
million discs from Poundland and being able to make them at home on your
computer being the stuff of science fiction. This didn’t last very long (in
comparison with how long cassettes lasted as the thing to post to promoters and
radio stations), as I then started receiving emails with attachments. New
fangled mp3 was the new way, and before too long they weren’t even bothering
with attachments; they were now asking that I check them out on Myspace (with
was 2004), whatever the fuck that was!
Although I was an early joiner
with Myspace, it took me by surprise when I first heard about it. It was soon
overtaken by the likes of Soundcloud, Bandcamp, and although nobody fully
understands what it is, Reverbnation. So whoever had the task of arranging that
side of the Little Angels tour with nothing more than a pad and pen and a sack
of cassettes had a major task in hand.
Anyway, having mentioned this
we played their best known song ‘Too Much Too Young’ (not the same as the song
by The Specials) to jog the memories of our listeners. This prompted us to Google
them which led us to a Twitter account, apparently they reformed last year.
Toby Jepson is now performing solo and is appearing in Nottingham as part of
his tour this December. We tweeted from the Trent Sound account to him to ask
if he’ll come in and perform a live session, you never know.
By the way, I didn’t send the
resignation email. I had advertised earlier in the day that I had a major announcement
to make on air, and that it would be today’s workplace ‘water cooler moment’.
Gary talked sense into me, pointing out that I love doing radio and regretted
quitting Trent Sound the last time. Funnily enough, at the end of the show I
quickly checked my email while I waited for the show to save (I take my laptop
to Trent Towers (not an actual tower) to record all my shows for my personal
archive as the ‘listen again’ is a little unpredictable – it will work for ages
until the day that I forget to record it, then the show will be lost), and I
seem to have come to something like an agreement with Trent Sound’s management.
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