Sunday 13th October

We woke up a bit too late for me to bother with doing the radio admin, so had to get up and ready for lunch at my dad’s. To be perfectly honest, I am feeling very little enthusiasm for The Sunday Alternative at the moment and am finding it hard to motivate myself to turn on the radio magic for two hours. I had spent a great deal of time sorting through my music collection and sending it to the station (via Dropbox) in plenty of time during the week. Normally I would email the station manager to tell him that they are there, but I didn’t want to start a conversation with him that could have potentially led to the round-in-circles discussion about Trent Sound playing songs from my American sessions. Last week I found out that he had been behind my back to ask permission from the artists rather than go along with the reasonable terms that I put forward; that I would release the session as a podcast and then send two of the tracks to Trent Sound if I had the permission of the artist (given that they were supposed to be exclusive to The Sound Of Nottingham UK). To attempt to nip this ridiculous situation in the bud, I messaged the artists that I have already worked with and the future guests to inform them of what had been going on. To my relief, a few of them said that they would not grant permission. With all this shit swirling around, I am not ‘feeling’ the show at the moment. I’m still enjoying doing NottinghamLIVE because that is a team show and we’ve done a great job of it since we took over from the Notts Live show. However, doing The Sunday Alternative on my own is becoming a drag.

It isn’t that I am getting fed up with The Sunday Alternative as a concept though. I have recently put the feelers out for a sponsor to give me the financial support that I would need to turn the show into a podcast only show. I’m not asking for a fortune, but I basically need the money to pay for studio hire and expenses (travel, food, drinks) for musical guests. It would be nice to be able to draw something like a wage from it too, but that isn’t the motivation. I’m taking two weeks off in November and will hopefully be able to reevaluate the show and start enjoying it again. Live music guests are the main priority, and I would like to carry on using The Sunday Alternative as a way to bring bands from outside Nottingham, as I already have two platforms for this city and its music scene and it is nice to be able to do a show that caters for my wider tastes.

Talking of Nottingham music, there wasn’t a live session on this week’s USA show, I only listen to the first twenty minutes before I leave the house to go Bulwell for Trent Sound but what I heard sounded good. I’ve got a double session booked this coming Tuesday so I’ll have one ‘in the bank’ just in case this situation happens again.

The show very nearly didn’t go ahead at all tonight. I arrived at the studio a little bit later than I usually do, and was a bit annoyed to see that none of my music was in the system and therefore I didn’t have a show. My initial reaction was to just go home and not worry about it, and even posted a message on Trent Sound’s Facebook (remember Facebook? It’s making an inexplicable comeback) to say that the show will not be going ahead. Luckily I decided to have a fiddle around with the studio computer and found the songs that I had sent in but hadn’t made it to the system. At least I now know how to do this in future as it sometimes happens on NottinghamLIVE and we end up playing songs from YouTube or Soundcloud, which is frowned upon but has been the only way. I made the announcement on the show regarding the future, so I hope the listeners will ride out this rough patch with me and continue to listen to the show in their current numbers.

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