Tonight was the media event of the year (a claim we’re backing up with the suffix ‘so far’ given that the year is only 29 days old) for the people of Nottingham, yet I was unable to share the celebrations as I was involved in making the event happen. This week’s edition of NottinghamLIVE was the first birthday show for us, so in true Trent Sound style all three of us presenters were late to the studio due to public transport problems. I can only assume that the reason for the gridlocked traffic was that everyone was dashing home to turn on their computers to tune in to the show, (our listening figures only register computers logged in to the website and not listening via a phone app so please consider that). I was the first to arrive at Trent Towers (not an actual tower) during the seven o’clock news and just had time to line up the first song, ‘Everything Beautiful Reminds Me Of You’ by Captain Dangerous – the first song we played on Wednesday 30^th January 2013 before the news ended.

All above photos © Steve Oliver

It was a four person team this week, as we were joined by Bainy. He founded Notts Live on Sherwood Radio before joining Trent Sound in 2011, giving me the perfect opportunity to make a joke about leaving a clueless Internet radio station with no money and no direction to join Trent Sound, the sad truth being that I have had that witty quip planned for about three weeks. All we are really doing is carrying on the good work of Notts Live, the show is about the Nottingham music scene and not about the presenters so it doesn’t matter who presents it. I am personally very proud of the fact that we are the only show of its kind (apart from Action Jackson on BBC Radio Nottingham, but he has had his day thanks to us) and an influential force to be reckoned with.

The Union was supposed to have been our live guests for the first show last year, but to add to our stress levels we didn’t have a sound engineer so they were unable to grace our performance room to mark the next chapter of the show. A year later and with a new name, Albion, they finally got the chance to perform one of our prestigious live sessions. It seemed fitting to have them on the birthday show, and they performed an acoustic set (two members of the band) in the second hour. Our other guest was Josh Wheatley (the second Josh of Nottingham music) who I invited in to plug his EP Follow the Smoke one day ahead of the launch gig. Josh appeared on the show in June last year and since then has continued to climb, his song ‘Sail Away’ contains my favourite line in a song; “I’m not that rich, I don’t have a boat, everything I own is in my coat”.

Group photos © Matt Stone

Despite the initial stress of being late to the studio, this was the most relaxed I have been during a show. After a year there’s a danger that we are getting good at this!

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