I didn’t bother doing a great
deal of promotional admin for The Sunday Alternative
this week, as my mood towards the show had soured a little bit this morning.
The American show got a good bit of social media pushing, especially as it isn’t
fair on the session guests not to. Josh Kemp’s show went out this weekend and
he did his own bit of tweeting and Facebook updating.
My mood was stilted because of
a dispute with Trent Sound over my relationship with ROFL Audio. It has
elements of a jealous playground tussle with Trent Sound saying that I can’t be
friends with both, but the main gist was that Trent Sound wants an exclusive
partnership with ROFL regarding the live music output. This would be
understandable if I was working for another Nottingham based radio station, but
a little weird that there’s a problem with me working for an American station. Trent
Sound wants me to share the audio that I record with musicians, even though I
sell it to the bands and artists as an exclusive American radio session. I
walked out of Trent Sound last year for a far smaller reason, and was tempted
to act on impulse and tell them to fuck themselves. I did manage to keep a cool
head though, and several emails were passed between us.
It didn’t help that Gary had
gone away for the weekend and was unable to join me in the co-presenter chair
for the show. I’m sorry to admit that I put in a really half-arsed programme as
I wasn’t in the mood, and said as much on air. This wasn’t fair on my
listeners, but I have always believed in honesty and cannot bullshit to save my
life. The Sunday Alternative is usually a pleasure
to do, but if my heart isn’t in it I can’t fake that. At least the music was
the usual brilliant selection. Last week I had a slight argument on Twitter
with Fiona Sturgess, the radio critic/reviewer for The
Independent. I had asked her a while ago if she would listen to the
show with a view to doing a write up, as she usually sticks to BBC programmes and
suggested that it might be nice to review something a bit different. A show
that has been described as “the reason computers have speakers” and prides
itself on playing (to use my own tagline) “music you don’t hear on the radio,
on the radio” all picked from my own extensive record collection, would surely
be worth writing about. It would seem not, as she made no effort to reply until
last week, in response to my tweet about how sad it was that she hadn’t
reviewed the second anniversary show. Her reply was to ask me to ‘give it a
rest’, the charmer, and to say that she only does national radio shows as she
writes for a national paper. My last tweet to her was to politely point out
that The Sunday Alternative is a national
show based on the fact that it is on the Internet, and listened to by people
all over the UK, (and quite a lot abroad too). She hasn’t got back to me since.
It would have been just my luck if she had listened this week and heard me
having a meltdown, announcing that this might be my last show. Still, no such
thing as bad publicity.
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