Radio! Radio!

Just down the road, yesterday

I had a lovely surprise this weekend when my new wee book got a mention on my favourite radio show (Sunday mornings with Cerys Matthews on BBC 6 Music). You can listen to this particular episode of the show on the BBC i-player for the next month or so (here and the bit in question is about 2 h 10 mins in) but the show is on every Sunday (10am-1pm) and it's always packed full of great music and interesting interviews. This week's episode has a really interesting segment on young poets earlier in the show too, including a great piece read live (that's at about 1 h 15 mins). Along with playing my choice of 3 tracks for the lunchtime Sunday Roast feature, Cerys even read one of my poems on air ('Stand', p. 23) and I went into a kind of mini-shock at that (I didn't know it was coming...). I loved how she managed to turn what often feels to me like a fairly sad book into something that earned a defiant laugh! Cerys is a very positive force on the radio and I've listened to the show with love for years (certainly since we came back from our big trip in 2011). I would have loved to have kept roaming as we did for those 6 months but it just wasn't possible (we were amazingly luckily to get the time we did...). Sometimes it has to be radio that takes us to new places instead (books can do it too of course... and maybe TV and films).

I know I'm not alone in this but radio has been such a huge friend to me over the years. I remember sitting as a teenager and listening for hour after hour and everywhere I've moved I've listened to different radio stations (sometimes local, sometimes not). I even had a (pirate) radio show for a few years with my friend back when we were club DJs in Leeds (Daisy & Havoc on Leeds' Dream FM back in the early '90s) and it was such a fantastic thing to do. It's very liberating working on radio - totally free of all gaze (male or otherwise), just playing tunes and trying to think of something to say in between. These days I still listen to a lot of radio (though I often pick and choose with i-player and the like). I suppose I'm in a bit of a quiet, not-really-very-sociable phase and radio is perfect for that. You can feel you are seeing people and being out there... even when you're not.

Off to go and listen to Sue Perkins on Desert Island Discs now... but I'll leave you with the song I picked for 'dessert' for the Sunday (radio) Roast (from the soundtrack to 'Inside Llewyn Davis'):