Music chosen with love and for a reason. Stuart Maconie, presenter of Freak Zone
I'm becoming dangerously obsessed with 6Music's The Freak Zone. If you haven't heard it - and if you haven't, I can't urge you to rectify that situation quickly enough - it's a Sunday evening show presented by Stuart Maconie, dedicated to playing the kind of music that you simply wouldn't expect to hear on the BBC on a Sunday evening.
Just plucking a show at random from the archives, on Sunday September 24 its playlist boasted Wire's Practise Makes Perfect, John Fahey, techno by Matmos and Boards of Canada, a forgotten flop glam single called Morning Bird by The Damned (not that one), some live recordings of John Coltrane, and the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band's We Are Normal. Last night, it broadcast a fascinating interview with Elektra boss Jac Holzman, who choked up when Maconie played Tim Buckley's Wings.
I love it, despite the flat-out awfulness of some of its selections - you always know that everything played on the show, even the lengthy prog-rock wig-outs for which Mr Maconie has a tolerance so high you begin to suspect his sanity, has been chosen with love and for a reason. I love it despite the detrimental effect it appears to be having on my marriage. The other half of the sketch, as Bertie Wooster would have called her, doesn't care to eat her Sunday dinner accompanied by The Legendary Pink Dots or Alice Coltrane or the admittedly testing vocal stylings of Peter Hammill. She is increasingly vocal in her disapproval: I suspect I get away with having The Freak Zone on largely because all Radio 4 has to offer at the same time is the children's show Go For It! (incidentally, are small children really listening to the radio at 7.30 on a Sunday evening? What year is this? 1948?).
Part of me thrills to the familiar sensation I last felt listening to John Peel, of genuinely discovering something completely new and unexpected, scrambling for a paper and pen to write the name of a track down. Part of me is just delighted that at the same time as Radio One is favouring the nation with JK and Joel's chart rundown and then 'Dangerous' Dave Pearce - the latter surely the most disheartening presence on the nation's airwaves since they hung Lord Haw Haw - another part of the BBC is playing Minotaur Shock, Kevin Ayres and an admittedly slightly dodgy record Serge Gainsbourg recorded with Nico years before she met the Velvet Underground. Lord Reith would be proud.
The Freak Zone has reinvigorated my interest in music on the radio, something I haven't paid much attention to in a while. I had forgotten there's something uniquely, inexplicably powerful about hearing a brilliant record for the first time on the radio. I gave up on Radio One's evening shows when the baleful figure of Zane Lowe showed up. He's just impossible to listen to because all the hyperbolic babble doesn't ring true: no sentient human being is that enthusiastic about music. No sentient human being is that enthusiastic about anything. It's like a radio show hosted by a red setter that has inexplicably developed both the power of speech and an antipodean accent.
Like every Brightonian, I give Fip FM - the esoteric French station that you for some reason you can pick up on the Sussex Coast - the occasional blast, but find my enthusiasm for its eclecticism (and indeed its excitingly stern-sounding female Gallic announcer) tempered by dismay that its eclecticism extends to broadcasting an intolerable number of jazz-funk 'jams'.
When I lived in London, I kept meaning to give Resonance FM a go. On the plus side, I was mightily impressed by the fact that their idea of a Christmas Day special was to broadcast Throbbing Gristle's 24 CD live box set in its entirety. On the other hand, I was aware that the last thing I wanted to listen to on Christmas Day was Throbbing Gristle's 24 CD live box set (if anyone out there can put their had on their heart and say they did stuff the turkey and prepare the sprouts to the strains of Five Knuckle Shuffle, Mother Spunk, Maggot Death et al, I think you should share your memories of the experience with the rest of us). In addition, the one time I actually got around to tuning in, it seemed to be broadcasting an audio verite recording of a London street, and as I was sitting in a traffic jam in a London street at the time, this seemed a trifle supererogatory to say the least.
Most of the time, the radio has stayed tuned to Radio 4. But fired up by The Freak Zone, I'm sick of You and Yours, and hungry to hear something else different. The internet means the whole world is suddenly open for us to listen to, but the sheer quantity of web stations and podcasts out there means you need someone to recommend stuff. That someone is you. What should we be listening to on the radio, or the DAB, or over the internet? What would you recommend as a vital source of fascinating music, old or new? What's happening in the world of the pirates? Does anybody out there listen to those weird stations that lurk towards the bottom of the radio listings on the Sky TV planner?
