Will get to all other business in a minute but first…
This particular post has taken a while because it is about what’s about to come in terms of the new show and how it’s only starting to take shape now. You might think, if you’ve ever heard me on nights before, that it might be a fairly simple thing to organise – a few hits, couple of stupid competitions, texts from the listeners and Bob’s your auntie… But this time it’s different.
I’ve been presenting shows with pretty much the same brief and to pretty much the same audience for the last dozen years or so and I suppose after the time I had to think over the last month I came to a sobering conclusion:
At 32 years of age I’m too old to be playing pop music to kids.
Might not seem like rocket science but there are many in our biz who never get as far as the sentence above. So I started thinking that if that wasn’t the brief then what would I actually like to do? It brought me back to an assertion I made a couple of years ago to someone who expressed surprise at some of the slightly leftfield tracks I was playing at night. I simply said to them that when 2FM took me on thought they were getting someone who wanted to be Dusty Rhodes but instead they got someone who always wanted to be Dave Fanning.
There’s only one Dave and long may he continue to be so and anyway Nikki is taking care of the pop/RnB lovers quite nicely thank you. That, and the horizon broadening excercise that was presenting the 2FM Breakfast Show for 6 months, got me thinking…
Maybe the time had come for a change…?
A late night show aimed at 20 and 30-somethings – album buyers, festival goers, movie eaters, music lovers, crap talkers, web surfers, basically me and my mates.
A show that finally kicks to the kerb boybands, girlbands, RnB hoochie mamas, untalented hip-hop “style over substance” MCs, anyone who’s ever been on reality TV, crap dance remakes of classic 80s tunes…
A show that loves everything with guitars, Singer/Songwriters, Hip Hop (before the suits took it over!), decent dance and positively wets itself over decent music of the last 3 decades:
The Futureheads
The Magic Numbers
The Kaiser Chiefs
Outkast
Kanye West
Coldplay
Franz Ferdinand
The Pixies
Travis
Oasis
Blur
Pulp
Faithless
The Killers
NERD
Mylo
Snow Patrol
Fountains Of Wayne
The White Stripes
Goldie Lookin’ Chain
The Barenaked Ladies (Did you really think I was going to leave them out?!?!?!)
Linkin Park
Royksopp
Bob Dylan
Lou Reed
Josh Ritter
Snoop Dogg
The Frames
Daft Punk
Basement Jaxx
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Hard-Fi
The Chalets
Gorillaz
Jamie Cullum
The Go! Team
The Beastie Boys
Future Kings Of Spain
The Smashing Pumpkins
Jay-Z
Beck
The Eels
Pink Floyd
Jack Johnson
The Walls
U2
The Who
The Stones
The Foo Fighters
Public Enemy
The Smiths
The Cure
The Housemartins
Just a few ideas, by no means a complete list , call it a starting point.
Then, there’s what will be the new Monday night show – something 2FM has never done before and something I’ve wanted to do for years… But that will take a bit of advance preparation and will follow in a few weeks…
For the moment I hope you and 1 or 2 others will end up feeling as passionate about the new show as I already do 🙂 We start the revolution Monday from 10.
R