The Daily Swarm

In music, “tastemakers” are a dime a dozen, mostly engineered by marketing needs and branding strategies. The term has become so fraught with cynism, fans tend to forget that actual champions of the next and the new, whose discoveries and cheerleading affect actual (not industry) trends and cultures, really do exist; and that they’re born of a lifetime’s passion and pursuit.

Any interaction with the output of BBC dee-jay Mary Anne Hobbs—her weekly “Radio 1’s Experimental Show,” her live DJ’ing appearances, or her trio of compilations for Planet Mu, the latest of which, Wild Angels, dropped in September – instantly exposes one to her excitement towards hunting and gathering new sounds, then introducing them to the masses.

The 45 year-old Hobbs’ most recent role has been as “Queen of Dubstep,” an unlikely and welcome breath of feminine gusto in a scene of bass-boy brooding. A January 2006 broadcast entitled “Dubstep Warz” (on Hobbs’ previous BBC show, “Breezeblock”) codified the sound and helped unite a community; she’s curated three dubstep showcases at SONAR; and her enthusiasm for the likes of Burial, Martyn and Flying Lotus has ensured that what’s known as “dubstep” is perpetually mutating.

Yet the woman known as MAHobbs has made a career of musical cheerleading (and some recipients of her love may surprise those who only know her for progressive electronics). It was this long journey, from its John Peel-inspired beginnings to its globetrotting DJ-meets-community-midwife present, that was at the heart of the interview TDS conducted with Hobbs during her first US tour, this past September.

So, tell me about your formative musical experiences. I know John Peel plays a big part in that, right?

I was born in a tiny little village in Lancashire in the north of England. Literally, we’re talking about a 1000 people who are residents there, just like a pin-speck on the map really. I had a quite an unusual upbringing in that my father was an extremely violent alcoholic; he banned music from the house completely. Needless to say that did not deter me at all as a kid. We had one toy shop in the village called Mears Toy’s, and if you wanted a record, you had to go to the toy shop, lay your money down, and it would take nine weeks for a 7” single to arrive. I was a great fan of punk rock as a kid, and I used to buy every conceivable Sex Pistols record that I could get my hands on. If my dad found these records, which he did on a routine basis, he would always smash them up.

But the only thing he did not ever find was this tiny little transistor radio I had, which was about as big as a sardine can. I used to pull the blankets over my head at night and scroll across the dial on the radio and look for John Peel. Because John Peel to me seemed like he had the keys to the gates of another universe—a universe I desperately wanted to reach as an adult.

Peel, when I first started listening to him in the early ‘70s, was playing these crazy old Led Zeppelin jams [with] 25-minute Jimmy Page guitar solos from BBC’s Maida Vale studios. Then, when punk came along, Peel reacted very swiftly to what he perceived was going to be a huge movement within the UK’s underground music scene. And almost overnight, the landscape of his show changed completely, and he became one of the most powerful champions of punk rock. For me it was amazing to hear the metamorphosis of that program. And as a little kid with almost no access to the media, that was enormously important and hugely significant. I don’t think I would have known that world existed without Peel.

You had quite a journey through music before you ever step foot at the BBC. You wanna run through the highlights?

It’s a really fascinating story. When I was growing up in Garstang, there was one club, very dirty, sawdust-on-the-floor kind of place, full of bitter gritty drinking men. But about twice a year, they would actually have a live band on. And I remember on the chalkboard one day, there was a message saying “Heretic, from London, playing next week,” and I just thought, this is it, this is my escape route from this village. I’ve got to get a job with this band. That’s what I’m going to do.

So, I did get a job with that hard rock band, and I moved down to London and I lived on a bus, which looked like something out of a Mike Leigh movie, in a carpark for a whole year with them, [having to] go to the local public toilet to have a wash. I painted their backdrops, I did all the lighting at their shows, I designed their record sleeves, made their costumes, and I was, of course, also the bus mechanic. We saved all the money we had to repair all this junkie broken-down equipment, our own backline, our own PA system, our own lighting system. So we would save up and pool all the money that we had, fix all the equipment and we would book a tour, and the bus would go on the road. They were difficult times, but I was 18 years old and I thought that this is what would be necessary to get on in this industry.

I wanted to be a journalist, to write for Sounds. It never occurred to me to just send in a review to the editor. I thought, he’d surely want to see that I’ve worked for a band. And the other thing I thought he’d want to see is that I had made some sort of fanzine of my own. So I put together a couple of issues of a fanzine called Krush while living on the bus, and sent the editor of Sounds a demented CV. It must have turned his head, cause I got a job with Sounds at 19.

A couple of years later, I was kind of bored of London. I heard so much about the fledgling thrash scene in LA, [with] bands like Metallica and Megadeth starting to make waves. So on a whim, I sold everything I owned and bought a one-way ticket to LA; I had $600 bucks in my back pocket and I thought I’d see how far I can get on that. I bought a motorcycle for $300. And it was amazing. I saw Guns N’ Roses play at the Troubadour before they were signed. I used to watch Jane’s Addiction play crazy downtown warehouse parties in the days when Perry had dreads and wear a red rubber corset. I interviewed David Lee Roth and rode around Hollywood in a bikini on my motorbike.

I was there for a year, writing for Sounds. When I came back [to London], Guns N Roses had just gotten a deal, and everybody was going just completely crazy about them. The NME recognized that they had a lot of people who knew about Marxism but not a lot of people who knew about rock, so they poached me in 1987 to go and write about rock for them, which is what I did for several years.

Then, [James Brown] the guy who I got on best with at the NME, went on to found Loaded magazine, so I went with him to do that for a couple of years. And given the fact that I was one of the only girls at Loaded, I got quite a lot of invitations to go contribute to other people’s radio shows. There was quite a lot of magazine radio shows at the time in the UK, and I was often a guest on these. When XFM, which was sort of Britain’s first alternative radio station, began trial broadcasts, I got involved. I worked with XFM for five years and it was just so fantastically exciting, despite the fact that we only had about a mile radius of actual [broadcasting] reach. It felt like a revolution at that time in the UK, there was nothing like it. Radio 1 was still incredibly conservative; it was only Peel doing anything radical at all.

So how did you make the leap to Radio 1?

Basically what happened was that the head of production at Radio 1 decided that he wanted to come onto XFM and play a few records. So the boss at XFM came to me and said, this was going to happen on “your show.” I was like, “No way, you’ve got to be dreaming—he’s not coming on my show, I’ve got Mudhoney in session.” But the boss was like “no, no, you don’t understand, Trevor Dann, the head of production is coming on your show.” So I said, “Look, I’m not interested in this guy, but if he comes on my show, I’m going to interview him first.” These were the days when I was a very belligerent, aggressive Loaded journalist, and the culture was very male-dominated; you had to hold your own. So this guy came on the show, and I dragged him over hot coals in this interview. Unbeknown to me at the time, he was employed by Radio 1 to get rid of all the old-school DJs, chop away all the dead wood, and people were terrified of him at the BBC. Somebody at Radio 1 recorded the interview and thought that it was so funny that this little girl was giving him such a hard time, that they made a tape that got bootlegged around Radio One. This tape ended up on the desk of Mattie Bannister, the controller of the day; he thought he was listening to demos for new shows, but he had inadvertently put in this tape, and was like, “oh my god, who is this girl, we have to get her.” And the rest is history. They rang me up and gave me a job.

How did you go from interviewing metal guys in LA and writing about rock for the NME and Loaded, to covering urban underground and electronic culture?

A couple of windows really changed my life: I was a huge fan of Seattle grunge and I was the first person to put Nirvana on the cover of the NME. But at the same time, there was a fantastic scene happening in the UK, the Madchester scene, which was headed up by bands like the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays. That was my entry-point to dance music. I hadn’t really understood a great deal about dance music until I crossed the Madchester bridge. We used to travel every weekend from London to Manchester to attend the Hacienda, a Mecca for this sound; it was the most mind-blowing place in the world, because when you would get to the Hacienda, you would hear acid house. For me, it’s always been about progression and discovering new things. And those bands were able to draw in kids like me who had very much a rock and metal upbringing. That was my route into electronic music, right about ’88 ’89.

How did you go from acid house and Madchester to jungle? Because the things you play on your radio show are a lot more informed by what happened around (and after) jungle than the indie-dance movement, and that itself seems like a leap.

For me, jungle was very much a club thing. Most of my profound experiences have happened in [specific] clubs, be it the Hacienda or in the case of jungle, Metalheadz at the Blue Note in Hoxton Square, Shoreditch. With dubstep it was DMZed [in Brixton] first and FWD [at Plastic People] second. The discovery of jungle came when I was working with a producer at Radio 1 called Wilber Wilberforce who went on to be the founding father of 1xtra, which is the BBC’s black music station. I had been playing a little bit of jungle but I had not known so much about it. Wilber had put together a legendary show on Radio 1 called “One in the Jungle,” and then when he became my producer, he was a hugely inspirational figure to me. He was almost like my John Walters [Peel’s long-time producer]. He gave me the keys to that gate. Then I started to go to Metalheadz and it absolutely blew my mind. It was a different time and space, really, even the vibe outside. [The name] “Breezeblock” actually comes from the queues waiting to get into Blue Note, because it was always a roadblock. You would have the greatest time talking to the other people waiting to get in, standing around in the beautiful summer breezes. The queues were as vibing as the night, once you got inside. That experience was the inspiration for the radio show name.

So how did you evolve to where you are now musically? The mutation where what is called “dubstep” encompasses not just it, but also hip-hop and techno/house, dub, and even wonky forms of soul and R&B.

That’s kind of interesting. To come back to my point that club culture informs and makes sense of so much of what I do. My trip to Low-End Theory in Los Angeles in January, made so much sense of this coming together of a great number of disparate influences but with the same kind of spiritual drive at the epi-center. When you look at a club like Low-End Theory—where they’re booking literally everybody from the Mars Volta to Mixmaster Mike to Nosaj Thing—what you find at the core is a sense of soul, really. The British press love to tag all music with a genre name, and immediately all the artists will balk at that: “no, I hate this word, don’t ever apply it to me.” But one of the greatest things about the Internet is the way artists are now able to communicate with each other and cross-pollinate their ideas and this amazing symbiotic energy that you feel between, say, the Hyperdub empire and the Brainfeeder empire or the Glaswegian artists, people like Rustie and Hudson Mohawke, they’ve got this incredible symbiosis with what’s happening on the West Coast of America, despite the fact that they’re an ocean away.

John Peel was an idol of yours, but you seem to have inherited his sense of freedom as well – using a weekly BBC Radio 1 show to push a musical agenda that changes moment-to-moment, but remains decidedly outsider. Talk a bit about what you gained from him in terms of programming the underground to the mainstream.

You know what it is with Peel? He, in a way, responds to the same elemental and unique qualities in music that I do. Certainly as a listener of Peel, I identified this spirit of defiance in the music that he championed, that he loved. Yet it was defiance for all the right reasons – do you know what I’m saying? It was music that sounded almost completely different from anything that was happening in the mainstream at the time. If you were questioning about what he was looking for in a piece of music, his reason never changed in 38 years, he would always say, “I want to hear something new, I want to hear something vital, something elemental.” He would always use the world “elemental.” Be it that Jimmy Page was going to roll out a 25-minute guitar solo and be damned. Or it was Johnny Rotten sneering at the British government and the monarchy; it was still that similar sense of defiance in all the music he cherished. That’s what I would have responded to as an angry young pre-teen child in this village with my records being smashed to bits on a routine basis. I love that still in the music that I support.

There is a real defiance in the myriad of different textures, in people making music for art’s sake. I think on a daily basis, you can’t help but be surrounded by and be bombarded by these hideous images from the mainstream, and the more that happens and the more extreme that culture becomes, the more I cherish what I do, the more I feel it is increasingly significant to have a platform upon which you can put art and say, “there is another pathway.” That’s what, in a sentence, John Peel demonstrated to me: that there is another pathway, a completely different pathway that I saw being played out in the mainstream. These days, conversely, the same thing is true. The glare of the mainstream media, the noise, the relentless screaming is almost inescapable. And I think it’s really important to have a show like mine to demonstrate to (particularly) people of the younger generation, that there is another route that you can go, if you so desire.

How do you choose which tracks will take them down that route, and which are just commodified dissent?

It still gravitates to that very simple principal Peel put in place where you are just trying to find a piece of music that touches the very core of your soul. For Peel that could be anything—a piece of music that some African tribe kicked out in a tiny little village in the middle of Malawi, a crazy scratchy old 78rpm record that you’d need to play on a wind-up gramophone with a copper needle, or the most ferocious piece of drum’n’bass you ever heard in your life—but it would move you in way that you could not quantify. It is physical, and yet it’s not. If you saw a map of the human body, you could not stick a pin in it and say, “That’s the bit” [laughs] “ – “it’s the pancreas, it’s the duodenum.” It doesn’t really work like that. Maybe it’s somewhere in the furthest recesses of your cerebral cortex.

So when you are putting together a show, do you think you are seeing at as disparately as Peel did?

One of the beauties of Peel’s show was you literally never knew what was around the corner. He would take a rockabilly tune and then play something out of Japan, a crazy piece like Melt Banana or something, so that the textures of sound were radically different from record to record. Whereas mine is an entire sonic journey, that is slightly smoother than that. I tend to begin harder and melt more towards the end. But I’ve always built in a different way to John. The thrill of listening to Peel’s show will never escape me. I’m trying to persuade the BBC to put the entirety of his 38 years just online, and then you can access it anytime. You can go back to September 1973 and hear what he was doing.

He became a better and better broadcaster the older that he got. His weight of experience and knowledge, his sheer phenomenal amount of man-hours listening to music made his status as a global authority more profound all the time. But always, it came down to that purely emotive response for Peel, and it does for me as well. I can’t quantify it or explain it. All I can do is hope and trust that my audience responds to the same kind of triggers that I do. They know that I’ll have put the hours in, in terms of listening. They know that I’ve done the work, that I’ll present them with the best conceivable selection of music that I think they’ll enjoy any given week. I’m lucky that they trust me in such great numbers, that “if it’s there, she’ll have found it.”

Talk to me a little bit about your process of discovering new music. You are one of the only DJs I’ve ever heard calling out Myspace and Soundcloud pages when giving out more information about the artist. It struck me from the very get-go that your process of discovery must involve a lot of digital tools. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Kode 9 recently did [an] interview on the cover of The Wire magazine [and discussed] this notion of being utterly all-consumed by the process of discovery. I really identified with that. Doing the job that he and I do does lead you to the brink of madness. But conversely that’s a place we both love to live in. It’s a process that completely consumes you. It’s relentless; and you always lie awake at night wondering if you’ve done enough. There is just an ocean of sound out there. Sometimes you feel like a tiny little stone skimming across the surface, hoping you will hit some interesting spots along the way. [Music] comes to me in a myriad of different ways. Obviously a huge amount of music comes to me online, digitally, to the various different inboxes that I have and also to Sound Cloud. I literally have 700 tunes a week on Sound Cloud. But I also like to go on missions, on little adventures through Mysapce, because I think it’s really important to seek as well as just sit and receive. A huge amount of the music that I’ve discovered has been as a consequence of actively seeking on Myspace. The pathways are infinite. I mean you could spend the rest of your life, hopping through different sites. But at some point you have say, this is as far as I’ve got in this process for this week. A few years ago, you could kind of clear the decks and say, “OK, I can create a show.” These days it’s not like that. You have to literally draw a line: “Now I have to actually put this mosaic of sound together.”

There is an amazing misconception about it. People believe that I‘m in an amazingly privileged position where almost every piece of music that comes to me is incredible. Quite the reverse is true. About 98% of the music that comes to me will not make the show. It really is like sifting for gold. There is so much shit before you think, “This is worth putting on a BBC platform.” I would say that about 2% of the music I seek and that is sent to me actually makes the show.

Name a few artists, albums or scenes you are repping for right now:

1) Appleblim’s label Apple Pips is absolutely incredible. Appleblim, like many producers, founded it to put out his own work initially, but he has got some incredible new artists, particularly Greener and a guy named Al Tourettes. I had never come across them before Laurie [Osborne, a.k.a. Appleblim] introduced me to them.

2) Kode 9 and Hyperdub” – goes without saying. The last guy I [did an interview with] in Copenhagen, asked “where would you pitch an entry-point to the scene?” And if it was up to me, it would not be with Caspa, Rosko, Skream, Benga. I am very excited to see them get props in the mainstream. But if you want a window on how diverse this sound really is, how unique the different interpretations are, Kode 9’s compilation “5 Years of Hyperdub” is an incredible piece of work. If you are interested in any form of underground music and you really want to know what’s going on in this world that for me would be the best entry point.

3) Low-End Theory, without a question. What Daddy Kev is doing there, and the residents Gaslamp Killer, D-Styles, Nobody, it’s iconic and massively inspirational to the next generation of young artists coming up on the West Coast. Also, I don’t know about you, but I spend most of my life in a virtual bubble listening to everything online, in isolation, working online, speaking to people on AIM, clearing out in-boxes, emailing. And these places like Low-End Theory are important, in terms of actually physically drawing human beings who are kindred spirits together again, to exchange ideas face to face, to share and experience this incredible music, these textures of sound they love. As we become more isolated in terms of the way we work these days – and producers are the same, they spend their entire lives in their bedrooms making this music—we need places like Low-End Theory, like DMZed, like FWD, like Sonar Festival, to come together as humans again. We can’t underestimate the significance of that at all.

4) Brainfeeder, speaking of things that are going on in LA right now, Flying Lotus’ label and site are informing and inspiring so much. Every other week there’s a brand new mix up there. All kinds of different artists, and Flying Lotus, his nurturing of a whole coterie of LA-based artists is really significant.

5–6) Hessle Audio out of Leeds are doing amazing things right now. There’s another couple of producers you should keep an eye out for right now, named Airhead and James Blake, who are just totally different. They are so, I don’t know, “Other” in every way.

But there’s so much going on. It’s almost like, in any given week, if you listen to the show, you will hear what I love. I’m delighted to say that I’m always on the verge of being overwhelmed by what’s good. It always blows my mind when people say to me “ugh, music is so boring, so dry.” All I can think is, you are looking in all the wrong places.

MAHobbs Radio Show
MAHobbs YouTube Channel