There’s nothing quite like the feeling you get when you see a live show that knocks you off your feet. Figuratively speaking, of course (although I’d imagine the feeling of one that literally causes you to fall over is a bit weird too). Eddy went to such a show recently, featuring Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly, Jehst and Engine Earz Experiment. And here begins his quest to help more people see that show.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a gig review here. But two weeks ago, I saw a show so astonishing that I felt the need to share it with a wider audience than the very lucky four hundred or so people who witnessed this with me at Cargo.

The story starts two years ago at the Lake Of Stars festival in Malawi. It was there that I got to meet and hang out with a marvellous man and musician, Sam Duckworth, of Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly.

It’s hard not to like Sam. His music is so likeable, and his character so affable, that it was a given we’d stay in touch. Last year, Get Cape’s bass player had his stag weekend at The Secret Garden Party, and Sam got so busy he forgot to get a ticket in time. While other festivals were experiencing in the region of a 40% drop in ticket sales, Secret Garden Party sold out in record time, leaving many, like Sam, caught horribly short.

He told me of his dilemma, but all my DJ slots had long gone, so I couldn’t help him out that way, much as the prospect of him appearing on my stage thrilled me. I did, actually, have one slot left, but that was earmarked to be auctioned off in aid of CALM. And to his credit, when the time came, Sam queued up with everyone else (virtually, I carried out the auction on Twitter) to place his bid. He ended up paying way over the odds for a pair of tickets, happy to do so because the cause was so good and the reason for his attendance so strong.

Fast forward to January, and Sam and I are talking about Get Cape playing live at Secret Garden Party this year. He tells me he’s doing an “experimental show” at Cargo soon and I should come check it out with the wonderful Freddie Fellowes, The Head Gardener.

As it turned out Freddie was busy ‘gardening’ and missed it, so I’m writing this both for you, and for Freddie, so he can see what he missed.

Sam told me it was a live collaboration between Get Cape, Jehst, a four piece brass section and Engine Earz Experiment. At the time the latter meant nothing to me, but just a matter of days later Enter Shikari introduced me to them when they co-hosted an hour of the show. The tune they played was extraordinary.

I asked Sam approximately how much this live show would cost to stage at SGP, as my budget has to stretch thinner than a really good pizza. Sam replied that he was still scratching his head over the budget, but that there were 22 musicians involved on stage.

“22?!” I despaired.

There’s no way on earth, or in hell, that I could afford to pay 22 musicians in one band. But what the hell, maybe Freddie could look at them for the main stage? And by now I was really intrigued, so I made my way down to the gig to check them out.

The familiar Cargo stage had so much equipment, so many microphones, it was hard to imagine how one band would fit on stage, let alone (effectively) four. When show time came, Get Cape shimmied their way past all the kit and assumed their positions. They played three Get Cape songs. OK, no big deal there, but there was a palpable feeling of excitement and expectancy. Suddenly, a horn section popped up as if they were conjured, to shake things up. Then half way through the third song I looked away, and while I did, the beat of the track had become a little funkier and looser in the wrist.

The horn arrangement shifted towards Motown. I looked back and saw a different drummer, a big fella, with dreadlocks, had replaced Get Cape’s stickman, who was now slowly snaking his way past cables, decks, stands, mics and synths towards the side of the stage and a legion of musos there, in a holding pattern. Another bass player then started playing alongside Get Cape’s, who slowly wound his volume down and headed in the same direction as his drummer. A DJ sprung up, behind some decks, and a girl singer sashayed onstage to join Sam, who was now singing that third Get Cape song with a different band behind him.

They seemed to be improvising a groove and slowing it down to a languid hip hop beat. Then Sam melted away and an MC came on the replace him. The song playing was still Get Cape, but smoother and dancier, the MC and the singer were skitting over the top and creating something new, this was a live mash-up between two bands! Jehst duly stalked onstage and delivered his three songs with great aplomb. Hip hop, reggae, soul, it was all there.

“I can’t tell you how much love I have for this place, but right now there’s not much about Britain that’s great” was a line that stuck in my mind, and he delivered it with so much passion. From my point of view, I could argue with that sentiment at that moment, but I know what he meant. I was entranced by it all, even more so during Jehst’s third track, when the same thing happened, a smooth segue, with other musicians, a tabla and percussion player, another drummer, a singer and a keyboard player, all appearing on stage and riffing together over the Jehst track.

The rhythm and instrumentation shifted, beautifully eastward, towards the Indian sub continent, a wash of sitars, a gorgeous girl voice, soaked in heavy delay, as Engine Earz Experiment blended seamlessly with Jehst’s band, who in turn melted away to leave their front man rapping over Engine Earz, who were moving the track towards a delicious new tempo around 140bpm.

A tall skinny MC in Public Enemy style glamour, bandana, military webbing, gee’d up the crowd and the music shifted from hip hop to dubstep, but performed live, faultlessly.

Engine Earz Experiment provided a lesson in how to do dubstep live. I’ve been talking to Bare Noize and others about this, and I know Ollie and Danny Bare Noize are big Engine Earz fans. The drummer wasn’t even playing to a click-track, the keyboard whizz at the back – whom I now know to be Prash – was playing these dirty, subby, crunchy synth noises live to the drummer! The overall result was mesmerising.

Then, again, Get Cape sidled onstage halfway through the third song, and played along with Engine Earz, and the horn section slid on to glue the whole thing together.

What we ended up with was in the middle of a Venn diagram: Organised chaos, pure genius, orchestration, practiced arrangements, improvisation, with sometimes members of three different bands and a horn section all playing together. Junctions between songs were soft, there were no gaps and the lines between everything and everyone were blissfully blurred. For over two hours they meandered between indie rock, folk, hip hop, reggae, dubstep and dnb.

I imagined this on the main stage of Secret Garden Party, as a gorgeous distillation of what’s been great about British music for the past decade.

Freddie has been on a well deserved holiday since then, but I’ve been bombarding him with emails about this. I’ve already booked Sam to do a late night laptop set in The Temple Of Boom (the new and improved Remix Bubble at SGP), and yesterday fate twisted things a little, in an interesting way. I had saved a slot for Bare Noize to do their first ever live show. But they’ve predictably been so busy, and don’t have a day off until June now, that they’ve postponed their live show until next year. That left me with a rarer than rocking horse shit live slot on Saturday night.

I currently have a list of artists the length of my arm who would each kill, maim, or give up a kidney for that slot, but this night at Cargo, curated by the brilliant Sam Duckworth, blew my mind so much that there was only one band I could book. Engine Earz Experiment, with not even an official release yet, are my wild card for 2012. I remember booking Reverend And The Makers before they released anything, to headline Friday that year. At the time people thought me insane: “You’re paying 800 quid for an unsigned band?” But by the time they hit that stage at The Remix tent, their value was more than ten times what I’d paid.

So. I have a dream. That every lucky person at Secret Garden Party this year will leave it totally and utterly mind blown.

Engine Earz are there.

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly are there.

Freddie, today we are one step closer to the dream.

Eddy x

This week is the British Tinnitus Association’s annual Tinnitus Awareness Week. As ever, there will be a range of events around the UK put on to help raise awareness of tinnitus and to dispel a few myths about it too. Myths which, sadly, are still held up as fact by some GPs, meaning that many tinnitus suffers are not getting the support they need. This year’s focus, therefore, is to make sure all GPs have the right information about the condition and aren’t simply turning people away who come seeking help. Tinnitus sufferer and BTA ambassador Eddy Temple-Morris has more.

I cast my eyes over the packed Sunday crowd in the Breaksday Tent at the first ever Glade Festival and smiled. A small lake of hands in the air, happy faces, wide eyes and wild costumes… then my gaze settled on one particular female, in the weirdest, most wonderful costume of them all, who’d made eye contact and was waving frantically, like she was drowning.

She seemed to be trying to say something, but in the melee and with the music playing at that immense Function One sound system volume it was hard to make the words out. Her costume represented every colour in the visible spectrum as she beckoned me over at the end of the set. I felt I should make a reciprocal effort and so made my way to the barrier at the side of the stage. She removed her ornate headdress and multi-coloured bubble glasses to reveal a familiar face as she opened her arms.

“Eddy, how amazing to see you here, it’s me – Annette Steele!”

Hang on, I know that name… but where do I know it from…? Hang on, no, it can’t be…

And I suddenly realised this amazingly dressed festival goer was my GP. I was flabbergasted and delighted at the same time. I couldn’t quite believe someone as professionally serious and able was bouncing up and down to Rage Against The Machine in the busiest tent of an electronic dance music festival.

Damn, I miss her now. She was the best GP I ever had. When a bad sinus and ear infection, and cumulative years of loud music with no protection, combined to trigger my tinnitus fourteen years ago, she was my first port of call. She knew what it was straight away and referred me to an audiologist immediately.

You’d think that was standard procedure, but, unfortunately, not every GP is as well informed or as sympathetic as Annette.

This week is Tinnitus Awareness Week 2012 and, as ambassador for the British Tinnitus Association, I am bound to tell you that this year our focus is on GPs. First of all I have to say I am a massive fan of the National Health Service. I’m the most accident prone person I know and I’ve been helped and treated along the way by some incredible people, kind, thoughtful, knowledgeable, overworked and underpaid angels in human form. What I’m not attempting here is to have a go at GPs in general. There are some incredible GPs out there, like Annette, who help make Britain truly great.

BUT – and it’s a big ‘but’ – we know, from the BTA helpline, and from asking many case study sufferers, that there are GPs out there who really need to raise their games when it comes to this condition.

Below are a few examples of genuine responses GPs have given to people seeking help for tinnitus – it almost helps if you start each one of these like an old fashioned doctor gag: “Doctor doctor, I’ve got tinnitus, what should I do?”

“Come back when you’re actually ill”

“Man up and don’t waste my time”

“You can’t have tinnitus, only old people get that”

“I’m not referring you as it’s not a priority, here’s the number of a private consultant”

Each one of these real examples is so shockingly wrong on every level. I know there are many very good GPs out there, but still, in this day and age, to have someone as authoritative and responsible as a qualified doctor say something like that is unbelievable and unacceptable. Though, while it is unforgivable, these Victorian attitudes are possibly understandable given the awful state of tinnitus awareness among supposed professionals.

The health correspondent of the Telegraph only last year wrote: “Tinnitus is a disease that affects old people”. While I get calls from suicidal teenagers with tinnitus, some journalist is getting horse-shit like this past their sub editor in a supposedly quality newspaper. I suspect quite a lot of GPs read the Daily Telegraph, and while they won’t formally look to it for medical knowledge or opinion, sweeping statements like that can still make an impact subconsiously, especially if the someone reading it already believes the misguided statement the Telegraph’s supposed health expert is presenting as fact.

Now imagine one of these catastrophically ill-informed GPs getting more power from the government to control their purse strings, as the Coalition intends. Do you see that doctor referring the next tinnitus sufferer s/he meets to the specialist that patient dearly needs? Or will they be sent away to (literally) suffer in silence?

The reality is that in these tough times tinnitus services are a soft target for closure, and we cannot let that happen. This condition is causing severe discomfort and distress for NHS-reliant people right now, to the extent that some of them will become suicidal. Some sufferers have even asked for their auditory nerve to be severed. In a few cases their doctors have been daft enough to let that happen, and in every case the patient became deaf but STILL HAD tinnitus.

If you have tinnitus, or you care about the issue, write to your MP, almost all of them are available on email and most of them will read correspondence, or at least have their staff go through each letter and log it. If you’re not sure who to contact or how to get in touch, go to www.writetothem.com which will work out who your MP is from your postcode and send your email for you. If they get enough emails and letters on this issue then perhaps George Osbourne’s axe won’t cut off the one kind of healthcare needed by almost every musician I know.

Speaking of which, here is a link to some video diaries kindly recorded by some of our tinnitus-suffering friends and colleagues. Those ill-informed GPs and health journalists need to see for themselves that saying “only old people get tinnitus” is as ridiculous as saying “only old people get cancer”. These diaries are also useful to learn ways you can cope with the condition, and we’ll hopefully get a few more uploaded this week, I know Adam F did one for us over the weekend.

If you’ve recently developed tinnitus or you’re worried about it, just click this link to the BTA website, where you can find out what it is and even call a free, confidential helpline to talk to somebody that knows their onions.

If you want to get protection, in the form of some proper earplugs, moulded to your own inner ear, with filters that don’t interfere in any way with the fidelity of your music, our friends at Harley Street Hearing, who look after the ears of musicians as diverse as Chris Martin and Plan B, can help. If you book an appointment this week you’ll get a hefty £40 discount, bringing the cost down to £139.95, which I assure you is money well spent. Just call 020 7486 1053 or email geraldine.daly@harleysthearing.co.uk and quote ‘Tinnitus Week’ to get your discount.

Finally, if you’re going to visit your GP about tinnitus, the chances are they’ll be as good as mine and you’ll be treated with sympathy and understanding. But given that not every GP is as good as Annette, this webpage (also available as a PDF) may be useful for you to take along with you. It’s a top ten tips for GPs, so they can see, at a glance, what they are dealing with and be warned of some of the more obvious pitfalls.

Thanks to all at the BTA and their supporters, and thanks to all the DJs and musicians that donated their time to make video diaries. Even if just one GP raises their game as a result, then this will have been a sterling success.

I remain your loyal and humble servant, and one of the one-in-ten people in this country with tinnitus that just wants every GP to be as aware of the condition as you are. It’s not that much to ask is it?

Eddy x

We define ourselves as people by our tastes – particularly as social networking and online sharing becomes more and more a part of our daily lives. The elements of pop culture you clutch to your heart say as much about you as those you push away. This week Eddy Temple-Morris has a question that will ascertain what sort of person you are, based purely on your view of two Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.

This week I was reminded of a question I was once asked by one of the best lyricists I’ve been lucky enough to cross paths with in my life.

Dan Fisher wrote the words for The Cooper Temple Clause songs, and these days he’s fronting his own band, Red Kite, who are staggeringly good, but this piece is not about them, but about a random question Dan asked me last year, or possibly the year before.

There was a drinking session going on at my Losers partner (another a former Cooper) Tom Bellamy’s old place on the North Circular. It was a weekend afternoon and I’d joined a party that’d been going on for a while. Ciders were flowing, and Tom’s laptop was being passed, centrifugally, around the front room, where turns were taken with tune choice from Spotify. I love this game – when alcohol starts removing inhibitions, people’s tune choice can be very interesting and revealing.

But again, I digress, because in the middle of all of this a heated debate was taking hold. It was a debate that was sparked off by a deep question. It’s a question that, on the surface of things, doesn’t look that deep. But I assure you, it has ramifications way beyond its initial veneer.

Dan looked me in the eye and said: “Eddy, I have a question for you. It’s an important question: ‘Terminator’ or ‘Predator’?”

“That’s a very tough call”, I replied. “But what exactly are you asking me?”

“Which is the best one… the one you’d put on first?”

“But hang on, that’s two different questions and two different answers”, I ventured.

“No, it’s not”. Fisher (nobody calls him Dan, except possibly his parents) was unilateral. “The one you’d put on first is the best film”, he decreed.

I thought about this hard, and however I approached it, I could not get away from this thought: ‘Terminator’ is the best film but I’d always put ‘Predator’ on first.

“Aaaaah, then ‘Predator’ is the best film”, Fisher scoffed, while asking if I could pull another ‘apple juice’ from behind the sofa. Others in the room were joining in, allying themselves with one or the other, picking things they loved about each film.

“No it’s not, it’s the one I’d put on first. That doesn’t automatically qualify it as the best film”.

“Yes it does”, Fisher maintained. “If you put it on first, that means your saying it’s the best, there’s no argument here”.

“But there absolutely is!” I protested. “Look, ‘Terminator’ HAS to be the better film, it’s the genre prototype, Cameron’s vision, the script, the amazing story, the weird techno soundtrack, these are all things that make it stand out as a unique film that pushes the envelope”.

“But you like ‘Predator’ more?!” He interjected.

“Yes, I do”.

“And you’d always put it on first?”

“Yes, I would”.

“Then it’s the better film”.

“No, it’s not”.

This went on for some time, with hoots coming from various parts of the room. Our mutual friend, a lovely man called Matt Dunbar, was getting stuck in too, feet firmly in the ‘Predator’ camp. I don’t think we ever reached an accord. We just had to agree to disagree. Fisher gets famously bloody minded after a certain number of cans. But I’ve come back to this question again, and again, and laughed at how useful it is.

It’s a brilliant question, almost like a formula, or a metaphor, that can be applied across just about anything. I keep returning to this question, in the context of music, and in particular, this past year or two, in the context of dubstep.

Somebody on my Facebook wall last week said this: “Really hard to hate on Skrillex, but it’s slowly becoming a gimmick with repetitive sounds, patterns and arrangements though”.

My reply was immediate: “I know what you mean, it’s comparatively shallow but hugely entertaining, I think. Like watching ‘Predator’ instead of ‘Terminator’”.

His reply made me laugh: “That’s an excellent comparison!” Thanks Hugo!

But that’s it, isn’t it? That’s effectively the key to this whole Purist v Eclectic thing: Just replace ‘Terminator’ with, I dunno, Skream or Benga, and ‘Predator’ with Skrillex or Knife Party. There’s no question in my mind that the purist makes the ‘better record’ for a number of reasons, but when I’m in a club, or at a gig, the majority of my crowd are gagging for those big, fat, dirty noises, just like we love when the screen goes all ‘heat vision’ and you hear that guttural clicking noise that ‘Predator’ makes when he’s stalking his prey from the jungle canopy.

I LOVE ‘Terminator’, but next to ‘Predator’, it’s harder to watch. Cameron’s bleak vision is just not as easy on the eye as the sweeping, technicolor jungle panorama; and Brad Friedel’s haunting, stripped down, sort of 8-bit techno electronic soundtrack is much tougher than the huge, orchestral, rousing and stirring ‘Predator’ score by Alan Silvestri (who did ‘Back To The Future’ a short time before this). Like the theory of relativity, “‘Terminator’ or ‘Predator’?” is a question that can be applied across the whole of life, art, architecture, poetry, literature, or music. Respect and kudos goes to the envelope pushers, the genre definers, the frontier people whose talent and energy created something, but props must also go to the people that took that idea and made it more accessible by making it less deep and therefore more fathomable. When you go snorkelling in the shallows, the colours are brighter than when you go diving at depth.

So there it is: I KNOW ‘Terminator’ is the better film, and I love seeing it when it invariably comes on the telly, but if I’m honest, and I remember most people in that beautifully drunken room at Tom’s agreeing with me, if I had both DVDs in my hand and I had to put one of them on, it would have to be ‘Predator’. I’m a ‘Predator’ kind of guy. So shoot me. But please shoot me with one of those shoulder mounted Gatling guns, like the one Native American Billy Sole (Sonny Landham), scythed an area of jungle the size of Luxembourg with, when he emptied a whole box magazine in blind fury, ripping through branches, splintering boughs and shattering trunks. It sounded a bit like a Skrillex tune, didn’t it?

x eddy

This time last week, Enter Shikari’s third album ‘A Flash Flood Of Colour’ was outselling all others in the UK. Its blend of metal, drum n bass, punk and dubstep was ahead of Adele, Coldplay and Ed Sheeran.

And the band managed to keep those three at bay for most of the week too. It all came down to the Saturday sales, and that’s where the competition was won, putting Enter Shikari at number four when the official chart was compiled on Sunday. Here Eddy reveals why Enter Shikari are his favourite band – and proves it with maths.

So, Enter Shikari ended up at number four in the album charts this week, after spending the best part of the week at number one. This truly independent album just could not realistically compete with the parent and teeny-bopper supermarket purchases on Saturday, where huge numbers of Adele, Coldplay and Sheeran albums get put into shopping trolleys with the same emotional attachment as a tin of peeled plum tomatoes.

I’ll not try to hide my disappointment, but at the same time we have to look at this positively. These are three great artists with three great albums with a great deal more money behind them, therefore we have a moral victory for a band on their own little label, with a distribution deal through PIAS, that manages to punch way above its weight and go toe-to-toe with EMI, Warner Music and the Beggars Group.

Enter Shikari have a special place in my heart, as I explained to them on the show this weekend. Mathematically speaking, I love this band more than any other – stick with me here.

When Enter Shikari first appeared, I recall a few listeners saying: “Eddy, you should love this band, they mix dance with rock so literally”. But, while I had to give them massive kudos for being the first ever unsigned band to sell out the Brixton Academy, their music at the time filled me with horror. They had taken my least favourite genre in dance music – trance – and my least favourite genre in rock – hardcore metal – and fused them together like a train wreck. There was nothing for me here.

But fast forward a couple of years and, of course, dance music had changed, the way it does, immeasurably. Trance had fallen from grace and the kids were onto different sounds, drum n bass had crossed over from the underground and dubstep was about to blow. Enter Shikari’s sensory input from the world of dance suddenly shifted, and those awful preset keyboard sounds from Ferry Corsten records were replaced with the booms, squelches, scrunches and wobbles from a world where the sub-bass was as important as the top-line.

Suddenly I was faced with the unthinkable: an Enter Shikari record I actually liked. I always try to be objective and open about these things, and so I ended up playing this record on my show, while slightly in shock, and feeling a bit awkward about it. I remember their plugger, a lovely girl called Hayley, equally incredulous of the fact I was now suddenly supporting them. We joked about it on email, and she said something like: “Haha, you’ll be having them on your show next!” But hang on, there’s an idea here, I thought. Everybody loves a good turn around. If I’m my usual honest self, and they reciprocate in an equally honest way, this could lead to a ‘radio gold’ situation.

So, I made Hayley a proposition: Invite Enter Shikari to do a DJ mix for my show, then get them to come in and we’ll meet face to face, I’ll tell them I hated them, but they’ve turned me around with this new single, and let’s see what happens.

Hayley, bless her, did exactly that, and reassured the band and their management that this would be a good thing to do, and that it wasn’t some kind of post-modern media trap. The boys did the mix and two of them, frontman Rou and drummer Rob, came in, with nervous smiles, to The Remix on Xfm one Friday night. I told them – honestly – how I felt about them, and they accepted my opinion with incredibly good grace, while I listened to their mix as it was broadcast. The DJ mix was a triumph. We got on really well, and vowed to DJ together at a club or a gig in the future as they left the studio with big smiles. They were such good sports, coming into a potentially hostile situation, and turning it into the exact opposite, I’ll never forget it.

This next record proved to be a massive one for them. I heard it all over Radio 1 daytime, and remember them playing The Other Stage at Glastonbury that year, the same year as Pendulum blew up, both taking that stage by utter storm. The blades of grass in that dairy field had never felt the air move like that before.

I was mesmerised by them live – great musicianship, incredible energy and an explosive amount of passion all gelled together to astonishing effect. From that point on, Enter Shikari had become one of my favourite live bands ever.

Musically, they grew stronger, they dropped those trance influences and replaced them with those of dnb and dubstep, mutating their hardcore sound into something uniquely wonderful and alluring.

Rou came back on my show, this time with guitarist Rory, on Friday. In the whirlwind of press, radio and TV they did last week (including an interview with CMU), we only had time for an hour’s co-host, but the boys promised they’d be back for more, and you can hear that hour all this week on www.xfm.co.uk.

Normally, you love a band, or you hate a band. It’s not rocket science. I love NIN. I hate Muse. There. Easy. You love some bands more than others, in a measurable way. You can imagine a calibrated, straight line, with bands plotted all the way along. But the fact is, I hated Enter Shikari, therefore the distance between those two points is vast, and if a journalist was to now ask me “what band do you love the most?” then by the laws of mathematics, I would be bound to answer: Enter Shikari.

I wanted them to make it to number one in the album chart for so many reasons. They are such nice guys, and are surrounded by such nice people too. For them, for the underdog, I wanted to see them hold that number one position, but faced with the combined weight of three incredible British artists, who themselves started as Xfm backed underdogs, that was not to be this time around. But my gosh it is heart warming to see a band like this vying for the top slot in a world that is becoming more corporate, more globalised and more homogenised.

To the band, their management, crew, friends and fans, I take my hat off. The chart in my heart has a clear number one this week.

X eddy

When a hard drive meltdown at the end of last year left Eddy Temple-Morris without his music collection, and most importantly the last twelve months of new music, it delayed his traditional review of The Remix year. Thankfully, with technical difficulties overcome, he has put together his annual ‘Bombs Of The Year’ show. But working technology didn’t overcome the biggest problem – what to pick as overall album of the year?

Ever since I can remember, when putting together my ‘Bombs Of The Year’ show, choosing an album of the year has always been a relative walk in the park. Certain artists managed to make it easy by providing an album that, for me, just stood head and shoulders above everything else around.

Two and a half years ago, I remember getting stick for choosing my album of the year at the end of August. It was that clear-cut for me that Calvin Harris’s second album would not be beaten that year. The year before that, Empire Of The Sun provided the soundtrack to a monumental twelve months, personally, managing to pull me right out of the mire of separation with their astonishingly uplifting sound and sense of pop song writing nous.

Near the start of 2011, I had that ‘Calvin Harris feeling’ with ‘No More Idols’ by Chase And Status. It was a record of such staggering ambition, the list of collaborators alone was enough to make my head spin. The production was adept, a glorious nailing of the pop culture zeitgeist, and the whole effort was like a line in the sand, when underground music becomes mainstream.

Will and Saul came in for a full album playback, and it was a riveting couple of hours of radio, getting the full scoop on all these tracks from the men who made them. I remember their manager – no easy man to please – texting me, saying: “Dude this sounds great – I’m so glad we did this”.

Soon afterwards I recall Steve Harris on Xfm saying (with some incredulity): “Eddy thinks this is the album of the decade, not the album of the year!” That’s not exactly what I’d said, but Steve could be forgiven for the over-expansiveness. What I actually said was that I think this album will be looked back on in ten years time as one of the records that defined the decade, and I stand by that.

The point is that I thought, for yet another year, I’d just breeze through the next many months until December, then name ‘No More Idols’ as album of the year. So I mentally ordered the champagne, put the guest list together for the party, got my fancy dress costume sorted, then BOOM. The unthinkable happened. I had to postpone the champagne and send back the oversized turban. What’s this? Someone had come along to spoil the party. Or, someone had come along to make the party better – you know me by now, the glass is always half full.

Another two men, but called Dan and Joe, ironically signed to Will and Saul’s label, MTA, delivered an album that took my breath away. They were Nero. Their debut album, ‘Welcome Reality’, gave me, on the one hand, an immense amount of joy, but on the other, a massive headache.

I was now torn.

My head said Chase And Status.

My heart said Nero.

My life is a constant battle between my head and my heart, with my heart winning most of the time, but in the last few years, I will confess to, on a personal level, listening to my head a lot more.

‘No More Idols’ had the pizzazz, the superstars, and was a broader vision of urban inspired music – drum n bass, dubstep, hip hop and electro-house all represented on one dazzling record. But it was also a little colder, and more clinical than its cheeky cousin, Nero’s ‘Welcome Reality’.

One of Chase And Status’s circle of trust even confessed to me, privately, that he wasn’t counting ‘No More Idols’ as a proper artist album, saying it was more a “collaboration compilation”. He also felt it was too devoid of emotion. I feel that’s harsh and a little unilateral. Yes, it’s certainly less of a cohesive journey, but the scale of it is massive, and the sheer confidence of Chase And Status was reflected in all these glittering stars and interesting wannabes from major label A&R departments wanting to take part.

But then Nero gave us the single of the year, and the first dubstep track to be playlisted by Xfm, so this was a historical benchmark record too, that would equally be looked back on with reverence with the advent of time. It was a warmer experience, with Dan’s girlfriend singing on most of the tracks, and ‘Bladerunner’ – my favourite film – providing an inspirational focal point for the sound and the imagery. This was a record as huge as their label bosses, but huge without the Dizzee Rascals and the Cee-Lo Greens, this was dance music that sounded like it should be played in stadiums because of the music itself, not the guests.

I really did go through the mill, in my own head, for weeks and weeks. I see-sawed between the two records, at various points, convinced that my heart should listen to my head, or vice versa. The turning point came when I arrived at the realisation that they were almost the same record, or a flipside of the same coin. Both artists were, in some way, involved in the making of the other, whether it was inspiration or guidance, or just that unconscious rubbing off you get with talented people that are close to you.

The choice was just too hard, and both records deserved to win, or both records deserved not to lose to the other, so an honourable draw was, in the end, the only way I could call it. But I have to say that it’s an incredible achievement by Chase And Status to not only come up with an album of the year, but also to sign, encourage and guide Nero to what is one of the greatest debut albums in electronic music, ever.

Just my personal opinion, remember; I know there is an army of dubstep purist Nero haters, seething as they read anorak bell-ends like me wibbling on about how amazing Nero’s drum programming is. But there it is, my show has always been an extension of me and so my album of the year is just that. MY album of the year. And how brilliant, now that the dust has settled, that there’s two of them, when normally you’d only get one.

I must quickly doff my cap towards some of the other great records I added to my heaving collection in 2011. Like Alex Metric’s deft mix compilation, which is all we could expect after he sacked off his entire debut album in a fit of classic over-thinking. He’s such a perfectionist that, when it comes, it will have to be perfect, and probably will be.

Scroobius Pip cast off his double act preconceptions and delivered a phenomenal nu-punk album with hip hop overtones, and videos that put others with ten thousand times the budget to shame.

Apparat, Stateless, Washed Out, SBTRKT and M83 charmed and cajoled with their work. Blake accidentally invented a sub genre with his, Officers plugged the gap left by a bored Trent Reznor, and Brookes Brothers delivered a wonderfully bright and optimistic drum n bass record.

Tom Vek reminded us never to write him off, Friendly Fires proved they are no flash in the pan, Justice got kudos for doing their own thing, while DJ Shadow and Kasabian released their best work since we first fell in love with them. Austra united The Remix and X-Posure with love from all sides, and The Horrors came of age with the surprise of the year for me.

So that’s enough looking backwards for now, January on The Remix has traditionally been a time to scan the horizon for the next big thing, or in the case of most of the artists we love on the show, the next small to medium thing. So next week I’ll do just that, and tell you what I’m most looking forward to in 2012. I have a strong feeling this year is going to be a classic, we’re going to make some incredible memories, I’m feeling so up for it, and it’s nice to have you along for the ride.

As Tone Loc would say: “Lezz do it”.

For his first Eddy Says column of 2012, Eddy Temple-Morris is helping out a friend. Longstanding compadre of The Remix on Xfm, Hervé needs a singer to add a cherry to one of his musical cakes. And that singer could be you. Presuming you can sing, which I’m sure you can. CMU readers are notoriously good singers. We should form a choir or something.

It’s always nice to help out a friend of the show, and over the years there has been a mutually beneficial axis of nice-ness between The Remix on Xfm and quite a few labels and individuals. My favourite labels (and this applies to radio shows too) have always been the ones that are an extension of an individual: James Lavelle – Mo Wax, Mark Jones – Wall Of Sound, Damian Harris – Skint, Trevor Jackson – Output, Richard Russell – XL, Dan Fresh and Adam F – Breakbeat Kaos, Brendan Futurebound – Viper are some of the more obvious ones that have enriched my show and our lives.

And there is one more that has to go on that list, a label and founder that have dazzled with both their prolific nature and the excellent quality of their output. The label: Cheap Thrills. The man: Hervé.

The different sides of the man, Joshua Harvey, with his myriad noms-de-plumes (The Count Of Monte Cristal, Machines Don’t Care, etc), is reflected by the crystalline sub division labels: Deep Thrills, Cheaper Thrills. I’m fully expecting him to sign something really tough and start a label called ‘Steep Thrills’, or sign Zomboy and start ‘Bleep Thrills’. Watching the man and the labels develop has been nothing short of a joy over the years, his eclecticism and good taste are the stuff of legend. After you heard Jack Beats’ demo on The Remix, it was he who gave them a home, now look at them…

I always say how much I love it when talent turns out to be nice with it, and Josh Hervé is one of those life-affirming case-in-point characters, like Utah Saints or Brookes Brothers, who makes music so brilliant that it almost gives someone a right to be arsey, so then it’s even more uplifting when they turn out to be the opposite of what you expect to come with the territory. Nice guys certainly do not always come last.

I don’t think any artist has been on the radio with me more than Josh. He helped me out as a special guest when I sat in for John Kennedy. He came in again when I did the same for Mary Anne Hobbs. He DJed at my first Remix All-nighter at Matter. And on The Remix itself, he’s done mixes, co-hosted, the works.

His All Time Top Ten mix – ‘Hervé’s High School Mix Tape’ – was one of my favourites ever. It was around the time Hervé seemed to be at the height of his powers, that wobbly house sound that he and Switch defined was at its zenith and we were all expecting a furore of bass wobbles and seamlessly mixed flat four-four beats. But what Josh did was – and I love him forever for having the balls to do it – to come up with a 1980s style cassette mix compilation like we all used to do, taping stuff off the radio, and just crudely editing it together via the pause button of the cassette deck.

He went against every expectation, and I always admire that in people. So it’s doubly gratifying to return the favour – and here comes the good bit – to help find a collaborator for his new album. Over the years I’ve helped lots of bands do remix competitions, from Simian to Caan, and Air to Electric Six, but this time the competition is to find a singer, pure and simple as that.

Go to www.cheapthrillsrecords.co.uk/herve/ and get involved if you’re a singer, male or female, or if you know a singer, tell them to get stuck in. It is an amazing opportunity for someone to get a really high profile collaboration track on what looks like it’ll be Josh’s best record ever. His new single, ‘Better Than A BMX’ (the video for which you can watch below) strikes a wonderful balance between nightclub and chart pop, and if that’s the shape of things to come, then I’ve no doubt this album will transcend all that has come from Josh in the past, while providing a dream come true for one of you. Once he finds you, and you write and produce the tune together, then you’ll come on the show with Josh – if you want to – and play the tune on Xfm. I cannot wait to hear it, and I’m honoured to be involved.

So happy 2012 to you all, I hope this year brings more good than bad, and I’m already looking forward to ACTUAL new year, in March, after which I’ll be celebrating twelve years on Xfm with an utter legend mentioned earlier in this piece, hopefully co-hosting the show. I can’t say who because I haven’t asked him yet – James, I’m calling you soon with an idea I think you’ll like.

X eddy

December begins this week, which means CMU will be running its end of year features in the run up to Christmas and Eddy will be taking a break until the new year. Traditionally, this is where Eddy reveals his favourite producers, tracks and remixes of the year, but technical problems have delayed that post – I suspect Eddy’s new year’s resolution is to back up his digital music collection at every opportunity! But to get things started, he has decided on his favourite single and album of 2011 (almost), plus he has some new music from Losers for you to listen to.

This is the last Eddy Says of 2011 and, under normal circumstances, would be a retrospective look back at the musical highlights of the year, and a throw forward to my traditional Bombs Of The Year show on Xfm where a best single, best album, best remixer etc would be decided by a democratic vote involving each and every producer and presenter involved in the making of The Remix. OK, that’s just me, but still, that should be a reason enough for a ripple of excitement, a frissante of expectation.

But unfortunately, on Friday night, after the show, my hard drive decided to throw its arms aloft and say “Fuck this! I’ve had enough of being deluged every day with an avalanche of massive zip files full of remixes, of enormous wav files when just a SoundCloud stream would do the job fine”. Then it fell backwards with its eyes open and held its legs stiffly in the air.

I am now full of self-loathing, having been, for several months, ignoring the voice in my head telling me to back up. Plus now I’ve got to go out and buy a new hard drive. Though, on the up side, while I’m out I’ll also get to pick up my late 70s Musicman Bass, that’s been cleaned and re-set-up for Losers’ first London show with our new live line-up.

We’re showcasing tracks from our almost finished new album ‘So We Shall Never Part’ on Wednesday night, supporting Pure Reason Revolution at Heaven. I’m really stoked to be unveiling new songs with such talented musos alongside me. My Losers production partner Tom, of course, but now augmented by Paul Mullen from YourCodeNameIs:Milo and Young Legionnaire on guitar and vocals, plus Mark Heron from Oceansize and Kong on drums. We’re even drafting in a keyboard player for this one, to cope with new songs like this:

This is just a demo version Tom has sent to the Cooper Temple Clause massive, and the finished version has been touched by the phenomenal hand of Jem Godfrey. But while this is an untouched, unmixed and unmastered version, it gives you an idea of where we’re at with this album. Much darker, moodier, and much more emotional.

But back to business, and the normal angle of this Yuletide piece. The premature meltdown of my 500GB hard drive means I won’t be able to go through the year’s music and do a full retrospective justice, so I’ll save that for the first one of 2012. But I will share with you where I’m at with album and single of the year. As I said to Joe and Dan from Nero last week, when we recorded their long overdue full album playback, Xfm Remix Single Of The Year is a no brainer. For me it has to be ‘Me And You’ by Nero, with ‘Blind Faith’ by Chase And Status a close second.

Historically, that Nero single was a musical line in the sand. The first ever dubstep single A-listed by Xfm. I still remember the smiles of people on the dancefloor at Proud Galleries when I was playing that tune a year ago, in the run up to Christmas. The immediate feedback from a dancefloor is the fastest, most honest way to gauge reaction to a record, and the unbridled joy I felt, emanating from almost everybody in that club, was remarkable.

The fact that it was almost a coin toss between Chase And Status and Nero for single of the year, brings me to album of the year, and my conundrum. I sort of knew, in January, when ‘Me And You’ came out, that nothing would beat it for track of the year, in the same way that I knew in August a couple of years back that Calvin Harris’ album would be unbeatable. But the album of the year this time is so close, I’m almost considering a coin toss. In an echo of the battle for single of 2011, it’s down to one family: Chase And Status and their first born son Nero.

I still haven’t decided, although I am hedging towards Chase And Status’ ‘No More Idols’ because of its broader vision. I think it’s an album that’ll be looked back on in ten years time as a body of work that embodied everything that’s great about British dance music right now. A record that stood aloft in the winds of change, and stood FOR that change.

Either way, that and Nero’s ‘Welcome Reality’ are two monumental records that will rank right up there with some of the greatest in your collection. If you haven’t heard Nero’s album yet then wait until 16 Dec, when you’ll hear each track played out on the radio with the two lovely and superbly talented chaps who wrote and produced it in the studio with me.

That, by the way, is just the first festive treat we have for you on The Remix this year. Yes, my Christmas present to you all is as double barrelled as my name, and my album of the year dilemma for that matter. You’ll get the Nero show one week, then, the week after, the whole show, all four hours, will be co-presented by someone I’ve been trying to get on the show for YEARS, the deepest, most musically knowledgeable DJ I’ve ever met: Paul ‘El Hornet’ Harding of Pendulum. His depth of knowledge is astonishing, and that will surely be reflected in the four hour journey we’re about to take.

That show will be available right through the Christmas holidays on www.xfm.co.uk and will be fatter than your stomach come Boxing Day. So until next year, take care of each other. Eat well, drink well and do whatever you can to increase the love in your life. It’s been a pleasure talking to you, thank you for listening.

With much love and good fortune to every single one of you.

X eddy

thecalmzone.net
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xfm.co.uk

This week Eddy looks back at the various occasions when one time Southern Death Cult drummer Aki Nawaz has had a presence in his life, starting off as a poster on his bedroom wall, through to being a bandmate, then the man behind so many great underground electronic releases Eddy rated, and now an old friend at a surprise party. Remembering how Aki, as THE cool Asian of the early 1980s, provided such inspiration for a mixed race teen living in a very different era in British culture, Eddy also celebrates the more multicultural Britain of today, where MOMO (music of mixed origin) is all around. 

It’s so easy to take the UK’s most brilliantly multi-cultural society for granted, but I’m old enough to remember the days when things were painfully different.

On my first day at secondary school, the biggest boy in my class threw a chair at me and told me to “go home you fucking Paki”. If that happened now I’d just throw it back and say “My mum’s from Iran and I was born in Cardiff, you ignorant cunt”, but in those days, you just couldn’t draw attention like that. I was too outnumbered.

My parents were married in the mid 60s, when inter-racial marriages were pretty rare, so you could say I was one of that first wave of mixed race kids that called themselves British, even though we were despised by many of our contemporaries.

You would pale at some of the names that were said to, or rather screamed at, me while I was being chased through the back streets of Hereford in the 1970s. Me and my friend Ade – his dad was Nigerian and his mum was Herefordian – were, at the time, the darkest skinned kids in our neighbourhood, and my god didn’t we know it.

But we just had to take it on the chin, and, I think, looking back on it, the seige mentality we had was partly due to the fact we had nobody to look up to, nobody we could call our own, in pop culture. I think having ‘heroes’ makes you stronger. Having cool icons on your wall, and to have characters you identify with, when you’re that age is so important, especially if you are, as we were in those days, ‘outsiders’. Teenagers feel excluded enough already.

When I started to fall in love with music, I didn’t have anyone I could REALLY identify with. Sure I had Robert Smith of The Cure, and Sid Vicious, and Paul Simonon; the uber-cool icons on my wall at the time. But they were all white, and I was brown. I felt different and I didn’t really connect with anybody on a genetic level.

That is until my last year at school, and the day I bought a twelve-inch record by a little band from Bradford with a weird name: The Southern Death Cult. I was at first drawn in by their Native American imagery (we said ‘Red Indian’ in those days, which sounds weird now but at the time was perfectly normal and not meant disrespectfully). Then I looked closer, past their beautiful 80s effeminacy, and I looked at their drummer Aki, and I smiled, deeply. He was brown. He was brown AND cool. Blisteringly cool. Here was a man at the top of the NME Independent Charts and I couldn’t believe my eyes. This man was Pakistani. I could not, for a second, imagine this beautiful man being called all the names I was called.

I was blown away by the fact that this guy, whose picture was on the back cover of my favourite record at the time, was the first person I ever pinpointed as being both Asian and cool. Up until that point, being Asian, or in my case half Asian, was pretty much the most uncool thing you could be. There were no Nihals, no Frictions, radio and TV was ‘white’, music was ‘white’ and ‘black’, there were no shades.

It’s peculiar thinking back on those days, it doesn’t seem all that long ago, but there will come a time soon when us mixed race ‘kids’ will be in the majority. We’re everywhere I look, all over the music I love and play: Example is half Indian, so is Jakwob. Ayah Marar is half Jordanian. When the MOBOs were happening I tweeted, half joking-half serious, that there should, by the same token, be a MOMOs (Music Of Mixed Origin). Why the hell not?! There’s probably more music out there now of ‘mixed origin’ than anything else!

I followed Aki’s career, as a street-level supporter, and paying customer, when Southern Death Cult split up and became Death Cult, then The Cult on one side of the family tree, and Getting The Fear on the other.

One day my flat mate, an utterly wonderful man called Nigel Templeman, alerted me to the fact that Getting The Fear, the band that featured Aki and Buzz from Southern Death Cult, wanted a new bass player, and that they were having auditions at a London rehearsal studio. I excitedly packed up my then relatively new looking Musicman Stingray bass (the one I still use as Losers’ bass player today) into the back of Nige’s car, and he drove me to the audition, like the big brother I never had.

Once there, it was nerve wracking. A handful of hopeful Goths were in front of me in the queue, skin pale as alabaster, and hair dyed jet black. I was so nervous when it was my turn. Jesus Christ, I was about to meet, and even jam with, two guys who were on a poster on my wall when I was at school! I walked in, smiled, said hello and was surprised to see my two icons, not dressed in obligatory post-punk-goth regalia, but running shorts, vests and trainers. At least Aki had a black jogging top on (the term ‘hoodie’ was not on the horizon then).

That was the moment I chose to play my trump card. I thought, before the audition, how can I set myself apart from everyone else? How can I show them I’m the sort of guy who should be in their band? How can a young kid like me be taken seriously by two older and wiser musicians? Surely, I thought, as a naive nineteen year old, drugs are the answer! I’d pre-rolled a fat, hash spliff, and whipped out this marvellous cone before I’d even plugged my bass in.

“Fancy an ice-breaker?” I said, with a smile as big and fat as the Camberwell Carrot between my thumb and index finger. I looked at Buzz, who looked at me as if I’d just stuck my finger up my own arse then asked him to smell it.

“No thanks, I don’t smoke draw”, he said, quite seriously, in his lovely Bradford accent.

I was crushed. My last hope of salvation was Aki. I held the joint aloft, like the torch on the Statue Of Liberty and swivelled to face the drums.

“You’re alright mate”, said the coolest Asian ever. “I’m a strict Muslim, I’ve never had a drink or taken drugs in my life!”

At that point the blood drained from my body. I hoped that a fissure might appear in the earth that I could dive into and escape from this nightmare of awkwardness. Thank god they saw the funny side of it, Buzz just took the piss: “What were you thinking?! Look at me, I’m in fookin running gear, I’m a fitness fanatic!”

Aki laughed along with him and pointed out that this was work for them, and we should get on with it. Which we duly did, with ice well broken, but not in the way I’d planned.

I plugged in and started playing, we gelled almost straight away, and when I left I felt that I’d at the very least retrieved my dignity after that disastrous opening gambit. Aki and Buzz were all smiles when I said goodbye and said they thought I was a really good player, the best they’d seen, but there were plenty more to come, so not to get my hopes up too much.

But my career in this crazy business started at the point they called to tell me I had the job, and that I’d have to move up to Bradford, on and off, for a year or so.

You may know Aki from the name he adopted many years later: Prince Haq Propaghandi, frontman of Fun Da Mental, and head honcho of Nation Records. He signed and supported some fantastic underground electronica in the 90s, Transglobal Underground, Prophets Of Da City and many others. The last compilation I got from Nation was called ‘And Still No Hits…’

Aki was always politically provocative. Fun Da Mental and Nation were part of the global backlash against US foreign policy. Nation is still going, and Aki is still kicking against the pricks, producing TV documentaries on subjects close to his heart. For example, Aki was on the very boat that broke the Israeli Navy blockade of Gaza, as part of a documentary on the treatment of Palestinians by the rest of the world.

The rest of this story could easily provide another Eddy Says, but the reason it’s all come flooding back now is that last Saturday was Aki’s (surprise) 50th birthday party, where I saw him for the first time in years. There’s nothing like an email from the son of a good friend, who’s now grown up and got his own Facebook page, telling you it’s his dad’s surprise birthday party and asking “can you come dressed as a punk?” to make you feel your age. People often, sweetly, tell me that I don’t look my age, but my god, Aki does not have one single grey hair, not one! And he’s years older than me!

The party was emotional, for Aki, of course, but when I saw his picture on this massive birthday cake, it really got me to thinking, that my old friend may actually be a proper trail-blazer, the first ever young Asian man that crossed over into pop culture. He was from my point of view, anyway. I cannot think of anyone else both Asian and cool until way after The Southern Death Cult. And he’s still there, on the edge, still refusing to cross into the mainstream, and still challenging it, while still inspiring people like me.

Funny that now feels, politically, just like the 1980s, but for one thing: those brown kids who had bricks thrown at us in the street decades ago are now almost in the majority.The MOMOs may not be that far away…

X eddy

As you may know, Eddy joined the Music Board of suicide awareness charity CALM following the death of his friend, Ou Est le Swimming Pool frontman Charles Haddon, who took his own life at the Pukkelpop festival in Belgium in August 2010.

Since then, he has been involved in various initiatives to boost the profile of the charity, which aims to bring down the high rate of suicides amongst young men in the UK. Here he announces an event to launch the charity’s new magazine, RESET, and a new helpline number later this month.

I don’t know what the gender breakdown of people who read this column is, but I wouldn’t mind betting that it’s majority male. Just like I’d bet that the majority of people buying CDJs, or vinyl records, would be male. Another fact I’d bet on is that there are many reading this who are unaware that the biggest killer of men under 35 in this country is not drugs, cars, bikes, cancer or knife crime. All these things are dwarfed by one thing: Suicide. Unhappily, suicide is another thing where, in the UK, the majority of people who do it are male. The vast majority. By a landslide.

(Girls, don’t stop reading, I’m talking to you too. While the female suicide rate is a fraction of the male suicide rate, it’s still unacceptable, in that it is largely avoidable. Plus you ladies have a crucial role to play in dealing with the male suicide rate also, because you can teach us how to be more like you, god knows we need it – so many of us blokes need our girlfriends or our girl-friends to help us unlearn our daft bloke-ishness.)

Many of you know (from columns I’ve written here in the past including Ou Est Le Conversation? and Keep CALM And Carry On) that, through my friend, the utterly brilliant Joseph Hutchinson from Ou Est Le Swimming Pool, I became involved with CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably), the unique charity set up specifically to be there for young men to fall back on if they become depressed and suicidal.

The need for an organisation like this becomes painfully clear when you look at the figures for, say, a city like Liverpool. Everyone at CALM was blown away when the figures emerged. Since CALM was set up there, and started reaching out to the young men of that city, the suicide rate was driven down by OVER 50%!

Let the wonderful Simon Howes, from CALM Liverpool, talk us through this: “Numbers of suicide and undetermined injury deaths amongst men aged fifteen to 34 in Merseyside [came] down 55% from 1999 to 2009 … We did it by taking the CALM brand and the message to every suitable lifestyle, music, sport etc outlet across the patch. We chose credibility over everything so that our audience saw us in their worlds, their turf, talking their language. We worked with quality partners like Creamfields, Chibuku and Liverpool Sound City and promoted ourselves with audacity and style. This made us a viable option, one that young men would consider when they wouldn’t touch others with a barge pole. They recommended us to their mates and we became the support option of choice”.

Men’s lives are being saved here, just by getting them to talk more and giving them someone to talk to, if they feel alone. So can we do something about London now? That’s the big question, and we’re answering that with a resounding “HELL YES!”

Some weeks ago I got the call, or rather, the email, from the nice people at CALM alerting me to the fact they are launching both their excellent magazine, RESET, and a new helpline in London this month, and that Topman was kindly pitching in by providing a venue for CALM to take over for the day, to help raise awareness.

My colleagues on the CALM Music Board and I were asked if we could come up with some DJs to fill slots between twelve noon and 8pm on 25 Nov at Topman’s flagship store in Oxford Street. So, keyboards started rattling and thumbs got texting. Naturally, my first call was to the biggest radio DJ in the UK. My old pal, Zane Lowe.

My relationship with Zane these days is the perfect metaphor to demonstrate just how awful men are at communicating. In the past decade we’ve seen each other twice. Both times at gigs. We keep saying we’ll get together, then we never do. Life just gets in the way, and, of course, being men, we hardly ever talk about it. So when Zane said: “Yeah, great cause, count me in!” I joked that the only way I’d get to see him is if we both DJed at exactly the same time. Then it hit me. Two men, communicating, right there in front of you, behind decks… of course! This would provide the perfect visual metaphor for what we’re trying to get across here. Suddenly we realised that if we booked twice as many DJs as we had slots, we could put them up against each other, in the classic ‘versus’ format.

I’m careful not to use the word ‘soundclash’ because that implies there will be a winner and loser. And that is not in the spirit of what we’re doing here. It’s about communication, pure and simple. Communication and co-operation. So, I’ll get an hour to hang out with my friend Zane for the first time in around a decade. And, thanks to the support of numerous friends and colleagues of both myself and other CALM Music Board members, various male DJ friends will be coming together for some communication and co-operation all throughout the day.

In fact we have ended up with a bill that looks like a small festival, with some of the finest male DJs and producers in the UK, many of whom have a profound understanding of why they are there. Here is what just a few of them had to say…

Zane Lowe: “What support groups like CALM do is help men who struggle with balance to understand that they are not alone. That when things get too much, there is help at hand. It’s really important that music plays a part in this. It helps people to express themselves when simple dialogue is not enough”.

Huw Stephens: “I’m looking forward to a special day of music to highlight a very worthy cause. It’s going to be a fun day and will hopefully bring CALM to the forefront of a lot of people’s minds”.

Rob Da Bank: “Nearly all of us must have had or will have extremely dark or suicidal thoughts at some point during our lives. It’s human nature. That’s why CALM are doing such an important job – not only helping and being a friendly ear for men experiencing those thoughts, but also reminding the rest of us that the issue is happening and is out there”.

Kissy Sell Out: “I think the tendency to ‘bottle things up’ is an institutional phenomenon amongst young men and the suicide rate of under 35s is, frankly, horrifying. The service offered by CALM to help anyone who contacts them is both important and dignified, so I am very proud to be supporting this cause with this and future events”.

Hervé: “We need to help young men speak about the (in their minds) unspeakable”.

Sonny Wharton: “I’m very humbled to be helping raise awareness for CALM at this event. As guys we aren’t naturally the most forthcoming about dealing with pressure and often bottle our problems up – I think it’s really encouraging that there is a charity like CALM to offer the help and support that a lot of young men really do need when they feel low. Hopefully through the fun vibes of this event we can help bring focus to this in a positive way!”.

Ed Wideboys: “Having had experience of one of our closest friends taking his own life and leaving behind a family, any awareness and help to people on this subject is priceless and we are backing CALM 110% in their campaign to increase knowledge”.

A most poignant quote in support came from Kaiser Saucy of The Loose Cannons, which took me back, and totally surprised me, in so far as, you look at a guy like him, one of the most flamboyant, bouncy, happy-go-lucky DJs on planet earth and you think – well, I think – surely this man has never been touched by depression, surely this man has no understanding of what’s at stake here. But in a marvellous stereotype-shattering way, he came up with the deepest and most incredibly thoughtful words, I was almost moved to tears when I first read this…

He said: “It strikes me that the possible benefits of the very existence of CALM, and its potential capacity in terms of the people it attempts to reach, are so vast as to be almost unquantifiable. Everybody gets down from time to time. There’s never enough money. People let you down. Your career hasn’t amounted to a tenth of what you imagined at school – these feelings are universal, and yet to admit to worries like these, amazingly, still somehow seems wantonly selfish and is often regarded as in some way ‘weak’ or just ‘foolish navel-gazing’ by most men. And worse, through no fault of their own, most male friends should they ever be reached out to, are themselves massively unaccustomed to dealing with psychological problems of this nature. Instead tending to opt for the easy, but ultimately unhelpful, ‘It’ll be alright mate’, coupled with a jovial slap on the shoulder. The mere existence of CALM as a charity gives legitimacy to the FACT that these issues are real, that you don’t have to sit there and stew in silence, that there are people out there who understand what you’re going through, and most importantly, it’s fucking OK to ask for a little help sometimes. You’re not alone. Believe in finding CALM”.

I’m also particularly moved that Majestic will be there, Wideboys’ MC. Many will have seen him working with Jacob Plant and a few will have seen us together at The Full Moon Party on Kavos this summer just gone. Majestic is bang in the middle of CALM’s target demographic. He is in his early 20s, a Londoner that has had a hard life, and been ravaged by depression in the past. You couldn’t meet a nicer, happier young man right now, but this is a man who knows, first hand, how important an organisation like CALM is for young men like him. It’s vital. I use that word literally.

Today, even perhaps as you read this, a young man, under 35 years old, in London, will kill himself, like 434 did last year, because they felt so alone, and had nobody to turn to when it really mattered. You can bet your arse none of them killed themselves while they were talking to someone. So these deaths are AVOIDABLE. We know that from what happened in Liverpool. The calls to CALM went up, the suicide rate came down. It’s a simple and exquisite relationship either side of a fulcrum, and that fulcrum is CALM.

So, please spread the word. Talk about it, support it, and most importantly (and I’ve asked this before) do me a favour and just call an old friend, someone you haven’t seen for ages. Give them a call, let them know you love them, and you’re there for them, and that you know how crap you both are at saying these things. (There’s a gap here. I picked up my phone, before I’d finished writing, and had a 20 minute conversation with a man I love, who I know is having a hard time at the moment).

It’s too easy to say ‘call someone you know is depressed’ because, more often than not, the ones who are depressed aren’t telling you they feel that way, because they are men, and we’re just mostly not hard-wired that way. So you never know, but just by calling and talking and LISTENING to a mate, right now, you MAY have personally brought next year’s suicide figures down from 434 to 433.

X eddy

PS – Here’s some blurb to help you spread the word:

DJ schedule – 25 Nov, Topman Oxford Circus:

12pm – 1pm
Rob da Bank
The Maccabees

1pm – 2pm
Zane Lowe
Eddy Temple-Morris

2pm – 3pm
Mistajam
Pixel Fist

3pm – 4pm
Kissy Sell Out
Union

4pm – 5pm
Hervé
Baxta

5pm – 6pm
Sonny Wharton
Wideboys & Majestic

6pm – 7pm
The Loose Cannons
The Freestylers

7pm – 8pm
Huw Stephens
dan le sac

For press enquiries and interviews contact Nick Bateson at Leyline Publicity on nick@leylinepromotions.com or 020 7575 3285

How to contact CALM:
Online: www.thecalmzone.net
Helpline: 0800 58 58 58 or 0808 802 5858*, it’s free, confidential & anonymous.
Texting no: 07537 404717*, please start your first text CALM1.
CALM doesn’t charge, though the caller’s network might.
Lines open 5pm-midnight, Sat/Sun/Mon/Tues. *Please note the two numbers marked will become operational on 26 Nov 2011.

About CALM:
CALM was first launched as a Dept of Health pilot in 1997 before it became a charity in 2006 with the support of music mogul Anthony Wilson. It is a well-known brand in Merseyside, where the service was commissioned in 2010 by the local health authorities. Since then, the suicide rate has dropped year on year in young men there, dropping further than either the average for the North West and for England and Wales.

Eddy is, of course, mainly known around these parts for his rants and stories derived from years working in the music and media industries. But occasionally he’s touched on other topics, one of which being his love of food. Because this man knows his food (we’ve been trying to pry his secret chilli recipe out of his hands for years) and this week he’s come up with something a little different; his ten (or so) favourite places to eat in London.

Doing a weekly column is weird because some weeks I simply have nothing to say. If it was just my blog, that’d be fine, I’d take a week off, but my excellent editor at CMU cracks his whip on a Monday morning and I have to come up with something. So, in the absence of anything to rant about, I’m falling back on a tried and tested formula, one of my infamous top tens. They always seem to go down well. This one features a topic I’ve only ever touched on briefly in these columns, but because my mind is so focused on food at this time of year, it’s my first foodie top ten. Places to eat in the capital.

Hopefully this will make you hungry and it will fuel debate. It’s not the be-all and the end-all, just some recommendations based on many years living and eating in London, with some obvious ones and some real little gem, secret squirrel haunts of mine. This is personal.

By the way, the reason there’s no pizza on here is because London doesn’t figure in my top three pizzas I’ve ever had. I don’t think there’s anywhere here that does it the way I like. For your info, the best pizza I’ve ever eaten was from a tiny, medieval bakery on the island of Gozo, near Malta. I’ll tell you more about that one day. I didn’t do Sunday lunch either, because there are just too many good ones, but the top tip is if you’re eating late is never order the beef, always the slow cooked meats, like pork belly, that benefit from long cooking. Chinese is only missing because it’s a top ten and I ran out of numbers. I could have gone on with this all day!

It’s important to add that this is all entirely from the heart, there were no free meals here. I ate at all these places as a normal punter, no special treatment, no discounts or anything. I’m not getting a kickback on alerting you to these places, they are all blissfully unaware that I’ve written this. I’m just sharing some places that deserve to have your patronage.

Indian – Namaaste
My favourite Indian food is Keralan. While I am a rampant omnivore, I love the flavours of Keralan food – always vegetarian – because they’re like the distillation of a perfect holiday beach. Coconut, herbs, crunchy textures like sand underfoot. If Indian food is on the agenda I’d always look for a Keralan place first though, if I’m honest, the best Indian dish I’ve ever had was not from a Keralan place, it was a plate of simple, marinated, Tandoori lamb chops from Namaaste, in Parkway, Camden. Just astonishing. The best lamb chops I’ve ever eaten in my life. Bar none. Anything that’s the best you’ve ever had is a big deal, even if it’s a poached egg or beans on toast.

Fish n chips – Fish Club
Having a good fish n chip shop near you is like having a hug from your mum. It’s THAT important. Right now, I live very near an excellent place called Ken’s, in Half Moon Lane. They do guilt-free sustainable cod in there, and the portions are mountainous.

But, again, if I’m honest, it’s not my favourite one in London. For me, and this is a personal thing to do with how well I like my chips cooked, The Fish Club in Clapham High Street is the best. The chips there are ALMOST as good as Heston Blumenthal’s triple cooked chips. Sort of a cross between a chip and a crispy roast spud. They are well done, a darker brown than you’d find in almost every other chippy, and the sustainable fish (Coley) is expertly poached inside crispy tempura style batter.

What I love about this place is that you can have the fish grilled or pan fried, and you can have pretty much any kind of fish you want. It’s a fishmonger, so you could push the boat out and have lobster and chips if you really wanted. They have awesome tartare sauce too. Homemade of course, and done the French way, with a bit of parsley in there as well.

Italian – 500 & Il Mirto
If you wanted to impress the hell out of someone, and money was no object, the Montpeliano, opposite Harrods, in Montpelier Square is the one. You eat and have your arse kissed with excellent service, and you’re surrounded by glitzy pictures of the 50s, 60s, 70s film legends who have eaten there. But pound for pound, the best Italian restaurant in London, for me, is 500, at the top of Holloway Road.

The chef there used to be the sous chef to one of the big superstar Italians, but rather than open his own place in Knightsbridge or St James’s (where you feel you should be eating food of this quality) he opened up, rather socialistically, in the hellhole that is Archway. A ferociously seasonal menu, and Michelin star quality Italian food at bistro prices. I don’t know how he does it. You HAVE to order the homemade, deep fried, raviolo filled with provolone cheese and mint as an appetizer. If you don’t do this then we can’t be friends.

Meanwhile, if you live down in South London, I just this weekend discovered a tiny Sardinian Cafe in Melbourne Grove, East Dulwich called Il Mirto that served me the best mushroom ravioli I’ve ever eaten, made with Porcini mushrooms the chef had picked himself that morning. It cost around £7, and if Gordon Ramsay had served me that same plate and charged me £30 I’d have paid it happily.

Posh – Trinity
By ‘posh’ I mean an occasion restaurant. Somewhere you need an excuse to go to, or a rich friend who is paying the bill.

My dear old friend Matty from The Infadels texted me last week asking where in South London a good friend could take her mum to celebrate her 30th birthday (she was turning 30, not her mum). I delighted in giving him two options. For the simple, classic French things done really well, I recommend Chez Bruce. I think Chez Bruce has a Michelin star that they are very proud of. But my favourite posh nosh has no such star. And I admire this place all the more for not having one: Trinity, on Clapham Common.

They refuse the coveted Michelin star because that limits them, for example, to only two sittings. They’re full all the time, so don’t need the props. If this were starred I’d give it easily a 1.5 star rating. The menu was playful and the chef has real vision and the balls to take risks and give you a plate that’ll make you go WOW! The staff know their shit too.

Thai – Esarn Kheaw
I know a bit about Thai food; I used to be married to a Thai chef who worked at E&O in Portobello. The best food in Thailand comes from the north east of the country, so that’s what you look for in a good Thai restaurant. The area is called Issan, or Esarn – there may be even more random spellings – and the best places I’ve ever eaten in London are all Issan, or NE Thai places (Udon, Nong Khai etc).

There’s one near me in Brixton, at the end of the market, behind the green gates just past the Dogstar, and there’s the Thailand restaurant on Lewisham Way, where you may be serenaded with bagpipes, by the owner, a hilarious Scot who played the pipes on some of the biggest records of the 1970s and 1980s. Gold and platinum discs are displayed with the same pride as the 50 odd single malt whiskeys around the room. But the best one of them all is in West London, in Uxbridge Road, and it’s called Esarn Kheaw.

Order the national dish ‘Som Tam’ (papaya salad) but ask for it ‘mai pet’ (not hot) – it’ll still be hot as hell but won’t kill you. Eat it with sticky rice, another north eastern staple, and their amazing Issan sausages and/or simple BBQ chicken. If you’ve never eaten Thai sticky rice ask them to show you how, there is a knack to it.

Breakfast – Banners and Brockwell Park Lido Cafe
Like a good fish n chip shop, we all need a good greasy spoon nearby to make our lives complete, and we all have a decent one, but there are a few breakfasts out there that stand out for special mention. When I lived in North London it was all about Banners in lovely Crouch End. A legendary place owned by Andy Kershaw’s lovely ex-girlfriend Juliette, and an institution. It’s a proper man-meal that’ll leave you in pain when you walk out, but my god it’s good if you’re starving and need that massive meat and stodge hit after a big night out. Order the smoothie of the day to balance out the badness and marvel at the ‘Now Not Playing’ record on display.

Now I’m down South I’ve discovered a more refined brekky at Brockwell Park Lido Cafe, where my plate sings with free range bacon and a quite spectacular artisan black pudding, one of my weaknesses with a full English. Plus you’re eating next to a large body of water, in London, which feels really nice, even if it is just a swimming pool. The only bummer is they don’t do bubble and squeak. And if they are really busy your poached egg may be over-done. But I sent my cannonball back and it returned perfect with apologies and smiles.

Bar Snacks – Quo Vadis
Let us not forget the humble bar snack, a meal that’s not a meal, and that special something to replace a lunch that cannot happen, or to keep the wolf from the door until dinner. And believe me this is worth the journey. Quo Vadis in Dean Street, Soho. Either find a friend who is a member of this place, or ask if you can go to the restaurant bar – you don’t have to be a member to eat at the restaurant (which is top notch by the way, every one a winner), but members get access to private dining rooms.

Anyway, head for the bar and order a Scotch egg and some pork scratchings. They are both homemade, and utterly exquisite. The scratchings are long bits of crackling, taken straight off a roast and served with apple sauce, and when you cut the perfect, crispy, scotch egg in half, you’re greeted with a runny organic egg yolk inside. Phenomenal.

Tapas – Angels & Gypsies
My inspiration for this top ten came while eating at Angels & Gypsies in Camberwell last night. They do the best tapas I’ve ever eaten outside of Barcelona, with a few dishes beating everything I’ve ever eaten in Spain. The Aubergine dish and the Jamon Croqetas were easily the best I’ve ever had anywhere. The pan-fried pumpkin with scotch bonnet pepper, juniper berries and thyme was sensational. Everything we had was either good, great, or fucking out of this world! Like the Italian place in Upper Holloway, this is a gem in a shit-hole of a neighbourhood.

Japanese – Kikuchi
I do love a Japanese place and usually I’d go for a cheaper one, just to get my fix without breaking the bank. But you do usually get what you pay for with Japanese food, so I’ve eaten at Nobu and Hakkasan, both as tremendous as the bill. However, the best one for me is a tiny little place the same back street behind Tottenham Court Road as you’d find Hakkasan. It’s called Kikuchi in Hanway Street.

The owner is also the only chef and looks like a Samurai warrior. His chef’s knife looks more like a sword and he wields it to give you the finest ingredients, put together with more love than you can imagine. Not cheap, it’s another occasional place but well worth a splash if you’re in the mood. I swear you will not find a better Japanese restaurant in London. The only one better, ever, for me, was in New York.

Middle Eastern – Mohsen
I’m a real sucker for Lebanese food, and if you’re on the hoof, you won’t find much better than the places up Edgware Road, where people are smoking hookah pipes, to grab an amazing rolled up chicken sandwich with garlic sauce and pickles, but my biggest love is the food of my motherland, Iran.

Persian food is the most under-rated, unknown cuisine in the world, I think. And the best place in London to appreciate it is surrounded by smiley Iranians at a place called Mohsen, near Earls Court. It’s pretty rugged, like a roadside cafe in Iran, it feels a bit like you’re in a slightly pikey B&B, or something. But the food is straight from the kitchen of an average Iranian grandma. Fresh cooked bread from their tandoor oven, the best rice you’ll ever eat, and incredible, warming, long cooked stews that will bow your mind at this time of year.

If you have an Iranian mate, take them with you so the menu will be a little less daunting if you’ve never been. Or just suck it and see by ordering specials and talking to the staff. Don’t forget a side order of paneer cheese with herbs, and finish with falloudeh, a kind of sorbet with rice noodles in it. You squeeze fresh lime over the top and it’s the best way to finish anything, ever.

And that’s your lot. Bon appetit, my friends.

X eddy

Last week Eddy wrote about Snow Patrol. This week he tackles another band who can, shall we say, rub people up the wrong way. With their new album just released, Coldplay hate is back on the up. But, asks Eddy, why do bands like Snow Patrol and Coldplay attract such strong negative reactions? Are people genuinely that offended by the music they create, or is there some other reason for this bile?

Funny that after last week’s piece about the early days of Snow Patrol (thank you very much for all the positive comments on that!), I ended up watching ‘Later… with Jools Holland’, which was last week book ended by Coldplay, and I was reminded of a nice little story involving Chris Martin and Co.

It was the year 2000, and I’d just got what would be my last properly salaried job, Head Of Programming for Done & Dusted, a fantastic production company specialising in huge, televised gigs from Robbie Williams to The Prodigy. They wanted me to come up with ideas for quirky, edgy TV music shows and pilot them on the web, which was just starting to catch on in those days. One of the numerous things we piloted online was a music and entertainment show that was made entirely in my flat.

One of the strands of this show was to get bands in to be interviewed on the sofa in my sitting room (the same scuzzy orange one that Gary Lightbody sat on in last week’s anecdote) and to play a live version of one of their songs, but only with the instruments they found in that room. These included my Takamine acoustic guitar, my tiny Pignose electric guitar with a speaker in the body, and various Fisher Price baby instruments that belonged to my son Tone, then only few months old, such as a tiny one and a half octave ‘piano’, a kazoo, and a blue ‘shaky egg’ shaker.

The basic idea was that a band would be invited to my flat, I’d make them tea or coffee, and they’d bring biscuits. Them bringing the biscuits, we thought, would get the interview started – my theory was, and still is, that you can tell a lot about a person simply by what biscuits they choose. We needed to make a pilot edition, so we booked a band we liked, who’d had an independent single out and had just signed to EMI, but who were still waiting to have that elusive hit. That band was Coldplay.

The TV crew brought with them so many lights that my little flat turned into a blinding electronic alien womb, covered in cables. I think I’m still paying the electric bill from that day. The band turned up with nice manager Phil, and apologised for the absence of one, it was their drummer, Will Champion, who had tragically just lost one of his parents that week. But the rest of them were there, all smiles and wonder, the novelty of it all still reflected in their wide eyes.

Chris was slack jawed and looked around, like a kid who’d just been let into the Cadbury’s factory. His blazing eyes came to rest on the one side of the entire room that was covered, floor to ceiling, in CDs and vinyl. Then he looked at my decks and mixer set up, on a mad bit of furniture I’d inherited from my MTV days. He looked at me and said almost the same thing that Mike Myers said in ‘Wayne’s World’ when he saw Rob Lowe’s flat. Something like, “I’m so gonna get a place like this when I move out of my parents’ house!”

The band sat down, I made a round of hotties and the interview began, with them offering their biscuits to go with the tea. Chris revealed his choice first and handed them over with a big grin. Cadbury’s Boasters. I remarked that this was the choice of a confident man, a quality choice, a buttery biscuit with reassuring chunks of chocolate and nuts. Chris laughed and we all started to gel in the interview.

I can’t remember what guitarist Jonny Buckland whipped out, but Guy Berryman made me hoot when he gingerly handed over a pack of pink wafer biscuits. I obviously ribbed him a bit about that being the most light-loafered biscuit ever and the rest of the band joined in, clearly used to this vein of humour and bass player piss-taking.

I found all three of them delightful and Chris to be charming, erudite, intelligent and both self-aware and self-deprecatory. The interview was a real pleasure and passed off in such a good natured way that when it came time to do the live track, in the absence of Will, they asked me to play the shaky egg.

The song they chose was ‘Yellow’, their next single, a track I was already in love with, and the tune that would prove to be their breakthrough hit. Guy played the bass line on my Takamine, Jonny played that gorgeous bendy-string guitar line on my electric Pignose, which sounded the dog’s bollocks as I recall. Chris played Tone’s tiny piano and I sat on percussion duties with my plastic egg.

When it was all over, Chris shook my hand and said, looking at his manager, then back to me: “That was great, I’m really glad we did this”.

The next time I saw Chris, it was backstage at Glastonbury and he was a fully-fledged popstar with a few hits under his belt, an ascension that has continued and always warmed my heart, thinking back to that eager young guy sitting on my sofa.

I’ve ended up defending Coldplay ever since, to friends, colleagues, girlfriends, total strangers in bars. I can see why they rub people up the wrong way, when I saw them on ‘Later…’, I was reminded that Chris has a way of dancing that brings to mind that mad uncle that every quality wedding has. But still, I find his enthusiasm infectious and he is an undeniably great singer with enviable pitching.

Snow Patrol too have a similar tendency to infuriate people. I’m often shocked how much these bands are such a focus of hatred. “Oh but they’re so mediocre”, the detractors say. “They can’t rock!” Or even, “I’d rather boil my own head than see them play”.

But surely you’d never go and see a band like Coldplay if you wanted to rock. But that doesn’t mean there’s no reason to go and see them at all. Life is a rich and splendid tapestry, with so many shades of colour and texture, why cut one route of entertainment off in favour of another?

I love Snow Patrol AND I love Tool.
I love Coldplay AND I love Deftones.
I love Embrace AND I love Nine Inch Nails.

For some reason, a lot of people seem to find this weird. Or at least that’s what they say. Whatever, the disproportionate hatred that these ‘nice’ bands get still makes me slightly suspicious.

Yes, when bands become successful they always get that much more hate. Yes, some people feel they cannot publicly like a certain band because they feel that band is not cool enough to suit their image or job. Yes, these bands occupy a middle ground, a path of least resistance, and some people don’t like that. But I just get the feeling there’s too much hate out there, and that the negative side of the imbalance doth protest too much.

I think there’s more to this than the simple fact that the universe is in perfect balance. That for everyone who loves something, there is someone who hates that same thing. I truly feel that bands like Coldplay and Snow Patrol act like putting a mirror up to people. It’s not as simple as being the case that nice people like these bands and horrid people don’t. I think it’s deeper than that. Nice bands have some horrid fans, just as noisy, dark bands have some utterly lovely ones.

I read some horridness towards Snow Patrol from Manics bassist Nicky Wire recently. But I know Nicky to be an extremely nice man, very clever and well informed, well read and extremely affable with it. So when Nicky says: “Snow Patrol are the most boring band in Britain”, while I’m no psychologist, it occurs to me that maybe Nicky, deep down, feels bored himself and that the Patrol diss may have been a form of projection.

Bands like these are so utterly nice, and deal in such uplifting melody, and can tackle melancholia with such a beautifully light touch. So, if you take personal feelings about people involved out of the equation, what’s not to like about Coldplay or Snow Patrol? I suspect that most people who say they hate these bands are not hateful people, they are just people who are in some way, deep in their own self, unhappy.

I am both notoriously happy and painfully honest, to the point of annoyance, I’m told. I’m also completely devoid of any sense of coolness. That leaves me free to love any band that reach me on any level. Therefore the sense of unbridled joy I experienced last Thursday night when I saw Snow Patrol live for the first time since they were famous, was intoxicating, as enthralling and mesmeric as the darkest Tool or Nine Inch Nails gig. The flipside of the same coin, if you will.

I’m not trying to convert everyone here. I understand, to the core of my Zoroastrian roots, that some people need to dislike these bands for the universe to work properly. I’m just asking a question, and it’s a question that demands unflinching honesty and self-awareness: Do you truly, honestly, deeply, dislike a band like that because of something in front of you, or do you dislike that band because of something inside you?

X eddy

Everyone has to start out somewhere, and for most people in the music world that somewhere is just this side of the poverty line. How long you stay there, grafting away seven days a week for little return, has very little to do with talent and a lot to do with luck. And even those bands who appear to be “overnight sensations” have often spent months, maybe years, in that waiting zone. But, usually, the really talented people do make it, if they are willing to persist, and except favours where they can. This week, Eddy recalls how he once befriended one such musician, a certain Gary Lightbody, whose story should inspire all the newer artists currently sitting in that waiting area.

We all have our weaknesses. Musical weaknesses that is – artists we love unconditionally which may not quite fit in the genre hole we are more usually associated with. I remember when I was at Radio 1, we sometimes joked about some of our colleagues’ weaknesses – with John Peel it was The Undertones, obviously, while Andy Kershaw’s was Bruce Springsteen. I suppose John Kennedy’s weakness might be Razorlight, but I’ve never broached this subject with him! But everybody, no matter how cool, or how street, has one. Or, in my case, several. Those who know me well will know that my main weakness through the latter part of the 90s was Snow Patrol. I have always loved that band, or, more honestly, that man. Gary Lightbody.

When I first heard their demo, Snow Patrol were called Polar Bear, and my friend Mark Jones (not to be confused with Wall Of Sound MJ) had signed them to his little West London label, Jeepster. Their offices were overlooking the same park I lived on.

Mark was officially the most honest man in the UK record industry, confirmed by a hilarious poll conducted by the now defunct SKY Magazine. They sent a blank demo tape to every major label in the UK and then tracked the responses they got over the next several months, posting the results on a double page spread. Almost every label responded, but some took six months to do so, and in almost every case they received the same stock letter: “Thank you for your demo, we’re sorry but it’s not what we’re looking for at the moment”. Only two labels responded by pointing out that the tape was blank. Out of those two, only one got back within a week. Actually, he got back within 24 hours. That was Mark Jones, then a junior A&R man at Polydor.

Jeepster was a great little label, and Snow Patrol a great little band. I quickly became their number one public fan. Colin Murray liked them too, and I played them to Zane, who also fell in love with them, although he may not admit that publicly now for fear of a knock on his door and a wag of the finger from the Cool Police!

In the early days, I must have seen Snow Patrol play, I don’t know, the lion’s share of 20 times. In every case, I saw them play to a crowd (if you can call that few people ‘a crowd’) of anywhere between five and possibly 75 people. I remember one gig where I was practically alone, in a big student venue in London. Tumbleweed was blowing across the venue and a lone church bell could be heard in the distance, yet even at this gig, with just me and a handful of other people, one or two of whom clearly didn’t know why they were there, I could hear utter brilliance, and untapped and under-appreciated genius. And not just while the songs were playing.

In between every tune, Gary, like a professional stand up comedian, would speak, inform, entertain, cajole and self-deprecate in the most utterly charming way. I remember feeling ashamed that I was on telly every day and he wasn’t. I felt that HE should be presenting my MTV show, and that I was just getting in the way of somebody truly talented.

In the end, through the love and support of many, but particularly the wonderful Jim Chancellor at Fiction Records, and our mutual friend Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee, Snow Patrol made it. And then some. Their third album, ‘Final Straw’, became the indie version of ‘Thriller’, with so many hit singles coming off it that, for a time, Snow Patrol were undeniably the biggest band in the UK. Worldwide success duly followed. Even the doubters and haters couldn’t stop them, it was like a landslide.

And there had been plenty of doubters and haters prior to that album’s success. I recall one hilarious-in-retrospect conversation with Xfm’s then music programmer (the same guy who tried to stop the rise of Kasabian, a story I wrote about in one of the very first Eddy Says columns). I told him how brilliant I thought ‘Final Straw’ was, and how convinced I was it could finally break Snow Patrol as a band. He disagreed, telling me he was unlikely to support the record on daytime Xfm because “Eddy, there are no singles on this album”. Bless him. That is right up there with “The Beatles? Naah, not what we’re looking for at the moment” or “The internet? Don’t think it’ll catch on mate”. Though he went to Radio 1 and is doing very well there.

So, anyway, my weakness became the biggest band in the country. And, as is often the case when little bands I take under my wing have hits, we sort of fell out of touch, but I always followed Gary’s career, and every once in a while we’d meet up at a DJ gig, or he’d get Losers to do a Snow Patrol remix, something I’m massively grateful for.

Every time I heard a new Snow Patrol track on the radio I’d think back to those tumbleweed gigs, or their tiny, rusty, Transit van and the battered gear it contained, and I’d smile broadly with a sense that the universe was working right. And a few times over the years, I will confess to getting a little misty-eyed when I heard yet another massive song of theirs on the radio.

I have more weaknesses now and I’m hoping the same thing will happen to them in the future, but the Patrol have been popping up in my life quite a lot again recently, in random ways. First, out of nowhere, Gary sent me a sweet message saying he’d love to catch up and play me his new album, and hear what Losers were up to, and so that’s what we did. And I can report that the new Snow Patrol album is an epic piece of work. It was recorded in LA, and you can really hear America rubbing off on it, but in a good way. I think it’s the best thing they’ve done since ‘Final Straw’.

And on Sunday, the Patrol entered my consciousness again, in an indirect way. I went for a lovely Sunday lunch and invited a few local muso mates to have a South London convergence, a hook up of like-minded souls. One of them has made one of my favourite albums of this year, another tore the roof off the Remix Bubble in July with a rampant techno set, and the other is a brilliant producer and guitarist in one of my favourite bands. None of them knew each other, with me being the only common thread. At one point, one of them, who I know is really skint, offered to buy me a drink, and I refused. He was slightly offended at first, but I explained to him why via an anecdote, which I’ll share with you now.

I told him that, years ago, I think around 1998-99, Gary Lightbody was sitting on my shitty, dark orange, IKEA sofa, for the umpteenth time, having just eaten a dinner, having a beer and a post-dinner-social-spliff, something most of us partook in back in those days. He looked at me with a pained expression and said: “Eddy, I feel terrible. I’m always coming round here, and being fed by you and your Mrs, always drinking your beer, always rolling your weed, this is just too much, I want to contribute towards all this!”

“Gary”, I reassured him. “What’s happening here is very simple. At this moment in time, I am earning a great deal more than you. I’m not earning very much, but the sad fact is, that at this current point in time, it’s probably more than twice or three times what you’re earning in a year. So I’m not going to let you buy me a drink, or pay for dinner, because one day the tables will turn, and – believe me on this – there will come a day when you will be earning so much more than me, that it isn’t even funny. When that day comes, buy me dinner”. I meant that metaphorically of course – I could have been saying “let me remix one of your records” or “give me a sneak preview of your new album”. With all that in mind, I told my new neighbour that I’d pay for his drink, and his lunch, and one day, he could reciprocate, in some way, same as I told Gary all that time ago.

And then, with Gary and his band so much back in my mind, and again out of the blue, today I got an email from Snow Patrol’s manager asking if I wanted to come and see the band play this Thursday at The Forum. I told her I’d love to go. Then it occurred to me that I’ve never actually seen Snow Patrol play a gig since they became famous. I’m scratching my head and wondering how this could have happened, but there it is. I suppose I got busy having a child, a divorce, a custody battle, building a house, losing a house, gaining custody of a child etc while Gary got busy being an A-listed, globe-trotting musical phenomenon, so I suppose it’s not that surprising I’ve never seen them play since the turn of the millennium.

I’m aware that there are people who read this column who have ‘made it’ and are currently at the top of their respective games. But I know newer artists read this too. And to you guys, and I know it’s a bit of a cheesy story, but I say remember Gary and where he was, for years, before the big time came his way. Keep your head up. Keep doing what you do. Accept favours when they come your way from friends who recognise your talent. And have faith in yourself and don’t give up. You don’t have to make it as big as Gary to be happy, or to be ‘successful’. You could, like me, just get by doing something you really love, and be astonishingly, infectiously and gloriously happy, like I am. Bottom line. Keep the faith. Use the force. One day your ship will come in.

Meanwhile, on Thursday I’ll be seeing Snow Patrol play in front of a comparatively huge crowd. Something I have never, ever seen. I have only ever cried at three gigs, but I suspect that by shortly after 9pm on Thursday night, that number will have crept up to four.

X eddy

After a very, very busy week, presenting and producing no less than three different radio shows, Eddy looks back at some particularly good co-host guests this weekend, a combination that truly demonstrated the ethos of The Remix – a great new(ish) band in Officers and a legend in the form of Adam F. And with co-hosts the topic for the day, Eddy previews some of the guests he’s got lined up for the rest of the year.

Last week was so bursting at the seams that I’m afraid I’ve been remiss with Eddy Says this week. Normally I’d think about it throughout the week and have a topic to write about sorted by now, but the past few days have been extraordinarily occupied.

I had to produce and present a bi-monthly show, called Wired, for Air New Zealand, then plan, produce and present two more, both for Xfm – my usual Remix show, and a further show on Saturday, filling in for an on-leave Mary Anne Hobbs. And, as most of you know, I’m also a single dad with custody of an amazing eleven year old boy. These days he usually stays with his mum at weekends, but this weekend he was with me. So, as you can see, it’s been a bit hectic over the last seven days. Not that I’m complaining, of course!

Some shows really do stand out as extra special. I don’t know what it is, something in the air, the water, the guests, or our collective frames of mind, but some shows I really feel on fire, and last Friday’s show was a particular joy to present. It was great to see Officers and hear them really come of age. They occupy a place in UK music that’s almost unique, a British version of Nine Inch Nails, who come close to the brilliance of their inspiration.

I also felt last Friday’s show really embodied its own ethos – to champion new music and to balance that with the odd legend – and this week it was Adam F who supplied that equilibrium. Hearing him talk as enthusiastically as a teenager about Knife Party making him feel like smashing his studio with a giant axe was a joy to hear. He reminded me of myself, and the proud fact that neither of us, no matter what happens, will ever stop being fanatical music lovers. This is a state of mind I’ve written about here before and will mention again no doubt, it is part of the glue that holds and keeps us together.

Which reminds me, presenting Mary Anne’s show was an equally massive pleasure, not least because that one was done with the help of another brilliant, eclectic and enthusiastic champion of new music, Hervé. Funnily enough, Adam and I had bigged him up not 24 hours previously, then he and I were eyeball to eyeball, sharing music with each other and many of you. Doing Mary Anne’s show was a fantastic chance to delve deeper into electronic music and give some well deserved ‘mainstream’ airtime to artists usually reserved more for night-time. And I must thank True Tiger and CRST for doing mixes for the show, at a moment’s notice.

This is a very long winded way of saying that I haven’t got anything of massive import to say this week, except that – having waxed lyrical about my recent co-host guests on Xfm (all of which you can listen again to right now on the RadioPlayer) – perhaps I could share with you details of some of the co-hosts still to come, because we’ve got some great people booked in. And again, it’s a marvellous and reflective balance of new artists and the odd legend, the star spangled fuel that has kept the home fires of The Remix burning for nearly twelve years.

So, coming up in the next few weeks:

High Contrast – Lincoln is booked to come in next week and provide the sprinkling of legend stardust that has kept us flying for so long.

Ayah Marar – I love Twitter. The other day I was writing Ayah’s name on my playlist for the gajillionth time, then I thought: “Hang on, I wonder if she’s on Twitter”. Two clicks later I’d found her, reminded her we met when Calvin Harris headlined The Remix Stage at Big Reunion a few years ago (she sang ‘Flashback’ from my Album Of The Year at that time, and was part of his live band) and invited her to come in and co-host the show. A matter of minutes later and Ayah and I were conversing, with Paul Pendulum interjecting and publicly throwing love her way, then a plot was hatched and she was booked, within minutes of my first random thought. There are definitely not enough girls that really rock in dance music, and it’ll be awesome to show some support for, and to hang out with, one of our finest.

Shock One – Karl, from Perth, used to be in a metal band with the boys from Pendulum. They’ve known each other since they were kids, and it shows. His music is stunning, and I can’t wait to see what he’ll bring to the table for an hour of Xfm airtime that will probably wake up the dead.

Those guys are all coming in over the next few weeks, then we can look forward to the following, whom I’ve asked to come in, who’ve all said yes, but I’ve not confirmed a date as yet:

Tom Vek: This has been a long time coming. No radio show in the UK has shown the unconditional love for Tom that The Remix on Xfm has over the years. We kept the fires burning while he dropped off everybody’s radar in between the debut and sophomore albums.

MJ Cole: UK garage’s most important and influential producer and someone I have massive admiration for. His first job in music was with a mutual friend, Vini Medley from Sound Of The Underground, who went onto establish Botchit & Scarper and Emotif Records, a trail-blazer of UK future-electronica.

Richard Russell: Boss of XL Recordings and as such one of the most fascinating characters in the UK music industry. He signed The Prodigy right through to Adele and I mentioned him reverentially here in Eddy Says when I wrote about the art of A&R. I can’t wait to meet him and shoot the shit over the Xfm airwaves.

If all these come to fruition this year, then, my gosh, we’ll be all the way through to Christmas, and my Bombs Of The Year show, all so fast that my head is spinning just thinking about that. Then looking forward to another year and the horizon which will bring us next year’s Skrillex, next year’s SBTRKT, or next year’s Nero.

So, there you go, lots to look forward to – and don’t forget, you can hear the Remix on Friday at 10pm, or again on Sunday at the same time, on Xfm, or at anytime during the week via the RadioPlayer. And while I’m hear talking about things to look forward to, don’t forget to spread the word about Brixton Electric and the Get Loaded night every Friday.

They are championing new music there in much the same way as the Remix has, and in the words of Dan Le Sac, who DJed at the launch party: “This place has massive potential, the drinks are so cheap in there, and they’ve got really interesting DJs and new bands, as soon as people realise it’s cheaper to get a pint or a short in there than it is in a local pub, then they’ll see the crowds they deserve”.

This week, reflecting what I’ve said above, is a heady cocktail of new artists topped off by a legend… we have Remix hero Jon Carter playing a Monkey Mafia DJ set. Watching that while clutching a pint that cost you less than your local boozer is my definition of happy days.

And friends of mine don’t even pay to get in, so get in touch via the usual ways, via Twitter or my Facebook pages here and here and let’s give Jon the crowd he deserves.

X Eddy

As our politicians’ summer holiday draws to a close, each of the major parties in turn gets together to talk about how great they are and how well they’re all doing. Last week it was the turn of the Conservatives, who held their conference in Manchester.

Various controversial things were said, but in the music world it was not what was said but rather what was played that set tongues wagging. This week, Eddy asks if it’s right that politicians can align themselves with a piece of music without the songwriter’s knowledge.

So, another year, another Tory conference, one of those things that I’d never normally pay any attention to. The words ‘Tory Party Conference’ have the same lure, the same attractiveness for me as ‘Hitler Appreciation Social’ or ‘Jehovah’s Witness Cheese And Wine Evening’. But last week, on Wednesday night, while working on my playlist for Friday’s show and farting about on Twitter, I saw ‘New Radicals’ trending. Now, I’m on record as saying that ‘You Only Get What You Give’ is an example of pop songwriting perfection, so I had a look. It turned out the Tory party had used the track at their conference, one of that shower of bastards walked on, or off, stage to it.

My first thought was one of utter horror, like my mojo had been sucked out. If this tune is now associated with the Tory bell-ends, I can’t play it when I DJ any more. It’s been the personal highlight of many a ‘wedding set’ at a festival, so I was dismayed.

Then I saw Primal Scream trending, seemingly for the same reason. Had a Tory really taken to the stage to the sound of ‘Rocks’? Surely not. Well, as it happened, no they hadn’t, someone (not The Primals, they’re even less likely to be watching a Tory Conference than me, unless, perhaps, a bomb had exploded there) had got it wrong. Though, so eager were the band to distance themselves from any association with Cameron and his chronies, they’d issued a disgusted statement before that fact became clear. In the end it turned out to be The Dandy Warhols that had been usurped by the Tories, to add a little glamour to the most dull event of the British year.

While seeing this all unfold on Twitter made my evening that much more entertaining, there’s a back-story to all this that perplexes me greatly.

First, the Conservative Party doesn’t need to get permission before using any songs at their events. They can ruin tracks like ‘You Only Get What You Give’ for a whole generation without even giving the artist a heads up. This is because music played at a party political conference is covered by the same ‘blanket licence’ as a football match, shopping centre or local pub. All those organisations need a licence from two separate rights bodies in order to play music – PPL and PRS – so money exchanges hands, but they don’t need to get permission from any one artist or songwriter before using their music.

In most scenarios this is sensible – and it’s a similar blanket licence which means I don’t have to phone every single artist for permission before I play their records on Xfm, but at the same time I know they’ll get some pennies (or pounds) from the station’s owners for gloriously filling some of our airtime. But surely it’s different if its a political party using a track? I mean, if McDonalds wanted to use a New Radicals song in an advert there’s no blanket licence that can help them, they’d have to ask the band’s record label, music publisher and – assuming they’d got a decent record and publishing contract – the band themselves. But for many artists being played at the Tories’ big bash – on live TV in front of the world – is worse even than being synced into a McDonalds ad. Surely the blanket licensing rules should be changed?

Though, and this brings me to my second even more worrying point, would that change have actually rescued New Radicals and the Dandy Warhols? Possibly not, because I have a suspicion the Tories did actually ask the two bands’ record companies before using their songs, even though copyright law says they don’t have to. Possibly because they are aware nearly every band in the world is likely to take to Twitter or Facebook and point out all the Conservative Party’s many flaws if their music is used without advance warning.

The reason I suspect this is because I was once on tour with (one of my favourite bands) Delays, several years ago, and on day two a message came through from their manager to the effect that Tory Reichstag had called asking for permission to use their sublime track ‘Wanderlust’ at their conference that year. The band, who have staunch socialist roots, all howled “no fucking way” in unison. But I said: “Hang on a minute… why don’t you say yes, but only for the part of the song that goes ‘you don’t listen’”. And amid the howls of happy laughter that’s what was relayed to management and hopefully to the Clearance-Oberst who’d made the request.

So if Delays were asked then, why wouldn’t Gregg Alexander of New Radicals and Courtney Taylor-Taylor of the Dandy Warhols be asked now? Did both these artists give the all clear when they got a phone call from their manager telling them the British equivalent of the Tea Party brigade wanted to use their songs at a big televised party? Or is it more likely that the record companies who released these two records – both multi-national majors, unlike the London-based indie Delays were signed to at the time – chose not to pass on the message, instead looking forward to the few pounds in royalties they could expect to receive from Cameron and his mates?

We know for certain Taylor-Taylor had no idea his song was being used, because – again thanks to Twitter – he soon discovered what had happened and responded via his website. He was disgusted, as I’m sure 99% of the people reading this would have been had their song been hijacked without their permission by an organisation that you would not cross the street to piss on if its members were collectively on fire. Yet Courtney isn’t the first and won’t be the last to experience such disgust, when the system allows political parties to use songs at events without specific permission, and when – even if the parties do approach the major music companies who distribute a song – said companies give the green light without consulting their artists and songwriters.

So we’re relying on politicians and major music companies here, what are we to do? Except, hang on, what about the BBC? Because the cursory thumbs up we are assuming Tory HQ was given by the New Radicals and Dandy Warhols’ labels or publishers only applied to the room where the conference was taking place. But the association the wider public then makes between the song and the Tories comes about because the conference is filmed, by the BBC, and that footage is broadcast, in prime time, to a massive audience via BBC News. TV in the UK is also covered by a blanket licence, so under law the BBC only has to fill in a few PPL and PRS forms after the fact, and pass a few pounds over to the collecting societies. But – when unfair political association is involved – couldn’t and shouldn’t they do a check with the artists first?

All in all, a right little comedy of errors. Perhaps there’s nothing we can really do about this – or, more to the point, any campaign that involved getting Tories, major labels and BBC bigwigs on side possibly isn’t worth pursuing, but I’m just shining a little light on it now, just in case there are any people out there who think that Courtney Taylor-Taylor or his band The Dandy Warhols (or Gregg from New Radicals) would ever condone such a rampant abuse of their music by a political organisation.

The only up side of all this is that it gives great artists like Courtney the opportunity to issue statements like the one he posted last week, and which I’ve included in its entirity below. I have to say I adore the guy, we got on like a house on fire the numerous times I interviewed him or his band on TV and radio in the late 90s and early noughties, and I admire the fact that he’s an artist that is zen enough to be impartial, balanced and never take a side. I’m not strong enough to do that.

eddy X

Take it away Courtney:

WTF? Where do I bitch about this? I’ll tear their fuggin heads off. Well maybe not but this happened to us in an Arkansas gubernatorial race and it makes me super angry. And then I wanna puke.

Why don’t these assholes have right-wing bands make them some right-wing music for their right-wing jerk off politics? Oh, because right wing people aren’t creative, visionary or any fun to be around. Nor are they productive or even introspective about it. Wait, I live in Portland, Oregon… neither are left-wingers come to think of it.

Jesus, I tend to really dislike ANY people who take sides in politics. It is the single greatest contributor to getting nothing done. Fuck “politics”. What a joke. I give my charitable donations to people who get on a plane themselves and go to Haiti or Africa and help other people. Do you? NEVER to a political machine. I like to get shit done. You do too.

Fuck, now I’m pissed off.

Courtney Taylor-Taylor

We’re used to Welsh people now. They’re all over the place these days. Eddy Temple-Morris is one. As is that Steve Jones fella. You remember him, don’t you? Off of the ‘T4’. Wandering around, looking all buff with his silky Welsh tones drifting about the place. Not any more though. Not now he’s gone to America to present ‘X-Factor USA’. Americans don’t want Welsh Steve, they want British Steve, who walks about looking all buff with his Welsh tones jostling for position with some other voice not his own.

I don’t normally watch ‘X-Factor’. Like Stephen Fry, I find the emotions it exploits – awkwardness and embarrassment – over-rated as entertainment vehicles. But last Saturday night, before I left for a 1-3am DJ set in London, I was forced to switch on the US version of the show after seeing Steve Jones trending on Twitter.

Among some tweets that were just a massive release of hormones, and a sizable number along the lines of “this guy is going to annoy me”, the vast majority all said the same thing: “What happened to Steve Jones’ voice?!” Somebody in the Jones camp has obviously stuck their oar in and encouraged Steve to lose his Welsh accent as he moves to American TV, which is a crying shame, because he’s clearly struggling as a result, adding to an already awkward situation with a voice that he seems to have borrowed off somebody else.

I know Steve from years back, when we both worked at the marvellously named Pop Factory in South Wales. The former fizzy pop factory, where they had once made drinks like Corona Fizzy Orange and Dandelion & Burdock, was enterprisingly converted into a TV production facility by a brilliant producer/director called Emyr Afan, who I’d worked with before. Emyr made use of European and UK governmental funding to help launch a creative oasis in a relative desert, the Rhondda Valley in South Wales. While there, I presented two series of a great little show called ‘This Way Up’ on ITV1 Wales, the show on which I had that excruciating experience with Muse.

Emyr was not only great at seeing the potential for development in an area crying out for it, he was also very canny at spotting talent and giving it the chance to develop. The other two presenters working at The Pop Factory at that time were Steve Jones, possibly the best looking man ever to grace a cathode ray tube (or Liquid Crystal Display), and the magnificently over-endowed Alex Jones, now of ‘The One Show’.

Steve was, in those days, so young, so naïve, so buttock clenchingly thick, but so lovely with it, that you wouldn’t want him any other way. He really was one of the nicest guys you could ever hope to meet, and the fact that he could only dream of beating anyone over the age of eleven at Scrabble only made him more lovable. Somehow, being super intelligent just wouldn’t be fair with Steve, he’s just too good looking, as if the gods who were giving out looks asked him to skip the brains queue and stay for a triple helping of what they had to offer.

So, anyway, back to last Saturday night, and the curious case of Steve’s missing voice. The poor boy has obviously been leant on by someone, because you can bet your bottom dollar this wasn’t Steve’s idea. So WHY do you think they did this?

Could it be that in the wake of Cole-gate, the show’s broadcaster Fox is paranoid about alienating US audiences who are unable to understand a regional British accent? If so, they’re doing themselves and Steve a disservice. Because while Cole’s Geordie twang might take a little getting used to for those not already familiar with it, the Welsh accent only makes words easier to understand. It’s a very well pronounced variety of the English tongue, probably the easiest to understand of any.

Of course we’ve already been through all this, and out the other side, here in the UK. Many decades ago regional accents were simply not allowed on TV. Everybody had to speak like Harry Enfield’s hilarious character, Mr Cholmondley-Warner (pron. Chumley-Warner). By the noughties, things had swung to the other extreme, and posh accents got no voiceover work at all, you had to speak like the dude who does ‘Big Brother’ – “Porl, Jern and Meyk oor in tha smerking aaairea…”

That said, as voices moved from posh to regional on British telly, in the 1990s probably, it did sometimes feel like the Welsh accent was the one being left behind. Perhaps that was linked to the fact people from Wales were increasingly the victims of what I call ‘internal racism’ within England. Because, of course, in the UK the bias against regional accents was never to do with whether or not people could understand what was being said, but was more about the preconception viewers – and TV bosses – would form about someone based simply on how they spoke.

When I was growing up it was the Irish who were the butt of every joke in England, which I found mystifying. Without the Irish, things would be very different in this country. For starters we’d all be speaking French now if it wasn’t for Arthur Wellesley, The Duke Of Wellington. His victory over Napoleon at Waterloo insured English independence, yet the history books (written mostly by English men) seem to conveniently gloss over the fact he was Irish. But as Ireland gentrified through the 1980′s the pisstake-pendulum swung over the Irish Sea and seemed to get stuck over Cardigan Bay.

I was born in Cardiff, and my great uncles, on my father’s side, played rugby for Wales. As a person of Welsh heritage I’ve long sensed an undercurrent of ‘internal racism’ against the Welsh. And up until the marvellous Huw Edwards first read the BBC Six O’Clock News in 1999, there were no Welsh voices in the mainstream public eye. The last flirtation the UK had had with a Welshman was fairly disastrous. Poor Neil Kinnock, both Welsh AND ginger. He may as well have publicly poured petrol over himself and struck a match.

Things do seem to have got better recently, with Huw getting the most coveted news reading position in the country on the BBC News At Ten, and the aforementioned Alex Jones being groomed for chat show stardom via morning TV. But this Steve Jones thing has got me thinking about this all over again. I really do hope the edict for Steve to adopt a more neutral voice on American TV didn’t come from the UK-end of the ‘X-Factor’ operation, from some English person deciding that the Welsh accent sounds too stupid for a US audience. Did Simon Cowell stand there, with his daft flat-top hair and trousers pulled up to his hideous moobs, and tell the most gorgeous man on TV to lose the Welsh accent?

And even if the ruling did come from US TV bosses, while that might be less surprising, it’s still a stupid rule. With an increasing number of British TV presenters popping up on shows over there, surely even American viewers would welcome a bit of variety in how those people speak. Though, I suppose, the decision – whoever made it – has had an upside for the all new ‘X-Factor USA’ on this side of the Atlantic. Because Steve’s attempts to cover his natural accent sound so ridiculous at times, everyone is talking about it, and therefore the show. To the extent that even I ended up watching a bit of the programme. And I even heard my marvellous Xfm colleague Dan O’Connell talking about Steve’s voice, and its unknown whereabouts, last week.

But if this is a battle that can’t be won, if all British TV presenters are going to be asked to neutralise their accents if they want to work in the States, no matter how bizarre it makes them sound, well here’s an idea: why not just make them all do their best New York private detective impression and be done with it? Or maybe, for international promotional purposes, all Brits – you and me included – should have to mask their true voices.

And then we could swing back right the other way and have Mr Cholmondley-Warner presenting every show on TV… “Helloo, end hwelcome to thee ‘Hex-Fector’, en engaging end edifying televisual progrum thet discarvers telent in the most hunlikely uf pleeces”.

You know, come to think of it, I’d watch that.

X eddy

Live TV is an unpredictable thing. Sure, you can plan things to an extent, but once the camera is rolling no one really knows what might occur to knock things off course. Though, actually, this is not a tale of a live TV broadcast going wrong, as such. The broadcast itself went off without any obvious hitches. It’s just that two minutes from the end, the presenter, a Mr Eddy Temple-Morris, quietly broke his neck.

Whenever I’m tired, stressed, or hold my neck still for any length of time, I can hear it crunch when I move my head. It’s horrible, off-putting, and really annoying – calcium rubbing against calcium – but how it happened is so bizarre, it sounds like it was written for a sitcom.

The year was 1998, and Alton Towers had approached MTV with an idea to broadcast my show, ‘Up For It’, live from the park, in celebration of its latest, greatest ride, Oblivion. They wanted me to be the first person to ride this thrilling new rollercoaster, and to do it live on the telly. It sounded like fun to me; I relished the change in normal routine, and have always been a fan of outside broadcasts in general.

After Zane Lowe (my sidekick in those days), producer Paul and I had gone through how we planned to tackle this ride televisually, and how we were going to fill two hours of live TV with, essentially, a two minute ride, I found a quiet spot to work on the script.

We’d decided to build the whole show up to the ride, and to have us all, the whole team, get on Oblivion for the last shot of the show. The Production Manager at the time approached me holding a bright orange beanie hat with the Oblivion logo front and centre. He said that the Alton Towers’ people wanted me to wear this hat on the ride, at the end of the programme. I was busy writing, so didn’t give it much thought and just said “yeah, OK”, and when it came time for the ride, I put it on, as requested.

Now would be a good time to explain, for those who’ve never been on it, how Oblivion works: Your seat is winched up high, over 100 feet above the ground, then you are pivoted forward, so you face downwards, looking at a big tunnel below you, then you are dropped. The almost freefall rollercoaster accelerates very quickly to around 70mph, hurtles into the tunnel, then banks up and to the left, as I recall from my one and only ride.

I loved rollercoasters, I still do, so I was properly excited and happy to be going on this ride. Zane and I did our job of building the excitement up to a crescendo at the tail of the show. When the time came we all rushed up excitedly to the embarkation point, cameras following us all the while, for our thrilling ride and the climax of the show. I’d put the promotional beanie hat on, and I was ready to roll.

We sat down. We were lashed down. Then it began. I was wild eyed with excitement and the smile I wore threatened to rupture my cheeks. Somewhere, somebody pushed a button and we were released over the Staffordshire countryside.

The couple of seconds of almost freefalling were breathtaking. Then, as we hurtled towards the massive hole in the ground and the coaster reached its terminal velocity, the inevitable happened: My hat blew off. No, not my hat, the hat they suggested I wear. Of course it did. I was face first at 70mph. Only superglue or a chin-strap would keep a hat on anyone at 70mph.

So, I did what anybody would do in the split second after realising their hat had blown off. Imagine it. I thought ‘fuck!’ and looked up, involuntarily. At that precise moment the rollercaster bottomed out and banked sharply. The G-force at this moment was stupendous as the carriage suddenly whipped upward, transferring all that energy to my neck.

It was all over so quickly. The show was still live and as we pulled into the terminus the cameras were still rolling for the goodbye link, a very quick one, which I did ably, still buzzing on the double adrenal rush of both live TV and a joyfully exciting rollercoaster ride.

As soon as the red light went off on the camera, I stood up and started to feel really strange. I remember Huse, one of the team, and Zane, saying: “Come on Eddy, let’s go again!” Their smiles were broad and their eyes were on fire.

Before we’d gone on the ride, I couldn’t wait, and was totally up for going as many times as I could get away with, but at that precise moment, as the boys asked me that normally rhetorical question “go again?”, I remember feeling puzzled, really bizarre, and distracted. I said “No…” in an oddly distant way, and let the crew hoop off back onto the ride.

I walked away, in a kind of trance, handed my microphone back to the sound guy and just walked away, all I knew was that I had to get home. That was my only thought. Later I would discover that at this point I was in shock, but at the time all I knew was I wanted the safety of home as soon as I could get there. I didn’t say goodbye to anyone, I just left, stunned, dazed and a little confused. I drove silently down the motorway, keeping my head and neck very still, and got home. In those days I would have smoked a spliff and then gone to bed.

When I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t move. I was, literally, paralysed. This was now becoming very scary. My legs worked fine but the whole top half of my body was petrified. I somehow got out of bed, into a cab and off to St Marys Paddington A&E, where they gave me an X-ray and, after a quick look, said my neck was not actually broken but that I had horrible whiplash. They gave me some drugs to make me feel better. They didn’t make me feel bette. So I ended up going to a private spine specialist to get a second opinion.

He took four X-rays, one from each quadrant, and examined them closely. One shot, taken from the side, revealed what had happened. The whiplash was so bad that the ‘fin’ at the rear of my spine, at the point they call C7, had smashed into the one next to it, and the tip had broken off. So my neck was broken, just not all the way through, thankfully. It took a long time to get functioning properly again, years even, and to this day, it’s still not really better, and never will be – that crunching sound when I move my neck comes and goes depending on how I use it.

I spent over £5,000 on physical therapy at the time to get back to a level of normality. It was a lot of money, and the specialist treating me suggested I sue MTV to get my money back, on the grounds that their Production Manager had been negligent in making me wear that hat without any thought for the consequences. So that’s what I did, with a recommended law firm, comically named Reid Minty.

As it happened the lawyers’ name was rather apt, as the whole situation became a little bit ridiculous. In this scenario, in America let’s say, I would have expected a six or even seven figure sum. Unfortunately for me, the way the British system works is loaded in favour of the corporate defendants, in this case MTV and Alton Towers, who teamed up to fight me. Because I had gone home straight away, and not reported my accident to anyone on site, they argued that I must have left Alton Towers fit and well and then broken my neck at home, or perhaps, they said, on the way home in an unreported car accident!

The fact that neither MTV nor Alton Towers had ever made me aware of any health and safety person, or office, to report my injuries too was irrelevant. It was astonishing, but my lawyer advised me that I could actually LOSE the case and should therefore settle out of court. I was gobsmacked at how hideously unfair it was looking.

There were two possible settlements. One of a more substantial sum, with my not being able to say anything to anyone about the case, or a payment of around £30,000 but with no gagging order. They took the second option. My legal costs were £25,000 and my medical costs were a little over £5000, so I came out with less than nothing in the end. Just this painful and expensive story, and the legal right to be able to tell it to whomever I choose.

In retrospect I should have gone to court, I think. We never made it there, but I’ve been to court six times since, facing the same scenario, ie where my opponents were lying to the judge and I just wanted the truth to come out. I’ve found all the courts and judges I’ve faced to be exactly how they should be, great at getting the truth out. And all six times I’ve won.

The last two times I even represented myself, because my solicitors had already taken all my savings with their fees. Which is possibly the conclusion to all this, and pretty much every story that involves the legal profession and having your day in court: Whatever you fight over, there is only one winner. The lawyer.

X eddy

Everyone loves a bit of rivalry. So much so that lines are often drawn on the most ridiculous and arbitrary of terms. In London, East hates West and North hates South. That’s just the way it is, and Londoners on any one side can give you endless reasons why those who live at the opposite end of the compass are terrible people who live in awful surroundings. So, in the spirit of promoting togetherness in the capital, Eddy invites you, wherever you’re from, to join him at his new club night in Brixton.

Are you North or are you South? Are you left bank or right bank? These geographical dividing points are so definite, so defining, and the tribal boundaries they mark run oh-so-deep.

I grew up a North West Londoner, first in Notting Hill, back when it was rough, in the late 60s and early 70s, then Hampstead, before it went really posh. After that, I’ve lived, over the years, in places as diverse as Fulham, Angel, W10, Brockley, Archway and Balham.

The first flat I bought was in Westbourne Park, where I spent a happy decade on one of the most infamous sprawls in West London, The Trellick Estate. Even under constant threat by car burning London-Irish hoodies, I mostly loved it. And, more to the point, in those days I felt mildly threatened every time I had to go to South London.

“Oh no, not Brixton Academy again…”

Whenever something happened south of the river that meant myself or any of my mates had to cross the water, eyes would roll. We would cross the Thames with fear and trepidation, our knuckles white around our steering wheels or handlebars.

My next move was disastrous. I moved into North London and bought a flat in Archway, to be closer to my girlfriend, two streets away, then we split up the week after I moved in.

To compound the awkwardness of living two streets away from your ex and driving past her flat every day, I was unlucky enough to move in above the most horrid neighbour you could ever imagine. Proper neighbour from hell stuff. Yet my fear of South London was still overriding, even though I started regularly hanging out, and going out, in and around Clapham and Brixton the following year.

So much so that when I finally did move south of the river, it wasn’t because the area had any lure, it was for one simple reason: schooling. My overriding concern by this time was Tone, my gorgeous eleven year old boy, of whom I have what used to be termed ‘custody’, after an acrimonious and buttock clenchingly expensive court battle. The school he went to in Archway, deemed “outstanding” by the government inspectors, was teaching bible parables as history, and brainwashing its kids into thinking that, for example, Adam and Eve were the first actual people on earth.

This sickened us both and I started looking and asking around about schools in other neighbourhoods. My quest lead me to Clapham Manor School and, to cut a long story short, Tone ended up there, and soon became happy, focussed and engaged. He had a blinding last year and a half of primary school, under an amazing staff.

During this time I’ve fallen in love with South London. All of the xenophobic feeling I had, instilled into me over the years by North and West Londoners, vaporised over a short time. My prejudices were all unfounded and my fears unwarranted. I personally found Brixton, Clapham and that area around Brockwell Park to be my favourite place to live of all the places I’ve ever lived.

I found the landscape greener, and I’ve found people to be so friendly that I’m now cursing all those people that misinformed me, and I regret the fear I had of the Sexy South. I feel like I’ve been missing out on some kind of secret for years. I’ve laughed inwardly that the prejudice and misinformation might actually originate from South Londoners who don’t want the secret to get out.

I’ve just come out of the most stressful period of my life, moving to a catchment area the size of a postage stamp to get Tone considered for a place at a really good secondary school. We’ve now settled, very happily, in Herne Hill/North Dulwich and are charmed by Brockwell Park, Dulwich Village, Sydenham Woods, and I really ‘get’ Brixton now.

I’m not getting all evangelical about it, this is just a personal thing. The Sexy South is, for me, by far the nicest place to live of all the neighbourhoods I’ve lived in. And over the years, that’s a lot of hoods. I’m not saying all you North Londoners should move South – many of my favourite places and people remain north of the River Thames – I’m just saying don’t believe the geo-haters that spread propaganda and misinformation about South London. Keep an open mind and don’t be afraid to come down and hang out – that alone changed my life for the better.

Which brings me neatly and happily to the main point of this piece: the return of Remix Night. It’s happening. But it’s not called Remix Night for this incarnation. I’ve been asked to be resident at an exciting new WEEKLY night in October, and it’s right on my new doorstep: The Fridge in Brixton.

You may have read that this legendary London venue is reopening its doors under the new name of Electric Brixton, after being lovingly restored to its Victorian glory, with a mission statement to fill the gap vacated by The Astoria.

Friday nights at Electric, from October, will be taken over by Get Loaded, the team who brought you The Gallery at Turnmills, and who went on to launch Get Loaded In The Park (on Clapham Common), Get Loaded In The Dark (that brilliant New Years Eve night at Brixton Academy) and The SW4 Weekender that saw Pendulum lock horns with Tiesto, also on Clapham Common. The point is, they have become something of a South London brand and, now I’m a South London resident, I’m doubly delighted to have been asked to do this. We’ll be entertaining some of our favourite DJs, producers and bands over the next few months, while we see if a night like this, at a venue that holds 1500, can work somewhere like Brixton.

We’re keeping ticket prices low, and pledging support to lots of new bands and upcoming DJ producers. We’ll be recording sets, for those that want that, and playing key tracks on The Remix on Xfm, as ‘live tracks’. I’ll even do my show live from there once in a while.

Logistically, it works out fine, as I always finish my show at 1am (the last hour is always pre-recorded) so I can play the last set from 1.30-ish til 3am each week.

I’ve had so many emails and tweets asking when the clubnight is starting again. So, I wanted to write about it here to let you all know. But I’ve put it in the context of this Naughty North vs Sexy South piece, because I don’t want anyone to feel as though they can’t come because it’s in Brixton. The Victoria line is bullet train quick and there are loads of nightbuses too. Plus it’s actually surprisingly central – it’s a stone’s throw to Elephant And Castle and therefore Shoreditch, my old clubnight stomping ground, is really a lot closer than I’d ever imagined.

So, there you go. New club night, every Friday. And I don’t ever want to hear any North Londoners saying: “Brixton… aaaaah no, I can’t be arsed to go to South London”. Brixton is a fantastic place, and I think the relaunched Fridge will really help cement the neighbourhood as one of London’s best, most vibrant and beloved entertainment hubs.

X eddy

Get Loaded at Electric Brixton (formerly The Fridge)

7 Oct (launch night): Shake Aletti (live), Dan Le Sac, Foamo, Eddy Temple-Morris
14 Oct: Retro/Grade (DJ set), Eddy Temple-Morris
21 Oct: Kry Wolf, Monkey Mafia (DJ set), Eddy Temple-Morris
28 Oct: Tropics (live), Disclosure (live), Duffstep (live AV show), Eddy Temple-Morris

Tickets: £6 before 11.30pm, £8 after 11.30pm, £5 NUS

This week, Eddy Temple-Morris asks when and why it became acceptable to mock people simply for the colour of their hair. Can we trace back through history to the exact point in time when the strawberry blonde, the auburn, the, well, ginger people of the world started to be picked on? And are we on the verge of a world where, as in Victorian England, to be flame-haired is considered the height of cool?

I emerged from the Charing Cross Road exit of Leicester Square station, as usual, at around 11.45am one Thursday, to record the last hour of my show, when I was effectively hit by a lightning bolt. I saw a girl so beautiful, so utterly bewitching that I was stopped in my tracks. My jaw slackened and, in an uncharacteristic way, I just stood and stared. My body froze and only my neck swivelled as she crossed the street and sashayed into China Town.

She was the most gorgeous specimen of human being I’ve laid eyes on for years, dressed in black, like a James Bond girl, with fairy tale length hair swishing in the light breeze, and the hair, was bright, flamboyant, unmistakably, undeniably, ginger.

Other people were gobsmacked, too. I could see other guys’ necks swivelling in her direction. But if it had been a man, I thought, it would only be a matter of time before somebody shouted “GIIINGERRRRRRR!” at him.

Having this astonishing looking woman cross my path illuminated the ridiculousness of the whole ‘ginger’ thing. My mind went back to school days, and a poor, unfortunate kid called Steve, who was ridiculed for the simple fact that his hair was red. I got to thinking, when did it become OK to take the piss out of ginger people in that way? If it were for skin colour it would be called racism. Was there a point in history, a line after which this became acceptable?

At the same school where poor Steve was ridiculed with names like ‘copper-knob’, I studied history of art. During my studies I was taught about the British Victorian art movement, The Pre-Raphaelites, and loved a lot of what I saw from that collective. They almost worshipped red hair, their paintings were romantic, and often featured willowy, pale and beautiful women much like the girl I’d seen that day, all of whom were depicted with ginger hair.

The Pre-Raphaelites connected with society at the time and their paintings became the height of trendiness. In other words, just over a hundred years ago, being ginger was considered not only very cool, but the absolute zenith of beauty.

So, given these Pre-Raphaelite women were the paragon of loveliness, I was interested to know what went wrong, when and why? I did a little digging around, and still haven’t really found a definitive answer, but discovered some interesting things along the way.

Some historians trace ginger bashing to Roman times, and the Empire’s loathing of the people north of Hadrian’s Wall. Others find that hard to swallow and instead trace the gingerism, probably more plausibly, to the beginnings of Jacobite England, when (ironically the most famous ginger) monarch Liz The First died childless, making James VI of Scotland the King of England. No surprise, some of the English resented this unfortunately wispy haired ginger man from north of the border.

Still, I very much doubt that a flame-haired man, or woman, walking down an average high street would have incurred the now familiar sing-song taunt of ‘GINNNGE-ER-RRRRRR!’ from a random passer by on an ox-drawn cart.

Hundreds of years later, and the First World War, ‘Ginger’ was a totally innocent name for some men. The interesting thing was the absence of malice at this point. It was just a name, like ‘Chalkie’ for somebody who’s surname was White or ‘Lofty’ for someone tall.

The point at which malice entered the equation, according to a swift poll I conducted on Facebook, was the mid 1970s. That was the earliest anybody I know could remember that it was acceptable to take the piss, in a more cruel way, out of people with red hair.

The current state of play doesn’t look good for gingers, from Catherine Tate’s hilarious Russett Lodge sketch, to South Park’s typically unashamed announcement that ginger people have no soul, which gave rise to one of the internet’s funniest over-reactions, to more recent and twisted MIA video. And all this even though some of the coolest people in the world are ginger!

I wonder if Josh Homme, from Queen’s Of The Stone Age has ever been shouted at in the street? Or Damian Lewis, the blisteringly cool British actor most famous for his brilliantly authentic portrayal of an American platoon commander in ‘Band Of Brothers’. I talked to ginger friends and colleagues about it. Interestingly, many of them, including Photek, one of the coolest producers to ever push a fader, suggested the piss-taking had made them stronger, more resilient, or even more rebellious.

History proves these things to be cyclical, so if you’re a ginger-hater, careful, because the wheel could be close to turning full circle.

As the Labour Party rebranded ‘New Labour’ in the 90s, I can see the dawning of a ‘New Ginger’ movement, where people’s perceptions will shift and the possession of red hair will no longer be a handicap but a benefit. In fact, the backlash has already begun, thanks to Tim Minchin.

But I think there’s an even better candidate for the figurehead of such a movement. Someone younger, who can lead simply by being effortlessly cool. That person is on X-posure with John Kennedy tonight on Xfm from 10pm. His name is Ed Sheeran, and he’s been given a day pass from Russet Lodge to go through his debut album track-by-track with my colleague.

Joking aside, I love everything this man has done so far. And you can find out why I think his sound is so exciting by tuning into 104.9FM in London, 97.7FM in Manchester, Sky channel 113, or by logging on to Xfm.co.uk tonight.

X eddy

I do get stopped by people quite regularly. Sometimes in the street, or mostly at gigs, in clubs, or at festivals. It’s always positive, and I always appreciate people reaching out and letting me know how they feel about me or my show (or even this column – I was massively chuffed to be enthusiastically accosted in Leicester Square by a charming man who ignored all the usual strings to my bow and bigged me up for ‘Eddy Says’ – a first for me).

Amongst the random things I’m told on these occasions, the thing that crops up the most, and I’m utterly delighted every time I hear this, is: “You opened my eyes to dance music” or “I didn’t think I liked dance music til I listened to your show” or “I thought I was a rocker, now I’m a rocking raver!”

You get the picture. I never get bored of hearing this, and there’s something else I keep hearing, not as much as the above, but I do hear it frequently, and I think the two things are definitely linked:

“Big beat turned me on to dance music”.

I hear it again and again, and I find it fascinating. While helping persuade Jon Carter to reform Monkey Mafia, I made a few comments about it on Twitter, and had a deluge of big beat love from so many people, including some real heavy-hitters. The likes of Alex Metric, Hervé, Infadels, DJ Nerm, Pathaan, Tomb Crew and lots more all professed a love for the ‘breezeblock beats’, as we used to call them in the roaring 90s, with a doff of the cap to Pete Tong, who coined that phrase.
I remember being a fresh faced 20-something at Radio 1, loving my rock music and being suspicious of house music in general. In those days I didn’t really see drum n bass as coming under the umbrella phrase ‘dance music’ – it rocked so much that I didn’t consider it part of what was defined as ‘dance music’ back then. At that time, ‘dance’ was largely inhabited, both at the cutting edge, in journalism and in its consumption, by purists. Almost all of these people were part of, or had witnessed first hand, the rave explosion of the late 80s and 90s, and their tastes were locked into that four to the floor kick-drum pattern.

I’d not long arrived back on terra firma after losing my mind at the Manumission closing party, when the previously mentioned Andy Mckay – the man in charge of the back room at the king of all Ibiza clubs – called a meeting to plan what was happening in Manumission’s ‘Music Box’ the following season.

My manager, my promoter and I met up with Andy, and he told us how he loved what I’d done in the back room at that year’s closing party, and what we were doing with Remix Night back in London, getting indie-dance crossover acts to play live and DJ. He wanted to do more and needed a name for it. Straight away I suggested Ibiza Rocks. “Dance Rocks” was the strapline of my Xfm show and the name of my compilation album, and it just seemed like the perfect name for this.

“You can own the island”, I said.

“Hmmm”, came Andy’s reply. “I’m not sure, I have a brand to protect. I think perhaps it should be called ‘Manumission Rocks’”.

“No no no”, I insisted. “Like it or not, Manumission, as a brand, is on the wane with the genre it’s attached to. Here you have a chance to create a new brand to take forwards, that could grow wings and fly on its own!”

“Still not sure”, he said. “Let me have a think about it”.

My manager and promoter both agreed ‘Ibiza Rocks’ as a name was a great idea and said so at that initial meeting. And the next time we met, Andy too said it had grown on him, and he even presented us with some logos he’d had knocked up. Guitars in the shape of the island, that kind of thing. The brilliant plectrum logo still used today came a bit later.

It was agreed that I would ‘host’ the first year, working in tandem with Andy’s office in booking bands and DJs. I’d try to get mates rates to help get things going, and together we’d make this the best year ever in the back room of the greatest club in the world, a club within a club, a brand within a brand.

So, I got on the phone to my mates. There were a few key people I wanted to get involved. Adam Freeland was first on the list, because he’d had a terrible time when he’d played Manumission once before, years previously. Two tunes into his set, the Spanish owner of Privilege, the club where Manumission took place (and not Mike or Claire from Manumission, I must stress) came barrelling up to the booth and exclaimed: “THIS IS NOT HOUSE MUSIC!” To emphasise his point, he jabbed his finger towards the twelve-inch on the turntable as if it was a freshly laid dog turd.

He took the needle off the record and, in front of the stunned crowd and even more stunned superstar DJ, ushered Adam away from the booth, to be replaced by a Spanish resident quick-smart. Adam had never returned to Ibiza. I’m not surprised. He was made to feel as welcome as a pork pie at a bar mitzvah.

Similarly, I wanted Barry Ashworth on board. He had played Ibiza regularly, way back at the start of the island’s notoriety, when things were more ‘Balearic’ and DJs were playing more random good music, with less emphasis on strict 4/4 house.

And, of course, I wanted to involve Zane Lowe as well. I can recall Andy’s eyes lighting up when I mentioned he was my friend and I could hook them up.

So I booked all three of them, along with other friends, like The Freestylers with MC Sirreal, and The Breakfastaz, all Remix Show stalwarts at the time. Meanwhile the Manumission office booked Babyshambles to play the launch party, and some other Remix-friendly acts like Hard Fi and Tom Vek. Summer approached and we were ready to go. All good.

Except, on opening night poor Andy had the look of a man asked to lick his own elbows.

“Eddy”, he gasped. “It’s Pete Doherty… he’s asked for crack and smack ON HIS RIDER! I don’t know what to do, he’s refuses to play unless we come up with… with this stuff”. He scratched his head. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin looking!”

Whether or not he personally succeeded in that hunt I never found out, but someone certainly managed to get hold of the two drugs not generally associated with Ibiza’s party vibe. Later that evening, there was Pete Doherty sucking on a miniature brandy bottle filled with wire wool, the foul, burnt plasticky clouds of crack smoke all around him and his vile cronies. Pete must have learned, presumably the hard way, that it was better not to be in possession of Class A controlled substances and to instead have them stashed with his entourage. Consequently he was being spoon fed lumps of crack by one of his mates.

It was a loathsome scene and it depressed me so much I had to leave. I was the first person, ever, to interview Pete Doherty. The distance between that bright eyed, bushy tailed, sparklingly intelligent teenager and this hollow, washed out shadow of his former self was just too much for me to bear. I ended up a single dad with custody of my son because his mum got into that stuff, the smell of crack just depresses me and makes me feel sick.

The gig was awful. Doherty couldn’t remember his own lyrics, and kept tripping up on his own microphone cable. There was, however, still a palpable feeling of excitement, of the birth of something new and exciting, as well as a turning point in the cultural history of this island – an ‘I was there moment’, as I like to call them.

Conversely, it felt like Pete Doherty was at rock bottom of a downward spiral, and this could be the last gig he played before he was found slumped on a hotel floor, his heart finally having an ‘I’ve had enough of this’ moment. A thousand paparazzi and gutter journalists were presumably delighted that this was not to be, giving them something to snap and write a stream of bollocks about ever since.

But, all that said, that something infamous did kick off a first Ibiza Rocks season full of much happier memories.

For starters, the time when somebody fooled Adam Freeland into eating a space cake. The poor boy lost the plot halfway through his set and I had to finish it for him. He actually got lost in the DJ booth, a space the size of a sofa! At this stage of my life I’d given everything up, even coffee, and my drug of choice to get me through to 9am was a single vodka and Coca-Cola. The enormous hit of caffeine right there would power me through, wide eyed, until breakfast time and even the aftershow on the terrace at Space.

When Barry Ashworth returned, predictably, he ended up staying awake for three days. I kept bumping into him after I’d slept another night, and he’d still be going hard at it with James Lavelle or another of the other ‘big boys’. Baz was in his element and clearly overjoyed to be back in Ibiza. Mid-way through our one-on-one set in the Music Box, I was hunched over my bag, flicking through my vinyl (nice historical yardstick there, I was still using vinyl, but haven’t done for years now) looking for the next tune, when I felt a god awful whack on my back. It gave me a massive shock, knocking the wind out of me. It was Barry. His body had finally given up, mid tune, and he had simply passed out. I finished alone, with a few savvy people in the crowd signalling: “Where’s Barry?”

There was something about that place that turned even the most normally clean living, sensible DJs into monsters with rolling eyes, puking backstage before, during or after their sets. I have some very funny images scorched into my memory from that season. You’d be surprised who fell from grace after being there for a few hours! I should possibly be in the Guinness Book Of Records as the first ever resident of Manumission who got through an entire season without taking any Class A drugs. Even if I wanted to, I was being drug tested in a hideous court room custody battle at that time, and the reason I have custody of Tone is the simple fact that both my annual drugs tests during that period were clean and normal.

All in all, that first season had been a great success, and Ibiza Rocks had arrived. Sadly, and this has happened before, and will happen again, my generosity proved to be my downfall. I noticed the way Andy’s eyes went ‘kerching’ when I first introduced him to Zane. If nothing else, Andy knows which side his bread is buttered, and when it launched for year two, the website had changed from “Ibiza Rocks hosted by Eddy Temple-Morris” to “hosted by Zane Lowe”. I enquired why and it was awkwardly changed to “Zane Lowe and Eddy Temple-Morris”, but I was only booked for two or three shows that year. One of the insiders told me it was Zane’s management (not my biggest fans, shall we say) and Radio 1 who said they wanted Zane in and me out. Of course, Andy knew who was more valuable to him.

No call came at all the next year, so I ended up doing my own night, Dance Rocks, at Es Paradis. My manager showed me a vile email she got from Andy, along the lines of “You can’t use the name ‘Dance Rocks’ – I own the word ‘rocks’ on Ibiza”. My manager reminded him that it was me who’d given him the name in the first place, something I’d done with nothing but love and no strings attached. This possibly made him nervous, as the night was now heavily sponsored and he was in bed with Radio 1; certainly a story went round that he, or someone at NME, had come up with the name. This was odd, as there were two witnesses to my giving it to him, and like I said, I had no agenda. I was at the time totally in love with Manumission and the island of Ibiza, a love affair that has never stopped.

It’s such a massive shame my personal involvement ended so sourly, but I’m glad Ibiza Rocks worked, and that it went from strength to strength, and even more so that Doorly ended up as a resident: he’s one of my favourite DJs and a lovely man. After telling Andy he would “own the island” and encouraging him to start his own brand, I remember showing him pirated Ibiza Rocks t-shirts from San Antonio market. People were already adorning themselves, voluntarily, with his new brand.

So, there you have it, my friends: the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the birth of Ibiza Rocks, my part in it, and the silly reason why I’m never asked to play there any more. It all seems unbelievable looking back, and I know there will be people saying “if you’re nice, you’ll always get fucked over”, but I disagree. I think it’s entirely possible to get through this business with your head held high and with your sleep patterns largely uninterrupted. It’d just be nice if, occasionally, people were less suspicious and just see a person and what they do for what it is.

In the words of my favourite lyricist, Scroobius Pip: “Some people are just nice”.

X eddy