Yo! Would you like an Interview?....No Thanks, I have some Music to listen to...

A good few years ago some friends of The Hat clubbed together and bought him a beautiful black brick with the message “Take That!” inscribed on it. The appeal of this present was not that it predicted the rise of Bland Boy Bands, but that it was made of rubber. Its purpose was simple. You kept it close to hand and threw it, with vim, vigour and vengeance at the television when it was upsetting you. What with The Hat being an excitable feller, this happened quite a lot and my WMD fell apart and sadly was no more - quicker than you could shout 'Bog Off Jeremy Vine'...or 'You Cannot Be Serious!'...

Oh, how I have missed it, my bouncy missile, and particularly lately when watching the BBC coverage at Glastonbury. I'm not talking about the music. What a fabulous festival. A hundred stages and countless artists - where you could click from Seasick Steve and John Paul Jones having a proper good time to the Stones via the Smashing Pumpkins, Chic, Bobby Womack, Billy Bragg and Elvis Costello and dozens of others including Brucie and Kennie. No, I am on about the presenter 'links'. I am sure I am not alone in not expecting very much when a 'presenter' talks to a musician. It does help if they try not to use the words 'awesome' and 'fantastic' in every sentence and that their star-struck besottedness doesn't blind them to the need not to talk about themselves all the time. Yes, yes, I know that there is this desperately important Beeb mission to relate to the audience demograph, but surely it should be possible for the presenters to treat their audience as though they haven't all just stopped off on the way to a part-time-week-end Bieber language course - any more than all viewers spend their evenings collecting interesting pop data and dancing round the kitchen listening to Coldplay....

Above everything else, Glastonbury is a Festival of Music and the Arts and there is far more to it than the Headliners and those lucky groups that the hip BBC staff happen to fancy or are able to pronounce....from young unknown brilliant bands, film, acoustic wizardry, poetry, and burlesque to performance art, street musicians and radical protest. Anyone who has been there or listened to Michael Eavis for more than ten seconds will know that. Interviews? What interviews? Er, the deathly interruptions to some brilliant music to make space for buttock-clenchingly moronic questions ...(How did it feel?/I saw you wore the same hat/ Gosh, I do like a bit of Buddhist monk singing).....you couldn't make it up. 
This all combines to slightly mar what is really a quite spectacular television coverage of a major event. The presenters could, almost without exception, be replaced by a sensible voice-over and some more time spent showing the music. Notwithstanding that, the hours of coverage, red buttons, downloads, iplayer catchups and the diversity of the music are generally superb and if you were not one of the 150,000 then the licence fee is worth every penny...so keep on keepin' on Auntie....but, to mis-use an old hack's phrase...next time, can we please, please, please Drop All The Dead Donkeys? Now where's that brick?

While on this matter of Proper Interviewing, The Hat would conjecture that a good many of his regular readers tune in sometime, somewhere around the world, to a Blues Music station. What a wonderful collection of grown up people we have out there, ploughing their furrow for us, hunched over some complicated switches, forever clamped into pincers on their heads, often talking out loud to themselves and not knowing whether we are listening, shouting, nodding agreement or lobbing Rubber Bricks. No, I agree, they are not all Wolfman Jack or Clint Eastwood playing Misty. They may not even be one of those DJs famously 'saving your life'. Indeed, you may agree that some of the very best could not be described as the greatest of poets or totally fluent in long meaningful sentences. But...invariably, these guys know what they are doing, know what they are talking about and are still welcome to whisper in our ears on a regular basis and bring us good music. For many, the internet has brought with it the opportunity to interact in real time, trade information and lobby for your favourites and alongside that comes the station's ability to identify exactly who is listening and more accurately cater to their needs.

In the UK, the Independent Blues Broadcasters Association has amongst its membership some of the best Interviewers in the blues business. Invariably, they know about the people they are talking to, have read their backgrounds, listened to their music and frequently trade stories and gossip that serve both to keep the listener absorbed and the artist feel as though they are not wasting their time. Good heavens, they are actually given time not only to play but to reply to a question! Showing that respect to both musician and audience pays dividends. Both come back for more and, of course, it is a small world. Word carries.

Just a short while ago, there was a suggestion that the much loved Blues On The Marsh blues station might go off the air. Within less time than it takes for Russ Tippins and Jenna Hooson to deliver 'Mama Don't Allow', it became clear that the blues community was not going to allow this to happen. Hundreds of messages and a support page appeared on the social media overnight, phones hummed and air waves buzzed. The Marsh isn't Alice's Restaurant but Arlo Guthrie would have been proud – a Movement appeared, as it were, Out of The Blue. Here was a fine example of Blues Community action, with participants around the world standing up and being counted to save something that they believed in and thought was worthwhile. What is more is that in the front ranks were many of the musicians who maybe got their first sensible interview on an independent blues radio station and had their music played and listened to by an appreciative audience. The interviewer didn't want to know their star sign or how they felt about the weather....and I bet you, it all got done without anybody wearing sparkly wellies..

The Hat (who, by the way, is an Aquarian - in case you think it's important) thinks that is...er... Totally Awesome and Fantastic! Yo!

Pip Pip!
The Man in The Hat


Hi-tech Update...You can now find The Hat on that Facebook thingy...