Hang the DJ! Hang all the DJs!

There’s too much stuff. That’s the problem with the modern world. Everyone’s making things, creating things and there’s no time to consume it. Why can’t I list all the great albums of 2026? Because I’m not listening to them. I’m too lost in my own world, writing this blog and making my own music (or remaking some previously unreleased music of mine). And even if I wasn’t, there are hundreds of new albums being released every week and precious few people out there with the time to go through and add some kind of curation.

There’s too much stuff and I’m a prime offender. It eats at me like a virus and I can’t stop. I’m like the gambler who keeps coming back to the roulette table because this next spin will be the one. 17 black. Push all your remaining chips out on to the table and see what happens. What happens is you lose all your money, go home, lick your wounds and then when you’ve built up your float, back you go again. Doomed to repeat yourself for eternity.

So I’ve been a writer all my life (to some degree or other) and been making music (some good, some not so good) since I was about sixteen. In 2009 I added DJ to my career CV. It’s always good to diversify and find new areas into which you won’t succeed.

I grew up with radio. I found it comforting and intimate in ways that TV never was. You had a personal connection to radio presenters because you tended to spend longer in their company and everything on the radio was more relaxed, the schedules to some degree less rigid. Obviously I grew up with John Peel. He was the musical compass for several generations. He was the yin to the yang of the music press. Both would signpost you towards interesting new music (and old music sometimes), but the music press were often didactic or pretentious or capricious in how they treated bands and scenes and trends. On the other hand, John Peel seemed more benevolent. He played the music he liked. He championed the bands that he felt deserved to be championed. He remained loyal to his favourites, but in most cases once those bands became successful he’d move on so that he could allot his limited air time to something new.

But music radio wasn’t all I listened to growing up. I also had a soft spot for late night local radio shows. During the day these stations tended to have rigid formats, regular news and sport, weather, traffic news, local features. But once you got past 9pm you could freewheel it. The best presenters gathered a community around them and you could join in or else lurk within these spaces.

Before the internet came along, I feel like those late night shows were the great refuge for the dispossessed, the lonely, the reclusive. You could be yourself or you could assume a persona if you felt vulnerable as yourself. Hearing voices, the anonymity of it all, somehow made it more intimate. There’s a book to be written about those late night local radio shows and some of the characters that presented them and some of the characters that became regulars on those shows, calling in every night. There’s a book in it and I’m sure someone somewhere has written it.

Beyond the regular stations, scanning through the dials offered other weird and wonderful discoveries. I’ve spoken about the era of the pirate radio stations, dayglo dance music pumped out from inner city tower blocks. I’ve reminisced about listening to the police radio bands in London. You also had shortwave, bringing strange sounds from across the globe. The distinctive call sign from Radio Tirana was (and still is) fixed in my brain. What you could pick up was dependent on the weather, the atmospheric conditions that on a good day could bring you signals from hundreds or thousands of miles away. Foreign voices. Weird call signs. Spy stations broadcasting coded messages late at night – random strings of numbers barked out in a robotic manner. I loved this kind of stuff. Lights out, eyes closed, where will we go tonight? Theatre of the mind.

In Bristol there was a brief period where my radio would pick up nearby phone conversations. I’m not sure if that was somehow related to how early mobile phone signals worked, but it was bizarre and somewhat disconcerting to hear random conversations spilling out from the speakers. It was like placing a glass against the wall of a neighbouring property to spy on someone.  There was probably enough material for Jarvis Cocker to construct an extra album or two from some of these calls, but I never really got to the bottom of it all and it had gone before I had time to decide if catching random phone calls was interesting, intrusive or (most likely) just banal.

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There is as ever a chain to all these things, a thread that runs through everything once you step back and look for it. Remember those youth-targeted radio shows that the BBC local radio stations used to provide? Not the one I was interviewed for, but the well-established and flourishing one in Sussex called Turn It Up. It was one Saturday evening in 1991 that I heard them play a record that was in retrospect to have a profound effect on my creative life. The track was titled Joe Meek and it was written by Wreckless Eric.  Wreckless (real name Eric Goulden) had briefly been a star in the early days of punk, but success hadn’t done much for him aside from leave him with a loathing for the machinations of the music industry and a serious drinking habit that he needed treatment to recover from.

Joe Meek was a great song. It celebrated (or perhaps documented is a better term) the madness that had defined the famous fifties/ sixties record producer’s life and career. It also replicated some of the freewheeling recording techniques that Joe Meek had been famous for. It was an exhilarating record that jumped from the speakers. I might have vaguely heard of or at least recognised the name of Wreckless Eric, but I was completely unaware of his work to that point.

Overnight that all changed. It wasn’t long before I’d tracked down and purchased a CD copy of the album that song came from – The Donovan of Trash – which, while no other track quite matched that one, was still an excellent introduction to the Wreckless Eric universe. After that I went backwards and forwards, tracking down past albums and then acquiring new ones as and when they came out. Wreckless Eric managed to carve out a niche for himself once the internet came along. He wrote a blog in which he documented a lot of his experiences within the music industry. He had some interesting stories to tell and he had an engaging and accomplished way of telling them. These posts eventually formed the basis of his book A Dysfunctional Success, which naturally I also purchased.

In 2009 he branched out into producing what was titled The Wreckless Eric Radio Show. I guess you’d call this a podcast, back in the days when podcasts were new and more niche than they are today. (Everyone knows what a podcast is now – chances are most people have even appeared on one or produced one of their own. See my opening point re: there’s too much stuff).

Running to a tight 30 minutes, released irregularly, but mostly weekly when it started out, I loved these shows. His presenting style was a little rough around the edges, but his enthusiasm for the music was infectious and with John Peel having passed away five years earlier, this felt like the closest in spirit to what Peel used to do. Not only was the music interesting and presented with genuine enthusiasm and affection, but he had all those tales from his time in the music industry to add some extra colour to the mix.

It seemed like fun and in some weird moment of hubris I thought, I could do that. Thus was born the idea for Radio of the Second Dimension. My show launched on the first Saturday of 2009 and ran for two years. I too began with a strict thirty minute run time, but this soon drifted towards forty minutes or longer. What I lacked was any interesting stories that I could thread through the songs, so I started inventing extra characters to populate the show. A deliberately dysfunctional assistant called Norman who would play the wrong record at the right speed or the right record at the wrong speed. In a later episode (dedicated to the music of my hometown of Southend) he drove a pier train into the sea. (It’s amazing what you can do with a few sound effects and a vivid imagination).

Sometimes I’d go out and about in West Cornwall and record the sights and sounds of the moors or the coastal areas and weave these into the show. I was creating my own mini pieces of radio theatre, mostly to amuse myself.

I did have an audience, although the regulars never amounted to more than half a dozen or so. I even had The Rustic Age record a sting for the show, mimicking those I remembered from Turn It Up. At the start of this venture, I was still unemployed. Post redundancy from the local council, I’d spent several months away in Sussex supporting my mother who’d undergone hip surgery after a fall while out shopping near her home. Back in Cornwall as my financial situation deteriorated, I ended up taking on one, then two and eventually three different freelance jobs. Producing forty minutes of radio theatre every week became untenable and for a while I switched to broadcasting live each Saturday night instead. This was more challenging (due to the limitations of internet connections back then) but less time consuming.

The shows lost some of their charm, though it was nice to interact more directly with the audience. Eventually, I dropped back to two jobs and resumed the pre-recorded format. By then some of the original spark was missing. In truth the first 38 episodes had been the best. After two years I’d reached 97 and although there might have been a temptation to get to three figures I decided to wind the show up at exactly the two year mark. By this point, ironically, The Wreckless Eric Radio Show, whose format I’d largely copied, was only on about episode 32.

Wreckless Eric had only kept up the weekly schedule for a few months, was then recording new episodes here and there sporadically and after a few years moved on to other things. Which made sense, with his writing and his own music to concentrate on and also a seemingly endless touring schedule. But I did miss those shows and kind of wished he’d kept on making them.

So by 2011 I was done with podcasting. I was about to reconnect on a more regular basis with my brother.  New musical adventures beckoned. Further down the road would be the purchase of my first guitar, the relaunch of the record label and all the other crazy and broadly unsuccessful tilts at finding success.

I still listened to the radio back then, but not to the same degree as I once had. Post John Peel, Radio One was fragmented and no longer offered the same depth of alternative music coverage. 6 music was the digital successor, aimed at that old audience, but I found it too married to the past, playing classic songs from the bands of my youth and hand picked selections from old Peel sessions. It wasn’t all backward looking and one or two presenters offered interesting shows, but I never felt the same connection to these as I had in the past. Meanwhile local radio was becoming less local – late night shows were often syndicated across wider areas and had less of a community feel.

YouTube and Justin.tv (soon rebranded as Twitch) became the new media. Here you could find your tribes and consume as much content as you wanted, interact or lurk, always someone doing something interesting somewhere in the world, twenty-four seven. Too much to take it all in. The story of the modern age.

Radio, its glory days are now just a memory. I don’t even have a radio. I can no longer spin a dial and wonder what I might stumble across. The world feels much smaller. It’s lost an air of mystery. The call signs of those long gone Soviet republics are now nothing more than evocative three or four note melodies lodged in the deeper recesses of my brain. Somewhere out in space you might still catch them. Here is eventually where all our broadcasts will travel, drifting who knows where and for who knows how long.

This is our parting gift to the universe, a record of who we once were.