Highlights and Footlights

The last 6 months or so have been a wild ride and a hell of a lot of fun. It’s been a lot of work and a lot of hours have gone into producing the 13 episodes of the show so far (and the making of this blog also!) but it’s been worth it. Being involved with PBS has afforded me the opportunity to meet and work with some great people. It’s also opened up doors to other opportunities with much greater ease than otherwise would have been possible.
Of course as with anything there’s ups and downs. Admittedly the downs really have not been very down and the ups have been fantastically up. There’s been laugh out loud moments, whoopsy moments, OH SHIT! moments and downright strange moments some of which I’ll try to now tell you about.

Highlights

• Getting to interview Chris Robinson, Michael Franti & Jeff Martin.

• Chris Robinson was the 1st interview I did with a well known international artist. Add to that the fact that the debut album from The Black Crowes is still one of my most favouritest Blues Rock albums and you can understand why this experience rates as such a highlight. Picking up the telephone and hearing a voice on the other end that I had previously only heard coming through the speakers of my Hi-Fi system was surreal to say the least.

• Receiving a phone call from someone 5 minutes into the 1st episode to say "congratulations on getting your own show" was pretty cool for a multitude of reasons.

• We've all heard the term "They only come out at night" but it wasn't until I started doing an insomnia shift show that I fully came to realise why this saying exists. In the wee small hours of the morning you have all types of people calling up. One of my personal favourite calls was from somebody asking me to track down a particular album for him so that I could play it on air. In and of itself this is not necessarily a strange request. The strange part was that this person wanted me to email or call him to let him know once i've tracked it down and when I would be playing it so that he could record it!

• Just before starting up the regular fortnightly show that is Connections I did a fill in for Wendy on the Metal Genesis show & received the following SMS

• In the same week that i filled in on the Metal Genesis show I also filled in for Matt Frederick on a Sunday afternoon for The Juke Joint. Now this show has a large number of regular listeners and when I was planning the show I thought rather than clone what the show is usually like I'd try something different. Well there were quite a number of people that liked it but there were also quite a number that were not happy that I would be so bold as to try to do anything different to what they are used to hearing on their beloved Juke Joint radio show and were not afraid to let me know. In the space of roughly 10 minutes during the show I received 4 text messages and 2 phone calls. Each call and SMS alternated between telling me how they were enjoying hearing something different and telling me in no uncertain terms that I should never fill in for the show again. Oh well, you can't please everyone!

• Getting the opportunity to DJ at the Sunday Soul Sessions at the Retreat hotel in Brunswick

Footlights:

• The one "oh shit!" moment came the day that Sasha and I had planned to show our performer member Kylie Auldist some love by playing some of her tunes. As always I thought I'd get some shut eye before heading into the station to do the show. I set my alarm and turned off my phone and off to bed I went. When I woke up and saw the sun shining outside I knew something was up. The clock said 6:15am (15 minutes past the show finish time). After freaking out somewhat and realising I had set my alarm to 1pm as opposed to 1am I managed to get in contact with my good mate and co-host Sasha who assured me everything went well and not to worry. Lesson learned!!

• Forgetting to hit record until halfway through the Chris Robinson interview and only recording the
less interesting portion of the interview

• Leaving the studio to make a cup of tea and not realising we had not set the CD player to play continuously until after roughly 10 minutes of silence. eek!