FEATURE:
Saluting the Queens
PHOTO CREDIT: Sophia Spring
that I last saluted and wrote about Lauren Laverne. As her birthday is on 28th April, I wanted to include her in my Saluting the Queens feature. It is appropriate that she is included in a feature that celebrates and highlights important women in the music industry. You can follow Laverne on Instagram and Twitter. She presents the breakfast show on BBC Radio 6 Music weekdays. There is so much to cover when it comes to talking about Lauren Laverne and her influence. The host of Desert Island Discs, she recently hosted a run of three live nights at the London Palladium. I have always said how there should be more interview with Lauren Laverne. Podcasts where she is featured. Also, as there is loads of stuff that I will not have time to include, I would encourage people to dig. Interviews she has conducted and ones where she has been interviewed. Check out all her Desert Island Discs episodes. As much of her archived BBC Radio 6 Music shows as you can. Even wonderful things from Spotify such as this. I would still love to hear more from Lauren Laverne as an interview subject. I am surprised someone like Adam Buxton has not contacted her. I would love to know more about her music tastes and upbringing. Sort of like Desert Island Discs, the music and memories that are important to her.
She is such an admired and influential broadcaster, I know she is inspiring a whole generation coming through. So many young women looking up to her; those who want to follow in her footsteps. Laverne is an awe-inspiring broadcaster who we are all very lucky to have. A queen of the airwaves who is among the very best in the world, it is only right to give another pre-birthday salute to a wonderful human. Also, formerly, Lauren Laverne appeared on other artists’’ songs. She has featured alongside Mint Royale and The Divine Comedy. As the former lead of Kenickie (videos such as this are worth a watch and also lead you to an early interview too), Lauren Laverne has written and recorded songs that I grew up around in the 1990s. A wonderful songwriter who, alas, is probably not going back into the recording studio anytime soon. I may repeat myself in terms of some interview archives and resources. This is going to be a bit of a scattershot approach in terms of the interviews sourced. Just stuff that caught my eye through the years. I am going to intersperse the text with some videos and podcasts where we get to see Lauren Laverne in her element. Also some Instagram posts and other bits. Let’s get started…
I want to start by going back to an interview from 2011. Maybe she doesn’t look back on interviews from the likes of The New Statesman. It was a time when Lauren Laverne was relatively new to BBC Radio 6 Music. She joined in June 2008. It is amazing to think that she has been at the station for almost sixteen years! Long may she continue to reign there:
“What sparked your interest in politics?
Growing up during the 1980s in the north-east probably did it. My paternal grandfather was a miner – one of my first memories is of him being on TV during the strike.
Which is home – Sunderland or London?
Put it this way: I always look at both bits of the map on the weather forecast.
You used to be in a band, Kenickie. Do you miss performing?
I don’t. Or at least I wouldn’t want to do it now. I was in the band between the ages of 15 and 21, which I think is the optimum age for those kinds of high jinks.
You’re a DJ (on BBC 6 Music) now. Would you ever return to making music?
I can’t imagine it. But not making records isn’t giving up music – I don’t feel the distinction between loving it and writing it is that important.
Why do you think the closure of BBC 6 Music was ever proposed?
There’s a bit of a conspiracy theory that it was a genius advertising campaign, but I’m sorry to say it wasn’t. I have to believe that the proposals were made with good intentions, but since part of the BBC’s charter is about stimulating creativity and cultural excellence and the station does that, demonstrably, for a modest sum, it would have been wrong to close it.
Do you think the BBC can get its priorities wrong at times?
I think it gets it right a lot more often than it gets it wrong. “Inform, educate and entertain” is a tough brief to set yourself.
What would be your plan for the BBC if you were in charge?
I’m bloody glad I’m not. Running an organisation with such a broad audience must be almost impossible: like DJing at a wedding, you’re always going to lose part of the crowd no matter which record you put on next. Maybe in both those situations you just have to lead from the front and play something you love.
You co-present 10 O’Clock Live. What’s the greatest challenge of making a live TV show?
The fact that the news never stops happening. But the way I look at it, the bits where everything fucks up can be the most memorable, enjoyable ones. You have to embrace the fact that, if you die on your arse, people will probably love it even more – and think of the Schadenfreude as your special gift to them.
You are outnumbered by your male co-hosts. Do you feel there are too few female presenters?
If that’s the case, I have no idea why. It’s not like you get to be one and they sit you down and go, “We’ve let YOU in. Now let me explain precisely why the others are outside . . . ” like a baddie at the end of Scooby-Doo.
How do you balance motherhood with work?
The challenges are ever-evolving and I negotiate them with great difficulty.
You got a strong reaction when you spoke of the benefits of starting a family early.
I was talking about my experience. I said that when I had my first son I was quite alone, in that not many of my peers had babies. I found
it quite hard, but an advantage now is being in the position of having completed my family. I’m glad I’m not at the beginning of that process. I have absolutely no view on if or when “women” should start having families. Who is “women”? It’s absurd.
Do you think it does get difficult for women in broadcasting as they get older?
I think it gets difficult for women when they’re born and remains so. It isn’t just in broadcasting.
What was your view of the recent case of Miriam O’Reilly at the BBC?
Ageism is wrong. TV is unfair. Equally true, unfortunately.
Is the coalition working?
I like the idea of moving beyond the knee-jerk sniping of party politics, but in practice I can’t see where the Lib Dems are – it’s all cuts and no cushion. It’s a Tory government, isn’t it?
What do you think of Nick Clegg and David Cameron?
I have very little interest in them as individuals. I’m interested in – and generally disapproving of – their policies.
Is religion a part of your life?
Once a Catholic . . . It’s like the Mafia – you don’t get to leave. I’m not sure I’d want to, but I’m incredibly angry with the Church at the moment.
Is there anything you regret?
Worrying when I had the time to.
Is there a plan?
Yes. It involves records, books, gin slings and great shoes. Join in if you like.
Are we all doomed?
No. Because people are (mostly) wonderful.
Defining Moments
1978 Born in Sunderland
1994 Forms the band Kenickie with her brother and two friends from school
1997 Calls the Spice Girls “Tory scum”
1998 Moves into television presenting on The Alphabet Show with Chris Addison
2002 Joins Xfm
2006 Becomes anchor of The Culture Show
2007 Gives birth to her first son
2008 Begins regular show on BBC 6 Music
2011 Becomes co-presenter, 10 O’Clock Live”.
I want to come to an interview from 2016. It made me think what a terrible year that was in terms of music losses. We said goodbye to, among others, David Bowie, Prince and George Michael. That is a tangent! Lauren Laverne spoke with The Guardian, as she was hosting Late Night Woman’s Hour. That was an incredible run of shows. I do hope that she does it again. Busy with other commitments, maybe it is not something that will be viable soon. She is also a brilliant host and has hosted, among other things, the Mercury Prize. One of our greatest talents for sure:
“Lauren Laverne is sitting in a Radio 4 studio, her new home as the presenter of Late Night Woman’s Hour. It really is a bit of a homecoming, she says, peeling a banana. Her mum listens to Woman’s Hour. In the house where she grew up, she and her brother shouted to make their voices heard over blues or the radio. “My earliest memories of Radio 4 are my mam’s dad, who worked in the shipyards. Right at the end of his life, when he was in his early 70s, he got really into it. So he was in his house on Ford Estate in Sunderland, just listening to Radio 4. He’d retired, and me mam’s one of nine so the family had grown up and everything, and he had time to have the radio on. And he l-o-o-o-ved it.”
Laverne’s grandfathers (the other was a miner) often figure in her interviews. So it seems reasonable to assume that she values her working-class heritage. Laverne’s father, like her mother, was from a large family, one of six. But both parents – “60s grammar-school kids, that classic working-class thing” – studied hard and had university jobs so that life for Laverne, growing up in Barnes in Sunderland, was comfortable.
“It was a house full of music and books and ideas that were not that usual where I was. There was always a lot of – we might call it alternative culture now,” she says. “We were this funny little middle-class outpost of a big working-class family, and that was a really lovely place to be. Because we had all the advantages of being middle class, but also had a real sense of place in history and culture that connected back to where we were from.”
Does she worry that her own children will be further removed from those origins? “Well, you know, they’re part of my family too, and they’re part of their own extended family and they have their own relationship with that, with my parents, my cousins, the place that I’m from,” she says. She’s sitting in a swivel chair, spinning from side to side as she thinks. “They’ve been on the beach that The Walrus and the Carpenter was written about!” The question was really an economic one, to which Lewis Carroll – a passion she got from her father – is an unexpected answer. I wonder if she worries about the privileges her children enjoy compared with the life of her grandfathers – does she sometimes feel the need to adjust their perspective?
“What? When we’re throwing another 50 on the fire?” she exclaims.
“My dad said a thing to me the other week that is really interesting. He said, you don’t teach kids the value of money, you teach them the value of people. And for me, that’s what it comes down to. What is a pound? What is a gold bar worth? It’s actually more about how you treat people, so that’s what I try to do.”
In many ways, another radio show is the last thing Laverne needs. She already hosts every weekday on 6 Music, she does voiceover for a children’s show, fills in time with all manner of documentaries and prize-presenting and live events – the Mercury, the Turner, the Baftas, Glastonbury. She has written a teen novel. When she counts her BBC radio stations – “I’m not sure about 4 Extra, but certainly 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, I’ve hosted on” – she runs out of fingers. Somewhere in there, she finds time to call her mother “several times a day”.
Maybe one big change made her more open to a second, because seven months after she gave birth to her eldest son, Fergus, in autumn 2007, she started a new show on 6 Music. By the time he was two, she had the weekday slot. His younger brother, Mack, came a year later; Laverne is married to DJ and producer Graeme Fisher.
She has said before that motherhood “brings you back to the fundamental aspects of your personality”. What did she mean by that? “Well, it brings you back to brass tacks in all sorts of ways. You work out what’s important and who you want to be. I’m not saying you can’t work those things out without having kids. Of course you can. But … I happened to have kids and it gave me an imperative to decide what mattered.”
Surely she didn’t give birth and then everything made perfect sense? Did she lose herself for a while before that? “Well, I think what’s interesting is that it’s a new role, right? It’s a new job. Not just a job. You’re being a new you. Mummy. Who is Mummy or Mam or whatever? It takes ages … You learn the ropes but to really enjoy it and delight in it and feel confident, I think it takes 18 months, two years – for me,” she adds.
There has been another, unexpected consequence of having children. They have cast Laverne’s own youth in a new light. Fergus, now eight, has begun to learn guitar, the instrument Laverne played with Kenickie, the band she started in her teens with her brother and two schoolfriends. Watching Fergus, tuning the guitar for him, showing him the odd thing, has made the Laverne of her youth seem younger.
“I look at my kids now and think … I was not much older when we started to make records. That’s a real trip to look at that. You know, I experienced being in a band in that very episodic way that children experience school. Like, ‘We’re going here now! We’re doing this now!’ I wasn’t in the driving seat of my own life. Of course I wasn’t. I was a little kid. You don’t know who you are. You don’t understand the significance of things.”
She casts around for an example, her feet tapping to the tune of her thoughts. She is wearing printed Karl Lagerfeld trainers. In 1996, Kenickie supported the Ramones. “If I could go back now and say to myself as the Ramones go, ‘Do you want to support us at this gig?’, which turns out to be their last ever British gig at Brixton Academy …” she says. “Obviously, I thought it was great and they were lovely … and it was brilliant. But now I’d be: ‘Oh my God, do you know they’re music history?’”
Maybe her younger self didn’t do so badly. “I look back now and I feel terrified about all the things that I did. But also more forgiving towards myself because I was so young,” she says. “Everyone’s an idiot when they’re 16.”
You can see why Woman’s Hour thrilled at the idea of Laverne. She is the go-to woman for cutting the familiar with edge, all while making her listeners feel understood. But she also has a reputation for mischief. “Definitely, I’m mischievous,” she nods, with that funny halfway smile she sometimes has, like a smile doing a u-turn. Late Night Woman’s Hour has been billed as slightly naughty. “Intimate,” the press release says. It is recorded at night. There is wine. Forthcoming topics include birth, anger and masturbation. The very name “Late Night Woman’s Hour” seems subversively oxymoronic.
Laverne used the phrase “alternative culture” earlier to describe the atmosphere of her house growing up, but now that she has become so prolific, does she still consider herself alternative? She appears less comfortable hearing the word said by someone else. “Well, I don’t think anybody sits down and goes: ‘I am part of alternative culture’. It is … I hate to use the word ‘problematic’, but it is a problematic word, ‘alternative’: what does it really mean? But yes, in the broadest sense.”
Does she worry that she has been co-opted by the mainstream? Even 6 Music is no longer an underdog, with its record 2.2m listeners a week, a growth to which she has brilliantly contributed. Can a station that the prime minister’s wife enjoys really be considered alternative? “I think all of our listeners are very welcome,” she says, and it is typical of her that the sentence manages to sound both sincere and ironic”.
There are interviews that I will not have opportunity to include (such as this. There are four more interviews/features that I want to cover off. The most recent takes us back to last year. I will move on to 2018. Technically, it is a feature from Music Week that looked back at their 2017 interview with Lauren Laverne. Reacting to the fact that she was going to be hosting the BBC Radio 6 Music breakfast show. She started that slot in 2018. Yet more insight into the career and importance of the amazing Lauren Laverne:
“Even then, it was clear Laverne was destined for great things and today, 20 years on, not much has changed; her quotes still sparkle with northern wit and George Orwell references and her passion for music still abounds, even if these days she’s enthusing about someone else’s tunes, rather than her own.
That makes her the perfect choice to host this week’s MWAs at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel and help celebrate a momentous year for the biz. But then, these days, wherever you find good music, Laverne is unlikely to be far away.
As well as her 6 Music show, which cheerfully champions leftfield sounds in an accessible way every weekday morning, and now has a reach in excess of one million listeners, she’s involved in presenting the television coverage of both Glastonbury Festival and the Mercury Prize (not to mention being co-founder of female-focused website The Pool). And now she basically gets to be in charge of the music biz for a few hours on Wednesday night…
“At last!” she beams. “I can’t bloody wait. It’s going to be great. Did you know the Grosvenor House room is the second biggest interior space in Europe?”
Er, no. What’s the biggest?
“I don’t know, but I’ve done gigs there before and it’s always good to have some facts in your back pocket in case there are technical issues…”
Before she does some additional research, however, it’s time to sit down with Music Week to talk 6 Music, streaming services and why Kenickie won’t be reforming any time soon…
Are you a fan of the music business?
The bottom line is, I’ve worked in all different sides of the music industry. I started out as a musician and then got into TV presenting followed by DJ-ing. The music industry has had a tricky time over the past couple of decades, but it’s interesting to see how people in other media are looking at the music industry to see how to survive and prosper in the digital age. You know, publishing has Bookshop Day now with coffee machines and in-stores and limited run editions. It’s lovely to see how the music industry is a test case for how to be adaptable and still get people’s work out there. So I feel very pleased to be part of the awards this year.
You were in a band in the ‘90s, when the business was at its commercial peak…
Absolutely. In those days – not us because we just signed the one record deal – but there were bands on the scene who were signed and dropped three times and each time they’d get a massive advance. Videos would cost 100 grand, again not for me, but that certainly wasn’t uncommon, because it was the video age and MTV was everything. That’s unimaginable now. It’s weird to look back and think about how it was back then.
Do you miss those days?
It’s changed so much, but it’s always interesting when someone releases a very old-school studio album and you hark back to the days when many bands could afford that huge studio experience to make their record. I guess there’s always a certain tier where people are still living that life, but most of the industry has had to move on. There’s an upside to that as well: you look at where British music is actually pushing things forward and making inroads – and that, fundamentally, is grime.
The British grime scene has come out of people making music in a very DIY way with what I would think of as a punk rock mentality. It’s exciting to see that going global and the Mercury Prize win for Skepta. There’s as much good music at every point in history, the industry changes around it but the ratio of really good stuff out there always stays the same. But it does change form and it’s really interesting to see how the changes in the music industry have changed the sound of the music that we listen to. There’s a lack of studios, venues, rehearsal space, all those spaces are closing down and being turned into flats. All that stuff feeds into changing the actual sound of the music that’s out there. You can also find clues about where we’re going next as a culture. Music is always at the forefront of that. The vanguard of the music scene is way ahead of the cultural conversation. Boy George was in everybody’s living room years before people were having the conversations we’re having now about sexuality and gender.
And I suppose at 6 Music you only really have to engage with the good stuff…
It is a ridiculously lucky position to be in, to be able to play a nine-minute Miles Davis track followed by four minutes of King Gizzard & The Wizard Lizard followed by Deee-Lite. We’re all so proud of the way the station’s been embraced by people and the music we get to champion.
It’s also pretty popular with the music business. What do you put that down to?
When I took over from George Lamb [in 2009], I was thinking, How do I want to pitch this? Quite early on I thought, If we make a show that musicians enjoy listening to, then I felt sure we’d take everyone else along with us. That seemed really obvious to me. It had to be good enough to broadcast to people who really knew their shit. And with 6, it’s been a case of holding the line [until] the technology’s rising tide has allowed people to access that. It’s so wonderful to see it having gone from nearly being taken off-air [in 2010] to being this small, but perfectly formed jewel in the crown.
When the station was potentially going to be closed it really galvanised everybody [into thinking]: What does this mean, why does this matter? And then, when we were saved because of the listener protests, we literally owed them our existence. Of course, every station owes their audience its existence, but we did in a very direct way. We’d met them! We had a very direct connection and it made everybody work very, very hard and think about why we’re doing what we’re doing. We’ve all got different music tastes and backgrounds, but it definitely changed the way that we approach what we did as a station and since then it’s just flown.
How different would your life have turned out if the campaign had failed?
Well, I was pregnant. Pregnant and losing your job is never good! It would have been such a shame, obviously for me personally, but also for the listeners and for the music industry as well. We’re an important link in that chain. As the industry has changed because of the digital revolution, each link has become very important. Everything’s evened out, we’re all supporting each other and you could argue that wasn’t the case in the past, things were more top down.
How conscious is the station of that influence?
In radio terms, the rule is an audience of one, so it’s always about the one person you’re speaking to. So you can’t sit there and think, I’m so massively influential, whose career shall I boost today? It should never be about that…
I suspect it might be for some radio DJs…
I’ve met a few of them! But that’s not how I do things, personally. You start with your ‘user’, as we’d say these days, and work back. That was good enough for George Orwell, who coined the phrase ‘audience of one’ in his essay Poetry And The Microphone, which is a must-read for all radio DJs. That’s always steered me right. I’ve learned more at 6 than anywhere else. It’s where I really found my feet and and understood what I was doing and why it matters to me. It’s wonderful to have people say 6 Music is influential and can help people’s careers, I’m very proud of that and grateful, but the thing that makes my job meaningful to me is that I’ve got a listener who’s maybe having a shit Tuesday morning, or a great Tuesday morning, and I’m there with them and part of their ordinary life and their routine. That’s the magical thing.
Streaming services would say they do that too...
Well, if you just want to generally check stuff out, a streaming service is a good place to do that. Whereas, when people want something more niche, they know they’re going to get that from us. We had a few of those moments over the past couple of years, with so many important and influential musicians dying. When Prince died, nobody could get Prince on Spotify. We were desperately trying to get all these records together and making it up as we went along. There’s a community thing to it, which is different. When you’re sitting listening to a streaming service – and I don’t have a problem with streaming services, they’re really useful and brilliant – but you don’t feel like you’re joining together with other people.
You present Glastonbury and the Mercury Prize – but why is there still not enough music on TV?
It’d be great if there was more. But I’ve been badgering people about that for about two decades now and nobody listens to me. It’s one of my hobbyhorses, it’s such a missed opportunity. The thing that I think is a shame is, we’re going to run out of archive. You look at the stuff on BBC4 and all of these fantastic shows using the archive of Top Of The Pops and whatever and I think, What happens when we get to 1999? Is everything going to be iPhone footage after that? The good thing is that all the distinctions between media are melting now. So at 6 we’re visualising/filming a lot of the sessions on my show now and that is all added to the archive. Some of the Maida Vale sessions we’ve done have been unbelievably popular. There’s an extraordinary appetite for that stuff so maybe it will fall to radio to plug that gap”.
Prior to finishing with a Beatles-related feature around Lauren Laverne, there are a couple of things from 2022 I want to include. I will spotlight an interview I have sourced before. It is with The Guardian. A nice, insightful and varied question-and-answer with a broadcasting legend:
“When were you happiest?
There are different flavours of happy, but I think my favourite is the quiet contentment when several generations of family are sitting together watching a crowd-pleaser like Harry Potter on the telly.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Deflection – what about you?
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Unkindness, meanness. People who could make the world better and choose to make it worse.
Describe yourself in three words
Hopeful, curious and thoughtful, in the sense that I am always thinking about things.
If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?
The concept of polite disagreement.
What makes you unhappy?
I find it very difficult when the people I care about are unhappy.
Who would play you in the film of your life?
Evanna Lynch who plays Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter films.
What was the last lie that you told?
Oh, what a lovely hat.
What is your most unappealing habit?
I have a tendency to take on a bit too much and then complain about it in my head afterwards.
What scares you about getting older?
Losing people.
Which book are you ashamed not to have read?
I always feel like I’m catching up because I didn’t go to university, so War and Peace and Proust.
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
I wanted to be like my dad, who was an academic, because he had an office packed full of books, always had loud music on, and seemed to get to do what he wanted.
Would you choose fame or anonymity?
Anonymity. It’s not good for human beings to be famous, even though it’s the thing lots of people seem to want.
What is your guiltiest pleasure?
I never feel guilty about pleasure.
What was the best kiss of your life?
The first with my husband, 20 years ago. We worked together on a pop TV show in the early 00s. He invited me to a gig and we both thought other people would come, but nobody did. We realised that it was Valentine’s Day and ended up getting together.
PHOTO CREDIT: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian
What has been your biggest disappointment?
My biggest disappointment is always myself. That’s my Catholic upbringing.
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
It would have been lovely to have grown up in private like a lot of my friends.
What would you like to leave your children?
The knowledge that they were absolutely adored for exactly who they are.
How would you like to be remembered?
I’d rather be enjoyed while I am still here.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
The difference between simple and easy.
What happens when we die?
Life goes on”.
In 2022, for British Vogue, Lauren Laverne spoke with Amelia Diomoldenberg (Chicken Shop Date) about the art of the interview. It is a compassionate and fascinating discussion between two phenomenal interviewers. Although there is a gap in terms of age and experience, they each imparted important wisdom and experience
“To have the freedom to have your own show and vision is amazing,” Amelia Dimoldenberg, comedian, journalist and creator of Chicken Shop Date, tells broadcaster Lauren Laverne in the third episode in British Vogue and YouTube’s Vogue Visionaries series.
Following two enlightening conversations – about how to break into the beauty industry with YouTube Creator NikkieTutorials and make-up artist Val Garland, and making it in music with music legend Nile Rodgers and singer-songwriter Rina Sawayama – Dimoldenberg and Laverne met to discuss their jobs as two of today’s most successful interviewers. Here they swap anecdotes, career advice and reflect on how they’ve carved out distinctive voices and styles.
Beginning her career in the public eye as a teenager in the band Kenickie, Laverne moved into television, becoming a guest on panel shows, before finding her home in radio. “It had this brilliant intimacy,” she says of its appeal. Since 2018, she has been the presenter of the legendary programme Desert Island Discs, where her recent guests have included Adele and Kate Moss.
Dimoldenberg, meanwhile, first had the idea for her wildly popular YouTube series Chicken Shop Date – in which she takes on a deadpan persona to pose questions to musicians, actors and other well-known personalities in a chicken shop – at school. It started life as a print feature for a youth-led magazine, before Dimoldenberg decided the unique format would make first-rate viewing too.
“YouTube was always going to be the platform [to host the videos on] because it’s so accessible,” says Dimoldenberg. “I could connect with a whole range of different people and get it out there to the masses, [and] you can connect with your fans.” Furthermore, she says, “The comments are where I do a lot of my research. I’ll get a sense of what people think about a certain person or get into the mind of the fan and that’s a great way to carve questions.”
In one of Dimoldenberg’s favourite and most-watched videos (which regularly amass upwards of one million views) she interviewed Louis Theroux. “He was such a hero of mine,” she says, smiling. “A lot of my awkward interview style comes directly from him.” In that episode, Theroux recalls a rap he once wrote – “Jiggle Jiggle” – which then became a viral sensation. The pair have now recorded a music video together, also featuring Jason Derulo and Duke & Jones, which has had more than 1.6 million views on YouTube.
One thing that taught her as an interviewer was the importance of digging deep. “If I hadn’t done in-depth research,” says Dimoldenberg, “then I wouldn’t have known he did that rap in one of his documentaries over 20 years ago.”
What makes her YouTube interviews stand out, she thinks, is how they show another side of a personality. “I try and get a sense of what they’ve been asked before and figure out what kind of person I want to show them as.”
The ideal interviewee for Laverne is someone who has “nothing to prove. It’s always lovely to get people when they’ve had the success they want to have and they can just enjoy it at this point.”
In terms of the success of their own shows, Dimoldenberg credits the fact that they “have a very clear format. I think that as a viewer people can really connect with something that’s so simple with the way that it’s presented,” she continues. Ultimately, Dimoldenberg has three tips for getting a project off the ground: “Believe in your idea, be persistent and annoy people to the point where they end up saying yes”.
I will wrap up with Lauren Laverne’s reaction to The Beatles’ final single, Now and Then. Released late last year, it was an emotional and moving listen. A song that still affects me when I hear it. Lauren Laverne spoke with Radio Times and shared her verdict on the song:
“I cried like a baby! And I never cry,” reveals Lauren Laverne, recalling the first time she heard the new Beatles song Now and Then.
This emotional reaction broke one of the BBC Radio 6 Music and Desert Island Discs presenter’s own broadcasting rules - no tears on the job. “Obviously I listen to some very difficult stories when people are talking to me for Desert Island Discs. They’re often very emotional episodes,” Laverne explains. “But with this, I actually did cry.
“I’m quite a softie in real life, so I have a thing where I just can’t cry at work. But someone said to me, ‘I think you might get emotional hearing this…’ And I do have very deep connections to the Beatles.”
As the song – all four Beatles, reunited by the wonders of technology on a “lost” demo by John Lennon in 1979 – unspooled, so did the 45-year-old’s emotions. Such was the impact of the avowedly “last” Beatles track.
And this afternoon, having kept quiet about this precious experience for several weeks, Laverne can finally exhale as the world can share in the wonder of hearing John, Paul, George and Ringo back together for one final moment of musical magic.
“It’s global treasure, isn’t it?” she says. “It was quite a profound experience to get the chance to hear it [early]. And I couldn’t get over the resonance of the title: to have this final track that’s arrived out of the mists of time, which takes us back to the beginning of this amazing story – this story that’s become part of our national character...”
The new, short documentary, The Beatles – Now and Then – The Last Song, which Laverne introduced in a UK TV exclusive on yesterday’s special edition of The One Show, reflected this sentiment. She praises the “lovely, beautifully non-linear way that the film is constructed – it’s not represented in a chronological way. I thought that was so clever and so touching.”
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She continues: “It’s the story of Britain in the 20th century, I think. Lads from an industrial city who represent so strongly what Britain did, as we moved from this industrial country to being a place where arts and culture is made. Which is very much what we’re about now: this is a place where ideas are born. They represent this story about Britain, about who we all are. They represent us.
For this lifelong fan and mother-of-two who’s passed on to her children her own parents’ obsession with the band, the Beatles are everything to Laverne. Arguably, the same applies universally: the Beatles' music is in all of us. So, yes, we can all cry – and cry together”.
Ahead of her birthday on 28th April, I wanted to spotlight and celebrate the simply wonderful Lauren Laverne. A BBC Radio 6 Music stalwart and host of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, who knows what her future holds. It will be golden. I think she will be in broadcasting for decades more. Whether with BBC Radio 6 Music or other stations, we will see her go from strength to strength. She is an award-winning and hugely popular broadcaster whose breakfast show on 6 keeps growing in popularity. As she says, the station’s listeners are a family. Not that Lauren Laverne is the mother, yet she does exude this warmth, authority and sense of comfort that makes us all feel safer, happier and together. And for that, we offer her our collective…
LOVE and appreciation.