Bowblog

Music radio’s all tension and release. Building anticipation – highs and lows strung together to keep things moving and bring listeners along with you. Mary Anne Hobbs’ breakfast show on 6 Music this morning was built around a classic music radio high – the long-awaited record release. My Bloody Valentine have a new record out [...]

The Proms is over for another season. It was my first as a member of the Radio 3 family and I’m a bigger fan than ever. Here’s why. It’s a journey. Over 80 concerts leading audiences (nearly a third of a million tickets were sold for the 2011 season) through the riches of the classical [...]

The Pussy Riot case is an affront to humanity, a miserable, dispiriting state-sponsored kicking for three angry free spirits. It’s so depressingly like the kind of relentless, malevolent crucifiction handed out to non-compliant creative people across the decades of Soviet rule it’s as if the country has lost its memory (Hari Kunzru has a post [...]

It was properly spine-tingling. Aung San Suu Kyi visited New Broadcasting House. As the news spread around the building, people came out into the shared spaces and caught glimpses of her progress through the building – she visited the Burmese Service on the fifth floor and went on to meet Dave Lee Travis, John McCarthy [...]

Note: I’m not a proper cyclist. I don’t own a bicycle pump or a puncture repair kit. The Mayor of London takes care of all that for me. I have a Boris Bikes fob and I swan around on one of his sponsored blue bikes for a total of about three hours per week. But [...]