TESTIFY!
I had to cut out a lot from an interview I recently did with Mala, which took place on the Tuesday after Mary Anne Hobbs announced she would be resigning from the BBC. It’s easy for people to underestimate the power of identification – it’s an unconscious thing – and I don’t think I can measure the influence Mary Anne has on myself and other women around me. Neither is her influence just gender-specific, since she has been such an important mover in UK bass music in the past few years. So I wanted especially to share this part of my interview with Mala:
Is there anything you wanna say about Mary Anne… did you hear about her show?
No.
Oh. She’s resigned.
Serious? Really … really?
Yeah.
Naaaaaaah. Has she really resigned?
Yeah.
I’m gonna give her a call now man. When’s this been known from?
She announced it on Saturday, I saw it on twitter. I can’t really imagine you’re a twitter person.
Nah, Pokes got me up on twitter man. Me and Pokes were in a hotel room in Dublin, and everyone had been talking to me about twitter, so I checked it out to see what it was about, and I was like Pokes help me set this shit up, so he showed me what to do. And it was mad cus I got a lot of responses in the first few hours, but I think since then I’ve only been on it about six times. It just feels really unnatural for me to be like that. So I didn’t know that she announced this. So, she’s given it up yeah? Wow… Well you know sometimes in life you just feel like this is the right thing to do, and even though it might be a hard decision, you gotta go for that feeling […]
I remember back in the day, pre-Dubstep Warz when we was talking about that show. She’s one of those radio DJs that is rare, to be honest with you, cus you got a lot of radio DJs that expect to get sent tunes just because they’re on radio. But at the time that this music was coming through, even though she wasn’t in it around at FWD or dmz in the early, early days, you have to give her a lot of credit because she did a lot of research about what was going on. So when she decided she wanted to do this Dubstep Warz show she spoke to a lot of people about it, I remember having long in-depth conversations with her about the show, and I’m sure she did the same with the other guys that were involved in it as well. You know, she made people everybody feel comfortable with her, she made everybody feel that they could send her their music and it wouldn’t be abused or disrespected.
Photo taken at the recording of Generation Bass, Mary Anne’s follow up to Dubstep Warz, by Georgina Cook.
And she didn’t.
No she didn’t of course she didn’t, cus she’s not that type of person, she’s got respect. Can you imagine doing so much already, and you get to a certain point in your life, for her to all of a sudden pick up this sound and do what she has done and get a DJ career out of playing this style of music. No matter how you wanna look at it, you gotta take your hat off to it man, cus I don’t come for free, it comes with a lot of hard work. And a lot of consistent hard work as well, it’s not like you just do one radio show. That’s why when people talk about Dubstep Warz when it was January 2006, and it was dmz 1st birthday in the March, or was it 2nd birthday… and the January we always do a dmz on the first Saturday of the month, and everyone was like, nah you can’t do that, cus it’s the weekend after New Year’s Eve and no-one will come, but we did it and it was jammed, it was the busiest we’d ever had. And then Dubstep Warz thing come about and that just went mental on the radio waves, and March dmz come about and that one was just mental!
Yeah that’s when you had to move upstairs into the Mass (dmz switched venues during the event because the one they were in got too full).
Yeah and 2006 was a really interesting year cus it was one of those things where it started getting a real identity. We’d been going round record shops for a couple of years trying to sell records to shops who were like ‘no we can’t sell this’, but them same record shops were now calling back saying ‘shit we sold out of all your records in a copule of hours, we need another box!’ Things were really starting to change in 2006 and Dubstep Warz and all the people that played on that radio show, it was definitely …some people wanna say pivotal, whatever, however you wanna describe it. But it did what it did. I still meet people and I’m sure Mary Anne does that say, oh that Dubstep Warz show that was when I first got into this music. So I got a lot of love for Mary Anne and I wish her all the best with whatever she goes on to do, and no doubt she’ll make a success of it as well because the one thing she has over a lot of people is that she’s prepared to take a risk. And I know she took pure risks at the BBC, and they didn’t wanna play this music called whatever you wanna call it, and a lot of the magazines that are raving about the music now, were the same, they were worried it weren’t trendy enough or it weren’t good enough to write about it. Someone like Mary Anne Hobbs she didn’t really care about that, she felt it. And that’s probably why she’s doing what she’s doing now, if you can do what you feel and you feel it wholeheartedly you should do it, and if you don’t do it it’s stupid. She will be a success as a teacher cus she works hard man. [...]
Yeah it’s gonna leave a hole as well.
Yeah, but such is life. People will just turn to something else and they’ll find something else and it will be nice as well because it will always be looked upon as a really good radio show, and she will always be remembered and respected for what she’s done. Big up Mary Anne!
