European Eclecticism and London Pirate Style: Gilles Peterson Interview

Gilles Peterson tells the story of his life in radio as we celebrate his Lockdown FM book and the new STR4TA single

“I think the idea of just doing radio and being a kind of speaking connector between the songs, I don’t know if that’s something I want to do. I want it to be meaningful.” Gilles Peterson is talking to me from the Brownswood Basement via Zoom, although we are both actually in North London. His voice is of course familiar from his influential Saturdays on 6 Music and shows on Worldwide FM, the internet radio station he founded in 2016 – let’s just say I’m a regular listener. I had wondered whether doing this interview might therefore feel as if I’m talking back to my radio, so I’d prepared an ice breaker of sorts, or at least my kids had. They had each drawn a picture of Gilles and as I hold those up to the screen, his reaction is so genuinely enthusiastic that I’m immediately put at ease. Indeed, as suggested by his on-air persona, Gilles is open, thoughtful and passionate about what he does. Radio exists very much in the moment, yet we’re here to talk about his life to date as a broadcaster, inspired by the recently published Lockdown FM book documenting his year of Covid-induced lockdowns.

“It was initially just meant to be about playlists. Then the thing grew, and Black Lives Matter was a major spin on everything. And my questioning of who I am, and what my responsibility is, and what my role is, and where I fit, and have I done the right thing, am I doing the right thing – all of that is continual with me. It was a very difficult time as a white broadcaster of repute playing black music.” Indeed, Gilles remains on a journey of discovery, both of the music and himself; thinking of the future without sacrificing the past. 

Going back to the beginning, I ask about his formative experiences of radio as a listener. “My really early memories are probably my mum listening to radio a lot,” he tells me. “She would be listening to a lot of talk radio and comedy stuff in French. I remember it was a big part of my mum’s life and it kept her in touch with her French roots. But for me it was when I discovered specialist music shows. That gave me an entry point, something that was all exciting and new and mysterious.” These included Greg Edwards’ The Best Disco in Town live from the Lyceum Ballroom on Capital, The Robbie Vincent Show on BBC Radio London and community talk radio from Jeremy Beadle on LBC [London Broadcasting Company]. Something even more inspiring was around the corner for him though.

I wasn’t really much of a John Peel person. I was a straight-up soul boy.

GILLES PETERSON

“When I discovered the pirate stations, that was really exciting. Whether it was Radio Invicta or the more traditional rock stations that were around at the time. It seemed to be mainly rock and sort of nerdy, electronic guys who liked building transmitters and playing their favourite records. I wasn’t really much of a John Peel person,” he admits. “I was more into the pirate stations. I was a straight up soul boy. I wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand between The Clash and Steel Pulse, and the kind of stuff that he’d play. So, I was going directly to my jazz, funk and soul DJs.”

Pirate radio offered the young Gilles Peterson entry into another world, one he hadn’t been aware of being brought up as a French boy living in England. His parents’ decision to switch his schooling to the British system around age eleven changed everything and he had to find his own identity within the new environment, although there were new friends who helped guide him. They “took me down this soul route, where I found my uniform. By that I discovered girls and music and fashion. And the radio. The radio was the way in because obviously I was too young to go to the clubs and the wine bars, and the pubs that had those DJs. I discovered Black Echoes and Blues and Soul,” he continues, “and the pirate stations and those radio stations I was telling you about. And then the record shop in Sutton Market that would have imports. At the same time as all that there was the Brit-funk scene going on [the resurrection of which he has been spear-heading alongside Jean-Paul ‘Bluey’ Maunick as the mighty STR4TA]. So, there was a bit of a live feeling as well. As time went on, I became more and more enveloped in it, and eventually got my decks. With my mate we started doing all the stuff that you do when you’ve got two turntables and some disco lights. Before long I found someone who knew how to build transmitters.”

The DIY possibilities of the pirates stood in stark contrast to an institution such as the BBC, and Gilles was able to set up a pirate station with a friend and assistance from his dad. They recorded shows in his garden shed, then broadcast from Epsom Downs, leaving the number of a local phone box for listeners to call, although only one person ever did. Something had nonetheless been set in motion and when Radio Invicta got busted and were without a transmitter; word reached them that there was a youth in Sutton who had one. They asked if they could borrow it and Gilles struck a deal: he would lend them the transmitter if he could be involved with the station.

They were laughing in the kitchen as I was broadcasting, I’ll never forget that.

GILLES PETERSON

“By then I was seventeen and I passed my driving test really fast. I basically became a helper, so I used to go and put aerials up for them. And I eventually got my first show. I remember broadcasting from a squat in Clapham Junction. I was on first and they used to make fun of me. The first thing they said to me was, give a shout out to Mike Hunt. And I stupidly fell for that one. They were laughing in the kitchen as I was broadcasting, I’ll never forget that. I was just that super enthusiastic boy who had a car. They took advantage of me, and I was happy they did.”

Parallel to this, Gilles was DJing in small venues, including a residency at Christies Wine Bar in Sutton, where he had to leave before the end of the night since he hadn’t told his mum what he was doing; a young Carl Cox would close for him. Gilles also organised coach trips to The Royalty in Southgate, bringing forty to fifty people with him to guarantee a DJ slot. Having residencies and regular gigs led to DJ charts placed in Blues and Soul or Record Mirror, which subsequently meant getting asked to play prestigious clubs such as The Gold Mine or Flicks and, eventually, Caister Soul Weekender. He was steadily building a name for himself as a club and a radio DJ.

“I was doing all the pirate stations that I could get on, but I was quite loyal, I didn’t go from place to place. I followed the line of the growth of pirate radio. The first station that came out of the death of Radio Invicta would probably have been Horizon and Horizon became Solar Radio because there was a fallout between some of the people. This is just before pirate radio really changed, when LWR [London Weekend Radio] arrived [in 1983/1984]. That was the beginning of twenty-four-hour pirates and Horizon was twenty-four, but we weren’t that smart getting advertising and stuff. So, it wasn’t until LWR turned it into a business and then they started becoming quite ruthless. You didn’t know who was busting you, whether it was another pirate or the actual DTI [Department of Trade and Industry]. Around that time, I got invited onto Radio London to do a show. That was when I started working at the BBC.”

Gilles was brought in as part of a strand of BBC Radio London night-time programming billed as Nite FM, which also featured Gary Crowley and Dave Pearce. New BBC management in the guise of Matthew Bannister eventually put an end to his time there, but not before he was let go and reinstated a few times. Precarious employment aside, Gilles notes that his time at Radio London in his early twenties was vital to his future.

In the space of a few weeks, I interviewed three very key people who shaped my life in the music.

GILLES PETERSON

“As a young boy who didn’t know much about music – I mean, I knew stuff from a pirate radio, jazz-funk kind of perspective – but I didn’t really know about jazz, not in a serious way. Then basically in the space of a few weeks, I interviewed three very key people who shaped my life in the music. One of them was Wayne Shorter. The other was Jalal from The Last Poets. And Mark Murphy the jazz singer. I was introduced to three very different aspects of jazz legacy and history.”

His time with Wayne Shorter was meant to be a half hour promo slot, but the legendary saxophonist saw in Gilles someone who was ready and willing to be taught. “I’d got my moment with him because he was promoting an album called Phantom Navigator,” he says. “He was amazing. The interview with him was about an hour and a half long and he really gave me a lesson about spirituality, about the history of jazz. What a lesson for me to have!

“And then Jalal, The Last Poets was a mad one, because he heard me on a Tuesday night on Radio London. He happened to be in England. This is The Last Poets, who were the first black consciousness kind of rap group from the sixties – proper heavy, civil rights, the whole thing. He was in a taxi, they had me on and I was playing “It’s a Trip” by The Last Poets. He was dumbfounded that he was hearing this on the BBC, so he called the BBC from a phone box and he said if you don’t put me through to the studio, I’m going to bomb the building! In the end he got through to me and then he came to the studio. So, I met Jalal and then we became colleagues for years. He used to come to my clubs, and I even signed him to my label Talkin’ Loud, we put some records out of his. He was a really important influence.

“Then Mark Murphy, who was a white guy who grew up in the fifties and sixties and was a big jazz singer. He was a singer who could have gone sort of theatre, but he kept it real. There’s a song that he wrote called “Dingwalls”, it’s an amazing piece about me and about his coming to my clubs and meeting me and stuff like that. So those three people, they shaped me, in terms of giving me that sense that I had a responsibility for the music I had to push forward. I do look back at that as a key time.”

In 1985 Gilles set up K-Jazz with friends Chris Philips and Jez Nelson, although it abruptly ended before its time when they were busted by LWR. Around then the pirate radio landscape was shifting, with the government beginning to hand out licences. “If you wanted to have a licence, you had to come off air,” Gilles tells me. “So, a lot of us went off air because we wanted to basically be in the good books when we put our applications in.” Gilles hedged his bets by accepting invitations onto two applications, Jazz FM and Kiss FM. Jazz FM was part of the old-fashioned English jazz network, yet they recognised Gilles as the young face of British jazz, and were ultimately granted the licence. Gilles brought in his K-Jazz crew and stayed there until he was fired in 1990 after encouraging listeners to attend a peace march during the Gulf War. 

We were an uncontrollable bunch of obnoxious young people and we were so full of ourselves, which was a strength to the scene.

GILLES PETERSON

“You couldn’t do it today because everything has got to be balanced. I was just a young tearaway not listening to anyone. In parallel to being on the radio, I’d already done a load of comps, I was doing lots of residencies, I was doing Acid Jazz Records. This is the time of Jamiroquai, Brand New Heavies, Galliano, all these groups. We were an uncontrollable bunch of obnoxious young people and we were so full of ourselves, which was a strength to the scene because it fired it, but equally for other people we were probably a nightmare. I used to do a show every Saturday for four hours from, I think, 12pm to 4pm and that show was basically quite cultish. At this time, I’m also DJing six nights a week. So, Saturday I’d been out – on a lot of Saturdays I’d probably been up all night and went straight to the studio. I remember we got a complaint from someone on the phone and my partner in the studio started swearing at that person. They had a bit of a row and he didn’t realise that the person who was complaining was one of the bosses of Jazz FM. So that was basically the beginning of the end.”

Gilles views it as a somewhat inevitable turn of events, since he had naturally positioned himself against their prevailing notion of jazz as dinner jazz from the start. “To be honest with you, the first song I ever played on Jazz FM was “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy, the Branford Marsalis saxophone version.” After leaving, he was offered a job on Kiss FM, where he spent most of the nineties until eventually being asked to join Radio 1 in 1998 – something which had eluded him up until that point.  

“It was a weird thing with Radio 1, because I was quite unconventional as a broadcaster,” he explains. “They couldn’t really place me. I wasn’t a jazz guy in the traditional sense. I wasn’t a world music guy. I wasn’t dance. My style of radio was a combination of a kind of European eclecticism mixed with a London pirate style.”

Radio 1 at the time had two outsider shows in John Peel and Andy Kershaw. Gilles believes that the BBC wanted to get rid of Kershaw, but to do so meant they had to replace his traditional world music show with something along similar lines. A fortuitous misinterpretation of Gilles’ ‘Worldwide’ moniker (which didn’t actually refer to ‘world music’) ultimately saw Gilles in and Kershaw out. “Andy hated me for years after that,” says Gilles. “I don’t know if he hated me, but…” He was given a slot after Kershaw’s friend and colleague John Peel, and it took a while for Peel to warm to him. Although Gilles fondly remembers an occasion a number of years later when Peel stayed behind one night to present him with a Sun Ra 7” from his personal collection. “That was probably one of the last exchanges I ever had with John before he passed away. For me, things like that, and things like meeting Wayne Shorter, they’ve given me a lot of juice and energy and raison d’être to pursue what I do.”

Gilles might have felt like a perennial outsider at Radio 1, but the understanding from above that he had a “weird following” protected him for some time. Eventually new management and the offer of “the worst slot ever” effectively put an end to his time there. He was interested in pursuing a move to Radio 3, but an old colleague from his Kiss FM days, Lorna Clarke, stepped in with the offer of a daytime show on 6 Music.

Because my early experiences of hearing jazz and avant-garde music were in mainstream environments, I’ve always been about doing mainstream, because that’s how you capture new ears.

Gilles Peterson

“I thought that again they might be slightly dubious about me,” he says. “It also was digital, and I personally hadn’t really transferred myself, I was still a bit old-fashioned and listening to the radio on the radio. But this was interesting that they were offering me a daytime show on 6, so yeah, I went for it.” This was 2012. “It gave me a whole new lease of life and a whole new way of finding new ears. I think the thing that people forget, and this relates to everything I do, but the thing with me is that I’ve always been somebody who, because my early experiences of hearing jazz and avant-garde music were in mainstream environments, I’ve always been about doing mainstream, making sure that I can be within a mainstream environment to play music, because that’s how you capture new ears.”

Speaking of different environments, I wonder whether his radio and club DJing continue to feed into each other. “Yeah, they do. It’s a brilliant thing. And it’s difficult,” he says. “I’m thinking about doing a book, this idea of the complete DJ. Because I can go and play with Floating Points and Four Tet or Motor City or Antal, all these guys. And it’s a certain approach to DJing, right. But that’s a different approach to being on at Sónar before Richie Hawtin or a hardcore jazz dance gig with Colin Curtis. Or having to play a wedding. And the funny thing is, I’ve done it all. I’ve done the mixes where I’ve just played at 128 BPM for two hours or where I’ve gone through all the different gear changes. It’s a bit like being a chef, are you just going to stick to sushi or are you going to do the full gamut? I’m still trying to be the complete DJ.” Endearingly, he tells me about a recent festival gig playing before Optimo (I’m wearing one of their t-shirts) and how he probably didn’t push it hard enough and could have gone deeper with his set – Gilles is clearly not one to rest on his laurels. 

This notion of the complete DJ is an intriguing way to consider what Gilles is all about. Of course, when the clubs were closed he was unable to inhabit each of his DJ personas, yet that period nonetheless became a vital one for him.

“It was a year where I felt that I was as much on top of my game as I’ve ever been. I could have fallen apart, I would have fallen apart a few years previously, my head wouldn’t have been ready. I was DJing too much, my lifestyle wasn’t right. It just happened to be that during the year of lockdown, I needed to spend time with my family, I needed to settle down. I’d set up Worldwide FM a few years previously – it came to my rescue with regards to allowing me to pursue something and have a cause to wake up every morning,” he tells me. “I had an audience and I wanted to communicate with them. It was a remarkably interesting time for me as a broadcaster, it’s like everything came home. I found my place.”

Stream/buy STR4TA When You Call Me

Buy Lockdown FM: Broadcasting in a Pandemic

Main photo credit Jesse FK Howard

Shout out to Colin Steven at Velocity Press who originally commissioned this interview