Adam Walton '93-'23 - List of Sessions / Interviews / Live Sets etc.

An ongoing list of artists who have been in session, or who have been interviewed / played live sets, for my BBC Radio Wales show(s).

I felt an itch to start writing about my 30 years in music radio a few weeks ago. Nostalgia doesn’t come naturally to me. This job has had me focused on whatever’s happening that week since 1993. It’s a very narrow window that doesn’t even afford much in the way of future gazing. If artists I’ve played have gone on to great things, it’s not ever because I predicted it, it’s just because they stood out - stand out - in that given week.

Which is as it should be.

Lists of artists who should be on your radar for the next 12 months are anathema to me. I don’t trust anyone - organisation or individual - who embraces the mantle of ‘tastemaker’, as soon as someone calls themself that - or a synonym - I struggle to recognise their integrity. Clearly I exist at a quantum level of cynicism. Perhaps I’m bitter and resentful to the core; I don’t know. I prefer to tell myself it’s purer to react to the music in the moment, as purely and unburdened as possible.

BBC Radio Wales archived a lot of its news and sport output and programmes about the countryside - and such like - since my tenure began. But the Radio Digital Archive contains little or no mention of my shows until the mid-00’s. Which is a great shame because we spoke to many fascinating artists from the programme’s inception onwards. In the dark old days of 1993, music was still very much the domain of record labels and pluggers. I write that as if things have changed markedly now and although they have for me, and our show, labels and pluggers still hold sway elsewhere in radio: 6Music and Radio 1 and 2 in particular.

More withered chips on this shoulder than in the footwell of my old car.

When I started out in October 1993, I wouldn’t have been able to compile a weekly three hour programme of ‘just’ Welsh music. There wasn’t enough of it about. The first programmes that I did - on Tuesday and Thursday nights between 10 and midnight - were a glorious mixture of the fantastic Welsh music that was surfacing at the time: Dub War, Manic Street Preachers, Helen Love, Gorky’s et al, and some of the finest international artists of the time. This was a template, a philosophy, dreamed up by my producer Jane Morris. I will write more about Jane in due course, suffice to say that without Jane there would have been no programme.

There’s a few of us about who have a lot to thank Jane for.

New music radio in 1993 was mostly Peel, Out On Blue Six and a nascent Evening Session. Revolution was a bit like all of these shows, but with a Welsh focus and a dizzyingly smaller budget. However - because of Jane’s ambition and my curiosity - we punched above our weight. The pluggers I was sniffy about earlier (my sniffiness is much more about radio that doesn’t listen beyond what is offered to it on a silver salver) liked bringing artists to our Mold Studios. The little schoolhouse on Glanrafon Rd in Mold was charming; artists playing in the Tivoli just up the road could call in easily to record a session between soundcheck and their stage time, and tarmac- fatigued, tour-weary artists liked the hills and the relative quietness of Mold.

Neil Cossar, TMP, Alan Jones PR, Intermedia, Red Alert, Parlophone, Mutante, Rocket, Overground, Revolution PR and others whose names I’ve forgotten, brought many amazing 90’s music-makers to our humble schoolhouse, where they got to rub shoulders with Pinney-The-Chips (eminent TV reporter Roger Pinney… very fond of chips); irascible Jean (our secretary); Chrissy Burns (Take That visited Chrissy regularly early doors… Robbie made a very nice cup of tea); the TV news guys… Julian Cope spent an hour upstairs pointing out tumuli and stone circles on the map that adorned the newsroom wall to Tony, Claire and Tracy. Pretty surreal.

Terry Bickers - founder member of House of Love and in to record a session with us as part of his Levitation project - went for a walk just before his session started because he wanted to see the hills. He never came back. He could still be up on the slopes of Moel Famau.

Mostly artists visited to record a session for Revolution in our tiny studio. The tiny studio had a couple of advantages. Firstly it had a recording area separated from the mixing desk by a wall with a soundproof glass window, like what proper recording studios have.

Neither of these rooms can have been much more than 10 feet by 10 feet. Drum kits were a no no. It didn’t stop Stereophonics from trying. Nor did it stop us from trying to squeeze the entirety of Soundtrack of Our Lives - a troupe of large, bearded Swedish psych bears - into the studio to record their brilliant session, back in ‘97.

The other huge advantage we had was our in-house presenter / producer / tech / Swiss Army Knife of radio, Alan Daulby. Alan singlehandedly kept the technical side of the office running and enabled all of our outlandish expectations for session recordings in facilities that were barely up to recording news bulletins for Radio Clwyd.

What Alan could do with two 1/4” tape machines, a couple of mics, and a bit of ingenuity and care for the subject matter was wondrous indeed.

They were mostly acoustic sessions, but they never sounded compromised.

They sounded great.

Because Alan also had the foresight to archive and date the sessions, we have copies of each of them and an accurate record of the dates they were committed to tape.

No such discipline existed elsewhere.

The hundreds of interviews I recorded for the show (they were almost always recorded) are neither preserved (except in very rare and arbitrary cases) nor chronicled. I remember some because of the magnitude of who I spoke with, or because something awry happened. Beth Orton, for example, was one of the few who really didn’t want to speak with me about her music. So her monosyllabism made the interview memorable (to me). I also remember an American alleged punk band called ‘Sammy’ whose rebellious swearing and indolence were entirely lost, as we were doing a pre-recorded interview, that ended up - in its entirety - on the cutting room floor.

Luke Wood from that band went on to be a music executive and - amongst other things - signed Elliott Smith to Dreamworks, thus enabling one of my favourite albums of all time, X/O. So I forgive Luke now. I’m sure he’s relieved, in his palatial LA uber-pad.

I remember an ISDN / down the line interview with the Inspiral Carpets because they insisted on calling me Lloyd Grossman for the duration.
And an interview with Jason ‘Spaceman’ Pierce in our studios in Mold that felt like it lasted hours, so somnambulant were his tones… all exacerbated by Jason’s insistence on keeping an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth for the duration.

Granted these aren’t revelations that would entertain even the most desperate after dinner crowd. I know this. I was once employed to entertain as an after dinner speaker at a new 5 star hotel in Deganwy. The invitation was never repeated.

“No one in Deganwy knows who Rocket From The Crypt are…” was the agent’s surmise of my efforts.

I’m detailing all of this here for my benefit, really; on the off-chance that you might find the details interesting. They’re rarely sensational, but I do think they’re a snapshot of radio and music culture over this period that tells us much about music, technology and people over the last thirty years.

In short: I can’t remember the entirety of who I have interviewed, or where the interviews took place. The face-to-face ones are memorable; the ISDN (poncey phone lines) less so. One of Jane’s great strategies was to take us to the big festivals (Glastonbury, Phoenix and Reading) and for us to collect interviews there that we could then broadcast throughout the year. It was a fine strategy and I remember us working hard over those hazy and heady weekends… often the only people in the backstage press area who appeared to be doing any work. Other than Caitlin Moran.

However I can only remember a handful of the people we spoke to at the festivals. Again, it wasn’t necessarily the gravity of the artists that made the conversations memorable; it’s usually that something went wrong or a difficulty arose.

I will never forget Jane telling Richard Ashcroft and the rest of The Verve (as they were still known at the time) off for blasting music out of a ghetto blaster while I was trying to interview them. She totally bollocked them and they were meek putty in her hands afterwards.

Maybe Jane remembers who else we spoke to with more clarity?

I remember who we didn’t speak to at these festivals. Or even see. If I had any kind of opportunity to interview Bjork or The Beastie Boys now, or Public Enemy, I’d sacrifice kith and kin to do so, but back then… I don’t know… I didn’t push for these conversations. I could have done but I had too much awe. No bad thing, maybe.

Some interviews I do remember doing with clarity, but I can only guess - with low accuracy - the dates. In 1994 and 1995 I was coming to terms with aspects of my mental health that I understand far better now, but which - regularly - incapacitated me then. My GP put me on librium and I had to visit a community psychiatric nurse once a week to try to get to the root of my problems. I had depression and general anxiety disorder, but these weren’t talked about often, or openly, back then, until Kurt Cobain’s suicide in ’94 and, the following year, the disappearance of Richey Edwards.

I interviewed Richey twice. Once around the release of Gold Against The Soul and then around the release of The Holy Bible. His clarity of thought, his intelligence, and his pain were both inspiring and terrifying to me. My nightmares were chimeras at - mostly - the edge of my imagination, whereas Richey’s were real, objective and couldn’t be talked out of existence.

I wish copies of those interviews still existed. But in ’94 and ’95 we recorded everything onto 1/4” tape, and the tape was then re-used. The interviews - these fascinating people’s words and stories - flowered on air once and then were lost forever, except in the memories of whoever heard them.

There’s something beautiful about that temporalness. Nothing is temporal now, everything is preserved for as long as the technologies endure. That’s a whole lot of stuff for future historians to wade through. Artificial intelligence’s greatest use to us might be in sorting wheat from endless chaff. I can see an algorithm scanning this piece in the not too distant future, in mere milliseconds, and classifying it ‘CHAFF’.

At least it is human-written chaff. My chaff.

So, at the bottom of this chaff is the list I’ve compiled of what I know we did, whether it was radio sessions / live sets as part of outside broadcasts the programme was involved in / interviews / programme features and blogs commissioned by the show, when that seemed like a forward thinking thing to do.

I haven’t detailed facts about the regular contributions from Soundhog, Gareth Potter, Alan Holmes, Anne Matthews, Peppermint Patti, DJ Fuzzyfelt, Lara Catrin, The Minister for Cool Welsh Pop, Martin Carr, Bethan Elfyn, Simon Price or Iestyn George to the show, over the years. All of these people contributed hugely to the programme, but this is all about me: narcissism rampant in spreadsheet form!

Often I have guessed dates according to the releases I know the artists were talking about at the time.

I want this list to be as accurate as possible, but some of it will be wrong or inconsistent. For example, some of the session dates given are the dates that the sessions were recorded, not necessarily the dates on which they were broadcast.

I’ve guessed too many of the studio locations because I just don’t have that information to hand.

With all of these ‘things’, I’m very happy to be corrected! God, please do.

And if you have any photos / anecdotes / information pertinent to any of the listed items, absolutely feel free to contact me. It will be much appreciated.

If you know of guests I’ve forgotten about, please do similarly.

I think compiling this list has swallowed up more of my last month than I ever intended it to. This programme - my programme… OUR programme - has always been first and foremost about the music between the guests. I’ll get to that in due course. It’s important to remember that - perhaps - when scrolling through this list. For all of the amazing guests, or the guests who are now unknown and forgotten, they were embellishments to the show and not its reson d’etre.

This is especially important when considering the diversity of the guests involved. There’s an appallingly predictable focus on white / male / guitar-orientated artists throughout. That has evolved now into an inclusiveness with regards guests that has always - I think - been apparent in the music played on the show.

Please only re-use this content with a credit and a link to the Google Sheets doc. It’s taken me many hours to compile and it will be an ongoing process.

Thank you for reading / diolch am ddarllen.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w-rIPj0l0QhUcbEm08PUPLUWh-416mwlteG_8wpNWtQ/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks for reading Adam’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.