As I wrote about in my last blog, I was recently invited on to BBC Radio Berkshire’s The Session radio show. This all came about because I uploaded some of my music on to the BBC Introducing website via their Uploader. The way it works is that after you have uploaded some music it gets sent to the BBC Introducing show on your local BBC radio station, in my case this is BBC Radio Berkshire. If they like it, then hopefully they will play it on the air.

This is exactly what happened to my track Make It Better. It was one of 4 tracks played for 30 seconds in the Demo Panel section of the show and was chosen to be played in full. As I am sure you can imagine, I was chuffed to bits about this. After getting in contact with the show’s presenter Jenny Minard, I was then invited on to the show the following week to be ‘In Session’. This meant I would be interviewed in the studio and they would play a couple of my tracks. As I’m sure you can imagine, I was even more chuffed to bits than the previous time that I was chuffed to bits.

I was a little bit nervous before the interview, but also very excited. BBC Radio Berkshire is in Caversham on the outskirts of Reading, Berkshire and is housed in the very lovely and grand Caversham Park.

After arriving I met Jenny and she was very nice and friendly. We had a bit of a chat about what we would talk about in the interview and I gave her a copy of my CD with the two tracks that I wanted to play, Make It Better and Tonight. I was given the option of either playing the songs live acoustically, or from a CD. After having a run through at home with my guitar, I decided that I would go with the CD option. I have been recording these songs for a long time now and spending so long making sure the production is good. It suddenly seems silly to pass up playing them on the radio in the way that I want them to be heard.

We did the interview in two parts with one of my songs played at the end of each. The interview was a pre-record which was good as after about a minute I forgot about the BBC rules and started babbling on about how great it is to make music on an Apple Mac and then sell it on iTunes. Whoops! A bit of Apple advertising there. So we went back and did that bit again.

I think that the interview went really great. I talked about how I make music in my studio, my album Parkview, my collection of odd instruments, my love of recording harmonies, making artwork, Twitter and my thoughts on the Reading Festival. Talk of my Shurti Box seemed to go down very well, both with Jenny during the interview and also with all the people that listened to the interview. I even had bring it in to work and do a bit of a show and tell.

The interview was broadcast live on BBC Radio Berkshire on the 2nd May 2010 and was also available online on the BBC iPlayer for a week after the show. This was great as it meant that all my friends and family around the country could also listen to it. The feedback has been really great, thanks everybody!

The interview was also written up as an article on the BBC website and if you would like to have a read, you can find it here.

So all in all, it was a great experience that I really enjoyed and would love to do again. In the meantime I guess that I should get on with making the rest of my album.

Stephen.