No Tags

Vivian Host’s rave credentials go deep. Much deeper than we realised in fact, and we’ve been friends with her for over a decade.

There are several entry-points through which you could have discovered Vivian. Maybe it’s her podcast, Rave to the Grave, where she interviews DJs, dancers and ‘freaks of all ages’, from legendary house vocalist Barbara Tucker to performance art pervert Kevin Carpet. In Vivian’s words, RTTG exists to document ‘a vital and resonant global (sub)culture that has often been ignored, dismissed, trivialised and poorly documented.’ Amen!

Or maybe you know Vivian through her journalism? A former editor-in-chief of both Thump and XLR8R, she also hosted Red Bull Radio’s Peak Time show, once the internet’s best resource for audio interviews with unsung heroes from countercultural scenes across the world.

Or maybe it’s simply through throwing parties and DJing under the name Star Eyes. After breaking through as a teenager Vivian spent the late ‘90s and early 2000s becoming one of the most prominent jungle DJs on the West Coast (she may have both been the first woman from LA regularly playing jungle at parties, and one of the first people full-stop to play UK garage in the States). After relocating to New York in 2004 she co-founded Trouble & Bass, a party and record label with an anything-goes approach to genres – far from common 20 years ago. T&B were also the first crew to book grime artists in New York. There are a lot of firsts in Vivian’s catalogue.

In this episode we naturally talk about the current state of play in LA, but we also go back to Vivian’s formative years exploring the city’s nitrous-fuelled punk and rave scenes, how she navigated the world of jungle as a teenager, San Francisco’s ‘90s free parties, and being held up at gunpoint by dodgy club owners in New York’s wild mid-2000s. It’s Vivian’s story, but it also doubles as an education on how raving evolved in the US throughout the 1990s and ‘00s. By the end of the interview we were equal parts inspired, envious and exhausted.

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With festival season over, it's time we investigated a story that’s been on our minds all year: has the bubble burst? In March it was reported that 21 UK festivals had already cancelled, postponed or closed in 2024. By the end of summer that number had risen to over 50.

Industry bodies blame rising costs, which is doubtless a factor – but what else might be at play here? A small cluster of dominant companies contributing to an oversaturated festival landscape, perhaps? Or are festivals simply falling foul of the strategy they’ve employed for years: pushing up live fees to price out their competition?

More importantly, how many of these events are actually any good?

For positivity’s sake we also spend some time shouting out the festivals we loved this year. Turns out that with clever booking and some attention to detail, you can still put on events that offer an alternative to the homogeny.

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We’ve not interviewed too many DJs so far on No Tags, so when we do, it’s a safe assumption that a) we’ve watched them play a few times, and b) they’re pretty tasty at it.

OK Williams falls into both categories. We’ve seen her DJ multiple times and have never failed to leave the dancefloor refreshed. But she’s also one of our favourite dance music personalities, as evidenced on her regular NTS show (and, OK, her Twitter account) where she exhibits the sort of energising but healthily realistic attitude that, frankly, more DJs could do with cultivating. Who knew there could be a link between having an engaging personality and making people dance?

We sat down with OK Williams for a solid 80 minutes to talk, well, a lot. Is this one of No Tags’ more forensic and focused interviews? No. Is a it a lot of fun? Undoubtably. But OK Williams offers as much insight as entertainment. We talked through her formative raving years, the musical awakening she found in queer clubs, her secret background in journalism (awkward!), her relationship with Andrew Weatherall, and some big picture questions on DJs as public figures and their responsibilities.

If you like what we’re doing at No Tags, please like, rate, review or subscribe to us on your podcast app of choice – in their own abstract ways, these things help. You can also support the show in a more literal way via our paid tier, which costs £5 a month and really helps us keep bringing you these podcasts and transcripts.

Regular No Tags listeners will notice that we often talk about living through several revivals at once, but indie sleaze is one that doesn’t seem to be going away. So why indie sleaze, and why now? And what do people actually mean when they talk about an indie sleaze revival in 2024?

For this episode, Chal and Tom dug out their skinny ties and shutter shades (not to mention some brutal photos from the depths of their personal Facebook archives) to try and figure out whether this is a genuine musical revival or a cynical move from struggling millennial marketeers to reanimate an era when they were still relevant. And are we dealing with nostalgia for a genuine scene here, or simply a yearning for a time when city-focused alternative scenes were actually realistic and accessible? And is there actually a much more interesting scene from this era that we could and should be excavating instead?

In summary, this is an episode where we evoke both Mark Fisher and Agyness Deyn – a No Tags manifesto if ever there was one. Enjoy!

On No Tags 25, we meet Jonny Banger: T-shirt hustler, avant-bootlegger, visionary rabble-rouser, DJ battle champ and bossman of the anarchic anti-fashion brand Sports Banger.

From a certain angle, it can seem like the clothes are the main event at Sports Banger, from the original Free Tulisa tee and bootlegged NHS logos to wearable inflatables and a Chanel toilet seat headpiece. Naturally, Jonny has been asked a lot of questions in previous interviews about his designs and his philosophical take on bootlegs and infringement. But there’s another side to the Banger story that hasn’t been excavated: obviously, the music.

Flipping through Sports Banger: Lifestyles of the Poor, Rich and Famous, the book that charts the first decade of the project, you can find musical references on almost every page: pilfered record label logos, Skepta in a postie’s hi-viz jacket, descriptions of his studio’s fine-tuned sound systems, playlists of tunes that inspired the Sports Banger runway shows, and even allusions to Jonny’s previous life in the UK rap scene.

We invited Jonny to go deep into the musical side of his story, from tape packs to free parties to the “shit mix jar” that collected fines in the first Sports Banger studio. He told us about his teenage years as a scratch DJ, his previous life as a club booker on Brick Lane, his ravey links with Swamp 81, School Records, Shangri-La and his own Heras label, and how he finally fell in love with free parties. And, most exciting for our resident KLF dweeb, he gave us a hint of what to expect from Sports Banger’s forthcoming collaboration with K2 on the People’s Pyramid.

It’s been a wild ride, and he’s got the stories to prove it.

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If four generations make up a family, then how many podcast references to the early 2010s make up a revival?

We confront the spectre of 2011 from a few different angles in this episode, but particularly via dance music, where it feels like the anthems of the early 2010s, not to mention the top tier of DJs, are yet to be replaced. Is that down to nostalgia for the music itself? A lack of inventiveness plaguing the decade since? Or have we entered a period in history where we’re living through multiple revivals at once?

We also talk about something genuinely brand new: Hit Em, the internet’s genre-of-the-moment. This absurdist microgenre was invented on Twitter last Monday, discussed in our recording on Wednesday, and has since been covered in The Fader, NPR and The Guardian. Maybe it’ll all be over by next week. Twitter being used for good? Now that does feel like a throwback to 2011.

We also chat about Jane Schoenbrun’s new film I Saw The TV Glow, and particularly its staggering musical moments. We doubt anyone’s 2024 bingo card had Alex G, Yeule, Phoebe Bridgers and Fred Durst in the same room, let alone coalescing into some of the year’s most must-see cinema.

As ever, if you like what we’re doing on No Tags then please like, rate, review or subscribe on your podcast app of choice, and if you really like what we’re doing, consider supporting us via our paid tier. It’s only £5 a month, and seriously helps us keep doing what we’re doing.

This week, Henry Bruce-Jones joins us to run down the best music of 2024 so far.

With the caveat that we didn't think it was worth revisiting the albums we've already discussed (and Brat summer's over anyway, babes), we start with the gaseous moods of Naemi, Bianca Scout and Chanel Beads. Are we in the midst of a brave new wave of shoegaze, or has the NTS early morning schedule pumped one too many Cocteau Twins songs into the water supply?

We compare and contrast Erika de Casier and Clara La San’s throwback R&B styles, and dive into some of the year’s most interesting hip-hop records with both feet: They Hate Change, Jawnino, and Cooper B. Handy & Surf Gang.

In club corner we celebrate recent releases by Facta, Parris, Emma dj, Verraco, Less-O, Jabes, SOPHIE and Actress (his best album in years?). We get into the various sides of Mica Levi and Henry goes deep on recent efforts by Nudo, Hafeez and NMNL.

Finally, we close on some of our most bonkers Bandcamp discoveries of the year. Unfamiliar with Lust$ickPuppy, FIN and Phil Geraldi? No matter – these are the sort of discoveries that, in Chal’s words, are a reminder that we love music. Jaded insiders? Us? Never!

If you like what we’re doing on No Tags then please like, rate, review or subscribe on your podcast app of choice, and if you really like what we’re doing, consider supporting us via our paid tier. It’s only £5 a month, and seriously helps us keep doing what we’re doing. Enjoy!

We’ve become so accustomed to bad news that Labour’s landslide victory in the UK general election has been a hard one to process, despite it being a dead cert. The Tories are actually gone? Can it be real? So this week we decided to piece together our memories of the last 14 years of cuts, corruption and chaos, and see if we can identify the sound of Tory Britain. 

We’ve spent most of our music careers toiling under the long shadow of George Osborne’s turbo-cuts to public spending – not to mention Brexit batshittery, the crazy days of Corbynism, the aftermath of the Grenfell disaster and Black Lives Matter, and of course the lockdown years and attendant Covid conspiracies. 

But the politics of austerity Britain also changed the nation’s musical culture, and in this episode we talk about the dominance of festivals at the expense of clubbing, the sound of the student protest movement, the emergence of drill in the hollowed out communities of South London, and the political backlash to the five-headed monster of Cameron, May, Boris, Truss (lol) and Sunak. 

We also have a think about why Keir Starmer seems to have forgotten his musical roots, and what we might expect from a Labour government that’s appointed Lisa “Towns” Nandy as culture minister.

Remember that this Saturday 20th July we’ll be in Glasgow for a live No Tags experience, hosted by Feena and Wheelman at Glasgow University Chapel! Tickets are available on the door, or you can sign up for membership of the Events Research Programme for just £3.50. 

If you like what we’re doing on No Tags then please like, rate, review or subscribe on your podcast app of choice, and if you really like what we’re doing, consider supporting us via our paid tier.

This time we’re joined by Meaghan Garvey, author of America’s #1 vibes-based newsletter, SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE, and one of the best writers in the game.

Meaghan started off as an illustrator, laundering a semi-successful weed-dealing operation through an Etsy empire before becoming better known as a music journalist. Whether writing pin-sharp profiles of megastars like Lana Del Rey and T-Pain or getting deep in the DIY weeds, Meaghan has long been a BS-free voice in a sea of mediocrity. And ahead of the curve, too – she broke up with Drake in 2015.

In 2020 Meaghan launched SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE, a Substack that’s somewhere between a confessional travel diary and a photo album of nostalgic Americana. Recent editions include a rundown of Milwaukee’s oldest dive bars, a crash course in train-hopping and a visit to House on the Rock, “Wisconsin's tweaked-out Graceland.”

When she returned to Pitchfork for a flagship review of Charli XCX’s Brat, we knew the timing was right for a No Tags interview. We talked about stan culture, the pantomime of vulnerability in modern pop music, nostalgia for 2011, learning how to write about yourself, and searching for honesty while fleeing from the discourse.

Plus, Tom and Chal report on more examples of payola in underground music and get into the Glastonbury debate: should people be losing money to play it? Why is it so crowded? Is Glasto finally… cooked?

Hit that like, smash that share, bosh that review, and be free.

A fairly big topic this week, as Tom and Chal investigate the issue of payola in underground music. Does it exist? Well, kind of - but not in the way you might think.

Some background: in our Fish56Octagon episode, Tom mentioned that he was pretty sure that Fish was being seeded and potentially paid to play people’s music. A couple of people got in touch to confirm that the first part of that at least was true, and it got us thinking: accusations of money changing hands for coverage are still pretty rife in dance music discourse, and we’ve not really seen this publicly investigated before.

Given that we’ve both offered quite a lot of our adult lives to cultivating the content farm, we figured we were in a good position to talk about this topic: notable examples of it we’ve seen in our careers, how prevalent it is or isn’t in the music press, and what it tells us about both the current climate of music media and its uncomfortable relationships with advertising and creative agencies. Plus: the story of a certain disgraced record label once pulling its advertising from FACT over a middling album review.

Elsewhere, we address recent accusations of a No Tags anti-baldness agenda, talk the first music from SOPHIE’s forthcoming posthumous album and celebrate an all-timer of a victory lap in the form of Kendrick Lamar’s Pop Out concert. Cool underground dance recommendations? Who needs those when you have a roomful of NBA players and California gang leaders dancing on the grave of Drake’s reputation.

As ever, if you like what we’re doing on No Tags then please do like, rate, review or subscribe on your podcast app of choice, and if you really like what we’re doing, consider supporting us via our paid tier.