No Tags

We trailed ‘big things coming’ on our last episode, and would you look at that – the big thing has come. Or is available for pre-order, at least.

That’s right, it’s our first ever book. Titled No Tags: Conversations on underground music culture and designed by All Purpose Studio, this hefty tome (350+ pages) compiles every interview to date on No Tags, edited transcripts of the best of Chal and Tom’s non-guest conversations, and specially commissioned essays from four of our favourite writers and thinkers: Eris Drew, Chris Zaldua, Henry Bruce-Jones and Ray Philp. The book is available to pre-order now.

We’ll also be launching the book with our first live show in London on 3rd December, taking over Ridley Road Market Bar. On the night we’ve got Kode9 giving his new talk on Sonic Warfare for the first time in the UK, celebrating a new release of his seismic 2009 book about acoustic force and the ecology of fear.

We’ll also be recording a live episode of No Tags with everyone’s favourite breakfast host Flo Dill, morning doyenne of NTS Radio. Plus we’ll have music from Jennifer Walton – not only one of our favourite artists, but the wizard behind the No Tags theme tune. Entry is free, simply hit ‘Interested’ on the event page.

There is also a podcast this week. We introduce the book before getting into some of our favourite recent releases (The Cure, mediopicky, Dubbel Dutch and Toma Kami) and dissecting the long-awaited debut album by Two Shell. There's also some film chat (Lords of Dogtown, Kneecap, The Florida Project) and a debate over the key historical entries in the Florida Film canon. We are confident that No Tags is the only podcast where Toma Kami and Wild Things get discussed in the same breath – and if that doesn’t count for something in 2024, what does?

Truly an artist who needs no introduction to the No Tags universe, Midland is also one of the nicest people we know in this bottomless viper pit called dance music.

Harry Agius has been a constant presence on the dancefloor since we were first finding our feet as music writers, and we’ve followed him every step of the way – from his early run of steppy house records on Aus Music and Phonica, to ‘Final Credits’ mania in 2016, and his current incarnation as something of a grande dame of gay club culture.

That role is one he’s grown into slowly but surely, as he explains to us in this episode, and it blossoms into something very special on his debut album Fragments Of Us. It’s far from your typical wham-bam, nine-tracks-and-an-ambient-interlude dance music long-player. Constructed around gay voices past and present – including ‘80s artist and Aids activist David Wojnarowicz, mould-breaking Black filmmaker Marlon Riggs, and Luke Howard of London institution Horse Meat Disco – it’s a genuinely personal record that’s also a kind of time capsule for future generations.

We talked to Harry about growing into his identity as a gay DJ, the many, many reasons to turn down a gig, and whether Arthur Russell would have liked dubstep. Plus, he loves his films! We get an excellent recommendation and confirmation, if it were needed, that he’s #PartyGirlHive.

As ever, if you enjoyed this episode of No Tags, please do rate, review and subscribe on your go-to podcast app, as it does really help. We’d also ask you to consider subscribing to our paid tier, which costs £5 a month and helps us continue planning, recording and editing these (often long!) podcasts.

A chunky episode, this, as we tackle the last fortnight of music news.

We mull over Charli XCX’s Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, a star-studded remix album that reworks the original from the stems up. If these are Brat Summer’s dying embers, then it’s a flame that struggles to consistently flicker – but the bright spots are very bright indeed.

We pay tribute to Ka, the Brooklyn rapper who died earlier this month aged 52. A proudly independent artist, Ka eschewed industry conventions to build one of underground hip-hop’s most committed fanbases – an example to us all. We also remember Jackmaster, whose influence both onstage and behind the scenes helped define an era of British club culture, and we grapple with how to eulogise those who’ve done harm.

Next we get into Chal’s recent essay for The Quietus about the current state of the dancefloor (have we truly lost dancing? And is it Tinder’s fault?), before finishing on the brilliant new album from Oklahoma dirtbags Chat Pile. Plus, the usual film chat to close.

As ever, if you enjoyed this episode of No Tags, please do rate, review and subscribe on your go-to podcast app, as it does really help. We’d also ask you to consider subscribing to our paid tier, which costs a mere £5 a month and helps us continue planning, recording and editing regular podcasts.

Timestamps01:03 Brat and it’s completely different…18:33 Ka28:32 Jackmaster44:10 Is everyone talking about dancing, rather than doing it?56:42 Chat Pile59:40 The obligatory films bit

On October 2, Amy Lamé stepped down from her post as London’s first Night Czar. Lamé had faced constant scrutiny since taking the job in 2016, especially following her chunky pay rises – most recently she was earning £132,846 a year in a period when the city’s venues have been struggling to survive. But Lamé’s achievements have also been defended by people deeply involved in the city’s nightlife.

One of those defences came last week from Party Lines author Ed Gillett, who argued in the Guardian that London nightlife could end up poorer for Lamé stepping down. In this episode we’re joined by Ed to get the real tea on what Lamé was up to during her eight years in the post, how her job compares to similar roles in other cities, why she was so heavily criticised by the rightwing press, and whether it was worth having a Night Czar in the first place.

Like No Tags? Give us a rating or review and hit that subscribe button on your podcast app of choice. We’d also ask you to consider signing up to our paid tier, which costs 0.04516% of Amy Lamé’s salary per month and helps us continue hosting and editing regular podcasts like this one.

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.

As ever, if you enjoyed this episode of No Tags, do consider rating, reviewing and subscribing on your podcast app of choice, as it does really help. We’d also ask you to consider subscribing to our paid tier, which costs a humble £5 a month and helps us continue hosting, editing and transcribing extensive interviews like this one.

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.

If you enjoyed this episode of No Tags, we’d love you to spend a minute rating, reviewing and subscribing on your podcast app of choice. We’d also ask you to consider subscribing to our paid tier – cheaper than cheesy chips.

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.