Our Space: A Women in Radio Roundtable
Meet the Hosts:
Erin
(Lake Forest, IL) - Hosts The Weekly Playlist
Fridays at 10 am EST
A weekly themed radio show doing everything from Halloween music, to deep dives on Tegan and Sara, to songs only about food.
Nicole
(Doylestown, PA) - Hosts Moonlit and Mellow
On hiatus due to COVID-19
Chill indie tunes for late night vibes.
Nicole and Erin
Host …Baby One More Time
On hiatus due to COVID-19
Inspired by Britney Spears and boasting as WSOE’s only pop show, a year is picked and that year's top hits are played while Nicole and Erin go on multiple tangents, have surprise guests, and explore how music’s past influences the present.
Ruby and Liv
(NYC) and (Essex) - Host …Unless?
Sundays at 3 pm GMT
Two girls, one brain cell, and a couple of tunes.
Millie, Honor, and Alexis
(St Albans) (Oxfordshire) and (Atlanta, GA) - Host The Vagina Room
Sundays at 11 pm GMT
Looking at feminist and pop culture issues, as well as choosing a music genre to unpack every week.
Myra
(Boston, MA) - Co-hosts Gateway Beats
Wednesdays on Soundcloud
Your Gateway to the wackiest Beats. We'll start off easy before nudging you off a cliff into the wildest tunes electronic music has to offer.
Issy and Cordelia
(Shanghai) and (Philadelphia, PA) - Host The Emphasis
Tuesdays at 3 pm GMT
The Emphasis aims to put a spotlight on individuals and the projects, societies, or events they have helped to grow. The show will feature guests from across a range of groups working to provide something unique at St Andrews, and discuss themes from events and culture to debunking the myth of ‘how does she do it all?’ Don’t miss out, see you on Tuesday!
Notes: This round-table has been edited for clarity, but the integrity of the answers has remained the same. Hosts’ shows may have since been discontinued since the time of this Roundtable, listen to archives via links listed above. Reach out to the hosts via shows’ social media found at the bottom of the piece.
Erin: So, what are the most rewarding and the most challenging parts of hosting a radio show? Because there are rewards and there are certainly challenges.
Honor: I would say the most rewarding thing for me was that I got a lot more confident in my music taste because you’ve got direct feedback from people going “that’s a lovely song” which I always appreciate. The most challenging part is probably the talking on air sometimes, especially when I’ve got a lot of things I want to say about one song I end up running out of time.
Millie: We’re really bad with time management on our show. But I think the biggest reward is just being really enthusiastic about something and then being able to share it with people and having that soundbite. My nan listens to our radio show and sometimes tells me off for swearing and Alexis’ parents tune in for every single show that we do.
Alexis: Yeah.
Millie: Especially during this time when it can be so horrible, we have that way of connecting to people and it’s really lovely. Especially in the format of STAR Radio because we have the buzz box so there’s that constant connection that we have as well. Ruby’s always on the buzz box.
Ruby: I think that’s really true and I feel like that’s been the most rewarding part of “Unless” for me is that we have this space where, to put it frankly, we can just be total dorks about whatever we want that week whether it’s music or a meme or a very serious topic we feel really passionately about. It’s a space where I can talk to one of my best mates. And Liv and I have spoken and we always come out of it feeling better about the day even if we had 2 listeners or we had 30. My favorite memory is after doing a show, our first show, we didn’t tell anyone we were doing it because we were so nervous so it was a big secret. And we left the STAR studio because it was pre-COVID and we were just gushing and couldn’t stop smiling. It was so rewarding to have that space to be the dorks that we are. But I would say the challenging part is remembering that it is something you do for fun and that it shouldn’t be a chore or something that stresses you out. It’s like playing a sport, it’s stress relief.
Liv: I totally agree, having that area where you can practice expressing yourself and develop and hash out ideas each week on such a broad range of subjects is so fun. I don’t think I realized how confident I’d become expressing myself and my own opinions until we started having guests on the show. And you see how nervous they are before the show and then they get more excited and start to have a laugh and you get to share the excitement and the joy you get from radio with everyone else.
Millie: I remember when Honor and I did our first show second year.
Honor: Oh god.
Millie: We had our intro track and then the second the track ended we were shaking hysterically that people could hear our voice. And I think as women as well it’s very important to have a platform to have our voices being heard. And I was always very bolshy, very loud, and so I was regularly told to be quiet, and the whole point of a radio show is that you’re not supposed to be quiet, you need to fill the time with talking.
Honor: You have to have opinions.
Millie: You have to have opinions, you have to be able to talk, you have to be comfortable with it. And those are things that, especially women, are told to suppress when they’re children because you’re supposed to be polite and you’re supposed to be quiet and you’re supposed to sit at the back of the room with your legs crossed. So it’s just a great way for me personally to express myself.
Alexis: And to get it across an international listening...like we have such a wide range of audience.
Nicole: I would say one of the most rewarding things has been the people that I’ve met through the radio, like without radio I would probably never have met or become as close with Erin as I have and Erin is like one of my best friends ever. So I just think radio provides a lot of awesome opportunities to meet people who are interested in the same things you are and passionate about the same things you are. And I think us doing our radio show together has obviously been a highlight because it’s an hour of our time where we just get to mess around and have fun.
Issy: Because Cordo and I started this year, it’s been kind of daunting to do it and we had never been in a studio and you have to figure out the tech. We always joke that our jingle should be “Can you hear me?” Because we can never figure out how to get the other person. But I think the most rewarding thing for us is you get the randomest messages from people you wouldn’t ever think would listen to your show being like “I just cracked up in the M&S parking lot because I couldn’t stop listening, I couldn’t get out of the car.” And I’m like “thank you, I would never expect that you would spend an hour of your time listening to me but here we are!”
Cordelia: And I think definitely starting this radio show during COVID and also starting a radio show that’s entirely guest based has been both really rewarding but really challenging because of coordinating different time zones. Also it’s COVID, people forget things, so having to improvise if someone can’t make it last minute. But also asking people to come on the show that not only have we never met, but we’re not going to meet because they can’t come into the studio. But still having this really amazing opportunity to interview someone and learning so much about them and creating this friendship with someone and helping our listeners learn about someone during these really weird, crazy times.
Ruby: I think definitely what you were saying about people listening is so rewarding in a. Way that I wasn’t expecting. Liv and I have a running joke on our show where we have “friends of the show,” which is just like the same five of our friends that listen every week, and we sometimes joke that this is just our five friends tuning into a conversation Liv and I are having. But there will be weeks where I’ll get messages from people like “oh I love that song.” My downstairs neighbor once listened and didn’t tell me and we played this song from RuPaul’s Drag Race and in the middle of the song he messaged and said “this song is giving me melanoma” and I started laughing on air and I remember after our first show there was this girl we didn’t really know but she messaged us about a Wolf Alice song we played and just geeked out about Wolf Alice over Messenger. And I thought it was so sweet because I’m a huge geek about that, I will happily geek out right back at you. So it’s nice to know other people are listening as well, especially when you’re talking about something you’re really passionate about.
Myra: My first year doing the radio I had a 2am show by choice because I thought no one would hear me, so I could talk and have the illusion of doing this and no one would know except my parents. And I would write out a full script of what I was going to say, I would be shaking while doing it, I had the worst stage fright growing up. And then by whatever year further along, I would get invited into a show because I was just in the studio and I would feel so confident to hop on because I would just speak and it was like “No one’s gonna die, I know how to talk, I’ll be fine.” And that change and how that helped grow my confidence and my ability to talk like a human being in front of people I didn’t know was really useful for me. And now doing the show how we’re doing it now, being able to spotlight a lot of small artists and having our social channels up and running too, people will reach out and these small artists will thank us for spotlighting them to our, like, 2000 followers. It’s not a ton, but it’s great to have that interaction with the artists too.
Erin: Those are great, thank you guys. Thinking about the creative outlet of a radio show, how do you think the radio show has helped you harness your own creativity and confidence with your ideas and with executing a project? Because, at its core, a radio show is a kind of project.
Liv: The first thing that springs to mind for me is the fact that it’s been an exercise in not taking yourself too seriously. We tried so hard at the beginning and we had this idea before that we were going to pioneer punk music at St Andrews and do all this stuff that there was no market for and we’re not cool enough to do. So once you get over that and just start doing what you actually love, you find that space and you're able to have a lot more fun with it and do exciting things that people want to engage with.
Honor: I think that’s so right, like working out what there is a market for but for sure just what you want to do. There's some things we've done that we know people aren’t calling out to listen to, but we want to do the show and it’s our show, so you have confidence in what you’re interested in.
Millie: And it’s like one of the only opportunities you have, especially in Uni, like you have a certain amount of this is what my module is or this is what I have to kind of do, but with radio you can just pick something out of thin air and you’re like d’you know what? Today I’m interested in the color purple, and so purple is going to be our theme.
Honor: French revival was our last theme.
Millie: Or French revival or whatever.
Alexis: We don’t really choose until the Friday before our Sunday show-
(Ruby points to herself)
Millie: Yes Ruby, I see you!
Alexis: But then we have so much fun with it and we do really play around with it. Like we were talking before with our buzz box, people do react with us on that and on our Instagram. It’s something that brings people together and also just gives us a solid hour of self-care time and we don’t have to do anything else.
Millie: The process of it, it does have that self-care element. I personally get really stressed out by new uni work, and it’s constantly on my mind no matter what I’m doing. But on the radio I can’t be stressed about uni work because I have to tell everyone in 30 seconds when this song ends, the album it was on, when it was released, and who released it.
Honor: And tell them why you like it. My favorite bit of the show is when you do the introduction or the end of a song and you go “this is when it was made, this is who it’s by, and personally, I like to listen to this when…”
Ruby: Yeah totally, I feel like when I came to uni, I do politics and IR, and there’s so much pressure to join all these clubs that are super professional and that’s just not what I’m like as a person. I was a bit too shy to go on the radio so I felt like when I was finally doing it, it was a space where I could, as corny as it sounds, be who I actually am without having to talk about uni work or anything. I just talk about stuff that I like, and that makes me happy. What Liv was saying earlier when we were like “we’re gonna do this and it has to be this,” we’re very similar in that way. But personally, my favorite episode we’ve ever done was our “Guilty Pleasures” episode which we came up with the night before, we played like Gwen Stefani and Madonna and it was just a great time where we could be geeky about these songs we liked at the time. And we make funny graphics for it and they’re so shit but they do bring a lot of joy to our day so I feel like that’s part of it.
Nicole: I think that something in terms of growing confidence, when I was a freshman joining WSOE I felt almost intimidated or insecure about my taste in music. I think now that is just ridiculous. I don't think anyone should ever feel insecure or like less than because their music taste isn’t “whatever” enough. And I think obviously you want to curate a playlist that people are going to like and you want to get that good feedback but I think doing a show like mine, at night, playing songs I like, helped me with that realization that if you like something that's what matters. You're going to connect to some people and other people are going to like it, too. Especially if you're passionate, that's going to come through and I don't know. I just feel like it helped me grow my confidence in who I am and what I like and not really worry so much about other people's feedback.
Myra: Something that was really useful for me was starting to listen to more people's shows outside of my own, which took me a little bit more time to do than I think it should have. I realized that even if I really couldn't care less about what they were talking about, if the people I was listening to sounded like they were having a good time, and they were laughing and they were having fun, then like I enjoyed it. That really helped me boost my confidence in being on a show because I was like “I'm enjoying myself so it doesn't really even matter what I'm saying, like I can be wrong.”
Issy: I think Cordo and I, we came up with the idea in lockdown, we didn't really want to be two Gen Z girls that are like “oh we’ll just start a podcast, we’ll just start a radio show” just because we can. We wanted to be like “what is the niche, what can we tap into that people like haven't heard or people might be interested in?” And I think what we found is that a lot of the anxieties that we all feel, and we all feel like we're alone in feeling at our age, a lot of other people do too. Every single person that comes on to a show we asked them “What you wish you told your eighteen-year-old self” and they all say “be more confident, care less about what other people think.” I think the advice that comes through is individual to everyone but it's also, like a lot of people have the same issues that they’ve worked through and it’s really interesting to hear them talk about how.
Erin: Do you think your show influenced the way you started interacting with music and other media? I know my show really started influencing the way I listened to music.
Nicole: Kind of going off what Myra was saying, I think like not necessarily having my own radio show, but being a part of radio and then meeting like lots of other people and listening to other shows and everyone just has different tastes. I think that being part of radio has opened me up to so many different kinds of music and just like so many different artists I wasn't listening to before or I probably wouldn't have heard of or like ventured into if I hadn't liked that other people who introduced me to them. So I definitely think that has helped me kind of open up in terms of music.
Ruby: Yeah totally, I feel like anytime I hear a song I just vaguely like I'm immediately on the phone to Liv like “this has to go in the show this weekend, like I don't know how it will make it fit, we’ll fit the theme around that.” And just in terms of the people in the call from St Andrews, like I've listened to both their shows, I've gotten music from The Vagina Room, and I’ll catch myself listening to random shows as well. Sometimes I'll just put on STAR which is something that I remember when we started our show, someone who worked at STAR was like “yeah, sometimes I’ll just listen to random shows on STAR” and I was like “why would you ever do that if it wasn't your friends?” And now I have started listening to really random shows and showing some of them. I think the process of finding music has really pushed me to listen to music outside of my comfort zone, as silly as that sounds, music I would normally be like “I don’t know if that’s my thing” and then really enjoying it, and thinking more flexibly about the themes behind it.
Honor: Yeah I get so much more excited about finding new music and sharing new music with the people around me. Like before I’d hear a new song and I might add it to a playlist or something and now I’m like “you need to hear this song!” So it’s a lot more exciting.
Alexis: I also definitely research the artists a lot more. I care so much more about the artist and where they're coming from, and what the album means and what year and location it’s in. It changes things.
Millie: Every song has a story behind it, and part of what our show does is it tells the story behind each song, and that’s what I find really interesting about music. Not just the song and the lyrics and the melody, but the influences and the history. I’m a history student and therefore a bit weird about it, but you know, I find it really enjoyable researching and getting into all the ins and outs and what instruments they used. It’s really enjoyable and it’s a great space to be creative in which I really appreciate, especially in my fourth year.
Liv: I think before I had a radio show I was very guilty of being the person that, whenever someone gave me a recommendation I would be like “yeah I’ll listen to it whatever,” and then never listen to it. And now I’m obsessed with whatever people show me. We’ve been trying to get our listeners to suggest songs live on air that we can play, like real time recommendations, and it’s just absorbing so many more types of music and songs. It’s definitely made me more open, which it seems like everyone is echoing.
Erin: Great and based on some of the things you guys have said I can definitely tell that there might be some really cool answers for this, but I’m curious about the relationship you and your shows have with social media and how you can use that. I think it’s a really interesting time for music and social media, so do you think social media has helped, hurt, or both helped and hurt how you and other people consume music?
Myra: I love it for interacting with artists, especially if you’re in the studio and you can take a quick video and tag one of the smaller artists you’re playing, they get so hype about it. Even if I’m playing this at 11 pm and am lucky to have like 5 people listening, and we don’t know how many people are listening from our end so it’s just kind of a shit shoot with that. But that’s always really fun for a small artist to see “oh my god they’re playing my music and maybe other people are hearing it, too.” I always use socials for that and now pushing it, it’s been really fun to design the feed and interact with artists, so I’ve really liked it for that. And I like it for being able to follow the artists and see when they’re dropping things, knowing when something’s gonna come out is really great for planning the show because if you already have the list made ahead of time but you know when something’s gonna come out, being able to be the first one to play that is a fun little thing that I always like doing.
Alexis: I run The Vagina Room social media and I find myself checking that more than others and all I’m following is the three of us and a bunch of other radio shows. That’s the whole part of the fun is the promo that we post. Also we use MixCloud and that’s definitely proven to be really useful because we post them at like 2 am and then everyone who didn’t get to listen can. We get something like 15 plays on average on MixCloud so it’s beneficial, and we can go back and listen to ourselves and it gives us a boost of energy. We find ourselves listening to the music and then our voices will come on and it’s a second of “oh that’s us, I forgot this was the show,” but then it’s “oh we sound good!”
Honor: And also we can definitely tell if we post a lot of promo on our individual accounts and the actual account, we get so many more listeners. You can literally see the direct correlation between being confident in putting your work out there and making people listen and how many people do respond.
Alexis: And it’s helping us go beyond STAR as well.
Millie: Social media is very helpful in that it’s incredibly accessible. I’ve got family that live abroad and so sometimes I can’t sit and talk to them for an hour because I’ve got way too much work to do, but they’ll tune in to the radio show and then text me saying how much they like a song and I’ll do shoutouts to different family members if they say they’re gonna listen on the MixCloud. I think especially in COVID times, we’ve got a lot of elderly relatives who are really enjoying student radio because what other sources of entertainment do they have? And what a nice way for them to interact with their grandkids. My nan messages us all the time saying that she loves our radio show because she knows that it’s a creative outlet for me and it’s something I really enjoy. I do it with my friends, I do it with my family. So it’s really special to share that input with someone, especially when you can’t physically see them.
Erin: That’s great. Kind of a more general question about creativity and the pandemic. So what creative outlets have been getting you through the pandemic, whether that’s radio or anything else? Do you find that you’ve been more or less creative than usual?
Issy: I think more. I think I have more time to sit and I’m not doing anything. I’m not in St. Andrews at the moment but when I am I get so distracted by everything. I was talking to Dagny today actually because I wrote this poem called “iPhone Notes” on PILOT like six months ago and today Refinery29 put up an article that was like “iPhone Notes are Poetry” and I was like “I was here first.” You look at things in a different way and you consider all types of media differently. Kind of going back to the social question, I use it differently because I’m not just looking at what people are doing because no one’s really doing anything in the same way that they would be. So everything everyone’s putting up is for a very different purpose and a different cause, and I think considering that effect has been quite interesting.
Ruby: I think it’s been harder to be quite creative, especially in the onset of schoolwork coming in on top of the pandemic. But pivoting back to radio it is a space where I can just section off an hour of my day just to listen to music with my phone on airplane mode, lying down staring at the ceiling. Because it’s the only time where I can think about it like that, and I don’t know if that’s necessarily creative because I’m not creating anything but I’m appreciating what other people have created during the pandemic.
Liv: During the sort of worst part of the pandemic over the summer, when Ruby was in New York and I was in England, we carried on doing episodes via CleanFeed. And no one was really listening to be honest. We weren’t really promoting them like normal, but we were still having the conversations and making the time and editing music in, and that felt kind of essential. It was just this unspoken thing we were going to carry on doing. And looking back, I’m really glad we did.
Ruby: Yeah and I remember we even lost two of the episodes because I spilled a beer on my laptop and they went missing forever. But it didn’t even matter. I mean I was obviously upset, but just being able to keep talking about these things genuinely did make my day. Like I was in New York and the pandemic was obviously horrific there in April and it was obviously quite a dark time and I just feel like that was something that was keeping me tangent to reality a little bit.
Cordelia: I think having a radio show where we intended it to be interviewing people that have started organizations or societies or charities at St Andrews, and then when we actually start it it’s during a giant pandemic where nothing can happen, it’s been really interesting hearing how it was for them when it could happen but also it’s been really fascinating hearing how it is trying to run an organization during this really crazy time that hopefully in the future won’t be a thing.
Issy: Yeah learning about adaptability has been interesting. Sometimes Cord and I will have episodes where it’s just us and I feel like people don’t want to listen to us just chat for an hour, but when we do we always walk away from those shows being like “wow that was great,” but when you have a guest or someone new on it sparks a whole new viewpoint. We had a videographer this week and neither of us had any idea how any of it worked, so just to talk to him, every time he said something we were like “that’s a soundbyte, you have to write this stuff down.”
Erin: So Dagny and I wanted to, in tandem with talking about radio, get the perspectives of young creative women handling your early twenties. Would you all share a piece of advice, maybe one personal and one creative or work-wise, that you would offer to other people?
Myra: The term “fake it ’til you make it gets dropped a lot” and I hate it and I think you guys should all second guess it if that’s something you live by. I’ve had a lot of great experiences working in the music industry and some people say “just pretend like you know what’s going on,” and that can totally backfire versus working with people who are very much aware of where you’re at in your career. You’re in a place where it’s okay for you to ask questions and not know the answer and not feel like you have to pretend that you know something and put in all this extra time to get caught up. Everyone has to start somewhere. Wherever you’re at with that, don’t feel like you need to pretend to know more than you do. And there’s an array of that, you want to come to something with confidence and know that you can do it, you just might not know how to.
Ruby: I think as, personally speaking, a very nervous, quite anxious person, I think the best piece of advice, as silly as it sounds, is to take a step back and be introspective and just relax a little bit. That kind of came to me when, on MixCloud, I was listening to one of Liv and I’s shows pre-pandemic and we were winging about something and in that moment I was like “oh my god, where I was then would be so happy with where I am now so why am I being so hard on myself about this one thing.” And that’s probably for the more personal side, as silly as the slogan “just relax” is, you do have to remind yourself of that. And the environment a lot of us are in right now is one that’s teaching you to just constantly second-guess yourself and not to give yourself an easy time about anything and that can be really harmful and it’s definitely impacted me. It feeds into it in a creative and work-wise way, like when Liv was saying earlier, “don’t take yourself too seriously” because it’s easy to get like that and get bogged down by it.
Millie: Just to follow on from that point, I think it was the second radio show ever we did and the files had gotten messed up and basically every time we clicked a song, it was the wrong song, it was a song from the previous week. I remember just being so stressed out and so nervous and so worried about it, and then just like you were saying, just to not be so hard on yourself. Everyone messes up. Even when you’re on professional grade radio sometimes the wrong track is played. From a professional standpoint I think that’s very important to recognize, even when you’re in a professional workplace, even when you’re working with people who are at the top of their craft, even they can get it wrong. Getting something wrong and having a mix up or mess up isn’t the end of the world, it’s about how you respond to that and you get back from that mix up, that’s what counts.
Alexis: And I would just add on to that, as silly as it sounds, don’t forget to laugh at yourself. Just have fun with [radio], it’s not the end of the world, you’re not being graded on it, it’s your time.
Millie: Sometimes the thing that people remember the most from your show was the part when you accidentally played the wrong track and then you make like a silly joke about it, and even though yeah, you did the wrong thing, people remember if you made that a positive and turned it into an enjoyable experience because when you’re enjoying yourself on the radio, the listeners are enjoying themselves too.
Liv: I think from both a personal and a professional standpoint, something that I’ve really picked up on over the last year or so is to not belittle your interests. It’s what makes you memorable, it’s what makes you someone that people are going to find interesting. Even when you’re on the radio, I’ll notice Ruby and I will be like “oh I really like this one specific, niche thing but that’s really dumb.” That is a mindset that carries into how you conduct yourself in a professional sphere, tutorials, when you’re talking with friends. It’s something I think a lot of women just default to and it’s really hard to shake, but as soon as you become aware of it, I feel like it’s something good to carry forward.
Millie: Yeah Liv I think you make an excellent point there. As women when we grow up we’re told to almost apologize for being interested in things. I went to all girls schools from ages eleven to nineteen and I remember always being like “oh, sorry but I think I have this idea!” Even just how we phrase it, how we come out with the words to say our point, we’re contradicting ourselves because we don't trust ourselves, and I think that’s what is so important about doing things like this and recognizing that there are other women that have those interests in that field. Just knowing that, yeah we all mess up now and then. It is really important to have that community.
Nicole: This is more personal but I saw this artwork on Instagram that said something like “take a break from endless self-fixing” and that really resonated with me when I saw it because just given the circumstances of the world right now, that shit is so hard. I feel like we can get really caught up in trying to do things to better ourselves and the state of our minds and the state of our bodies, and inadvertently that makes things even harder. We all just need to take a step back and realize that we’re okay as we are and embrace the person you are in any given moment and just give yourself grace.
Issy: When we first started, Cordo and I would notice that we would end our sentences with “if that makes sense.” And of course it makes sense, we’re making fully formed points, we’re very intelligent women. Some of the other guests we would have wouldn’t do that, we started to realize. But we’ve come prepared, we have a master sheet of all the questions we want to ask and we send them as a courtesy but it’s not something we had to do, so ultimately the respect is ours and it’s also within us to take it, if that makes sense. Oh, see I did it! I did it right then! But that’s the biggest thing we’ve learned, you are worthy of the space that you occupy. We got this show for a reason so it’s ours to explore and figure out what we want to be doing.
Erin: Amazing. Well whenever I’m doing a roundtable or an interview I always like to give a fun question to end on, not that that wasn’t a fun question and you guys gave great answers. Since we are talking about radio, and I know some are music based and some aren’t so I’ll say, if you were to give one album or podcast or piece of media as a gift to the people reading this, what would you give?
Cordelia: I feel like we’ve already brought this up but I think it inspired our radio show a lot. It’s a podcast called How I Built This by Guy Raz. It’s Guy interviewing the entrepreneurs being Twitter, Facebook, Rent The Runway, even like Cliff Bars. It’s people talking about where they started and how they got to where they are. I feel like it shows you that 9.9 out of 10 times, they never would have thought that they got there. And they come from humble beginnings and it’s about resilience and that really inspired us. That’s the message we’re trying to share with other people. 10/10 recommendation.
Issy: And I’m surprised Cordo didn’t bring it up but our bible on the show is The Defining Decade by Dr. Meg Jay. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. It might send you into a bit of a spiral but we both read it and we discuss how she views the decade that all of us are embarking on. That would be what I recommend.
Liv: I’m frantically messaging Ruby as we speak trying to figure out exactly what song I would recommend to someone right now and it’s freaking me out. I’m gonna go with the 10 Things I Hate About You soundtrack which is the perfect thing for a girl our age, or anyone our age really, to enjoy being young, having fun, and discovering who they are.
Ruby: I think that’s quite a defining soundtrack for our show, not because it’s the music we always play. Me saying that I don’t listen to one of the songs every day. But it’s one of the first conversations Liv and I had is about that [soundtrack] and it’s something we bounced off of a lot. I would say this question made me react in that way because whenever I have one drink in me, I make everyone go around, especially at family dinners, and say their desert island discs so I have a notes app prepared about it because I’ve thought about it a lot. And I would say the 10 Things I Hate About You soundtrack as well. Also there’s a playlist Liv and I have from our first show. I want to get it framed, not because the songs are particularly great, just because it means a lot. I might have to say “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” by The Slits because it’s the first song we played on our show.
Erin: That’s one of the first songs I played on my show!
Ruby: Women in radio! And also, Liv and I used to shamelessly model our show after The High Low, we don’t anymore but that’s a podcast I’d recommend.
Honor: I think my recommendation would be a Spotify account. It’s Ozzy Recs, because our show is a lot about finding new music and exploring the music you already listen to. [The account] is like a record shop, and they have different playlists for different genres of music and they’ve got really good selections. If I’m trying to find new music on a theme, I look to them first.
Millie: And then some former St Andrews students set up a really sick record store, and part of what they do on their website is have these integrated playlists.
Alexis: It’s called Ostrich Records and their Spotify is Ozzy Recs!
Millie: I have a book recommendation called Mars by 1980 by David Stubbs and it’s a popular history book about the history of popular music, specifically electronic music, and how it developed and key players from Sun Ra to J Dilla, and that’s given me some of my favorite artists. I think there’s something about learning about an artist by reading what someone’s written about them, and someone who’s dedicated years to researching them, and then hearing the music afterwards. It gives a completely different aspect and feel to me once you already know the history and the story behind it.
Myra: I’m gonna recommend anything by Caravan Palace because it’s the last show that I saw, in London with Erin, and if you don’t just get up and dance to every track they’ve ever made, I don’t know how you could not do that. That and “Like Sugar” by Chaka Khan because it’s my all time favorite track.
Nicole: I would say Geography by Tom Misch because that’s my go-to feel good album. It just makes me want to dance.
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Nicole // @nicole_hawley
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