Paul Golder writes for the Brentwood Gazette
Festival season isn’t quite over for Phoenix FM as we were invited to the first RiZE festival last weekend.
RiZE is a new festival in Chelmsford replacing the V Festival which had been attracting local music fans for over 20 years. We were invited at fairly short notice and I went down with Steve Robertson to talk to some of the acts playing.
Between us we managed to interview 16 artists over the two days giving us another two hours of exclusive content, which is all up on our website and popping up on various shows on air too.
I got to chat to some great indie and pop acts such as Ash, Miles Kane, Jake Shears (lead singer with the Scissor Sisters) and Lewis Capaldi, while Steve spoke to Tom Walker, Catherine McGrath and a DJ who I think said his name was Example, although that doesn’t seem quite right so I’ll need to look that up …
Very few other radio stations seemed to be invited and it was great not to spend half our day lining up behind the BBC who always seem to jump the queue at these events! We’ve built up a good relationship with local festivals, having appeared at our 12th consecutive Latitude this year.
We’ve also enjoyed a first year officially partnering with Standon Calling. These partnerships help us produce some interesting programmes that local listeners won’t be able to find elsewhere – one of the strengths of community radio.
In the meantime we’ve got a ton of local acts from all genres playing live on Phoenix FM so we’re continuing our commitment to new and live music even though the summer will soon be a distant memory.
* Guests coming up on Phoenix FM in the next seven days include former Mike + The Mechanics singer and sometime Roxy Music and Squeeze keyboard player Paul Carrack who will be chatting to Bob Simpson about his new album “These Days”.
* Adam Adshead will also be appearing with Bob, chatting about this year’s Billericay Art Trail.
* There will also be live music in the studio from Olivia-Jayne, Spudd Cannon and Dive Exit.
