Gilles Peterson is one of those rare broadcasters who doesn’t simply introduce you to music; he alters the way you listen to it. In the mid-1980s, when I was making my first pilgrimages from Northern Ireland to London, he was quietly rewiring my teenage brain. I’d come south in search of vinyl and tapes, gutties and garms [sneakers and clothes], a better understanding of Hip-Hop & Rap, and the occasional gig. Gilles, meanwhile, was busy dismantling my musical prejudices before I’d even had time to develop them properly.
While most of my contemporaries were arguing over the latest chart hits, he was introducing my Irish ears to what was then known as Rare Groove: a loose, wonderfully unruly universe of jazz, soul, funk and records that seemed to exist beyond the reach of ordinary music retail. It was an education delivered without the faintest whiff of a lecture. You listened, you learned, and you went looking for more.
I was a b-boy, so Hip-Hop was always going to be my first love. But breaks were the gateway drug. Every b-boy eventually found himself tracing a breakbeat back to its source, whether through diligent research or the more traditional method of squinting at a record sleeve in a second-hand shop. If I wasn’t on the dance floor while he was behind the decks at Dingwalls in Camden, or alongside the mighty Patrick Forge at The Wag in Soho, I’d be tracking down his Radio London broadcasts whenever I was in the capital. London’s club nights in those days were more than opportunities to dance until your feet filed a formal complaint. They were informal universities, with better sound systems and considerably less sitting still. Every set sent me home with a mental shopping list of records to hunt down, new names to remember and the growing suspicion that the musical world was considerably bigger than the one I’d arrived with.
Anyone paying attention came away a little wiser. The trick, of course, was paying attention while you partied and danced your ass off !
In 1992, I moved to London, and continued following Gilles wherever he was dropping gems. Fortunately, I’d stumbled into a job that made this particular obsession unusually convenient. I was the night manager at HMV in the Trocadero, that sprawling temple to Central London leisure, retail and questionable architectural decisions. Just around the corner, within the same building, at Bar Rumba, 36 Shaftesbury Avenue, Gilles Peterson and Mo Wax founder James Lavelle were establishing their legendary That’s How It Is nights.
The Trocadero complex was my workplace; Bar Rumba was my extracurricular education. The nights were becoming essential Monday destinations, and I went every week. I’d finish a shift at HMV and head straight over with colleagues or other party prepped friends, having spent the evening surrounded by records only to spend the night discovering more records I needed to spunk on staff discount. There are worse ways to ruin yourself financially.
The majority of the time, when I wasn’t working or gallivanting around town, I was at home recording the radio. Gilles during the week; Westwood and the rest at the weekend. Blank cassettes were cheap, radio schedules were sacred, and the pause button was an instrument requiring the reflexes of a concert pianist. I was building an archive without quite realising it. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only obsessive who understood that a good broadcast was something to be preserved, not merely enjoyed and forgotten.
Back in Belfast, between 1999 and 2005, my old-school mate Alex Thompson had been recording the shows with similarly religious devotion. A few years ago, he handed his archive over to me, adding hundreds of broadcasts to my own collection. It was an act of extraordinary generosity, and one that has left me with a problem of almost comical proportions: a mountain of cassettes containing decades of musical discovery, all of which need to be digitised before the magnetic tape, or my remaining free time, gives up the ghost.
So I’ve been working my way through them, one tape at a time, transferring what has turned out to be an absolutely staggering archive. Each cassette is a small time capsule: a record of what Gilles was playing, who he was talking to, and the musical connections he was making long before the streaming algorithms decided they knew what I ought to hear. Back then, I was simply a kid from Northern Ireland trying to find the next great record. I couldn’t have known that, decades later, I’d be sitting among hundreds of cassettes, determined to preserve the broadcasts that helped shape my ears in the first place.
The shopping list, it turns out, never really ends.
If anyone has tracklists, playlists, guest indexes or archived information relating to Worldwide broadcasts between 1998–2005, I’d genuinely love to hear from you: craig@randomrapradio.com.
One standout so far is this “Words & Music Special” featuring Saul Williams. Part interview, part poetry, part musical journey, it’s a fascinating listen. Saul drops some incredibly prescient observations that feel even more relevant today, and naturally the soundtrack is packed with incredible music from the period.
Surely someone out there has already built an Excel spreadsheet, guest database or show index…
The BBC Genome archive stopped long before this era, and the old BBC programme pages have largely disappeared. The reality is that I’m sitting on a colossal archive of full two-hour broadcasts—every single tape contains the complete show—and there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to fast-forward through hundreds of 120-minute cassettes hunting for appearances from Gang Starr, Common, Peanut Butter Wolf, J Dilla, Madlib, The Roots, Roots Manuva, Questlove, Jazzy Jeff and countless others.
By the late 80s, I’d hear him on the schedules of BBC Nite FM, alongside Gary Crowley & Jeff Young.
Massive love and eternal thanks to Alex Thompson for trusting me with this incredible archive. And, of course, big love to my Worldwide fratelli… the Local Wizard, Treats!!
Frank Foster – The Loud Minority
Innerzone Orchestra – Blakula
Raw Deal – Untitled
Akasha – Interzone [Menlo Park Remix]
Mic Break
Leon Thomas ID
Blackalicious – Alphabet Aerobics [The Cut Chemist Workout]
Ray Swinfield – Shake On A Barre
Fourth World – Fica Mal Com Deus [Feat Flora Purim]
Sunkids – Rescue Me
Mic Break
DJ Die – Autumn
Positive Force – Tell Me What you See
Mic Break
Labi Siffre – I Got The [Excerpt]
Jack Wilkins – Red Clay [Excerpt]
Reflection Eternal [Mos Def Talib Kweli & Bahamadia] – Chaos
Pharcyde – Feeling
DJ Spinna – Haunted Space Freak
Saul Williams Interview and performance
Saul Williams – Coldest Day in February Shines the Amethyst Rock
Company Flow – Infokill [Instrumental]
Pink Floyd – The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party
Mos Def – Soldiers Dream
Mike Ladd – Welcome To The Afterfuture Instrumental
John Coltrane – My Favourite Things
Saul Williams – A Glimpse of the Future
Mic Break
Mogwai – Chocky
Isotope 217 – Commander
Dick Grove Orchestra – Nighthawk
Alex Gopher – The Child
Mic Break
Havanna Moods – Rhum & Bass
Amalgamation of Sounds – Salsin
