Stereosonic Exclusive Interview With Annie Mac
Radio 1 heavyweight Annie Mac is so keen to DJ in Australia that she’s skipping her beloved program for two weeks. “I’m quite precious about leaving my radio show – and it’s probably a lot to do with the reason why it’s taken me this long to come to Australia,” Annie confesses. Nevertheless, this adventurer is “super-excited” to hit Stereosonic 2011 on her inaugural trip.
Luckily, Annie’s BBC bosses are “really happy” to see her DJing around the world and flying the Radio 1 flag. As one of the station’s specialist DJs, the Dublin girl presents a flagship dance program on Friday nights, showcasing house, electro and bass music – the UK’s happening genres. She co-hosts another show on Sundays with Nick “Grimmy” Grimshaw, dedicated to music and goss.
Today Annie is a brand unto herself with a blog, events, tours, and compilations, all under the banner ‘Annie Mac Presents’. She’s just dropped her latest mash-up annual, Annie Mac Presents 2011, with tunes from Robyn, The 2 Bears and SBTRKT. Yet Annie is inherently modest, recently quipping to NME’s Peter Robinson, “If you start thinking of yourself as a tastemaker, that’s a very bad day.”
Annie has done much to foster dubstep – especially the rootsy side. She’s confounded by its global popularity, the once underground music “weirdly” appealing to rock and hip hop heads alike in the US (and Oz). “It’s music that you can go out and mosh to… It’s really ignited the excitement of kids – young, young kids.
Annie MacManus, as she was born, grew up in a musical family, with folk and indie their soundtrack. She plays guitar (and reputedly mandolin) and two of her brothers are performers, Davey M fronting the band The Crimea. Annie discovered nightclubbing while studying English Literature at Queen’s University in Belfast. Andy Weatherall was resident at the local night Shine – but Annie was more enamoured of Chicago’s DJ Sneak. She herself was soon practising on the decks, taking cues from Sneak’s “bouncy”, “jacking” and “choppy” style.
Annie opted to pursue a career in radio – and eventually headed to London. She networked behind the scenes of the entertainment biz, even serving as a radio plugger. Her big break arrived when she became a broadcast assistant at the BBC. Still, in downtime, she sneakily presented on a student radio network. And Annie, who’d previously only DJed at mates’ parties, landed her first residency at Camden’s grungy Underworld. In mid-2004, Annie, now Zane Lowe’s assistant producer, finally secured her own Radio 1 slot, having proven her capabilities with various on-air fill-ins. She’d join a diverse roster of DJs, including female broadcasting icons Mary Anne Hobbs and Annie Nightingale. A year on, Annie launched her ‘Presents’ club at Fabric.
There’s no stopping Annie. If Radio 1′s Fearne Cotton began as a television presenter and then segued into radio, Annie is doing the reverse, astutely knocking back reality TV gigs in favour of cred things like The Culture Show. However, she remains unsure about producing music (it took the busy Pete Tong decades!). “I’ve done little tiny dabbles of it in the past, but not really,” Annie says. “I just don’t really have time at the moment, to be honest… So maybe some day – if I ever break my leg! (laughs)” Though intrigued by “the process” of music-making, she’s determined to master Logic first.
Ask the dance fashionista about her fave Antipodean producers and she namechecks Beni, who, coincidentally, is also billed at Stereosonic. So what can we anticipate from her? “Well, I guess because I do my radio show, I play a broad spectrum of music – and people expect that from me, which is really nice, ’cause it gives you a kind of platform to go anywhere that you wanna go. At the moment my sets are maybe 85% house music, but all different types of house. So I play funky-sounding house music with garagey-type stuff, some bass music… I’ll definitely play some dubstep – not as much of the tear-out Skrillex-y stuff, just more fun, bouncy dubstep like Caspa, Redlight, that kinda stuff – UK-sounding dubstep, I s’pose. I’ll sometimes play a little bit of jungle in my set, if I’m in a party mood – and then [I'll] just play lots of really good electro-ey stuff… So I try to cover a lot of ground in the sets, depending on how long they are – it’s gotta sound smooth, obviously!”
Words: Cole Laroche