Back in June 2024, hot on the heels of her latest Music Week Awards win and just ahead of Glastonbury, Music Week sat down with Lauren Laverne. To celebrate her tenure as host of the 6 Music Breakfast Show, revisit our interview with the presenter and broadcaster, in which we chart her illustrious career, challenge misconceptions about 6 Music and dissect the unique position the station occupies in our industry…
Words: Anna Fielding Photos: BBC
When Music Week encounters BBC Radio 6 Music star Lauren Laverne at the station’s HQ on a Friday morning in late May, she has just come off air, having delivered the last breakfast show of a busy week.
The night before we speak, she was in central London hosting the Ivors, taking a rare breather from the intense Glastonbury preparations that dominate her schedule at this time of year. Shortly before that, it was her own name in lights, as she triumphed in the Radio Show category at the Music Week Awards, reclaiming a trophy she won in 2019, when her breakfast show gig began.
It was a momentous victory and Laverne smiles as we start by reflecting on what it means to have won.
“I think that, with the creative industries in general, music in particular and doing what I do, it’s not like there’s a qualification you can get that says you can do it,” she begins. “You do what you do and you really put your heart and soul into it, you put it out there and just hope it connects with people. There aren’t really that many metrics that show you’re doing a good job, so for me, winning this award is like getting a bloody degree in radio.”
She describes the affirmation as “fantastic,” and is proud to “know that my peers, in an industry I’ve spent my life in and that I care about, think that what we’re doing is important.”
At this point, Laverne obviously has no need of any degree in radio. She started her career as the lead singer in indie band Kenickie, a blur of glitter, guitars and clever lyrics. But she has spent the majority of her working life as a broadcaster. In addition to her prime breakfast spot on 6 Music, she hosts Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, arguably the biggest jewel in BBC radio’s crown.
Laverne has hosted Desert Island Discs for almost six of the show’s 82 years and has also worked on the Late Night version of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. She has been at 6 Music since 2008, moving from mid-morning to breakfast in 2019. Prior to that she worked on various shows at XFM, starting at the alternative station in 2002. There have also been many high-profile TV gigs: she’s currently a presenter on BBC One’s flagship magazine programme The One Show, and a key figure in the corporation’s Glastonbury programming across both TV and radio.
Laverne will kick off this year’s coverage, as her show goes out live from Worthy Farm on June 26, on the morning the gates open and the crowds begin to pour in. For now though, she and her team are in London, where they have just hosted both Jessica Gunning and Stephen Merchant as guests. Laverne, a Sunderland girl, also talks happily about the Newcastle theme to today’s Desert Island Disco slot.
The presenter certainly packs a lot into her early mornings. She has already run into the Pet Shop Boys in a corridor, informing them that she’d played their hit Left To My Own Devices after it was requested by a listener. The legendary duo told her they felt the song would have made for “a rather lively start to the day” for her audience. Laverne took it in her stride, feeling fresh after the Ivors. She doesn’t drink when she has to work the next day and is used to late nights coupled with early starts.
“You cut your cloth and you make up for it elsewhere,” she says.
The evening’s festivities, though, left her buzzing.
“It might sound cheesy to say this, but it made me so full of the joy about the possibility of pop music,” she says.
Laverne also loved seeing the “young fans lining up outside for Lana Del Rey, holding their books of poetry and with glitter everywhere”. Her youngest son had actually instructed Laverne not to wash her hand if she was able to touch Del Rey. “I think I was supposed to anoint his head with molecules of her DNA,” she explains. It was a reasonable request in Laverne’s eyes: this is the kind of fandom she understands.
Such passion makes her the perfect fit for the BBC’s Glastonbury coverage, as Alison Howe, executive producer for Glastonbury on TV, BBC Studios, explains.
“Lauren has always had Glastonbury in her heart and her passion for the event, the music and the whole celebration of the weekend shines through,” says Howe. “We are able to offer an incredible range of artists across our coverage, so we can celebrate the household names, but also importantly offer a space for many artists to reach a whole new audience.”
Jonathan Rothery, head of BBC Pop Music TV, is anticipating a “cultural moment” and says the introduction of a second dedicated Glastonbury channel on iPlayer will improve this year’s package.
“Glastonbury Channel II will feature highlights and festival moments, meaning that viewers are able to catch up on the weekend’s events as they happen,” he says. “Not everybody will be watching live all weekend, so this channel allows those who are dipping in and out to stay up to date.”
Rothery calls the line-up a “carefully curated broad church,” and praises the BBC teams both behind and in front of the camera for their “gold standard coverage”.
It’s no surprise to hear that Laverne cannot wait to be back on Worthy Farm.
“It’s the best bit of the year and I’m really up for it,” she says. “It’s all about trying to bring that festival experience as close as you can to audiences at home.”
But before all that, we settle in for an in-depth discussion that covers her award-winning success, misconceptions about 6 Music and the station’s unique position in the music industry…
Congratulations on your latest Music Week Awards win! What do you think made your peers in the industry vote for you?
“Well, I still can’t quite believe it. The whole team works really, really hard to make sure that every day we are excited and we’re bringing a number of different elements together in a way that just feels easy, fun and accessible. It’s not a typical breakfast show, it’s not a conventional listen. But maybe that’s why people like it. I certainly hope so. I decided a long time ago that I just want to make programmes that feel like they’re doing something constructive in the world. That doesn’t always mean everything’s shiny and happy-clappy, it’s about hope, not optimism. It’s something positive in people’s day.”
What exactly prompted that decision?
“Years ago, I was talking to one of the members of the band Songhoy Blues. They’re from Mali and they got together because they were all exiled. Music was made illegal by the government, briefly. They had to move out of their homes and they met in the city of Bamako. Nat [Dembélé] from the band told me there’s a saying in Mali that everybody hears the tree fall down, but nobody hears the forest growing. I thought about it a lot, because sometimes all we hear in the world is the sound of trees falling. My challenge was to think about what my response to that should be. I wanted my job to be the forest growing. Supporting people who are doing creative things, making space for listeners to talk about their lives and bring what they care about out on air, being a bit of company for someone on a rainy Wednesday morning.”
How has the culture at 6 Music changed in your time there?
“As a station, it has always had a very positive outlook. If you think of the music that we play, that alternative space is very forward-looking and accepting. It’s a nice place to work with lovely people, and it always has been. In terms of direct cultural change, it’s always evolving, there’s always new voices coming in. There was a long, long time when I was one of the few women there and the only one on weekdays and I am glad that has evolved over time. There are wonderful people, Mary Anne Hobbs and Jamz Supernova doing such brilliant work. That’s nice because that’s your little group and you become friends and support each other. Sherelle [DJ and producer] was on my show, she was in covering for Mary Anne, she’s wonderful. There’s so much brilliant talent coming through. That’s great to see, culture-wise, but it has always been a great place to work. Then, in May, the boss [head of station Sam Moy] and a few others came up with Change The Tune [an initiative to raise awareness around the impact online abuse has on artists].”
Why is it important for 6 Music to do this?
“I think it’s probably the first time that it’s really been made explicit that we want positive engagement with our audience, but without abusing people and behaving in a way that you would never do in real life [in June last year, musician Billy Nomates asked 6 Music for a social media post containing footage of her Glastonbury set to be removed, citing ‘personal abuse’]. In terms of a cultural shift, that’s the first time where we’ve said, ‘We’re going to introduce a code of conduct because we feel it’s necessary in social spaces.’ It’s wonderful to see, especially as someone who came up in the ’90s music industry, which is a weird way to meet the adult world.”
You referenced Sam Moy, how would you sum up her impact on 6 Music?
“Sam is such a great boss, I absolutely love working with her. She’s really wonderful. I think the Change The Tune campaign is a good example of the kind of plugged-in and compassionate leader that she is. She wants to put music at the forefront, but also wants to create a level playing field where everybody can get involved in a way that’s fair and where people aren’t shouted down. She’s also someone who has made a lot of programmes. I always think it’s really helpful when you’ve got a boss who has made radio and knows how it works. She’s a really great support for DJs, but also for production teams as she knows the job inside and out. And then there’s bringing through new people, new shows, making space for new genres of music. We’ve always championed that, but she is just making sure that we are. Alternative culture is so broad and always exists in counterpoint to the mainstream. It’s also ever-evolving, so you can’t just say, ‘It’s this,’ and then do that thing forever. Sam has been great on that front.”
After she took the job, Sam told us that the biggest challenge 6 Music faces is one of awareness. Would you agree with that?
“That is the challenge, it’s not about what we’re doing. We know that as soon as people find us then they love us and they stay with us for a long time. If you want to get into the boring industry metrics of it, 6 is an outlier, an interesting test case. Our listeners don’t behave in typical ways: people listen for hours and hours, and we were one of the first digital-only stations so people have made us part of their daily life. A lot of people are looking at us, even though we’re smaller, because they think, ‘When FM stops, how are our audiences going to behave?’ So, as part of that, we know that the more people know we exist, the more we will grow. It is a challenge of awareness.”
Previously, some have imagined 6 Music’s typical listeners to be middle-aged men who like indie rock. Is that association still there? And is it something you’ve actively worked against?
“No. We have a really broad audience and all kinds of people are welcome to listen and I would hope we wouldn’t exclude anyone. And what’s wrong with being an indie dad? I just played all eight-and-a-half minutes of Leave Them All Behind by Ride, because those are my guys. I don’t want any section of our audience to feel like they can’t come with us. I feel like the 6 Music Dad thing is really affectionate. It describes loads of the best people I know. But that doesn’t mean that’s all it is. Because if it does, then why am I doing the breakfast show?”
Homing in on your own programme, what are the ingredients for making a successful radio show in 2024?
“This is much simpler to answer than you might think. There’s peripheral stuff you can get caught up in thinking about, but the joy of radio is, in George Orwell’s phrase, the audience of one. You start with one listener and you never think of more than one listener. Where are they? What time of day is it? What’s going to be happening for them? If you give them what they need then everything will fall into place. Doing my job, there are a lot of elements to consider. You do a lot of research, you do a lot of prep. It takes a long time for us to put the music together, to build the running orders. But weirdly, it’s also the same simple job as it always was. It’s one person talking to one person, sharing music with them or talking to a guest. If you start with your listener, everything else sorts itself out. That’s what I say to the younger team members when I start working with them.”
Can you sum up the evolution of the breakfast show in your time as host?
“Well, obviously it changes all the time with new artists, guests and features, but, ultimately, the job is what it is. I was recently at Annie Nightingale’s memorial where her kids asked me to talk about her as a broadcaster. Thinking about Annie, you realise the job itself doesn’t change, and what’s great about it is that it’s the most direct, exciting, intimate kind of media that you can create, it’s the most connected you can be to your listener. I was thinking about all the years and years that she spent on air. All of this magic and all of this heart, love and passion poured into these shows, and then you’re just putting them out into the sky, into the air, not knowing where they’re going, really. I said that she was like a nightingale, singing a song and not knowing how far it’s going to reach or who is going to hear it. But then, at the end of Annie’s life, the tributes to her and the reach of her voice were utterly mind-blowing.”
With the benefit of hindsight, how did you change your style with the move from mid-morning to breakfast?
“My audience would arrive at 10 and then stay with us. So it was about [asking], ‘How do we bring that into breakfast?’ It was an interesting challenge that we’ve really enjoyed attacking. You can’t treat breakfast in the same way as a 10am-1pm show. We could track the quietest period and it was 8-8.30am. Shaun [Keaveny, previous breakfast host] used to call it the dead zone. So we took a gamble and decided to put all of our best stuff in there, to make it the very best half hour of the show. It worked, we flipped it and it keeps everybody with you.”
What keeps you at 6 Music specifically?
“Well, I also love Radio 4 and The One Show. I only work with great teams and as you get older, that’s so important. I feel incredibly lucky for all of the places that I work, but 6 is my heart. It represents the kind of music fan I am. The life-long adventure of continuing to discover music and the frustration of knowing you will never get to the end of it. I mean, the ephemeral nature is what makes it special, and that is what 6 runs on, it’s all about that.”
Do people ever get confused on Fridays when you’re doing your show on 6 and Desert Island Discs is going out on Radio 4?
“I don’t know about people, but I certainly do! There have been numerous occasions when what’s happening on one is diametrically opposed to the other, playing a face-melting techno mix on 6 Music and then on Radio 4 having an intense talk about a high achiever’s personal life.”
Has doing Desert Island Discs changed your life? Or people’s perceptions of you?
“I don’t know. You don’t try and work out people’s perceptions of you, that’s their business. But I think it has, hopefully, changed me. There’s always opportunity to improve, but I think having those kinds of conversations week in, week out has made me more compassionate. It has made me a better listener and it has made me braver, I think, because it’s maybe the most high-profile thing I’ve done. I’m not a natural attention seeker, I always say radio is the place where people who like to show off in private go. So to be looking after something that is such a jewel in the crown is a big thing. But to know that we’re doing a good job, and continue to take care of something I loved so much as a listener, to take it up from Kirsty [Young, former host] who is my hero... It’s a real challenge, but it’s a joy to get there.”
Let’s move on to Glastonbury. The lack of veteran acts among the headliners has been criticised by some this year, but the ratio of women to men has improved markedly. Where do you stand on those arguments?
“It’s always going to generate conversation and that’s fine. That’s like any music event, you can’t really avoid it. With Glastonbury, you’re talking about how many acts? About 2,000? If you can’t find something that you like, among that, I think it might be you. But I think when you’ve got the biggest music and arts festival on the planet, if you’re just determined to moan about it and find fault, and you can’t find anything that you like, I think it might not be Glastonbury that is the problem. It’s all of the clichés, everybody has a different Glastonbury experience. You can go and never see a band and have an amazing Glastonbury. You can go and see music all weekend, none of which you have ever heard before in your life, and have an incredible time. It is so much more than the main headliners.”
You must have a good relationship with Emily Eavis having worked on Glastonbury for so long...
“Emily is a friend. When she was younger, she was working in music TV, and we worked at the same company. There was a group of us and we would go and get dinner. The strange thing about it is that people would never put this in the story of my life or Dermot O’Leary’s life or Emily’s life. But that was the time we all met each other and became friends. Dermot and I worked together on XFM, then he started dating a girl I was living with and now they’ve been married for decades. I also met my husband on that show. It is this shared experience that we went through together when we were young, but it’s invisible to everybody else.”
Do you think Emily and the rest of the Eavis family get the credit they deserve?
“Emily, and her husband, Nick, who is absolutely wonderful, their whole team, they work so hard and so brilliantly. They’re not in it for the credit, they’re in it because what they do is utterly unique. It’s an expression of Britishness and British culture, it says something about us as a country that is so special. It’s not about making money and the commercial, corporate game; they give a lot of money away. The amount they donate to charities is next level. I know how hard Emily works because she’s my friend and I know about the invisible stuff that people don’t see. When they stopped using plastic water bottles on site there was pressure on every other festival to follow suit. So there’s the environmental side, then the work on diversity, inclusion and gender balance. I know how much effort goes into that and I think if other people understood that, then they would realise there is a lot more to running a festival than who is headlining the main stage.”
The 6 Music breakfast show has traditionally been the kick-off point for the BBC’s coverage. What are your plans for this year?
“We’re going to be there from the Wednesday morning to the following Monday and there’s loads of extra coverage this year. There are special episodes of Sidetracked with Annie Mac and Nick Grimshaw in the run-up for people who want to take a deep dive into the event or the artists. And, once we get into the weekend, it will be all over BBC iPlayer.”
Given the 6 Music focus on alternative music, how do you approach mainstream artists like Dua Lipa at Glastonbury?
“The joy of being right across the BBC with Glastonbury is that there’s a place and an editorial fit for everybody. But 6 is also a really broad church and we’re not in the habit of saying we wouldn’t play such-and-such. That’s why Glastonbury is pan-BBC, and then people can stream stages online, so they can enjoy whatever they’re into.”
Personally, what do you want to see from this year’s Glastonbury?
“I’m very excited to see what Little Simz does. She told me it will be her only UK show, so I think she will have something very special planned. She is so exciting. In terms of the coverage in general, the great thing about all the technology that we’ve got now with apps like Sounds and iPlayer is that we can bring such an extensive range of things to viewers and listeners, so they can find whatever they want to on a livestream of particular stage. It’s really interesting to see how effective it is at getting you round the festival site. It’s a bit like when you’re there with your mates and everybody is looking at programmes.”
Finally, everyone has their favourite Glastonbury moment. What’s yours?
“I remember interviewing Stevie Wonder in 2010, when I was pregnant with my second son. He came off stage and was just being so chilled. It was like it was a Wednesday and he had just popped to the corner shop, but he’d just played the most mind-blowing set you’d ever seen. We nearly called the baby Stevie. Also, Beyoncé [in 2011] was just the most extraordinary thing. It felt as if Glastonbury was truly international and making waves, everything changed at that moment.”
