I'm Writing for a Living*

...sort of.  An opportunity came up to write about music via the day job.  That I can do.  I can remember lines from songs that I've never bought such as 'You can suntan', one of the finest rhyming couplets ever.  (It's from Club Tropicana by Wham!)  I can remember stupid trivia about songs like the fact that it's Chaka Khan wailing away in the back of Steve Winwood's 'Higher Love'.  (Why would you put Chaka in the background?  That's gotta be one of the greatest hires ever.)  Ask me what I was doing this time last week, or the date of my sister in law's birthday or anything remotely important and I can't remember it.  I don't understand the way my brain works.

Click on this picture to enlarge it.

My only conclusion is that music is important to me.  We have 6Music on all day at work and I'm lucky enough to work with two blokes who are roughly my age with all the same cultural reference points.  We know that Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love' is one of the greatest records ever made and that it probably invented house music but we equally love 'The Forest' by The Cure and newish things like Jagwar Ma.  We try and guess the year that certain things came out and we speculate endlessly what song titles might be when we can't exactly place them.

People always ask me why I don't write anything for the Mail (where I work).  Until now my answer was that I could never think of anything they'd like.  I couldn't think of any food stories such as 'Yellow Fruit Gives You Cancer/Is a Superfood'.  I couldn't think of any MPs or celebrities that I wanted to have a go at because they held opposing views to my own.  I also quite like the BBC.  Writing the Top of the Pops pages for Mail Plus sort of fell in my lap.  The former scribe wanted more money (and now I'm doing it, I can see why) and the powers that be weren't up for that.   I thought I could do it and I sit next to the person who commissions it.  I did a writing test, they liked it, bingo.
* The money I get for this is about 10% of my salary so writing's not paying for everything just yet.

Save BBC6Music

 To trust.enquiries@bbc.co.uk, srconsultation@bbc.co.uk

Dear Sir or Madam

While the recession means times are tight for all of us and I understand that the BBC is answerable to the licence fee payers, please don't axe 6 music.  I'm 37 years old - too old for most of Radio 1 except for the stuff that's on in the small hours (thank you iPlayer) and too young for Radio 2, which is too middle of the road for me and most of my peers.

6Music is good because it's a place where I can listen to new music when I want to (Marc Riley, Tom Robinson), can occasionally be assured of a classic from the days when I was mad about music (morning Shaun Keaveny) and be entertained by fantastically daft stuff in between (hello Adam & Joe).

You only need to surf Facebook or Twitter for a while to realise how much the station is loved and revered.  At it's best, its truly a station in the mould of the BBC's greatest ever DJ - John Peel.  It supports new bands, lets you hear them live and raw and is discerning in broadcasting older, mostly pretty cool music that you might have missed first time around, thus opening it up to a new audience.

The BBC is something I'm proud of as a Brit.  I love watching David Attenborough as much as I do Dot Cotton.  Similarly Mary Anne Hobbs does it for me as much as Desert Island Discs.  But without 6Music, there will be a big empty musical hole in my life.  Don't force us to listen to all the other rubbish commercial MOR stations like Absolute.  Keep us stimulated.

Please keep 6Music on air.

Regards,

Lee Mannion

PS If you need to make cuts, get rid of George Lamb.  He's not bad on the telly, but just because a bunch of mates have a laugh when they get together, it doesn't mean everyone listening will if you broadcast it.