CV; MARY ANNE HOBBS Radio 1 DJ
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Your support makes all the difference.When I was a very small girl in Garstang, Lancashire, I used to buy a music paper called Sounds. It was always my dream to write for them. I left school in 1981 with a pitiful collection of CSEs and took a job in an egg-packing factory, and mulled over how to get a job at Sounds.
One day a poster went up for "Heretic - from London". I decided I'd go and see them and get a job with them. I ended up living on a bus in a coach park in Hayes for a year as their lighting engineer.
In the meantime, I had started to write my own little band fanzine and I sent a couple of issues to the Sounds editor. He got me in to write, at the age of 19.
I was completely over the moon, and spent the next year reviewing and interviewing. But then I got this burning itch to go to LA, and on a mad whim sold everything I owned and bought a one-way ticket. Sounds said I could be their LA correspondent, and I lived in a little pool-house in West Hollywood, interviewing everybody from David Lee Roth to Jane's Addiction.
After a fantastically exciting year, one of my best friends at Sounds, James Brown - now editor of GQ - had gone to NME as features editor, and asked me to come and work with him. I was at NME for the best part of 4 years, starting off as a news reporter, and later writing big features: I did the first-ever cover feature on Nirvana, and an exclusive interview with Ice-T right in the thick of the "Cop Killer" controversy in 1992. Then James went off to start Loaded, and again said: "Come and write for us".
After about three years, when the media went crazy over the Loaded culture, I was asked to do lots of stuff on the radio. I guested on different people's shows, and some broadcasts for Xfm's early trials, then GLR gave me a little breakfast show on Sunday mornings.
During the Xfm broadcasts, Trevor Dann at Radio 1 asked for an hour to do some DJ-ing on it - an hour which cut into my show. I was outraged, and made it a condition that I interview him on my show. I was savage with him, completely taking the piss out of Radio 1, but to his great credit he was a brilliant interviewee. Within a couple of weeks he phoned me up and asked me if I wanted to go and work at Radio 1. I was astonished.
I started off on the film show Clingfilm, then they gave me this extremely weird late-night slot from midnight to 4am, where we started to lay the foundations for what we do on my show now. I think it's a revolutionary show, and I hope it sounds like it.
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