In England, Pete Tong had his show on BBC Radio One, where new dance music was played, sometimes in mixed form. In Sweden at the national radio level we had P3 dans, which featured varied club music, rarely mixed and with a huge variety of genres. We also had P3 Mix, which was much more commercial in their music selection. Besides that, there was probably only NRJ, which, in spite of that, played mixed music in the evenings sometimes, but was only available as a local radio in larger cities. Here I saw a huge gap to fill and an opportunity to submit a program proposal for a separate program.
In the summer of 1999 my proposal was sent to P3 and after a while I received positive feedback. My first thought was, wondering who should lead the show in regards to do the talking? It may sound like crazy, but I did not see in front of me that I would host the program with my voice, but soon realized that if I did find anybody else, that task would be on me. Ok, I’ll try. Because the idea of the program was that the music should be in focus, and I myself was looking for a program where amazing music was played non-stop without having to be interrupted by talking all the time, I saw my role as an informant about what had been heard rather than host.
As a preparation and test of me, before the whole program was approved, I would do a test broadcast. I would send 4 hours P3 Mix on October 22, 1999 from Växjö. I was really not ready to lead a program of 4 hours. My programs would also be done at home in my studio, and not live in any live broadcast. Sound technician for P3 mix was still Magnus Larsson, as I learned well, and we agree that I’m running a lot of the program pre-recorded. So I did a lot of talking and burned on CD, along with some pre-recorded mixes that are also included on CD. But we also do a part of the production in Växjö, including an interview with Antiloop and one with Stonebridge. Then I actually broadcasted the last hour of the show completely live.
The program went well and I was most pleased to have survived the night without any major mishaps. After that, the positive message was that I would have 2 hours of programming time all by myself every week for a year. There was no big budget, but I thought this would be my chance to create something unique in Swedish national radio. More about it in an upcoming post.
Here are the interviews with Antiloop and Stonebridge.
