"It all began for me when I was 14-years-old" Mary Anne Hobbs tells me from a tucked away booth up on a high floor in one of the BBC’s buildings at Media City, Salford, that overlooks the set of Coronation Street. She’s talking about buying a record that changed her life from her local toy shop in Garstang, Lancashire, where she grew up. Normally you had to order in records and wait nine weeks for it to arrive but this one, by David Bowie, was already in the racks. "Music was quite exotic; it was a rare and extraordinary physical commodity," she says of the record that would trigger a lifelong obsession with music.
Hobbs went on to work as a music journalist, writing for the like of Sounds and NME before moving into the world of radio, working for a variety of stations and shows with a longstanding relationship with the BBC now spanning over twenty years. When working at Radio 1 she presented ‘The Breezeblock’, a show focusing on electronic and experimental music that led to the 2006 special ‘Dubstep Warz’, the success of which led to a compilation album release on Planet Mu. It was compiled by Hobbs and featured prominent pioneering artists of dub step, grime and electronica, such as Kode9, Andy Stott, The Bug, JME and Burial.
Since 2012 she has hosted the weekend breakfast show on BBC Radio 6 Music, as well as a weekly nightly show that focuses on new music, ‘Recommends’. As part of 2017’s Manchester International Festival she is curating an astounding-looking programme called Dark Matterwhich, under the strapline of ‘destroy your boundaries’, will see performances from Sunn O))), Clark, Colin Stetson, LEVELZ, Holly Herndon, The Haxan Cloak, Paleman and Kojey Radical. MIF is taking place between June 29th and July 15th – visit their website here. Click the image of Mary Anne Hobbs to start reading her 13 selections.
