My story
and a big announcement!
HELLO READERS!
Back again for the monthly newsletter, but this time it’s going to be a little (a lot) different. Usually I’m here musing on music and culture, and rarely do I share personal stories - mainly because I share a lot on my podcast and videos, and I assume most people know my story. But realistically, very few do.
In this newsletter, I want to share with you a very specific, very personal story of my journey sharing music with the ones I love. This newsletter is a dedication to the launch of my Patreon, which I’ll get into later, but let’s start at the start.
We all love a good statistic
I’ve been doing radio for a long time. By my estimations, here’s how many songs I’ve played:
Finetooth, NTS and Spirit House: 364 episodes
One year of daily radio hosting on SiriusXM: 260 episodes
Total episodes: 364 + 260 - 70 (variance of not being consistent in year 1 and 2) = 554
Episode length: roughly 90 minutes
Average song length: 3:30
Average songs per show: 27
Approximate number of songs played (554 x 27) = 14,958
YO THAT’S A LOT OF DRAKE. In all seriousness, that’s…kinda insane?
So what makes a madman want to broadcast almost fifty thousand minutes of music, for free, for barely anyone to listen to? To understand my condition, we must go back to 2005.
“Listen, you’ll understand me once you listen to this”
Remember CD-Rs? Where you could burn your beloved ripped songs to disc, whack it your car’s CD stacker and have your very own radio station? Well, before the aux was being passed around, these compact disc jockeys were riding high in their 1996 Subaru Imprezas. My 50 pack CD spindle couldn’t keep up.
The first “serious” mix CD I remember making was for my friend Andy during my early years of university. I was the goober that walked around with headphones on at all times (see the above Porta Pros), so that people knew I liked music (sigh). Andy knew I loved music more than anything, so I made him a CD. And I spent a long long time making it. It was a MOVIE. I can’t remember what was on it besides the Philip Glass song Einstein on the Beach which had a reading of a Samuel Johnson poem throughout. To me, this was like handing Andy a home made oil painting. It was the greatest gift I could give someone. I even meticulously designed the sleeve to fit the concept and put it in a pristine jewel case. I’m not sure if he listened to it or not, but I was satisfied with the result.
My second serious mix CD that I vividly remember (a story I’ve never shared anywhere until now) is the break up CD I made for my (now) wife. We had split after having only been together for one month. I wasn’t over her, so I dropped a CD in her letterbox full of emotional folk and love songs. WHAT A SAP HAHAHAHHAHAHA. We’ve been married for almost 12 years now, so the CD WORKED GUYS. I put my heart onto that piece of plastic, including this song by Clem Snide. To this day I don’t really know what it’s about, but it sounded poetic, and I hoped it would help get her back. I guess it did.
My third memory is less to do with CDs and more to do with broadcasting. At university, we had to do a presentation on an era of poster designs, and I decided to go with psychedelia. To illustrate my point as vividly as possible, I filled a gym bag with my Logictech 5.1 computers speakers, hauled them on the bus and blasted The Who’s Sparks to the class, drowning everyone in a heavy dose of Derrick psychedelia. The class wasn’t going to understand the poster unless I drowned them in the sound of 1969. I pummelled them with it on a Tuesday afternoon. I don’t think anyone had a sonic epiphany, but there was no way I wasn’t playing it.
As you can see, in my early twenties, music was my flag semaphore - and with every year I was getting better at waving them. But I was still waiting for the right plane to land.
The Dot Connector
Fast forward to maybe 2009. This ravenous music listener had consumed his fill of “music’s greatest” canon. I had read every “best of” book up until that point, and pondered endlessly whether I liked The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, or whether it was just “too advanced for my simple ears”. Spoiler: I think it’s alright. Safe to say, by my early 20’s, I was bored of listening to Bob Dylan and the “all time classics” prescribed to me by Rolling Stone’s 2008 editorial team. I was going through my second musical adolescence - I was looking for the music that I could call “mine”.
Enter stage left in the Derrick Gee musical - Gilles Peterson. A softly spoken Brit, then on BBC Radio 1 - broadcasting between 12-2am every Wednesday night. Gilles was my Willy Wonka. A man who, from across the globe, introduced me to a world I didn’t even know existed. A world in which hip hop, jazz and electronic music atoms collided at tremendous speed. A world where the unknown was far more thrilling than the well known. I feverishly streamed his show every week, to the point where I even found a Russian blog that made the episodes downloadable to mp3, which meant I could cherish his archive on my bus ride to work every day.
One of the earliest songs I remember Gilles introducing me to was Ain’t Nobody Gonna Treat Us Like They Used To by Philip Cohran & the Artistic Heritage Ensemble. I’d never heard such music, and with that song, Gilles became my shaman to another dimension, sending my imagination far beyond my suburban Sydney bus route.
Gilles’ tagline has always been “connecting the dots of music”, and to me, he was my music big brother, who could see the whole picture when all I could see were random dots on a page.
Funny story: one ordinary day when I worked in London many years later, someone buzzed on the office door. I picked up the receiver and a familiar voice said “Gilles here to see Nikhil”. There was only one Gilles with that voice, I had committed that timbre to memory. I went to the frosted glass door and opened it. I couldn’t look him in the eyes, so I proceeded to stare at the floor and usher him in. In many ways, a nice full circle moment of opening the door for Gilles, who opened many for me.
Derrick “Gilles” Gee
After listening to enough Gilles, the penny started to drop. “Maybe my path in life is to become a radio host…”.
I won’t bore you with too much detail, as I’ve spoken about my radio journey, or “passion project” at length on this podcast episode. But to summarise, in 2012, looking down the barrel of the rest of my TV career, I took a leaf out of Gilles’ book and started an internet radio show called Finetooth from my Sydney apartment. Here’s what my first homepage looked like:
“Combing the world of music” is what I said. Cute.
My instinct for stating it was this: statistically speaking, surely there’s enough people on planet earth that some might like my music taste. Surely it’s a numbers game, and just about finding them. And the rest, they say, is 15,000 songs of history.
So hellbent was this radio nerd, that when we left to live in London (and our worldly possessions were still on a boat en route to our new home), I brought with me a suitcase of clothes… and my radio equipment in my carry-on luggage. It looked like I was boarding the flight with a bomb, but I was willing to risk it in order to deliver my next show.
From a backpack full of radio gear to the fabled NTS booth shot, my radio journey took me far. It educated me on more genres than I could count. It connected me with work around the world. And it provided me with a knowledge that I still rely upon today.
I never thought it would end, until it did.
I remember when I retired my radio show Finetooth. It was February of 2020, fresh from moving to live in New York. I was in the midst of launching a nation-wide radio station on SiriusXM when I decided to hang up my hosting hat. I felt fulfilled - my barely known radio show had reached its natural conclusion. No, I didn’t get headhunted to be a BBC1 radio host (an impossible dream of following in the footsteps of Gilles). No, I wasn’t a superstar DJ who was championed for playing folk songs on a Monday morning on NTS (what a surprise!). Instead, I had become the steward, for a new radio endeavour at SiriusXM- one larger than me.
Or so I thought…
I never thought I’d see the day but…
RADIO DERRICK IS BACK!!!
Yooo. Looking at this image actually has me a bit emotional having written all the above. Ok ok ok, don’t let me rush this part.
Deep breath.
So. As many of you know, over the last eighteen months my life has been turned upside-down - but in a good way. Like a pineapple upside down cake.
What happened is - I started talking about some of the 14,958 songs I’ve obsessed over on TikTok, and for some reason, it took off. And this was completely by accident. You see, in January 2021, I posted a video in response to a trend about niche items (in my case, my Klipsch La Scala speakers). It was my first TikTok. That got 300k views. Then, people started asking me about them and I started answering. I then began to talk about what I listened to on them. And the rest is history.
To my complete surprise, it turns out that I have a knack for storytelling and talking in front of a camera - something I’ve never done before. Combine that with a deep knowledge of a broad range of music and suddenly, as Sasha Frere-Jones jokingly told me one day on a call, I had “jumped the queue” - a music personality that had sprung up, seemingly out of nowhere. Alas, this troll had been hiding under a bridge for many years, with a backpack full of radio hardware.
Since then, I have garnered an audience of many, and have juggled a day job, becoming a dad and resettling into Sydney life, all while making a podcast, newsletter, hundreds of videos and more. Friends often ask me, how do I do it? To which I reply…”when I can” - when the kid’s asleep, when I’m in-between meetings, or better yet, when a meeting cancels. At first I felt a little dumb talking into my phone as a new dad with bills to pay. But the more I did it, the more I could see what was happening. My radio show grinding wasn’t what I thought it was: broadcasting into the abyss. It was my version of doing laps at 5:30am on Christmas day in preparation for the big race.
I can’t say I expected to have built an audience off my music interest. And I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t been overwhelming at times. Sometimes I feel tremendous pressure, other times the comments keep me up at night. But more than anything, I have come to realise that this journey has been remarkably special. And I feel I’ve only scratched the surface.
So after a long long time of people asking if I was going to start a Patreon, as of today I have decided to take the plunge - for this reason alone: if I can sustainably do what I have been doing, and continue to entertain and inspire the people who enjoy what I do, then I won’t stop. And Patreon seems the best way to do just that. But, I’ll be honest, the thing that has held me back from starting one is that I don’t take the idea of having patrons lightly, as your money is a huge vote of support. And it’s your money!!!
So for the last 3 months I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking about how to do it in a way that I would feel worthy of your patronage, and one day it hit me:
I. Gotta. Bring. My. Radio. Show. Back.
As you can probably tell by now, music and radio has been at the centre of everything in my life. It is the string that ties everything together. My breadth of knowledge about music. My stories. My career. My love. Without it, I wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be reading it. So, really, it only makes sense.
So today, I’m excited to announce this:
As of today, August 1st 2023, I am relaunching my radio show, exclusively on Patreon. It will be in audio, video (a scary new addition to my old radio format), and playlist form, one hour every week from when you read this newsletter. I will be playing and talking about the discoveries I have found that week, with the biggest smile on my face. And if you are so generous to become a Patron, you will be supporting me as I make radio the centre of my solar system once more.
There are a whole raft of other perks, including bonus podcast minisodes, extended playlists and more, but if you’ve made it this far in my newsletter, you’ll know that the radio show IS the thing.
The first episode is free and available here, right now.
Finally, thank you
To conclude, I’d like to say this: if you have liked, shared, commented, followed, reposted, read or watched anything I’ve made up until this point, thank you. As you can probably tell from this newsletter, I’m not someone that thinks “this was always going to happen, and this was always the plan”. It really wasn’t.
All I knew then, and all I know now, is that I can do one thing and one thing well - find music, and share it with all my heart, and hope it connects with someone out there. I hope, however you enjoy my work, that sometimes, the music I share connects with you. It is my absolute pleasure to give that to you.
With all the love in the world,
Derrick
Fantastic. Love seeing people in expansive mode, it makes the world turn :)
Heck yeah, the breakup playlist worked! 🙌🏼 That part made my grinch heart grow 3 times...gross. 🥹 Proud of you Gee.