Posts
Westwood off
After twenty years doing a thing that was very much his thing, Tim Westwood is off, leaving both Radio One and 1Xtra.
Noticeably, while Radio one's Ben Cooper and Charlie Sloth, who is taking over the shows, are warm and effusive in their statements, there's no standard 'it was great to be offered the chance to be part of this for twenty years' twinkling from Westwood.
It's being reported that Radio 2 is currently not answering its doorbell, and sending all messages to answerphone.
2 comments:
He did say back in 1999 that he didn't see himself "DJing at the age of 60" (which he is now alarmingly close to), more taking a back seat / Godfather role, bringing through the likes of, er, Charlie Sloth. Always easy to say that when it's that much further away on the horizon, of course ...
Much of his best work was on Capital *more* than twenty years ago (and before anyone starts, I don't live in the London area), but that was more a function of its being before the lucrative commodification of hip-hop culture which he enthusiastically embraced on his way to self-parody.
And yet there were still occasional high points which reminded us of what he was capable of: the Sunday night grime show on 1Xtra in 2008 was extraordinary (when it was allowed to be live, before the Mail-provoked Sachsgate bullshit), an extraordinary barrage of sound which was so atonal, so determinedly We Will Not Lose, that it made a sceptic and outsider such as myself actually believe in all the post-Reynolds critical claims for that music as a vanguard for some kind of New Left recovery. So naturally a Tory resurgence finished it off.
And there were other isolated though more problematic moments; in the summer of 2003 you could almost get lost in Dipset, almost believe in capitalism.
The tragedy is that the mass consciousness will not remember him for any of this, as the passing of time chews him up as it will us all.
Post a Comment
As a general rule, posts will only be deleted if they reek of spam.