Lauren Laverne’s a day in the life of a DJ

Hello I’m Lauren Laverne. A day in the life of a DJ. Well my day starts very early because em I’m on air at ten so I try and get to work a couple of hours before that and I go through a mountain of post that I get sent. People still send me physical music, CDs and I get quite a lot of vinyl because 6Music is kind of an alternative radio station and so vinyl is still very much a big deal for serious music fans. I love a bit of vinyl. So I er I spend an hour maybe more just going through post every day. I listen to probably about a 150, 200 records a week, maybe more. Em it’s a big post bag to keep a track of and that takes up quite a lot of my week to be honest! As well as that though, of course, I’ve got guests on the programme so I research and write questions to think about what I want to talk to them about and er I kind of like to research quite a lot in advance so that when we have a conversation then we can just be a bit more spontaneous so I always have got an idea of what I want to talk about but you’ve got to always be able to listen – that’s the most important thing I think when you’re a presenter – listen to what they’re saying to you don’t just kind of wait and then just ask the next thing that you want to ask on your list which you hear and see people doing all the time on TV and radio it’s really annoying. I do kind of a fair bit of research before the show, write a menu and then at ten we are on air until one. And I think that a lot of people think that the video must be a lot of sitting around while you listen to music playing out but actually it’s not really like that at all it’s really busy in between times – there’s a lot of kind of rushing around and em everything has to be run to time. Obviously you don’t want your audience to get the sense that you are dropping tracks and switching things around to make everything come in on time em you want it to sound like a bit seamless sweep of music though that is enjoyable and all kind of fits together. We come off air about one o clock and then I usually head out and do other work, I do lots of other jobs or if not then I kind of head home. I kind of catch up with more music in the evening. I have a huge post file to work through so do a bit more of that though, of course, I really love it so it’s a real pleasurable experience and I think if you’d have gone back to me when I was fourteen and told me that I was going to get free records for a living and also money on top of that for doing my job I would have thought you were just lying and ridiculous. It’s a pretty good job – I like it.