Zane Lowe arrives at the Apple Music’s Beats 1 studio – coffee in hand – in an orange jumper, faded blue jeans ripped at the knees and a pair of Adidas Yeezy boosts. He asks how I am with a disarming enthusiasm, as though he is going to sit down and conduct this interview, falling back into a familiar trope. He tells me he is tired.
Zane Lowe is tired.
If you’ve ever listened to one of his shows you might wonder how that’s possible. He got his start as a presenter on Auckland’s XTV channel, relying on imports of hip-hop and grunge from America to drive his own personal tastes. Then it was a stint at MTV Two, which led to presenting Gonzo, the channel’s flagship music show for the new millennium.
His radio career began at XFM, where he would sneak in the occasional Ugly Duckling, Prodigy or another hip-hop record amongst the sea of alternative rock. Then came Radio 1, and an evening show that began in 2003 and ended almost 13 years later. Now he is one of the four DJs driving Apple Music’s Beats 1 radio, a 24/7 streaming platform that broadcasts in over 100 countries in the world.
There was a time when he first moved to London, trapped in the basement of the Record and Tape Exchange store in Notting Hill, when that eventuality might have seemed a world away as he played Siamese Dream on the store stereo and other members of staff slapped their foreheads in mock disgust.
It has since rebranded as a ‘Music and Video exchange’. Maybe it will become an ‘MP3 and DVD museum’ one day.
“I was a low-level gronk, flicking 10p records in the basement. I was down in the windowless rooms for a long time.
When it was my turn to put music on the stereo I’d put on Pearl Jam and you could audibly hear the groan from people in the store. ‘Is this guy fucking kidding me? Did he just put on Ten!?’
They used to play this trick on me where I would try and fit in, so I would put on some rare Rolling Stones album. Someone behind the counter would go ‘Who’s this?’ And I’d go ‘It’s the Stones.’
They’d look at me like: ‘Come on, mate. Did you really just fall for that? I’ll tell you what the catalogue number is on the back, mate. What are you fucking tell me it is the Stones for?’”
As music and the way we listen to it has evolved, Lowe has remained since asking listeners to jump on board during his show. They would then stay locked in as he dropped the Hottest Record in the World, Monday to Thursday, 7 pm until 9 for over a decade. For a generation of music fans, it was unmissable.
Genreless and borderless, it was pirate radio for a new age.
There was a time before Fortnite and before banter Twitter, whatever the fuck that is, that meant young teenagers had to find other means of entertainment after their parents had wrestled control of the TV remote out of their hands and forced them to retreat upstairs.
Typically, for one teenager at least, this meant lying, sprawled out on the floor with a few maths textbooks decoratively strewn around and a pen in hand whilst listening to Zane Lowe.
He would play music I knew – and knew I loved – but he would also play music I had never, ever heard before.
That last part was crucial; that is why his radio show meant so much to so many people. Maybe you could call it the NME generation; the people who knew the infamous story of Ryan Jarman crashing through the glass table at the awards show, Ryan Jarman discharging himself from the hospital, and consequently Ryan Jarman fainting again at the after-party before Zane Lowe found him bleeding out in a corridor.
Maybe you could call it the iPod Classic generation, too. The people that took pride in how long it took to scroll their click wheel top to bottom, A-Z; Arctic Monkeys to The Zutons.
True to form, his first tune on his Apple Music’s Beats 1 show was Spring King’s ‘The City’, a surf rock adrenaline shot in the arm from an unsigned band few people had heard. For a DJ coming off the back of interviewing Kanye West and Eminem, it felt like an odd choice, and then a statement, and then a call to arms.
Lowe admits that Apple originally had something grander planned for his debut show, in the form of a one-off performance from an artist important enough to keep their anonymity. They dropped out over genuine concerns that their cover might not be well-received by the original performer, apparently a certified legend in their own right.
“The decision was made at 9:15 pm the night before. You can prepare all you want but sometimes the best stuff just comes from somewhere else.”
His last show on Radio 1 was one such event, after all that time, when instead of a meticulously crafted goodbye letter, Lowe rocked up with only two songs on his mind and over a decade’s worth of music to fit into two hours.
It wasn’t the only time he had to broadcast in adverse conditions – he tells me about the time he had to pivot suddenly on air after Prince died, the sheer emotional weight of the first show after learning the passing of John Peel and the only show he was ever late for, on the day of the 7/7 terror attacks in the capital.
There was also the time he was in agony with a broken rib and could barely speak, which led to the late John Peel himself texting after the show to call it “the most compelling hour of radio you have ever done.”
But this was his finale on Radio 1, a platform he had slowly made his own over the course of thirteen years. You’d forgive him had he leaned quietly into the microphone and whispered “I know you’re all emotional. Don’t worry. It’s going to be OK” to kick things off, as he demonstrates to me in a hushed Terry Wogan tone I’ve never heard him use before.
Instead, he made it about the music, as he always does. He played 30 songs in total, and listening to them again it’s difficult to imagine a setlist that could greater represent the last decade and a half of music since the turn of the millennium. In a more personal sense, it’s hard to imagine a spectrum of music that could better take me back to when I was younger, a time when music just seemed to matter more; when ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’ felt like the best song in the world because it actually was.
You’ll notice songs you sang along to over and over again, and songs you didn’t. There are songs you heard on the radio but you never quite loved, and there are songs you heard and instantly fell in love with. The playlist might now strike you as a series of obvious choices. It’s easy to forget that, without Lowe in the first place, many of them wouldn’t be.
“My show was always just about, really, slamming the records.”
I associate Lowe’s sets with the iPod and the click wheel because it reminds me of the kid at school I wanted to be, the one you would ask to share an earbud with at the back of the Geography classroom whilst pretending to take notes on types of rock. Differentiating igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic to Earth, Wind & Fire.
Is there another radio DJ now, or ever, that would play Simply Red’s ‘Fairground’ and Skepta’s ‘That’s Not Me’ on the same show? How about to segue Jay Electronica into The Middle East, or Jamie T into Dizzee? It just didn’t happen.
Unless, of course, you were sat with your friend jumping from track-to-track without a care in the world.
“Everyone’s a curator. Everyone who has a phone, who shares a song with friends, who creates a playlist. They’re curating.”
As it transpires, Lowe had quite a lot on his plate at the time of his final show, and was holed up in a central London hotel room with his family whilst all his belongings were the other side of the Atlantic ocean as he prepared for his move to Los Angeles.
“I’m not big on goodbyes. There was talk of getting a lot of guests in, getting a big circus out of it. But I was like nah man, you know, I just want to get in and get out. I was tired.”
There’s that word again.
It was a long process, he tells me, deciding whether to make the move from London to LA, from BBC to Beats. It left him and his family exhausted, and along with pressure from his new employers to wrap things up as soon as possible, it meant there was no transition process, no easing in and out like one track mixing seamlessly into the other.
Still, it could have easily ended up as a jump cut, too. An underwhelming goodbye – the kind usually rushed on a train platform – due to an evening flight the day after his final set and then his first day at Apple at 9 am the morning after.
In preparation for the hectic hours ahead, Lowe stayed out late, drinking wine with friends down in the hotel bar.
“I wasn’t prepared for the last show and I had been out the night before as you do, which is just human nature if you’re stupid like me.”
“It was exhaustion more than alcohol, I was tired. I was mentally and physically tired. I woke up the next morning and I wasn’t on my game. I remember thinking ‘this is going to be really underwhelming. You’re just not thinking straight, you can’t even string a sentence together. You’re just too tired.’
After picking his kids up from school there was time for a much-needed power nap. Then, it was a simple case of beginning with ‘Turn the Page’, the rousing, orchestral opener to Original Pirate Material by The Streets and closing with ‘Song for the Dead’ by Queens of the Stone Age.
All the tracks in between, well, he probably knew they would come to him like a roulette croupier, a quick spin of a wheel.
“Those were the only two things I wanted to do. I had no idea what I was gonna do yet. Literally, as I went to air. There’s something kinda cool about that. Situations like that I’m just not built to assume that anyone gives a shit.
For me, I was in a hurry to get on with it, I was in a hurry to say goodbye because it was gonna be hard. I wanted the music to do the talking. It was never gonna be perfect so why even try to make it perfect. Just go in there and make it. Afterwards, everyone’s like ‘That was amazing.’
‘Excellent! Where’s the bar? Job done.’ I was just relieved.”
When I tell Zane that I used to be an avid listener of his show, he interrupts, to joke “Of course you still are and I appreciate your support.”
The connection he once had isn’t lost on him – “That was an engaged audience of music fans back then” – even as he acknowledges that things are different now in the immediate, gratification-fuelled world of online streaming.
“You’ve gotta remember now, the way we listen to music, individually on our phones, on our own a lot of the time, we search for meaning on social media, but really we’re just looking at a timeline waiting for our comment to pop up. We look for a reaction. I’m not trying to harken back to the old days, or be that person who pines for old things, but that’s why live events and festivals are so important. Concerts still matter. Because people do yearn to have that experience as a group.”
As he finishes, he emphasises the ‘p’ as he says group, like he is drawing his lips away from a lollipop.
It’s easy to dismiss Lowe as overly enthusiastic and insincere, something he acknowledges with a well-renditioned impression of the modern hater: “Oh, you love everything! Blah, blah, blah.” He’s honest, and admits that his broad range could come at a cost. This is, after all, the tribal nature of music. Or at least it once was, before artists like The Weeknd and Juice WRLD started to blur how fans perceive genre.
“Maybe that’s to my detriment, you know. But for me I’m just curious. I’m into the story.”
During our almost hour-long discussion – double the original allotted time – we touch upon my favourite band ever (Interpol), an artist I had never heard of who I listen to later on, and immediately love, (Rex Orange Country) as well as all the acts that have gotten away, interview-wise: Beyonce, Rihanna, Prince, The Boss, Beiber.
It’s hard to see anything other than a genuine music fan, still giddy about the thrill of it all, whether it is newcomers like Bryson Tiller and Halsey, or whether it is Drake, who threw Lowe with his affable nature before the cameras started rolling and “his whole vibe changed”, or Gaga, who reacted brusquely to a spontaneous comparison he drew to Madonna during their interview – a moment that quickly went viral afterwards.
There’s something about the process that continues to draw him in after all these years, or maybe it’s more that there isn’t one, that his best moments as an interviewer and a DJ have come in the very pocket of the moment. He notices that I was never quite as spontaneous.
“I love the fact that you’re writing your questions down on a pad. Tactile. It means something. There’s just something about having a collectable. I was talking to an artist the other day who writes all their lyrics down on a pad. They’ve got stacks of them. They mean something.
It’s an age thing. Our kids just don’t even think about holding books now, they just do everything on devices, iPads, tablets, phones. It’s about what you grew up with.”
It’s about what you grew up with, whether that’s Fortnite and streaming or an iPod loaded with the hottest records in the world.
After the interview, I notice an artist I don’t recognise – he’s young, but you can tell from the clothes and the way he carries himself he is someone – waiting just outside the room. I catch a glimpse, nothing more, of an enthusiastic introduction and a handshake as I leave.
Zane Lowe doesn’t seem tired.
Listen to Zane Lowe on Apple Music’s Beats 1 Monday-Thursday 5-7pm, apple.co/B1_Zane.
