Mary Anne Hobbs
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Artist DetailsLocation: London, UKPerformance Type: DJ (CDs) Available for Booking: Yes Artist BioMary Anne Hobbs is best known as an evangelist for underground music, a BBC Radio1 host, and an international live DJ. Her Dubstep Warz show for BBC Radio1 is widely regarded as the show that broke the dubstep sound globally. Mary Anne also makes films, presents on TV, and writes. She released a trilogy of definitive underground electronic compilations for the Planet Mu label. Running four years strong, Mary Anne has curated her stage for Sonar Festival in Barcelona, including the historic 2007 UK dubstep showcase with Skream, Oris Jay, Kode 9 & The Spaceape; bringing the sound out of boutique clubs for the very first time and onto an international festival stage in front of 8.5 thousand people. Mary Anne left school at the age of 16 and went to work in an egg packing factory for the princely sum of £39 per week. She quickly ran away to London with a hard rock band and lived on a bus with them in a car park in Hayes, Middlesex for 12 months, working as their lighting engineer, record sleeve artist, wardrobe designer, and mechanic. Her great ambition was to become a music journalist, and she figured the next logical step would be to produce her own fanzine, entitled Krush. She sent a couple of issues along with a demented CV detailing her adventures to the Editor of Sounds music paper and landed a job with them at the age of 19. At 21, having been profoundly influenced by snapshots of Metallica and Motley Crue, Mary Anne sold all her worldly goods and bought a one-way ticket to Hollywood, where she lived in a garden shed. She spent a year as a Sounds US correspondent in the dark underbelly of LA writing about the fledgling thrash-metal scene, covering bands such as Guns N’ Roses and Jane’s Addiction. At Sounds, Mary Anne met fellow teenager James Brown (legendary writer and publisher, not the godfather of soul) who became a lifelong friend. James moved to NME as Features Editor and when Mary Anne returned to London from LA, he promptly poached her to work with him. Mary Anne spent three years on the news desk and also worked as a major feature writer there, writing cover stories on everything from Nirvana to Lollapalooza. She went on with James Brown to form part of the original team he put together to launch Loaded magazine. She worked there as Music Editor, and also writing major undercover stories about private detectives, cocaine dealers to the stars, and most notoriously, a SoHo sex club. Mary Anne got her break in radio at BBC GLR on Sunday mornings alongside Mark Lamarr. She presented groundbreaking shows on XFM for 5 years during their trail broadcasts, which helped to win their license. She was poached by Radio 1 in 1997 after a particularly confrontational interview with Radio 1′s then Head of Production, Trevor Dann, who was bootlegged around the BBC and found the desk of the controller of the day, Matthew Bannister. Mary Anne’s time at Radio 1 has been hectic. She has hosted shows from all the major award ceremonies: Brits, Q, NME, Kerrang, Mercury Music Prize, and made documentaries about artists as diverse as David Bowie, Slipknot, and The Sex Pistols. She championed comedy god Ricky Gervais in his pre-Office days, hosted a movie review show with Mark Kermode called Cling Film, and founded and fronted the award-winning Radio 1 Rock Show for five years from 1999 to 2005. As for her work in television, well, there’s quite a lot. Mary Anne hosted a season of live coverage for the World Superbike Championship for British Eurosport, she made a series about global biker culture in India, Russia, Japan, the US, and Europe for BBC Choice called Mary Anne’s Bikes, fronted 27 hours of live coverage at Glastonbury Festival for the BBC, and has guested on everything from BBC2’s Never Mind The Buzzcocks to John Peel’s Record Box for Channel4. Now leaving BBC Radio 1, Mary Anne Hobbs has an infinite ocean of exciting new possibilities ahead of her, and the bass music world waits with bated breath to see what this pioneer, champion, and icon will dream up next. Mary Anne can ride any motorcycle you care to park in front of her. LABEL: Planet Mu PR/PRESS CONTACT: Ryan Romana at Press Junkie PR + Book This Artist |