You know, I’m not even entirely sure how this came about. Like Indian Summer itself, it’s something of a distant memory.

I think that, at some point in spring 2007, BBC 6music put out a call for listeners to supply mixes of their favourite Scottish artists to tie in with the Indian Summer festival that July in Glasgow’s Victoria Park (6music were sponsoring a stage there).
I sent something in (he said vaguely) and got a call to go down to London to record the show proper. It wasn’t entirely clear why I couldn’t do it from ‘home’ (something which would become even more mystifying when I got there!) but I figured that I could do it on the cheap via a couple of easyJet flights, maybe do some other stuff when I was down there and it might be a bit of fun. Might even lead to some other work – I was freelancing at the time, and I had done something for Wise Buddah (oddly enough, Mark Goodier’s production company) in the past – to be precise, interviewing a band called The Blueskins in the back of a van somewhere in Glasgow.

Got to 6Music easy enough and was basically asked some questions by a bloke – Asha wasn’t there – in fact I’m sure I was told it’d be Nemone who’d present the show, I guess it’d be interchangeable as my answers were linked, not very seamlessly, with her questions – and as you can tell from the show, it all sounds a bit underprepared, as I wasn’t told that it’d be a Q&A-style setup. Though listeners to my regular radiomagnetic podcasts will be well used to that…

I didn’t hear the thing going out live myself, it was broadcast on the weekend of Indian Summer, and I was at the festival – as were, as you can imagine, most people who’d have been interested, though there are a couple of comments that came during the live broadcast from people in Cardiff rightly praising the track from the Flying Matchstick Men. Never mind, there’s always listen again on the iPlayer or whatever the system was in 2087. Except, they fecked up and for some reason my slot was taken by Guy Garvey’s show. Wouldn’t have been a bad thing except that Guy’s show was also occupied by his, rather denying me a falsely high listenership and exchanging it with, well, no-one. Well, apart from a chap who I met 3 or 4 years later – a pal who was Xfm’s Head of Music at the time, had a 40th birthday, and one of his friends at the party had heard the show. So retrospective justification for what was a long day’s work.

And Indian Summer? Sadly, that was the last time it took place, killed off by the Connect festival, which itself then also disappeared into oblivion. There have been a couple of ‘sightings’ of a reborn version of what was a very popular (but just not quite popular enough?) weekend among – in 2010 several bands including Zola Jesus included “Indian Summer, Glasgow” on their tour dates lists. Checking with the promoter was met with a “ssh”, as they had presumably set up provisional dates. Sadly, perhaps with the recession and rumours at the time of damage to the park and noise complaints from local residents, no more was heard about a revived fest. But it probably boils down to the fact that, despite a great weekend being had by all those who attended (review) the large numbers required to support an event of this size were sadly not present at Victoria Park.
We can only assume they stayed at home and listened to the radio…

Anyway, here’s the mix – not entirely sure of the legal aspects of this, complaints to the usual address…

(Photo by Ian McF, his flickr seems to be defunct now…)