Xfm Scotland’s Friday night presenter has travelled the world, but if he could find the time he’d do it all again – he might even spin some records while he’s at it…

Tracking down someone as busy as XFM’s Friday night presenter Huggy is no mean task, so our chat takes place on his home turf with the choice of venue his – he opts for The Outhouse which, it transpires, is handy for him, and as it happens, owned by the same person who runs several of the local night clubs which make for much of his dayjob.

Edinburgh hasn’t always been Huggy’s home, but he was born in the capital and has lived there most of his working life. That said, it was a period in his childhood which has perhaps shaped his career, when he spent time away in the wilds of the north of Scotland.

“Our nearest neighbour was a mile away. And if anyone thinks Scotland’s rainy and cold, try the Western Isles,” he grins, as we watch the rain teem down outside.

On the upside, one of his neighbours was wildlife expert Terry Nutkins.

“A killer whale got stranded up the road at Skye and I was 5 feet away from it,” he remembers. However, there was a downside to this isolation. “When we were growing up the area didn’t have a good TV reception, so I didn’t get STV or Grampian – we could only get BBC, and when the tide was out not even that!” The tide!? “You’d not get the signal bouncing off the waves,” he explains.

And since radio waves work the same way… though not even the Clydes and Forths of the radio world stretch as far as Glenelg, tide out or in!

He wasn’t influenced by the local folk music during his stay in the north, and his mother took a very hands-off approach to any musical education.

“I didn’t know about this until a wee while ago, but she used to run club nights – folk clubs in the 60s and 70s – but she never told me until 5 years into my career. So I didn’t now it but I was around Billy Connolly, Phil Cunningham, Silly Wizzard – who have not influenced me AT ALL!” he laughs.

Instead he was largely music-free until into his teens, returning to Edinburgh around the age of 12, having missed out on what should have been his formative pop years. Perhaps mercifully – it was during a time when “soft rock or crappy PWL, Kylie and cheesy pop” ruled the roost. And then, in the nick of time, electronic and dance music came along.

”It was this different voice and that’s what’s always attracted me to electronic music, I guess I fell in love with as it was an alternative; what music I did embrace was really modern fresh stuff.

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A long and enthusiastic list of early influences ensues. “Hiphop and acid and American house, stuff on the DJ international label, Traxx, Promised Land, Ten City… mixed in with early acid and rave tracks – it was all very American – Chicago, Detriot, but on the UK side was the Manchester scene, the Hacienda – more on the band side.”

He admits that he was almost completely focused on dance music at that time.

“Musically in the past I may have been fairly one-dimensional, but I think there comes a time in your life… I don’t know, it’s a trigger or switch where you suddenly start to appreciate a lot of other things.” Those earlier influences can of course be heard in most modern music.

“Music’s like a flu virus, it adapts itself – everyone’s too quick to make comparisons… ‘this band’s like the Beatles’ – why not take it for what it is, either you like it or you don’t!”

Huggy’s unafraid to use the term ‘house’ as a major part of his interest, despite it taking a recent “battering”. “I’ve always been into what you’d call house music, but over the last 12 months house has been viewed as cheesy dance or rehashed music.”

“But it’s not,” he insists. “It’s really an umbrella for electronic music – I view a lot of things today that are classed as house as 21st century pop.” Which could itself be Xfm’s manifesto. “It’s funny…” he agrees.

“I’ve always been into new and fresh music and that’s what the station’s about so it’s a great marriage.”

So the rumours of dance’s death have been.. exaggerated? He cites Xfm’s playlists.

“There’s a phenomenal crossover, even if you look at it from a rock angle, in the current music sound – a lot of bands are using synths and drum machines, so to write off dance as being dead… why are these bands using synths and Drum Machines?”

He warms to his theme. “I think it’s brilliant that we have a live band culture and people playing instruments again, but not everyone dances to rock music, so where do they go to let their hair down and get sweaty and mashed up? So it’s great for me, that electronic house or electronic or dance, call it what you will, has dipped back under the radar again.”

He doesn’t say it but clearly believes that Xfm are the good guys in the fight against mediocrity.

“It’s ironic that NME declared ‘Dance is Dead’ and then they had Klaxons and Simian Mobile Disco on the cover…”

Huggy admits that the fast-talking ebullient presenter (and interviewee!) that we know and love is a different person from when he started.

“If you’d done this interview 5 years ago, I’d have been ‘I play dance tunes, it’s really good’ and that’d have been it!”

He likes his DJ sets to be his personality, and isn’t keen on that whole superstar DJ thing, where the set is performed standing up or indeed jumping up and down. “You’re putting yourself above the music,” he says.
Indeed, we have an Edinburgh record shop owner  to thank for him taking up a life on the decks and dancefloors at all.

“The guy – one Johnny Nesbitt – who I bought my records from took 6 months to coax me to DJ,” he confesses.

“‘He was saying ‘you’ve got a good attitude and sense of music, you possibly have what it takes’… but getting into it is really expensive – turntables, CD decks… so I got a second deck from him, then saved up to buy a mixer.”

Eventually he managed to make it pay off with a slot at the capital’s City Cafe. “In the first week there 10 or 20 there, the second week 50, then 100, then before I knew it everyone was really excited about it.” The nights continued to snowball, with his ‘promotion’ to running Burgerqueen at Belle Angelle and eventually DJing for 1200 people at the Vaults and the Honeycomb, which was the biggest underground club in Edinburgh. His reputation led him from there to bigger and better gigs, plus an essential mix for Radio 1 and eventually his production work led to his being the first UK artist to sign for Ministry of Sound.

Still, the step to taking the microphone was in a rather different direction. “I wasn’t to go on air until I could talk on radio: my show’s very much a broad umbrella, and has to involve a bit of speech to be informative; it’s part of the presenters duty to bring them forward – the worst radio link ever is ‘That’s a great record’. Why? What makes it good?”

And pushing new sounds is all part of the job satisfaction.” It’s an honour and a pleasure, to have my taste in music brought forward.”

The radio shows mirror his DJ sets to an extent, but listeners shouldn’t expect an non-on-air version of Stereotype (his current club night).

“It’s not completely underground and off the scale, I understand and appreciate people like lots of different things – some things I might not exactly play at my gigs.”

So he is holding back on the more ‘radical’ tunes? “If it was completely my choice and my station, we’d maybe have 500 listeners!” he laughs.

But Xfm is still the station of choice in a sense. “It’s not like we’re Hit Radio, to please everyone, we are a station passionate about people who care about music, and breaking good music – I view it as a good opportunity to help young artists – it’s like Jim (Gellatly) with his rock market, he believes that we need to nurture these people. The business is different now than it was – talent is image, it’s who you know and the work you do in the background. We may have really unbelievable artists out there who can’t put themselves forward and I think it’s our duty to expose them.”

You can sense that Huggy’s not a fan of X-factor.

“We live in a bullshit society, if someone has a million pounds behind them and want to be a singer they can spend that to push themselves forward – but what about some poor guy who’s busking, how’s he going to get heard?”

He’s doing his bit – an album in the works, Rock Tha Disco, merges dance and rock music, and his current Edinburgh club night, Stereotype – “a tongue-in-cheek name,” alluding to the fact that the industry is indeed made up of stereotypes.” It’s different month-to -month, even week -to-week,” he enthuses, listing Freeform5, Martjin Ten Velden, and Tom Neville as recent guests.

“Oh, and a little character Fedde Le Grand, who’s been on my radar for a couple of years.” Huggy broke ‘Put Your Hands Up For Detroit’ and was the first in the UK to book him.

“It’s been a good year” he says contentedly.

So what does he do when not clubbing or DJing? “Sleep!” he exclaims.
”I spend a scary amount of time preparing – 6-12 hours for a 3 hour show.”

He confesses to being “anal” about getting things right. “I don’t want to play something I’d be embarrassed about in a year, I don’t see music as being that disposable.”

The rest of his waking hours are spent looking for new music – he derides “copycat” DJs and is disappointed by people who just wait for new material to land in their laps.
And this means that his connections in the industry are legendary – hence the nickname.

”‘Huggy’ came about because I like to know what’s going on and how to market it, so I’ve been responsible over the years for bringing people together and sorting things out.” Indeed, he’s just hooked up Paul Harris and Jay P with a German singer, Stax, who will be recording a vocal with them to get round a vocal sample that can’t be cleared. Anything to get the record out!

However, he – not entirely convincingly! maintains that he has interests outside music – he’s a dedicated Hibbee though he insists that it’s football first, with no time for any inter-team rivalry. He’s less enamoured with TV so any time at home not spent listening to music will involve watching a movie. “I like eating out too, but I’m probably too much of a critic, so I I’d probably find something to grumble about!” Eating in is trickier given the odd hours he keeps. “I tend to have really good living in the week, and ‘bad’- not as healthy – living at the weekend.” His penance is a Monday supermarket trip to stock up on fresh fish and organic fruit and veg.
”I view what I do as one job at the weekend – going out and playing music; and one during the week – so I’ve got two body clocks and there’s this sort of ‘stutter’ as one’s constantly catching up wit the other.”

As with many DJs he’s less likely to have a proper time off but foreign trips as working holidays are a great source of enjoyment for our globe-trotting presenter. “I love the whole fact that dance music is global, for a while it was very European-oriented so I’ve been blessed that I’ve played in New York – that was a dream come true – and Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Ibiza, Sweden…” He also enjoys the differences in audiences, and the challenge of working round an initially unenthusiastic audience. “Some things work better in some places, it tests you as a DJ being out of your comfort zone. I love playing my own club, but you can get really tested, thrown in at the deep end when you’re away.”

None more so that in Russia, where he found himself with his records lost in transit and a club date looming… and at that time, no suitable records in the local shops!

“There was an embargo on imports,” he recounts, “so I was led to an ‘underground’ shop’.” This was actually the living room on the 27th floor of an out-of-town high-rise tower block, where an Aladdin’s Cave of vinyl, presumably smuggled in, saved the day.

Nowadays, you’d just go on the web and download the tracks.

“That’s one good thing about the change in technology – I said years ago I’d never play a CD,” he admits, “but that’s the power now, previously it’d take 2 months to get a record out but now, you can have it available that night. ” So he’s in approval of the new-fangled developments?

”It’s keeping underground music alive,” he says, simply.

And what if he hadn’t been a DJ, or if the music, unaccountably died?

”If I went deaf – touch wood – I’d love to be a travel writer, I can’t help being jealous when I turn on the telly and see someone sampling Barbados or Antarctica.”

We watch the rain splatter the Outhouse’s beer garden. As the new boy, his first assignment might be somewhere like… Glenelg! “Hey, I have first hand experience, I could take them to the hot spots!”

Huggy’s on Xfm Scotland on Friday nights, from 22.00 – 1.00 am
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