No Tags

Who’s on your Mount Rushmore of pop? That’s the question of the week. After welcoming Jeff Weiss back to London for a live show about his tremendous novel-slash-memoir, Waiting For Britney Spears , we got to thinking about our own pop album percies. 2007’s Blackout is certainly up there – ‘a lost weekend of one-more-gram indulgence’ that ‘embodied the hedonistic sleaze of the late Bush years,’ as...

It’s Glastonbury weekend, and we’re back with the Big Questions. Not a sentence we expected to be saying on No Tags, but we kick off by talking about Will Smith – specifically his recent appearance with London streamer du jour DJ AG. The Fresh Prince is in the middle of a generationally cringe promo run and we’ve been wanting to discuss AG’s streams for a while now, so these two forces colliding o...

We talk about festivals a lot on No Tags, and usually the negative stuff: monopolisation, bad owners, overpriced cheesy chips. But good can still prevail, and are hopes are pinned on Field Maneuvers: an LED beacon of hope in the darkness, and an event that puts the comfort and enjoyment of ravers first. Perish the thought! In this episode, FM organisers Henry, Ele and Leon explain how they’ve just...

What connects Adonis resident Grace Sands, the free party explosion of summer '91, Deleuzian dancefloor philosophy, and the annual Gloucestershire cheese-rolling competition? It's this episode of No Tags, obviously, but the connecting tissue goes much deeper, we promise. The last third of the show contains our recent conversation with Grace Sands – house DJ, free party originator, icon of London's...

Rave royalty on No Tags this week as we’re joined by Paul Woolford. We’re both drawn to artists who are driven by a compulsion to put art into the world at all costs – and 25 years into his career, Woolford (AKA Special Request) seems to be more driven than ever. In the last six years he’s released six albums and countless singles and remixes, and he still tours relentlessly – from seasons in Ibiz...

Tom and Chal emerge from a proper-large-’avin-it May bank holiday weekend with a desire to explain the perfect clubbing experience. Borrowing a few ideas from Friedrich Nietzsche, we sketch out two divergent tendencies in club culture and talk about the countless variables that accelerate our rave engines. Got feedback? Obviously please write in, DM or voicenote us with critiques of our emergent t...

We’re back! And booting off a busy season of No Tags content by speaking to 'professional music fan' Derrick Gee. You’ve likely come across Derrick on your feeds already. He’s a beacon of sophistication in the murky waters of social video, and a true enthusiast for music of all kinds – from audiophile sound systems to viral TikTok trends to his favourite bossa nova recordings. He’s racked up milli...

There was only one topic we could tackle this week. The argument boiling over around Boiler Room and the BDS movement is one of the most divisive and emotionally charged intra-scene disputes we’ve seen in a long time. There’s a lot being said in public and in the comments, with much of it relegated to Instagram Stories with a 24-hour timer. So in the spirit of our mission statement – chronicling u...

We’re pretty confident about slapping the “AOTY contender” badge on this one: aya’s second album hexed! is out on Hyperdub next week, and it has blown our tiny minds to pieces. The South London artiste joined us in the No Tags “studio” to reveal the pills, thrills and bellyaches behind the phenomenal follow-up to 2021’s im hole . We talked about shaking off the curse of drink and drugs, embracing...

No guest this week, but plenty of meat as we take our previous episode with Spotify chronicler Liz Pelly as a jumping off point to talk about the idea of independence. We use the word ‘independence’ a lot on No Tags without really investigating what we mean by it. In a era when the major labels are all stake-holders in the biggest streaming platform on Earth, and are hoovering up indie labels and...

No journalist has contributed more to our understanding of the streaming era than Liz Pelly. A contributing editor at The Baffler and a lifelong DIY scene participant, she’s been investigating the inner workings of Spotify since 2016, writing a series of increasingly alarming stories that exposed the streaming giant’s black box of profit-seeking operations: mood-based playlists filled with mysteri...

Still high off the fumes of January’s first Big Beat Cinema episode , we return to the scene of the crime this week for a follow-up film special with Finn, Manchester’s very own pope of trash. In this episode, we start by diving into your feedback, ranging from literary theory to eyewitness accounts from big beat OGs. We expand the official BBC canon with even more movies, including Go , Twin Town...

A jam-packed episode of No Tags this week, but we had a lot to catch up on. Central Cee ’s debut album  Can’t Rush Greatness  is out (02:56) and it’s UK drill’s biggest album to date, almost by default. Eusexua  (10:07) might be the record that finally sells us on FKA twigs ? And we talk about the grey zones of desire in Babygirl  over in film corner (18:32). But then onto the main event: we’re jo...

This week we kick off the first ever No Tags film season! Based on an original idea by DJ and NTS host Finn, Big Beat Cinema is our attempt to identify and decode a much-loved and entirely made-up micro-genre. We begin by outlining the core canon and basic tropes of BBC, paying particular attention to the ultra-stylish heist movies of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s – think Ocean’s Eleven , Mark Wahl...

Heaving ourselves into 2025 like a rebuilt BILLY with half its dowels missing, No Tags returns to its usual schedule. We kick off with a journey to the North Circular, where London’s biggest club is under investigation following two drug-related deaths and an alleged stabbing. Following the recent revelations about Drumsheds in Jim Waterson’s excellent London Centric newsletter , Tom and Chal ask:...

December comes but once a year, and sneaking in at the very last point we could probably get away with… it’s No Tags’ 2024 round-up! Joined by regular guest Henry Bruce-Jones in what’s becoming a bit of a list-making tradition, we run down our favourite music of the year and tackle some of the year’s big consensus releases – good and bad. Minimal intro required, really, but below is a timestamped...

What do The Simpsons , Dawn of the Dead and the Facebook page for Tom and Chal’s former employer have in common? They’re all overrun by zombies. Prompted by the publication of No Tags’ first physical book , in this episode we return to our long-held worry about disappearing archives. As older platforms fade away, can we be bothered to start again with the latest social media fads? Will gated micro...

We trailed ‘big things coming’ on our last episode, and would you look at that – the big thing has come. Or is available for pre-order, at least. That’s right, it’s our first ever book. Titled No Tags: Conversations on underground music culture and designed by All Purpose Studio, this hefty tome (350+ pages) compiles every interview to date on No Tags, edited transcripts of the best of Chal and To...

Truly an artist who needs no introduction to the No Tags universe, Midland is also one of the nicest people we know in this bottomless viper pit called dance music. Harry Agius has been a constant presence on the dancefloor since we were first finding our feet as music writers, and we’ve followed him every step of the way – from his early run of steppy house records on Aus Music and Phonica, to ‘F...

A chunky episode, this, as we tackle the last fortnight of music news. We mull over Charli XCX ’s Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat , a star-studded remix album that reworks the original from the stems up. If these are Brat Summer’s dying embers, then it’s a flame that struggles to consistently flicker – but the bright spots are very bright indeed. We pay tribute to Ka , the B...

On October 2, Amy Lamé stepped down from her post as London’s first Night Czar. Lamé had faced constant scrutiny since taking the job in 2016, especially following her chunky pay rises – most recently she was earning £132,846 a year in a period when the city’s venues have been struggling to survive. But Lamé’s achievements have also been defended by people deeply involved in the city’s nightlife....

Vivian Host’s rave credentials go deep. Much deeper than we realised in fact, and we’ve been friends with her for over a decade. There are several entry-points through which you could have discovered Vivian. Maybe it’s her podcast, Rave to the Grave , where she interviews DJs, dancers and ‘freaks of all ages’, from legendary house vocalist Barbara Tucker to performance art pervert Kevin Carpet . I...

With festival season over, it's time we investigated a story that’s been on our minds all year: has the bubble burst? In March it was reported that 21 UK festivals had already cancelled, postponed or closed in 2024. By the end of summer that number had risen to over 50. Industry bodies blame rising costs, which is doubtless a factor – but what else might be at play here? A small cluster of dominan...

We’ve not interviewed too many DJs so far on No Tags, so when we do, it’s a safe assumption that a) we’ve watched them play a few times, and b) they’re pretty tasty at it. OK Williams falls into both categories. We’ve seen her DJ multiple times and have never failed to leave the dancefloor refreshed. But she’s also one of our favourite dance music personalities, as evidenced on her regular NTS sho...

Regular No Tags listeners will notice that we often talk about living through several revivals at once, but indie sleaze is one that doesn’t seem to be going away. So why indie sleaze, and why now? And what do people actually mean when they talk about an indie sleaze revival in 2024? For this episode, Chal and Tom dug out their skinny ties and shutter shades (not to mention some brutal photos from...