Mark Freeman is the man behind Loose.fm. I have to state an interest here, having been a contributor to the station since it began. But Mark has been the driving force behind the station since then, surviving against some pretty tough odds to create something unique and a long term vision to go with it. We spoke about two months ago to hear the story from start to now...

Paul East: The studio's been open for a couple of months now. How does it feel?

Mark Freeman: It feels amazing. To have put something on the ground in real life, IRL as they say. I'm probably going to list about four or five things, but something in real life that feels like an artistic statement that is daring, or that nobody else would have bothered to put there has been really exciting for us. Firstly, that's the physical part of it, and to have collaborated with brilliant architects to do this like Caukin Studio (who built a bedsit in a skip). We approached them, and they said they wanted to be involved.

To have got this project even off the ground, and then seen it to fruition, with the likes of Caukin, our supporters at the design district who have been really brilliant and really embraced the idea. Josh Space who designed the lighting on top of the studio. And then what’s happened over the last year, as we started to build a core team around Loose as well. Then bring them in properly and started building the studio, working on the programming and running the thing together. It's not only given me a lot of hope and satisfaction that difficult things can be achieved if you put your mind to it. But as someone who is constantly fighting the devil on your shoulder, it's very affirming that we've achieved this. Next stage now is, can we keep it going?

Saying that though, it is like “we did that”. Is this next bit harder, or less hard? We'll find out. But the only way we'll find out is by doing it. So, it's all about persistence at the end of the day. Having a vision and moving towards it. But also, my absolute favorite thing, has been the reaction. Not only the old guard - I realised Loose has been going for four years pretty much today. In fact, I think it might be our fourth birthday! I don't tend to track these things, but the response from the community that were around when we lost the first studio and have come back and said, “we like this even more”, has been great. And then the new influx of talent and DJs and ideas coming in, who also love the space and love what we're trying to do. So, all in all, it's been really positive, and I'm now just thinking, what do we do next?

Paul East: Where else did you look, how did you land on where you are now?

Mark Freeman: There were a couple of options, we looked at a tunnel in Deptford, well not a tunnel. That sounds cooler than it was, like a railway arch which is still pretty cool. A tunnel would be amazing, wouldn't it? We looked at a former glass fronted refrigerator in the west end of London which we started to move towards. But that kind of didn't work out. We worked with Cymon Eckel for a while on that. There was a moment when I was talking to him about the project it had stalled a bit and we didn't know what we were going to do. I was looking at Deptford, and he said to me “do not go to Deptford”. "If you open up in an archway in Deptford, you will be forever in the indie ghetto". This guy's like, a bit of a music and nightlife industry maverick and legend, so it was really nice to get this advice. He also said, well kind of, “the only reason why Simple Minds and U2 got massive was because they went for it. They were the same as any other post punk band of the time, but they went for it”. They decided they wanted to go commercial. There is nothing wrong with being overtly commercial, if you stick to your vision. Well, to be fair, he didn't say that second bit - I just added that! But I kind of translated it as that, but that really stuck with me.

In the end, we couldn't get to an agreement with Cymon but that advice really stuck. But then I was scratching my head, wondering what to do, because the studio used to be in my office. I used to be into creative studios, I'm a creative director. I've run this agency for 14 years. But that company went under, and we lost the studio space. I could have just gone and got another job as a creative director somewhere or started up a new marketing agency and left the whole Loose thing behind. But I figured that the silly thing to do is sometimes the right thing to do. Someone mentioned it to me recently when I was explaining it, he said “you should read this book” ‘The Obstacle is the Way’ by Ryan Holliday. He said, "It's really interesting and I think you'll get a lot from it." And what I did was, not read the book, but just took the title - the obstacle is the way. I thought that book must mean if there's an obstacle, go for it because no one's daft enough to go that way. And once you get behind the obstacle, you've got virgin snow behind it.

I did read the book after I started on this journey and it's not about that at all! It's about like when you're striving for something, then this is how you get over obstacles. Anyway, I figured the silly thing to do would be the right thing to do, because nobody else would dare to do it. And if you can get there, then it's an achievement, right? In this case you'd have built something that didn't exist previously. That is not just for my own sort of sense of self-worth and personal interest or fascination. It’s something, more importantly, that is for a community of left-field musicians and creators and DJs which is a scene that's really important to me. So, I thought let's go down that path. I'd lost my mojo a bit after the West End thing fell through. But then a really lovely, brilliant, bloke called Alex Howard, who's works on the commercial side at the design district, kept emailing me. He knew we were after a studio. Plus it felt like the guy in Deptford just wanted to flog me a space. I was avoiding Alex for months and then eventually he got me on a call and had developed a whole pitch to us for me saying, "Look, I've got an idea. I really like what you do. I would love Loose to come to the design district. We have a shipping container. We have a space; we have a financial model that can help you out”.

To prove it, he'd even done a 3D map of the space and a little shipping container with our logo on top and some musical notes coming out of it - I was sold. Then we went to Design District because I didn't really know of it and it was a marvelous thing. A lot of people don't know about this campus for creative businesses by the O2 on the Greenwich Peninsula. When we went to see it, I was completely blown away. It's cool. It's beautiful. It's collaborative. It feels clean and safe, which is kind of unusual in a big city like this. In a way, it kind of makes it feel different from the scuzzy East End or somewhere like that where we might usually find ourselves. Then we got onto the project. It took quite a while to get going as well, but as soon as it did, man, it moved fast.

Paul East: So going back all the way to the beginning do you remember the moment when you thought right, I'm going to try and do this, start a radio station? What was the inspiration behind it?

Mark Freeman: There are always several strands, like everything, obviously there comes a moment when you think I'm going to do this or a Eureka moment or this is an idea, but there are several strands that led up to it. One is a tale of poor mental health. I was running the agency in Shoreditch with my business partners and basically burnt myself out horribly. I was sitting in a little room in the office one day and I felt incredibly mentally uncomfortable and was just exhausted and couldn't work and I felt like my brain had just totally blown a fuse. Then someone came in and asked me to sit and if they could help with what I was working on. I said “no, no, it's fine”. Then I looked back at my laptop, and you know that scene in The Shining when Jack Nicholson's written over and over ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’? I looked at what I'd been working on all day and it was just absolute gobbledygook, then I realised, you've got to get out of here. So, I stood up and I left that room and I walked out of our basement office and thought, “I'm never going back there”.

Then I had six months away whilst considering my options. At the same time, while working there, we were listening to NTS a lot in the office, and also playing our own music and it was our own particular vibe. An idea was starting to form in my head around musical eclecticism, and how for me, the way that I have always approached music, in fact not just music, all culture really is from a very open-minded point of view. I like things to have a certain vibe and for me it's kind of spacey, grungy and cosmic.

I like to put music together in this way and it doesn't matter what genre it's coming from. I've been fascinated by how genres and scenes tend to formulate around a similar sort of idea. That disco formulated from rooms. We all know the story of The Loft and David Manuso and then Nicky Siano and others who were playing not just disco, but rock, funk, jazz, Latin, soul…to a room to create a vibe and the vibe is very personal to the host. And then you could say the same thing about hip-hop in the breaks that DJs were looking for. They were not obvious, but some genre furrows were richer than others. But there was a very sort of atheist/agnostic feeling to it.

Paul East: Openminded?

Mark Freeman: Yeah. Yeah. Which also translates into the Balearic scene as well and I think there must be other ‘genres’. You see this play out a lot, even in house music. It arguably had a similar genesis. So, I've always been interested in that. We talked about it, me and my colleagues, saying we should start a radio station. Fast forward, I tried to go back to work after my burnout, although they didn’t even call it burnout in those days. It was only a few years ago, but it was fully fledged. It was known as a breakdown at that point. But now we use the more polite ‘burnout’. Anyway, I tried to go back to work, but then it was like March the 9^th 2020, and I went back to the office for two days, and then Boris Johnson's standing behind a lectern and saying, "Everyone's got to go back home again." I was like, "Great!”.

But that suited me. It allowed this idea to gestate further. Then we still had the lease on this place after the lockdown started to ease up. I started to go back again to the office. I felt I wanted to do something that would make me feel excited again to be going to work, and to live I suppose, I wanted to change direction really but also, I felt as a creative agency this might be something that we could do to mark us out as different. I said, I think we should start a radio station. I think we should do it in that room over there, which actually was the tiny room that I'd lost my head in. First of all, I thought, never ever, I hated that room. But then I grew to absolutely love that space. I got myself a book, which wasn't massively helpful, but was kind of the DIY internet radio cookbook. That told me a lot of what I needed to know.

Since this scenario, I've been diagnosed with ADHD, which completely explains why I can totally throw myself into a hyperfocus on building a radio station, because I did not stop for about 12 months. I found out how to build the studio physically, what a mixing board does, how to balance with microphones, how to get it online. Thankfully, I got someone to build the website for me, but nowadays I've found out how to do that myself as well. Then absolutely doggedly, I started to pursue the sort of DJs that we wanted on it at this point.

Test Pressing came into its own here, because I was a fan. I love what Apiento does. I was delighted to see that he'd started a forum and so I was engaging in that and one day mentioned it on there. Actually, Apiento had done a radio show, and played a tune that I'd recommended on the forum. He then said after the tune, “I got this from the forum”, and then shouted out lots of people - but didn't shout me out! So, I was like hey that tune that was me and by the way I'm starting a radio station if anyone's interested….then he floated that to the top of its own thread on the forum which I owe him a lot of gratitude for, because it gave us a really good groundswell of the type of DJs that have become the kind of audio signature of the Loose sound.

To put a description on it, it’s that very eclectic, wide ranging (massive, inverted commas) ‘Balearic’ sound. Loads of them are still with us: Mark S does Space Blues, yourself, Tom Forrest, Joe Morris…I don't want to leave anyone out…Sensei Dave. Some of these are more lurkers on the forums and active. Dom Milan…So that gave us a good bedrock. And then I was doggedly pursuing, or rather just following, DJs and then asking on Instagram whether they'd come in and while hammering an Instagram account to make it look like something was going on - which worked!

I was looking back at some old schedules a few weeks back and within about a month it was happening. What was also happening was that me saying to my colleagues, I think we should start a radio station, and also the historical conversations we'd had about let's start a radio station. By the time it started, it turned out none of them were remotely interested in running a radio station! Of course, we had a business to run as well, which I was still involved in, but it was very much like, all right, I'm going to have to carry this. So, I was there in the studio and programming the station and making all the promos and everything for nine months to a year, if I remember right. We did get some help along the way, but it became an obsession and also an exercise in persistence. That's the one thing I've realized all the way through this last four years, that the moment you stop doing and start spiraling and worrying what to do next nothing happens - everything just goes to shit, so you have to keep moving forward and doing things. At the same time, I've learned to try and find moments to take a rest as well.

Paul East: Have you always been into radio then? Was it a constant in your life? I know you talked bit about NTS, but what about growing up?

Mark Freeman: Yes, it's always been there. In that I always thought I'd be involved in it. I've never been that interested in the sort of technical side. I wouldn't describe myself as a radio guy, and never was and still am not really. For me, it's about having a platform to allow people, including myself, to express our ideas whether that's through music or through other means. That's what's been important for me. I've always been more of a resistor to the kind of dominant mode of things. I suppose I find that I try and avoid cliché. When a lot of radio platforms, for example, go on about this is your plug-in to have a news broadcast on the hour and this is your time sting. This is when you tell people what time it is and you should have this many jingles within the hour and all that. It's meaningless. It's that thing - function following, something to do with the medium and the message I suppose. I’m not into that at all.

Paul East: Like homogenizing it…forcing you down a very standard templated approach to doing ‘radio’?

Mark Freeman: Exactly. Yeah.

Paul East: I guess it’s them saying if you want to do a radio show, you need to do these things and all the rest of it. So, you were thinking it didn't have to be like that?

Mark Freeman: Exactly. We bought this radio mixing desk which is great and I think it makes us sound a lot better than a lot of other stations our size. I know that a lot of stations don't use this fat Allen and Heath. Anything nearly as powerful. It's got two channels on it for phone ins. But if I'd have known that, I probably wouldn't have bought it! I can't conceive a time when we're going to have at least a phone in show that's going to use traditional phone lines. So, no, I've never been a radio in that traditioanl sense.

But then luckily Matt Slaymaker, who is on the team is a radio guy and is fully across the production and the engineering side of the new studio, which is great for me. It's always been about being a broadcast platform in the same way that Live Aid was able to reach the whole world via TV. In the same way that Chris Morris was able to fool everyone that Michael Hesseltine had died, without actually saying Michael Hessletine had died. These are platforms for ideas, and they can be platforms for good as well. I think it's been growing anyway and now it's really coming to fruition. But the power and the duty I think of left field culture and entertainment is to speak truth to power as well. And at a time when rank conservatism is on the rise, the power of left field challenging culture.

And when I say challenging, it doesn't necessarily have to be like that, what's his name? That Argentinian guy playing a water flute in a lake or whatever, or it is just stuff that's not middle of the road. Plurality of ideas of voices and of genres is a way of keeping conservatism at bay…if not beating it at some point. The whole eclectic, experimental, ecstatic thing, like it's really helped us not just as a slogan but as a north star for where we want to go for everything we do. And as a score sheet. For whether we accept a new show, or not, or a new DJ, or even people that want to be involved - do they get it? Some shows aren't all three. Some shows are just one and that's fine. But if it's two, then we're super interested. If it's all three, then it's on the money. We can never say no to something that's all three.

Paul East: How do you go about getting new shows rolling? Are you still approaching people or are you they coming to you?

Mark Freeman: We do approach people. After we lost the live studio and I had to keep Loose going for 18 months digitally with, as you remember, a week of pre-recorded shows. Towards the end of that time, the well was starting to run dry and I was starting to have to go and ask people for shows and find new DJs. But all through that time people would come to us and say they wanted to do a show for Loose. As soon as you've got the network effect of live DJs coming into a studio and cross fertilizing with other DJs coming in and out as well, you get inundated with submissions basically. So, we don't have to go looking that much, but if there's people that we really want to get on, or someone that's coming through town or someone that we just think is a brilliant fit for us, we do approach them. But, now, nine times out of 10, it's people coming to us. It is really lovely, most people that we ask do it say yes. We generally get positive responses from our target talent so far. But at the moment we're actually looking at kind of how we hone what we've got.

The next few months are absolutely packed, and we're going to look at residencies now and work out what our residency roster is going to look like, and it's starting to allow us to really focus into that triple X. Eclectic, experimental, ecstatic. How do we amplify that through the talent that we give a platform to. It's always like, is it one of these three things, is that enough? Is it eclectic enough? And if it’s experimental, that doesn't need to mean it is experimental music. It's just like experimental in its approach to genre, for example. Playing different types of stuff. And then ecstatic. It doesn't have to be all like the Macarena, but just with an eye to the ecstasy and the joy that music and culture can bring.

Paul East: I think the fun element, the joy part of it, can get forgotten about sometimes, especially when people are very much into something - music's just one of those things, isn't it? You have to step back a bit and just remember this is fun, right? We play music because it makes us feel good, whether that's because it's something you've never heard before or it's like challenging you. That's where you get your joy from.

Mark Freeman: And if you're in a low mood then you may listen to low music for cathartic reasons. I don't know anyone who listens to low music in a low mood so they can get low and stay permanently low. It's a route back to joy and the flip side of this of course is that things do tend to be taken very seriously. What's cool, often in the underground tends to be, and especially in the last few years, very monochrome, moody visually. That’s even if the music isn't necessarily that. So our view was why if we build something, and the form of a brand has always been very multicolored and make that our aesthetic. It's always been very skittles-like, it's to put a stake in the ground and put something that is platforming left field music and culture, but that looks big, dumb and fun. It felt like if we didn't do this, then no one's going to do it. This is what we are. And even the design of the studio, we saw lots of very kind of eclectic artistic designs that were wild and weird, and some of them were fun, but none of them really ‘stupid’ that is until we saw this big, giant face and then we were like, "Right, that's the one!”.

Paul East: How about the future, what are your ambitions for Loose?

Mark Freeman: Firstly, we've got to get some partners involved to help fund the station, or to fully fund it, to be honest. This is an absolute necessity and all the other sort of stations our size are funded by the DJs that are on it through subs. But I've never liked that idea as someone that worked in marketing and working on interfacing with big brands. I know the types of budgets that are sloshing around and the overheads for a radio community are not huge, we can do this. That will involve offering partners sort of collaborative programs of work, ideally not advertising, because the advertising model's broken. That's the kind of the boring bit. I mean it's not boring for us. It's very exciting, but our plan is to start running some events. Again, it feels a bit kind of obvious. But then what type of events are they going to be? I don't just want to do a club night. I mean, there will be club nights, but if we're going to do a Loose event, then what's our version of it?

I would absolutely love to run a festival at some point that is eclectic, experimental, ecstatic and platforms not just music and DJs, but visual art and spoken word, live podcasts, comedy….. We want to build the platform out to have more speech-based shows, we’re mainly speech and music, but some pure speech shows so that it's got that podcast element. But, those podcasts have to be about something. I don't just want people sitting around a studio talking aimlessly about their feelings! They need to take on a broad range of subjects. I'm looking for specific sorts of genre music shows. We’ve got a really nice show coming up soon with a ‘zine called Hideous, that is an indie magazine. That's another thing Loose wants to get more involved in, is the live music, band and indie scene. I think it's on the cusp of a massive resurgence, because as much as we all love dance music and electronic music and the groove. It feels like it's running to a natural kind of dead end at the moment. Unless something incredibly fresh comes out. But the indie scene is just absolutely smashing at the door at the moment.

I really love the Egg punk scene. I don't know if you’ve heard bands like Prison Affair and Snooper and Autobahns? Really fast melodic punk music with synths and often chipmunk vocals. It's so good! That's on the programming and events side. With that will eventually come our seven days a week broadcast schedule. At the moment we can only afford to broadcast half a week. Then for me it's about how do we platform new ideas in music and culture. I think the more we take this approach to eclecticism, and I’m not saying ‘we are going to create a new genre’, but this is our offering to how a new genre can work. If something new can come out of UK or global culture and we help it along by giving a platform for eclecticism, then great. That's the thing that excites us. If you ask someone to play wide and broad, across their musical landscape, to bring their vibe, it becomes a very personal sound and it becomes very hard to pigeonhole as well. So, yeah, we're just looking to continue to broaden that platform for this cultural idea.

Paul East: You're welcome to say you don't want to answer this, but if you had to pick a record or an album or even an artist, in fact any of those, that you think encapsulates the stuff that you've just talked about there, even if it's just one of your favorites, what would you pick?

Mark Freeman: So, there are several answers to this question. You might be pleased to know. One is obviously the early disco hosts, DJs like David Mancuso, Nicky Siano. I'm terrible at pulling out names like this, but then Optimo. It's a coincidence that this falls on the sad news of JD Twitch's death, but what they were doing in Glasgow was really life affirming for what I was thinking about music. Seeing someone actually doing it, and doing it like a thousand times better than I ever would behind some decks. Maybe that Optimo Psych-Out compilation in the mid noughties, that really switched the light on for me, as did Andrew Weatherall's work of course. More recently, DJ Lloyd on the Lot, he would play absolutely anything from any genre so long as it fits into his tempo. It’s very slow and chuggy. before people were talking about chug, but again his isn't just chug. It's some sort of psychedelic, cosmic, dreamy sort of stuff. Charlie Bones’ Old Breakfast Show of course, on NTS, was also taking this same approach.

If there's one record that I think has been played a lot on Loose in the last few years, it would be ‘Spirit of Eden’ by Alex Kassian. Which for me, it was so great to hear it so often on Loose, because it's also one of the best tunes that I can remember being released for a long time. I absolutely love that. Everyone always asks, “what’s this record?”. It's so hard to pin down really, because one person's “Spirit of Eden” is another person's ‘insert record here’. It is just one of those tunes that just hits you in the feels - wherever whatever. Whoever the DJ who's playing it is, we all know it when we hear it. I think that's what we're looking for.

Listen to Loose.fm via their website with archive shows via SoundCloud.

Photo credit: Ruth Ward