Thinking Metal Music

Bridges 66 Air date : 29th June 2024 @ 1900 hours

The sixty sixth edition of Bridges will air at 1900 hours on Saturday 29th June 2024. Special shout out to all those musicians who helped or kindly donated material to the show : Chop5, Twin Complex, Scott Helland, David Wright, Frenchy and the Punk, Stock Image, Ian Boddy, John Christian, marsheaux, Computerchemist, Specky Cult, Keith Newman, Stewart Allen. If I didn't play your music on this show then stick around for the next. I have around fifty hours of music to listen to and, even then, I'm not even close to the end.

The track listing for this show looks like this:

• Part One : Loud
• Barry Numan, Berserker
• Drab Majesty, Unknown and the I
• Twins Complex, Reyka
• Guitarmy of one (Scott Helland), Solar Angel Island
• Stock Image, What’s my Name?
• Frenchy and the Punk, Like in a Dream
• Ian Boddy, Memory Lane
• Patriarchy, Hurt Me
• Air Sculpture, On Writing
• David Bowie/Brian Eno, Get Real!
• Part Two : Loudermilk
• Harry Numan, Child with the Ghost
• Twin Complex, Helix
• Marsheaux, Like a Movie
• Computer Chemist, Way too Much
• Dream Kid, She’s gone
• Guitarmy of one (Scott Helland), nNver end the rocket century
• Wavestar II, Call to Arms
• Propaganda, They call me Nocebo
• Specky Cult, Different Kind of Difficult
• Drab Majesty, The Foyer
• Larry Numan, The Hunter

Bridges 65 Air date : 25th May 2024 @ 1900 hours

The sixty fifth edition of Bridges will air at 1900 hours on Saturday 25th May 2024. I received a lot of new music in the week prior to broadcast and, frankly, I couldn't have been happier. To receive this level of support from so many artists is just truly amazing. A special thank you to all of tonight's contributors. Without you, this show would be just a rehash of my old and faded CD collection.

The track listing for this show looks like this:

• Part One : Loud
• Larry Numan, My Name Is Ruin
• Bill Nelson, Another Slice Of Wonder Cake
• MFBB, Blue Banana
• Bush, Warm Machine
• Editors, Strange Intimacy
• Marsheaux, The sun and the rainfall (DM Cover)
• Billy Currie, William's Mix
• David Bowie, V-2 Schneider
• Dream Kid, Waves
• Bill Nelson, Real Worlds And Dream Worlds
• Editors, Karma Climb
• Ion, Tesla Street
• Billy Currie, Folly Brook
• Part Two : Loudermilk
• Dream Kid, The Highway
• Barry Numan, The End Of Things
• A Shoreline Dream, Everything Turns
• Editors, Heart Attack
• Hyperfield, Frenemy
• Marsheaux, To the End
• David Bowie, Subterraneans
• Chilled with the Ghost, Stormtrooper in Drag (Paul Gardiner cover)
• MFBB, Just like You
• Spare Room Music, Airlane (Gray Numan cover)
• Bush, The Chemicals Between Us
• Frenchy and the Punk, Hypnotized

Bridges 64 Air date : 27th April 2024 @ 1900 hours

The sixty fourth edition of Bridges will air at 1900 hours on Saturday 27th April 2024. In tonight's show, we mark the passing of one of the nicest blokes I've ever had the pleasure to meet, Chris Cross aka Dr. Chris Allen, bass player with my favourite band from the 80's and beyond, who passed away in March at the age of 71. Expect lots of Ultravox.

Tonight, the show also examines the latest developments in AI technology, which appears to be able to create new music just from a series of simple text commands. I've included some of my early experiments as well as two fully developed tracks just to show how scary this is for musicians and broadcasters. Suffice to say, Bridges now operates a STRICT NO AI MUSIC policy. If you send us any AI music, even as a joke, you'll end up with a lifetime ban. I detest this crap.

The track listing for this show looks like this:

• Part One : Loud
• Ultravox, All Stood Still
• Frenchy and the Punk, Hypnotized
• MFBB, Window
• Ultravox, Passing Strangers
• Promenade Cinema, On video
• Frenchy and the Punk, Cities in the Dust (Cover)
• Part Two : AI Music, The work of the Devil?
• CP3O, Dancing with the Morris (Rock version)
• CP3O, Dancing with the Morris (EBM)
• CP3O, Where were you?
• CP3O / Hedge Numan, QuietlyBroken
• Part Three : Louder
• Richard Barbieri, New Soul
• Marsheaux, The One
• Ultravox, Brilliant
• Promenade Cinema, Spellbound
• Richard Barbieri, Hypnotek
• Ultravox, Slow Motion
• Larry Numan, Face to Face
• MFBB, Window (Instrumental version)
• Ultravox, The Voice
• Frenchy and the Punk, Dark Carnivale
• Ultravox, Love's Great Adventure
• Promenade Cinema, Vanish
• Ultravox, Vanish

Bridges 63 Air date : 30th March 2024 @ 1900 hours

The sixty third edition of Bridges will air at 1900 hours on Saturday 30th March 2024. The track listing for this show looks like this:

• Part One : Loud
• Pete Murphy, Cuts you up
• The Cult, She sells sanctuary
• Fifteen Lions, One for the Demon
• MoonPic, If Rammstein wrote Poison
• Voyager, Promise
• Chop5, Deadmarch
• Poeme Electronique, 1
• Nanobots, Wollstonekraft
• Voyager, Prince of Fire
• Liela_Moss / Gary Numan, Vanishing Shadows
• Fifteen Lions, Remedy
• Nigel Stanford, AUTOMATICA
• Stabbing Westward, The Thing I Hate
• Part Two : Louder
• Dave Bessell, Elegy
• Arrows meet, Be all End all
• Fifteen Lions, Throw it away
• Dave Bessell, After Hours
• Pete Murphy, Marlene_Dietrich's Favourite Budgie
• Nigel Stanford, Cymatics
• Slalom D, Cat and Dogs
• Japan, Quiet Life
• Nanobots, Cut Existence
• Paralox, Are friends Electric (awful cover)
• Boy Is Fiction, See You On the Flipside
• SkinMechanix, The Art of Falling
• Voyager, Colours

Bridges 62 Air date : 2nd March 2024 @ 1900 hours

The sixty second edition of Bridges aired at 1900 hours on Saturday 2nd March 2024. The track listing for this show looks like this:

• Part One : Loud
• Kraftwerk, Computer Love, from The Mix
• Mello, Only Love
• Scenius, I want more
• Jean-Michel Jarre, Herbalizer
• Tangerine Dream, Huckabee's Dream
• Marsheaux, Can you stop me now?
• Chop 5, Cyclohexane
• Kebu, Just Another Space Odyssey
• VNV Nation, Where is the Future?
• Jean-Michel Jarre, Oxygene 19
• Simple Minds, Don't you forget about me
• Part Two : Louder
• Steve Hausschildt, Strands
• Bit Pixel, No Time For Regret
• Marsheaux, Breakthrough
• Agency-V, We Can Erase You
• Ultravox, A friend I call Desire
• Tubeway Days, I die, You die
• System F, Insolation
• Agency-V, Some Kind Of Game
• Blancmange, Living On The Ceiling
• Chop5, Sunset Frequencies
• Mello, You and me
• Kraftwerk, Radioactivity (1991 Remix)

Bridges 61 Air date : 2nd February 2024 @ 1900 hours

The sixty first edition of Bridges aired at 1900 hours on Saturday 2nd February 2024. The track listing for this show looks like this: Mostly tracks I like...

• Part One : Loud
• David Bowie, Scary Monsters and Super Creeps
• OMD / Marsheaux, She’s Leaving
• Gary Numan, I die, you die (from his 1000th show)
• Depeche Mode, Ghosts Again
• Ian Boddy & Nigel Mullaney, Run The Clock Down
• Marsheaux, To The End (Extended version)
• My Mercurial Drive, Object of Desire
• David Bowie, Little Wonder
• Depeche Mode, Sweetest Perfection
• Eisbrecher, Ohne Dich
• Project Pitchfork, Rain
• Part Two : Louder
• Ian Boddy, Sequence In Blue
• Tubeway Days, War Songs Love Vera Lynn Remix
• Depeche Mode, Leave In Silence
• My Mercurial Drive, Signals
• Ian Boddy & Nigel Mullaney, Vanguard
• David Bowie, I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship
• Gary Numan, Crime Of Passion (Acoustic Version)
• Marsheaux, Now You Are Mine
• Deviant UK, Access denied
• Department S, So Far Away
• David Bowie, Dead Man Walking

Bridges 60 Air date : 1st January 2024 @ 1900 hours

The sixtieth edition of Bridges aired at 1900 hours on Monday 1st January 2024. The track listing for this show is currently unavailable. I'll sort it properly when I can. Look, it was New Year. I'd been up and partying for thirty-six hours straight. I didn't even know what day it was until somebody shoved a party favour in my hand and said Happy New Yeah...

Okay, I sorted it. More or less... I plyed two YouTube Compilations, the first by Miami Nights 1984 and the second Chill Synthwave playlist by Night Drive with Ryan Gosling although I don't think Ryan Gosling had much to do with it. Anyway, here's the playlist.

• Part One : Miami Nights 1984
• Heat
• Sentimental
• Pavement Surfing
• Voyage
• Ascend
• Keep Running
• Only When it's Dark (feat. GUNSHIP)
• Sunseeker
• Accelerated
• Reflections
• Tuff Turf
• Late Night Call
• Coastal Bliss
• Decelerated
• Part Two : Night Drive with Ryan Gosling, Chill Synthwave
• College & Electric Youth, A Real Hero
• Mr. Kitty, After Dark
• Timecop1983 & The Bad Dreamers, Back to You
• The Midnight, Los Angles
• Timecop1983 & Josh Dally, Neon Lights
• Timecop1983 & The Midnight, Static
• W O L F C L U B, Can't Stop Falling In Love
• Gunship, Tech Noir
• W O L F C L U B, Tears
• The Midnight, Shadows
• DRYVE, Blink of an Eye
• Trevor Something, Fade Away

Submission Guidelines (updated 02-Jan-24)

Here are a rough set of guidelines for submitting tracks to Bridges

1. First and foremost, we aim to be a family-friendly show. We don’t play tracks which a have strong sexual theme. End of. If your track features an explicit video then we won’t play your track. This is non-negotiable.Our audience includes children and young adults, and we need to adhere to OFCOM rules and guidelines once we have our DAB licence.

2. Don’t send us files. If you send me a 100Mb AIFF file of your latest hit then I’ll blacklist you and you won’t ever hear from us again. Send us a link to your file on Youtube or Soundcloud or, better still, a code for Bandcamp. Please do not send us Spotify links.

3. We don’t play tracks by a small number of artists simply because thse artists have been blacklisted. They know who they are.

4. The programme concentrates on a mix of Dark Electro, Machine Rock and Alternative. Basically, we play what we like and what we enjoy, as well as artists who, we feel, deserve to be heard by a wider audience. In particular, we’re interested in those artists who are having a really hard time getting noticed. Guess what? We were in the same boat when we started out. Got a hard-luck story? Tell us all about it.

5. Please do not submit AI albums for consideration. We won't play them. End of story. I've already explained why but, for the sake of completeness, I'll repear myself.

AI is still pretty dumb. It pretends to be human. It pretends to have feelings and emotions. Some algorithms have even passed the Turing Test so I guess thta makes them human, right? No, it doesn't. AI music is hollow and empty and cannot create something genuinely new. Not yet anyway. Worse, certain organisations are using AI to generate music that they own. They create artist profiles that are entirely fake just to feed their own shitty businesses. They don't want to pay musicians any more. Musicians cost money and Joe Public will soak this shit up because they don't know any different. We're opposed to this. Strongly. I don't get paid for producing Bridges. I do it because I love music. AI companies do not love music. They love the money and that's all.

So don't send us AI music. Don't be part of the problem.

If you send us AI music and it's obviously AI music, and worse, insist that it's your own work then you're just a liar and I reserve the right to take the piss and humiliate you and your shitty tunes on air. I will ridicule your work and show you up for the thieving charlatan you are. You have been warned.

The Music we play

So long as the piece is fundamentally electronic, your musical style is unimportant - content and context is paramount.

Length - the majority of the pieces we play are between three and six minutes in duration although we do, on occasion, play longer tracks. I think the longest so far was around fifteen minutes. However, If your track involves fifty minutes of long slow aimless meandering before getting to a vague and nebulous conclusion then sorry, Bridges is probably not for you.

We won’t play noise tracks. If your track is just five minutes of car alarms going off or an hour of filter-swept noodling then this programme is not for you.

We do play ambient, usually as part of our Sleepy-time thread. It's proven extremely popular, too.

We don’t play drones mostly because I DO NOT LIKE THEM. Our aim is to keep the listener entertained and engaged, and to provide the backdrop to their Saturday night in. We do not want our listeners to switch over to another station. Careful, detailed precise scientific analysis has clearly demonstrated that nearly every scientient being in the Universe would rather gnaw its own foot off than listen to another artfully crafted three hour drone track. So, no... Don’t.

You Sir, are not metal.

We like our metal. We like our punk. We love our guitars. How heavy will we go? We don’t know. Try us. However, if it sounds like a Machine Gun blasting off two hundred rounds a minute with lyrics that appear to have been written by a hoard of Satan’s more playful minions then we’re unlikely to give it airtime. Fans of Norwegian Death Metal and Des O’Connor’s later works should look elsewhere.

Quality

We’re not massively bothered if you gift wrap your latest release in a roll of newspaper that’s been at the bottom of the cat’s litter tray for a month or if you stick it in a Jiffy bag with around a dozen or so nice, crisp ten pound notes. Art is subjective and we’re not critics. However, we do insist that you pay attention to the quality and format of your recording.

We must be able to read your files. It's not important if your track has been artfully rendered in glorious 24-bit, 96kHz pro audio or just hacked together with bits of old cassette tape. What matters is that we can import it easily into our audio system (Logic Pro X running on Apple Mac). Our shows are rendered and exported as 320 kps MP3 files so the source is not hugely important. WAV, AIFF or MP3 files are ideal. We can deal with other formats if we have to but we’d rather not. If it will take two hours to import and edit your Meisterwerk into Logic then we’ll probably just replace your track with something by Rammstein or Rick Astley. Your choice really, bubs.

Recording levels are very important. If the levels are so low that they’re barely above the noise floor then we cant play it. Similarly, if your levels were recorded at such a level that the waveform is just a dense wall of black that hits 0dB 100% of the time then... No. I probably won’t even look at it. I have no desire to blow my speakers out. Or my ears.

One final word - If you do send us something then it's very, very important that you send us your best possible work. If it's not your best possible work then why are you sending it?

We play the music we like. We play the music we think our audience will like. Our aim is to build an audience that keeps coming back to the show week after week, year after year. We want to develop and support a community of musicians, a scene, in the North East of England that is second to none because we believe we have a deep, deep well of highly skilled, very talented musicians and bands in this part of the world that deserves to be heard. We’re not partisan.

We’re also happy to work hand-in-hand with other radio shows within this region to develop and enhance the scene.

Great, you made it this far. Still want to send us something? Even better.

Our submission form has stopped working so... Send us a message using your standard mailer by clicking here with the following details:

• Your name
• Your e-mail address
• Your band name
• A link to your track ideally on YouTube, Bandcamp or Soundcloud but not Spotify

Talk soon,
David