They bring you the best uploads from amazingtunes.com each week, but who are the people behind the shows you hear on Amazing Radio? In a series of articles, we’ll be making it our mission to find out more about the owners of the infamous on air voices you know and love.

This time we’re talking to one of our newest presenters, Amazing Live‘s Rich Brant.

Rich Brant

Hello! Who are you?

I’m Rich Brant, but if you were to walk in to the Amazing Towers I’d probably be nearing about 50 nicknames by now! (Little Lord Brantleroy, Brantabulous, Brantosaurus, Charlotte, etc…)

How did you find out about Amazing Radio?

I actually worked with Amazing‘s very own beats expert Mark Ryan not so long ago in a short stint at BBC 6 Music. I then saw that a few more presenters were needed and jumped at the chance to get involved in a station the sought to be at the cutting edge in new music.

Before we plucked you from relative obscurity and plonked you on the Amazing airwaves, what did you do?

(I take exception to that… everyone knows who I am down my local pub!)

I’ve been involved in radio in a full time sense ever since I left university. I had been involved in hospital radio, uni radio and when I finished my degree at Loughborough I decided to send a demo off to one of the first adverts I saw for a presenter. The job happened to be in Luxembourg (tiny country in the middle of Europe) and they hired me pretty quickly. Before I knew it I was finding a flat and opening bank accounts in the Grand Duchy, and generally sh****g myself about the whole thing.

Like David Hasslehoff in Germany, I’m huge in Luxembourg!

Tell us about your show please!

The show is all about letting the ludicrously handsome Amazing Radio listeners know all about where they can catch the best unsigned artists (or artists without a traditional record deal) out and about Live. Simple as that.

Each week we try (I say we, I mean me and my fantastic producer Dani Charlton) to ensure we have interviews with industry folk, such as promoters, venue owners, festival organizers, managers, labels etc. so we get different perspectives on how to get ahead in a pretty turbulent industry and get music listened to on the live circuit. We also try to make sure we speak to bands established or new to hear their advice to new bands, and generally what they’ve been getting up to.

Little Lord Brantleroy

Why should we listen?

Because it’s awesome! Like Amazing Radio in general, the show focuses on the grass roots of music and gives a platform to those bands that deserve the limelight but lack the attention of already established acts. It’s a great way to find out where you can see these great bands in intimate venues before they inevitably get picked up and become huge.

Aside from your own fabulous show, have you got any other favourite Amazing Radio shows?

It’s always quite exciting to see how the amazingtunes.com community feel about the music we play, so the Amazing Chart Show with Charlie Ashcroft is always a good one. I also find the musings of the many expert opinions on the Trevor Dann fronted It’s Amazing good fun

Finally, what makes Amazing so, well, amazing!?
A radio station that concentrates on the grass roots of music and exposes thousands of unsigned gems? That’s pretty amazing. Is that a cheesy line? Yeah probably… but I’ve said it now, so get over it and go enjoy the music!

You can hear Rich presenting Amazing Live every Friday at 1pm.

Every Tuesday, The Afternoon Show goes on a mission to bring a listener love of the musical variety!

This week we were contacted by Rachel Chismon, who was looking for an act who could compliment her love for lady artists such as Rhianna, Madonna and Kate Nash.

We decide to get Amazing Radio‘s most prolific musical cupid, Music Scheduler Tom Cotton, in on the action. He was only too pleased to scour amazingtunes.com for the perfect act, but was happy to admit that his quest was a difficult one.

The first track Tom has chosen for Rachel is by Anglo-Czech MC V-Double-E. Her track Don’t Hold Me Back has been causing a storm on the Amazing Radio. It’s a fiesta, attitude packed number with a funky bass line and some ‘irresistible lyric spitting.’

The second track Tom’s decided to present to Rachel is by female fronted act Jazica. The Southampton four piece are hugely popular on the Amazing Radio, with their synthy electro stylings proving infectious. The Jazica track Tom has chosen for Rachel is called Illusions.

Hear Tom play Matchmaker on The Afternoon Show from 3pm today, on Amazing Radio.

Every Sunday, Charlie Ashcroft counts down the Amazing Radio Chart. Here he gives us the lowdown on this week’s movers and shakers from amazingtunes.com.

After yet another keenly-contested week, The Stereo Shutdown have made it two weeks at Number 1 on The Amazing Radio Chart with Feels Like Summer.

The Stereo Shutdown boys

Whether the Bank Holiday weather has felt like summer where you live is another matter entirely, but the popularity of the Guildford quartet’s track has shown no sign of abating as August draws to a close.

In spite of some hefty climbs and a record number of New Entries on the Chart, The Stereo Shutdown remain in pole position, ahead of Brighton quartet Tom & The Tides, whose Spider stays at Number 2 in its ninth week inside the rundown.

Scotland has two big climbers inside this week’s Top 10, with May The Forth by Futuristic Retro Champions up two places to Number 3, and Hummingbird by Julia & The Doogans climbing four to Number 6.

The Ukrainian pop train shows no sign of slowing down either, with Kiev collective Champagne Morning hitting the Amazing Radio Chart Top 5 for the first time with Miracle.

What about these New Entries then? Well, we’ve got five of them this week, and all of them are proper belters.

Charly Coombes & The New Breed are the highest-placed of them all, in at Number 12 with Panic In Between The Sheets, while Worthing producer extraordinaire Tony Tronic goes straight in at Number 15 with Diskonexion.

Elsewhere we’ve got other new kids in school in the form of Zell Am See, Bim and Luna Park Rescue, forming an orderly queue behind Mr Tronic at 16, 17 and 18.

Click here to see the The Amazing Radio Chart Top 20 in full. Find out if The Stereo Shutdown can make it three weeks at Number 1 by tuning in to Amazing Radio this coming Sunday from 5pm.

They bring you the best uploads from amazingtunes.com each week, but who are the people behind the shows you hear on Amazing Radio? In a series of articles, we’ll be making it our mission to find out more about the owners of the infamous on air voices you know and love.

In the next installment of our getting to know series we’re getting the info from radio royalty Trevor Dann.

Trevor Dann

Hello! Who are you?

Trevor Dann.

How did you find out about Amazing Radio?

I met founder Paul Campbell before he’d even invented it!

Before we plucked you from ‘relative obscurity’ and plonked you on the Amazing Radio airwaves, what did you do?

Chief Executive of the Radio Academy, Head of BBC Music Entertainment, Head of Music at Radio 1, Executive Producer of Top of the Pops, writer, broadcaster, dreadful guitarist, grumpy old man…

Tell us about your show please!

It’s Amazing: Quality chat about quality choons.

Why should we listen?

Well, as the trail says, “there’s only one thing better than listening to music and that’s talking about music.”

Aside from your own fabulous show, have you got any other favourite Amazing Radio shows?

Frankie’s Amazing Folk Roots Show is a special favourite, but it’s all good really.

Finally, what makes Amazing so, well, amazing!?

The bands.

You can hear Trevor’s ‘quality chat about quality choons’ on It’s Amazing every Sunday at 4pm, Wednesday at 1pm and Friday at 6pm.

Every week The Afternoon Show awards the accolade of Website of the Week to a worthy online winner. This week they’ve chosen to bestow the honor upon super cool culture ‘zine The Quietus.

In this blog, The Quietus tell us more about how they’ve become one of the coolest musical destinations on the ‘net.

At the start of 2008 we were of the opinion that there was a massive gap in the market for an online music publication not in thrall to snarky one-upmanship, hype, or an overload of fast-click, low-quality content. We also thought there was a gap in the market for a magazine that treated music of all genres from the last 30 years with the same reverence that titles such as MOJO and Word treat the rock & roll hall of fame.We chose a completely spurious Year Zero of 1974 because that’s when Kraftwerk released ‘Autobahn’ as a single. It seemed to us the birth of modern music. Modern sounding, that is.

Since then we’ve aimed to bring you the best of everything. We’re here to give music ranging from dubstep, death metal and post punk to hip hop, pop and spacerock the coverage it deserves. We’d like to inject some much-needed humour, intelligence and passion back into journalism, so we run in-depth features, reviews and opinion pieces from the best new writers and established greats. We also cover film, books, TV and comics, old and new, concentrating on quality over hype.

Whether we’ve achieved all this is not for us to say, but Record of the Day gave us the Music Publication Of The Year (Student Award) in 2008 and Music Website of the Year award in 2009. Da Capo’s respected Best Music Writing guide also picked out three of our features for praise in its 2009 edition, edited by Greil Marcus. Add to this praise from publications and broadcasters including the Guardian, The Sun, Fader, Observer, The Independent, BBC, New York Times and Chicago Time Out, and we’re at least confident we’re doing something right.

Our independent approach allows us avoid the pitfalls faced by comparable print and web publications: our word-counts are generous and we’re not afraid of surprising our readers. We have regular contributions from many of the best music writers working today – you may recognize their names as published authors, broadcasters on the BBC, Sky and beyond, or members of bands like The Bad Seeds and Pulp, and from newspapers, magazines and websites including… The Guardian, Independent, The Observer, The New Statesman, Sunday Times, Times, The Telegraph, Esquire, Harpers Bazaar and many more…

Hear Kyle and Frankie getting the low down on The Quietus from 3pm today, on Amazing Radio.

They bring you the best uploads from amazingtunes.com each week, but who are the people behind the shows you hear on Amazing Radio? In a series of articles, we’ll be making it our mission to find out more about the owners of the infamous on air voices you know and love.

Today we’ve got banter aplenty from Saturday Show presenters Colin and Matt.

Matt (L) and Colin (R)

Hello! Who are you?

Why, hello there! We’re Colin and Matt, and we present The Saturday Show every Saturday (naturally) from 9 in the morning until 12pm. We bring the ‘Amazing’ to Amazing Radio.

How did you find out about Amazing Radio?

A couple of years ago, we read about this site where users could upload their track and earn money for their efforts. As we were skint at the time, we decided to upload a track that we made for these podcasts that we did before presenting on Amazing Radio. The track, Lady Noise, never did get many ‘likes’ but maybe this interview can bring us more exposure and we can finally get it to number 1 in the Amazing Radio Chart!

Before we plucked you from relative obscurity and plonked you on the Amazing airwaves, what did you do?

As mentioned above, we used to produce weekly comedy and entertainment podcasts imaginatively entitled The Colin and Matt Show (it was a working title that ended up sticking). We did three seasons of these shows and have to say, we’re very proud of them. They were nominated for awards on 3 separate occasions, including one high-profile award nomination for Channel 4′s WEX branch, 4Talent. (We didn’t win though.)

Tell us about your show please!

Our show is a less-explicit version of our podcasts, with music. Therefore, we’re talking features that include the ridiculous What Would Who Do? where we suggest what hilarious things different celebrities might do in everyday situations. We also bring you the week’s Quirky News, the Random Song Generator, the Hangover Cure (where we aim to get all you lazy bums out of your pit in a morning via massive tunes), and so much more. We literally can’t fit in the amount of things we cover, but we’ve been told we’re brilliant (thanks mum).

Colin and Matt get casual

Why should we listen?

We have to get up early, so you should too!

Aside from your own fabulous show, have you got any other favourite Amazing Radio shows?

Erm, all of them? Okay, we’ll stop sitting on the fence and plump for the Chart Show with Charlie Ashcroft. You can’t beat a good chart show! It’s created by you, the listener, simply through interaction on amazingtunes.com and airplay on Amazing Radio.

Finally, what makes Amazing so, well, amazing!?

The fact that no other station in the universe is like this. You very easily get sick of the monotonous over-produced rubbish on other commercial stations, and there’s always new tunes to enjoy on this station. Now, THAT’S amazing!

Catch up with Colin and Matt every Saturday morning from 9 ’til 12 as they present The Saturday Show.

Join Trevor Dann this afternoon for It’s Amazing – Amazing Radio’s no-holds-barred panel show. What better way to celebrate the middle of the Bank Holiday weekend?

Paul Lester

Trevor’s guests will be Rough Trade manager and former Wat Tyler singer Sean Forbes and Guardian music journalist Paul Lester, whose New Band of the Day blog on the Guardian website has become essential reading for so many music fans over the years.

Rough Trade

They’ll be discussing the Nottingham gothtronica of Moscow Youth Cult, the hymnal folk qualities of Dry The River and the Inverness electro duo Capitals amongst other things, so you can expect plenty of lively debate and opinion over the course of the show.

Click here to see the full list of songs up for discussion on this week’s episode of It’s Amazing. Listen through them and tune into the show to find out if your favourite track matches the panel’s top pick!

Make sure you catch It’s Amazing with Trevor Dann, Paul Lester and Sean Forbes, this afternoon from 4pm, on Amazing Radio.

Jim Gellatly has been a busy boy this week.

As well as scouring amazingtunes.com for his favourite new releases from the site, he’s also been getting the low down from Must Be the Music‘s semi finalist Emma Gillespie, aka Emma’s Imagination.

Jim meets Emma

The 27 year old singer/songwriter has been making a name for herself on the Sky One talent show, which focuses on empowering original and new talent. Emma’s been causing a stir on the show not just with her stirring voice and classic songwriting skills, but also through her full time occupation; busking on streets of Glasgow.

Emma will be joining Jim from 3pm this Sunday to chat about the competition, her unusual occupation and of course, the music. She’s tipped for the stratosphere, so don’t miss this exclusive chance to  hear Emma in more intimate surroundings [Jim's living room!]

You can catch Jim Gellatly’s show on Sundays at 3pm, Tuesdays at 6pm and Thursdays at 1pm, only on Amazing Radio.

They bring you the best uploads from amazingtunes.com each week, but who are the people behind the shows you hear on Amazing Radio? In a series of articles, we’ll be making it our mission to find out more about the owners of the infamous on air voices you know and love.

Our next interviewee is Kyle Wilkinson, better known as the host of The Afternoon Show.

Kyle Wilkinson

Hello! Who are you?

Kyle Wilkinson, I present The Afternoon Show.

How did you find out about Amazing Radio?

I heard about Amazing Radio for the first time when I read an online article about its launch on DAB digital radio.

Before we plucked you from relative obscurity and plonked you on the Amazing airwaves, what did you do?

I presented a specialist dance music show on a community radio station in Sunderland called SparkFM. I still represent the station as the Student Radio Association Regional Officer (North East & Yorkshire).

Tell us about your show please!

I present The Afternoon Show, weekdays from 3pm till 6pm. It’s crammed full of the biggest and freshest new music from amazingtunes.com!

We dig deeper into music scenes across the country through our daily Region of the Week feature and you, the audience, get the chance to have your say on the music we play each day by getting involved with The Four Tops and Matchmaker.

Kyle

Why should we listen?

The biggest selection of new and emerging music with great banter! AND it’s at a time of day that allows for you to have that king-sized lie in you so desperately wanted! (Good times.)

Aside from your own fabulous show, have you got any other favourite Amazing Radio shows?

I’m a massive fan of dance music. If you’re a dance nut like me like me then you NEED to lock into Amazing Beats with Mark Ryan! Friday nights have been changed forever!

Finally, what makes Amazing so, well, amazing!?

It’s ground breaking; the first of it’s kind across the UK! We give absolutely anyone the chance to have their music played and honestly, the music is unreal!

Catch Kyle presenting The Afternoon Show, weekdays from 3pm, on Amazing Radio.

They bring you the best new tracks from amazingtunes.com each week, but who are the people behind the shows you hear on Amazing Radio? In a series of articles, we’ll be making it our mission to find out more about the owners of the infamous on air voices you know and love.

Today we’re chatting to Jim Gellatly. As well as being the station’s sole Scottish voice, he’s the only solo presenter to have a self-titled show on the Amazing Radio airwaves!

Its your boy... Jim!

Hello! Who are you?

Jim Gellatly.

How did you find out about Amazing Radio?

[Fellow Amazing Radio presenter] Trevor Dann spilled the beans over several glasses of wine at the Hospital Radio Awards, where we were both presenting prizes.

Before we plucked you from relative obscurity and plonked you on the Amazing Radio airwaves, what did you do?

I wandered the streets looking for an outlet to play new music.

Tell us about your show please!

Expect quality tunage with a strong Scottish bias. Anything with bagpipes has a good chance of being played. I also have some (hopefully) interesting guests lined up to select tracks from amazingtunes.com.

Jim Gellatly

Why should we listen?

Because I pretend to know what I’m talking about with regards to new music, (despite the fact that I’d rather be playing Abba & Boney M).

Aside from your own fantastic show, have you got any other favourite Amazing Radio shows?

It’s Amazing and the Amazing Chart Show are particular favourites.

Finally, what makes Amazing so, well, amazing!?

Music is treated on a level playing field, with the best tracks floating to the top (rather than major label priorities).

Catch Jim Gellatly and friends pick their favourite amazingtunes.com tracks every Sunday at 3pm.  You can also catch the show on Tuesdays at 6pm and Thursdays at 1pm.