What difference does a decade or two make in the worlds of music, kids’ TV and poetry?
Grandmaster Flash – born Joseph Saddler on New Year’s Day, 1958 – is often credited as one of the pioneers of hip-hop, but his achievements are as much in the field of engineering as they are in music. It was Flash who invented the slipmat that allowed records to be manipulated by DJs; who used solder and Super Glue to give decks a separate headphone channel, so they could hear the record they were cueing up; and who invented the “quick-mix theory”, allowing small portions of tracks to be looped. Those innovations formed the basis of modern DJing.
My mother was a pirate radio DJ. Being a white Welsh woman spinning hip-hop was unheard of
The big-time drug dealers would come to the park with us and buy 300 bottles of pop and bags of crisps for the audience
I've always had an office of people whose job it was to find something to do. On Blue Peter, 75% was viewer-suggested
I would never put something in my videos that I wouldn’t say to my mum
On social media, we can’t hide from the fact that a lot of things are very self-centred
It seemed to put people off when poetry was taught in schools. It’s exciting that social media poetry has changed that
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