Nine Songs: Nick Grimshaw

With one exception, most of the songs you’ve picked all came out before your career began. Do you think it’s harder for music to really take your breath away and cement itself to parts of your life in the same way when you’re a grown-up?

I definitely think hearing something you’ve never heard before is so exciting that it must imprint on you in a different way. So hearing New Order or “Smack My Bitch Up” for the first time…especially coming from listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Tina Turner with my mum and dad.

But stuff does still does excite me, and I still get obsessed with stuff for sure, and I can hear a song and play it over and over and over and over – and that's my personality for a week. I’m less gagged, but I’m still as excited.

Like me, you must get to hear a lot of things very early on, where the songs and artists are often untarnished by mass opinion or any consensus.

I was saying the other day that it’s one of the things I feel most lucky about in doing radio – in that, like you say, they’ve not been tarnished by something like a review or “I don't like it” or “Have you heard it?”

It’s the same when I get to see a film for work before it's out, and before you've seen the trailer and you go in to see it with zero expectations. But I also like it when someone plays something to you that they love in they way I’d hear stuff from my brother and my sister. I love it when someone comes along and says: “Oh my god! I love this! Have you heard this?”

I put Marie Davidson down because I thought I should have something I’m listening to at the moment, and I love her. And I’ve been pretending for the last couple of weeks that I’m Marie Davidson every time I work out, because it’s the only thing I can listen to.

Are you someone who actively listens to new stuff every single day or do you go back to the same old records?

A bit of both. We always listen to music from the moment we wake up, and really, ever since I was allowed to have a radio my room, I've listened to it when I'm walking the dogs, on the tube on the way here, on the way home from here, whilst I'm here at home, in bed.

At the weekends, I'll put records, on because there's time – I’m not going put a vinyl on at 5.15 on a Monday morning!

Do you buy a lot of records?

I kind of buy older stuff, or stuff that I’ve listened to already, although I did buy Eusexua the other day because I wanted to support Twigs as a statement of intent, as she’s doing something so interesting. I bought Madvillainy, oh and the Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra record [Promises]

But I do listen a lot; I'll get very into something and listen to it over and over and over, like one song consistently for three days and that's where I'm at with Marie Davidson at the moment. I've been listening to “Sexy Clown” over and over and then I just went through a Eusexua phase where I could only listen to “Drums of Death” by Twigs…

Twigs on her '90s Madonna trip is a wonderful thing isn’t it?

It sent me back to “Bedtime Story”. I remember when Chris Evans hosted the Brits and he introduced Madonna, who did “Bedtime Story”, by saying “Oh, it's my flatmate up next, here's Madonna.” And because I was young, I was like "Oh, my God, no way. Chris Evans lives with Madonna!” I fully believed it.

The song was maybe too Avant-garde for my age, but when I grew up, I realised how good it was, so I've been listening to “Drums of Death” and “Bedtime Story” on repeat, and now Marie Davidson's getting it too.