ALAN RAW

About me:

I’m in my 8th year as presenter of the award winning BBC Introducing show BBC Raw Talent on BBC Radio Humberside, and will have produced and presented West Yorkshire’s Raw Talent for a year on 22nd October. With live new band sessions every week & acoustic sets by local artists. I’ve had over 700 live sets on the shows so far by some great new artists. I present the BBC Introducing Stage at Leeds Festival. I started the stage with Melvin Benn and other fine friends 5 years ago and have been delighted with the developments that BBC Introducing have added, not least the addition of a sister stage in Reading. Outside of the BBC: I've worked in voluntary and community arts since 1992. I work with a not for profit organization that develops talent in music and media, delivering workshops and providing opportunities for people who would not otherwise have access to the means to develop their skills. This involves Regional Creative Industries Advice work which I enjoy very much. For fun: I DJ and play drums and button accordion. My family are all musicians in the Irish folk world, many generations of of them www.myspace.com/rawfamily . Iv'e been a musician with lots of bands and sessioned a lot. Highlights include: playing Glastonbury, making a dub album with Benjamin Zephaniah, being featured in the book "Banging On" by Geof Nicholls, watching my own video creations on TV (MTV, Ch4, BBC), playing button accordion on a record in the American charts, Playing Djembe in a band in West Africa and getting John Peel dancing. The wonderful Mr. Peel gave me a lot of support whilst championing my band and was still an inspiration when I started Raw talent with Radio 1’s support in 2002. I like getting sent new demos of all kinds of music, and the new BBC Introducing Uploader http://www.bbc.co.uk/introducing has been a fantastic boost to me and my team, making it really easy to recommend artists to other stations and put them forward for festivals If you want to know more and see who’s on my playlists each week, visit these links. http://www.Alanraw.com http://www.twitter.com/alanraw http://www.linkedin.com/in/alanraw Thanks for reading my waffle...Alan