The Sunday Times
23 August 2009

The BBC biter who hates being bitten

The Culture Show presenter Lauren Laverne can’t bear being interviewed -  she knows how dangerous it can be. Still, she did talk to Claire Sawers

For Lauren Laverne, nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. She is the kind of girl who doesn’t believe in looking backwards, and likes to keep one Converse-clad foot in the future. “My head is always thinking about what’s coming next. It’s that whole ‘the best is yet to come’, sort of thing,” she says, leaning in to the corner of a squishy couch in an Edinburgh hotel.

“Sometimes it can be a bad thing, though,” she laughs. “I’ll be in the middle of doing something really awesome and I think, ‘Oh, I must do this again!’ But it’s like” — and she stops to rolls her eyes, with pretend exasperation — “ ‘You’re doing it now!’ I think to myself. ‘Just enjoy it!’ ”

Her forward-thinking approach to life means she prefers to sidestep talking about her band days as singer and guitarist with Kenickie, where she got a taste of teenage fame during the 1990s. “I’m so future focused, when it comes to the band, I don’t really remember a lot of the things, you know?” she says. Although she doesn’t dwell on her pop past, she has a little chuckle as she remembers the time the band was offered a deodorant advert for Soft and Gentle. “We turned it down on the grounds that it was the only deodorant we could find that smelled worse than sweat. We got a bit of a bollocking for saying that, in the NME or wherever it was, at the time. But yeah, it wasn’t really our thing.”

Get her talking about her television and radio work, though, and she’s off and running. Laverne is an entertaining anecdote machine once she finds a topic she can get into. For example, Paul McCartney, whom she has interviewed several times. “I find the phenomenon of the Beatles really interesting, and Paul’s just a really great person to have a conversation with,” she says. “He’s gone through this insane experience with the Beatles, but he’s still totally focused on his family and his home life. In a lot of his songs, especially the post-Beatles stuff, he almost fetishises the domestic. You are the biggest rock star in the world and what do you choose to dream about? Oh, home.”

For the past three years Laverne, 31, has been co-host of BBC2’s The Culture Show, where she and Mark Kermode have welcomed authors, fledgling bands and rock royalty like Macca into the studio for a chat. It’s seen her perched on a lobster pot in Fife talking to King Creosote, coming face to face with her hero Lou Reed, and more recently, dropped in to the middle of the Pleasance Courtyard, where Laverne has been presenting the weekly Edinburgh Festival Show from a velvet sofa. She has just wrapped up an interview with the author Lynn Barber for this week’s show when we meet.

She is known for putting her guests at ease with her Sunderland banter, but admits that when the tables are turned, it’s a very different story. “I’m terrible at being interviewed,” she says. “I think of myself as being quite boring. I can sympathise with the people who I interview. You’ve got to give definitive opinions that will then be quoted back at you, for ever, so it’s not a great experience.”

She is, however, being stopped from expressing her own opinions today. With the debate about sexism in television still raging, following Arlene Phillip’s dismissal from Strictly Come Dancing, the BBC has sent along a chaperone to ensure that Laverne does not become embroiled in the row.

The idea that being young and attractive makes her a target for questions about sexism or ageism seems to bemuse her more than anything and she tries to dismiss the subject. “I think I’m a person who’s very steady, I’m not really a spotlight type of person. That might sound really disingenuous as a TV and radio type of person, but I’m not.”

I don’t like this idea in culture or music or art that it’s some sort of competition, and you can either get it right or wrong.

She is more comfortable when we turn to the subject of what she looks for in a guest. “The worst thing when I’m interviewing someone else is for them to be boring. That’s the number one crime,” she says. “I don’t go in expecting for us to have this crazy free jazz conversation, where sparks are flying, and ‘hey, we’re really vibing off each other!’, but listlessness, from my perspective, makes a bad interview.”

After presenting television shows including CD:UK, Planet Pop and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, plus her own radio shows on Xfm and now BBC Radio 6, Laverne believes a good interview comes from not trying to suck up to the celebrity in front of her.

“You can’t need the other person to like you,” she says. “If you do, you won’t get what you need and you will totally muck it up. I’ve interviewed Ian McKellen a few times — I love him so much, there’s some part of me that’s thinking, ‘like me, like me!’ So I don’t think I’ve ever done it well. I’ve always said something stupid, and it’s been

really embarrassing. You’ve just got to get on with the job, and not want to bond with the person.”

Working on The Culture Show, Laverne has a full-time job staying in touch with the latest releases. “You have to trust your instincts. You’ve got to, in everything. You’ve got to be confident about your tastes. It’s not about claiming you’ve got the absolute best music taste; it’s just about knowing what you like.

“What bugs me is when people think they’ve got the right answer, and they want to tell everyone else where they’re going wrong. I don’t like this idea in culture or music or art that it’s some sort of competition, and you can either get it right or wrong. TV and radio are about sharing things — I mean, bloody hell, my Radio 6 audience, they’re 10 times cleverer than I am.”

In the world of indie music, she is not aiming for what she calls “Norris McWhirter-style fact retention”.

She says: “There’s this feeling that by accumulating the most trainspottery facts on George Orwell or new music or Shakespeare or whatever, you’re somehow the best. No, it’s boring. On the radio, ideally, we should just play mind-blowingly amazing music, and not talk in between about who the bass player is.”

Outside work, her life is full of “different types of happiness”, including her son Fergus who will be two in October. Laverne married the DJ and television producer Graeme Fisher four years ago and their son has picked up a curious hybrid accent. “Some of it’s quite Sunderland, definitely. He has picked up the word ‘babe’. I must say ‘Hi babe!’ to him a lot, so he says ‘babe’ in this funny little accent now.”

Her work might be full of long hours and unpredictable schedules, but then again, so is motherhood, she points out with a shrug. She and Fisher would like to have another child s

ometime in the future. After the Festival, she will return to her home in London and plan a holiday. “Then again, my job is one big holiday really, so it seems a bit cheeky.”

Lauren Laverne is presenting The Edinburgh Festival Show on August 26, BBC2, 7pm. Her BBC 6 Music radio show is on Saturdays at 4pm, or listen again at bbc.co.uk/6music