Annie Macmanus: The Real Reason I Became Europe's No. 1 Female DJ
Guests: Annie Macmanus
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
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I fiercely wanted to prove that I could do it all, but I realized quite quickly that doing it all wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
Annie Mac, a superstar DJ who's been forging her own cult status for nearly 20 years.
I was a teenager in the 90s. Heroin chic, Kate Moss. It was very hard not to become consumed by what the magazines and the music videos were showing you. I became obsessed with how much you weigh and what you're eating and all of that. I really wanted to get out. I loved music, I loved talking to people, and I loved connecting with people. What happens when you put music and connection together? Radio.
I was madly ambitious. I wanted to get bigger, I wanted to try everything. I felt like I wanted to prove a point. There was a lot of pressure being female in what was essentially a man's world. It's a horrible feeling when you don't feel like you can do anything good enough. It became this kind of feeling of the walls closing in. I should be more grateful for the fact that I'm getting sent brilliant music every week and I get to play this on the radio, but I don't feel excited enough for what this is. I felt like I didn't want to be needed by so many people anymore. It takes time to feel at peace with yourself to just walk away.
For people that are stood there looking into uncertainty, can you tell them about how you felt in the lead-up to that decision? Was there fear? Was there doubt?
What I’ve realized now is...
Annie, what do I have to understand about your origin story—where you came from, the context in which you were raised—to understand the person sitting in front of me today?
Probably that I grew up around a lot of noise. Being the youngest of four, my mom had four babies in five years, so we were all very close together. We were, I guess, lower-middle class. I was born in a housing estate—my claim to fame was being the first baby born in our housing estate. Semi-detached. My dad worked in England from Monday to Friday, so he was away a lot, and my mom kind of raised us during the weeks.
I was surrounded by love, and because I was the youngest, I was kind of allowed to grow up without too much fussing or disturbance. I was allowed to figure out my own likes. I was hugely influenced, of course, by my older brothers and sister, and I still am. I've always been around people and felt a sense of being part of a group—a big family—which gives you that feeling of safety, I suppose.
The other thing I would say is that I've always—and you notice this as you get older and you go home and regress—I've always noticed that I am a bit of a pacifier, a diplomat. I like to try and keep the room happy and keep the equilibrium between people. I'll become a joker, an entertainer. I like to try and make people happy.
Was that a useful skill at some point in your life, or a required skill?
I think it's become useful later in life, especially in my professional life, because I literally chose a job that was to be a conduit of joy. That was my job on Friday nights on Radio 1 for many years—just to spread the kind of magic and joy that music can give. That euphoric feeling. I was that messenger. So I did find a job that led to me making use of that skill, if you could call it a skill.
It’s certainly a skill. I'm wondering why you were a pacifier, though. Was that something necessitated by the environment?
I think there was never any trauma in our house or anything like that, but it was definitely just a loud, busy house. Four teenagers in one house is a lot. There’s loads of arguing and stuff. It's easy for everyone to take a role when you live in a house like that, and my role was to keep people sweet, basically. As the youngest, it was easy because I was the one that everyone doted on a bit, so it was easy to play that role.
What influence did your parents individually have on you? When you look at who you are today, can you see an imprint of either of them?
Yeah, I'd say there are both in me quite a lot. My father is an extrovert. He loves people, he loves his friends, he loves chatting to anyone he can chat to. I've very much got that from him. My mom is really bookish and really smart, and very gentle. She parented with real kindness and a real sense of selflessness. She was just soft and gentle in a way that, the more I look at her now as a parent, I'm just in awe of, especially with four bonkers kids bouncing around the house. My friends have said there's an element of me that's strong and also an element of me that's sweet, and I think maybe that's one parent in each of those.
Before you became an adult, what were the things that were occupying your mind? You know, reflecting on childhood, I think about insecurities, shame, trying to fit in, and how that shame played a big role in the path I pursued. What was occupying your mind under the age of 18?
I mean, there was so much corporeal stuff. So much about your body and the changes your body is going through. Were you thin enough? Were you skinny enough? I was born in '78, so I was a teenager in the 90s—heroin chic, Kate Moss, low-rider trousers that hung off your hips, rib cages on show. It was very hard not to become consumed by what the magazines and music videos were showing you.
Of course, there was shame. I think in Ireland, you grow up around shame. There's a lot of shame in Ireland as a country; I think it's passed down generationally. I was brought up Protestant, so I went to a Church of Ireland church, but Ireland is majority Catholic. There's a lot of shame in that. When I was born, there was no divorce, there was no abortion, there was no gay marriage. Nothing like that.
In my lifetime, I've been incredibly lucky because Ireland has changed hugely and irrevocably. They publicly voted for all three of those things. It's become a way more outward-facing country, but I suppose when I was growing up, it still felt very closed. I felt very eager and curious about the world. Everything I knew about the world was through *The Face* magazine, or *NME*, or *TFI Friday*. I was just curious to go and see it and get out. I really wanted to get out.
Had I asked you at that time what you were going to do once you left, what would you have told me?
Well, I really wanted to be an actress. That was my one true love, and I put all my eggs in that basket. Now, I did apply for an acting course in Dublin with a very prestigious university—Trinity University. I didn't get in. I spectacularly failed the audition. That classic "went to go and do my speech," which was a soliloquy at the end of *Romeo and Juliet*, and I froze. The words just didn't come. It was awful.
I went home and chopped all my hair off. I had hair down to my lower back and chopped it all off. I came home with hair that was very short, gave my mom a plastic bag with my ponytail in it, and was like, "That's it, my life's over." I was such a drama queen, clearly. But my life at that point—I had done really well. Well, I was just average, but I succeeded at other things. I was good at sports, I was in the choir, I was proactive and involved. Everything I wanted had gone my way until this point.
It’s so ironic; I was actually voted the person most likely to be a movie star in my year. I was like, "It's destined!" And then I didn't get in. It was a real rejection and something I hadn't experienced before. It was actually my mom who really helped me out of that rut. She suggested I go to Belfast through clearing. At that point, I was desperate, so I went to Belfast and did English Literature there. She helped me find my way out of that rut. She was always a very calm presence in the background—very wise and calm. The more I think about her, the more I think she guided so many of my decisions very quietly.
So, I did leave home. I got out. I went to Belfast, and it felt completely different from the Ireland I knew. It was completely starting again. I didn't know anyone, and I was living in a hall with someone I’d never met. I had to start from scratch. It was kind of cool because it meant that all of the baggage that comes from growing up in Dublin was gone.
In Dublin, everyone wants to know what school you go to, or if they know your mom. All of that was gone. I was a completely unknown person. I had a clean slate. I could build my identity from scratch and figure out exactly who I was in this new world without the constraints or baggage of family connections or school. It felt really scary but also really exciting. Those were honestly three of the best years of my life. I found friends, I found a new family for myself, and I figured out what I wanted to do slowly over the course of three years—I found the career that I wanted, which was radio.
I always think, looking back, sometimes the things that you don't get end up being the best things that you've ever gotten. If you mess up, if you fail, if you don't get what you want, that can end up being the best thing that ever happened to you. That's very much what happened to me. I had one path, it didn't work, I had to turn left, and it meant then that I was able to very slowly and organically feel out how I wanted to live in the world and what made me happy. I loved music more than anything, I loved talking to people, and I loved connecting with people. What happens when you put music and connection together? Music radio. It was that simple.
Talk about how failure can redirect you towards something else. I think everybody can relate to that. But I know how persistent you are and how hard-working you are. Why didn't you go back around for another shot at acting?
It’s a really good question because I asked myself that recently when I interviewed Anne-Marie Duff on my podcast. That happened to her; she didn't get into acting college, and she went back and tried again. I think that maybe I didn't want it as much as I thought I did. I’d been a lead in the school play and suddenly I was like, "That's it, it's destiny." But I hadn't done any acting experience or any amateur theatrics. I think I was feeling a little lost. In school, there's a pressure to pick a path. What are you going to do when you grow up? What's your vocation? It's ridiculous to ask an 18-year-old that. Life changes, life zig-zags. For me, it felt convenient because I’d had this experience that was good, and it was like, "Okay, that's grand, I'll just do that," as opposed to really thinking it through.
You talked there about discovering who you are and that moment when you're 18 and you've got to pick an identity. There's this unsaid assumption that this is what you're going to be forever. What have you come to learn generally about these labels we put on ourselves? "I am a lawyer," "I am an actor." I understand why they serve us—they help us to fit in and be understood—but there can also be a real downside to pigeonholing yourself as "a thing."
Completely. I couldn't agree more. I think the world can be terrifying sometimes, and I think it's comforting to be able to put a label on yourself and feel like you're part of something—a community, a tribe. Prue Leith came on *Changes* and talked about how she very much believes that you should have a revolution every 20 years in your life. I'm obsessed with that now because I feel like I'm going through that in my 40s.
I love that idea that you should be able to completely put... obviously, there's a privilege in this. I'm not assuming that everyone can just drop their jobs and go and get another one. But if you are able to afford the space and the time to do that, I think it's so good for being alive—to learn. Everything's about learning. That's when you feel the most alive, the most stimulated, and the most connected to yourself.
For me, I just want to keep learning. With my own experience now, I have two young sons. When they are growing up, I'm going to try and be very open about what they do and encourage them. You can't force them to do things. You can't force your kid to play football if he's not into football. But if he's decided he really wants to do hip-hop dance, well come on then, let's go do hip-hop dance. It's the same as adults. You can't force yourself to do something, but if you feel a pull, you should be able to do that. The only way you feel those pulls is to be able to listen to yourself. You have to check in with yourself, give yourself the headspace and the time to really allow yourself to listen to how you feel about life.
You have to listen to when things feel a little wrong or when you feel un-stimulated. To come home at the end of a working week and say, "I didn't feel remotely excited or stimulated by what happened that week. Okay, what can I do to change that? How can I tweak things? Do I need to zoom out and really look at my general career?" It’s that. It’s constantly checking in with yourself all the time. That can lead to small incremental changes but also really big ones, which I feel very excited by.
It’s almost a bit of a paradox that we can become the victim of our own success in that regard. If we become really good at being a lawyer, then we build a community of lawyers, and we get known as that. We become somewhat imprisoned by this identity. What in your experience is the cost then of becoming too wrapped up in your own label or identity?
I think it's basically a feeling of stagnation, I suppose. And "stagnation" is maybe a strong word, but everyone will relate to the word "coasting." When you're coasting. I guess I was feeling that a little bit at the BBC and especially with DJing. They’re two very different things, but with the BBC, I loved my job and I’m so grateful for it, but I think I did feel a little coasty.
There's a point where you feel like, "I should be more grateful for the fact that I'm getting sent brilliant music every week and I get to play this on the radio," but I didn't feel excited enough for what this was. I didn't feel like I was serving my audience right now in the right way. I wasn't on their level when it came to how excited I should be about what this was. So that was a conscious decision to take myself out of that and be able to have someone replace me who serves them and who is at the peak of their excitement. I still love broadcasting and I still want to broadcast, but it will be in a different way.
With regard to DJing, the problem with DJs that they always say is that the DJs grow up and the crowds stay the same age. And that's what happens; you feel yourself growing and growing. When I started out DJing, I was flinging myself in the crowd. I had a problem with crowd-surfing. It was like, "Stop crowd-surfing, Annie!" I'd get hammered, I'd be hugging people, we'd have after-parties and then after-after-parties. I'd get no sleep. I'd fall asleep in Ibiza airport face down waiting for the flight. I had the best time.
But then life catches up with you when you have kids and you grow up and you have other priorities. Fast-forward ten years, I'm DJing to people who are the same age, but I'm thinking about what I'm going to put in the school lunches the next day. I'm thinking about how much sleep I'm going to get on the way home in the back of this car before my kids wake up at 6:00, and how I'll be able to get through the working day tomorrow. I started dividing my time in increments of kind of 15 minutes because I was so stressed out about not being able to have the time to sleep, to rest, to then be a good parent, to be able to do my job properly. It became like this feeling of the walls closing in—just like I can't please everyone.
So at that point, it was like, "This isn't sustainable. It's just not sustainable. I can't keep doing this." And I started DJing a lot less because of that. The world of DJing and dance music and club culture was, in the very nature of how it worked, kind of shutting me out because of how I was changing as a person. But then I kind of opened a door and made it work for me and a lot of other people. When I do the "Before Midnight" shows, people just come up and say thanks. They're just like, "Thank you so much. Thank you, I'm 52 and I feel like I can belong here and I can come out." It's not just people in their 50s; it's all ages. It's club kids, it's mothers and sons, it's people in their 70s. I’ve never DJed to a crowd like it because they're so kind and open and it's not really that druggy. Everyone's just there for their one night out. They invest so much in it and they're there to have a good time. It’s nice to know that my own feelings about something were echoed by so many other people.
I don't know any other women in their 40s really who are doing what I do. So I was coming at it from a very unique perspective, which is that women in their 40s just aren't listened to in the music industry. The music industry is run by men mostly. When you have a woman in her 40s, they're kind of forgotten about. I don't think people think about women in their 40s or 50s when it comes to selling music, and they really should. It's a big industry. There's a lot of income there, there's a lot of investment of time, and they have some great taste. It’s been wonderful to kind of feel like I can give those women a space in the world of clubbing.
I hear a real lesson about creativity but also innovation in that, in the sense that when you want to create something that is going to feel authentic and is going to be original and in-demand, you should first create something for yourself under the assumption that there's many more people out there like you.
I couldn't agree more. I think that's the key to everything, in my opinion, is authenticity. In order to be authentic, you have to trust yourself. You have to have conviction in yourself, and you have to trust that your own instinct is the right instinct, even if everyone else is telling you something different. That’s hard. In order to do that, you have to really know yourself.
At radio, my job there was to play music and break bands. You get sent so much music. At some point, you have to say no to stuff, and there are many reasons you can say no. They’re not the right hype band, they don't have enough followers, they don't have someone from their record label who's icing me up to play it. But actually, the decision has to be down essentially to you: does this song move you? Do you feel like this song has got something—ideas, lyrics, sonics—that elevate it to the point where you feel moved by it?
I suppose there's training in that because it makes you every day, every week have to use that mechanism in your mind, which is instinct. You have to listen to your own instinct. So I was kind of exercising that muscle by default in my job. I guess that's why I'm so happy and just grateful for "Before Midnight," because that is an extension of that. It's me using my instinct and saying, "No, I believe in this. Surely there must be people out there who believe this too."
Instinct is almost, especially in the way you describe it, almost a voice inside of you that is whispering to you about what you truly want. But then there's this counter-narrative, this counter-voice, which is usually outside of you. It can be, "Well, what if my producer doesn't think that's a good song?" or "What if the listeners don't like it?" Has your ability to tune into your own instinct—to that voice inside of you that informs you before you know yourself consciously—grown over time with evidence of your results?
Yeah, I think it really has. DJing is a huge amount of that. It's having the courage to draw for a tune that you know the audience don't know and won't recognize, but you still think will keep them on the floor. Again, that is a really hard exercise and it takes a lot of fearlessness to be able to do that. It's very easy to panic and just put on the tune that you know is going to fill the dance floor. I have a folder on my USB called "Panic" for that special thing!
We all have those; every DJ does. But again, I think that's a really good lesson in instinct and a lesson in reading the crowd, but also holding firm to your own conviction in something's good. That has grown over the years; it’s grown with confidence and the success of my shows. As I've become more successful in my career as a result of instinct and trusting my tastes, then obviously that feeling grows more firm. You get less worried about making the wrong decision.
As your career has progressed, do you feel like if one side of the pendulum is trying to guess what people want from you and the other side is doing what I think is right, you've moved towards the latter?
Definitely. I'm kind of all there now, which is lovely. It feels really good. I think part of the big changes that went on in my life in the last couple of years—extricating myself from Radio 1 and doing writing and writing books and taking up podcasting—that's all been about that. It’s all checking in and doing what I feel is right. There's no way I could have made those changes ten years earlier or even five years earlier. It takes time to feel at peace with yourself enough to just walk away from a career like that and say, "No, I'm going to do something completely different now."
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Zooming back then into that part of your life where you described yourself as having a knot in your stomach. The quote I read is, "I've learned that for the past six years, I've had a knot in my stomach. I had no idea it was there until it's gone." I could relate to that. The broader context of what you were saying there is this feeling that you're not going to do a good job at pretty much anything at the same time, and almost like a building sense of guilt or trying to find a way to slow down time, and it's always kind of hanging over you. And then you can kind of feel it in your chest. Walking around with a sense of guilt and "I just need five more minutes to sleep" or "to be this" or "to do well for this person." It’s a horrible feeling, isn't it?
Absolutely. It’s the absence of peace. It's the opposite of peace. It's a constant feeling of turbulence in your head, constantly being pushed and pulled. So when you take that out, again, I was too busy to check in with myself. I had never done that. I was never spiritual or into any of that stuff because I was too busy. I don't have time for anything apart from just getting up and getting through my day. My friends used to take the piss out of me because everything was like five-minute increments. I'd take a call and be like, "Cool, give me the headlines. How are you? I don't have time for a full thing." It was always, "How can we truncate all of this into as short a time as possible so I can move on to the next thing?"
And do more.
Yeah, and do more! Or just maintain. It wasn't even about doing more; it was just maintaining at that point. So when I made the decision that I was going to leave radio, it's important to know the context in which that happened. I didn't just walk away from the career and be like, "See ya, I'm just going to see what happens." I obviously took a couple of years to try out some different avenues, and these were avenues that I felt very passionate about—writing and podcasting.
Podcasting was a reaction to the BBC. It was definitely me being like, "I want to own something with regard to my own broadcasting. I want to control it." I love the BBC, but it can be very frustrating working for a huge institution because there are so many islands, there are so many departments, and it's very hard to get something off the ground. So I wanted to be a broadcaster outside of the BBC and see how that felt. And then writing was something that was very much not professional or career-oriented at all. That was for my soul. I wanted to try and learn something. I knew I loved this and I wanted to try and do it again. Also, I think in retrospect, it was a way of me trying to understand myself. They say that about writing—writing is a way to know yourself. So I thought if I wrote, in hindsight, maybe it was a weird subconscious way of me trying to climb out of the panic. I knew if I dedicated time to writing, then I would have to confront myself. I would have to look in the mirror. I knew deep down that there was something wrong, but I just didn't have the time to confront it.
So I was doing writing—I did a six-month course. I was also doing podcasting that was on top of DJing, on top of doing my five shows a week, on top of everything else that was going on. So I had two years of total chaos of trying to juggle everything. And it was after those two years when I was like, "Okay, I know enough. I know I love writing enough, I know I love podcasting enough that I can give these a go. I'm going to take myself out of radio now, out of what was essentially my day job, and give myself the space I need to really pursue these things." And that's when the knot left. When I made the decision to leave is when the knot left. When I called my boss and said, "I'm out."
You used the words "panic" and the phrase "something wrong" to describe the feeling that was underpinning these decisions to go in search of something else. In hindsight, I've heard you say that in some respect, like a mid-life crisis. Is that accurate?
I think I still might be in the mid-life crisis! I feel like something goes on in your 40s where you really are compelled to look back at your life. You're halfway through life, right? So you're like, "Whoa, what's going to happen for the next half?" So you look back, you're kind of forced to look in the mirror. I don't know if I would attribute that directly to a mid-life crisis; it was more just feeling incredibly stressed and burdened and demanded by people. I felt like so many people needed me. I had a lot of teams around me—production teams, management teams. I had an ecosystem of people of which I was in the middle. And I felt like I didn't want to be needed by so many people anymore.
My kids themselves were very needy and obviously needed to be needed, and I wanted to devote most of the needing to them, and then also try and devote more time to have the space to try new things and learn. I think it can happen to everyone, and when you're busy and you're in a situation where you're just keeping things going—you're just trying to maintain life, maintain a business, maintain your job, keep your kids happy—it's very hard to come out of the chaos and look in. From about the age of 30 to my 40s, it was that. It was just maintenance. I was madly ambitious, don't get me wrong. I wanted to get bigger, I wanted to try everything, and I fiercely wanted to prove that I could do it all. But when it got to my second kid being about two, I realized quite quickly that doing it all wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Actually, there were different ways to do it. And what is "all of it" anyway?
I think there's something tremendously powerful and feminist in being able to choose to step away from a high-power job to look after your kids because it's a choice. I was very lucky in that it was a choice. And I still worked, don't get me wrong. I love working, I will never stop working, but I just worked in a way that suited me, that worked for my life as it was then.
That pivotal decision removes the knot. But in the lead-up to that decision, was there fear? A lot of people might imply you're making a wrong decision. I can imagine people listening to what you've just said and they’re stood on the edge of that decision themselves, looking into the darkness thinking, "I'll lose my friendship group, I'll lose this, I'll lose that." Stepping into uncertainty requires a certain level of courage or conviction. There's that quote I used to love: "Change happens when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of making a change." For people stood there looking into uncertainty, can you tell them about how you felt in the lead-up to that decision? Was there fear? Was there doubt?
No. And there wasn't because I'd spent two years trying to do the things that I wanted to do behind the scenes. I knew with all my heart that I wanted to write. Writing felt like coming home. It felt like the most wonderful feeling, discovering writing again. And I knew that the podcast had potential to be a business if I had the time to put into it. So there was this sense of knowing that the choices I'd made were right. I didn't feel scared leaving Radio 1. I didn't feel scared making that decision because after I made the call to my boss to say I was leaving, I just felt the most huge sense of relief.
I always say that you know you've made the right decision as soon as you deliver that decision. You get a feeling afterwards, and that feeling tells you whether you've made the right decision or not. I knew with that feeling of relief that I'd made the right decision. And you know, I'd been there for 17 years. It wasn't like I'd left too soon. I felt like I'd done a good innings. If anything, I felt at peace and I was just excited. I was excited to get the news out, excited to move on and move forwards. I've always been like that—I'm really impulsive, I'm really impatient. Ask any of my friends or my management team and they will say I'm very impatient, very impulsive. I want everything to happen now. In a way, it was good to have time to make this decision and to have time before it came out to the world to process it, but I genuinely didn't feel fear. For anyone standing on the precipice of change, the best power you can have is knowledge. Know what you're stepping into as much as you can, and you will feel better and stronger about walking away from what’s come before.
Part of the issue, and I remember Obama saying this on stage when he spoke in Brazil, he talked about how in his role when he went to get Osama bin Laden in that compound in Pakistan, you never have all the information ahead of time.
Never! But that's what's exciting. There has to be the unknown. There has to be a sense of the unknown.
It's terrifying for some people. A certain type of person is trying to get to 100% certainty.
There’s no such thing! Only in hindsight you get it. But I think there's something very life-affirming about not knowing everything, and something very important about being comfortable in that space of not knowing everything. You cannot control life as much as you try. I have tried; it's not possible. At some point, you have to relinquish control and allow yourself to move through life freely without trying to control everything around you. For me, stepping into that, there was definitely an unknown ahead, but I knew enough to know that I was going to be okay in terms of emotionally and psychologically. I agree, I think fear of the unknown is undeniable and indisputable, but I think it's about allowing that fear to exist—acknowledging it, seeing it, allowing it, and living with it to move forward. Fear sometimes is healthy; it's a human instinct. It’s important to feel it.
17 years with the Beeb. You became one of the best DJs, one of the most well-known DJs in the whole of Europe. Tremendous success. Why you? When you look back and connect the dots—because there's very few people at that top table—why you?
I think essentially I was different because I was a woman. There weren't that many women around when I was starting out in the world of dance music. There were women, I'm by no means saying that there weren't, but there weren't very many. So I think for Radio 1, they quite liked this idea of having a young woman join the station and do dance music. For them, they really liked the fact that I wasn't an expert, I wasn't tried and tested, I didn't have a reputation for being a huge global DJ. They wanted to employ someone that was representative of the audience. My initial tagline for my first show was like, "I'm coming at this from the perspective of the dance floor as opposed to the DJ booth. I'm a fan here."
And then obviously I got the gigs off the back of that, and slowly that transformed into me being a touring DJ and Ibiza residencies and all of that. I do think that at the start of my career, it felt a bit like a phenomenon because at the front of all my shows, it was women. It was all girls, and everyone used to remark on that, and I used to love that. So I think there was a feeling of me bringing a different audience to the table. I was very amenable, I was very ambitious, I was professional, I showed up, I did the work. I had a great team, an all-female team who worked really hard. I don't know if I can say any more than that. I find it really difficult!
How long was your apprenticeship? How long did it take from the day you first DJed a track to when the world knew your name?
I used to DJ around my friends' parties and stuff just for fun from when I was about 20. And then I got my show on Radio 1 in 2004, so I would have been maybe like three or four years. When I got my show on Radio 1, people knew my name immediately, which was quite mad. It was just mad to go from being the assistant producer—the person who made the tea—to then being a DJ. Get an agent, let's do a photoshoot. It was just like, "Whoa," it was quite bizarre. But actually, the biggest shock for me was going from working full-time to having one show a week, and just being really like, "What?" because I love working, so I was a bit bored. I had to find a way to make peace with being freelance and working in my own hours.
Do you think your relationship with your work is healthy?
I do now, but it definitely hasn't been in the past. I've always worked from when I was 15. I really enjoy working. I've been hugely ambitious, so I had a sense of momentum that I felt like I had to honor.
Why?
I think there was a lot of pressure being female in what felt like a man's world. I felt very much like I wanted to prove that this was possible—that women could DJ, and we could carry a crowd and a club night and an event and a festival and a residency. I felt like I wanted to prove a point, basically. So there was that, but I also loved it. So it was a combination of both. A lot of the DJs at Radio 1 were really competitive as well, so you kind of sense that there's a sense of wanting to be able to stand and be proud of your lot and what you represent and what you bring to Radio 1. That momentum carried me all the way through from my mid-20s up to being around 40.
And then just stepping off that train... it's just crazy because you ask yourself all these questions: "Where was all that coming from? Why did I want to work so hard? Who was I trying to prove these things to?" But the fact of the matter is, I did enjoy it, and I'm not going to sit here and be like, "It was awful." It wasn't; it was absolutely fucking amazing. So I’m really grateful for it. But it was unsustainable for where I was at, and this is the thing that I've learned is that where I was at in my life, it didn't work at that time. But as we know, life changes, our situations change all the time. So I could go back to being a full-time touring DJ in five years and do my Ibiza residencies all over again. I quite like having that openness. This doesn't have to be a closed book now. I could go back to broadcasting and doing a daily radio show. It's about adapting with who you are at that time in your life and what you need. That’s what I did. It’s only really in the last year that I've opened up to everything again. I think I’d been so blinkered: "That's it now, radio's done. I'm going to be a writer, a podcaster, and I'm going to DJ now and again. The end." But now it's like, no, actually, with "Before Midnight," I can really flourish as a DJ. I can really make this last and blossom into something that's completely different than how I envisioned being a DJ as an older person. Same with radio; I could go back to that and find a whole new way of doing radio that feels amazing for who I am at that moment. So I really like this feeling of everything being open and attainable according to where I'm at in my life.
With all of this "chaos"—I think chaos is a good word because I think chaos is, going back to something you were talking about earlier, the need for something to strive for and a sense of forward momentum. I wrote about how we go through lives thinking we're trying to reach stability, having no goals, everything sorted, but really we're actually trying to stay in chaos. And it turns—it's kind of a paradox—that when we reach stability, we get psychological chaos, and when we're in chaos, we have stability. Like when our life—when we're striving and when we have goals to complete and things are busy—we're stable. But with all this chaos that you've chosen over the last 10 years, what's your mental health journey been like?
The mental health journey's been pretty okay, and I realize how lucky I am to say that. I feel very grateful that I haven't suffered from depression or anxiety or anything like that in my life. Weirdly recently, like in the last six months, I’ve experienced a bit of that. I think that is finally, like a year after leaving radio, it's all kind of settled down. Everything I've wanted to change has changed, and life is really safe, it's really predictable, and I'm a little bit bored. So I've had to be like, "Okay, you've got everything you want, but now you need a bit of chaos again?" So it's just constant tweaks. I'm going out on the road again; there are things that are happening that will scratch that itch. It's fine.
I’ve also felt kind of like, hormonally... I'm 44. I'm in perimenopause. This is all happening to me now. This is a whole different change in life. They call it "the shift," you know? Everything's changing there. So there's this sense of hormones kind of consuming you and taking over your mental health in a way that, if you weren't aware of it, could be really scary and frightening and damaging. So I'm trying to educate myself as much as possible about all of that stuff so that when it hits me, I know what's coming for me and I know what to do when it comes.
I was talking to Gabby Logan about that in our last episode.
Yeah, it's so insidious because it comes so quietly. It kind of creeps in and creeps in, as Gabby said, like with moods. Your moods are more extreme, you don't deal with things as well, you kind of get irritable more or angry or upset easier. But for me, I felt like... and this is the other thing about perimenopause: it might come and then it will go for six months and then it would come back again. So there's no regulation to it, so it's very hard to pinpoint, "Oh, that's it." So what you have to do is be really across it and document everything and then be able to zoom out and look and be like, "Right, that, that, that, that. Okay, it is perimenopause." So that's what I'm kind of doing at the moment—I'm documenting everything. I had a feeling recently of just feeling totally restless—like, oh my God, insatiable. Nothing was satisfying me. I would exercise, I'd see friends, I'd go out, I'd be with the kids, I tried everything. I just could not feel satiated, and I did not understand it. And then I realized that it was a hormonal thing. So there are so many things that you go through, and it's like a weird jigsaw puzzle, but if you know what you're looking for, it really helps. I actually have Davina McCall to thank for that because she sent me her book, and she's been an incredible spokesperson for menopause and perimenopause and just getting information out there to people. I think she deserves some sort of national treasure status. She's incredible for what she's doing.
I agree. I think she's amazing. She DMs me sometimes, and I still freak out because I think that she’s Davina off the telly! On that point of women-related issues, one of the things I’ve heard you talk about is tokenism. I read an article you wrote in *Vice* in 2014 or 2016. How do you feel about that article?
At the time, I felt it and I meant it. What I was arguing about was a journalist who asked me what it was like to DJ in heels and kept referring back to the fact that I was a woman when I DJed, and I was pissed off about it. I was like, "Can you stop asking me about being a woman because you're not asking this to Pete Tong? You're not asking this to other DJs." And then there was a thing at the time where it was like this idea of doing all-female nights—female-only DJ nights. And I resisted that because at the time I felt like it didn't feel right to have to put us down to gender as opposed to ability as DJs. Like, "Why are you grouping all the women together? Just let us all be DJs together. You're either a good DJ or you're not. The end. There shouldn't be a gender issue."
But obviously over the years, with the lack of women in the game, I kind of had to change my mind on that a little bit. Not change my mind—I still don't think that DJs should be assessed with regard to their gender. But if we need to have more women in the game, then yes, we should be encouraging any way that we can do that. And if that means putting a load of women on a lineup and reminding people how great women are as DJs, then go for it. For a lot of my early career, it didn't even occur to me that it was... I mean, I knew there was a problem in that there wasn't a lot of women DJs, and I was always delighted when there were other women around, but it didn't occur to me to be an activist about it and to shout about it and to try and bring women through. There was one turning point I remember when I got asked to DJ at a festival and they wanted me to be a headliner. And I looked at the lineup and the first 11 lines of names were all men. And it was the 12th line where there was a female name. And I remember emailing back the promoters, who were all guys who I knew and worked with, and was like, "Guys, come on. What's going on here?" That was the first time I ever kind of answered back, like, "This isn't okay." And then from then, it kind of snowballed and I became a lot more vocal about it once it clicked that I actually had a bit of power and I could do something about it. It’s been a joy to watch because now there are so many amazing women. They are killing it.
When you think about the next chapter of your life—if we sat here in ten years' time and I said, "Annie, that was a really successful ten years," what would it have had to involve for that to be the case?
This is fascinating because as I've got older, my idea of what success is has completely changed. Success for me isn't numbers, it's not tickets sold, it's not awareness, it's not algorithms, it's not anything like that. Success for me now is personal happiness. Personal happiness stems from feeling stimulated, feeling as alive as I possibly can, learning, and also feeling like the people I love are in the best possible way that they can be in terms of living their lives. That's success now. So if you were to tell me at the end of my 40s that you had a successful decade, for me, that would mean that I felt a sense of contentment and peace, but also I felt alive.
I always go back to that. I think writing makes you feel alive because it forces you to put what's there down on paper and it forces you to look at what's in your head and it forces you to figure things out. I think learning makes you feel alive; it makes your head tick, it challenges you. So it's that combination of peaceful contentment but also feeling like you’re pushed and challenged in a way that isn't going to be damaging.
Conversely, then, if the next ten years were unsuccessful and you said to yourself, "Do you know what? I made the same mistakes again," what would that ten years involve?
I think it would be running away with a sense of what I should be doing as opposed to what I actually really want to do. So let's take this for example: let's say *Changes*, my podcast. It would be, "Okay, it's doing well, so I want to double it. I want to do two more episodes a week. I want to try and be the biggest, best podcast out there," and kind of doing that without the resources or without the team around me to do it. Taking on that responsibility as opposed to just allowing it to grow slowly as it is. It would also be DJing way more. It would be trying to write a book every two years, which I have been doing and I don't know if it’s that sustainable. And just, yeah, I guess kind of doubling down on all the work I'm doing and trying to be the best and the biggest at what I'm doing as opposed to doing what I'm doing well and within my means.
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. The question that's been left for you is: "What is the pain you experienced in your life that hurt the most, but you would not erase in hindsight?"
Getting dumped when I was in my 20s. Yeah, getting dumped. It was the biggest kind of experience like that, and it was really important for me to know how that felt—to be on the receiving end of heartbreak. I was incredibly miserable, but I climbed out of it, and I think it was a really big lesson to know how that felt.
Why was it important to know how that felt?
Because I'd always been the dumper! I was always that person who was able to up and leave, and I’d never been on the other side of that.
Isn't it the most excruciating pain in the world? Like a black hole of...
It's just awful. Just ultimate rejection. It's kind of very hard to see past it. But yeah.
A lot of the world will know you as Annie Mac, but more recently you've really taken hold of your full name, Annie MacManus. Reclaimed it. Why so?
I don't know. I just felt like I went through this period of change, Steve, where I wanted to change everything. It was like, "Okay, I've changed my job." Something so huge and what felt quite insurmountable at times, to be able to change that empowered me to want to change loads more. So writing this book—the first book I wrote, *Mother Mother*—it genuinely felt like a whole different side of me. It felt like all of me.
When I'm on the radio, well first of all when I'm DJing, no one really gets any of me apart from my music selections and the odd crowd-surf if I've drank enough. But radio, there’s also a very limited surface level of me that you get because I was only able really to talk about music most of the time. Yes, there are tidbits of your life, but with this book, it felt like a real sum of all of my parts. It felt like a disservice to the book to give it that name. I was also very determined to try and call it by my full name in a contrary way. My agent at the time would have probably said that surely you should just cash in on the fact that it’s Annie Mac and people know you for that. But I really didn't want to do that. I wanted the book to be judged for the writing and for nothing else.
I should have started with a memoir and then gone to a book, but I wrote this strange, kind of bleak novel about addiction and grief and a young girl growing up in Belfast, and it was so far removed from any perception of who I was as a professional person. But I liked that because it kind of set the bar for what I wanted to do with the writing. I didn't want it to be influenced by anything that had come before. I wanted it to be real and true and authentic to who I was as a person, so it felt right to give it my full name, my born name.
Well Annie, I’m really glad you did because I think it’s somewhat symbolic of the journey you've been on so clearly in your life and your relationship with your own conviction and creativity and intuition, which is creating ever-greater, ever-more-valuable art as the pendulum swings over to intuition and stepping into yourself and understanding who you are. But I can also tell from the conversations we've had that it's bringing you closer to your sense of fulfillment in life and balance and all those things which for many of us, we abandon in the pursuit as we’re dragged away by our desire to fit in or momentum or our success or whatever. That’s created some amazing writing, it’s created amazing new ideas as you talked about with your new format that ends at midnight, and it’s very exciting to be on the receiving end of all of that art and creativity. It’s also very inspiring. Your podcast is amazing. My best friend in the whole world, he peppers me every day; he says, "You need to listen to this episode and this episode." He absolutely loves it. My friend Ash, he's my best friend. And I recommend everybody listening to this to go and check it out because if you love deep conversations, if you love realness and vulnerability, then you definitely will love *Changes*.
Thank you so much, Steve. And also, everything I've talked about has been inspired by talking about change on a weekly basis. That is empowering, learning from other people and how they changed their life. So I think that’s helped me a little bit; the podcast has helped me to be brave to change.
Me too. And yours is one of the real, really important ones out there, so everybody make sure you go and listen to that. I'm excited for your book coming next year. I know how terrifying that can be and how much work it is to create something like that. So thank you, thank you for your time, thank you for the inspiration. And as a fan, I’m excited to see all the wonderful things your passion and intuition create over the next decade.
Thank you for the lovely questions. I feel like I just talked at you for an hour!
No, exactly, that’s the point of me being here! I’m not here to talk, people are sick of me. But no, thank you Annie, means a lot.
Thanks, Steve.
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