In conversation with Nay Nay

Maeve de Bordóns Álvarez

October 2024

With a love for uncovering leftfield underground sounds and digging into music’s diverse cultural heritage, Nay Nay curates a range of tempos and global styles to bring a unique spin to every set. Expect bass-weight, curveballs and a generally good time. With fresh and dynamic sets at parties in London, Birmingham and Manchester - Nay Nay has also expanded her reach to the airwaves. You can catch them hosting their own eclectic monthly radio residency with STEAM Radio Manchester, as well as cooking up a string of guest spots with community radio platforms across the country.

Could you tell us a bit about where you grew up and what your relationship with music was during your early years?

I grew up in Birmingham in the late 90’s and 00's -  so I had exposure to a lot of shifting music scenes. I think being in a busy multicultural inner city area, at a time when the popular music scene was often very playful and driven by sonic fusion and the creation of new sounds has really shaped my relationship with music.

I enjoyed grime, garage and bassline, punk rock, indie/ folk/ alternative. It was a great time for R&B and DatPiff hip-hop mixtapes. French house and Ibiza anthems were becoming club classics in real-time. My dad is a musician so I guess I’ve always seen listening and cataloguing music as a personal project to actively practise, even if I have little instrumental skill haha.

I used to hoard NME magazines and had a notebook in which I would sit and write down every track ID from Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service on 6 Music as it played live (only to find out they are all up on the BBC website).

And, I think even though early smartphones and YouTube meant you could jump decades and continents in seconds for the first time, there still wasn’t that infrastructure of database, algorithm to show you every artists name, shoe size, dating history, entire back catalogue, similar music and then blink over to the next thing. I was picking up a lot of CDs in HMV that I had no idea what it sounded like until I got them home. I’m not saying it was better than now or before, but it was slower and interactive and I found the mystery quite freeing. It’s definitely one way to learn what good music feels like on a personal level.

That shifting ground is home to me more than any particular kind of sound and I think you can hear it in my selections. I visualise music more in eras and energetic spaces, rather than through genre guidelines. I like to think this has set me up to pull off genre some fluid tap dancing and produce a really varied radio show with some flair and cohesiveness, but who’s to say… maybe it sounds really hectic, just like music in 2010 haha. 

Nay Nay Djing out and about

Having Jamaican heritage, I do have those classic memories as a child of carnivals and block parties with booming sound systems with the sub bass which would shake my sternum. Although, I really hated that sensation at the time, how times change!

What are some of the defining songs/tracks of your life?

Lose Control - Missy Elliot. Noughties Missy never missed, ever. The piano loop in this felt illegal and Fat Man Scoop’s vocals hyped me up. I was more shy at the time and didn’t want to lose control like I would now on the dancefloor but I feel like something in this song activated that.

Sound & Colour - Alabama Shakes. This is the first and presently still the only song I’ve ever heard and thought authentically and assuredly, “this my favourite song”.

Macky Gee, DJ Phantasy - Transition. Drum & Bass was my first experience of raving and this dropped right when I was going out in uni so it has a special place in my heart.

Weed and Warfare - Sub Luna City. Sub Luna played a gig around 2016 in a small room above a Turkish social club in Hackney and it was the first gig I went to on my own. I was quite overwhelmed on the way there, navigating tubes and dark streets of London on my own. I didn’t really know how gigs worked yet so I showed up promptly at 6.30, ready for a 7pm start and Maxwell Owin assumed I was with everyone and let me in the venue while they were all smoking upstairs haha, so I did leave and come back. But it was beautiful and exhilarating and I’ve never really looked back in terms of pursuing live music independently. Where in the past I had not attended events or felt like things needed to be co-signed by people I knew to be culturally significant, this assured me I could follow the music and share it with people who were dancing to the same beat.

Honourable mentions:

• PJ Harvey - Man-size

• Girl Unit - Queen B 

• The Bug - Skeng

• Retired Sports - Wiki

• City Slicker - Casisdead

• Firestarter - Prodigy

Nay Nay out and about

What was your inspiration behind this mix?

It’s definitely a party/ dance mix. I wanted to do something progressional and play around with the journey of musical unveiling, where you can sometimes end up listening to things that are harder, faster or more hectic than you may have been ready to appreciate at the start. I think it goes from about 130-180 in the hour.

There’s some inspiration from digging tunes for different episodes of my STEAM radio show, Sound Tracking - definitely some broken beat and Egyptian leftfield bass in there. I also feel really blessed to have a few tunes sent to me by very talented friends I’ve made in the past year.

Outside of music, what’s something you’re currently excited about?

This is a tough question because I feel like I am always working or doing music stuff. I should probably revisit some of my other hobbies! But, I am currently finishing off my Master’s and I’m about to start my dissertation researching the role of cultural institutions in empowering subcultures and countercultures. I hate academic work, but I’m really interested in the subject so I think it could be fun (and may slip some music into it).

What are some of your favourite labels, parties and artists?

It’s a very transient thing! So, i’ll have a different answer in 3 months, but recently enjoying:

Labels: Exit Records, Tiger Beat 6, YUKU, Ostinato, Hooversound, West Norwood Cassette Library and Juan Forte

Parties: Bruk Up, Acid Morris, Incognito Radio, Field Maneuvers 

Artists: Deft, Rawtrachs, Luke’s Anger, Sam Link, Itoa, Hassan Abou Alam, Suzi Analogue, Ivy Lab, Truant, Summer Pearl, Towa Tei, Frankley Ruiz

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