Lauren Laverne is sitting in a Radio 4 studio, her new home as the presenter of Late Night Woman’s Hour. It really is a bit of a homecoming, she says, peeling a banana. Her mum listens to Woman’s Hour. In the house where she grew up, she and her brother shouted to make their voices heard over blues or the radio. “My earliest memories of Radio 4 are my mam’s dad, who worked in the shipyards. Right at the end of his life, when he was in his early 70s, he got really into it. So he was in his house on Ford Estate in Sunderland, just listening to Radio 4. He’d retired, and me mam’s one of nine so the family had grown up and everything, and he had time to have the radio on. And he l-o-o-o-ved it.”
Laverne’s grandfathers (the other was a miner) often figure in her interviews. So it seems reasonable to assume that she values her working-class heritage. Laverne’s father, like her mother, was from a large family, one of six. But both parents – “60s grammar-school kids, that classic working-class thing” – studied hard and had university jobs so that life for Laverne, growing up in Barnes in Sunderland, was comfortable.
“It was a house full of music and books and ideas that were not that usual where I was. There was always a lot of – we might call it alternative culture now,” she says. “We were this funny little middle-class outpost of a big working-class family, and that was a really lovely place to be. Because we had all the advantages of being middle class, but also had a real sense of place in history and culture that connected back to where we were from.”
Does she worry that her own children will be further removed from those origins? “Well, you know, they’re part of my family too, and they’re part of their own extended family and they have their own relationship with that, with my parents, my cousins, the place that I’m from,” she says. She’s sitting in a swivel chair, spinning from side to side as she thinks. “They’ve been on the beach that The Walrus and the Carpenter was written about!” The question was really an economic one, to which Lewis Carroll – a passion she got from her father – is an unexpected answer. I wonder if she worries about the privileges her children enjoy compared with the life of her grandfathers – does she sometimes feel the need to adjust their perspective?
“What? When we’re throwing another 50 on the fire?” she exclaims.
“My dad said a thing to me the other week that is really interesting. He said, you don’t teach kids the value of money, you teach them the value of people. And for me, that’s what it comes down to. What is a pound? What is a gold bar worth? It’s actually more about how you treat people, so that’s what I try to do.”
In many ways, another radio show is the last thing Laverne needs. She already hosts every weekday on 6 Music, she does voiceover for a children’s show, fills in time with all manner of documentaries and prize-presenting and live events – the Mercury, the Turner, the Baftas, Glastonbury. She has written a teen novel. When she counts her BBC radio stations – “I’m not sure about 4 Extra, but certainly 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, I’ve hosted on” – she runs out of fingers. Somewhere in there, she finds time to call her mother “several times a day”.
And for the last year or more, she has legged it each afternoon from the 6 Music studio to the offices of The Pool, the website “for busy women” – that figures – that she co-founded a year ago. All of which makes for a day that is “really, really, really busy but really interesting and fun”.
The funny thing is, it was only when she became a mother, at 29 – she’s 37 now – that the work took off properly, she says, which is not how motherhood is conventionally billed. But Laverne doesn’t really do convention. “Having kids changed my attitude to my job. I don’t know whether that would have happened anyway. I only have my experience, and that is that I had them at the same time – literally at the same time – as my career started to happen. Before that, it was ticking along, job to job, then suddenly these two big seismic personal incidents happened and it all grew up together.”
Maybe one big change made her more open to a second, because seven months after she gave birth to her eldest son, Fergus, in autumn 2007, she started a new show on 6 Music. By the time he was two, she had the weekday slot. His younger brother, Mack, came a year later; Laverne is married to DJ and producer Graeme Fisher.
She has said before that motherhood “brings you back to the fundamental aspects of your personality”. What did she mean by that? “Well, it brings you back to brass tacks in all sorts of ways. You work out what’s important and who you want to be. I’m not saying you can’t work those things out without having kids. Of course you can. But … I happened to have kids and it gave me an imperative to decide what mattered.”
Surely she didn’t give birth and then everything made perfect sense? Did she lose herself for a while before that? “Well, I think what’s interesting is that it’s a new role, right? It’s a new job. Not just a job. You’re being a new you. Mummy. Who is Mummy or Mam or whatever? It takes ages … You learn the ropes but to really enjoy it and delight in it and feel confident, I think it takes 18 months, two years – for me,” she adds.
There has been another, unexpected consequence of having children. They have cast Laverne’s own youth in a new light. Fergus, now eight, has begun to learn guitar, the instrument Laverne played with Kenickie, the band she started in her teens with her brother and two schoolfriends. Watching Fergus, tuning the guitar for him, showing him the odd thing, has made the Laverne of her youth seem younger.
“I look at my kids now and think … I was not much older when we started to make records. That’s a real trip to look at that. You know, I experienced being in a band in that very episodic way that children experience school. Like, ‘We’re going here now! We’re doing this now!’ I wasn’t in the driving seat of my own life. Of course I wasn’t. I was a little kid. You don’t know who you are. You don’t understand the significance of things.”
She casts around for an example, her feet tapping to the tune of her thoughts. She is wearing printed Karl Lagerfeld trainers. In 1996, Kenickie supported the Ramones. “If I could go back now and say to myself as the Ramones go, ‘Do you want to support us at this gig?’, which turns out to be their last ever British gig at Brixton Academy …” she says. “Obviously, I thought it was great and they were lovely … and it was brilliant. But now I’d be: ‘Oh my God, do you know they’re music history?’”
Maybe her younger self didn’t do so badly. “I look back now and I feel terrified about all the things that I did. But also more forgiving towards myself because I was so young,” she says. “Everyone’s an idiot when they’re 16.”
You can see why Woman’s Hour thrilled at the idea of Laverne. She is the go-to woman for cutting the familiar with edge, all while making her listeners feel understood. But she also has a reputation for mischief. “Definitely, I’m mischievous,” she nods, with that funny halfway smile she sometimes has, like a smile doing a u-turn. Late Night Woman’s Hour has been billed as slightly naughty. “Intimate,” the press release says. It is recorded at night. There is wine. Forthcoming topics include birth, anger and masturbation. The very name “Late Night Woman’s Hour” seems subversively oxymoronic.
Laverne used the phrase “alternative culture” earlier to describe the atmosphere of her house growing up, but now that she has become so prolific, does she still consider herself alternative? She appears less comfortable hearing the word said by someone else. “Well, I don’t think anybody sits down and goes: ‘I am part of alternative culture’. It is … I hate to use the word ‘problematic’, but it is a problematic word, ‘alternative’: what does it really mean? But yes, in the broadest sense.”
Does she worry that she has been co-opted by the mainstream? Even 6 Music is no longer an underdog, with its record 2.2m listeners a week, a growth to which she has brilliantly contributed. Can a station that the prime minister’s wife enjoys really be considered alternative? “I think all of our listeners are very welcome,” she says, and it is typical of her that the sentence manages to sound both sincere and ironic.
Then there is The Pool, for which Laverne blogs as well as being broadcast director. On air, Laverne lives on her wits. She is fast and funny. But on The Pool, her wisdom can seem conventional, even a little preachy. “Ties can secure you as well as bind you.” “Wildness is all around us if we look for it.” That kind of thing.
“Well, I’m not sure about that,” she says quietly. “I suppose it is a little bit … every different broadcast, whether it’s online or writing … it’s like being in a different room. If we were having this conversation in a club at two in the morning, if we were round the corner in a noisy cafe, it would be different.”
But I wonder how broad The Pool is. The staff list of 22 shows mostly white faces. “We haven’t updated that page. We’re about to update it,” Laverne says, adding that the site is going through another funding round and when it is recruiting, diversity will be “the first thing on our minds”.
All of this matters because Laverne defines herself as a broadcaster, and the “broad” part of the word is important to her. Every job she has done has been broadcast, she says, with the possible exception of Kenickie – but even there it was always about “the lyrics and the writing”. Her voice is the thread that stretches from those early days of performance to now. And the kind of voice she wants, she says, is friendly, intelligent – and inclusive.
Maybe that is why she manages to blend so many apparently contradictory interests – an indie kid who is also the perfect fit for children’s TV. Even her look, hair flicking up at the ends, is at once groomed and untamed. She is a culturally liminal figure – cultish but inclusive, with niche interests and a broad education, a working-class background and middle-class perks, happy reading Nietzsche yet with Terry Wogan as a sort of tonal mentor. “Ohhh!” she cries. “Merely to touch the hem of his robe …” And, of course, equally at home in London and Sunderland. That is, as she says, “the stew of everything, who I am”.
Late Night Woman’s Hour is on Friday 25 March at 11pm on BBC Radio 4
