Deb Grant and Nathan Shepherd: Making the BBC Glastonbury magic happen

The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Arts is getting ready to welcome an eye-watering 200,000 or so people across the 1,500 acres of Worthy Farm. And the only thing as gargantuan as this green metropolis of a festival is the BBC’s comprehensive and all-encompassing television and radio coverage of Glasto; BBC One, Two, and the free iPlayer streaming service provide live sets across the festival’s weekend and a number of its main stages, including the Pyramid, Other, West Holts, and Woodsies stages.

Taking a venerable army of a production crew to achieve this feat, a sizable host of the BBC’s top radio and television presenting talent descends upon Somerset, with last year’s coverage including Lauren Laverne, Clara Amfo, and Nick Grimshaw. As soon as a live set ends, the coverage will cut back to the presenters, discussing what they’ve just seen, the rumours flying around the festival, and also interviewing the lineup’s artists and hosting exclusive live sessions.

Two vital cogs in the marathon presenting wheel are Deb Grant and Nathan Shepherd. Having spent two years presenting BBC 6 Music’s New Music Fix show with Tom Ravenscroft, Grant has recently been joined by new co-host Nathan Shepherd. This also means the pair have the golden ticket to Glastonbury 2025. Grant and Shepherd chat to Headliner about what we can expect from the BBC at Glastonbury this year. As if it wasn’t a hard enough life getting paid to attend Glasto, they join the Zoom call from Barcelona, where they are on presenting duties at the Primavera Music Festival.

Hello there! How are we feeling today?

Grant: I'm good. We're waking up in Barcelona today because we're here for Primavera. I'm feeling good. How are you doing, Nathan?

Shepherd: I'm good. Recovering from a wild night of DJing in Barcelona.

Deb, could you tell us about growing up in Dublin, getting into music, and how it all led you to broadcasting?

Grant: Growing up in Dublin was great. I left when I was 19, but the opportunities I had to immerse myself in music were pretty good. There were some great record shops in Dublin, which are still around. There was a brilliant pirate radio station that I used to listen to obsessively, which set the template for what I went on to do later. I was particularly obsessed with forcing the music that I liked onto other people, making mixed CDs for the common room at school and monopolising the car stereo and all of that.

I think it felt a bit ‘in the sky’ to imagine myself as a broadcaster. I'd been DJing since I was a young teenager, playing records, and I continued doing that when I moved to London. I came to London to study music, and then I got swept up working office jobs and DJing on the side. I didn't start the radio thing until I was in my late twenties, and even then, it was only a very casual thing. I'm not quite sure how this happened, but I'm very happy that it did.

And how about you, Nathan; could you tell us about your journey into BBC 6 Music?

Shepherd: I grew up in Stockport – still there! Same house, I’ve not fled the nest yet. Growing up, my mum and dad would play absolutely everything. I think I was about nine and I asked my dad, very bravely, ‘Dad, could you buy me a guitar, because I no longer want to play football?’ I think he was happy because he didn't want to drive me at seven in the morning on a Sunday to football games. I think the turning point for me is as a family, we'd always watch Jools Holland, and I saw Arctic Monkeys when they first played there.

From then on, I knew that I wanted to be a musician or get into music. I was in bands, and I did a bit of music in college. The radio thing came about after I started doing mashups of songs on TikTok during lockdown. They blew up a little bit. And that's how I came onto 6 Music’s radar. I started doing the Indie Forever show in 2023, and I’d never been on the radio before. So it's a bit of a mad journey. But I'm very thankful.

Some who are less familiar with the 6 Music playlist might think indie is the main genre the station plays, but it actually plays an enormous variety of genres. With that in mind, could you tell us a bit about the Indie Forever show?

Shepherd: 6 Music is a mad world of everything. But Indie Forever hones in on that classic noughties indie. The strap line at one point was: ‘solid gold, upbeat indie bangers.’ But it spans further as well: ‘80s, ‘90s, just celebrating indie music, indie musicians, and playing great tunes on a Friday night, nine to 11 pm.

Deb, you’ve only just welcomed Nathan onto the show as your new co-host. How has that been, and can you tell us a bit about the show?

Grant: Our first show together was two days ago, wasn't it? It feels like Nathan's been on the show forever. He's such a great communicator and broadcaster. He's so passionate about music, and he's coming at it from a musician's perspective, too. 

The show feels like such a big responsibility: to be that conduit for bringing new music into the station, introducing new artists to the listeners and to the rest of the network, potentially for those artists to get picked up and put on playlists. For them to be an artist who we're supporting throughout their whole journey. We play weird, experimental, electronic music, avant-garde stuff, jazz, country and folk, pop, hyper pop, and guitar music as well.

With Glastonbury 2025 fast approaching, what does the festival mean to you both?

Grant: I remember my sister going when she was 17. She came back and was telling me all her stories about the adventure she had at Glastonbury, and how she kissed two different boys in one day. I was 15 and like, ‘Oh my god!’ It just seemed like a fantasy land for anyone who cares about music. This will be my third time going, and my third time with the BBC. Not to labour the point, but it really is a pinch yourself kind of thing because you have access to all this incredible music. At 6 Music, we are a big family, but we're ships in the night often because we're all on different schedules. Glastonbury is one of those opportunities where we all just get to come together and hang out and appreciate this incredible festival.

Shepherd: I'm the same as Deb. I applied so many times. I tried to get tickets and never got them. My mates went in 2016 and I was so jealous. I applied with my band to try and play. And apparently, the way to get in is to be a presenter on 6 Music. It's such a magical place. There's definitely something either in the water or in the grass. Maybe it's in the dust. It's very dusty.

What does the week look like for you as presenters? Is it a case of trying to see the acts you want to see while also doing lots of presenting for 6 Music?

Grant: I'll be on air with Nathan for the whole week. The whole point of us being there is that you need to reflect what's happening at the festival on air for people who aren't there. You can’t have too strict an agenda of the artists that you want to see, because inevitably you get swept along in the crowd into some tent that you didn't realise existed. I have anxiety dreams all week at Glastonbury that I won't make it back to the studio in time. We definitely need to make sure that we're not just focused on the technical side of things, and that we're actually out there having the experience of being at Glastonbury, so we can talk about it on air.

And how about the New Music Fix show at Glasto in particular?

Grant: We'll be putting some live sets to air, and generally bands who are playing Glastonbury who've maybe come through the pipeline of the show. Not that we're taking responsibility for the success of certain bands, but I think we're definitely going to try and focus on putting people on air who are acts that will be familiar to regular listeners of the show. Because that's always really exciting, especially if you played a band's debut single, and now they're playing Glastonbury.

Nathan, you’re doing a live DJ set also — where can the revellers find you and what can they expect?

Me and Emily Pilbeam are going to be DJing the BBC Introducing Stage. I think it's half past midnight on Friday, going into Saturday. We did it last year, and we'd just been on air and then came off and went to the Introducing Stage, and we thought no one would be there, and that no one would want to listen to indie tunes when they're at Glastonbury. And then we got there, and it was packed. It was insane. So fingers crossed more of that this year.

Deb Grant and Nathan Shepherd present New Music Fix Daily on BBC Radio 6 Music (Monday – Thursday, 7-9pm) and will be taking their show to Glastonbury as part of the BBC’s broadcast of the festival on BBC iPlayer, TV, radio and BBC Sounds.

Image credits: BBC, Darren Skene