Welcome to No Tags!
No Tags is a podcast and newsletter from Chal Ravens and Tom Lea chronicling underground music culture.
Who are we?
Based in London, Chal Ravens and Tom Lea are club music lifers who like to think they’ve been fighting dance music’s good fight since the late 2000s.
Since meeting through mutuals in the heyday of Kingsland Road clubbing, we worked together editing FACTmag.com in the early-to-mid 2010s, building one of the web’s best outposts for cutting-edge club music and beyond.
Post-FACT, Chal became one of the most acclaimed freelancers on the circuit, her bylines a fixture in The Wire, The Guardian, Pitchfork and Dazed, and is currently head of audio at Novara Media, creating lefty podcasts about politics, history and culture. Tom, meanwhile, created an award-winning independent record label in Local Action, and has managed and worked with countless key artists in the fields of dance music, R&B, grime and more.
Why No Tags?
In short, we got sick of moaning about the lack of coverage and quality interviews with some of the figures that we think are doing God’s work in this niche music sphere we inhabit, and decided to Be The Change instead. The name is a tribute to the Blogspot and mp3-sharing era that essentially birthed the pair of us — R.I.P. Dat Piff.
So… what is it?
No Tags is an interview-based podcast where we talk to the artists and industry figures we think deserve more recognition, hearing their stories and getting deep into the weeds with them about what’s going on in music, culture and the rest of it. Each episode comes accompanied with an edited, written version of the interview, accompanied by a playlist from our guest.
How does the paid tier work?
Look, the main reason we’re doing this is to chronicle culture in the way we believe it warrants. The main episodes are always going to remain free, and our priority is people listening and reading rather than paying.
However, if you do want to support what we’re doing, the paid tier of No Tags on Substack costs £5 a month. Paid subscribers (aka the No Tags hard crew) get access to bonus content that we’re going to start rolling out in 2024. This might be bonus podcast episodes, it might be blog posts, some transcripts from our extensive personal interview archives… who knows, Chal might even bring back the mix round-up. We’ll figure it out, it’s a work in progress.
We don’t have any sponsors or backers and are funding No Tags ourselves, so any money we make from Substack goes straight back into the show.
Where can I listen?
Everything will live right here on Substack — however, you can listen to main episodes at the usual podcast apps (Apple Podcast, Spotify, Overcast etc), as well as SoundCloud. You can follow us on Instagram.
Anything else I need to know?
No Tags is a work in progress. The current aim is to release an episode every other Tuesday and we’ve stockpiled a few already, but that — plus what we do with bonus content, or even the way we release them — could always change in the future. It’s a journey: strap in and enjoy the ride!
Credits
Branding: All Purpose
Theme music: Jennifer Walton