By Kate Radojkovic& Konstantinos Nicolas Kouvaras (CNK) From the beginning … Where have you been all this time? Hahaha, I have always been here. Some people think I went back to the UK. No chance! I have been in Cyprus since 1994 making music, teaching, writing, being a father, DJing, doing radio shows, walking the dog. Those who know, know, those who don’t… don’t! Why do you think people have that impression of you? Now if you posed the question differently, say like, where have you been, you are no longer on TV or doing radio shows in Cyprus then maybe it would make sense. What do you mean? Well I have not done a TV show, as in presenting one since around 1998, around the time my son was born. I was on SIGMA TV, doing fairly well when one fine day a manager told me they had to out the show to do ‘Pare Pente’! Ok I thought, time to move on. . I never really felt I was a TV person. I have a face for Radio 😊 I found TV stressful and frankly, back then very badly paid. The kind of TV I would like to make costs money and local TV stations have different priorities like tacky soap operas and blasé sitcoms. As far as radio goes, I have never really stopped. In one way of another, with a few intermissions I have been doing radio since 1980 when I was a student at Essex University. I got off air in Cyprus, as in a land-based station around 10 years ago, I was on Astra then. I feel all local stations marginalize the music I play, which is Reggae. And most of them now have a play list of basically the same songs content wise. Very few stations have actual DJ’s. There are some exceptions on Astra, Kanali 6, and say a legend like Robert Camasa on CyBC, but most people in my mind know very little about music. So this last decade I have been on internet stations around the world. I am not sure how many I have been on. It has been a quiet a journey. I am now on a station called Nice Up Radio in the USA. It’s a wicked net-based Reggae station @ www.niceupradio.com. Usually my show is done form the studio but inder COVID-19 Lockdown I do it from home on a laptop. How do you make a radio show from home on a laptop? Easy, plug in the mic, open software, start recording and edit. I know it's not the same thing as the studio but there are so many things you can do in a program like Reaper, which is what I use for editing my shows. It's amazing how so much can be done online. You mentioned teaching earlier on, how and when did you start doing that? Around the time I stopped doing TV 😊 I had just finished my PhD in 1997. A friend of mine, Andreas Panayiotou, who was lecturing at Frederick called me and asked me if I wanted to teach. We met down town at OXI round about. I said yes. He said you start next week! I was teaching Cyprus History. It was a challenge for me, but in many ways, I was drawn into teaching, it's something I liked because I had one or two inspirational teachers at school and university.   What do you mean? Well I have not done a TV show, as in presenting one since around 1998, around the time my son was born. I was on SIGMA TV, doing fairly well when one fine day a manager told me they had to out the show to do ‘Pare Pente’! Ok I thought, time to move on. I never really felt I was a TV person. I have a face for Radio 😊 I found TV stressful and frankly, back then very badly paid. The kind of TV I would like to make costs money and local TV stations have different priorities like tacky soap operas and blasé sitcoms. As far as radio goes, I have never really stopped. In one way of another, with a few intermissions I have been doing radio since 1980 when I was a student at Essex University. I got off air in Cyprus, as in a land-based station around 10 years ago, I was on Astra then. I feel all local stations marginalize the music I play, which is Reggae. And most of them now have a play list of basically the same songs content wise. Very few stations have actual DJ’s. There are some exceptions on Astra, Kanali 6, and say a legend like Robert Camasa on CyBC, but most people in my mind know very little about music. So this last decade I have been on internet stations around the world. I am not sure how many I have been on. It has been a quiet a journey. I am now on a station called Nice Up Radio in the USA. It’s a wicked net-based Reggae station @ www.niceupradio.com. Usually my show is done form the studio but inder COVID-19 Lockdown I do it from home on a laptop. How do you make a radio show from home on a laptop? Easy, plug in the mic, open software, start recording and edit. I know it's not the same thing as the studio but there are so many things you can do in a program like Reaper, which is what I use for editing my shows. It's amazing how so much can be done online. You mentioned teaching earlier on, how and when did you start doing that? Around the time I stopped doing TV 😊 I had just finished my PhD in 1997. A friend of mine, Andreas Panayiotou, who was lecturing at Frederick called me and asked me if I wanted to teach. We met down town at OXI round about. I said yes. He said you start next week! I was teaching Cyprus History. It was a challenge for me, but in many ways, I was drawn into teaching, it's something I liked because I had one or two inspirational teachers at school and university. You went to school in England, you grew up there, was you born there? What was it like going to school there? I was born in Cyprus, Marathovouno, Me-sar-ka. I am a CBC not a BBC. That whole abbreviation started in our dorms at Essex University in the 1980s. BBC = British Born Cypriot. CBC = Cypriot Born Cypriot. I knew I was different from the first day I arrived at school when I was about 5, that was around 1965. School was not easy being an outsider, from another country, in the mid 60s in North East London. It was hard adapting and surviving in school. I’d say I got my best experiences, outside of a great Sociology teacher called Mr. Clark, in college and University. That’s where I developed more intellectually, you had more freedom there, more choice, and University particularly, Essex University, which as a campus was like a small utopia for me. That’s where I first got into so many things like radio and music.  How did that happen and when? Well music I had kind of been into from a younger age, so I started buying and collecting records from about 1977, before that what I heard was in my brother's collection, stuff like ‘Abraxas’ by Santana, Stevie Wonder’s ‘InnerVisions’, James Brown’s ‘Make it Funky’. In terms of DJing proper, I got into that around 1979/80 my first year at University by initially doing private parties, and getting on University Radio Essex, URE, the campus station. I loved doing radio from back then. I had a show 5 days a week at one point. It was fun. A different environment technology wise, no internet, just an internal ohone system, where students called you up. We had some amazing times in that pokey little URE studio. I also got involved with the ENTS society, responsible for hosting concerts. Met and saw so many bands in those 5 years. The Specials, The Pretenders, Osibisa, Misty In Roots, Orange Juice, Level 42, so many more. Every week there was a couple of gigs. My role was usually on the stage door. So I got to hear and see the gigs from the back of the stage. I liked that feeling of being on a stage, even at the back of it. I also started to DJ more at those bigger events, which were way more challenging playing to 800 people. But that’s where I got my first taste of the DJ bug. From around 1980 I got much more into Reggae, more so Dub than anything else. With some mates, Skev, my oldest friend who I have known since school, and Donald Mack, we made societies like ‘Reggae Appreciation Society and ‘Black Music Appreciation Society’ and hosted out own dances events. That was a lot of fun, a lot of work too, but with very little money. We ended up usually with at most a fiver or a tenner in our collective pockets at the end of the night after paying for hiring the gear. Madness when you look back at it. But a tenner was worth a lot more in say 1981 than it is today. So when and how did you become known as Haji Mike? Who gave you that name as a DJ? That’s a story. My Greek friend Giorgos from Patra, and Donald, from Jamaica via London, at one of these Reggae parties we used to host one day came up with names for all the DJ’s. I was last, so one of them said, Haji, the other said Mike. My Greek friend said ‘Hazti Mike’ and it stuck from then. Haji had been my nickname for a long time. So all these Greeks the next day on campus started to shout my name from the high-rise student dorms!  So was you famous from back then? No, on campus, fame was irrelevant. We just had good times. You can’t call yourself famous on a campus of say 3000 people. But I was active, involved in The Cypriot Society, all the music societies, the campus radio station, concerts, politics. Essex also had a few people much more famous than me back then. Like who? Yianis Varoufakis, Ben Okri, John Bercow And you knew them all? Well I knew Varoufakis and Ben Okri very well. Bercow, who have much more respect for nowadays was a hardened extreme-right Tory back then, I didn’t know him, only when he made speeches at student union meetings. Where he would often say the biggest chioftes! So you were involved with politics as well Yes, I was actually quite a radical leftie back then. I went to a lot of National Union of Students Conferences. I think those experiences made me realize how dirty, corrupt politics is and how I was not really made for it. Politics is a beast, it's like a plague. It can cloud our thoughts, blind our intellect even. But at the same time, I realized that politics gave me a sense of conviction, ideals, things to fight against and it also gave me a right to express myself. Essex activism taught me so much about the world, things were different then. People had a sense of solidarity. We stood up time and time again during campaigns like The Miner’s Strike, The Steel Workers Strike, Anti-Nuclear marches/CND, anti-racism, campaigns against police harassment and racist immigration bills. Organized politics though, political parties, I’d say I got disillusioned with them a bit later on because they were and remain so corrupt. Politics both took something from my life but it also gave me so much in terms of understanding things around the world, and in Cyprus. Talking of Cyprus, you always seem to have this attachment with the island...how far back does that go, how frequently did you come here? I was torn / taken from Cyprus in 1964 after the intercommunal conflict flared up. My family had left in 1960, as a baby I was too young to travel with them so the first 4 years of my life was spent in Marathovouno with my grandparents. I always felt more Cypriot than British. Although I’d say I never really felt at home anywhere. Why is that? Because in varying degrees I have always been treated as an outsider as a ‘foreigner’ by how I look, the colour of my skin or how I speak a language. As people say in Cyprus ‘fakka h glossa sou’ and I have come to the admission to reply ‘Fakka o nous sou’. That feeling of being different will always follow us people who have been born here but grown/lived somewhere else. Wherever we have lived, in diaspora, whoever you are, whether here or there, there is always this sense of marginalization. Would you say you even feel that way now? Not as much as say in the early 1990s but yes, I don’t think there is this integration of people in Cypriot society. No matter who you are, with varying degrees, you feel different. Of course, I felt that even more in the UK. Even when I attended my first graduation at Essex the Dean announcing our names got mine completely wrong, he mispronounced the ‘Haj’ making it ‘Haaaaaj’imichael which made most of the people who knew me at the graduation laugh. But home is where you make it for yourself, and I accepted that in 1994 when I came back to Cyprus for good. So going back to original question, yes, I always had a strong bond with Cyprus. I came here many times as a student. Every summer more or less for a few years in the 1980s. And music brought me back eventually. When was that? 1992, and 1993 summer time. I came here to promote my singles ‘Mousiki’ and ‘Stavroulla’ and then ‘Vragaman’ and after that, whooooosh, so much changed. I then decided to repatriate, come back. Around this time I met Marina, my partner, we got married a few years later. I was very lucky, Marina was also a DJ and song writer and by about 1994 we came back for good. So we settled here permanently together.   Do you ever regret that? Nope, not in terms of where I prefer to live. I do miss some things. London, the UK in general is vibrant musically, there is so much happening, so many opportunities, so many music friends and family. At the same time though, London was a rat race, 24/7. The pace was becoming way too hyper for me, too cut throat and I really wanted to come back and contribute to the music scene here. What do you feel about that scene here, how has it changed, developed, moved on since then? It’s funny on the one hand back then it was easier with a few connections to get on radio, TV, in magazines, create some noise. I think now those kinds of media have become more cliquey, less representative of local musicians, unless they are playing a fiddle and singing chattista. The traditional thing has become so cliché today, so corny. At the same time, we have the internet, you can connect with people locally and all over the world, and generally I think more people are doing music, djing, doing their own thing now more than ever. Today we have more clearly defined music sounds and scenes, in the early 1990s it wasn't really like that. People are making internet radio, which for me is the best thing that ever happened to radio in modern times. Why do you think internet radio is the best? Simple, it’s free from the fascism of play lists and play list makers who realistically know very little about music, but they just think hits/loyalty and playing music that is a disposable and as unhealthy, in terms of brain food, as a McDonalds double quarter pounder with all the extras. Yes ‘Gangham Style’ is music, it is entertainment, but it's also so disposable, simple and uncreative. So online radio is more about the freedom principle. The right to select music, to talk about it, to share stuff from around the world. To give people real time on air. It's also one of the subjects I teach, because I see internet radio as radically different, just as different as online journalism and blogging, and Youtubers making their own content for people instead of people being spoon fed form TV. We live in an age of creativity, where people are, as Professor David Gauntlett says ‘making and doing’ rather than ‘sitting back and being told’ what to watch and hear. So tell us a bit more about Haji Mike the teacher Well first of all in that capacity I am Dr. Mike Hajimichael Associate Professor, and Head of the Department of Communications (from April 2020) at The University of Nicosia. I have been teaching now for about 23 years, I am not sure how many students I have taught in total, it must be quite a lot. As an academic and as a researcher I teach courses on Radio, Media Literacy, Persuasion and the Media, Pop Music (one of my favourites) and Internet Radio, which as far as I know is the only course of its kind in Universities in Cyprus. Academia like music has taken me all around the world, not so much with sounds, but with books, articles, conferences. As a teacher, I don’t know, guess you have to ask my students what they think. I’d like to think my job is to open doors in people’s minds, to unlock people’s potential, and to be facilitator, to give people access to tools to make, to create, express themselves, and to question things more, because we live in times of fakeness, disappointment, and confinement. I was wondering when we would get on the subject of COVID-19 and the Lockdown... Well in many ways we are tired of it, tired of how we have been living these last few weeks, how our lives, the world over has been turned upside down. It’s surrealistic. I walk my dog every morning at 7am, the dual carriageway at the end of my road would normally have traffic all the way up to the roundabout but there was not one soul on the road. Just my dog and me. It did feel a bit like a scene out of one of those type of Will Smith movies where it just him and his dog. I feel cheated by the system, which we have all bought into, the whole world over. We pay our taxes, we educate our kids, we abide by so many laws, rules and regulations and yet all these governments, all these states around the world could not contain this deadly dreadful COVID-19 nightmare. They could not all come together to save so many lives? I don’t buy it. I don’t get it! At the same time, I am not into the conspiratorial approaches online. I think something is fundamentally wrong when humanity has become so toxic, so angry. Some people don’t want to listen to any form of reason. They just sit at home all day, online, trolling people who have a different view on social media. When you say YES I have to say NO. Not because I am right but because you are wrong, but you know, who knows how this evil thing happened, how it transmuted from animals to humans. I don’t buy into the Chinese man ate a live bat in the market theory because that’s been happening for centuries, and why should I judge what people eat. We eat snails, some people freak out when I tell them that. And the whole 5G is the cause of COVID-19 is so unfounded, so false. Don’t misunderstand me, I am against 5G, I always have been, but it has nothing to do with Coronavirus. And while I am not a conspiracy theorist, I do however feel a Cambridge Analytica type scam is behind a lot of this fake news online, because obviously hits, clicks, shares online mean income. I do think we will be out of this soon though, and that’s what we should focus on, making and doing things, creating, using our time constructively, even under all these mad conditions.   So what have you been doing, how has your life changed? Well as a teacher, within 1 week my 4 courses this semester had to go online. That was a hard adjustment but as an organization, I believe The University of Nicosia was well prepared for this in terms of technological infrastructure, training and innovation. It has been difficult, more so for our students who had to adjust to things like not having studios to work in. So how did they overcome that? Laptops, mobile phones, and using them to the maximum of their creativity in their own environments. I must say I feel choked sometimes, emotionally, when students make work with such effort and compassion in these difficult times. We are all on this journey together, it's important we all realize that. Sitting here now pointing fingers, blaming each other and getting stressed is not healthy. We should be creative, make things and actually, do things. So creatively, musically, I have done lots of stuff these last few weeks. With my friend Kostas Margaritakis we’ve done an interpretation of Cavafy’s poem ‘Ithaki’. You can view and hear that here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To1jcrrEajw . It’s important to me to be doing these kinds of work, that uplift spirits, inspire people to do more things. With my longtime friend Med Dred from Strovolos we’ve done a song called ‘Dounia Felek - Vaomenoi Esso’ this one is for all of us in Lockdown in Cyprus. We’re making a clip for this soon, all online, with people from round the world sending their videos so we can edit it all together as a collaborative project. I just finished a song with producer Bernard O’neill based in France written by Simon Webster in Morocco, featuring some amazing vocals from his partner Mouna. That’s a Gnawa Reggae track. I also did a housey track with Dr Chrispy in Australia, that’s way out of my box, far out music. And of this stuff should be out there in one form or another soon. And all this was done online during lockdown? Yes all done virtually, online, through the internet over the last 2 weeks. I have been working like this with various people around the world since around 2007. Med Dred works like this too. He’s recently been working with Duckie Simpson in Jamaica, one of the founders of the legendary Black Uhuru band. We also work from the studio in Ayios Dometios, set up by our close friend and collaborator Dimi Morozov. Blind Dog Studios is our home. Our cave where we concoct all kinds of interesting sounds. And we hope to get back there soon, because like so many things it’s closed right now. Which is a good place to end...what's next Who knows what’s next? I’d like to believe at some point in the not too distant future we’ll be back to normal. Hopefully by June, although that normal will come back in stages. It's going to be a difficult time ahead of us. We will not go back to how we were. Many things will change. Normatively though we have to come together more as citizens of Cyprus and the world. I really feel the world is lacking in world leaders. We need much more solidarity and less dog eat dog, less war, more peace, less hatred, more understanding and compassion. And the people who have saved us through all this, the doctors, the nurses, the hospital staff, the ambulance drivers, they all need much more respect and reward across the world, where for the last couple of decades they have been treated like second class citizens through austerity, cuts and privatization schemes. The future has to be for all of us, every single one of us, and not for just ‘us’ and ‘them’ - the people who have. And those who have not. The future should be for everyone.... Thank you, Mike, when lockdown is finally over, we should do a TV program that we should call… “Haji Mike on the mike vs Haji Mike on the air.”
Comments are closed.
|
|
Cylife.org Interactive Media Consultancy (Est. 1997) All Rights Reserved 2024 ©
|