Thinking Metal Music

Bridges 83 : Air date : 9th May 2026 @ 1900 hours

The eighty third edition of Bridges, Radio Northumberland's show dedicated to electronic & alternative music will air at 1900 hours on 9th May 2026.

• Part One : Loud
• Bush, Bullet Holes (John Wick 3, Parabellum OST)
• Gary Numan, Dead Sun Rising
• MarqElectronica, Be There
• Kraftwerk, Computer Love [live 1981]
• GUNSHIP, Weaponised Love
• CLAN OF XYMOX, Lockdown
• After Cooking x INTI AVINA, Tamasuk
• Garbage, Theres No Future In Optimism
• Ghostbird, Lost Eden
• Divine Shade, Show Me The Way
• TinGun, This Conversation (Moving Parts Remix)
• AfterCooking x Blue Man Group, Things
• Uranium Saint, Where’s Planet X?

• Part Two : Louder
• Kraftwerk, The Telephone Call
• Ghostbird, Journey of a Lifetime
• Chilled With The Ghost, The Pleasure Skin
• Garbage, I Think Im Paranoid
• All The Emptiness, Hearts Against Minds
• Last Of Eden, Monsters & Miracles
• CLAN OF XYMOX, Blood Of Christ
• MarqElectronica, Waiting
• Sean Burke, Recnac
• Japan, Quiet Life
• Bush, The Chemicals Between Us

Bridges 82 : Air date : 4th April 2026 @ 1900 hours

The eighty second edition of Bridges, Radio Northumberland's show dedicated to electronic & alternative music will air at 1900 hours on 4th April 2026.

• Part One : Loud
• Visage & Depeche Mode, Fade To Grey / Everything Counts (Matt One Mashup)
• The Sisters of Mercy, Black Planet
• Catherine Elms, Are friends Electric (cover)
• Magnetic Skies , Back To Life
• Mesh, This World
• Nordic Giants, Torus
• Peter Gabriel, Shock the Monkey (Plissken remix)
• Robert Miles, Children (DJ Roach Remix / Cover)
• Magnetic Skies, Everything’s Alright
• Rafael Saez, Rain

• Part Two : Louder
• Nordic Giants, Faceless ft Alex Hedley
• Gunship, Postcard from the American Dream
• Gunship, When you grow up your heart dies
• David bowie, America (Cover)
• Magnetic Skies, Not a Fire
• Thomas Dolby, Europa And The Pirate Twins
• Japan, European Son [Single Mix]
• Dreams, Fleetwood Mac (DJ Roach Ethereal Hypnotic Melodic rework)
• Ultravox, Hosanna (In Excelsis Deo)
• Tangerine Dream, The Comfort Zone
• Nordic Giants, Undertow

Bridges 81 : Air date : 1st March 2026 @ 1900 hours

The eighty first edition of Bridges, Radio Northumberland's show dedicated to electronic & alternative music will air at 1900 hours on 1st March 2026.

• Part One : Loud
• Aha, The Sun always shines on TV
• Peter Murphy, Cuts YouUp
• Faux Tales, Ascent (Live at Parkonia, 2025)
• Nine Inch Nails - As Alive As You Need Me To Be
• Glen Alexander, No Brakes
• Pet Shop Boys, West End Girls (40th Anniversary remix)
• Grey Disco, Shadow Of A Dream
• Ultravox, Mr X / Western Promise
• Gary Numan, Here In The Black (Original Demo)

• Part Two : Louder
• David Bowie, Scary Monsters (& Super Creeps)
• Ultravox, Astradyne
• Frenchy and the Punk, Cities in Dust (Cover)
• Glen Alexander, The Strangest Things
• Propaganda. Pmachinery
• Aha, True North
• Sick Robot, Levitation
• Faux Tales, Beacon (Live at Parkonia, 2025)
• Grey Disco, Vigil
• Pet Shop Boys, Opportunities (Let’s make lots of Money)
• Frenchy and the Punk, Dark Carnivale
• Sisters of Mercy, Dominion
• Pet Shop Boys, Always on my Mind

Bridges 80 : Air date : 7th February 2026 @ 1900 hours

The eightieth edition of Bridges, Radio Northumberland's show dedicated to electronic & alternative music will air at 1900 hours on 7th February 2026.

• Part One : Loud
• Simple Minds, Theme for great cities
• Nine Inch Nails / Depeche Mode, Meet your master / barrel-of-a-gun Mash up
• The Singularity, Not A Machine
• Grant Beasley, Planets I Never Leave
• Volbeat, Shotgun Blues
• Nanobots, Cut Existence
• Gary Nnuman / Depeche Mode, The Seed of a Lie / Stripped (Matt One 2026 mashup)
• Mesh, Exile
• The Devout, World in my Eyes (Cover)
• Ultravox & Propaganda, White China / The Chase (Matt One Mashup

• Part Two : Louder
• David Bowie, Scary Monsters (& Super Creeps)
• David Bowie, Dead Man Walking
• David Bowie, Hallo Spaceboy
• David Bowie, I'm Afraid Of Americans
• Uranium Saints, Flying Over Blue Waters (Live)
• Grant Beasley, Echo Chamber
• Mesh, Exile
• David Bowie, The Stars (Are Out Tonight)
• Halsey, I am not a Woman, I’m a God (Modest mix)
• Ladytron, Playgirl
• David Bowie, Starman
• David Bowie, Space Oddity

Submission Guidelines (updated 10-Jan-25)

Here are a rough set of guidelines for submitting tracks to Bridges

1. First and foremost, we aim to be a family-friendly show. We don’t play tracks which a have strong sexual theme. End of. If your track features an explicit video then we won’t play your track. This is non-negotiable.Our audience includes children and young adults, and we need to adhere to OFCOM rules and guidelines once we have our DAB licence.

2. Don’t send us files. If you send me a 100Mb AIFF file of your latest hit then I’ll blacklist you and you won’t ever hear from us again. Send us a link to your file on Youtube or Soundcloud or, better still, a code for Bandcamp. Please do not send us Spotify links. We do not endorse, support or encourage the use of Spotify. If Spotify feels like paying its artists a reasonable amount of money in exchange for their use of our music then this policy will change. Until then, Spotify can get stuffed.

3. We don’t play tracks by a small number of artists simply because these artists have already been blacklisted. They know who they are.

4. The programme concentrates on a mix of Dark Electro, Machine Rock and Alternative. Basically, we play what we like and what we enjoy, as well as artists who, we feel, deserve to be heard by a wider audience. In particular, we’re interested in those artists who are having a really hard time getting noticed. Guess what? We were in the same boat when we started out. Got a hard-luck story? Tell us all about it.

5. Do NOT send us AI music

Please do not submit AI-generated music for consideration. We won't play it. End of story. I've already explained why on air but, for the sake of completeness, I'll repeat myself.

AI is still pretty dumb. AI pretends to be human. AI pretends to have feelings and emotions. Some algorithms have even passed the Turing Test so I guess that makes them human, right? No, it doesn't. AI music is hollow and empty and cannot create something genuinely new. Not yet anyway. Worse, certain organisations are using AI to generate music that they own. They create artist profiles that are entirely fake just to feed their own shitty businesses. They don't want to pay musicians. Musicians cost money and Joe Public will soak this shit up because they don't know any different. We're opposed to this. Strongly. I don't get paid for producing Bridges. I do it because I love music. AI companies do not love music. They love the money and that's all.

So don't send us AI music. Don't be part of the problem.

If you send us AI music and it's obviously AI music, and worse, you then insist that it's your own work then you're just a liar and I reserve the right to take the piss and humiliate you and your shitty tunes on air. I will ridicule your work and show you up for the miserable charlatan that you are. You have been warned.

The Music we play

So long as the piece is fundamentally electronic or alternative, your musical style is unimportant - content and context is paramount.

Length - the majority of the pieces we play are between three and six minutes in duration although we do, on occasion, play longer tracks. I think the longest so far was around fifteen minutes. However, If your track involves fifty minutes of long slow aimless meandering before getting to a vague and nebulous conclusion then sorry, Bridges is probably not for you.

We won’t play noise tracks. If your track is just five minutes of car alarms going off or an hour of filter-swept noodling then this programme is not for you.

We do play ambient, usually as part of our Sleepy-time thread. It's proven extremely popular, too.

We don’t play drones mostly because I DO NOT LIKE THEM. Our aim is to keep the listener entertained and engaged, and to provide the backdrop to their Saturday night. We do not want our listeners to switch over to another station. Careful, detailed precise scientific analysis has clearly demonstrated that nearly every scientient being in the Universe would rather gnaw its own foot off than listen to another artfully crafted three hour drone track. So, no... Don’t.

You Sir, are not metal.

We like our metal. We like our punk. We love our guitars. How heavy will we go? We don’t know. Try us. However, if it sounds like a Machine Gun blasting off two hundred rounds a minute with lyrics that appear to have been written by a hoard of Satan’s more playful minions then we’re unlikely to give it airtime. Fans of Norwegian Death Metal and Des O’Connor’s later works should look elsewhere.

Quality

We’re not massively bothered if you gift wrap your latest release in a roll of newspaper that’s been at the bottom of the cat’s litter tray for a month or if you stick it in a Jiffy bag with around a dozen or so nice, crisp ten pound notes. Art is subjective and we’re not critics. However, we do insist that you pay attention to the quality and format of your recording.

We must be able to read your files. It's not important if your track has been artfully rendered in glorious 24-bit, 96kHz pro audio or just hacked together with bits of old cassette tape. What matters is that we can import it easily into our audio system (Logic Pro X running on Apple Mac). Our shows are rendered and exported as 320 kps MP3 files so the source is not hugely important. WAV, AIFF or MP3 files are ideal. We can deal with other formats if we have to but we’d rather not. If it will take two hours to import and edit your Meisterwerk into Logic then we’ll probably just replace your track with something by Rammstein or Rick Astley. Your choice really, bubs.

Recording levels are very important. If the levels are so low that they’re barely above the noise floor then we cant play it. Similarly, if your levels were recorded at such a level that the waveform is just a dense wall of black that hits 0dB 100% of the time then... No. I probably won’t even look at it. I have no desire to blow my speakers out. Or my ears.

One final word - If you do send us something then it's very, very important that you send us your best possible work. If it's not your best possible work then why are you sending it?

We play the music we like. We play the music we think our audience will like. Our aim is to build an audience that keeps coming back to the show week after week, year after year. We want to develop and support a community of musicians, a scene, in the North East of England that is second to none because we believe we have a deep, deep well of highly skilled, very talented musicians and bands in this part of the world that deserves to be heard. We’re not partisan.

We’re also happy to work hand-in-hand with other radio shows within this region to develop and enhance the scene.

Great, you made it this far. Still want to send us something? Even better.

You can contact Thinking Metal Music by clicking here:

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Talk soon,
David