This week we caught up with our campus celebrity: Holly Tuxworth, one half of the livewire radio duo who have launched a growing petition to get Taylor Swift to grace the LCR with her presence and to party like she’s 22 with the UEA students.
The petition was launched less than two days ago and already has more than 500 signatures. Despite starting as a joke, the chances of Swift partying with us are becoming more and more likely, especially with the backing of UEA’s own Greg James. We were excited enough about the seven-time Grammy winner being confirmed as an act for BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend, but the prospect of shaking it out with TayTay on the LCR dance floor is just too much to handle!
We sat down with one of the brains behind the idea: Holly Tuxworth, to find out a little bit more…
Name: Holly Tuxworth
Degree: Psychology
Hometown: Orpington
Describe yourself in three words: “Need more words!”
Favourite UEA memory:
“There’s too many to count! But probably the best day was last year’s UEA Pimp my Barrow event – a massive event for charity which basically involves a lot of day drinking, themed wheel barrows, and very dedicated fancy dress…so all very Norwich!”
What kind of music are you into?
“Well I guess I quite like Taylor Swift…Quite a variety of stuff though. I particularly love a bit of indie stuff, acoustic & rock though too, and you can’t go wrong with a bit of pop punk…no shame!”
How did you come up with the change.org petition to get Taylor Swift to the LCR?
“My friend Dan and I have a radio show on our university station, Livewire 1350, and we’ve had a bit of a running joke about how we would love Taylor to come to the LCR…even before Radio 1’s Big Weekend was announced (so back when she didn’t know where Norwich was apparently…) we joked about starting a petition to get Taylor to visit the LCR, and made a ‘Welcome to New York’ Norwich parody. We started talking about Big Weekend on the show this week and Dan half-jokingly set up the change.org page whilst we were on air, because why not! Although we would obviously have loved it to work, we didn’t expect to get so many signatures so quickly, and basically as soon as we’d tweeted the link, we got a response from Greg James, with a cheeky hint that he’d see what he could do! Not ashamed to say there was screaming in the studio at that point from both me and Dan (sorry Dan)… Greg James is like UEA royalty though, so that was a major boost for us!”
Were you expecting it to get this much attention?
“Not at first, no! We’d obviously hoped it would do well and reach Taylor, but it wasn’t until Greg James tweeted us that we realised there was quite a potential to make it happen! Good old Greg.”
Do you think there’s a chance that your petition might work and that Swift could grace the LCR?
“I think so, yes! We’ve had quite a lot of attention about it already, and we only started the petition yesterday, so I’d like to think that the people of UEA/Norwich/the internet can help us reach Taylor and convince her to attend a classic LCR night! We’re going to pull out all the stops to make it happen – for me and Dan it would be an amazing end to our degrees as we’re both just about to graduate, so seeing Taylor Swift live in our student union would be a pretty memorable way to end our 3 years here!”
What are your personal plans for the future?
“Well, if this happens to reach Greg James I wouldn’t mind a job in radio!”
Why should HC readers tune into your livewire radio show?
“Because it’s all good fun with some great music thrown in there! We play quite a variety of music (including a fair bit of Taylor of course), and generally have a lot of fun…we usually discuss the weirdest news stories of the week, and come up with a lot of features, mostly to do with music, campus shenanigans or student life…there’s always a lot to chat about!”
“Tune on to Livewire 1350…our show is on Wednesdays from 12-2 but all of the shows are fabulous, so go listen!”
Access Holly and Dan’s radio show here: http://livewire1350.com/