About

The Big Paws with Jon Bounds and Julia Gilbert on Rhubarb Radio (live: Saturday breakfast, 8am til 10am, and on listen again all week).

Life is fast, harsh and short, and the music you listen to is mostly awful. Take a break and listen to the show that promises to tell you something you didn’t know and play you a record you haven’t heard. And if you survive that it’ll probably be a bit of a laugh too. Jules and Jon pick roughly half the tunes each, so there’s no-one to blame. There’ll be interviews too, if we can persuade anyone to get up at 8am on a Saturday morning.

Heap abuse at us during the show, or the rest of the week at twitter.com/thebigpaws – your tweets may be read out on air if we work out a way to pronounce “OMG!!!111!!!”. Follow us there to get the  We’ll be live-tweeting our track list during the show, and straight afterwards we’ll have the track listing on this website too, along with loads of links to the stuff we’ve been talking about.

For those of you who think that 8am on a Saturday morning is a little bit obscene, you’ll be able to ‘listen again’ to the show at any time during the week. We’ll post the link here as soon as it’s available.

You can contact us at any time via our Twitter account (@thebigpaws) or by dropping us an email to hello@thebigpaws.co.uk.

Who are we?

Julia Gilbert

Julia is originally from ‘historic brickmaking town’, Buckley, in Welsh Wales – a strange place with lots of houses and not many shops, but it is home to the wonderful “Tivoli Ballrooms” aka “The Tiv” nightclub, where she must have seen literally hundreds of bands play over the years. She saw Oasis there when they were still relatively unknown and always regrets not buying the tour T-shirt that had “London > Paris > Buckley” on the back! She likes teaching Jon Welsh words, but he refuses to believe that Welsh is a real language. Her weirdest job to date was selling ice lollies on the Chester to Holyhead train line.

She has lived in Birmingham since 1997 and considers herself an ‘honorary Brummie’. Her day job is as a technical author, but she finds it difficult to take off her work head and can’t help correcting people’s spelling and grammar, much to their annoyance (sorry!).

She loves an extremely eclectic range of music and especially new music (she gets bored easily). She prefers music that is either really manic or really mellow (not middle-of-the-road). She was involved with student radio “Shout FM” while studying at John Moores Uni in Liverpool, has worked in a couple of record shops and has done a bit of DJing at parties and bars. She hates music snobbery and over-analysis and prefers to just judge music on what it sounds like. Her musical guilty pleasure is oldskool rave/happy hardcore

She loves dancing and many years ago started tap classes so that she could dance to drum ‘n’ bass. She also loves mucking about on the interwebs, looking at pictures of kittens and other cute furry things, and joining in the latest web and Twitter memes. She has a blog at www.catnipmusic.co.uk which she updates about once a year and you can find her on Twitter as @catnip.

Jon Bounds

Jon doesn’t like being called “the new Carl Chinn”, he really doesn’t, but he gets phoned up by the press every time anyone disses the Brummie accent and has to defend it. That’s because he runs Birmingham: It’s Not Shit and declared 27 July to be Talk Like a Brummie Day, but not because he has a Brummie accent, oh no. Musically he likes ELO, UB40, Stephen ‘Tin Tin’ Duffy, Apache Indian, and the theme from Boon, but he pretends to have a predilection for early 90s indie and the music that came out of Sun Studios, Memphis, in 1955-7. That, and Half Man Half Biscuit.

He’s been a football referee, venetian blind maker, cellar man, journalist and writer – he did all of those things to flesh out the author bio on his book jackets, but no-one published his novel. Since it was the New Testament transferred to seventies Birmingham and starred a thinly disguised Noddy Holder as Jesus, that might take some time. He now “dicks about on the internet for a living”, trying his best not to use the term “social media consultant”.

Stalk him online at thebounder.co.uk or on Twitter as @bounder.

Don’t worry, we won’t be playing this (that’s Jon singing, that is).