Edith Bowman: "There's not an ounce of frustrated musician in me"

These are the kind of revelations you surely only get in the Sunday Herald. (And just to ensure value for money, her quote also doubles up as a great tongue-twister as well. Go on - try to say "I was never a big Big Fun fan" five times in a row at speed. Tonight. In the pub. After five double Bacardis.)

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes. Big Fun. Edith Bowman. Not a fan.

If it's any consolation to Phil, Mark and Jason (you did remember Big Fun's real names, didn't you?), the reason the band came up in the first place is because they played a key role in Edith Bowman's musical education. In a way they're the reason we are talking here today.

Once upon a time Big Fun were the headline act at the Radio 1 Roadshow on Portobello beach, one of the first outdoor musical experiences Bowman, a 1970s kid, ever had. Apart, that is, from the odd Rod Stewart gig at Ibrox.

And at least she got to hear Rod Stewart. Big Fun, not so much. "You couldn't really hear anything because it wasn't like they brought an enormous PA system. But it was more about the shared experience with everyone. I just remember seeing that vast space and never seeing so many people in one space before."

The Radio 1 Roadshow was her first taste of the communal thrill, of music en plein air - even if she doesn't recall much about it.

"All I wanted was a mug basically." Did you get one? "Nah. Not till years later."

What she did get was a taste for the festival experience. She went to T in the Park in only its second year on work experience for Radio Forth (nabbing Kylie for an interview when the pint-sized Aussie superstar came out of the toilet), and since then she has been a festival regular. She's been going to a couple, at least, every summer - whether as TV presenter, as the other half of a regular festival performer (Tom Smith, frontman of English guitar band Editors in case you're not keeping up), or just as a plain and simple music fan.

Bowman has now written a book about her festival experiences. That's why she's in town today. To talk about it to an Aye Write audience. Edith Bowman's Great British Music Festivals is part memoir, part travel guide and part photo album. It is an enthusiast's book, the work of someone who clearly loves the festival experience.

Which raises the question, does she have a favourite? "Impossible to answer. I've been to so many. I get something different from each one. T in the Park almost gives me a real patriotic emotion because you see bands blown away by the reaction from that crowd. Glastonbury is an entity on its own and I think you have to put the effort in with Glastonbury. You have to be there for the whole duration. Latitude is just a wonderful cultural experience. You can be watching ballet one minute and then Alt J in the 6 Music tent."

Yes, well. Let's be up front about this. The prospect of Alt J is not going to get me rushing to Suffolk this summer. Or any other. But then I'm not sure what would.

Truth is, I have a problem with festivals. Mostly it's the fact that they take place outdoors. Often when it's raining. That and the fact that they require the use of portaloos ... all to watch bands you wouldn't pay to see at King Tut's.

In short I tend to side with Edwyn Collins whom I once saw interrupt singing The Campaign For Real Rock on Glasgow Green to make sure we got the import of the lyrics: "Yes, yes, yes, summer festival," he chanted. "The truly detestable summer festival." Later, as I shivered in the cold while forced to watch the Levellers I repeated his words like a mantra. In between moaning: "Can't we go home yet?"

This may be an age thing of course. Because back when I was young in the Dark Ages (or the early 1980s if you want to be pedantically chronological) no-one went to festivals. No-one you'd want to see played at festivals. Festivals were about as uncool as sunburn.

"It's what hippies went to," agrees Bowman. So what has changed, Edith? Why do people buy tickets in the depths of winter to spend their summer risking chemical toilets to watch bands you could see in the comfort of a covered venue any time of year?

"They've become part of our culture," she reckons. "I think that the public's love of music and live music is fed through that. A lot of those who go to festival, that's their only live music of the year. That's their fix. A lot of people use it as their holiday.

"If you're a 21-year-old there have always been festivals around. They don't know life without them."

You could say the same about Bowman. She's been to festivals heavily pregnant. She's been to festivals with a newborn baby, two weeks after giving birth by caesarian section. She's taken her older son Rudy to Glastonbury (four times). "Spike's too little. He's two. But he'll get to that stage as well." She's even taken her mum.

Is the festival experience different with kids, by the way? "I don't get drunk and go out and watch bands to the wee, early hours."

Good to know. She tells me about the C section story. About going to Glastonbury two weeks after Rudy was born. Why, I ask? "At the time I was so driven by, I guess, hormones and emotions and adrenaline that it didn't cross my mind to go, 'What the f*** are you doing, you idiot?' But then if I had the chance to go back and change it I wouldn't.

"He's come into this world to be part of our lives. And he's come to so much with us since then. I was covering for Dermot's show on Radio 2 a couple of weeks ago and he said, 'Can I come with you?' He just sits in the control room with Ben the producer and gets to press the odd button. He loves it."

Rudy and Spike's childhoods are clearly going to be different then than their mum's (even if Big Fun decide to reform a few years from now). Well, Dermot O'Leary wasn't on the radio back then.

In other words, the distance between her home town of Anstruther and introducing bands on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury is more than geographical.

Edith Bowman's family ran The Craw's Nest hotel in Anstruther. It's where she learned what work meant. "My mum is one of seven daughters and five of them, including my mum, and their husbands helped my granddad run the hotel and then, when he passed away, they ran the hotel. That's maybe where I got my work ethic from. In a family business you've got to put the work in. If you don't, the cogs don't run." The kind of background, in short, that means you'll be working two weeks after giving birth.

Even if she didn't really know what she wanted to do, growing up - as a teenager she applied to do a PE qualification and then didn't take the place up - Bowman knew she wanted to leave home. "I think you're either one of those people who's happy in the nest or you fly the coop."

She got her first radio job at Radio Forth, which is also where she was told she'd never get much further because of her accent. Duh! These days regional accents are de rigueur in British broadcasting. Where would Channel 4 be without Geordie voiceovers? Presumably something must have changed in the years between, Edith.

"I think I've got to give a lot of respect and thanks to MTV because the one thing they wanted to do when they launched a UK channel was to represent the UK and they did that. [Presenter] Donna Air at the time had her thick Geordie accent. Cat (Deeley) had her Brummie accent. I had my Scottish accent. That was a big statement. No-one had done that. It was only in dramas that you heard accents.

"Obviously my accent is different than it used to be," she continues. "That's not a conscious thing. That's surroundings. And my boys roll their Rs. It's really funny the way they say 'Grrreen'. I'm really chuffed about that."

Bowman would go on to join Radio 1 in 2003, when, presumably she finally got a mug along with a radio show in tandem with Colin Murray (a Northern Irish accent there). "I had an amazing time at Radio 1. It's a very different place now and it has to be. It has to move with the times and how its demographic accesses music. But I have the best memories. And working with Colin, we were given a lot of freedom in picking music."

The connection with the girl on Portobello beach was very much still there, she says. "I used to listen to the charts on a Sunday afternoon and tape it. The notion of being there and presenting a show was mindboggling. It still is, to be honest."

Her Radio 1 days are now in the past - she was "axed", as the tabloids like to say, last year - but she remains a big BBC booster. "Because it's funded by us I think it gets a hard time. No other broadcaster gets the scrutiny the BBC does. And that's purely down to the fact that it's paid for by public money. But it's not this big bad ogre it's made out to be. I never experienced that anyway."

At which point I mention Simon Garfield's hilarious 1998 book The Nation's Favourite, a picture of Radio 1 in the mid-1990s when the dinosaur presenters - Simon Bates, DLT etc - were being forced out the door. Garfield's book is a glorious expose of vaulting egos. Was any of that still in the air at Broadcasting House when she arrived a decade later? "I never experienced any 'me, me, me' type things. I had a very different experience at Capital. Very ego-driven. 'How loud can I talk? How boisterous can I be?' And going to Radio 1 was a breath of fresh air after that."

Of course, there are now historic Jimmy Savile-shaped shadows over Radio 1, given the Yewtree revelations of recent years. Has that retrospectively tainted her time there? "It's got nothing to do with me. It's not like people were whispering in cupboards. I had no idea what had gone on in the past. There was none of that kind of thing going on when I was there. It's no reflection on me at all."

This is all said in a brusque manner some miles away from her default position of friendly chattiness. I rather like the nippiness of it. A little flash of steel behind the smile and doting parent. I get more of it when I ask a lazy question about the lack of female voices on Radio 1 (which probably says more about the last time I listened to the station than the reality). "Radio 1 has always had female presenters. Sara Cox, Zoe Ball. Both did the Breakfast Show. That's 12 years ago.

"I don't feel like a man's got a job over me in my time at Radio 1," she continues. "I never felt undermined by any male authority. I felt equal."

She left the station after 11 years and is now striking out in new directions. The book is an achievement of an ambition. She's also completed her first documentary for Sky entitled Songs To Have Sex To. Her drive remains intact.

"That goes back to my mum and dad. Not having any expectation of people giving it to me, which I think is how our media sets a lot of things up for our society. Hard work doesn't seem to be encouraged these days."

For the Sky documentary she tells me she spoke to Trevor Horn about Frankie Goes To Hollywood and gay sex and Jane Birkin about "the whole Je T'aime thing". I always preferred the Brigitte Bardot version of that song myself, I tell her. "Really? Oh God, no."

There's the music fan in her. She seems happy to be that even though, as her victory in the Celebrity Fame Academy a decade ago revealed, she can sing a bit. Did she never want to take that ability further?

"Naw. I'm not a musician. I'm a music fan. I like watching it being created. I like hearing it being created. I like talking about it but there's not an ounce of frustrated musician in me."

These days Edith Bowman is listening to her kids sing "I want some baked beans" to the tune of Queen's I Want To Break Free, going to bed early with her husband to watch three episodes of Game Of Thrones back to back, or taking her kids around museums when Editors are playing European gigs. "They're up at six, seven. So it's, 'Right, let's get off the bus and go exploring'. They make you do that kind of thing whereas prior to kids we'd probably lie on the bus till 12 o'clock and not see anything of the city."

In short, Edith Bowman knows how to have her own kind of fun. Even if it's not Big Fun.

Edith Bowman's Great British Music Festival is published by Blink Publishing, £16.99