Good Tunes: 'Essential Mix 2001 12 16 Jo Mills'

Thanks to my past (bad?) habit of saving everything, I think I found the mix I’ve been looking for, the one I heard at the end of my first semester of college.

My mom and I have been going through old things for about a year, sorting through the seemingly countless bins and boxes stuffed full of my family’s past. I found a lot of college-related material last week, including the schedule for Iowa’s 2001–2002 academic year, my first in college.

“Oooo,” I thought, immediately thinking of the mix. I scanned the dates for the first semester’s finals week: December 17–21.

I am pretty sure I heard the mix on the Monday of finals week. I previously assumed finals week was earlier that month and based my searches on those weeks. (Did I search for the dates online? Probably, but must not have been able to find them.) I hit the web again armed with the exact dates. The BBC website was no use, so I checked the Wayback Machine, but the schedule captured for that month is past the week I wanted.

I thought I was at a dead end, again, but then stumbled on the BBC Programme Index, which has past programming and scheduling information for everything BBC. What a dream! I dug in. Scheduled at 2 a.m. on December 18, 2001—8 p.m. December 17 in Iowa—was a replay of Jo Mills’s Essential Mix from a few days before.

Boom! These are the things that continue to give me faith in the internet.

So, this is apparently the mix. Having listened to it a few times since finding it, I can’t say it is mind-blowing or “one of the most amazing things I have ever heard in my life,” as I thought at the time. But it’s a good mix. I have tried to figure out which part mesmerized me, made me stay in my dorm long after needing to leave to meet someone downtown. There are a few bangin’ moments in the mix but nothing stands out. However, I assume it is somewhere around the half-hour mark.

Who was I meeting downtown? The Foxy Lady. We were meeting after she got off work at Planet X and I was pretty late. Oops!