At the 4th July we visited Raw Beats Festival in Groningen. The host for this event was MC Invalid, a fast rising Hardstyle MC. You might know him from hosting the second area of XQlusive Frontliner at the Heineken Music Hall. Recently he’s also working with artists on tracks so we decided to catch up with him! Check out the interview below.
Hi MC Invalid thanks for giving us the opportunity to have this interview with you!
You’re welcome, no problem!
Okay first of all we’d like to give our readers the chance to get to know you a bit, could you tell a bit about yourself?
Sure, well my name is Tim Rademaker and I’m from the capital; Amsterdam. Like many of your readers I have a day job working at Essent 5 days a week. I would call myself a party animal because usually my weekend is full, now often with bookings of course.
Alright thanks for introducing yourself. We’re curious, how did you come up with the idea to start MC’ing & how did your environment respond to it?
Good question, that’s actually a funny story. One day I joined a friend of mine (DJ Rawcore) to a booking in Belgium. Basically as a joke he asked me to come on stage & MC for him if I dared. I did it & the crowd & organization were really pleased with me. They called me later if I could come MC there more often. Well my friends & family were actually quite skeptical when I told them about my MC’ing. I have the image to be a rebel with many people so they wanted to see it to believe it. Probably the biggest compliment that I had so far came from the guys of NRG VIBE. They attended XQlusive Frontliner & didn’t believe it was me MC’ing because according to them it sounded so well. The whole process of being able to MC there actually came as a huge surprise. I was contacted by someone from Q-Dance & before I knew it, it was confirmed that I could host the second area. That was an amazing experience.
Wow that’s a nice story & especially a cool compliment to get. Many genres have MC’s these days, why did you decide to become a Hardstyle MC? What does Hardstyle mean to you?
Hardstyle is my life! It gives my energy and I’ve been listening to it way before it became mainstream. Early Hardcore actually was the music I listened to in order to get to sleep in 1998. These days my personal taste is Raw Hardstyle, but of course I still love music from the early days. My point of view is that the Raw Hardstyle of today is hard enough & that it shouldn’t be much harder than it is now.
That’s nice, your dedication to the music is clear indeed. We’ve noticed that your support keeps on growing, your fanbase, your recent release with Luminite & Rebellion ‘We feed the fire’ and earlier this week you’ve announced to be hosting Angerfist – The world’s leading Hardcore act! How does that feel?
Well it’s amazing because now my support is growing people are believing that this is really what I want to be doing. For me it’s always amazing to see the comments I’m getting online. Hosting Angerfist is again a dream coming true. The amount of bookings I’m getting & especially that they are abroad is something that I never could have dreamt of. I mean hosting in Scotland is insane, the crowd absolutely lives for Hardstyle music. Collaborating with Rebellion & Luminite has been a great honour & I’m actually working on another track now but I can’t tell more about that yet.
We can imagine it’s amazing to experience that indeed! Who would you really like to host in the future and where?
It would be my dream to host every weekend and if you’re talking about a big dream hosting Defqon would be insane. I wouldn’t mind which stage but that’s my dream event. As for people I would want to host, I’d love to host Frontliner/Ran-D/Noisecontrollers. Actually one of those will become reality soon. Obviously next to those guys it would be legendary to host Wildstylez or Headhunterz.
Alright, who knows! You’ve been doing well lately. Is there any advice you’d like to give to other upcoming MC’s?
Simply said: ‘Follow your heart’, don’t hate, practice a lot & believe in yourself.
Solid advice. What has actually been your most awesome gig so far?
That’s really hard to choose.. Of course XQlusive Frontliner was amazing, next to that my hostings in Scotland are always insane. At the moment my bookings are 50% in the Netherlands & 50% abroad.
That’s a nice balance of bookings! Before we finish, is there anything you’d like to say to our readers & your fans?
Enjoy the music & be yourself!
Alright thanks for this interview!
You’re welcome!
©Festivalling.com
Reporter: Alexander Bouten