Latin Alternative's Anglo Advocate

On the Air and Online, Nic Harcourt Keeps The 'Eclectic' Current Flowing, and Exciting

"I'm fortunate to be able to just play what I want to hear," says Harcourt, here behind the mike at his "Morning Becomes Eclectic" radio show. (By Mel Melcon -- Los Angeles Times)

SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- Here's your melting pot. Right here, in a basement studio on the Santa Monica College campus, where we find radio tastemaker Nic Harcourt hovering over a control panel.

It's shortly before 11 on Friday morning, and Harcourt -- host of KCRW-FM's flagship show, "Morning Becomes Eclectic" -- is introducing yet another wide-ranging mix of songs to an adventurous public-radio audience. There's a new track by the Liverpool indie-rock band Clinic and an old one by psychedelic soul man Shuggie Otis, along with tunes of varying age from Mexican guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela, Americana artist Lucinda Williams and a Danish garage-rock group by the name of the Blue Van.

And this, Harcourt says: "A remix of 'Yo No Se' by Los Amigos Invisibles." The Venezuelan dance-music group is coming to town for a show next week, Harcourt says, and KCRW is giving away tickets. And then, speaking, as he always does, in dulcet tones, with a distinctive British-by-way-of-Australia accent (most noticeable when he says "artist," which becomes "AHHHH-tist"), he repeats the band's name: "Los Amigos Invisibles."

The invisible friends. As if.

Harcourt's musician friends and acquaintances and interests -- all those artists he champions on his program and as KCRW's music director -- tend to get noticed. Working in a company town, for a station whose listeners have historically included record executives and Hollywood music supervisors and late-night TV bookers, he serves as something of an early-warning system. Since he arrived at KCRW in 1998, Harcourt has helped break Coldplay and Norah Jones, both of whom became multi-platinum international stars. He's also been an important, early supporter of countless other acts that have achieved at least a modest level of success: Dido, Damien Rice, Sigur Ros, the Shins. He's America's answer to the legendarily influential BBC Radio 1 presenter John Peel. In a Sunday magazine profile two years ago, the New York Times dubbed Harcourt "The Starmaker of the Semipopular."

Lately, the list of Harcourt-approved semi-stars has grown to include some of the leading players from the Latin alternative genre. Tune in to "Morning Becomes Eclectic," which is broadcast weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. EST and streamed live on the station's Web site, and you're just as likely to hear Aterciopelados, Jorge Drexler, Ozomatli and Pacha Massive as you are Arcade Fire, Ry Cooder, Patty Griffin and DJ Shadow.

On this day, on a whim, Harcourt dropped a song from the "Babel" soundtrack onto his free-form playlist: "Cumbia Sobre el Rio," by Blanquito Man -- "blanquito" more or less meaning little white guy. Apt, given that Harcourt himself is what you might call a wispy gringo.

Or, as the 49-year-old gatekeeper says off air: "I'm just a [expletive] English guy."

Harcourt grew up in the British Midlands playing soccer, working in a plastic-bag factory and listening to the Beatles, punk rock and a heavy diet of heavy metal. He's a high school dropout who played in a band and followed an eventual ex-wife to Australia, where he spent a half-dozen years absorbing the music of Midnight Oil and INXS. A dozen years ago, when he was working at his first and only other radio job, as a deejay for a modern-rock station in Woodstock, N.Y., all he knew of contemporary Latin music was rock en Espa?ol . And he didn't like it. "It just sounded like noisy rock being sung in Spanish."

And Harcourt doesn't speak Spanish.

And yet, he's become the most important and supportive figure on U.S. radio for Latin alternative music. KCRW, which broadcasts only in English, plays more alternativa artists -- and more often -- than any other radio station in the country. And it does so in the second-largest radio market, which regularly accounts for 30 percent of U.S. sales of Latin alternative music.

"Nic gets this music, and he really supports it," says Tomas Cookman, president of Nacional Records, the leading Latin alternative label, with a roster that includes Colombian rockers Aterciopelados, electronica outfit Nortec Collective and Sara Valenzuela, former lead singer of the Mexican alt-pop group La Dosis. Two years ago, Nacional even partnered with KCRW on "Sounds Eclectico," a compilation of live alternativa recordings produced by Cookman and Harcourt.