I catch Zane Lowe — just — in the middle of a celebrity sandwich. Immediately after our interview in Los Angeles he has an audience with the world’s highest-paid DJ, Calvin Harris, and he’s spent the previous 48 hours flying to and from Tokyo to meet R&B superstar Frank Ocean

“It’s funny with Calvin,” Lowe confides, in the easy manner of a man on intimate, first-name terms with every A-lister in the music world. “Because he’s in the press all the time people think he’s this open book. But he actually does very little talking.”

And what little talking he does, he does with Lowe, the BBC Radio 1 DJ turned creative director of Apple’s Beats 1 radio station.

It’s the same with Frank Ocean. The reclusive maestro of minimal R&B caused a culture-quake this summer when, out of nowhere and four years after the groundbreaking Channel Orange, he dropped his new album, Blonde. None of the world’s panting media were able to secure an interview. No one except Zane Lowe.

When I ask about how he pulled it off, I’m privy to a typically Lowe encounter. “Frank and I have known each other for a few years. So he trusts me enough to get on FaceTime. But if [that interview] doesn’t work and it’s not coming together, there’s that moment where you have to ask yourself: ‘How badly do you want to deliver this for Frank, and for the audience? And is this going to be the best way to do both?’

“Deciding within a few hours to jump on a plane for Tokyo to interview Frank Ocean, and getting the go-ahead from him by text — ‘Yeah, do it, get on a plane’ — and that’s all we have: we don’t have a time, we don’t have a location and there’s a freedom in that which makes it incredibly exciting to be working in this modern framework.”

“This modern framework” is the music industry’s new frontier. It’s a still-virgin landscape where Apple runs the show and its expat Londoner sheriff always gets his man.

When Apple launched its streaming service last year to challenge the sector-dominating Spotify and the Jay-Z-co-owned Tidal, it summoned Lowe from London to oversee the accompanying global radio station and its line-up of DJs — including Pharrell Williams and Drake — and secure headline-grabbing world exclusive interviews. Tufnell Park’s loss has proved to be the tech giant’s gain.

Lowe is the cheerleader-in-chief for new music, an attribute that made him Apple’s go-to guy when it was preparing to reinforce its dominance over how the planet consumes music.

In the past few months, through Lowe, Apple’s subscriber-only radio station has unveiled new music from artists who are already part of the Beats 1 family (Pharrell, Drake) and those simply keen to take advantage of the company’s unparalleled global clout (Zayn Malik, Disclosure).

As often as not, those unveilings go hand-in-hand with exclusive opportunities for Apple Music to stream the tunes. That curatorial oversight helped Apple Music sign up 15 million paying customers in its first year. Not Spotify numbers yet — it claims well over twice that figure — but a decent start.

“I worked closely with Drake’s manager,” begins Lowe by way of explaining how he hired the Canadian sensation and secured exclusive plays of his new album, Views. “I met him and Drake early on, before the show started. Drake got it straight away — the idea of being able to build another part of his creative output. Why does doing media have to be a job? Why can’t you creatively promote your music?”

We’re talking in his calm, clean office in the calm, clean Apple Music building over the way from the Beats 1 studio. Unshaven and dressed in comfy streetwear, he chugs another coffee, keeps up a constant patter and readily jumps from his seat to illustrate a point.

Lowe and his wife Kara, a fellow New Zealander and childhood friend with whom he reconnected in the UK, lived in London for 18 years. He still views the capital as home (he kept his house here, and spent the summer at his family place in Cornwall) but the Lowes are well settled in a new house in West Hollywood.

The school “is great for the kids”, he says referring to Jackson, 10, and Lucius, eight. “It’s funny, man, and he’ll kill me for saying this, but the younger one is developing this hilarious little American twang!” he laughs.

“We had our children in London, we have lot of friends and family there. So, you know, relocation comes with its challenges, even if you’re spoilt like we were with Apple. Emotionally it was hard to leave.”

At least he’s had the distractions of helping front a much-ballyhooed streaming service — one Apple VP has described Beats 1 as “almost the tip of the arrow” for the company’s “whole music ecosystem” — and of building from scratch a new kind of radio station.

He explains how, prior to Beats 1’s launch last June, he embarked on a series of hearts-and-minds pitches with Jimmy Iovine, the former record label exec —and industry legend — who helps run Apple Music, and Nine Inch Nails frontman and Apple Music chief creative officer Trent Reznor.

Some artists, he admits, were wary of getting into bed with Apple. British club culture legend Fatboy Slim has taken 18 months of persuasion, and has only just come onboard with his own Beats 1 show.

It was a situation not helped, perhaps, by Taylor Swift attacking Apple last summer over plans to not pay artists during the streaming service’s three-month free trial period. The company quickly capitulated. A good call?

“Do you think?” Lowe shouts. “Yeah, it was the right call. It was stressful until that call was made. I don’t want to speak for Trent but none of us were chillin’” he laughs again. “Because I make music too — I produce records, I worked with Sam Smith and Tinie Tempah. The only reason I’m here is because I love people who make music and I love the music they make. So when that relationship is potentially in trouble because of a business thing, it’s uncomfortable.”

As a globally-recognised flag-bearer for Apple Music, was it also uncomfortable for Lowe when, last month, the EU demanded the Silicon Valley behemoth pay 13 billion in back taxes? “I am a speck of dust in that conversation,” he shoots back, before becoming uncharacteristically tongue-tied. “I mean, that is like…” he winces. “Does it make me uncomfortable? It would be way beyond my station to put myself remotely in that frame.”

Lowe’s comfort zone, a place in which he’s arguably the world’s most powerful music tastemaker, is developing those artist relationships. Nowhere will that be more apparent in this month’s 10-night, north-London-based Apple Music Festival. Now in its 10th year — it was formerly the iTunes Festival — and returning to The Roundhouse, the clout of Beats 1 and Lowe are apparent in the stellar line-up.

Lowe won’t claim personal credit for persuading Robbie Williams and Britney Spears to pitch up to a Camden tramshed — “we got together as a group and threw names around” — but he did advise the Apple Music film crew on how to shoot the Calvin Harris gig. And he’s been instrumental in shaping Elton John’s offering.

“Elton is always looking for the creative angle,” he says of the host of Beats 1’s Rocket Hour show. “If he’s gonna do something we’ve got to find a way to make it exciting for him.

At Lowe’s suggestion, Sir Elton agreed to book artists he’d championed on Rocket Hour — Christine and the Queens, Gallant — and collaborate with them onstage.

“But then he gets into the bit he loves: the brainstorming. Out comes the reporter’s notepad, where he writes down all his new favourite artists, and he’s saying: ‘David, I woke up at two in the morning and wrote down a name but I can’t find it, who was it again?’” Lowe relates in a fairly impressive impression of Sir Elt.

“Elton does this thing where he’ll say to you, ‘Have you heard of Toulouse?’ ‘No.’ ‘Really? Well…’ And he is so happy that he’s caught you out, ” he yells, the laughter bouncing off the walls.

Little wonder the Kiwi nerd and the knighted nerd get on so famously. And to Lowe — who’s flying “home” to London for the Apple Music Festival — that intimate, impassioned relationship is the magic of his job.

“Elton and I worked it out, and it’s going to be an amazing night in Camden. It’s another classic example of when we get it right at Beats 1, we get it right.”

The Apple Music Festival starts on Sunday: applemusicfestival.com.

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