OFF RADAR: Have you always stargazed?

IONA: I was literally talking about this with someone yesterday on the shoot I was on, and I thought that everyone was doing that growing up. I had a really big garden growing up, and so I would just lie on the ground and look up. I went to high school in America, and I was very goody two-shoes. I didn’t drink or go to house parties, and so literally my idea of fun was going stargazing. I did that with my friends. We used to sneak onto the football pitch at the local school and look up at the stars, and it was great. It was incredible. I thought it was the most incredible thing in the world. 

So yeah, genuinely, I’m an avid stargazer, for sure.

OFF RADAR: Do you have an album of the summer?

IONA: I wasn’t really a huge pop girly before, but the fact that we’ve been blessed with Olivia Rodrigo, Gracie Abrams, and Ariana Grande in one summer! I'm sorry, that’s fucking crazy.

I have been devouring Olivia Rodrigo. I’m a new fan. I just think from start to finish, it’s glorious. I love the lore behind it. I think the marketing campaign behind it is also interesting. It feels very natural. It doesn’t feel too, too, too planned. But yeah, I’ve been loving that album. I’ve literally been listening to it on repeat. And how iconic, including The Cure in a pop craze album? It’s brilliant. So that’s probably the album I’ve been listening to the most on repeat that’s new this summer.

But then overall, an album I go back to every single day is probably Fontaines D.C.’s Romance. That one I’m listening to pretty heavily right now on rotation. And then any Brockhampton album because I love Midwest emo. 

OFF RADAR: Have you gotten into her older stuff yet, or not really?

IONA: I don’t like it as much. I’d say that’s just my honest take on it. It’s just maybe not for me. I don’t know why this album in particular has really opened something up in me. I think also the creative direction for the first single that came out, with Petra Collins directing this beautiful music video at Versailles, was honestly a game changer for me. 

OFF RADAR: I’ve stalked your Spotify before, and I really like the music that you have. How do you find new music? What’s your process for that?

IONA: I would say finding new music is truly my hobby. I just fall down these rabbit holes. I think a really weird place I find music is Instagram. If there’s a song I like, I’ll go to the artist’s Instagram. I’ll literally go through their tagged photos or their following and see who’s in their network. I’ll start looking and be like, “Oh, they hang out with this person a lot. I wonder what their music sounds like.” I am equally stalking. I am stalking everyone to see what their networks are like and what their creative friendship groups are like.

I also use SoundCloud and TikTok. There are so many TikTok songs I’ve found where I’m like, “Oh, that’s actually really cool.” TikTok’s good because you’ll get someone with 100 followers that you’ve never heard before.

Sometimes Spotify serves good stuff. I don’t listen to my Discover Weekly at all. I don’t let the Spotify algorithm dictate what I listen to.

OFF RADAR: What’s the live music scene like in London?

IONA: I watch a lot of live music. The London scene is great for music. It’s incredible. I was actually speaking to someone about this yesterday who was asking how I find working here, and I was like, you couldn’t ask for more creativity in one place.

I think there are so many incredible artists who are all really hungry. Some are more supportive than others, but you’ll get that anywhere in cities. 

I’m very lucky that I get to go to so many things, and I live in a part of London where there’s a lot going on. There’s no shortage of artists and no shortage of really good performances. Everyone’s super scrappy with it too, and I’d say overall people are really supportive of one another. In my opinion, it’s the best place in the world for music.

OFF RADAR: Do you have any dream guests you’d want on your show?

IONA: Yeah, I would love, one day, Tyler, the Creator. That would be sick. Or Donald Glover slash Childish Gambino.

OFF RADAR: Do you have a favorite Tyler album?

IONA: I’m still at Flower Boy, to be honest. I’m kind of stuck back there. Low-key, Goblin is an incredible album, which I don’t think he likes. I think he’s publicly renounced it. I love it. It helped me out of a dark time in life. I love his earlier stuff. I love his new stuff too.

Igor is incredible. I still have a lot of songs there that are on repeat. And Chromakopia was good, but I would say maybe Igor is my favorite. Or no, maybe Call Me If You Get Lost. There’s no bad Tyler album, in my humble—not humble—opinion. In my opinion, just because I’m obsessed with him and his creativity. But Igor is maybe the best case study in art. It’s crazy.

OFF RADAR: What about Childish Gambino?

IONA:  Because the Internet. When I heard “3005” for the first time, I was maybe 15, and I was like, “Oh, all my feelings suddenly make sense.” I love this. I think he’s such an underrated artist in that he writes plays, he’s an actor, he’s multi-hyphenate, and people kind of forget about that. 

OFF RADAR: What led you to do STARGAZER, and how did you actually make the idea come to fruition?

IONA: I worked at this tech company in the marketing department, and they basically needed someone to come up with a good marketing idea for this really complicated tech product that we were selling. That product involved a lot of crypto and blockchain, and so I was like, “Oh, well, what if I interviewed crypto bros? How funny would that be?” But I would be really mean. This was before Bobbi Althoff, and I remember my boss was like, “That doesn’t sound like it’s going to go anywhere.” There were people sitting right next to me who were like, “Yeah, I don’t think that’s a great idea, but run with it, sure.”

And so I did, and it became this six-episode miniseries that did really well on Twitter. This was before Elon Musk. Don’t get me wrong, I left Twitter as soon as he came on board. But yeah, it did really well, and then I kind of just got the bug from there to create something and produce stuff and write stuff and film stuff and interview. I was an artist when I was younger. When I was 18, I really wanted to be a pop star. That was my dream, and I ended up quitting because I just didn’t like the industry. It was a bit too much for me. So I basically married my love for music with my love for creating these little series and interviews.

In terms of how I came up with the concept, it was more from a creative constraint than anything. I basically could only afford one camera, and so I wanted the shot to be a top-down shot because I thought that would be interesting to interview someone like that. From that one camera angle, the rest kind of just fell into place. I was like, “Okay, well, what if we’re stargazing? Okay, I can’t do it outside. So what if we’re in a fort?” Because my brothers and I used to build forts when we were younger. That’s kind of how it all really just fell into place.

How I actually did it was truly just having the courage to DM an artist and pitch them a crazy idea, and then pray they said yes. I just thought, “Okay, if someone says yes, I’ll figure out the rest.” And then someone said yes, and I was like, “Okay, I have to figure out the rest now.” So that’s how I did it.

OFF RADAR: Do you have an interview that you did that you feel most proud of, or while you were doing it, you felt like, “Okay, this is why I made the show”?

IONA: I remember feeling like, “Oh, this is why I do what I do.” I think the Finn Wolfhard episode, which just came out, was really special because I felt like, because of the show’s tone, I was able to ask questions that a traditional interviewer wouldn’t feel comfortable asking.

I remember thinking that he’s heavily PR-trained, obviously, but “Wow, I feel like maybe he hasn’t been asked that before, or maybe he hasn’t laughed as much in an interview before, or maybe he hasn’t felt kind of seen like this before in an interview setting.”

So that was really special. I felt like the vibe in the room was great, and I feel like his fans saw that too. Seeing his fans respond to the episode was like, “Oh wow, this is really cool, what I’m doing.” It’s a rare moment where you’re like, “Okay, this has some emotion to it.” So yeah, that was a great episode.

OFF RADAR: Besides music, are there movies or books or even podcasts that you listen to when you’re in a rut and need something to fall back on or just ground you?

IONA: Yeah. I studied art history at uni, and so that’s really my basis for most things. Even today, on my way here, I was listening to this full video by the account Great Art Explained, and this one’s about The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. That was a really great thing to listen to and watch.

But yeah, art history is really what I fall back on. If I have a free moment, I’m going to a museum or a gallery, or I’m watching lectures on YouTube. I’m just obsessed with the subject I studied, and I’m so lucky to have been able to study it.

I have a master’s in it, and I always say to my friends, if I could go back to uni and get another master’s in art history, I would 1,000%. That’s my idea of full success. I know influencers always want to get gifted stuff. I would love to be gifted a master’s degree. That’d be great. That’s truly, truly what I want. So yeah, I love art. I love art.

OFF RADAR: I’m manifesting that. Did you study in the U.S. or in the U.K. or abroad?

IONA: The U.K.

OFF RADAR: Cool. Do you have a favorite painter or sculptor of all time?

IONA: Schiele. I find him really fascinating. He has these really interesting hand drawings, and he kind of draws hands like this. I’ve been to a few exhibitions of him. I have a few of his books, so I love him. It’s quite dark, that stuff.

And then Yoshitomo Nara, who has now kind of just exploded in popularity. I saw his exhibition as well. He’s incredible. I remember I learned about him at uni, and I quite liked it, but I wasn’t in love with it. Then it took me maybe a year of really studying him to understand his work.

But yeah, I love Yoshitomo Nara as well. That really informs a lot of STARGAZER too, that aesthetic. I’d say those two are always on my mind. Genuinely, always on my mind.

OFF RADAR: That’s so cool. I feel like just watching STARGAZER, you can see that. Have you always liked world-building and that kind of stuff?

IONA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think with everyone who likes world-building, it starts with being a child and getting lost in your head and building out worlds and imaginary friends. I would love to go into the garden and pretend there were fairies. My mom and I used to go look for fairies, type vibe. So I was very in the mythical world from literally the youngest age, and I think that’s continued throughout life.

I think world-building for me is definitely a self-protective thing as well as a creative thing. I really love pretending I exist in a different world.

I have a whole comic book for STARGAZER, which I don’t think too many people who are new to the show know about. I have this whole lore of what a stargazer is and what even my guests are, and what the world looks like and what it feels like, what it smells like. That’s all stuff that’s in my mind.

That’s kind of how I want STARGAZER to become one day. If you’re a super fan, you’ll know all the references, all the little Easter eggs I leave that people might not know about. But yeah, I love world-building. It’s a big, big part of my why. I love it.

OFF RADAR: Do you have advice on interviewing or advice for smaller creators in general?

IONA: I’d say just do it. I think the biggest piece of advice, the biggest thing that got me where I am and will continue to get me where I want to go, is sheer delusion. Truly, I think you have to believe in yourself so, so much, or else it just won’t work. I feel like I can say that pretty confidently. Even with the artists on my show, the ones who will go the farthest are the ones who are completely delusional about their success, in the best way.

I think there’s no reason my show or me should have worked. It was truly just such hard work and such delusion. I’d say with those two things, you shouldn’t really be able to go wrong.

If you wanted to create a perfect picture of it, it would be delusion at the top of the list, just believing in yourself. Then second is you have to outwork everyone around you. That’s an unpopular one. I feel like not everyone thinks that, but for me, I worked harder than anyone I knew at that time when I was starting STARGAZER. And then the third one is always know your why. Don’t focus on format. Don’t focus on the size of the guest. Focus on what makes you different as an interviewer and what makes you appealing to someone in the arts, or whatever field you’re interviewing. You need to know why you’re interviewing to get good questions out of people, or to have good angles. There are so many people who can ask great questions, but an interviewer is someone who really researches and interrogates and understands and has that level of curiosity that’s unbound.

So that would be my biggest piece of advice. I’m very passionate about interviewing, as you can obviously tell. I think it’s an art form for me. It’s how I express myself. Maybe not everyone will think that from their own interviewing skills, but it helps me a lot to think like that.

*** You can follow Iona on Instagram and watch STARGAZER on YouTube.***