Meet The Harrises

You sung in my choir.

"I don't think that's true. You came to my show."

It's the old 'where we first met at university' debate, only in this case not only are the sparring partners - John and Zinnie Harris - now happily married, they are engaged in careers directly related to their student hobbies. John is the proprietor of experimental music label Seven Things I Daren't Express, and Zinnie is an acclaimed playwright, who has worked as writer in residence at the RSC. She has also recently been working on television, including BBC1 flagship drama Spooks.

There can be no doubt that they're an interesting pair. But it's funny how, after setting out to create a piece that would ironise the flattering 'profile' photo piece associated with magazines like Hello! and OK, we've ended up with something very similar. Luckily, John and Zinnie prove both highly articulate and open: as part of the Opposites gig, we pitched John and Zinnie against each other as 'artists', and they rose to the challenge with style. For clarity, John's speech is in italics; you know, because he's the progressive one…

"Theatre must put the audience first."

"I don't give a monkey's. Well, that's not quite true, but I think ultimately you serve the audience best by putting the music first. Matins is probably the hardest thing on Seven Things, and I'm intensely proud of his stuff. One of his pieces opens with five minutes of silence – you can't play that on the radio. I think being unorthodox is really important. What Matins does is show possibility. If you're doing that, it's very difficult to have the audience in mind."

"When I'm writing, I don't think of the audience. But for TV there is an extra framework."

"Nobody ever wrote a play by democracy."

"Writing for a BBC1 flagship drama (Spooks) is very different from writing your own theatre piece. There are script editors, producers, from the BBC and the production company. Every decision is for a lot of people, you're more like a cog in a machine. In a way it's freeing – you have a story to tell and the skills to tell it. It's nice to jump between the two, and save your fully creative stuff for the theatre."

"It's hell."

"It's not! The episode I wrote last year was seen by six million people – it was the one in which Ruth Evershed left. [In this episode, the enthusiastic but skilled character, having been framed for colluding with terrorists, faked her own death and disappeared.] Thousands of postcards came in saying she must be proved innocent.

"The spy thing is fun, and I've become such a Le Carré fan. The spy metaphor works for us all: it's about what you're hiding. In that way Spooks is about us all, and that's why it's such a great series."

And on their modes of operation: "The Seven Things approach to music is a bit like John Peel's was: 'I think you should hear this;' though it goes a bit further: 'I hope you've never heard anything like this before" – it's explicitly exploratory. We pick a genre and pursue it to its outer limits. If you can dance to it, it's not on Seven Things."

"I think you could put a better spin on this."

"Come on then, PR expert. Okay, Seven Things is absolutely leading edge – it's stuff that'll be popular in five or ten years. Like Radiohead nicking large chunks of Stockhausen. Music is a really conservative form. We're stuck in four four – a new sound doesn't mean new music. My personal mission is to change the way we listen to music as a nation, no, the world."

"I have no mission like that."

"You have no mission."

"I just want to write bigger and better plays. I'm not against experimentation, but I'm happy to work within the form. You're sitting on a ballistic missile trying to shoot the whole thing down."

"I look to the absolute edge of what people are doing. Seven Things is a dedicated hardcore experimental label."

"It's not really 'hardcore' is it?"

"I think so. And that means you have to find an audience, people don't necessarily come to you. Raising finances is tricky when the market isn't yet there. It's great to be endlessly discovering new things, but it's hard to establish yourself when there's no following at all. It's kind of iconoclastic, and has all the difficulties of being thought of as such."

"As do you."

"There's a weird paradox, because although we don't record with the audience in mind, we often record live because people do their best work in front of an audience. The audience doesn't guide the music, but they can reflect it, and the artist's adrenaline is heightened. For all artists the secret is in the way it is presented not the thing itself. That'll suit your opposites theme. I do have a deeper thesis about the use of music, but that's for the book."