James Hyman is Managing Director of Green Bandana Productions, a company whose key ingredients are 'Popular Culture' and 'Media'.

From consultancy to specific media production and music supervision, Green Bandana has the wisdom, network and experience to meet the exact needs of its diverse client roster.

Turning your life’s passion into your profession is what most of us dream of. James Hyman has been living this dream ever since 1988 when at the age of 17, he found himself in the right place at the right time and started his career at MTV as the channel established a London HQ and launched through Europe.

An infamous multi-tasker, he achieved a 1st class honours B.A. in Film/Media at London Guildhall University while learning the ropes in music television from beginnings in the station’s press office before moving forward as a Senior producer/director/ programmer. Hyman steered MTV through the emerging UK dance music scene and from its inception during the acid house explosion at the start of the 90s, the channel’s groundbreaking dance programming charted the growth of a now global musical culture.

Headed for eight years by Hyman, who was involved in all aspects of the dance playlist, overall strategy and programme production, he was also responsible for producing/directing/editing over 200 pop videos, including clips for Fatboy Slim, New Order, Mike Oldfield, Moby, Prince & Michael Jackson.

As well as maintaining a foothold in the print media during his MTV stint, as a columnist and correspondent for various international publications, Hyman began presenting specialist programs on terrestrial UK television, including Frontal (Channel 4, 1999-2000) and www.personalservices (Channel 5, 1999; short-listed for a BAFTA in 2000), as well as being a key expert commentator on ITV’s series The Dance Years (2001-2).

His interest in everything new and culturally relevant resulted in the first ever daily internet show on television with MTV UK’s Up For It (1998-2000). In 1999, Hyman was voted at #22 in MUZIK magazine’s poll of the 50 Most Powerful People in Dance Music.

In 1999 and 2000, he also produced two long running dance music series’ for Play UK, ‘Hey DJ’ (40 episodes) & ‘Joy of Decks’ (60 episodes), both a continuation of the ‘MTV Megamix’ (100 episodes) another show James created, which segued music videos in the same way a club DJ mixes records. Many ‘visual bootlegs’ were conceived in these pioneering shows including ‘Shady Fatboy’ - a mix of Fatboy Slim’s “Rockafeller Skank” & Eminem’s ‘My Name Is’.

By this time, Hyman had amassed a personal library of apocryphal proportions! Over one million magazines, 150,000+ vinyl, 150,000+ CDs and a broadcast quality Beta collection of 20 years of pop videos. A testament to Hyman’s relentless pursuit of pop cultural knowledge, fanatical attention to detail and lateral approach to creating cutting edge content for all forms of media, this paved the way for Green Bandana Productions, the independent cross-platform media company set up by Hyman in 2000 that maintains a database of over 40,000 entertainment industry contacts.


Through Green Bandana, Hyman has presented the Sci-Fi Channel’s 5th anniversary week shows (2000) and produced/presented Headf*ck, a critically acclaimed series for the Sci-Fi Channel exploring innovative contemporary visual work (8 x 4 hour shows, 2001). Green Bandana has also diversified into film music consultancy with Mean Machine and Suzie Gold and music placement for television advertising including Royksopp for Lynx (view mpeg movie), Pilote for T-Mobile (view mpeg movie), and Man Called Adam for Gordon’s Gin (view mpeg movie).


In 2000, Hyman took to the airwaves as a DJ on London’s XFM, presenting, producing and programming two shows, The Rinse (nominated by MUZIK magazine as ‘Best Radio Show’ in 2002) and The Remix (among Campaign Magazine’s Top 10 radio shows in 2001, nominated for a Sony award in 2003), which he co-hosts with Eddy Temple-Morris. The Remix has become a platform for the cultural zeitgeist of bootlegging and remixing, with Hyman championing and becoming the spokesman for a DIY mix-and-paste musical genre which has propelled the likes of Sugababes (‘Freak Like Me’) and Liberty X (‘Being Nobody’) to UK #1 hits.


Hyman continues to be an in-demand event DJ, manning the decks at launches like the party for BMW’s Mini, post-screening film parties for ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’, Britney Spear’s ‘Crossroads’ and Eminem’s ‘8 Mile’ and hosting the Rizla tent at the Glastonbury Festival in 2002.


...And a final fact for trivia buffs: James Hyman’s father’s first cousin was The Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein.