Send us a Text Message.I met up with my old friend John Robb over the UK May bank holiday weekend. He was in London talking about his birthday, sorry life and career (!).For those who don’t know John, he formed The Membranes in the early 80’s and he’s an author whose writing about music and the future I admire hugely – and his talk was called “Do You Believe In The Power of Rock N Roll?”.So, do I? Well, in a lot of ways, yes. Music, art, poetry and dance remain the number one threat...
Send us a Text Message.My first experience of censorship in music came with the battle between the Dead Kennedys and Tipper Gore’s PMRC (remember the “Parental Advisory Explicit Content” stickers?) which culminated in the obscenity trial in 1985/6 over the artwork for DK’s record Frankenchrist. I don’t know if anyone remembers but the board members of the PMRC were a bunch of white power brokers funded by Coors Beer, who also just happened to be big supporters of….. Ronald Reagan. The el...
Send us a Text Message.If I were to create a mixtape (it’d have to be an old school cassette cos that’s probably the last time I made one!) for Amanda and her music life, it’d probably open with The Undertones’ Family Entertainment with the classic line “Got To…Keep it In the Family”. I mention family not so much to talk endlessly about the quite rare band structure of her band, Bad Mary – in her words “a band family and family band” - but to segué clumsily into some of the questions tha...
Send us a Text Message.You know when you hear a song or a collection of songs that literally make you shiver? Songs that could make you cry at how effortlessly beautiful they are. Another thing that interests me is the neuroscience of how some pieces of music can transport me to a time, a place, an older version of me, a perhaps as yet unseen version of me, how they can seem like my constant companion that’s seen my life, the very depths of me, the heights of me, how I can go back to the...
Send us a Text Message.What’s been intriguing me today? Reality. What is it? Is there “a” reality or is it all subjective and determined by our own perception, prediction and interpretation. I think it's a word - like so many others - that has been hijacked – you see it used in order to dogmatically defend belief systems or stances and this plays into our susceptibility to certain narratives – we hear that phrase “well this is my reality” at the expense of those who are experie...
Send us a Text Message.As regular listeners will be painfully aware, I’m no fan of genres. I can hear the groans already….here he goes again getting on his soapbox…yes, well, you know you gotta reinforce the message, right! I do believe that genres are obsolete to the point of being dangerous, created by an industry to keep people in their lanes, to reinforce “rules” and stereotypes of who should be playing what music - and to make it easier and cheaper to market. The good thing is that there...
Send us a Text Message.We live in a culture of immediacy and entitlement, brought upon us, in part at least, by the emergence of new technologies of the last 20 years that were supposed to democratise society, to disrupt the big corporates, but have laid themselves bare as the same old monolithic structures where the power bases and wealth are maintained and society is left with long lasting effects which are not always positive. The impact on how we consume the Arts, and specifically music, ...
Send us a Text Message.Listening to the music of Belle Chen brings me some mixed emotions – firstly, incredible love and admiration for the creativity and innovation of her thinking and the beauty and talent in executing this thinking through her composition and playing, yet still leaving room for the listener’s own interpretation. The second, and I fight hard against this one, is some regret that my own musical education was more constrained and I couldn’t – or didn’t want to - find a simila...
Send us a Text Message.As a habitual loafer, I spend a fair bit of time thinking about how some songwriters can create music that can feel familiar yet unfamiliar and why I’m attracted to music that gives me both of those feelings. I also love finding music that feels very unfamiliar to me and I’m interested in why. As you might expect I’ve failed to come up with anything concrete, but I did read something which made me think: basically when you are younger, you tend to use music as an i...
Send us a Text Message.When we’re kids, before we get to school and start to get hemmed in by society’s expectations, we don’t have the inhibitions that start to follow us around and start to influence our words, our actions, the clothes we wear, the way we cut our hair (although that’s not really been an issue for me for decades). I think this is also relevant in music –artists wrestling with breaking new ground or out of a genre for, for example, fear of alienating fans and it can make thei...
Send us a Text Message.As with most stuff, I was late to the Skinny Pelembe party and the way I got into his music was as random as it gets: I came across an Instagram post (see, Instagram does have its uses) of his about buying an Austin Allegro with his streaming royalties ( I think that was the gist of it). Now my old man - rest his soul - was an Austin aficionado back in the days of my formative years when he got hold of the Austin 1800, Maxi, Princess and Maestro (I crashed this beast of...
Send us a Text Message.Nayana AB is an outstanding songwriter, musician and producer, who, for me, is taking influences from great songwriters of the past but making the music in very much her own vision. She’s using that history and those legacies positively to shape her own future and the future of others. I think this is exactly what legacy is about and how it’s intended to be used.She recently won the Dr Martens Made Strong music in the community competition which landed her a show alongs...
Send us a Text Message.In the bands my guest has played with over the past, what 30 years maybe – like Minority, Brick, One Against Many and presently Black Mercy – I’m getting influences from some outstanding bands and I’m thinking Negative Approach, Whipping Boy, Poison Idea, Artificial Peace definitely a bit of Napalm Death thrown in there to grind things up a bit. Fuck, just saying those band names makes me want to do a back somersault…but at my age and all that, I’d better give that a mi...
Send us a Text Message.Situations and elements of duality, dualisms and paradoxes have started to become more evident in my life. I think I started to become more aware of this maybe 6/7 years ago when I started thinking and writing about the importance of mindset for surviving and functioning in this very complex and volatile world which, with a bit of gentle and not so gentle encouragement, led me to starting this little podcast. Exploring the existence of these situations, the reluctance t...
Send us a Text Message.I think more and more these days about how we’ve sleep walked into allowing our world to become one that doesn’t serve us, one that does its best to prevent our ever-evolving identity to find its path, to do things on our own terms and away from being defined in a certain way by preconceptions or however our brains uses predictions of who others are and who we are. Maybe that’s just me getting older and grumpier. Probably true. But what's also true is that I have defini...
Send us a Text Message.I interviewed Andrew Butler from Hercules and Love Affair last year and he made a really great point about how the most exciting music is produced when one “scene” starts to fade but the next “big thing” hasn’t yet arrived – l think of it like when a new star is being born from all this gas and dust coming together - before the “rules” of that genre are established (cos that’s what happens, right?) so it’s much more volatile, experimental and liberated. So, j...
Send us a Text Message.If this podcast were a musician, it's highly likely it would be called Trevor Dunn. Trevor is a hugely respected and valued composer, bassist, double bassist, collaborator, ultra-improviser and fantastic conversationalist, coming to prominence with the ever fluid and experimental Mr Bungle. He has also played with John Zorn, The Melvins, Fantômas, Tomahawk, his own Trio-Convulsant, plus many more collaborations.Now, with Sally Gates and Greg Fox, he's releasing ano...
Send us a Text Message.There’s so much about the work of J. Willgoose, Esq. of Public Service Broadcasting that really is everything that this podcast is about – resilience, curiosity, the importance of your physical environment, reinvention, collaborations, adaptability, trying things out, learning from the past – from successes or mistakes to what should have been or could still be – how to repurpose the past, how we shift ourselves in what is already a volatile and fast changing world, all...
Send us a Text Message.Since I started this podcast malarkey (maybe before actually, maybe the podcast just encouraged me to be more open about it - gawd, this sounds like a confessional!), I’ve developed a fascination with how music can whisk you off into a distant world, a kind of musical Narnia, not just through the lyrics, but the song structures, the atmosphere, the relationship of current music with past decades (cos we interpret and measure music by decades, right? - although it will b...
Send us a Text Message.I first met Alaura when we did an online workshop for the South London Arts Lab in October 2020. It was a practical exploration of Stream of Consciousness writing. It was called “Telling The Stories We Were Always Told To Keep Secret”, where we were encouraged to delve into our memory to write about things that have a hold over us, maybe things we are ashamed of, afraid of, whatever that hold may be. This had a very profound effect on me and I have to say took my intere...