Stuff I’ve liked listening to

2024

Strong Message Here - Armando Iannucci and Helen Lewis, leftie-liberal royalty, discuss 2024’s political jargon

Barbie and the plasticity of pop - Switched on Pop - a deep dive into the Barbie soundtrack

UFO sightings: an otherworldly history - History Extra - Unidentified Ariel Phenomena does seem like a better name than Unidentified Flying Objects

Cillian Murphy - WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - two things. Cillian Murphy has a nice voice, and i feel sorry for Marc Maron’s dad

The Hated and the Dead - Khorloogiin Choibalsan - the Stalin of the Steppes ruled Mongolia from 1939 to 1952. He had 3% of the population executed in purges, but maintained a small degree of independence from Moscow

The Rest is History - Stephen Fry and Troy - Mr Fry has a nice comparison between the development of computer hame graphics and the progress of Greek myth from the Gods to the human

Hancock’s Half Hour - Fred’s Pie Stall - particularly enjoyed this one. There’s bits about class, and gentrification, and immigration, and pies.

A right royal night out - Witness History - this is a lovely story - “In 1988, Princess Diana, disguised as a man, along with broadcaster Kenny Everett and singer Freddie Mercury had a drink in London’s Royal Vauxhall Tavern, a gay club in London.”

You Are There (TV Series) - The Capture of John Wilkes Booth (April 26, 1865) (1953) - it surprises me that a) Booth managed to get so far away after assassinating the President, and b) that he was caught after doing so

WTF with Marc Maron Podcast Episode 1449 - The United States of Conspiracy w/ Robert Guffey - “Conspiracy theories are great for stupid people who want to feel smart and smart people too lazy to do their homework”

Lenny Kaye nails some moments “when the universe shifted”. Word In Your Ear … Word In Your Ear. - “I didn’t learn about Muddy Waters from Chess Records, I learnt about Muddy Waters from the Rolling Stones”

The Rest Is History - Podcast Episode 392. JFK: The Road to the White House (Part 1) - I’ve not listened to much The Rest is History as yet, but there seven-part overview of the JFK assassination is excellent, in my view

BBC Soul Music - I Say a Little Prayer for You - i never knew that I Say A Little Prayer was written in reference to soldiers being in Vietnam

Paul Sinha’s perfect pub quiz - Bradford - the phrase in the Yorkshire folk song On Ilkla Mooar Baht ‘at means On Ilkley Moor without a hat

Word In Your Ear -David Gedge – and a postcard from Peel - David Gedge, of the Wedding Present, seems very vague on the ownership of band names in general, and of ‘the Wedding Present ' in particular

Word in Your Ear - Simon Napier-Bell - Marc Bolan, the Who, chains, feathers and German police - i was a bit shocked to discover that You Dont Have to Say You Love Me was written as an ‘anti- romantic lyric’ - in the sense of you dont have to say you love me for us to go to bed together, or whatever

The Rest is History - 400. Victorian Britain’s Maddest Mystery. In 1854, the twenty-five year old aristocrat Roger Tichborne, heir to an impressive fortune, died in a shipwreck ….Or did he? - with Zadie Smith. Includes the origin of the word ‘titch’.

Word In Your Ear - Record shops in movies and what Glenda Jackson did that no other actor ever dared try - Ep. 538 - Wednesday, June 21, 2023 - weapons-grade trivia: Axl Rose wrote Sweet Child of Mine about Erin Everly, the daughter of Don Everly of the Everly Brothers

Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon — Backlisted with crime novelist Mark Billingham - i need to read the Maltese Falcon

The Political Party Show 203 - Margaret Beckett - I didnt know Margaret Beckett was first elected in 1974. She says that when Margaret Thatcher was still Leader of the Opposition, Tory grandees nicknamed her ‘the cultured pearl’. It wasn’t meant as a compliment

Did the U.S. need to drop two atomic weapons on Japan in order to end World War II? - Fresh Air - a historian called Evan Thomas talks about his book ‘The Road to Surrender’. It’s a fascinating bit of history, if you can get past the horror of it all.

Radio 4 - Soul Music - Ghost Town - Jerry Dammers got a producer called John Collins in to produce Ghost Town after hearing his production of Victor Romero Evans song At the Club - Victor Romero Evans song At the Club on Spotify

‎History Extra podcast: Coffee history: everything you wanted to know … - Voltaire apparently drank 50 cups of coffee a day. Small cups, but even so…

Living through the Troubles History Extra podcast · - podcast about an exhibition about ‘the Troubles’ in Ireland. I would like to have seen it

The Last Bus Home Hancock’s Half HourSeries 6 Episode 3 of 14 - as a confirmed non-motorist a lot of this rings very true. A classic Hancock

Iain Dale All Talk: 272. Tim Shipman - Tim Shipman quotes Bismarck on Brexit, using the full quotation - “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best”

Political Party - Philip Hammond - “she had her own economic philosophy” - ex Chancellor Philip Hammond, on his then chief secretary to the Treasury, Liz Truss

Episode 153 : Lloyd Bradley on Black London + Tina Turner + Steve Barrow audio - Rock’s Back Pages - Lloyd Bradley says there are three great black cultural movements - jazz, funk and hip-hop. I’d be interested to hear more about that - especially on where reggae and soul and disco and other genres fit in

Dancing in the Dark - Bruce Springsteen -Soul Music - BBC - The Soul Music series partly focuses on the song, and partly on how much the song means to people. There’s often a lot of sadness and grieving, and this episode has a lot of that, but it’s nice to here Springsteen talking about the song, and doing his avuncular chuckling

Desert Island Discs - Peter Hennessy - Peter Hennessy relates how the Queen, on a visit to his college, came into his seminar on what became the Ministerial code. She said that “The British constitution is puzzling, and always will be”

Nick Heyward reboots ‘the fragrance of rock’ - Word in Your Ear - Nick Heyward has three grandchildren

Caesar is assassinated - You are there - Two things crossed my mind listening to this. Given that the assasins killed Caesar, but Rome eventually ended up with Nero, and Caligula, the murder of Casar could have been the least successful political assassination ever. Also… history is very much written by the winners

Word in Your Ear - Eamonn Forde: life after death in the music business - i knew that Gabrielle Drake had a lot to do with promoting her brother Nick’s music after his death - i remember seeing her on tv talking about hom many years ago - but i didn’t know that Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt had a lot to do with his later popularity

The life and music of Tina Turner - the Queen of Rock & Roll - interesting that Tina seems to have been appreciated, and helped, more in Britain than the US. Also, I’d forgotten how shocking her story was, at the time she first told it

Great Lives - Jon Ronson picks Terry Hall - sad that he’s eligible for Great Lives now :(

Six wives. 5. Catherine Howard. History Extra - more proof that Henry VIII wasnt very nice

Christy Moore talking about the songs on his live LPs - i’d not heard this quote before. Its not true, but there’s a truth in it “Some men cry, others have heart attacks”

Britain in the 1990s: everything you wanted to know - the biggest selling British band of the 1990s was the Beatles, partly because of the Anthology series

Six wives | 4. Anne of Cleves - History Extra podcast - Henry VIII’s disappointment with Anne of Cleves began when she failed to recognize him when he was in disguise, and they’d never met before.

George Orwell Part 1 – From Eton to Barcelona. Origin Story. Play. Origin Story Podcast. Back for season - a typically marvellous Origin Story episode, this one about one of the guy’s specialist subjects. I particularly liked it when he said something like thisbwhen explaing how Orwell’s views about various thinga had changed over time. “When people quote Orwell, I want to know which Orwell are they quoting. He’s like Taylor Swift, he has eras”

Paul McCartney: Inside the songs - All my loving - #TodayILearned that Elvis sent the Beatles a good luck telegtam before their first appearance on American TV.

Marcus Berkmann - Tina Turner gave me tinnitus - Word in your Ear includes the answer to the question ‘Who made their only ever advert in 1954, for Southern Made Doughnuts?"

Churchill part 1: Rebel Without A Cause - Origin Story | Podcast on Spotify - Good quote: “Churchill was a racist and an imperialist, and also the most important anti-fascist who ever lived”

Tara Hill and the Ark of the Covenant - The History Show - Podcast episode about a 19th Century outfit called the British Israelites who went digging on Tara Hill to find the Ark of the Covenant. More sensible than QAnon, but less sensible than Flat Earth imho

Did Elvis steal from Big Mama Thornton? - An Elvis story I hadn’t heard before: Songwriter Mike Stoller was in a mid-Atlantic ship collision in the 1950s. He abandoned ship into a ‘broken life boat’, and was eventually picked up by a cargo boat. Stoller’s writing partner, Jerry Lieber, met him when he landed back in the US, and said that they had a hit with Hound Dog. Stoller said ‘With Big Mama Thornton’? No, said Lieber, it’s some white kid. Stoller tells the story better than I do

Worst Decisions in Music History - I’m listening to Rolling Stone’s The 50 Worst Decisions in Music History. It’s good fun

From a goddess to a graduate - Interesting episode about Chanira Bajracharya, who went from being designated as a goddess until puberty to being a financial analyst

1949-01-30 - Episode 61 - Colonel Johnson Eats the Love Apple - TodayILearned that tomatoes were thought very poisonous in North America until a chap called Colonel Johnson publicly ate one in 1820

Your Place or Mine with Shaun Keaveny - Rob Delaney: Eastern Massachusetts, USA - BBC Sounds - Listening to Rob Delaney on Sean Keaveny and Izzi Lawrence’s Your Place or Mine.

Word In Your Attic Special 100th Edition: arise, Sir Midge Ure! (and God bless Viz) - Possibly the most British thing ever - Midge Ure doesn’t have his OBE to hand, but he does have a framed copy of a mickey-taking Viz page, entitled ‘Arise, Sir Midge’. Also, he has a (possibly fake) golden disc of Joe Dolce’s Shaddup Your Face - the song that kept Vienna off of number one

The Audio Long Read: The impossible job – inside the world of Premier League referees - This is well worth a listen if you’re at all interested in football. The main things I got were: refereeing is more art than science, often more subjective than objective, they need the VAR referees to be VAR specialists, the system by which they score referees is ‘interesting’, and I still don’t really know why referees do it

Life Without Plastic (It’s Not Fantastic) | Story of the Week - Podcast episode in which A.J. Jacobs tries, and largely fails,to live a day without plastic

Hugh Laurie - Full Disclosure with James O’Brien - This podcast episode includes my favourite tale of quintessential British upper middle classness. A young Hugh Laurie asks his father whether he can actually row before a boating expedition. It had not been mentioned before, nor was it mentioned at the time, that his father had won a gold medal in the coxless pair event at the 1948 Olympics

Is Karen Carpenter pop music’s saddest story? - Word In Your Ear | Acast - Drummers are like hockey goalies. No-one knows how to talk to them apart from other drummers

The Rise Of QAnon : Fresh Air : NPR - I listened to this yesterday. It’s fascinating, ridiculous and disturbing, often at the same time

The Secret History of Wonder Woman - I enjoyed The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore, although I maybe don’t have a full appreciation of the place of Wonder Woman in American culture.The inventor of Wonder Woman also invented lie detectors, he was a feminist, after a fashion, and he kept his home life shrouded in secrecy

Mehdi Hasan | Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking - Episode - Free Library - #TodayILearned the phrase ‘gish gallop’. It’s means to create a deluge of rubbish in argument, to overwhelm your opponent

Dick Whittington - #TodayILearned that Richard Whittington really was apprenticed to someone called Sir Ivo FitzWaryn and married his daughter Alice (For the benefit of people who aren’t the UK and/or aren’t pantomime nerds, Dick Whittington is one of the three or four main pantomime stories. It’s based on a 14th Century Mayor of London, but I didn’t realize the FitzWarrens also really existed)

Will Strictly decide the General Election? - The Rest Is Entertainment | Podcast on Spotify - #TodayILearned that the TV audience that is most disproportionately Labour voting is Taskmaster, followed by Rupaul’s Drag Race, and Big Brother. Somewhat frustratingly, Mr Osman doesn’t exactly tell us which shows are the most disproportionately Conservative, Liberal, Green or SNP, but the show which is directly in proportion to national voting intention is Question Time

Underground, overground … Mike Batt: “fun is often uncool” - Wombles chap, andpop genius talkd to Mark and Dave

When the Queen ‘jumped out of a helicopter’ This is lovely. Frank Cottrell-Boyce talking about how the Queen jumped out of a helicopter for the 2012 Opening Ceremony

EP74: The Kosovo Serbs - The Hated and the Dead - It’s clearly not the main point of my friend Tom’s podcast, but #TodayILearned that ‘Kosovo’ is derived from ‘Kosovo Polje’ which means ‘the field of blackbirds’, which I quite like

‘Neil Kinnock FULL DISCLOSURE WITH JAMES O’BRIEN’ tells of a minutes secretary, ‘the lowest form of life’, taking minutes at a constituency Labour Party meeting. They get to Any Other Business….and the sitting MP says he’s quitting. The minutes secretary, a young Neil Kinnock, breaks his pencil lead in surprise, but goes on to become the MP, and much later, the Leader of the Labour Party

I told the world Pope Benedict XVI was resigning - Giovanna Chirri is covering a Vatican committee meeting of some kind, in Latin. They get to the end of the meeting, and Pope Benedict has some AOB…

Robot Horses and Banning Wikipedia - The Rest Is Entertainment | Podcast on Spotify - #TodayILearned that the first known use of the word ‘celebrity’ was by Geoffrey Chaucer, translating someone I didn’t catch the name of

George Harrison and the T-Bone steak, rock fantasy football teams & spot the AI lyrics! - #TodayILearned that the first Beatle’s concert in the United States was at Boneyard Bocce Ball Club in Benton, Illinois.The first Beatles concert in the US was somewhere else

The Houdini Myth - Harry Houdini got into some difficulty trying to escape from a barrel of Tetley’s beer

Mitch Benn is the 37th beatle (FULL AUDIO , Radio 4) - As we know there were at least 37 Beatles

Peter Ames Carlin on how Warner Bros became “the first hip record label” - “A year ago the Beatles were known only to patrons of Liverpool pubs. Today there isn’t a Britisher who doesn’t know their names, and their fame has spread quickly around the world.” I’d like to start a revival of the word ‘Britisher’ via Word In Your Attic 89 - Peter Ames Carlin

BBC Radio 5 Live - Midnight Meets With Colin Murray, Sara Pascoe - As an ex-resident, I love this, from Sara Pascoe: “I live in Lewisham, which is brilliant. If you haven’t been there just go south-east from here [Hammersmith] until you start getting scared”. Tbf, some of the intervening places have probably come up in the world since I lived there

BBC News - Political Thinking with Nick Robinson, Series 1, The Tony Danker One - One of the odd things about being a year behind in my podcasts is listening to people and knowing what happened in their lives over the next 12 months. This one is a case in point - Nick Robinson talks to the director general of the Confederation of British Industry, Tony Danker

Killing Joke in Trafalgar Square - YouTube - I found this recording of a thing I was at just 43 years ago - Killing Joke playing in Trafalgar Square. Very atmospheric . The band were very off-message

From the archive - The selling of the Krays: how two mediocre criminals created their own legend - podcast | News | The Guardian - #TodayILearned that Charlie, Ronnie and Reggie Kray got £255,000 from the 1990 film that starred the Kemp brothers

BBC World Service - Witness History, Miracle on the Hudson - #TodayILearned that the passengers in the ‘Miracle on the Hudson’ got $5,000 compensation for lost luggage, a refund for the price of their ticket, and a letter of apology

Danny Baker: tracing the Beatles through their Christmas records - Word In Your Attic - #TodayILearned that the 1967 Beatles Christmas record was produced by Kenny Everett

BBC World Service - The Forum, Why do we have a seven-day week? - #TodayILearned that in 1929, the USSR replaced the 7 day week with a 5 day week, with a fifth of the workforce resting on any given day. This was a good episode to listen to in Leap Week :)

BBC Radio 4 - Desert Island Discs, Garry Kasparov - People who followed me on Twitter may remember this quote, which I tweeted both before and after people in my home town were poisoned “When people ask me how to understand the Putin regime, I tell them to read Mario Puzo’s ‘The Godfather’”

EP67: Juan Peron-The Hated and the Dead - Listened to this discussion of Juan Peron. Interesting stuff

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Irish Rebellion of 1798 - Listened to this. Made me realise how little I know about Irish history, although, to be fair, I dont know much about England in the eighteenth century either

BBC Radio 4 - Great Lives, Noddy Holder on Chuck Berry - I love this. Noddy Holder reckons he had more number one singles than the rest of the chaps in Slade, because he was singing along at the side of the Coventry Locarno stage when Chuck Berry recorded My Ding a Ling

[Sleeve design legend Kosh: the man who made the Abbey Road sky bluer

  • Word In Your Attic](https://youtu.be/_RJFYi2ZUGc?si=-klKNybpbCCiKq5X) - I look at it and think what an awful job I did retouching the horizon. It looks like I did it with a toothbrush - LP sleeve designer Kosh on the cover of Who’s Next

Conspiracy: did aliens build the pyramids? - History Extra podcast - The short answer is no, they didnt, but i did learn that they were built by people doing something like National Service rather than by people who were enslaved

Joe Wisbey and his 400 Beatles books. But which are the winners? - #TodayILearned that here are whole books about the Beatles in Bath, the Paul is Dead nonsense, and how John Lennon sold his soul. I might describe this as geek-y but I’m watching a video of a podcast on books about the Beatles so who am I to judge?

EP66: Nikita Khrushchev - The Hated and the Dead - M’young friend Tom refers to Putin’s eventual successor as “he or she”. The idea that it might actually be a ‘she’ made took me back a bit, if I’m honest. Well worth listening to, in any case

Billy Bragg: it’s the lamp from the Spy Vs Spy sleeve! - Word In Your Attic - #TodayILearned that the first two lines of Billy Bragg’s A New England are taken from Simon and Garfunkel’s Leaves that are Green “I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song. I’m twenty-two now but I won’t be for long”

The dangers of 2024 and how to manage them - with Britain’s oldest foreign secretary - The News Agents | Podcast on Spotify - In which David Owen refers to the Department of Health and Social Security as ‘the Department of Stealth and Total Obscurity’ :) I’m easily pleased

BBC Radio 4 - Gossip and Goddesses with Granny Kumar - Available now - #TodayILearned that the ‘Naga’ in Naga Munchetty means ‘snake’ - she says her mum dreamt of snake when she was pregnant. It was in one of these