podcasts 🎙️

Audio that I have liked, or been moved to comment about, or both.

Note that I have put stuff in quotes sometimes…but these will only be approximations of what people have said. I’ve heard most of this stuff while running or walking the dog so I can’t be very precise

January

Revisionist History - Blue Seattle with Cameron Crowe | Development Hell - Leon Russell: why do you keep making these shitty movies. Elvis Presley: last thing I remember….I was driving a truck. Great podcast in which Cameron Crowe talks about and plays the demo’s from his unmade Elvis film

McCartney: A Life in Lyrics - Give Ireland Back to the Irish - Give Ireland back to the Irish was number one in Ireland and Spain. It was written after McCartney had hear John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s The Luck of the Irish. imho, the Oko/Lennon song is better

Short History of…..Venice - Venice was never conquered by so-called “barbarians”, so the Venetians “viewed themselves very much as a kind of a Rome unfallen”

The Rest is Entertainment - David Walliams, Podcasts on Netflix & National Treasures - “I must say to all those armchair media analysts who always thought they understood talent pay and that the BBC had spent years overpaying Gary Lineker. I wonder, do they think he’s getting paid less by Netflix than he was paid in a year by the BBC? the answer might shock you…… if you’re an idiot”

Little Atoms 969 - Natalie Haynes' No Friend To This House - the Golden Fleece was really a Golden Sheepskin. Bad news for the Golden Ram.

Witness History - Diary of life in a favela - Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote a best selling diary of her life in a favela in Sao Paulo, called ‘Beyond all pity’ in the UK. Her neighbours were angry about what she said about them, and threw stones at the family when they moved out. She was originally from Sacramento, Minas Gerais

Word in your ear - How Springsteen went “six deep”, fictional rock hacks and who’s more conservative than Liam Gallagher - “you can’t have a snappy conversation with Bruce Springsteen, because, Lord, he was born a rambling man”

The Penguin Podcast: episode 6 – books to screen with Robert Harris - Harris says that having a film made of one of his books is a bit like becoming a grandparent - you get a lot of credit with none of the responsibility

The Hated and the Dead - Nayib Bukele in El Salvador - H.L. Mencken’s said that “The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe”. Ricardo Avelar explains how this idea is being pushed to extremes in El Salvador

Little Atoms 904 - Jon Savage’s The Secret Public - David Bowie was seen as a one-hit wonder until he hit with Starman, which came out a few months after he declared he was gay. Until then being gay would have been seen as death to a career in pop.

The Rest Is Politics: Leading: 169. Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia vs. Musk, AI, and the Battle for Truth - Jimmy says he tests LLM’s by asking about his wife, who has some profile on the internet, but not an exhaustive one. The LLM typically comes up with things that are very plausible but not true. Possibly the least plausible bit of information has been that she is married to Peter Mandelson

Short History of the Pinkerton Detective Agency - Alan Pinkerton was incolved with Chartism in the UK, then in the Underground Railroad in the US before working to suppress trade unions in later life

You’re dead to me - The Bloomsbury Group - according to Dorothy Parker, the Bloomsbury Group “lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles”

Betwixt the sheets - Real Wives of Dictators | Nadya Alliluyeva, Stalin’s Wife - i didn’t know that Nadya’s suicide followed a public row with her husband, during which she threw something at him

Short history of….the partition of India

Evil Genius with Russell Kane -Serge Gainsbourg - the fictitious Melody Nelson came from Sunderland. Gainsbourg liked the sound of the word ‘Sunderland’

Origin Story: Socialism: The Finale – What’s Left? - “George Orwell was the patron saint of socialists who find other socialists annoying”

The Louis Theroux Podcast: S6 EP8: Jimmy Carr discusses the secret to his comedy, being a late bloomer, and controversial stand-up gigs - Jimmy Carr justifies playing in the Riyadh comedy festival because he likes Saudi Arabia’s ‘direction of travel’

Short History of….. Shakespeare - Shakespeare’s father was a ‘family friend ' of Robert Catesby, the leader of the Gunpowder Plot

Talk ’90s to me: Stay Another Day – The story of East 17’s accidental Christmas classic with Tony Mortimer - Tony Mortimer says that at least some of the lines in the song are about the death of his brother

Americana Music Live with Drew Holcomb and Malcolm Gladwell | Revisionist History - “people in Memphis have a hatred of Nashville baked into their childhoods”

[McCartney: A Life in Lyrics - Band on the Run ](https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/mccartn weey-a-life-in-lyrics/band-on-the-run ) -McCartney on the first WINGS tour “we only had 11 songs…so we had to repeat some of them”