Speechification

After last month’s rather wonderful The Nun Who Nurtured Reggae came last Saturday’s This Are 2 Tone, which I nearly posted, but didn’t, because it was a bit rubbish. Disappointed not to be able to load Speechification with Reggae-tinged vibes, I was therefore overjoyed to find 6Music rebroadcasting Don Letts’ excellent Radio 2 roots and culture documentary Blood and Fire (Part One and Part Two). It’s quite music-heavy, but it does contain some great cuts, characters and commentary. I particularly love Burning Spear’s epic piece of history-denial, Jah No Dead.

I remain slightly perplexed by 6Music - I know I want a good music station, but this consistently fails to be it, usually thanks to the curse of all radio: over-talkative presenters. Tom Robinson’s evening show is generally OK, but if I wanted to listen to lots of old Peel sessions, Radio 1’s Keeping It Peel has it pretty much sown up. So the daily Play It Again slot (weekdays, 2130), showcasing old music docs, is great, and I’d appreciate it if anyone wants to point out what else I should look out for on the station.

Radio Three runs a lovely series of fifteen minute ‘cultural talks’ called The Essay. Monday to Thursday at 11pm. This week it was some smart and listenable radio called Maths and Music by trumpter player and mathematician Marcus Du Sautoy. Monday was all about time and counting with Steve Reich and Ewe music from Ghana. Tuesday we had Pythagoras, the music of the spheres and why so many cultures end up with twelve notes in a scale, Wednesday brought us Bach, symmetry, theme and variations and we ended on Thursday with some more twentieth century material and mathematically generated music. Brilliant stuff. Programme One. Two. Three. Four. Incidentally it’s well worth listening right to the end of programme three just to hear the continuity announcer’s way with German. No-one does foreign languages quite like Radio Three.

Here’s a nice long one. Nearly two hours of poetry and music on the theme of the weather from Radio 3: you might consider it a companion to Dan’s much scarier Aussie weather post from a few days ago. You’ll probably think this one’s a bit soporific for your cutting edge tastes but the choice is eclectic enough—from A. A. Milne to Kurt Weill and from Kathleen Ferrier to Steve Reich. I think this would make a great soundtrack to a longish train journey. London to Bristol, say. In the rain.

Here’s the programme’s MP3 and here’s the extensive playlist.

Radio 4 recently ran a new episode of this occasional jem in which John Humphrys introduces 28 acts in 28 minutes. It’s like a contemporary variety evening from the comfort of your own armchair. There’s an impressively complete list of acts on Wikipedia, with links to the various acts. This one, episode three of the second Radio 4 series, was broadcast on Thursday 27th March at 6.30pm. (MP3)

The 28 acts included guitar-playing singers including Tom McRae, Francesca Beard Gwyneth Herbert, Lady Carol of the Moon and Neil Innes, all very enjoyable in their distinct ways. These musical slots serve as a relaxing break from the stand-up comedians who make up the majority of the show. I particularly enjoyed Phil Cornwell - (who plays Greg Dyke in Dead Ringers), Jon Richardson, Danielle Ward pretending to be Andy McNab, John Finnemore being Britain’s silent majority and Will Smith (the comedian rather than the actor). There was also some poetry, a reading from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and even a drum solo.

The stand-out item for me was Liam Mullone, whose standup segment about ‘unexpected item’ in a self-service checkout, had me rolling around the floor.

Episode five of BBC Radio 2’s documentary ‘The Record Producers‘ is all about Stock, Aitken and Waterman. I grew up to the sounds of Rick Astley, Mel and Kim, Kylie and Jason, so hearing the distinctive Stock, Aitken and Waterman sound dissected and explained (LIN9000! Fairlight! Quantize buttons!) gives me deep joy.

(MP3)

Best of all, the documentary begins with an audio Rickroll.

Thanks to Nick for the link.

Praise the Lord. A big, loopy concept album of a radio show (which has a computer game to go with it) from Malcolm McLaren. It’s an hour long and it’s about Paris and life and… you know. Need I say more? (MP3). BBC radio does this kind of one-off quite often these days but makes hardly any fuss about it. Did you read about this in the paper? Did you know about it at all? Why not, I wonder?

More forty-something thrills from Radio 2. This time a terrific three-part series about songwriting that originally went out last Summer. All three subjects—Leonard Cohen, Nile Rodgers and Patti Smith—are old enough and rugged enough not to be troubled by self-doubt or by fear of the opinion of others so we get disarming honesty about methods and inspirations. Of the three, Smith is probably the most guarded but this is still a mesmerising show (MP3) and the other two parts are here.

The title says it all really. It’s the story of Sister Mary Ignatius Davis of the Alpha Boys School, Jamaica. The school encouraged ‘wayward boys’ to get interested in music; creating generation of musicians who played key parts in the creation of the Jamaica music business and culture. And ‘Sister Iggy’ ran her own sound system and had a massive collection of reggae records. MP3 here.

(Interestingly there’s very little information about the programme on the Radio 4 site, or on the official programme page, but there’s a long interview, and fascinating extra stuff on the BBC Caribbean page, which still has the show on Listen Again)

What do I learn from Radio Three’s Building a Library? I learn that, though I’ve been building (randomly accumulating, really) my own library for twenty-odd years, I know practically nothing about classical music. I learn that the potential for variation in the delivery of a piece of music is essentially limitless and yet quite often undetectable to my ears.

I learn that there are people in the world (well, Piers Burton-Page Andrew McGregor, really) who know too much about classical music. I learn that I don’t own any of the really good classical recordings (that’s what you get for choosing albums from the bargain bin by the door) and I learn that one person’s passion for and understanding of a subject can be really awe-inspiring.

This edition is about Bartok’s Violin Concerto No. 2. Here’s the MP3. Building a Library now has a podcast and, amazingly, it really works - even though the copyright rules limit the length of clips in the MP3 so the podcast version is a fraction of the length of the broadcast version. Another real joy from your national broadcaster.

Try as you might you can’t prevent this programme making you nostalgic for a time you don’t remember. A time when composers wouldn’t work until they had their tie on, when everyone seemed to smoke exotic Turkish cigarettes and when the BBC wrote long memos referring to everyone as ‘Mr’.  The voices are quaint but the music is belting. Nice music, nice people, niceness. What else could you want? MP3 here.