Laura Barton’s Notes from a Musical Island (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Saturday Night at the Movies (Classic FM)
Hip-Hop Saved My Life with Romesh Ranganathan podcast
Rolling Stone Music Now podcast
On Saturday mornings for four weeks, Laura Barton is taking a trip around the UK, rediscovering it via its music. Yesterday we heard her second episode, which concentrated on the area around Burnley and Hebden Bridge, though there was mention of Wigan later on. Barton talked to Colin Stevens, who worked for years in the weaving mills. When he first started, the noise was too much for him. “I couldn’t stand it. It were just booming at yer, rattling in yer head,” he said, and we heard the thundering rhythm of the warp and weft as he set just one loom working.
Barton is a careful, romantic music journalist and she chooses her words precisely: “a curious cacophony”; “the hulk of the urban landscape”; “where blackened brick meets a burst of beauty”. She has a theory – and I agree with her – that the environment you grow up in affects your choice of music. Last week’s environment was full of contrasts. Mill workers lived in small houses with thin walls, where everyone could hear what was going on; but they worked in vast sheds, deafened by the looms. They were industrialised, but within the wildest countryside. We heard from Rob St John, a cultural geographer, who grew up in a house with factories on the one side and fields on the other, filled with the singing of the curlew and the lapwing. And we heard the sound of a brass band that was once attached to the collieries; that gorgeous, yearning noise.
Barton also had a chat with Tony Sabanskis, who made the Blackout Crew’s Put a Donk on It. Sabanskis has 35 versions of donk sounds on a dongle, and we listened to a few. He had no truck with Barton’s theory, though he did say that his studio was in an old mill, and still had the mill’s blue dust on its high beams. All warm, daft, human life was in this programme, plus dazzling, heartening music. I loved it.
Other musical contenders this week? Andrew Collins has a Classic FM show that I keep meaning to mention. Called Saturday Night at the Movies, it’s actually on at teatime and is a conventional cinema soundtrack show, but excellently curated and put together. There’s always something a little surprising about Collins’s choices. He knows his stuff: recently, he talked to the Coen brothers (still up on the Classic FM listen again service), and his film knowledge shone through during the interview. Yesterday’s show was hung around the western, and there have been Oscar specials, animation jaunts, all excellent. A perfect programme for pottering to.
Comedian Romesh Ranganathan has a hip-hop podcast, but it’s too much comedy and not enough hip-hop for me. I want details, insight, not just jokes, as funny as Ranganathan and his mates are (and they are). Better for us music nerds is Sodajerker on Songwriting, where Simon Barber and Brian O’Connor talk to songwriters as diverse as indie hero John Grant and Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, who wrote the soundtrack to Frozen. Episodes come out once a month, and are detailed and interesting. Barber and O’Connor put together a lot of research and they know of what they speak; more than once, they make a musical connection that perhaps a journalist wouldn’t. I like their modesty, too: they’re really interested in what their guests say, rather than what they come up with themselves. Among their recent guests is Scroobius Pip, whose podcast I mentioned last week.
And – oh Lord – music magazine Rolling Stone has a new weekly podcast. This has been going since February and is infuriating and informative in equal measure. Essentially, the Rolling Stone hacks have a good old chinwag about music. Their most recent programme discusses the Kanye album, the first big hip-hop “post-Kendrick” set, as writer Rob Sheffield pointed out. Presenter and Rolling Stone executive editor Nathan Brackett quoted from Sheffield’s review, which said that Kanye “drops broken pieces of his psyche all over the album, and challenges you to fit them together”: beautifully put. They are clever, these people, but not a great advert for music journalists. They’re just too know-it-all (even though they do know it all) and they are writers, not speakers. Their voices! Like NPR journalists put through a Woody Allen machine. Hard work over 30 minutes.
