Podcasts about Carnaby Street

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Best podcasts about Carnaby Street

Latest podcast episodes about Carnaby Street

Bankadelic: The colorful side of finance
BANKADELIC THEME 2025: IMPOSSIBLY SUNNY DAY, CARNABY STREET, JUNE 1967

Bankadelic: The colorful side of finance

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2025 2:16


It's true: Bankadelic host Lou Carlozo writes, edits, engineers and performs most (and often all) the instruments on his podcast themes. Inspired by a visit to London a few decades ago, "Impossibly Sunny Day" started brewing as Lou strolled Carnaby Street and tried to imagine the scene when every cool Bristish band and celeb hung out there. Carnaby is kinda touristy today, but this instrumental longingly looks back at Swingin' London through psychedlic glasses. Enjoy!

Where I Long To Be: A Magical Trip Report Podcast
Stand-Alone Trip Report: Virginia & Alex's London Trip (August 2024)

Where I Long To Be: A Magical Trip Report Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 6, 2025 72:48


On this Season 3 Finale, Virginia and Alex sit down to recount their August 2024 family trip to London that was part of Alex's Christmas and 8th Grade graduation presents for last year!  London had been on the top of his list since he was 5 years old and started watching the Harry Potter movies so the trip included a visit to tour the Warner Brothers Studio where much of Harry Potter was filmed, of course.  They also made it to Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, and other fun spots around London. Trip Dates: August 24 - September 1, 2024 Interview: recorded 1/1/25   Episode Specific Links: DoubleTree by Hilton London Chelsea WB Studio Tour: The Making of Harry Potter  Hamley's Toy Shop Liberty London El Cenote (Mexican Restaurant in Camden we loved) Fortnum and Mason Afternoon Tea at the Clermont Hotel Buckingham Palace Tour Watching the Changing of the Guard Video: How to Get to the Secret Beach by the Tower Bridge Dirty Bones (restaurant in Soho on Carnaby Street we enjoyed) Today Tix London 606 Jazz Club Shakespeare's Globe Video: Beauty and the Beat (a parody by Todrick Hall)  Sha Xian Delicacies (restaurant in Chinatown) Video: Trailer for “Kathy and Stella's Murder Podcast” (a West End musical we saw) Santa Maria Pizzeria (Fulham neighborhood location) People mentioned in this episode: Beth - @elizabethclifford_ Leoni - @leonibarker Jeanette - @pixiejeanette Maria - @mrsbobo428 Nanci - @nancibat3 Chrissy - @cecagg   Be Our Guest: Do you have an upcoming trip you'd like to share?  Submit your trip information here to be considered as a podcast guest.   Get in Touch: If you would like to reach out to Virginia for something other than a trip report guest submission (for that use the link above!), you may email whereilongtobepodcast@gmail.com.   Follow: Instagram: @whereilongtobepodcast Facebook: @whereilongtobepodcast TikTok: @whereilongtobepodcast Website: whereilongtobepodcast.com

The Sustainable Fashion Wingman
The Sustainable Nature of Vintage Fashion, with Mikey Caunter and Peekaboo Marketplace

The Sustainable Fashion Wingman

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 8, 2024 35:24


In this episode, we explore the rich world of vintage fashion with Mikey Caunter, the founder of Peekaboo and the Peekaboo Marketplace. Mikey takes us on a journey through his early days at Portobello Road, selling vintage long before sustainability became a mainstream movement, and shares how his love for vintage evolved into a thriving business and a platform for slow fashion advocacy.With decades of experience in the vintage scene, including milestones like selling vintage in Topshop and opening a store on Carnaby Street, Mikey offers a unique perspective on the growing intersection of vintage and sustainability. We delve into how consumer interest in vintage has shifted, its role in responsible fashion, and the importance of supporting small, independent brands in the sustainable fashion space.Mikey also discusses the challenges and opportunities brought by the pandemic, which led to the creation of Peekaboo Marketplace—a curated platform championing slow fashion and connecting consumers with ethical brands. From his methods of engaging conscious consumers to his vision for the future of vintage in the sustainability movement, Mikey's insights highlight why vintage is a timeless and vital part of sustainable fashion.Join us to discover why vintage isn't just a nostalgic choice but a crucial step toward a more sustainable fashion future.Learn more about Peekabook Marketplace at https://peekaboomarketplace.com/We'll be bringing more conversations from the world of sustainable fashion regularly, so remember to follow and invite your friends for a listen. Connect with me on LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/sebastianvolneyFollow us on Instagram www.instagram.com/jaymesbyrontalentFollow us for jobs and news in sustainable fashion at https://www.linkedin.com/company/jaymesbyrontalent/

Rock N Roll Pantheon
What Difference Does It Make: Iain Matthews Tells Us How Much Is Enough

Rock N Roll Pantheon

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 18, 2024 50:25


Iain Matthews' 53rd-ish solo album is entitled "How Much Is Enough". He joins the podcast and we learn all about the start of his career, from selling shoes on Carnaby Street in mid-60s Swingin' London, to where he is today. It's a good insight into Iain's mindset about where he sees himself as a working musician/songwriter after nearly 60 years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What Difference Does It Make
Iain Matthews Tells Us How Much Is Enough

What Difference Does It Make

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 18, 2024 52:55


Iain Matthews' 53rd-ish solo album is entitled "How Much Is Enough". He joins the podcast and we learn all about the start of his career, from selling shoes on Carnaby Street in mid-60s Swingin' London, to where he is today. It's a good insight into Iain's mindset about where he sees himself as a working musician/songwriter after nearly 60 years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sateli 3
Sateli 3 - The Jam (1/4) In The City-This Is The Modern World (1977) - 12/09/24

Sateli 3

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 12, 2024 59:31


Sintonía: "Batman Theme" (Neal Hefti) - The Jam"In The City", "Takin´ My Love", "Art School", "I Got By In Time", "Away From The Numbers", "Sounds From The Street", "Non-Stop Dancing", "Time For Truth" y "Bricks And Mortar", extraídas del primer álbum de The Jam, titulado "In The City" (Polydor, 1977)"All Around The World" y "Carnaby Street", son la cara A y la cara B del mismo single"The Modern World", "London Traffic", "Standards", "Life From A Window", "The Combine", "London Girl" y "Tonight At Noon", extraídas del 2º LP titulado "This Is The Modern World" (Polydor 1977)Todas las canciones escritas e interpretadas por The Jam, mientras no se diga lo contrarioEscuchar audio

Fans On The Run: A Podcast Made By, For And About Beatles Fans
Fans On The Run - Marlene Weisman (Ep. 88)

Fans On The Run: A Podcast Made By, For And About Beatles Fans

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2024 85:32


It's time for new, vibrant, colourful (well, as colourful as an audio-only-podcast can be) episode of Fans On The Run!   Joining me on today's show is Brooklyn artist, silent-film-enthusiast, Saturday Night Live graphic-design-alumni, counterculture Xerox artist and personal friend - Marlene Weisman!   We talk "Sprockets", the first and only album from The Fool, Keith Haring, a private Paul McCartney concert at the Saturday Night Live studios, Mary Quant, Mary Quant knockoffs in the windows of New York department stores, the let-down of the real Carnaby Street, Richard Hamilton's designs for the White Album, the "computer room" of the NBC Art Department, Ben Weisman (Marlene's songwriter cousin), and the pop-art genius of Peter Blake.   All that and more; you won't want to miss it!   This episode is available to stream wherever good podcasts can be heard!   Keep up with Marlene: https://www.marleneweismandesign.com/ https://www.marleneweisman.com/ https://www.instagram.com/marleneweisman   Follow us elsewhere: https://linktr.ee/fansontherun   Contact: fansontherunpodcast@gmail.com

Word Podcast
the Architect of Mod: how Peter Meaden restyled and launched the Who - by Steve Turner

Word Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 6, 2024 39:49


Peter Meaden was a key figure in the Mod movement. He changed the world view of Andrew Loog Oldham, which shaped the early Stones, and he managed the Who, remodelling their look and sound, writing their first single and turning them into Mod figureheads. Steve Turner interviewed him in 1975, an exchange that's now the centrepiece of his new book 'King Mod: the Story of Peter Meaden, the Who and the Birth of a British Subculture', and the NME's published extract in 1978 paved the way for the Mod Revival. It's an extraordinary story that would make a movie, discussed here with Steve and including ... ... the Scene Club in Windmill Street "when a band was a way of life".... Angus McGill and the first press mention of 'the Modernists'.… the tale of Sandra Blackstone, the DJ who vanished into thin air.... the lifelong values of Mod culture for teenagers like Eric Clapton, Marc Bolan and David Bowie.  ... the single Meaden wrote for the Who - Zoot Suit/I'm The Face - and where he stole the music from. ... police raids in Soho. ... doing press for Bob Dylan at the time of Madhouse on Castle Street.  ... the Flamingo Club's dress policy, French and Italian film and fashion, boxing boots, cycle jackets and the origins of Mod style.  ... Chuck Berry in suburban Edmonton! ... Meaden's disastrous attempt to bring Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band to London. ... and a typical weekend in 1964, a sleepless, Drinamyl-powered 48 hours from the Ready Steady Go! green room to the Scene Club via Carnaby Street. £5 off copies of ‘King Mod' here. Just type in the discount code which is:-Podcast offerhttps://redplanetmusicbooks.com/collections/full-catalogue/products/king-modFind out more about how you can help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Word In Your Ear
the Architect of Mod: how Peter Meaden restyled and launched the Who - by Steve Turner

Word In Your Ear

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 6, 2024 39:49


Peter Meaden was a key figure in the Mod movement. He changed the world view of Andrew Loog Oldham, which shaped the early Stones, and he managed the Who, remodelling their look and sound, writing their first single and turning them into Mod figureheads. Steve Turner interviewed him in 1975, an exchange that's now the centrepiece of his new book 'King Mod: the Story of Peter Meaden, the Who and the Birth of a British Subculture', and the NME's published extract in 1978 paved the way for the Mod Revival. It's an extraordinary story that would make a movie, discussed here with Steve and including ... ... the Scene Club in Windmill Street "when a band was a way of life".... Angus McGill and the first press mention of 'the Modernists'.… the tale of Sandra Blackstone, the DJ who vanished into thin air.... the lifelong values of Mod culture for teenagers like Eric Clapton, Marc Bolan and David Bowie.  ... the single Meaden wrote for the Who - Zoot Suit/I'm The Face - and where he stole the music from. ... police raids in Soho. ... doing press for Bob Dylan at the time of Madhouse on Castle Street.  ... the Flamingo Club's dress policy, French and Italian film and fashion, boxing boots, cycle jackets and the origins of Mod style.  ... Chuck Berry in suburban Edmonton! ... Meaden's disastrous attempt to bring Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band to London. ... and a typical weekend in 1964, a sleepless, Drinamyl-powered 48 hours from the Ready Steady Go! green room to the Scene Club via Carnaby Street. £5 off copies of ‘King Mod' here. Just type in the discount code which is:-Podcast offerhttps://redplanetmusicbooks.com/collections/full-catalogue/products/king-modFind out more about how you can help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Word In Your Ear
the Architect of Mod: how Peter Meaden restyled and launched the Who - by Steve Turner

Word In Your Ear

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 6, 2024 39:49


Peter Meaden was a key figure in the Mod movement. He changed the world view of Andrew Loog Oldham, which shaped the early Stones, and he managed the Who, remodelling their look and sound, writing their first single and turning them into Mod figureheads. Steve Turner interviewed him in 1975, an exchange that's now the centrepiece of his new book 'King Mod: the Story of Peter Meaden, the Who and the Birth of a British Subculture', and the NME's published extract in 1978 paved the way for the Mod Revival. It's an extraordinary story that would make a movie, discussed here with Steve and including ... ... the Scene Club in Windmill Street "when a band was a way of life".... Angus McGill and the first press mention of 'the Modernists'.… the tale of Sandra Blackstone, the DJ who vanished into thin air.... the lifelong values of Mod culture for teenagers like Eric Clapton, Marc Bolan and David Bowie.  ... the single Meaden wrote for the Who - Zoot Suit/I'm The Face - and where he stole the music from. ... police raids in Soho. ... doing press for Bob Dylan at the time of Madhouse on Castle Street.  ... the Flamingo Club's dress policy, French and Italian film and fashion, boxing boots, cycle jackets and the origins of Mod style.  ... Chuck Berry in suburban Edmonton! ... Meaden's disastrous attempt to bring Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band to London. ... and a typical weekend in 1964, a sleepless, Drinamyl-powered 48 hours from the Ready Steady Go! green room to the Scene Club via Carnaby Street. £5 off copies of ‘King Mod' here. Just type in the discount code which is:-Podcast offerhttps://redplanetmusicbooks.com/collections/full-catalogue/products/king-modFind out more about how you can help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1960s UK radio girls pubs cars clubs ghosts
The Eternal Triangle, Lies, Deceit, Adultery, Infidelity, Carnaby Street, local shops, landline phones...

1960s UK radio girls pubs cars clubs ghosts

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 28, 2024 49:41


Adultery in the 1950s? Perish the thought! Did people lie and cheat on each other back in the old days? Two-timing, deceit, lies... Not in the good old days, surely? Join me this Sunday and we'll find out. Also in this episode, Carnaby Street in London, local shops, landline phones, sound effects and more!

Silhouettes: A Fashion History Podcast
Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style

Silhouettes: A Fashion History Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 15, 2024 71:41


In this exciting collaboration episode of Silhouettes, we're stepping into the immersive world of Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style, the captivating new exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands. This episode will offer you, my listeners, a unique glimpse into this remarkable celebration of the Jewish Londoners who played a pivotal role in building London's reputation as a fashion capital. From Dot Cotton's iconic coat to a Mr. Fish smoking dress, this exhibition illuminates the significant contributions of Jewish designers to London's fashion narrative. Join us as we uncover the tales of these visionary creators, who not only influenced London's fashion landscape, but left an indelible mark on the global stage. We're joined by Bethan Bide, a design historian at the University of Leeds, and the academic advisor to "Fashion City," and Lucie Whitmore, fashion historian and curator of “Fashion City”. Not only will Lucie and Bethan share their insights behind the curation of "Fashion City," exploring how they navigated the intersections of culture, creativity, and identity, shedding light on their research processes, as well as how they decided to showcase these narratives through the pieces selected for display, they will also guide us through the exhibition, leading you from the doors of a traditional tailor's workshop in the East End to the glittering ambiance of a Carnaby Street boutique amidst the heart of a cultural revolution. "Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style" has been extended for visitors until July 7th, 2024, offering an extended opportunity to immerse yourself in this captivating journey through fashion history. About Museum of London Docklands The Museum of London Docklands is located at West India Quay in east London. Opened in 2003, it occupies one of the few remaining original grade one listed warehouses, built in 1802 to store produce from the West Indies. A shared place in the heart of the East End, where stories cross and collide, it confidently shows how international trade, migration, enslavement and the river Thames were integral to shaping London and the world we live in today. The museum is open 7 days a week, from 10am-5pm and is FREE to all. You can explore the Museum of London with collections online - home to 90,000 objects with more being added regularly. Praise for “Fashion City”: "Brilliant!" - Patrick Grant "It's the best fashion exhibition I've seen in years" - Alexandra Shulman (Mail on Sunday) "A thorough and nuanced depiction of the makers of London fashion" - Evening Standard "Immersive and brilliantly assembled at every turn" -Apollo Magazine "Expertly crafted" - Glass Magazine "A must-see for anyone interested in either fashion history or London history" - Amber Butchart Join the Behind The Seams family to support the podcast and access bonus content: ⁠www.patreon.com/silhouettespodcast⁠ Thanks for listening, and stay fab everyone. Follow the podcast on ⁠Instagram⁠ @Silhouettespodcast for more updates --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/silhouettes/message

The Swinging Christies: Agatha Christie in the 1960s

Episode four of The Swinging Christies sees Mark and Gray get all togged up and browse down Carnaby Street, as they examine style, art and Agatha Christie.  You can find us on X and Instagram under @Christie_Time. Our website is Christietime.com. The Swinging Christies is a Christie Time project by Mark Aldridge and Gray Robert Brown.  Next episode: Horror   Solutions revealed! - The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, Third Girl

Unusual Histories
The Monopoly Series - (Great) Marlborough Street

Unusual Histories

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 7, 2024 8:24


This episode of Danny Hurst's London Monopoly board history series is all about (Great) Marlborough Street, the home of the world-famous magistrates court which has been the scene of many scandalous cases including Oscar Wilde vs the Marquis of Queensbury, Brian Jones and Keith Richards' drug trial and the prosecution of Christine Keeler.  Danny also shares the connection the street has with Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, Horatio Nelson, expensive cars and cigarettes. KEY TAKEAWAYS All orange squares on the London Monopoly board are connected to law and order. The court has seen famous people tried for drug possession, indecency, gun crimes and a list of other offences. Danny tells you about some of them in the episode. The most popular cigarette in the world was first made on the street. Liberty´s has the most famous frontage on the street. Carnaby Street – the home of the swinging sixties – is just off Marlborough Street. BEST MOMENTS ‘John Lennon and Yoko Ono were tried for obscenity there in 1970. ´ ‘Marlborough Street became known for its car showrooms.' ‘They let anyone live there these days.'   EPISODE RESOURCES Details of the trial connected to the Profumo Affair - https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-guardian-profumo-keeler/41347358/ Shop for all official versions of Monopoly here - https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/page/785DC233-0A69-4DF8-98E9-4F50CC50A59E HOST BIO Historian, performer, and mentor Danny Hurst has been engaging audiences for many years, whether as a lecturer, stand-up comic or intervention teacher with young offenders and excluded secondary students. Having worked with some of the most difficult people in the UK, he is a natural storyteller and entertainer, whilst purveying the most fascinating information that you didn't know you didn't know. A writer and host of pub quizzes across London, he has travelled extensively and speaks several languages. He has been a consultant for exhibitions at the Imperial War Museum and Natural History Museum in London as well as presenting accelerated learning seminars across the UK. With a wide range of knowledge ranging from motor mechanics to opera to breeding carnivorous plants, he believes learning is the most effective when it's fun. Uniquely delivered, this is history without the boring bits, told the way only Danny Hurst can. CONTACT AND SOCIALS https://instagram.com/dannyjhurstfacebook.com/danny.hurst.9638 https://twitter.com/dannyhurst  https://www.linkedin.com/in/danny-hurst-19574720 Podcast Description "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." James Joyce. That was me at school as well. Ironically, I ended up becoming a historian. The Unusual Histories podcast is all about the history you don't learn at school, nor indeed anywhere else. Discover things that you didn't know that you didn't know, fascinating historical luminaries and their vices and addictions, and the other numerous sides of every story. We start with the Monopoly Series, in which we explore how the game came to be, the real-life connection between the cheapest and most expensive properties, the history of each location, how proportionate the values were then and are today, what the hell a "community chest" is and whether free parking really does exist anywhere in London.  If you love history; or indeed if you hate history, this is the podcast for you…

Manuel Cheța
Podcast “Un român în Londra” ep 290 – Carnaby Street

Manuel Cheța

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 24, 2024 44:15


În episodul 290 al podcastului „Un român în Londra” am vorbit despre vizita în Chinatown și Carnaby Street.   Show notes: manuelcheta.com

Harvey Brownstone Interviews...
Harvey Brownstone Interviews Amirreza Tayebi, Author, “A Very British Revolution”

Harvey Brownstone Interviews...

Play Episode Play 60 sec Highlight Listen Later Jan 16, 2024 44:38


Harvey Brownstone conducts an in-depth Interview with Amirreza Tayebi, Author, “A Very British Revolution”, about the British Invasion About Harvey's guests: Today's guest, Amirreza Tayebi, has written a compelling and insightful book entitled, “A Very British Revolution” about an often misunderstood and sometimes unappreciated decade in the life of every baby boomer: the 60s – better known as the Swinging Sixties, which put London, England at the center of a cultural phenomenon.   The book discusses the genesis, development and global impact of the fashions, social attitudes, movies and music that became known as “the British Invasion”, which defined and exemplified 60's pop culture.  He writes about iconic music artists like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Kinks.   He discusses the influence of groundbreaking movies like “The Servant”, “A Hard Day's Night”, “Alifie”, “Blow-Up” and “Georgy Girl”.  And he talks about trendsetting celebrities like Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde, Michael Caine, Lulu, Twiggy, Marianne Faithful and Mick Jagger.  And of course, we can't forget those colourful psychedelic fashions coming out of Carnaby Street.    Our guest is a contemporary historian who studied politics and international relations, and is currently working in the broadcasting industry.   For more interviews and podcasts go to: https://www.harveybrownstoneinterviews.com/ To see more about Amirreza Tayebi, go to:https://www.amazon.ca/Very-British-Revolution-Amirreza-Tayebi/dp/1803814934 #AmirrezaTayebi   #harveybrownstoneinterviews

2-5-1
2-5m-1-S2E18-Club 11

2-5-1

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 1, 2024 5:47


Nick And Simon Discuss the short lived but influential London Jazz club "Club Eleven", named after the number of founder members, began life just before Christmas in 1948. It was a co-operative arrangement designed to bring bebop to the attention of the jazz public at large. The musicians involved were Ronnie Scott, Hank Shaw, Leon Calvert, Johnny Rogers, Bernie Fenton, Tommy Pollard, Lennie Bush, Joe Muddel, Tony Crombie and Laurie Morgan plus manager Harry Morris. Johnny Dankworth and Denis Rose were regulars from the start. Some gave up steady work, Scott left Ted Heath, Fenton severed relations with Oscar Rabin, and Rose, Crombie, Muddel and Dankworth came from the now defunct Tito Burns orchestra.This venue with these musicians were the first truly organised bebop sessions in Britain. With the star-studded assembly of musicians, Club Eleven became the focal point for the new jazz and the inspiration to many other young musicians throughout the country.The music was played by the Johnny Dankworth Quartet comprising Dankworth, Bernie Fenton (pno), Joe Muddel (bs), and Laurie Morgan (d) and a band led by Ronnie Scott with Hank Shaw (tpt), Johnny Rogers (alto), Tommy Pollard (pno), Lennie Bush (bs), and Tony Crombie (d). The Dankworth quartet became a quintet when trumpeter Leon Calvert was added. Mac's Rehearsal Rooms, 44, Windmill Street, (where the Moffat Club had been), became the first venue operating on Thursday and Saturday nights. Entry was by descending a wooden staircase to a cramped low ceilinged room with a bandstand at one end. It was dimly lit with with bare light bulbs with a few battered sofas. Only bebop was played - fierce and urgent music! The early months of the Eleven saw the highest peak of enthusiasm in the history of British modern jazz. The jazzmen continued to listen and study as many records of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis that they could get hold of. Broadcasts, recordings, and concerts came in quick succession and public acclaim was such as to force a move within a few months to much larger premises at 50, Carnaby Street, satisfying the legions of fans coming from all over the country to the by now famous Club 11. It was now operating six days a week in the evening and was open in the afternoon as a meeting point for musicians. At this point Johnny Dankworth left to form his Seven taking Joe Muddel with him, and Harry Morris also quit.This is our website This is our InstagramThis is our Facebook group

Straight Up
Dawn O'Porter and Josie Naughton: freeze-dried cats and the celeb secrets behind Choose Love

Straight Up

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 21, 2023 75:26


The three most shocking sex scenes of 2023? They're all in one buzzy new film: class satire Saltburn, which Ellie went to see last week and reports back with all the gory details in this episode. A little less sexy but equally entertaining was Kathleen's culture pick this week: Leave the World Behind, the apocalyptic thriller  starring Julia Roberts. We get into why it's so realistic for 2023 and why everyone's talking about its secret Friends references. And as an extra Christmas treat in this episode we also have a fabulously fun interview with two amazing women: Dawn O'Porter and Josie Naughton, the cofounders of our favourite charity and ‘movement' Choose Love, which supports displaced people across the world. Everyone from Olivia Colman to Phoebe Waller Bridge have lent their stardom to promote its incredible message, which proves celebrity philanthropy is not to be sniffed at. So we were so excited to be invited to Choose Love's stunning Soho pop-up boutique to chat  to Dawn and Josie, getting off to an excellent start by bumping into Dawn's husband Chris O'Dowd wielding a Choose Love placard just outside.  We talked all about the highs and lows of a celebrity marriage, the hilarious fails of being a ‘celebrity plus one', how Josie began her career in management for Coldplay, top tips for a fabulous dinner party and Dawn and Josie's best foodie spots in London.   We're having a little festive break next week gang but we'll be back with an episode on Jan 4 full of culture recommendations to brighten up our gloomy Januaries.  Happy Christmas to our wonderful listeners, we have absolutely loved growing this amazing community of smart, hilarious, fabulous huns - we're still sobbing over our latest outrageously cute Apple review - so thank you very much for listening, and until next year!  E&K x Please leave us a review on Apple, rate us on Spotify, and drop us a DM @straightuppod on Insta, we adore hearing from you Shop for someone who needs it via choose.love, visit the store at Carnaby Street (open until xmas eve) and follow @chooselove on instagram! Thanks so much to our brilliant partners for this ep: Flare, the cutting edge company behind the Calmer earbuds, which soften horrible sounds like chewing, tapping and loud breathing for sensitive souls like us (misophonia!). If you're someone who gets distracted easily then you absolutely NEED these in your life. Grab a pair at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠flareaudio.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Yonder, the super cool lifestyle credit card that's ideal for London Huns who want to get huge discounts and freebies across food, drink, and fitness. Every point you spend is then redeemable against amazing experiences in the capital, from top restaurants to the swankiest gym classes incl Boomcycle and Kobox this month! Sign up today at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠yondercard.com

Vox: Short audio from the RLF
Sonia Faleiro: The Writer And Nature

Vox: Short audio from the RLF

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 14, 2023 3:18


'Of the origin stories I read the one I liked best was about Jimi Hendrix releasing a pair of parakeets in Carnaby Street.'The origin story I liked best was about Jimi Hendrix releasing a pair of parakeets in Carnaby Street. Hendrix spent several months in the city before his death at the age of twenty seven. ‘There's no place like London', he said. ‘It's like a kind of a fairyland.'

London Asked and Answered - Your London Travel Guide
London Christmas 2023 - Yuletide in London: A Journey Through Lights, Laughter, and Legacy

London Asked and Answered - Your London Travel Guide

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 13, 2023 40:06


Welcome to "Yuletide in London: A Journey Through Lights, Laughter, and Legacy," a festive episode that whisks you through the sparkling streets of London during the Christmas season.We kick off with the dazzling Christmas lights switch-on, from the star-studded Oxford Street to the neon spectacle of Carnaby Street. Next, step into the Kit Kat Club at Selfridges for a unique blend of cabaret and Christmas cheer. Don't miss the full cabaret experience - book your tickets at Cabaret Musical Tickets.The episode then transports you to the historical grandeur of the Hampton Court Palace Festive Fayre, followed by a glide across London's enchanting ice rinks. We explore the vibrant Electric Winter at South Bank and share heartwarming tales from the Father Christmas storytelling sessions at the Old Royal Naval College.Answering your queries, we delve into London's hospitality etiquette, uncover hidden gems near The Rembrandt Hotel, and recommend the finest Indian restaurants in Chelsea.As we conclude, we share a quirky London anecdote, leaving you with a sense of the city's unique charm.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.GOT QUESTIONS ABOUT LONDON?Send me your question(s) for a chance to be answered live.Whatsapp: +44 7700 1822 99 (Text & Voice)E-Mail: hello@londonasked.comWeb: https://londonasked.com/askFOLLOW MEFacebook: @londonaskedInstagram: @londonaskedTwitter: @londonaskedJOIN THE FACEBOOK GROUPhttps://facebook.com/groups/londonaskedLEAVE A REVIEWPlease leave a review wherever you're listening to this podcast.GET IT NOW! The London Asked and Answered: Your Comprehensive Travel Guide Book or eBookhttps://guided.london/book© 2023 London Asked and Answered; Sascha Berninger Ready to dive into the ultimate London adventure? Subscribe now to unlock exclusive content and join us in uncovering the city's best-kept secrets, insider tips, and unforgettable experiences. Don't miss out on the journey of a lifetime – hit that subscribe button and let's explore London together! https://plus.acast.com/s/london-asked-and-answered. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Asylum Speakers Podcast with Jaz O'Hara: Stories of Migration
50. Imad's Syrian Kitchen with Imad Al Arnab

Asylum Speakers Podcast with Jaz O'Hara: Stories of Migration

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 4, 2023 51:33


In today's episode I speak to the wonderful Imad Al Arnab of Imad's Syrian Kitchen. Imad has such an amazing story. He was a successful restaurateur in his home city of Damascus, Syria where he owned multiple restaurants, several juice bars and coffee shops. After they were all bombed and it became apparent he had to leave, he made the dangerous journey to the UK, where at first he worked in a car wash and as a car salesman. It didn't take long for him to go on to open his very successful restaurant in Central London - Imad's Syrian Kitchen.. He's now written a recipe book also called Imad's Syrian Kitchen - a love letter from Damascus to London, and is in the process of opening an even bigger restaurant still in Kingly Court off Carnaby Street.In the run up to interviewing Imad I read loads of articles about his story. In some he spoke about the 65 days he spent living in Calais, holding on to the underside of lorries trying to get to the UK. But most importantly I remember him talking about how cooking was always a part of his journey. How a British Pakistani volunteer had given him a small stove and gas canisters so he could cook for himself and 14 friends. How he didn't want to carry a knife and appear dangerous so he broke the vegetables up with his hands, and how a local Calais resident had been annoyed with them fishing close by, until one day Imad offered him some of the dish he had made with the fish, and from then on, he allowed Imad and his friends to charge their phones at his house. Imad is so instantly warm and likeable. We recorded this episode in the restaurant after having lunch there together. I didn't order, but before I knew it the table was covered in colourful, beautiful dishes. I remembered some of Imad's words from another article saying “In Syria we don't ask ‘what do you want to eat? We just serve lots of food and you can eat whatever you like, whenever you like. It's like family.”I LOVED Imad's positive outlook and came away from the conversation totally topped up and inspired… I'm so sure you will too…--To support the show: https://www.patreon.com/theworldwidetribeThis episode is brought to you by Skin + Me - a personalized skincare solution that has not only transformed my skin, but also my packing experience wherever I'm going. Use the code ASYLUMSPEAKERS for an over 85% discount on your first month. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fingal's Cave - A Podcast for all dedicated Pink Floyd Fans
Ep.3 - Derek T. "I became a bit fanatical”

Fingal's Cave - A Podcast for all dedicated Pink Floyd Fans

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 24, 2023 77:28


In this episode, we talk to Pink Floyd recording pioneer Derek T.Derek, whose love of the band began when he listened to the live sides of Ummagumma in 1969, was present at many significant Pink Floyd gigs in their heyday. He shares his concert memories with our host, Ian Priston, and explains the 1970s vinyl bootleg industry and attempts to stamp it out. Derek took over a tiny record shop in Marlborough Court, just off Carnaby Street, London, in 1973, where he would encounter various classic titles such as The Best of Tour '72. At one point you'll hear Derek talking about an Elvis impersonator at the Crystal Palace concert on 15 May 1971, and this did indeed happen. Derek also acknowledges the loss of his good friend, Syd Barrett specialist Bernard White, in tragic circumstances. Later he talks about his experience of Knebworth '75 and going to the 1977 Wembley concerts. The enigmatic Jesus Jellett is mentioned and Derek explains racing driver James Hunt's connection to The Wall shows. Derek then moves on to his key Pink Floyd archival achievement, filming excerpts of multiple The Wall concerts in England and Germany in 1980 and 1981 from different vantage points on a Super 8 camera. Derek subsequently edited his footage highlights together to form a complete concert production. We would like to thank Vincenzo Gatti for his work on mastering the sound.

Questioning Fashion
Did Mary Quant revolutionise fashion retail?

Questioning Fashion

Play Episode Listen Later May 1, 2023 31:14


This week, Ali digs up an old research paper from uni about "The Swinging Sixties" and tries to pass it off as a topical episode. We talk about Mary Quant, Chelsea, Carnaby Street, Mods, Biba, and who we'd try to meet if we went time travelling.The books Ali mentions are "Quant on Quant" by Mary Quant and "In My Own Fashion" by Oleg Cassini.Our Instagram accounts:instagram.com/questioningfashionpodcastinstagram.com/joannegambaleinstagram.com/bellstreetOur TikTok accounts:tiktok.com/@bellstreettiktok.com/@slogue_joannegambale This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit questioningfashion.substack.com

Last Word
Anne Perry, Dame Mary Quant, Jean Argles, Ahmad Jamal

Last Word

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 26, 2023 27:07


Matthew Bannister on Anne Perry, the best-selling crime novelist who committed a murder when she was a teenager. Dame Mary Quant, the influential fashion designer at the heart of the swinging 60s. Pattie Boyd recalls the coat Mary designed for her wedding to George Harrison. Jean Argles, who – with her sister - served as a codebreaker during the second world war. Ahmad Jamal, the jazz pianist and composer whose restrained but intense style inspired Miles Davis. Joe Stilgoe pays tribute. Producer: Gareth Nelson-Davies Interviewee: Joanne Drayton Interviewee: Jenny Lister Interviewee: Pattie Boyd Interviewee: Tessa Dunlop Interviewee: Joe Stilgoe Archive used: Carnaby Street, British Pathe News, 1969; Mary Quant interview with ITN about the ideas that guided her innovative designs, ITN Archive, YouTube uploaded 13/04/2023; Mary Quant interview, Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4 , 16/02/2012; Anne Perry: The Making of a Writer, Open Road Media, YouTube uploaded 21/03/2010; Ian Rankin interview with Anne Perry, YouTube uploaded 18/08/2007; Heavenly Creatures film promo, YouTube uploaded 22/07/2014; Jean Argles interview, Legasee, The Veterans Video Archive, recording date unknown, source: legasee.org.uk;

On The Scent
Fabulous Ffern

On The Scent

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 20, 2023 57:04


This week, Nicola & Suzy took a trip to visit the beautiful @ffern.co London boutique. Having mentioned this lovely Somerset-based natural perfumery on the show previously, it was time to hear directly from Emily Cameron (who co-founded Ffern with her brother, Owen Mears), learn much more about the ingredients they use, and their seasonal, sustainable and slow-perfumery ethos.Walking around this haven of tranquility, you soon forget you're in the heart of Soho (Just off Carnaby Street!) as you smell the fragrances in the archive, marvel at the plethora of natural materials. Think fossil-embedded stones, a desk made from the same mycelium as their packaging, soft chalky colours of paintwork, sea grass flooring and pale woods. Even soft strips of algae (which felt like vintage suede!) make for a textural, sensorial delight, and you can sip their herbal teas (which also follow the seasonal ingredients of the scents) while watching the beautiful videos they created to evoke the landscape they are so inspired by. We hope you enjoy this immersive, sensorially soothing episode, and urge you to visit the next time you're in London. Suzy & Nicola left smiling, feeling totally restored, and ready to face the rest of the week….Ffern 23 Beak Street, London W1F 9RSFfern has a waiting list to join their ledger, and if you submit your email, they'll let you know when a space becomes available to join. Then, you will be sent seasonally beautiful scents quarterly (a sample vial alongside a full sized bottle - you simply try the sample and keep the full bottle if you like it, or send it back if you don't. You can also skip a season or pause your membership at any time).For much more information (and the gorgeous imagery and videos) see their website:https://ffern.coDo also listen to their own monthly accompanying podcast (linked on their site), which explores the seasons, foraging, and talks (again, so soothingly) of sunsets, the land, nature in all its glories. #onthescentpodcast #ffern #ffernfragrance #naturalperfumery #fragrance #scent #nature #perfumery #landscape #seasonal #slowperfumery

EL GUATEQUE
EL GUATEQUE T09C088 Seguimos recordando a Nino Bravo, una de las mejores voces de todos los tiempos (16/04/2023)

EL GUATEQUE

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 16, 2023 55:32


Que Luis Manuel Ferri se convirtiera en Nino Bravo era cuestión de tiempo. Había militado en grupos como Los Hispánicos y Los Superson , y aquel inmenso chorro de voz hacía saltar por los aires todos los cánones sobre los típicos registros del típico vocalista de conjunto beat.Nino Bravo tenía alma de rockero, que interpretaba aquellas baladas con la misma rabia y pasión con las que se lucen las más carismáticas voces internacionales.Los sesenta londinenses fueron tiempos de minifaldas firmadas por Mary Quant, y de juventud, colorido y libertad arriba y abajo de Carnaby Street, King's Road y Kengsinton; de beatles, whos, kinks y stones; de Michael Caine y David Hemmings con pantalones blancos y cámara en mano; de protestas, drogas, ideas y,Y suenan también: Micky, Los Mitos, Mireille Mathieu, Los Ángeles, Small Faces, Los Sirex, Billy Fury, Paul McCartney y Modulos

Bulletproof Entrepreneur
S02E07 Henry Dimbleby MBE - The fast food entrepreneur who sold Leon for £100m

Bulletproof Entrepreneur

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 23, 2023 66:06


Henry is the co-founder of the fast-food restaurant chain Leon with the unforgettable strapline ‘If God did fast food..'From humble beginnings, with one small shop in Carnaby Street in London to a national and international brand which eventually sold for a reported £100 million Henry is undoubtedly a bulletproof entrepreneur.During our conversation, he explained:How they came up with the memorable name Leon and the vital importance of getting your business name right from the outset.What he believes to be the two most important attributes that any entrepreneur must have to succeed .The value of narrative and storytelling to help grow your media presence and generate new customers.And as we were wrapping up the conversation, Henry provided us with one of the best definitions I've ever heard of what True Wealth really is.His new book, "Ravenous," has just been published and is a seriously good read if you're interested in learning about our food system and how to optimise for maximum energy  - something that every entrepreneur needs to do.LinksHenry DimblebyLEONRavenous: How to get ourselves and our planet into shapeBillionaire Issa brothers buy Leon for £100m | Evening StandardThis podcast is produced by GR Media Sponsored by Capital Asset Management

RIPOTTER
1x2 Hai un gufo in tasca o sei solo felice di vedermi? - Cap. 4-5

RIPOTTER

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 9, 2023 53:35


Il viaggio continua: Harry scopre di essere un mago e va a fare shopping nella Carnaby Street magica. In questo secondo episodio del podcast italiano su Harry Potter, Mirco e Filippo incontrano i primi nazisti, gli ebrei magici e soprattutto si chiedono: quanto è ricco Harry? Fai come Doris Crockford e seguici pure tu su Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ripotterpodcast

NuDirections
Mestizo Sounds presents MODS

NuDirections

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 17, 2023 110:27


This is a programme dedicated to the cool sounds of the mods. A genuine youth movement originated in Great Britain in the swinging sixties years. London was the coolest place on earth between 1962 to 1964 when young people flew there in hordes to hang around the smokey jazz clubs in Soho. Vespas riding through the narrow streets of Central London and mini skirts wore by the thin London young girls. Jazz, Blues and Soul was the music to listen and great bands were emerging every day immersed in these sounds. Small Faces, Graham Bond Organisation, The Artwooods, Rod Stewart the Mod singing in the Steampacket of Long John Baldry, The Birds (with the right spelling and counting with future Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood), the Action, The Attacks, The Zoot Money Big Roll band, The Creation, the Who, etc. Even the non-mod bands were influenced and the rest of the world was soon catching up and following all the action happening in London. Even Bob Dylan changed his folk days attire for the Carnaby Street style. So please stay connected, relax and enjoy the cool sounds of the Mods! A podcast programme dedicated to Russell Taylor who passed away 4 years ago and is missed so much by friends and music lovers. He was the founder of Crocodile records and the best man to be found behind a counter in a record shop. His encyclopaedic knowledge of the best music was the best guide to browsing among piles of records. Essential info  email - ndfm@mail.com Website - https://www.nudirectionsfm.com NDFM Music player - https://pod.co/nudirections Please enjoy the music We love. NDFM Playlist 1- My generation (instrumental) - THE WHO (in the introduction) 2- When I'm in the crowd - THE JAM 3- Organ grinder's - JIMMY SMITH 4- Wade in the Water - RAMSEY LEWIS TRIO 5- Route 66 - NAT KING COLE 6- In and out - RICHARD “GROOVES” HOLMES 7- Where you belong - EDDIE BOYD 8- I'm with you all the way - DOROTHY BERRY & JIMMY NORMAN 9- Watch your step - BOBBY PARKER 10- My babe - LITTLE WALTER 1 1- Can I get a witness - MARVIN GAYE 12- Time is on my side - IRMA THOMAS 13- I'm the one who loves you - THE IMPRESSIONS 14- Going to a go-go - SMOKEY ROBINSON & THE MIRACLES 15- This old heart of mine (is weak) - THE SUPREMES 16- Cool Jerk - THE CAPITOLS 17- Who's makin love - JOHNNIE TAYLOR 18- Liquidator - HARRY J ALL STARS 19- Summer breeze - JACKIE MITTOO 20- Bring down the birds - HERBIE HANCOCK 21- Keep on Running - THE SPENCER DAVIS GROUP 22- Sweet thing - GEORGIE FAME & THE BLUE FLAMES 23- Come home baby - ROD STEWART & P P ARNOLD 24- In my lonely room - THE ACTION 25- I'm looking for a saxophonist doubling French horn wearing size 37 boots - THE ARTWOODS 26- No good without you - THE BIRDS 27- Zoot suit - THE HIGH NUMBERS (later know as THE WHO) 28- I gotta move - THE KINKS 29- Biff bang pow! - THE CREATION 30- Oh Baby! - THE GRAHAM BOND ORGANISATION 31- You need loving - SMALL FACES 32- Shout - LULU & THE LUVVERS 33- Head over heels - THE STYLOS 34- Stop stop stop - GRAHAM GOULDMAN 35- It's all over now baby blue - THEM 36- Everybody needs somebody to love - THE ROLLING STONES 37- Shake - OTIS REDDING 38- Call me lightning - THE WHO

Mouse and Weens
Elon Musk, Viral Bananas, Hammy Mammagrammy

Mouse and Weens

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 31, 2022 53:06


E137 - We catch up over Christmas break while Joelle's in Idaho & Julianne's in San Diego editing our documentary. Hear about snowy plans, Poway bandits, Red Riders & Home Alone. We made this year's https://www.AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com calendar, talk crappy kids in photos & Mouse finally gives her London recap. See tourist recommendations from a Brit Pod Scene podcast below & hear Number One Rerun's deep thoughts on Harry Potter. We discuss when to scrub social media for work, & then get right into Weens' viral banana video & Hairy Pants song! Speaking of clickable, listen to Julianne's stories about the real personalities of Jack Black, Michael Shannon & Keanu Reeves. Do they have Brad Pitt's face blindness? Do you forget how you know people like Mouse does? We jump into the gutter for a while to discuss monorchidism & the female body part that rhymes with Horace, chorus & taurus. And finally we discuss Elon Musk's comedy career, finding out what politics, the Rachel Maddow Ultra & BagMan podcasts, & cat-sitting have to do with each other. We bring around the episode talking boobs, mammograms, & gallows humor. Then Weens redefines social work, throws out some gross words & ends questioning her solitude and dislike of crowds these days. Who relates? Write in! mouseandweens@gmail.com or DM any socials @mouseandweens https://facebook.com/mouseandweens is a good spot too! Watch this episode on youtube.com/channel/UCgeuFSExQ2EaHYSG-s4sgZw ►Thank you to our patrons - our family! Join the fun, get free swag & bonus content - like deleted scenes from this ep! https://www.patreon.com/mouseandweens ►Credits: "Mouse and Weens" theme song, "Hairy Pants", "Love of My Friends" by Julianne Eggold https://www.julianneeggold.com Voice actor: Matt Thompson ►Our network: Podfix https://podfixnetwork.com ►Sponsor: Dream Dinners! Quickly make homemade meals stress-free. More QT for you & your family! Dream Dinners is nationwide. If within 25 mi of Poway or San Marcos MOUSEANDWEENS99 for $99 off 1st order! Link on https://www.mouseandweens.com ►Please follow, subscribe, talk: Socials @mouseandweens | https://linktr.ee/mouseandweens | mouseandweens@gmail.com | 858-319-1089 ►Number One Rerun Podcast: https://NumberOneRerun.podbean.com and their London tourist guide based on Joelle's teenagers: "We reckon places they may like to visit: Junkyard Golf, Flight Club (go to Shoreditch one as Junkyard Golf is there too), London Eye, Sky Garden, Tower Bridge (walk over glass floor). If you want to get the tube to North Greenwich you can see the O2 - has outlet shopping, restaurants, etc & Toca Social (a virtual football/soccer place). Cable cars there too so nice views & if you want to be mega adventurous you can walk up the O2 as well. Shopping: start at Marble Arch & walk up to Oxford Circus & turn off into Carnaby Street (you can come back out & head past Tottenham Court Road towards Leicester Square (also cool & near Piccadilly Circus) to see Denmark Street on the way if into music (though not hip hop!) For restaurants/cool shopping - Covent Garden or Borough Market (you can see the Shard near there too). Good coffee chains Oree/Joe & The Juice/Ole & Steen/Peyton & Byrne). There's Harry bloody Potter things everywhere so you won't miss that little sod. Plus obviously for you see Buckingham Palace, go on a London bus, etc - lovely." Links Mentioned: ►Buy an Awkward Family Photo daily desk calendar - https://www.amazon.com/Awkward-Family-Photos-2023-Calendar/dp/1524873586 ►Michael Shannon doing comedy - https://youtu.be/IdeFYWX5nuk ►Face Blindness - https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/brad-pitt-interview-2022 ►Salon's "The Onion" article - https://www.salon.com/2013/10/22/were_the_onions_anti_semitic_slurs_fair_game ►Rachel Maddow's podcasts: https://msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-presents-ultra and https://msnbc.com/bagman

Malditos viajes
67. Londres navideño

Malditos viajes

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 20, 2022 26:27


Cómo nos gusta un mercadillo navideño en estas épocas del año, ¿verdad? (menos a Eva, que es el Grinch de la Navidad). En este episodio Geral nos cuenta cómo es volver a Londres 5 años después de haberse marchado y aprovecha a recomendarnos los lugares imprescindibles, conocidos y menos conocidos, de la navidad londinense. Winter wonderland, Carnaby Street, mercadillos y restaurantes especiales… ¡y mucho más! Si estás planeando un viaje a Londres o sencillamente conoces la sensación de volver a un lugar que te hizo feliz y quieres llorar un poco con nosotras, ya sabes, ¡dale al play! También puedes encontrarnos en @malditosviajes o mandarnos un abrazo navideño en malditosviajes@gmail.com

Vince Tracy Podcasts
Carnaby St Fashion, Helen Shapiro and Marc Bolan

Vince Tracy Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 10, 2022 49:40


Here's a very interesting podcast with my friend Mel Castle explaining his links to Helen Shapiro and life around Carnaby Street with some awesome memories and even Boy George, Marc Bolan and Paul Weller thrown in for good measure

Dave, Sam & Ash
663: Trees of Hope

Dave, Sam & Ash

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 22, 2022 4:40


Hot 91.1 are supporting the collection of non-perishable food, to create food hampers to be distributed to those doing it tough in the lead into Xmas. Our office at 17 Carnaby Street, Maroochydore is an official drop-off point for the donation along with the outstanding supporting businesses Sunshine Mitre 10 and Heritage Banks branches. Follow the link to the website for desired items, but the collection will accept ALL no perishable items. It's going to be a tough Xmas for many, so all contributions are welcome. Just bring in your donations, and place them in the green bags hanging from the wooden tree. www.theshackcommunitycentre.com.au/trees-of-hope

Conversations of Inspiration
Choosing love and changing the world, with Josie Naughton, founder of Choose Love

Conversations of Inspiration

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 24, 2022 74:28


“We can all do something” are the words of Josie Naughton, who is at the centre of the pioneering humanitarian aid movement, Choose Love. It's a charity that promotes compassion, people helping people, and true generosity of heart.  When Josie and her friends saw the refugee crisis unfolding in Calais in 2015 they decided to take action by raising £1,000 and organising a van load of donations to be delivered to Calais. With no former charity experience, a lack of fundraising budgets or highly paid executives, their grassroots campaign quickly went viral and redefined the sector.  Having now raised £70 million, which has helped over four million people, Choose Love is a movement ingrained in our society, and one that so many simply couldn't live without.  Josie's previous career in the music industry (working with Coldplay no less), coupled with an instinctive ability to really empathise with others, fuelled a different way of thinking. It enabled her to not just raise money but to change the world through charity. She explains how the idea for their revolutionary pop-up shop in Carnaby Street was coined, which encourages shoppers to, “Shop your heart out, leave with nothing and feel the love”.  With the largest refugee crisis since the Second World War happening right now in Ukraine, Josie speaks with Holly about her vision for the charity, its groundbreaking work and the challenges that lay ahead. And just remember as Josie says, “The refugee crisis is an extremely complex and political business in many ways, but there is nothing confusing or complex about a child having nowhere to sleep”. So listen, digest that thought, and remember – if you can choose anything, choose love.  If this episode strikes a chord, Holly's talk with Kristin Hallenga, founder of CoppaFeel!, might be of interest, too.   Plus for more unfiltered insight, subscribe to Holly's weekly newsletters on our website, where she shares small business inspiration of all kinds, exclusive nuggets of wisdom from her and her guests, plus offers, creative ideas and topical, 'ungoogleable' business advice. 

Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
October 20th - Spain finally drops demand for Covid jabs

Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 20, 2022 7:05


Today's podcast is brought to you from London's Carnaby Street where, amongst the throngs of shoppers, I'll be talking about Spain, which has rather abruptly announced the ending of Covid-19 restrictions.The nation, which is the most popular overseas destination for British holidaymakers, has lagged well behind most of the rest of Europe in removing vaccination and testing rules.Of course this podcast is free, as is my weekly newsletter, which you can subscribe to here: https://www.independent.co.uk/newsletters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Good Guy Podcast
Ep 143 - Jeff Innocent is Pre-Woke

The Good Guy Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 10, 2022 59:46


Jeff is a legend of the comedy world, if you haven't heard of him, which many of you won't have, check out this stand up clip.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdzFzg_YvGQ One of the very very best to ever do it.Born in East London during the mid 1950's, Jeff Innocent grew up in a family whose entrepreneurial spirit and activities were not always considered acceptable by the police. He managed to avoid going in to the family business however by taking a keen interest in youth theatre and Jamaican music. He took part in many productions as a teenager, primarily with the East End Soapbox Theatre, a collective which also spawned performance poet John Hegley. But it took over twenty years before he was to tread the boards again as a comedian.After leaving school his first job was as a windowdresser in the mens fashion trade working in London's trendy Kings Road and Carnaby Street during the early 1970's until the early 1980's when he became a mature student at the University of East London studying philosophy and history, achieving a BA Hons and an MA. He maintained his interest in Jamaican music by DJ'ing and contributing to fanzines during this period. His post graduate dissertation topic being, The History of Jamaican Music. He financed his studying by working in the fashion industry at Camden Market and High Street Kensington.It was after his experience at University that he decided to try stand up comedy, something that he had wanted to do for some years. His initiation was at a workshop in Stratford East London run by the God Father of Alternative Comedy, Tony Allen. Although being a stand up comedian and actor dominates much of Jeff's time he still maintains an interest in music and popular culture. He still lives in the East End with his partner of 23 years, the youngest of his four children and his two whippets. But not necessarily in that order.“In short, he's one funny man .” Chortle “Extremely talented cockney philosopher” Time Out“Terrific, thought-through comedy with a big warm heart” The Scotsman“Clever, honest, funny. Not only hugely likable comedy but fabulously subversive” The Scotsman“It should be made law that every British citizen go and see Jeff Innocent” Evening StandardThanks for watching! Like, subscribe, drop a comment, all the good stuff.Subscribe to Patreon for early access to episodes PLUS a bonus solo episode every week

Power To Speak with Confidence. Conversations that will inspire and empower.
Ep.46. Can you run a business you know nothing about? Can you be a polymorph and a wide boy?

Power To Speak with Confidence. Conversations that will inspire and empower.

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 15, 2022 54:54


Polymorph and wide boy is the way that Jason De Jonge describes himself. According to Linkedin, Jason is a recruitment and outsourcing specialist, a public speaker and a manager of a team of e-commerce gurus. With this many job titles, he is, indeed, polymorphic. But 'wide boy'?  Well, he started his career on the family market stall selling souvenirs to tourists in London's West End, followed by a stint on a City trading floor before running a fashion retail business from a shop on Carnaby Street. Then clubs and bars, eventually ending up in recruitment via an aerospace company! See, polymorph and wide boy! Plus, he is the director of Purple Fedora, where along with MD, Gareth Wax they help people convey their message online. In our fascinating conversation, Jason takes me on the journey through all over the stages of his incredible career. And what is his advice to young people just starting out - life is long. Enjoy it. Follow Jason on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thescribbler/ Or check out Purple Fedora. https://purple-fedora.com/index.html For more info on Power To Speak, podcasting, and speaker coaching go to www.powertospeak.co.uk.    

Sportshour
Women's Euro 2022: Could it come home?

Sportshour

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 2, 2022 54:20


It is a big month for women's football with four continental championships. The Women's Africa Cup of Nations kicks things off on Saturday before the hosts England take on Austria in the opening match of Euro 2022 on Wednesday. Gill Coultard was part of the England side that lost to Sweden in the first ever final in 1984 and tells us how far the game has come in the past 38 years. As the Tour de France gets underway we are joined by the man with the best seat in the house. Seb Piquet watches the race from a communications car ahead of the riders relaying important information to teams, broadcasters and fans. British sprinter Anyika Onuora stood on the podium at every major championship in athletics. However, her new book My Hidden Race does not detail her sporting achievements. In the era of the Black Lives Matter and Me Too, it is a powerful account of what it takes to pursue your dreams as a Black woman in Britain. Nothing is off the record as Anyika is determined to finally speak out and use her story to inspire and heal others. Plus we are live at Wimbledon and at the much delayed Fifth Test between England and India. Presenter: Caroline Barker (Photo: Uefa Women's Euro England 2022 organisers unveil giant women's table football players on London's iconic Carnaby Street. Credit John Phillips/Getty Images)

Silence on Set
Tribeca: Angelheaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex Doc shows Bolan's influence as a music icon and influence on glam rock

Silence on Set

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 10, 2022 29:57


Angelheaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex documentary showcases the long-lasting influence that Bolan has had not only as a fashion icon but as a musical legend. Family members Gloria Jones and Rolan Bolan and director Ethan Silverman sat down to talk about the importance of this documentary and why everyone needs to go see it at the festival.  Host: Monica Gleberman Editor: Ashley Pelletier Social Media Graphic: Jojo -- Bio: A leader of the glam-rock movement and an early champion of punk, Marc Bolan was always ahead of the curve. This was both an advantage and a stumbling block for the mop-headed T. Rex bandleader, whose unique approach to pop songcraft is highlighted in Angelheaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan and T. Rex. Director Ethan Silverman was involved in both the creation of this documentary and the 2020 Marc Bolan tribute album of the same name. This gives him intimate access, both to those who knew Bolan best and to the musicians who were profoundly impacted by his work. The list of Bolan acolytes just happens to include some of the biggest names in music, and U2,Billy Idol,Joan Jett, Ringo Starr, Nick Cave, and Elton John are all on hand to celebrate his work in interviews and performance footage. These combine with archival footage to trace Bolan's life from his teenage years digging through Carnaby Street dustbins with David Bowie to his tragic death at the age of 29.--Frederic Boyer

The Visible Artist
Olly Fathers

The Visible Artist

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 18, 2022 37:04


How can artists build relationships in the art world? What is it like to have your work selected for the Soho House collection? How do you balance a practice rooted in traditional materials and techniques, with a fascination for new digital directions? How can you develop networks with your followers across the globe? And, last but not least, what is it like working with the UK Marquetry Society?I travelled to ASC studios in Brixton to visit Olly Fathers, a wonderfully talented artist who never stops exploring ways to expand his practice, from the very traditional to the digital. His work is both playful and precise; working in wood, paper, card and more, Olly experiments with different materials and forms, examining the interactions of geometric shapes and bold block colours. Each piece is beautifully finished and invites the viewer to look closely at the precision of the puzzle-like artworks.This was particularly the case for his recent shortlisted piece for the Concord Art Prize. Inspired by the musical song, ‘Pure Imagination', Olly created a large-scale installation of pastel blocks and wooden squiggles suspended in mid-air thanks to crafty hidden wires. It fitted the song perfectly - light, delicate and almost unreal.As you can hear from our conversation, Olly is a very warm, open person who has managed to forge many friendships with the art world - from the Soho House curatorial team to the Vice President of the UK Marquetry Society. We chat about how he secured amazing opportunities such as the Jealous Rooftop Mural commission, painting the storefront of We Built This City in Carnaby Street and his multiple Soho House commissions. As we mention in our convsation, if anyone sees his work in Tel Aviv, please send him a photo! Follow Olly Fathers @ollyfathers____________________________________________Hosted and produced by Sophie Loxton Lucas, The Visible Artist podcast features individual artists and their paths to success within the creative world. Alongside conversations with an array of practicing artists, Sophie chats to key art world protagonists about their experiences of working with artists. The Visible Artist podcast is a must-listen for any artists looking to make their mark in today's art world. Follow the show @thevisibleartistpodcastFollow Sophie @sophieloxtonlucaswww.thevisibleartistpodcast.comPodcast cover by AmyIsla Mccombie Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs
Episode 139: “Eight Miles High” by the Byrds

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 22, 2021


Episode one hundred and thirty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Eight Miles High” by the Byrds, and the influence of jazz and Indian music on psychedelic rock. This is a long one... Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this time, as there were multiple artists with too many songs. Information on John Coltrane came from Coltrane by Ben Ratliffe, while information on Ravi Shankar came from Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar by Oliver Craske. For information on the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography. This dissertation looks at the influence of Slonimsky on Coltrane. All Coltrane's music is worth getting, but this 5-CD set containing Impressions is the most relevant cheap selection of his material for these purposes. This collection has the Shankar material released in the West up to 1962. And this three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript This episode is the second part of a loose trilogy of episodes set in LA in 1966. We're going to be spending a *lot* of time around LA and Hollywood for the next few months -- seven of the next thirteen episodes are based there, and there'll be more after that. But it's going to take a while to get there. This is going to be an absurdly long episode, because in order to get to LA in 1966 again, we're going to have to start off in the 1940s in New York, and take a brief detour to India. Because in order to explain this: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] We're first going to have to explain this: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India (#3)"] Before we begin this, I just want to say something. This episode runs long, and covers a *lot* of musical ground, and as part of that it covers several of the most important musicians of the twentieth century -- but musicians in the fields of jazz, which is a music I know something about, but am not an expert in, and Hindustani classical music, which is very much not even close to my area of expertise. It also contains a chunk of music theory, which again, I know a little about -- but only really enough to know how much I don't know. I am going to try to get the information about these musicians right, but I want to emphasise that at times I will be straying *vastly* out of my lane, in ways that may well seem like they're minimising these musicians. I am trying to give just enough information about them to tell the story, and I would urge anyone who becomes interested in the music I talk about in the early parts of this episode to go out and find more expert sources to fill in the gap. And conversely, if you know more about these musics than I do, please forgive any inaccuracies. I am going to do my best to get all of this right, because accuracy is important, but I suspect that every single sentence in the first hour or so of this episode could be footnoted with something pointing out all the places where what I've said is only somewhat true. Also, I apologise if I mispronounce any names or words in this episode, though I've tried my best to get it right -- I've been unable to find recordings of some words and names being spoken, while with others I've heard multiple versions. To tell today's story, we're going to have to go right back to some things we looked at in the first episode, on "Flying Home". For those of you who don't remember -- which is fair enough, since that episode was more than three years ago -- in that episode we looked at a jazz record by the Benny Goodman Sextet, which was one of the earliest popular recordings to feature electric guitar: [Excerpt: The Benny Goodman Sextet, "Flying Home"] Now, we talked about quite a lot of things in that episode which have played out in later episodes, but one thing we only mentioned in passing, there or later, was a style of music called bebop. We did talk about how Charlie Christian, the guitarist on that record, was one of the innovators of that style, but we didn't really go into what it was properly. Indeed, I deliberately did not mention in that episode something that I was saving until now, because we actually heard *two* hugely influential bebop musicians in that episode,  and I was leaving the other one to talk about here. In that episode we saw how Lionel Hampton, the Benny Goodman band's vibraphone player, went on to form his own band, and how that band became one of the foundational influences for the genres that became known as jump blues and R&B. And we especially noted the saxophone solo on Hampton's remake of "Flying Home", played by Illinois Jacquet: [Excerpt: Lionel Hampton, "Flying Home"] We mentioned in that episode how Illinois Jacquet's saxophone solo there set the template for all tenor sax playing in R&B and rock and roll music for decades to come -- his honking style became quite simply how you play rock and roll or R&B saxophone, and without that solo you don't have any of the records by Fats Domino, Little Richard, the Coasters, or a dozen other acts that we discussed. But what we didn't look at in that episode is that that is a big band record, so of course there is more than just one saxophone player on it. And one of the other saxophone players on that recording is Dexter Gordon, a musician who was originally from LA. Those of you with long memories will remember that back in the first year or so of the podcast we talked a lot about the music programme at Jefferson High School in LA, and about Samuel Browne, the music teacher whose music programme gave the world the Coasters, the Penguins, the Platters, Etta James, Art Farmer, Richard Berry, Big Jay McNeely, Barry White, and more other important musicians than I can possibly name here. Gordon was yet another of Browne's students -- one who Browne regularly gave detention to, just to make him practice his scales. Gordon didn't get much chance to shine in the Lionel Hampton band, because he was only second tenor, with Jacquet taking many of the solos. But he was learning from playing in a band with Jacquet, and while Gordon didn't ever develop a honk like Jacquet's, he did adopt some of Jacquet's full tone in his own sound. There aren't many recordings of Gordon playing solos in his early years, because they coincided with the American Federation of Musicians' recording strike that we talked about in those early episodes, but he did record a few sessions in 1943 for a label small enough not to be covered by the ban, and you can hear something of Jacquet's tone in those recordings, along with the influence of Lester Young, who influenced all tenor sax players at this time: [Excerpt: Nat "King" Cole with Dexter Gordon, "I've Found a New Baby"] The piano player on that session, incidentally, is Nat "King" Cole, when he was still one of the most respected jazz pianists on the scene, before he switched primarily to vocals. And Gordon took this Jacquet-influenced tone, and used it to become the second great saxophone hero of bebop music, after Charlie Parker -- and the first great tenor sax hero of the music. I've mentioned bebop before on several occasions, but never really got into it in detail. It was a style that developed in New York in the mid to late forties, and a lot of the earliest examples of it went unrecorded thanks to that musicians' strike, but the style emphasised small groups improvising together, and expanding their sense of melody and harmony. The music prized virtuosity and musical intelligence over everything else, and was fast and jittery-sounding. The musicians would go on long, extended, improvisations, incorporating ideas both from the blues and from the modern classical music of people like Bartok and Stravinsky, which challenged conventional tonality. In particular, one aspect which became prominent in bebop music was a type of scale known as the bebop scale. In most of the music we've looked at in this podcast to this point, the scales used have been seven-note scales -- do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti- which make an octave with a second, higher, do tone. So in the scale of C major we have C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and then another C: [demonstrates] Bebop scales, on the other hand, would generally have an extra note in, making an eight-note scale, by adding in what is called a chromatic passing note. For example, a typical bebop C major scale might add in the note G#, so the scale would go C,D,E,F,G,G#, A, B, C: [demonstrates] You'd play this extra note for the most part, when moving between the two notes it's between, so in that scale you'd mostly use it when moving from G to A, or from A to G. Now I'm far from a bebop player, so this won't sound like bebop, but I can demonstrate the kind of thing if I first noodle a little scalar melody in the key of C major: [demonstrates] And then play the same thing, but adding in a G# every time I go between the G and the A in either direction: [demonstrates] That is not bebop music, but I hope you can see what a difference that chromatic passing tone makes to the melody. But again, that's not bebop, because I'm not a bebop player. Dexter Gordon, though, *was* a bebop player. He moved to New York while playing with Louis Armstrong's band, and soon became part of the bebop scene, which at the time centred around Charlie Christian, the trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie, and the alto sax player Charlie Parker, sometimes nicknamed "bird" or "Yardbird", who is often regarded as the greatest of them all. Gillespie, Parker, and Gordon also played in Billy Eckstine's big band, which gave many of the leading bebop musicians the opportunity to play in what was still the most popular idiom at the time -- you can hear Gordon have a saxophone battle with Gene Ammons on "Blowing the Blues Away" in a lineup of the band that also included Art Blakey on drums and Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet: [Excerpt: Billy Eckstine, "Blowing the Blues Away"] But Gordon was soon leading his own small band sessions, and making records for labels like Savoy, on which you can definitely hear the influence of Illinois Jacquet on his tone, even as he's playing music that's more melodically experimental by far than the jump band music of the Hampton band: [Excerpt: Dexter Gordon, "Dexter Digs In"] Basically, in the late 1940s, if you were wanting to play bebop on the saxophone, you had two models to follow -- Charlie Parker, the great alto saxophonist with his angular, atonal, melodic sense and fast, virtuosic, playing, or Dexter Gordon, the tenor saxophonist, whose style had more R&B grease and wit to it, who would quote popular melodies in his own improvisations. And John Coltrane followed both. Coltrane's first instrument was the alto sax, and when he was primarily an alto player he would copy Charlie Parker's style. When he switched to being primarily a tenor player -- though he would always continue playing both instruments, and later in his career would also play soprano sax -- he took up much of Gordon's mellower tone, though he was also influenced by other tenor players, like Lester Young, the great player with Count Basie's band, and Johnny Hodges, who played with Duke Ellington. Now, it is important to note here that John Coltrane is a very, very, big deal. Depending on your opinion of Ornette Coleman's playing, Coltrane is by most accounts either the last or penultimate truly great innovator in jazz saxophone, and arguably the single foremost figure in the music in the last half of the twentieth century. In this podcast I'm only able to tell you enough about him to give you the information you need to understand the material about the Byrds, but were I to do a similar history of jazz in five hundred songs, Coltrane would have a similar position to someone like the Beatles -- he's such a major figure that he is literally venerated as a saint by the African Orthodox Church, and a couple of other Episcopal churches have at least made the case for his sainthood. So anything I say here about him is not even beginning to scratch the surface of his towering importance to jazz music, but it will, I hope, give some idea of his importance to the development of the Byrds -- a group of whom he was almost certainly totally unaware. Coltrane started out playing as a teenager, and his earliest recordings were when he was nineteen and in the armed forces, just after the end of World War II. At that time, he was very much a beginner, although a talented one, and on his early amateur recordings you can hear him trying to imitate Parker without really knowing what it was that Parker was doing that made him so great. But as well as having some natural talent, he had one big attribute that made him stand out -- his utter devotion to his music. He was so uninterested in anything other than mastering his instrument that one day a friend was telling him about a baseball game he'd watched, and all Coltrane could do was ask in confusion "Who's Willie Mays?" Coltrane would regularly practice his saxophone until his reed was red with blood, but he would also study other musicians. And not just in jazz. He knew that Charlie Parker had intensely studied Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, and so Coltrane would study that too: [Excerpt: Stravinsky, "Firebird Suite"] Coltrane joined the band of Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, who was one of those figures like Johnny Otis, with whom Vinson would later perform for many years, who straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B. Vinson was a blues shouter in the style of Big Joe Turner, but he was also a bebop sax player, and what he wanted was a tenor sax player who could play tenor the way Charlie Parker played alto, but do it in an R&B setting. Coltrane switched from alto to tenor, and spent a year or so playing with Vinson's band. No recordings exist of Coltrane with Vinson that I'm aware of, but you can get an idea of what he sounded like from his next band. By this point, Dizzy Gillespie had graduated from small bebop groups to leading a big band, and he got Coltrane in as one of his alto players, though Coltrane would often also play tenor with Gillespie, as on this recording from 1951, which has Coltrane on tenor, Gillespie on trumpet, with Kenny Burrell and two of the future Modern Jazz Quartet, Milt Jackson and Percy Heath, showing that the roots of modern jazz were not very far at all from the roots of rock and roll: [Excerpt: Dizzy Gillespie, "We Love to Boogie"] After leaving Gillespie's band, Coltrane played with a lot of important musicians over the next four or five years, like Johnny Hodges, Earl Bostic, and Jimmy Smith, and occasionally sat in with Miles Davis, but at this point he was still not a major musician in the genre. He was a competent, working, sideman, but he was also struggling with alcohol and heroin, and hadn't really found his own voice. But then Miles Davis asked Coltrane to join his band full-time. Coltrane was actually Davis' second choice -- he really wanted Sonny Rollins, who was widely considered the best new tenor player around, but he was eventually persuaded to take Coltrane. During his first period with Davis, Coltrane grew rapidly as a musician, and also played on a *lot* of other people's sessions. In a three year period Coltrane went from Davis to Thelonius Monk's group then back to Davis' group, and also recorded as both a sideman and a band leader on a ton of sessions. You can get a box set of his recordings from May 1956 through December 1958 that comes to nineteen CDs -- and that's not counting the recordings with Miles Davis, which aren't included on that set. Unsurprisingly, just through playing this much, Coltrane had grown enormously as a player, and he was particularly fascinated by harmonics, playing with the notes of a chord, in arpeggios, and pushing music to its harmonic limits, as you can hear in his solo on Davis' "Straight, No Chaser", which pushes the limits of the jazz solo as far as they'd gone to that point: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Straight, No Chaser"] But on the same album as that, "Milestones", we also have the first appearance of a new style, modal jazz. Now, to explain this, we have to go back to the scales again. We looked at the normal Western scale, do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do, but you can start a scale on any of those notes, and which note you start on creates what is called a different mode. The modes are given Greek names, and each mode has a different feel to it. If you start on do, we call this the major scale or the Ionian mode. This is the normal scale we heard before -- C,D,E,F,G,A,B,C: [demonstrates] Most music – about seventy percent of the melodies you're likely to have heard, uses that mode. If you start on re, it would go re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do-re, or D,E,F,G,A,B,C,D, the Dorian mode: [demonstrates] Melodies with this mode tend to have a sort of wistful feel, like "Scarborough Fair": [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "Scarborough Fair"] or many of George Harrison's songs: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Me Mine"] Starting on mi, you have the Phrygian mode, mi-fa-so-la-ti-do-re-mi: [demonstrates] The Phrygian mode is not especially widely used, but does turn up in some popular works like Barber's Adagio for Strings: [Excerpt: Barber, "Adagio for Strings"] Then there's the Lydian mode, fa-so-la-ti-do-re-mi-fa: [demonstrates] This mode isn't used much at all in pop music -- the most prominent example I can think of is "Pretty Ballerina" by the Left Banke: [Excerpt: The Left Banke, "Pretty Ballerina"] Starting on so, we have so-la-ti-do-re-mi-fa-so -- the Mixolydian mode: [demonstrates] That mode has a sort of bluesy or folky tone to it, and you also find it in a lot of traditional tunes, like "She Moves Through the Fair": [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "She Moved Thru' The Bizarre/Blue Raga"] And in things like "Norwegian Wood" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood"] Though that goes into Dorian for the middle section. Starting on la, we have the Aeolian mode, which is also known as the natural minor scale, and is often just talked about as “the minor scale”: [demonstrates] That's obviously used in innumerable songs, for example "Losing My Religion" by REM: [Excerpt: REM, "Losing My Religion"] And finally you have the Locrian mode ti-do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti: [demonstrates] That basically doesn't get used, unless someone wants to show off that they know the Locrian mode. The only vaguely familiar example I can think of is "Army of Me" by Bjork: [Excerpt: Bjork, "Army of Me"] I hope that brief excursion through the seven most common modes in Western diatonic music gives you some idea of the difference that musical modes can make to a piece. Anyway, as I was saying, on the "Milestones" album, we get some of the first examples of a form that became known as modal jazz. Now, the ideas of modal jazz had been around for a few years at that point -- oddly, it seems to be one of the first types of popular music to have existed in theory before existing in practice. George Russell, an acquaintance of Davis who was a self-taught music theorist, had written a book in 1953 titled The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. That book argues that rather than looking at the diatonic scale as the basis for music, one should instead look at a chord progression called the circle of fifths. The circle of fifths is exactly what it sounds like -- you change chords to one a fifth away from it, and then do that again and again, either going up, so you'd have chords with the roots C-G-D-A-E-B-F# and so on: [demonstrates] Or, more commonly, going down, though usually when going downwards you tend to cheat a bit and sharpen one of the notes so you can stay in one key, so you'd get chords with roots C-F-B-E-A-D-G, usually the chords C, F, B diminished, Em, Am, Dm, G: [demonstrates] That descending cycle of fifths is used in all sorts of music, everything from "You Never Give Me Your Money" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "You Never Give Me Your Money"] to "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor: [Excerpt: Gloria Gaynor, "I Will Survive"] But what Russell pointed out is that if you do the upwards cycle of fifths, and you *don't* change any of the notes, the first seven root notes you get are the same seven notes you'd find in the Lydian mode, just reordered -- C-D-E-F#-G-A-B . Russell then argued that much of the way harmony and melody work in jazz could be thought of as people experimenting with the way the Lydian mode works, and the way the cycle of fifths leads you further and further away from the tonal centre. Now, you could probably do an entire podcast series as long as this one on the implications of this, and I am honestly just trying to summarise enough information here that you can get a vague gist, but Russell's book had a profound effect on how jazz musicians started to think about harmony and melody. Instead of improvising around the chord changes to songs, they were now basing improvisations and compositions around modes and the notes in them. Rather than having a lot of chord changes, you might just play a single root note that stays the same throughout, or only changes a couple of times in the whole piece, and just imply changes with the clash between the root note and whatever modal note the solo instrument is playing. The track "Milestones" on the Milestones album shows this kind of thinking in full effect -- the song consists of a section in G Dorian, followed by a section in A Aeolian (or E Phrygian depending on how you look at it). Each section has only one implied chord -- a Gm7 for the G Dorian section, and an Am7(b13) for the A Aeolian section -- over which Davis, Cannonball Adderley on alto sax, and Coltrane on tenor, all solo: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Milestones"] (For the pedants among you, that track was originally titled "Miles" on the first pressings of the album, but it was retitled "Milestones" on subsequent pressings). The modal form would be taken even further on Davis' next album to be recorded, Porgy and Bess, which featured much fuller orchestrations and didn't have Coltrane on it. Davis later said that when the arranger Gil Evans wrote the arrangements for that album, he didn't write any chords at all, just a scale, which Davis could improvise around. But it was on the album after that, Kind of Blue, which again featured Coltrane on saxophone, that modal jazz made its big breakthrough to becoming the dominant form of jazz music. As with what Evans had done on Porgy and Bess, Davis gave the other instrumentalists modes to play, rather than a chord sequence to improvise over or a melody line to play with. He explained his thinking behind this in an interview with Nat Hentoff, saying "When you're based on chords, you know at the end of 32 bars that the chords have run out and there's nothing to do but repeat what you've just done—with variations. I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords ... there will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them." This style shows up in "So What", the opening track on the album, which is in some ways a very conventional song structure -- it's a thirty-two bar AABA structure. But instead of a chord sequence, it's based on modes in two keys -- the A section is in D Dorian, while the B section is in E-flat Dorian: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "So What"] Kind of Blue would become one of the contenders for greatest jazz album of all time, and one of the most influential records ever made in any genre -- and it could be argued that that track we just heard, "So What", inspired a whole other genre we'll be looking at in a future episode -- but Coltrane still felt the need to explore more ideas, and to branch out on his own. In particular, while he was interested in modal music, he was also interested in exploring more kinds of scales than just modes, and to do this he had to, at least for the moment, reintroduce chord changes into what he was doing. He was inspired in particular by reading Nicolas Slonimsky's classic Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Coltrane had recently signed a new contract as a solo artist with Atlantic Records, and recorded what is generally considered his first true masterpiece album as a solo artist, Giant Steps, with several members of the Davis band, just two weeks after recording Kind of Blue. The title track to Giant Steps is the most prominent example of what are known in jazz as the Coltrane changes -- a cycle of thirds, similar to the cycle of fifths we talked about earlier. The track itself seems to have two sources. The first is the bridge of the old standard "Have You Met Miss Jones?", as famously played by Coleman Hawkins: [Excerpt: Coleman Hawkins, "Have You Met Miss Jones?" And the second is an exercise from Slonimsky's book: [Excerpt: Pattern #286 from Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns] Coltrane combined these ideas to come up with "Giant Steps", which is based entirely around these cycles of thirds, and Slonimsky's example: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Giant Steps"] Now, I realise that this is meant to be a history of rock music, not jazz musicology theory time, so I promise you I am just hitting the high points here. And only the points that affect Coltrane's development as far as it influenced the music we're looking at in this episode. And so we're actually going to skip over Coltrane's commercial high-point, My Favourite Things, and most of the rest of his work for Atlantic, even though that music is some of the most important jazz music ever recorded. Instead, I'm going to summarise a whole lot of very important music by simply saying that while Coltrane was very interested in this musical idea of the cycle of thirds, he did not like being tied to precise chord changes, and liked the freedom that modal jazz gave to him. By 1960, when his contract with Atlantic was ending and his contract with Impulse was beginning, and he recorded the two albums Olé and Africa/Brass pretty much back to back, he had hit on a new style with the help of Eric Dolphy, a flute, clarinet, and alto sax player who would become an important figure in Coltrane's life. Dolphy died far too young -- he went into a diabetic coma and doctors assumed that because he was a Black jazz musician he must have overdosed, even though he was actually a teetotal abstainer, so he didn't get the treatment he needed -- but he made such a profound influence on Coltrane's life that Coltrane would carry Dolphy's picture with him after his death. Dolphy was even more of a theorist than Coltrane, and another devotee of Slonimsky's book, and he was someone who had studied a great deal of twentieth-century classical music, particularly people like Bartok, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Charles Ives, and Edgard Varese. Dolphy even performed Varese's piece Density 21.5 in concert, an extremely demanding piece for solo flute. I don't know of a recording of Dolphy performing it, sadly, but this version should give some idea: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Density 21.5"] Encouraged by Dolphy, Coltrane started making music based around no changes at all, with any changes being implied by the melody. The title song of Africa/Brass, "Africa", takes up an entire side of one album, and doesn't have a single actual chord change on it, with Dolphy and pianist McCoy Tyner coming up with a brass-heavy arrangement for Coltrane to improvise over a single chord: [Excerpt: The John Coltrane Quartet: "Africa"] This was a return to the idea of modal jazz, based on scales rather than chord changes, but by implying chord changes, often changes based on thirds, Coltrane was often using different scales than the modes that had been used in modal jazz. And while, as the title suggested, "Africa" was inspired by the music of Africa, the use of a single drone chord underneath solos based on a scale was inspired by the music of another continent altogether. Since at least the mid-1950s, both Coltrane and Dolphy had been interested in Indian music. They appear to have first become interested in a record released by Folkways, Music Of India, Morning And Evening Ragas by Ali Akbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] But the musician they ended up being most inspired by was a friend of Khan's, Ravi Shankar, who like Khan had been taught by the great sarod player Alauddin Khan, Ali Akbar Khan's father. The elder Khan, who was generally known as "Baba", meaning "father", was possibly *the* most influential Indian musician of the first half of the twentieth century, and was a big part of the revitalisation of Indian music that went hand in hand with the growth of Indian nationalism. He was an ascetic who lived for music and nothing else, and would write five to ten new compositions every day, telling Shankar "Do one thing well and you can achieve everything. Do everything and you achieve nothing". Alauddin Khan was a very religious Muslim, but one who saw music as the ultimate way to God and could find truths in other faiths. When Shankar first got to know him, they were both touring as musicians in a dance troupe run by Shankar's elder brother, which was promoting Indian arts in the West, and he talked about taking Khan to hear the organ playing at Notre Dame cathedral, and Khan bursting into tears and saying "here is God". Khan was not alone in this view. The classical music of Northern India, the music that Khan played and taught, had been very influenced by Sufism, which was for most of Muslim history the dominant intellectual and theological tradition in Islam. Now, I am going to sum up a thousand years of theology and practice, of a religion I don't belong to, in a couple of sentences here, so just assume that what I'm saying is wrong, and *please* don't take offence if you are Sufi yourself and believe I am misrepresenting you. But my understanding of Sufism is that Sufis are extremely devoted to attaining knowledge and understanding of God, and believe that strict adherence to Muslim law is the best way to attain that knowledge -- that it is the way that God himself has prescribed for humans to know him -- but that such knowledge can be reached by people of other faiths if they approach their own traditions with enough devotion. Sufi ideas infuse much of Northern Indian classical music, and so for example it has been considered acceptable for Muslims to sing Hindu religious music and Hindus to sing songs of praise to Allah. So while Ravi Shankar was Hindu and Alauddin Khan was Muslim, Khan was able to become Shankar's guru in what both men regarded as a religious observance, and even to marry Khan's daughter. Khan was a famously cruel disciplinarian -- once hospitalising a student after hitting him with a tuning hammer -- but he earned the devotion of his students by enforcing the same discipline on himself. He abstained from sex so he could put all his energies into music, and was known to tie his hair to the ceiling while he practiced, so he could not fall asleep no matter how long he kept playing. Both Khan and his son Ali Akhbar Khan played the sarod, while Shankar played the sitar, but they all played the same kind of music, which is based on the concept of the raga. Now, in some ways, a raga can be considered equivalent to a mode in Western music: [Excerpt: Ali Akbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] But a raga is not *just* a mode -- it sits somewhere between Western conceptions of a mode and a melody. It has a scale, like a mode, but it can have different scales going up or down, and rules about which notes can be moved to from which other notes. So for example (and using Western tones so as not to confuse things further), a raga might say that it's possible to move up from the note G to D, but not down from D to G. Ragas are essentially a very restrictive set of rules which allow the musician playing them to improvise freely within those rules. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the violinist Yehudi Mehuin, at the time the most well-known classical musician in the world, had become fascinated by Indian music as part of a wider programme of his to learn more music outside what he regarded as the overly-constricting scope of the Western classical tradition in which he had been trained. He had become a particular fan of Shankar, and had invited him over to the US to perform. Shankar had refused to come at that point, sending his brother-in-law Ali Akbar Khan over, as he was in the middle of a difficult divorce, and that had been when Khan had recorded that album which had fascinated Coltrane and Dolphy. But Shankar soon followed himself, and made his own records: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Hamsadhwani"] The music that both Khan and Shankar played was a particular style of Hindustani classical music, which has three elements -- there's a melody instrument, in Shankar's case the sitar and in Khan's the sarod, both of them fretted stringed instruments which have additional strings that resonate along with the main melody string, giving their unique sound. These are the most distinctive Indian instruments, but the melody can be played on all sorts of other instruments, whether Indian instruments like the bansuri and shehnai, which are very similar to the flute and oboe respectively, or Western instruments like the violin. Historically, the melody has also often been sung rather than played, but Indian instrumental music has had much more influence on Western popular music than Indian vocal music has, so we're mostly looking at that here. Along with the melody instrument there's a percussion instrument, usually the tabla, which is a pair of hand drums. Rather than keep a steady, simple, beat like the drum kit in rock music, the percussion has its own patterns and cycles, called talas, which like ragas are heavily formalised but leave a great amount of room for improvisation. The percussion and the melody are in a sort of dialogue with each other, and play off each other in a variety of ways. And finally there's the drone instrument, usually a stringed instrument called a tamboura. The drone is what it sounds like -- a single note, sustained and repeated throughout the piece, providing a harmonic grounding for the improvisations of the melody instrument. Sometimes, rather than just a single root note, it will be a root and fifth, providing a single chord to improvise over, but as often it will be just one note. Often that note will be doubled at the octave, so you might have a drone on both low E and high E. The result provides a very strict, precise, formal, structure for an infinitely varied form of expression, and Shankar was a master of it: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Hamsadhwani"] Dolphy and, especially, Coltrane became fascinated by Indian music, and Coltrane desperately wanted to record with Shankar -- he even later named his son Ravi in honour of the great musician. It wasn't just the music as music, but music as spiritual practice, that Coltrane was engaged with. He was a deeply religious man but one who was open to multiple faith traditions -- he had been brought up as a Methodist, and both his grandfathers were ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, but his first wife, Naima, who inspired his personal favourite of his own compositions, was a Muslim, while his second wife, Swamini Turiyasangitananda (who he married after leaving Naima in 1963 and who continued to perform as Alice Coltrane even after she took that name, and was herself an extraordinarily accomplished jazz musician on both piano and harp), was a Hindu, and both of them profoundly influenced Coltrane's own spirituality. Some have even suggested that Coltrane's fascination with a cycle of thirds came from the idea that the third could represent both the Christian Trinity and the Hindu trimurti -- the three major forms of Brahman in Hinduism, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. So a music which was a religious discipline for more than one religion, and which worked well with the harmonic and melodic ideas that Coltrane had been exploring in jazz and learning about through his studies of modern classical music, was bound to appeal to Coltrane, and he started using the idea of having two basses provide an octave drone similar to that of the tamboura, leading to tracks like "Africa" and "Olé": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Olé"] Several sources have stated that that song was an influence on "Light My Fire" by the Doors, and I can sort of see that, though most of the interviews I've seen with Ray Manzarek have him talking about Coltrane's earlier version of "My Favourite Things" as the main influence there. Coltrane finally managed to meet with Shankar in December 1961, and spent a lot of time with him -- the two discussed recording an album together with McCoy Tyner, though nothing came of it. Shankar said of their several meetings that month: "The music was fantastic. I was much impressed, but one thing distressed me. There was turbulence in the music that gave me a negative feeling at times, but I could not quite put my finger on the trouble … Here was a creative person who had become a vegetarian, who was studying yoga, and reading the Bhagavad-Gita, yet in whose music I still heard much turmoil. I could not understand it." Coltrane said in turn "I like Ravi Shankar very much. When I hear his music, I want to copy it – not note for note of course, but in his spirit. What brings me closest to Ravi is the modal aspect of his art. Currently, at the particular stage I find myself in, I seem to be going through a modal phase … There's a lot of modal music that is played every day throughout the world. It is particularly evident in Africa, but if you look at Spain or Scotland, India or China, you'll discover this again in each case … It's this universal aspect of music that interests me and attracts me; that's what I'm aiming for." And the month before Coltrane met Shankar, Coltrane had had a now-legendary residency at the Village Vanguard in New York with his band, including Dolphy, which had resulted not only in the famous Live at the Village Vanguard album, but in two tracks on Coltrane's studio album Impressions. Those shows were among the most controversial in the history of jazz, though the Village Vanguard album is now often included in lists of the most important records in jazz. Downbeat magazine, the leading magazine for jazz fans at the time, described those shows as "musical nonsense" and "a horrifying demonstration of what appears to be a growing anti-jazz trend" -- though by the time Impressions came out in 1963, that opinion had been revised somewhat. Harvey Pekar, the comic writer and jazz critic, also writing in DownBeat, gave Impressions five stars, saying "Not all the music on this album is excellent (which is what a five-star rating signifies,) but some is more than excellent". And while among Coltrane fans the piece from these Village Vanguard shows that is of most interest is the extended blues masterpiece "Chasin' the Trane" which takes up a whole side of the Village Vanguard LP, for our purposes we're most interested in one of the two tracks that was held over for Impressions. This was another of Coltrane's experiments in using the drones he'd found in Indian musical forms, like "Africa" and "Olé". This time it was also inspired by a specific piece of music, though not an instrumental one. Rather it was a vocal performance -- a recording on a Folkways album of Pandita Ramji Shastri Dravida chanting one of the Vedas, the religious texts which are among the oldest texts sacred to any surviving religion: [Excerpt: Pandita Ramji Shastri Dravida, "Vedic Chanting"] Coltrane took that basic melodic idea, and combined it with his own modal approach to jazz, and the inspiration he was taking from Shankar's music, and came up with a piece called "India": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India"] Which is where we came in, isn't it? [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] So now, finally, we get to the Byrds. Even before "Mr. Tambourine Man" went to number one in the charts, the Byrds were facing problems with their sound being co-opted as the latest hip thing. Their location in LA, at the centre of the entertainment world, was obviously a huge advantage to them in many ways, but it also made them incredibly visible to people who wanted to hop onto a bandwagon. The group built up much of their fanbase playing at Ciro's -- the nightclub on the Sunset Strip that we mentioned in the previous episode which later reopened as It's Boss -- and among those in the crowd were Sonny and Cher. And Sonny brought along his tape recorder. The Byrds' follow-up single to "Mr. Tambourine Man", released while that song was still going up the charts, was another Dylan song, "All I Really Want to Do". But it had to contend with this: [Excerpt: Cher, "All I Really Want to Do"] Cher's single, produced by Sonny, was her first solo single since the duo had become successful, and came out before the Byrds' version, and the Byrds were convinced that elements of the arrangement, especially the guitar part, came from the version they'd been performing live – though of course Sonny was no stranger to jangly guitars himself, having co-written “Needles and Pins”, the song that pretty much invented the jangle. Cher made number fifteen on the charts, while the Byrds only made number forty. Their version did beat Cher's in the UK charts, though. The record company was so worried about the competition that for a while they started promoting the B-side as the A-side. That B-side was an original by Gene Clark, though one that very clearly showed the group's debt to the Searchers: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better"] While it was very obviously derived from the Searchers' version of "Needles and Pins", especially the riff, it was still a very strong, original, piece of work in its own right. It was the song that convinced the group's producer, Terry Melcher, that they were a serious proposition as artists in their own right, rather than just as performers of Dylan's material, and it was also a favourite of the group's co-manager, Jim Dickson, who picked out Clark's use of the word "probably" in the chorus as particularly telling -- the singer thinks he will feel better when the subject of the song is gone, but only probably. He's not certain. "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better", after being promoted as the A-side for a short time, reached number one hundred and two on the charts, but the label quickly decided to re-flip it and concentrate on promoting the Dylan song as the single. The group themselves weren't too bothered about their thunder having been stolen by Sonny and Cher, but their new publicist was incandescent. Derek Taylor had been a journalist for the Daily Express, which at that time was a respectable enough newspaper (though that is very much no longer the case). He'd become involved in the music industry after writing an early profile on the Beatles, at which point he had been taken on by the Beatles' organisation first to ghostwrite George Harrison's newspaper column and Brian Epstein's autobiography, and then as their full-time publicist and liner-note writer. He'd left the organisation at the end of 1964, and had moved to the US, where he had set up as an independent music publicist, working for the Byrds, the Beach Boys, and various other acts in their overlapping social circles, such as Paul Revere and the Raiders. Taylor was absolutely furious on the group's behalf, saying "I was not only disappointed, I was disgusted. Sonny and Cher went to Ciro's and ripped off the Byrds and, being obsessive, I could not get this out of my mind that Sonny and Cher had done this terrible thing. I didn't know that much about the record business and, in my experience with the Beatles, cover versions didn't make any difference. But by covering the Byrds, it seemed that you could knock them off the perch. And Sonny and Cher, in my opinion, stole that song at Ciro's and interfered with the Byrds' career and very nearly blew them out of the game." But while the single was a comparative flop, the Mr. Tambourine Man album, which came out shortly after, was much more successful. It contained the A and B sides of both the group's first two singles, although a different vocal take of "All I Really Want to Do" was used from the single release, along with two more Dylan covers, and a couple more originals -- five of the twelve songs on the album were original in total, three of them Gene Clark solo compositions and the other two co-written by Clark and Roger McGuinn. To round it out there was a version of the 1939 song "We'll Meet Again", made famous by Vera Lynn, which you may remember us discussing in episode ninety as an example of early synthesiser use, but which had recently become popular in a rerecorded version from the 1950s, thanks to its use at the end of Dr. Strangelove; there was a song written by Jackie DeShannon; and "The Bells of Rhymney", a song in which Pete Seeger set a poem about a mining disaster in Wales to music. So a fairly standard repertoire for early folk-rock, though slightly heavier on Dylan than most. While the group's Hollywood notoriety caused them problems like the Sonny and Cher one, it did also give them advantages. For example, they got to play at the fourth of July party hosted by Jane Fonda, to guests including her father Henry and brother Peter, Louis Jordan, Steve McQueen, Warren Beatty, and Sidney Poitier. Derek Taylor, who was used to the Beatles' formal dress and politeness at important events, imposed on them by Brian Epstein, was shocked when the Byrds turned up informally dressed, and even more shocked when Vito Paulekas and Carl Franzoni showed up. Vito (who was always known by his first name) and Franzoni are both important but marginal figures in the LA scene. Neither were musicians, though Vito did make one record, produced by Kim Fowley: [Excerpt: Vito and the Hands, "Vito and the Hands"] Rather Vito was a sculptor in his fifties, who had become part of the rock and roll scene and had gathered around him a dance troupe consisting largely of much younger women, and also of himself and Franzoni. Their circle, which also included Arthur Lee and Bryan MacLean, who weren't part of their dance troupe but were definitely part of their crowd, will be talked about much more in future episodes, but for now we'll just say that they are often considered proto-hippies, though they would have disputed that characterisation themselves quite vigorously; that they were regular dancers at Ciro's and became regular parts of the act of both the Byrds and the Mothers of Invention; and we'll give this rather explicit description of their performances from Frank Zappa: "The high point of the performance was Carl Franzoni, our 'go-go boy.' He was wearing ballet tights, frugging violently. Carl has testicles which are bigger than a breadbox. Much bigger than a breadbox. The looks on the faces of the Baptist teens experiencing their grandeur is a treasured memory." Paints a vivid picture, doesn't it? So you can possibly imagine why Derek Taylor later said "When Carl Franzoni and Vito came, I got into a terrible panic". But Jim Dickson explained to him that it was Hollywood and people were used to that kind of thing, and even though Taylor described seeing Henry Fonda and his wife pinned against the wall by the writhing Franzoni and the other dancers, apparently everyone had a good time. And then the next month, the group went on their first UK tour. On which nobody had a good time: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] Even before the tour, Derek Taylor had reservations. Obviously the Byrds should tour the UK -- London, in particular, was the centre of the cultural world at that time, and Taylor wanted the group to meet his old friends the Beatles and visit Carnaby Street. But at the same time, there seemed to be something a little... off... about the promoters they were dealing with, Joe Collins, the father of Joan and Jackie Collins, and a man named Mervyn Conn. As Taylor said later "All I did know was that the correspondence from Mervyn Conn didn't assure me. I kept expressing doubts about the contents of the letters. There was something about the grammar. You know, 'I'll give you a deal', and 'We'll get you some good gigs'. The whole thing was very much showbusiness. Almost pantomime showbusiness." But still, it seemed like it was worth making the trip, even when Musicians Union problems nearly derailed the whole thing. We've talked previously about how disagreements between the unions in the US and UK meant that musicians from one country couldn't tour the other for decades, and about how that slightly changed in the late fifties. But the new system required a one-in, one-out system where tours had to be set up as exchanges so nobody was taking anyone's job, and nobody had bothered to find a five-piece group of equivalent popularity to the Byrds to tour America in return. Luckily, the Dave Clark Five stepped into the breach, and were able to do a US tour on short notice, so that problem was solved. And then, as soon as they landed, the group were confronted with a lawsuit. From the Birds: [Excerpt: The Birds, "No Good Without You Baby"] These Birds, spelled with an "i", not a "y", were a Mod group from London, who had started out as the Thunderbirds, but had had to shorten their name when the London R&B singer Chris Farlowe and his band the Thunderbirds had started to have some success. They'd become the Birds, and released a couple of unsuccessful singles, but had slowly built up a reasonable following and had a couple of TV appearances. Then they'd started to receive complaints from their fans that when they went into the record shops to ask for the new record by the Birds, they were being sold some jangly folky stuff about tambourines, rather than Bo Diddley inspired R&B. So the first thing the American Byrds saw in England, after a long and difficult flight which had left them very tired and depressed, especially Gene Clark, who hated flying, was someone suing them for loss of earnings. The lawsuit never progressed any further, and the British group changed their name to Birds Birds, and quickly disappeared from music history -- apart from their guitarist, Ronnie Wood, who we'll be hearing from again. But the experience was not exactly the welcome the group had been hoping for, and is reflected in one of the lines that Gene Clark wrote in the song he later came up with about the trip -- "Nowhere is there love to be found among those afraid of losing their ground". And the rest of the tour was not much of an improvement. Chris Hillman came down with bronchitis on the first night, David Crosby kept turning his amp up too high, resulting in the other members copying him and the sound in the venues they were playing seeming distorted, and most of all they just seemed, to the British crowds, to be unprofessional. British audiences were used to groups running on, seeming excited, talking to the crowd between songs, and generally putting on a show. The Byrds, on the other hand, sauntered on stage, and didn't even look at the audience, much less talk to them. What seemed to the LA audience as studied cool seemed to the UK audience like the group were rude, unprofessional, and big-headed. At one show, towards the end of the set, one girl in the audience cried out "Aren't you even going to say anything?", to which Crosby responded "Goodbye" and the group walked off, without any of them having said another word. When they played the Flamingo Club, the biggest cheer of the night came when their short set ended and the manager said that the club was now going to play records for dancing until the support act, Geno Washington and the Ramjam Band, were ready to do another set. Michael Clarke and Roger McGuinn also came down with bronchitis, the group were miserable and sick, and they were getting absolutely panned in the reviews. The closest thing they got to a positive review was when Paul Jones of Manfred Mann was asked about them, and he praised some of their act -- perceptively pointing to their version of "We'll Meet Again" as being in the Pop Art tradition of recontextualising something familiar so it could be looked at freshly -- but even he ended up also criticising several aspects of the show and ended by saying "I think they're going to be a lot better in the future". And then, just to rub salt in the wound, Sonny and Cher turned up in the UK. The Byrds' version of "All I Really Want to Do" massively outsold theirs in the UK, but their big hit became omnipresent: [Excerpt: Sonny and Cher, "I Got You Babe"] And the press seemed to think that Sonny and Cher, rather than the Byrds, were the true representatives of the American youth culture. The Byrds were already yesterday's news. The tour wasn't all bad -- it did boost sales of the group's records, and they became friendly with the Beatles, Stones, and Donovan. So much so that when later in the month the Beatles returned to the US, the Byrds were invited to join them at a party they were holding in Benedict Canyon, and it was thanks to the Byrds attending that party that two things happened to influence the Beatles' songwriting. The first was that Crosby brought his Hollywood friend Peter Fonda along. Fonda kept insisting on telling people that he knew what it was like to actually be dead, in a misguided attempt to reassure George Harrison, who he wrongly believed was scared of dying, and insisted on showing them his self-inflicted bullet wounds. This did not go down well with John Lennon and George Harrison, both of whom were on acid at the time. As Lennon later said, "We didn't want to hear about that! We were on an acid trip and the sun was shining and the girls were dancing and the whole thing was beautiful and Sixties, and this guy – who I really didn't know; he hadn't made Easy Rider or anything – kept coming over, wearing shades, saying, "I know what it's like to be dead," and we kept leaving him because he was so boring! ... It was scary. You know ... when you're flying high and [whispers] "I know what it's like to be dead, man" Eventually they asked Fonda to get out, and the experience later inspired Lennon to write this: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Said, She Said"] Incidentally, like all the Beatles songs of that period, that was adapted for the cartoon TV series based on the group, in this case as a follow-the-bouncing-ball animation. There are few things which sum up the oddness of mid-sixties culture more vividly than the fact that there was a massively popular kids' cartoon with a cheery singalong version of a song about a bad acid trip and knowing what it's like to be dead. But there was another, more positive, influence on the Beatles to come out of them having invited the Byrds to the party. Once Fonda had been kicked out, Crosby and Harrison became chatty, and started talking about the sitar, an instrument that Harrison had recently become interested in. Crosby showed Harrison some ragas on the guitar, and suggested he start listening to Ravi Shankar, who Crosby had recently become a fan of. And we'll be tracking Shankar's influence on Harrison, and through him the Beatles, and through them the whole course of twentieth century culture, in future episodes. Crosby's admiration both of Ravi Shankar and of John Coltrane was soon to show in the Byrds' records, but first they needed a new single. They'd made attempts at a version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and had even tried to get both George Harrison and Paul McCartney to add harmonica to that track, but that didn't work out. Then just before the UK tour, Terry Melcher had got Jack Nitzsche to come up with an arrangement of Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (version 1)"] Nitzsche's arrangement was designed to sound as much like a Sonny and Cher record as possible, and at first the intention was just to overdub McGuinn's guitar and vocals onto a track by the Wrecking Crew. The group weren't happy at this, and even McGuinn, who was the friendliest of the group with Melcher and who the record was meant to spotlight, disliked it. The eventual track was cut by the group, with Jim Dickson producing, to show they could do a good job of the song by themselves, with the intention that Melcher would then polish it and finish it in the studio, but Melcher dropped the idea of doing the song at all. There was a growing factionalism in the group by this point, with McGuinn and to a lesser extent Michael Clarke being friendly with Melcher. Crosby disliked Melcher and was pushing for Jim Dickson to replace him as producer, largely because he thought that Melcher was vetoing Crosby's songs and giving Gene Clark and Roger McGuinn free run of the songwriting. Dickson on the other hand was friendliest with Crosby, but wasn't much keener on Crosby's songwriting than Melcher was, thinking Gene Clark was the real writing talent in the group. It didn't help that Crosby's songs tended to be things like harmonically complex pieces based on science fiction novels -- Crosby was a big fan of the writer Robert Heinlein, and in particular of the novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and brought in at least two songs inspired by that novel, which were left off albums -- his song "Stranger in a Strange Land" was eventually recorded by the San Francisco group Blackburn & Snow: [Excerpt: Blackburn & Snow, "Stranger in a Strange Land"] Oddly, Jim Dickson objected to what became the Byrds' next single for reasons that come from the same roots as the Heinlein novel. A short while earlier, McGuinn had worked as a guitarist and arranger on an album by the folk singer Judy Collins, and one of the songs she had recorded on that album was a song written by Pete Seeger, setting the first eight verses of chapter three of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes to music: [Excerpt: Judy Collins, "Turn Turn Turn (To Everything There is a Season"] McGuinn wanted to do an electric version of that song as the Byrds' next single, and Melcher sided with him, but Dickson was against the idea, citing the philosopher Alfred Korzybski, who was a big influence both on the counterculture and on Heinlein. Korzybski, in his book Science and Sanity, argued that many of the problems with the world are caused by the practice in Aristotelean logic of excluding the middle and only talking about things and their opposites, saying that things could be either A or Not-A, which in his view excluded most of actual reality. Dickson's argument was that the lyrics to “Turn! Turn! Turn!” with their inflexible Aristotelianism, were hopelessly outmoded and would make the group a laughing stock among anyone who had paid attention to the intellectual revolutions of the previous few decades. "A time of love, a time of hate"? What about all the times that are neither for loving or hating, and all the emotions that are complex mixtures of love and hate? In his eyes, this was going to make the group look like lightweights. Terry Melcher disagreed, and forced the group through take after take, until they got what became the group's second number one hit: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Turn! Turn! Turn!"] After the single was released and became a hit, the battle lines in the group hardened. It was McGuinn and Melcher on one side, Crosby and Dickson on the other, with Chris Hillman, Michael Clarke, and Gene Clark more or less neutral in the middle, but tending to side more and more with the two Ms largely because of Crosby's ability to rub everyone up the wrong way. At one point during the sessions for the next album, tempers flared so much that Michael Clarke actually got up, went over to Crosby, and punched Crosby so hard that he fell off his seat. Crosby, being Hollywood to the bone, yelled at Clarke "You'll never work in this town again!", but the others tended to agree that on that occasion Crosby had it coming. Clarke, when asked about it later, said "I slapped him because he was being an asshole. He wasn't productive. It was necessary." Things came to a head in the filming for a video for the next single, Gene Clark's "Set You Free This Time". Michael Clarke was taller than the other Byrds, and to get the shot right, so the angles would line up, he had to stand further from the camera than the rest of them. David Crosby -- the member with most knowledge of the film industry, whose father was an Academy Award-winning cinematographer, so who definitely understood the reasoning for this -- was sulking that once again a Gene Clark song had been chosen for promotion rather than one of his songs, and started manipulating Michael Clarke, telling him that he was being moved backwards because the others were jealous of his good looks, and that he needed to move forward to be with the rest of them. Multiple takes were ruined because Clarke listened to Crosby, and eventually Jim Dickson got furious at Clarke and went over and slapped him on the face. All hell broke loose. Michael Clarke wasn't particularly bothered by being slapped by Dickson, but Crosby took that as an excuse to leave, walking off before the first shot of the day had been completed. Dickson ran after Crosby, who turned round and punched Dickson in the mouth. Dickson grabbed hold of Crosby and held him in a chokehold. Gene Clark came up and pulled Dickson off Crosby, trying to break up the fight, and then Crosby yelled "Yeah, that's right, Gene! Hold him so I can hit him again!" At this point if Clark let Dickson go, Dickson would have attacked Crosby again. If he held Dickson, Crosby would have taken it as an invitation to hit him more. Clark's dilemma was eventually relieved by Barry Feinstein, the cameraman, who came in and broke everything up. It may seem odd that Crosby and Dickson, who were on the same side, were the ones who got into a fight, while Michael Clarke, who had previously hit Crosby, was listening to Crosby over Dickson, but that's indicative of how everyone felt about Crosby. As Dickson later put it, "People have stronger feelings about David Crosby. I love David more than the rest and I hate him more than the rest. I love McGuinn the least, and I hate him the least, because he doesn't give you emotional feedback. You don't get a chance. The hate is in equal proportion to how much you love them." McGuinn was finding all this deeply distressing -- Dickson and Crosby were violent men, and Michael Clarke and Hillman could be provoked to violence, but McGuinn was a pacifist both by conviction and temperament. Everything was conspiring to push the camps further apart. For example, Gene Clark made more money than the rest because of his songwriting royalties, and so got himself a good car. McGuinn had problems with his car, and knowing that the other members were jealous of Clark, Melcher offered to lend McGuinn one of his own Cadillacs, partly in an attempt to be friendly, and partly to make sure the jealousy over Clark's car didn't cause further problems in the group. But, of course, now Gene Clark had a Ferrarri and Roger McGuinn had a Cadillac, where was David Crosby's car? He stormed into Dickson's office and told him that if by the end of the tour the group were going on, Crosby didn't have a Bentley, he was quitting the group. There was only one thing for it. Terry Melcher had to go. The group had recorded their second album, and if they couldn't fix the problems within the band, they would have to deal with the problems from outside. While the group were on tour, Jim Dickson told Melcher they would no longer be working with him as their producer. On the tour bus, the group listened over and over to a tape McGuinn had made of Crosby's favourite music. On one side was a collection of recordings of Ravi Shankar, and on the other was two Coltrane albums -- Africa/Brass and Impressions: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India"] The group listened to this, and basically no other music, on the tour, and while they were touring Gene Clark was working on what he hoped would be the group's next single -- an impressionistic song about their trip to the UK, which started "Six miles high and when you touch down, you'll find that it's stranger than known". After he had it half complete, he showed it to Crosby, who helped him out with the lyrics, coming up with lines like "Rain, grey town, known for its sound" to describe London. The song talked about the crowds that followed them, about the music -- namechecking the Small Faces, who at the time had only released two single

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RNIB Connect
1056: Vidar Hjarding MBE - What's New Pussycat, Audio Described Theatre Review

RNIB Connect

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 17, 2021 9:27


RNIB Connect Radio's Toby Davey welcomes back Vidar Hjarding MBE, Inclusion and Diversity Consultant for ITV News across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands to re-start his regular Connect Radio audio described theatre reviews with his first visit back to a live theatre performance in almost 2 years. Vidar's first trip back to the theatre was to see the audio described performance of ‘What's New Pussycat' at the Birmingham Repertory   Theatre on Wednesday 10 November at 7.30pm with live audio description by Julia Grundy and Caroline Smith.  What's New Pussycat  is a musical, comedy theatre production Written by Tony Award winning, Joe Di Pietro which marries  the classic Henry Fielding novel The History of Tom Jones.  and the iconic songs of Sir Tom Jones, to relive the delicious excess of London's in the swinging sixties. Set in 1965, ladies' man Tom Jones arrives in London with a broken heart, but he also has big dreams and a big voice. He quickly discovers an exciting world of mods and miniskirts, dancing and decadence, but most of all…incredible music. Romance and adventure await, but will Tom ever be reunited with his one true love, who seems more interested in designing for Carnaby Street than in being Mrs. Tom Jones?  Vidar began by explaining to Toby what it was like for him going back to the Birmingham Rep in almost 2 years and the joy of being back in the theatre seeing a live audio described show. If the rumours are true that What's New Pussycat will be hitting the London West End stage in 2022, then Vidar would certainly recommend going to see an audio described performance of the production for a trip to London's West End. (Image shows RNIB logo. 'RNIB' written in black capital letters over a white background and underlined with a bold pink line, with the words 'See differently' underneath)

TheIndustry.fashion Podcast
Hype Co-founders, Bav Samani and Liam Green

TheIndustry.fashion Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 25, 2021 33:39


Hype was founded 10 years ago this year by Bav Samani and Liam Green. Their first product was a rather rude statement cigarette lighter, followed by a T-shirt featuring a defaced Albert Einstein complete with nose ring, ear stretchers and tattoos, which sold out in hours. The pair had met while working at a graphic design and T-shirt printing company in Leicester. They decided to join forces and start a rival business in the same building with just £600 to make their first products.Swiftly following the Einstein T-shirt, other versions of the same idea featuring Marilyn Monroe and Elvis were released, and out of nowhere came a Facebook message from a buyer at Topman expressing an interest to sell their wares. Next thing they were at Topman at Oxford Circus being asked to make them a full collection, which ultimately went down a storm. Footasylum then got on board following an uninvited visit by Samani and Green to their head office armed with T-shirts and hoodies.In recent years Hype has been loved by teens and tweens alike, with its rucksacks on the backs of every other school kid on the block.  Jump forward to November 2021 and the brand has recently opened a new state-of-the-art 2,700 sq ft flagship store at 5-7 Foubert's Place, just off Carnaby Street, selling both its Hype range for younger fans and more recent Just Hype adult's collection.And this week the brand opens a new 1,195 sq ft store at Highcross shopping centre in the dynamic duo's home city of Leicester, where it all started. An in-store activation this Saturday with feature a DJ, branded cupcakes and goody bags for the first 100 people to enter the store.With over 430,000 TikTok followers, Hype is also one of the first fashion retailers to pilot the video-sharing platform's in-app purchasing software. Green and Samani tell us about it all.Get breaking news as it happens and be the first to know when our podcasts go live by following:  INSTAGRAM  ***  LINKEDIN  ***  TWITTER  ***  FACEBOOKGet breaking news, big name interviews & insights delivered to your inbox daily HERE

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs
Episode 136: “My Generation” by the Who

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 3, 2021


Episode one hundred and thirty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is a special long episode, running almost ninety minutes, looking at "My Generation" by the Who. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "The Name Game" by Shirley Ellis. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I mispronounce the Herman's Hermits track "Can't You Hear My Heartbeat" as "Can You Hear My Heartbeat". I say "Rebel Without a Cause" when I mean "The Wild One". Brando was not in "Rebel Without a Cause". Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud playlist of the music excerpted here. This mix does not include the Dixon of Dock Green theme, as I was unable to find a full version of that theme anywhere (though a version with Jack Warner singing, titled "An Ordinary Copper" is often labelled as it) and what you hear in this episode is the only fragment I could get a clean copy of. The best compilation of the Who's music is Maximum A's & B's, a three-disc set containing the A and B sides of every single they released. The super-deluxe five-CD version of the My Generation album appears to be out of print as a CD, but can be purchased digitally. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, including: Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 by William Strauss and Neil Howe, which I don't necessarily recommend reading, but which is certainly an influential book. Revolt Into Style: The Pop Arts by George Melly which I *do* recommend reading if you have any interest at all in British pop culture of the fifties and sixties. Jim Marshall: The Father of Loud by Rich Maloof gave me all the biographical details about Marshall. The Who Before the Who by Doug Sandom, a rather thin book of reminiscences by the group's first drummer. The Ox by Paul Rees, an authorised biography of John Entwistle based on notes for his never-completed autobiography. Who I Am, the autobiography of Pete Townshend, is one of the better rock autobiographies. A Band With Built-In Hate by Peter Stanfield is an examination of the group in the context of pop-art and Mod. And Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere by Andy Neill and Matt Kent is a day-by-day listing of the group's activities up to 1978. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript In 1991, William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote a book called Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069. That book was predicated on a simple idea -- that there are patterns in American history, and that those patterns can be predicted in their rough outline. Not in the fine details, but broadly -- those of you currently watching the TV series Foundation, or familiar with Isaac Asimov's original novels, will have the idea already, because Strauss and Howe claimed to have invented a formula which worked as well as Asimov's fictional Psychohistory. Their claim was that, broadly speaking, generations can be thought to have a dominant personality type, influenced by the events that took place while they were growing up, which in turn are influenced by the personality types of the older generations. Because of this, Strauss and Howe claimed, American society had settled into a semi-stable pattern, where events repeat on a roughly eighty-eight-year cycle, driven by the behaviours of different personality types at different stages of their lives. You have four types of generation, which cycle -- the Adaptive, Idealist, Reactive, and Civic types. At any given time, one of these will be the elder statespeople, one will be the middle-aged people in positions of power, one will be the young rising people doing most of the work, and one will be the kids still growing up. You can predict what will happen, in broad outline, by how each of those generation types will react to challenges, and what position they will be in when those challenges arise. The idea is that major events change your personality, and also how you react to future events, and that how, say, Pearl Harbor affected someone will have been different for a kid hearing about the attack on the radio, an adult at the age to be drafted, and an adult who was too old to fight. The thesis of this book has, rather oddly, entered mainstream thought so completely that its ideas are taken as basic assumptions now by much of the popular discourse, even though on reading it the authors are so vague that pretty much anything can be taken as confirmation of their hypotheses, in much the same way that newspaper horoscopes always seem like they could apply to almost everyone's life. And sometimes, of course, they're just way off. For example they make the prediction that in 2020 there would be a massive crisis that would last several years, which would lead to a massive sense of community, in which "America will be implacably resolved to do what needs doing and fix what needs fixing", and in which the main task of those aged forty to sixty at that point would be to restrain those in leadership positions in the sixty-to-eighty age group from making irrational, impetuous, decisions which might lead to apocalypse. The crisis would likely end in triumph, but there was also a chance it might end in "moral fatigue, vast human tragedy, and a weak and vengeful sense of victory". I'm sure that none of my listeners can think of any events in 2020 that match this particular pattern. Despite its lack of rigour, Strauss and Howe's basic idea is now part of most people's intellectual toolkit, even if we don't necessarily think of them as the source for it. Indeed, even though they only talk about America in their book, their generational concept gets applied willy-nilly to much of the Western world. And likewise, for the most part we tend to think of the generations, whether American or otherwise, using the names they used. For the generations who were alive at the time they were writing, they used five main names, three of which we still use. Those born between 1901 and 1924 they term the "GI Generation", though those are now usually termed the "Greatest Generation". Those born between 1924 and 1942 were the "Silent Generation", those born 1943 through 1960 were the Boomers, and those born between 1982 and 2003 they labelled Millennials. Those born between 1961 and 1981 they labelled "thirteeners", because they were the unlucky thirteenth generation to be born in America since the declaration of independence. But that name didn't catch on. Instead, the name that people use to describe that generation is "Generation X", named after a late-seventies punk band led by Billy Idol: [Excerpt: Generation X, "Your Generation"] That band were short-lived, but they were in constant dialogue with the pop culture of ten to fifteen years earlier, Idol's own childhood. As well as that song, "Your Generation", which is obviously referring to the song this week's episode is about, they also recorded versions of John Lennon's "Gimme Some Truth", of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' "Shakin' All Over", and an original song called "Ready Steady Go", about being in love with Cathy McGowan, the presenter of that show. And even their name was a reference, because Generation X were named after a book published in 1964, about not the generation we call Generation X, but about the Baby Boomers, and specifically about a series of fights on beaches across the South Coast of England between what at that point amounted to two gangs. These were fights between the old guard, the Rockers -- people who represented the recent past who wouldn't go away, what Americans would call "greasers", people who modelled themselves on Marlon Brando in Rebel Without A Cause, and who thought music had peaked with Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran -- and a newer, younger, hipper, group of people, who represented the new, the modern -- the Mods: [Excerpt: The Who, "My Generation"] Jim Marshall, if he'd been American, would have been considered one of the Greatest Generation, but his upbringing was not typical of that, or of any, generation. When he was five, he was diagnosed as having skeletal tuberculosis, which had made his bones weak and easily broken. To protect them, he spent the next seven years of his life, from age five until twelve, in hospital in a full-body cast. The only opportunity he got to move during those years was for a few minutes every three months, when the cast would be cut off and reapplied to account for his growth during that time. Unsurprisingly, once he was finally out of the cast, he discovered he loved moving -- a lot. He dropped out of school aged thirteen -- most people at the time left school at aged fourteen anyway, and since he'd missed all his schooling to that point it didn't seem worth his while carrying on -- and took on multiple jobs, working sixty hours a week or more. But the job he made most money at was as an entertainer. He started out as a tap-dancer, taking advantage of his new mobility, but then his song-and-dance man routine became steadily more song and less dance, as people started to notice his vocal resemblance to Bing Crosby. He was working six nights a week as a singer, but when World War II broke out, the drummer in the seven-piece band he was working with was drafted -- Marshall wouldn't ever be drafted because of his history of illness. The other members of the band knew that as a dancer he had a good sense of rhythm, and so they made a suggestion -- if Jim took over the drums, they could split the money six ways rather than seven. Marshall agreed, but he discovered there was a problem. The drum kit was always positioned at the back of the stage, behind the PA, and he couldn't hear the other musicians clearly. This is actually OK for a drummer -- you're keeping time, and the rest of the band are following you, so as long as you can *sort of* hear them everyone can stay together. But a singer needs to be able to hear everything clearly, in order to stay on key. And this was in the days before monitor speakers, so the only option available was to just have a louder PA system. And since one wasn't available, Marshall just had to build one himself. And that's how Jim Marshall started building amplifiers. Marshall eventually gave up playing the drums, and retired to run a music shop. There's a story about Marshall's last gig as a drummer, which isn't in the biography of Marshall I read for this episode, but is told in other places by the son of the bandleader at that gig. Apparently Marshall had a very fraught relationship with his father, who was among other things a semi-professional boxer, and at that gig Marshall senior turned up and started heckling his son from the audience. Eventually the younger Marshall jumped off the stage and started hitting his dad, winning the fight, but he decided he wasn't going to perform in public any more. The band leader for that show was Clifford Townshend, a clarinet player and saxophonist whose main gig was as part of the Squadronaires, a band that had originally been formed during World War II by RAF servicemen to entertain other troops. Townshend, who had been a member of Oswald Moseley's fascist Blackshirts in the thirties but later had a change of heart, was a second-generation woodwind player -- his father had been a semi-professional flute player. As well as working with the Squadronaires, Townshend also put out one record under his own name in 1956, a version of "Unchained Melody" credited to "Cliff Townsend and his singing saxophone": [Excerpt: Cliff Townshend and his Singing Saxophone, "Unchained Melody"] Cliff's wife often performed with him -- she was a professional singer who had  actually lied about her age in order to join up with the Air Force and sing with the group -- but they had a tempestuous marriage, and split up multiple times. As a result of this, and the travelling lifestyle of musicians, there were periods where their son Peter was sent to live with his grandmother, who was seriously abusive, traumatising the young boy in ways that would affect him for the rest of his life. When Pete Townshend was growing up, he wasn't particularly influenced by music, in part because it was his dad's job rather than a hobby, and his parents had very few records in the house. He did, though, take up the harmonica and learn to play the theme tune to Dixon of Dock Green: [Excerpt: Tommy Reilly, "Dixon of Dock Green Theme"] His first exposure to rock and roll wasn't through Elvis or Little Richard, but rather through Ray Ellington. Ellington was a British jazz singer and drummer, heavily influenced by Louis Jordan, who provided regular musical performances on the Goon Show throughout the fifties, and on one episode had performed "That Rock 'n' Rollin' Man": [Excerpt: Ray Ellington, "That Rock 'N' Rollin' Man"] Young Pete's assessment of that, as he remembered it later, was "I thought it some kind of hybrid jazz: swing music with stupid lyrics. But it felt youthful and rebellious, like The Goon Show itself." But he got hooked on rock and roll when his father took him and a friend to see a film: [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, "Rock Around the Clock"] According to Townshend's autobiography, "I asked Dad what he thought of the music. He said he thought it had some swing, and anything that had swing was OK. For me it was more than just OK. After seeing Rock Around the Clock with Bill Haley, nothing would ever be quite the same." Young Pete would soon go and see Bill Haley live – his first rock and roll gig. But the older Townshend would soon revise his opinion of rock and roll, because it soon marked the end of the kind of music that had allowed him to earn his living -- though he still managed to get regular work, playing a clarinet was suddenly far less lucrative than it had been. Pete decided that he wanted to play the saxophone, like his dad, but soon he switched first to guitar and then to banjo. His first guitar was bought for him by his abusive grandmother, and three of the strings snapped almost immediately, so he carried on playing with just three strings for a while. He got very little encouragement from his parents, and didn't really improve for a couple of years. But then the trad jazz boom happened, and Townshend teamed up with a friend of his who played the trumpet and French horn. He had initially bonded with John Entwistle over their shared sense of humour -- both kids loved Mad magazine and would make tape recordings together of themselves doing comedy routines inspired by the Goon show and Hancock's Half Hour -- but Entwistle was also a very accomplished musician, who could play multiple instruments. Entwistle had formed a trad band called the Confederates, and Townshend joined them on banjo and guitar, but they didn't stay together for long. Both boys, though, would join a variety of other bands, both together and separately. As the trad boom faded and rock and roll regained its dominance among British youth, there was little place for Entwistle's trumpet in the music that was popular among teenagers, and at first Entwistle decided to try making his trumpet sound more like a saxophone, using a helmet as a mute to try to get it to sound like the sax on "Ramrod" by Duane Eddy: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Ramrod"] Eddy soon became Entwistle's hero. We've talked about him before a couple of times, briefly, but not in depth, but Duane Eddy had a style that was totally different from most guitar heroes. Instead of playing mostly on the treble strings of the guitar, playing high twiddly parts, Eddy played low notes on the bass strings of his guitar, giving him the style that he summed up in album titles like "The Twang's the Thang" and "Have Twangy Guitar Will Travel". After a couple of years of having hits with this sound, produced by Lee Hazelwood and Lester Sill, Eddy also started playing another instrument, the instrument variously known as the six-string bass, the baritone guitar, or the Danelectro bass (after the company that manufactured the most popular model).  The baritone guitar has six strings, like a normal guitar, but it's tuned lower than a standard guitar -- usually a fourth lower, though different players have different preferences. The Danelectro became very popular in recording studios in the early sixties, because it helped solve a big problem in recording bass tones. You can hear more about this in the episodes of Cocaine and Rhinestones I recommended last week, but basically double basses were very, very difficult to record in the 1950s, and you'd often end up just getting a thudding, muddy, sound from them, which is one reason why when you listen to a lot of early rockabilly the bass is doing nothing very interesting, just playing root notes -- you couldn't easily get much clarity on the instrument at all. Conversely, with electric basses, with the primitive amps of the time, you didn't get anything like the full sound that you'd get from a double bass, but you *did* get a clear sound that would cut through on a cheap radio in a way that the sound of a double bass wouldn't. So the solution was obvious -- you have an electric instrument *and* a double bass play the same part. Use the double bass for the big dull throbbing sound, but use the electric one to give the sound some shape and cut-through. If you're doing that, you mostly want the trebly part of the electric instrument's tone, so you play it with a pick rather than fingers, and it makes sense to use a Danelectro rather than a standard bass guitar, as the Danelectro is more trebly than a normal bass. This combination, of Danelectro and double bass, appears to have been invented by Owen Bradley, and you can hear it for example on this record by Patsy Cline, with Bob Moore on double bass and Harold Bradley on baritone guitar: [Excerpt: Patsy Cline, "Crazy"] This sound, known as "tic-tac bass", was soon picked up by a lot of producers, and it became the standard way of getting a bass sound in both Nashville and LA. It's all over the Beach Boys' best records, and many of Jack Nitzsche's arrangements, and many of the other records the Wrecking Crew played on, and it's on most of the stuff the Nashville A-Team played on from the late fifties through mid-sixties, records by people like Elvis, Roy Orbison, Arthur Alexander, and the Everly Brothers. Lee Hazelwood was one of the first producers to pick up on this sound -- indeed, Duane Eddy has said several times that Hazelwood invented the sound before Owen Bradley did, though I think Bradley did it first -- and many of Eddy's records featured that bass sound, and eventually Eddy started playing a baritone guitar himself, as a lead instrument, playing it on records like "Because They're Young": [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Because They're Young"] Duane Eddy was John Entwistle's idol, and Entwistle learned Eddy's whole repertoire on trumpet, playing the saxophone parts. But then, realising that the guitar was always louder than the trumpet in the bands he was in, he realised that if he wanted to be heard, he should probably switch to guitar himself. And it made sense that a bass would be easier to play than a regular guitar -- if you only have four strings, there's more space between them, so playing is easier. So he started playing the bass, trying to sound as much like Eddy as he could. He had no problem picking up the instrument -- he was already a multi-instrumentalist -- but he did have a problem actually getting hold of one, as all the electric bass guitars available in the UK at the time were prohibitively expensive. Eventually he made one himself, with the help of someone in a local music shop, and that served for a time, though he would soon trade up to more professional instruments, eventually amassing the biggest collection of basses in the world. One day, Entwistle was approached on the street by an acquaintance, Roger Daltrey, who said to him "I hear you play bass" -- Entwistle was, at the time, carrying his bass. Daltrey was at this time a guitarist -- like Entwistle, he'd built his own instrument -- and he was the leader of a band called Del Angelo and his Detours. Daltrey wasn't Del Angelo, the lead singer -- that was a man called Colin Dawson who by all accounts sounded a little like Cliff Richard -- but he was the bandleader, hired and fired the members, and was in charge of their setlists. Daltrey lured Entwistle away from the band he was in with Townshend by telling him that the Detours were getting proper paid gigs, though they weren't getting many at the time. Unfortunately, one of the group's other guitarists, the member who owned the best amp, died in an accident not long after Entwistle joined the band. However, the amp was left in the group's possession, and Entwistle used it to lure Pete Townshend into the group by telling him he could use it -- and not telling him that he'd be sharing the amp with Daltrey. Townshend would later talk about his audition for the Detours -- as he was walking up the street towards Daltrey's house, he saw a stunningly beautiful woman walking away from the house crying. She saw his guitar case and said "Are you going to Roger's?" "Yes." "Well you can tell him, it's that bloody guitar or me". Townshend relayed the message, and Daltrey responded "Sod her. Come in." The audition was a formality, with the main questions being whether Townshend could play two parts of the regular repertoire for a working band at that time -- "Hava Nagila", and the Shadows' "Man of Mystery": [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Man of Mystery"] Townshend could play both of those, and so he was in. The group would mostly play chart hits by groups like the Shadows, but as trad jazz hadn't completely died out yet they would also do breakout sessions playing trad jazz, with Townshend on banjo, Entwistle on trumpet and Daltrey on trombone. From the start, there was a temperamental mismatch between the group's two guitarists. Daltrey was thoroughly working-class, culturally conservative,  had dropped out of school to go to work at a sheet metal factory, and saw himself as a no-nonsense plain-speaking man. Townshend was from a relatively well-off upper-middle-class family, was for a brief time a member of the Communist Party, and was by this point studying at art school, where he was hugely impressed by a lecture from Gustav Metzger titled “Auto-Destructive Art, Auto-Creative Art: The Struggle For The Machine Arts Of The Future”, about Metzger's creation of artworks which destroyed themselves. Townshend was at art school during a period when the whole idea of what an art school was for was in flux, something that's typified by a story Townshend tells about two of his early lectures. At the first, the lecturer came in and told the class to all draw a straight line. They all did, and then the lecturer told off anyone who had drawn anything that was anything other than six inches long, perfectly straight, without a ruler, going north-south, with a 3B pencil, saying that anything else at all was self-indulgence of the kind that needed to be drummed out of them if they wanted to get work as commercial artists. Then in another lecture, a different lecturer came in and asked them all to draw a straight line. They all drew perfectly straight, six-inch, north-south lines in 3B pencil, as the first lecturer had taught them. The new lecturer started yelling at them, then brought in someone else to yell at them as well, and then cut his hand open with a knife and dragged it across a piece of paper, smearing a rough line with his own blood, and screamed "THAT'S a line!" Townshend's sympathies lay very much with the second lecturer. Another big influence on Townshend at this point was a jazz double-bass player, Malcolm Cecil. Cecil would later go on to become a pioneer in electronic music as half of TONTO's Expanding Head Band, and we'll be looking at his work in more detail in a future episode, but at this point he was a fixture on the UK jazz scene. He'd been a member of Blues Incorporated, and had also played with modern jazz players like Dick Morrissey: [Excerpt: Dick Morrissey, "Jellyroll"] But Townshend was particularly impressed with a performance in which Cecil demonstrated unorthodox ways to play the double-bass, including playing so hard he broke the strings, and using a saw as a bow, sawing through the strings and damaging the body of the instrument. But these influences, for the moment, didn't affect the Detours, who were still doing the Cliff and the Shadows routine. Eventually Colin Dawson quit the group, and Daltrey took over the lead vocal role for the Detours, who settled into a lineup of Daltrey, Townshend, Entwistle, and drummer Doug Sandom, who was much older than the rest of the group -- he was born in 1930, while Daltrey and Entwistle were born in 1944 and Townshend in 1945. For a while, Daltrey continued playing guitar as well as singing, but his hands were often damaged by his work at the sheet-metal factory, making guitar painful for him. Then the group got a support slot with Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, who at this point were a four-piece band, with Kidd singing backed by bass, drums, and Mick Green playing one guitar on which he played both rhythm and lead parts: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, "Doctor Feel Good"] Green was at the time considered possibly the best guitarist in Britain, and the sound the Pirates were able to get with only one guitar convinced the Detours that they would be OK if Daltrey switched to just singing, so the group changed to what is now known as a "power trio" format. Townshend was a huge admirer of Steve Cropper, another guitarist who played both rhythm and lead, and started trying to adopt parts of Cropper's style, playing mostly chords, while Entwistle went for a much more fluid bass style than most, essentially turning the bass into another lead instrument, patterning his playing after Duane Eddy's work. By this time, Townshend was starting to push against Daltrey's leadership a little, especially when it came to repertoire. Townshend had a couple of American friends at art school who had been deported after being caught smoking dope, and had left their records with Townshend for safe-keeping. As a result, Townshend had become a devotee of blues and R&B music, especially the jazzier stuff like Ray Charles, Mose Allison, and Booker T and the MGs. He also admired guitar-based blues records like those by Howlin' Wolf or Jimmy Reed. Townshend kept pushing for this music to be incorporated into the group's sets, but Daltrey would push back, insisting as the leader that they should play the chart hits that everyone else played, rather than what he saw as Townshend's art-school nonsense. Townshend insisted, and eventually won -- within a short while the group had become a pure R&B group, and Daltrey was soon a convert, and became the biggest advocate of that style in the band. But there was a problem with only having one guitar, and that was volume. In particular, Townshend didn't want to be able to hear hecklers. There were gangsters in some of the audiences who would shout requests for particular songs, and you had to play them or else, even if they were completely unsuitable for the rest of the audience's tastes. But if you were playing so loud you couldn't hear the shouting, you had an excuse. Both Entwistle and Townshend had started buying amplifiers from Jim Marshall, who had opened up a music shop after quitting drums -- Townshend actually bought his first one from a shop assistant in Marshall's shop, John McLaughlin, who would later himself become a well-known guitarist. Entwistle, wanting to be heard over Townshend, had bought a cabinet with four twelve-inch speakers in it. Townshend, wanting to be heard over Entwistle, had bought *two* of these cabinets, and stacked them, one on top of the other, against Marshall's protestations -- Marshall said that they would vibrate so much that the top one might fall over and injure someone. Townshend didn't listen, and the Marshall stack was born. This ultra-amplification also led Townshend to change his guitar style further. He was increasingly reliant on distortion and feedback, rather than on traditional instrumental skills. Now, there are basically two kinds of chords that are used in most Western music. There are major chords, which consist of the first, third, and fifth note of the scale, and these are the basic chords that everyone starts with. So you can strum between G major and F major: [demonstrates G and F chords] There's also minor chords, where you flatten the third note, which sound a little sadder than major chords, so playing G minor and F minor: [demonstrates Gm and Fm chords] There are of course other kinds of chord -- basically any collection of notes counts as a chord, and can work musically in some context. But major and minor chords are the basic harmonic building blocks of most pop music. But when you're using a lot of distortion and feedback, you create a lot of extra harmonics -- extra notes that your instrument makes along with the ones you're playing. And for mathematical reasons I won't go into here because this is already a very long episode, the harmonics generated by playing the first and fifth notes sound fine together, but the harmonics from a third or minor third don't go along with them at all. The solution to this problem is to play what are known as "power chords", which are just the root and fifth notes, with no third at all, and which sound ambiguous as to whether they're major or minor. Townshend started to build his technique around these chords, playing for the most part on the bottom three strings of his guitar, which sounds like this: [demonstrates G5 and F5 chords] Townshend wasn't the first person to use power chords -- they're used on a lot of the Howlin' Wolf records he liked, and before Townshend would become famous the Kinks had used them on "You Really Got Me" -- but he was one of the first British guitarists to make them a major part of his personal style. Around this time, the Detours were starting to become seriously popular, and Townshend was starting to get exhausted by the constant demands on his time from being in the band and going to art school. He talked about this with one of his lecturers, who asked how much Townshend was earning from the band. When Townshend told him he was making thirty pounds a week, the lecturer was shocked, and said that was more than *he* was earning. Townshend should probably just quit art school, because it wasn't like he was going to make more money from anything he could learn there. Around this time, two things changed the group's image. The first was that they played a support slot for the Rolling Stones in December 1963. Townshend saw Keith Richards swinging his arm over his head and then bringing it down on the guitar, to loosen up his muscles, and he thought that looked fantastic, and started copying it -- from very early on, Townshend wanted to have a physical presence on stage that would be all about his body, to distract from his face, as he was embarrassed about the size of his nose. They played a second support slot for the Stones a few weeks later, and not wanting to look like he was copying Richards, Townshend didn't do that move, but then he noticed that Richards didn't do it either. He asked about it after the gig, and Richards didn't know what he was talking about -- "Swing me what?" -- so Townshend took that as a green light to make that move, which became known as the windmill, his own. The second thing was when in February 1964 a group appeared on Thank Your Lucky Stars: [Excerpt: Johnny Devlin and the Detours, "Sometimes"] Johnny Devlin and the Detours had had national media exposure, which meant that Daltrey, Townshend, Entwistle, and Sandom had to change the name of their group. They eventually settled on "The Who", It was around this time that the group got their first serious management, a man named Helmut Gorden, who owned a doorknob factory. Gorden had no management experience, but he did offer the group a regular salary, and pay for new equipment for them. However, when he tried to sign the group to a proper contract, as most of them were still under twenty-one he needed their parents to countersign for them. Townshend's parents, being experienced in the music industry, refused to sign, and so the group continued under Gorden's management without a contract. Gorden, not having management experience, didn't have any contacts in the music industry. But his barber did. Gorden enthused about his group to Jack Marks, the barber, and Marks in turn told some of his other clients about this group he'd been hearing about. Tony Hatch wasn't interested, as he already had a guitar group with the Searchers, but Chris Parmenter at Fontana Records was, and an audition was arranged. At the audition, among other numbers, they played Bo Diddley's "Here 'Tis": [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Here 'Tis"] Unfortunately for Doug, he didn't play well on that song, and Townshend started berating him. Doug also knew that Parmenter had reservations about him, because he was so much older than the rest of the band -- he was thirty-four at the time, while the rest of the group were only just turning twenty -- and he was also the least keen of the group on the R&B material they were playing. He'd been warned by Entwistle, his closest friend in the group, that Daltrey and Townshend were thinking of dropping him, and so he decided to jump before he was pushed, walking out of the audition. He agreed to come back for a handful more gigs that were already booked in, but that was the end of his time in the band, and of his time in the music industry -- though oddly not of his friendship with the group. Unlike other famous examples of an early member not fitting in and being forced out before a band becomes big, Sandom remained friends with the other members, and Townshend wrote the foreword to his autobiography, calling him a mentor figure, while Daltrey apparently insisted that Sandom phone him for a chat every Sunday, at the same time every week, until Sandom's death in 2019 at the age of eighty-nine. The group tried a few other drummers, including someone who Jim Marshall had been giving drum lessons to, Mitch Mitchell, before settling on the drummer for another group that played the same circuit, the Beachcombers, who played mostly Shadows material, plus the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean songs that their drummer, Keith Moon, loved. Moon and Entwistle soon became a formidable rhythm section, and despite having been turned down by Fontana, they were clearly going places. But they needed an image -- and one was provided for them by Pete Meaden. Meaden was another person who got his hair cut by Jack Marks, and he had had  little bit of music business experience, having worked for Andrew Oldham, the Rolling Stones' manager, for a while before going on to manage a group called the Moments, whose career highlight was recording a soundalike cover version of "You Really Got Me" for an American budget label: [Excerpt: The Moments, "You Really Got Me"] The Moments never had any big success, but Meaden's nose for talent was not wrong, as their teenage lead singer, Steve Marriott, later went on to much better things. Pete Meaden was taken on as Helmut Gorden's assistant, but from this point on the group decided to regard him as their de facto manager, and as more than just a manager. To Townshend in particular he was a guru figure, and he shaped the group to appeal to the Mods. Now, we've not talked much about the Mods previously, and what little has been said has been a bit contradictory. That's because the Mods were a tiny subculture at this point -- or to be more precise, they were three subcultures. The original mods had come along in the late 1950s, at a time when there was a division among jazz fans between fans of traditional New Orleans jazz -- "trad" -- and modern jazz. The mods were modernists, hence the name, but for the most part they weren't as interested in music as in clothes. They were a small group of young working-class men, almost all gay, who dressed flamboyantly and dandyishly, and who saw themselves, their clothing, and their bodies as works of art. In the late fifties, Britain was going through something of an economic boom, and this was the first time that working-class men *could* buy nice clothes. These working-class dandies would have to visit tailors to get specially modified clothes made, but they could just about afford to do so. The mod image was at first something that belonged to a very, very, small clique of people. But then John Stephens opened his first shop. This was the first era when short runs of factory-produced clothing became possible, and Stephens, a stylish young man, opened a shop on Carnaby Street, then a relatively cheap place to open a shop. He painted the outside yellow, played loud pop music, and attracted a young crowd. Stephens was selling factory-made clothes that still looked unique -- short runs of odd-coloured jeans, three-button jackets, and other men's fashion. Soon Carnaby Street became the hub for men's fashion in London, thanks largely to Stephens. At one point Stephens owned fifteen different shops, nine of them on Carnaby Street itself, and Stephens' shops appealed to the kind of people that the Kinks would satirise in their early 1966 hit single "Dedicated Follower of Fashion": [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Dedicated Follower of Fashion"] Many of those who visited Stephens' shops were the larger, second, generation of mods. I'm going to quote here from George Melly's Revolt Into Style, the first book to properly analyse British pop culture of the fifties and sixties, by someone who was there: "As the ‘mod' thing spread it lost its purity. For the next generation of Mods, those who picked up the ‘mod' thing around 1963, clothes, while still their central preoccupation, weren't enough. They needed music (Rhythm and Blues), transport (scooters) and drugs (pep pills). What's more they needed fashion ready-made. They hadn't the time or the fanaticism to invent their own styles, and this is where Carnaby Street came in." Melly goes on to talk about how these new Mods were viewed with distaste by the older Mods, who left the scene. The choice of music for these new Mods was as much due to geographic proximity as anything else. Carnaby Street is just round the corner from Wardour Street, and Wardour Street is where the two clubs that between them were the twin poles of the London R&B scenes, the Marquee and the Flamingo, were both located. So it made sense that the young people frequenting John Stephens' boutiques on Carnaby Street were the same people who made up the audiences -- and the bands -- at those clubs. But by 1964, even these second-generation Mods were in a minority compared to a new, third generation, and here I'm going to quote Melly again: "But the Carnaby Street Mods were not the final stage in the history of this particular movement. The word was taken over finally by a new and more violent sector, the urban working class at the gang-forming age, and this became quite sinister. The gang stage rejected the wilder flights of Carnaby Street in favour of extreme sartorial neatness. Everything about them was neat, pretty and creepy: dark glasses, Nero hair-cuts, Chelsea boots, polo-necked sweaters worn under skinny V-necked pullovers, gleaming scooters and transistors. Even their offensive weapons were pretty—tiny hammers and screwdrivers. En masse they looked like a pack of weasels." I would urge anyone who's interested in British social history to read Melly's book in full -- it's well worth it. These third-stage Mods soon made up the bulk of the movement, and they were the ones who, in summer 1964, got into the gang fights that were breathlessly reported in all the tabloid newspapers. Pete Meaden was a Mod, and as far as I can tell he was a leading-edge second-stage Mod, though as with all these things who was in what generation of Mods is a bit blurry. Meaden had a whole idea of Mod-as-lifestyle and Mod-as-philosophy, which worked well with the group's R&B leanings, and with Townshend's art-school-inspired fascination with the aesthetics of Pop Art. Meaden got the group a residency at the Railway Hotel, a favourite Mod hangout, and he also changed their name -- The Who didn't sound Mod enough. In Mod circles at the time there was a hierarchy, with the coolest people, the Faces, at the top, below them a slightly larger group of people known as Numbers, and below them the mass of generic people known as Tickets. Meaden saw himself as the band's Svengali, so he was obviously the Face, so the group had to be Numbers -- so they became The High Numbers. Meaden got the group a one-off single deal, to record two songs he had allegedly written, both of which had lyrics geared specifically for the Mods. The A-side was "Zoot Suit": [Excerpt: The High Numbers, "Zoot Suit"] This had a melody that was stolen wholesale from "Misery" by the Dynamics: [Excerpt: The Dynamics, "Misery"] The B-side, meanwhile, was titled "I'm the Face": [Excerpt: The High Numbers, "I'm the Face"] Which anyone with any interest at all in blues music will recognise immediately as being "Got Love if You Want It" by Slim Harpo: [Excerpt: Slim Harpo, "Got Love if You Want it"] Unfortunately for the High Numbers, that single didn't have much success. Mod was a local phenomenon, which never took off outside London and its suburbs, and so the songs didn't have much appeal in the rest of the country -- while within London, Mod fashions were moving so quickly that by the time the record came out, all its up-to-the-minute references were desperately outdated. But while the record didn't have much success, the group were getting a big live following among the Mods, and their awareness of rapidly shifting trends in that subculture paid off for them in terms of stagecraft. To quote Townshend: "What the Mods taught us was how to lead by following. I mean, you'd look at the dance floor and see some bloke stop during the dance of the week and for some reason feel like doing some silly sort of step. And you'd notice some of the blokes around him looking out of the corners of their eyes and thinking 'is this the latest?' And on their own, without acknowledging the first fellow, a few of 'em would start dancing that way. And we'd be watching. By the time they looked up on the stage again, we'd be doing that dance and they'd think the original guy had been imitating us. And next week they'd come back and look to us for dances". And then Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp came into the Railway Hotel. Kit Lambert was the son of Constant Lambert, the founding music director of the Royal Ballet, who the economist John Maynard Keynes described as the most brilliant man he'd ever met. Constant Lambert was possibly Britain's foremost composer of the pre-war era, and one of the first people from the serious music establishment to recognise the potential of jazz and blues music. His most famous composition, "The Rio Grande", written in 1927 about a fictitious South American river, is often compared with Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue: [Excerpt: Constant Lambert, "The Rio Grande"] Kit Lambert was thus brought up in an atmosphere of great privilege, both financially and intellectually, with his godfather being the composer Sir William Walton while his godmother was the prima ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn, with whom his father was having an affair. As a result of the problems between his parents, Lambert spent much of his childhood living with his grandmother. After studying history at Oxford and doing his national service, Lambert had spent a few months studying film at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris, where he went because Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Renais taught there -- or at least so he would later say, though there's no evidence I can find that Godard actually taught there, so either he went there under a mistaken impression or he lied about it later to make himself sound more interesting. However, he'd got bored with his studies after only a few months, and decided that he knew enough to just make a film himself, and he planned his first documentary. In early 1961, despite having little film experience, he joined two friends from university, Richard Mason and John Hemming, in an attempt to make a documentary film tracing the source of the Iriri, a river in South America that was at that point the longest unnavigated river in the world. Unfortunately, the expedition was as disastrous as it's possible for such an expedition to be. In May 1961 they landed in the Amazon basin and headed off on their expedition to find the source of the Iriri, with the help of five local porters and three people sent along by the Brazillian government to map the new areas they were to discover. Unfortunately, by September, not only had they not found the source of the Iriri, they'd actually not managed to find the Iriri itself, four and a half months apparently not being a long enough time to find an eight-hundred-and-ten-mile-long river. And then Mason made his way into history in the worst possible way, by becoming the last, to date, British person to be murdered by an uncontacted indigenous tribe, the Panará, who shot him with eight poison arrows and then bludgeoned his skull. A little over a decade later the Panará made contact with the wider world after nearly being wiped out by disease. They remembered killing Mason and said that they'd been scared by the swishing noise his jeans had made, as they'd never encountered anyone who wore clothes before. Before they made contact, the Panará were also known as the Kreen-Akrore, a name given them by the Kayapó people, meaning "round-cut head", a reference to the way they styled their hair, brushed forward and trimmed over the forehead in a way that was remarkably similar to some of the Mod styles. Before they made contact, Paul McCartney would in 1970 record an instrumental, "Kreen Akrore", after being inspired by a documentary called The Tribe That Hides From Man. McCartney's instrumental includes sound effects, including McCartney firing a bow and arrow, though apparently the bow-string snapped during the recording: [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, "Kreen Akrore"] For a while, Lambert was under suspicion for the murder, though the Daily Express, which had sponsored the expedition, persuaded Brazillian police to drop the charges. While he was in Rio waiting for the legal case to be sorted, Lambert developed what one book on the Who describes as "a serious anal infection". Astonishingly, this experience did not put Lambert off from the film industry, though he wouldn't try to make another film of his own for a couple of years. Instead, he went to work at Shepperton Studios, where he was an uncredited second AD on many films, including From Russia With Love and The L-Shaped Room. Another second AD working on many of the same films was Chris Stamp, the brother of the actor Terence Stamp, who was just starting out in his own career. Stamp and Lambert became close friends, despite -- or because of -- their differences. Lambert was bisexual, and preferred men to women, Stamp was straight. Lambert was the godson of a knight and a dame, Stamp was a working-class East End Cockney. Lambert was a film-school dropout full of ideas and grand ambitions, but unsure how best to put those ideas into practice, Stamp was a practical, hands-on, man. The two complemented each other perfectly, and became flatmates and collaborators. After seeing A Hard Day's Night, they decided that they were going to make their own pop film -- a documentary, inspired by the French nouvelle vague school of cinema, which would chart a pop band from playing lowly clubs to being massive pop stars. Now all they needed was to find a band that were playing lowly clubs but could become massive stars. And they found that band at the Railway Hotel, when they saw the High Numbers. Stamp and Lambert started making their film, and completed part of it, which can be found on YouTube: [Excerpt: The High Numbers, "Oo Poo Pa Doo"] The surviving part of the film is actually very, very, well done for people who'd never directed a film before, and I have no doubt that if they'd completed the film, to be titled High Numbers, it would be regarded as one of the classic depictions of early-sixties London club life, to be classed along with The Small World of Sammy Lee and Expresso Bongo. What's even more astonishing, though, is how *modern* the group look. Most footage of guitar bands of this period looks very dated, not just in the fashions, but in everything -- the attitude of the performers, their body language, the way they hold their instruments. The best performances are still thrilling, but you can tell when they were filmed. On the other hand, the High Numbers look ungainly and awkward, like the lads of no more than twenty that they are -- but in a way that was actually shocking to me when I first saw this footage. Because they look *exactly* like every guitar band I played on the same bill as during my own attempts at being in bands between 2000 and about 2005. If it weren't for the fact that they have such recognisable faces, if you'd told me this was footage of some band I played on the same bill with at the Star and Garter or Night and Day Cafe in 2003, I'd believe it unquestioningly. But while Lambert and Stamp started out making a film, they soon pivoted and decided that they could go into management. Of course, the High Numbers did already have management -- Pete Meaden and Helmut Gorden -- but after consulting with the Beatles' lawyer, David Jacobs, Lambert and Stamp found out that Gorden's contract with the band was invalid, and so when Gorden got back from a holiday, he found himself usurped. Meaden was a bit more difficult to get rid of, even though he had less claim on the group than Gorden -- he was officially their publicist, not their manager, and his only deal was with Gorden, even though the group considered him their manager. While Meaden didn't have a contractual claim though, he did have one argument in his favour, which is that he had a large friend named Phil the Greek, who had a big knife. When this claim was put to Lambert and Stamp, they agreed that this was a very good point indeed, one that they hadn't considered, and agreed to pay Meaden off with two hundred and fifty pounds. This would not be the last big expense that Stamp and Lambert would have as the managers of the Who, as the group were now renamed. Their agreement with the group had the two managers taking forty percent of the group's earnings, while the four band members would split the other sixty percent between themselves -- an arrangement which should theoretically have had the managers coming out ahead. But they also agreed to pay the group's expenses. And that was to prove very costly indeed. Shortly after they started managing the group, at a gig at the Railway Hotel, which had low ceilings, Townshend lifted his guitar up a bit higher than he'd intended, and broke the headstock. Townshend had a spare guitar with him, so this was OK, and he also remembered Gustav Metzger and his ideas of auto-destructive art, and Malcolm Cecil sawing through his bass strings and damaging his bass, and decided that it was better for him to look like he'd meant to do that than to look like an idiot who'd accidentally broken his guitar, so he repeated the motion, smashing his guitar to bits, before carrying on the show with his spare. The next week, the crowd were excited, expecting the same thing again, but Townshend hadn't brought a spare guitar with him. So as not to disappoint them, Keith Moon destroyed his drum kit instead. This destruction was annoying to Entwistle, who saw musical instruments as something close to sacred, and it also annoyed the group's managers at first, because musical instruments are expensive. But they soon saw the value this brought to the band's shows, and reluctantly agreed to keep buying them new instruments. So for the first couple of years, Lambert and Stamp lost money on the group. They funded this partly through Lambert's savings, partly through Stamp continuing to do film work, and partly from investors in their company, one of whom was Russ Conway, the easy-listening piano player who'd had hits like "Side Saddle": [Excerpt: Russ Conway, "Side Saddle"] Conway's connections actually got the group another audition for a record label, Decca (although Conway himself recorded for EMI), but the group were turned down. The managers were told that they would have been signed, but they didn't have any original material. So Pete Townshend was given the task of writing some original material. By this time Townshend's musical world was expanding far beyond the R&B that the group were performing on stage, and he talks in his autobiography about the music he was listening to while he was trying to write his early songs. There was "Green Onions", which he'd been listening to for years in his attempt to emulate Steve Cropper's guitar style, but there was also The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and two tracks he names in particular, "Devil's Jump" by John Lee Hooker: [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "Devil's Jump"] And "Better Get Hit in Your Soul" by Charles Mingus: [Excerpt: Charles Mingus, "Better Get Hit In Your Soul"] He was also listening to what he described as "a record that changed my life as a composer", a recording of baroque music that included sections of Purcell's Gordian Knot Untied: [Excerpt: Purcell, Chaconne from Gordian Knot Untied] Townshend had a notebook in which he listed the records he wanted to obtain, and he reproduces that list in his autobiography -- "‘Marvin Gaye, 1-2-3, Mingus Revisited, Stevie Wonder, Jimmy Smith Organ Grinder's Swing, In Crowd, Nina in Concert [Nina Simone], Charlie Christian, Billie Holiday, Ella, Ray Charles, Thelonious Monk Around Midnight and Brilliant Corners.'" He was also listening to a lot of Stockhausen and Charlie Parker, and to the Everly Brothers -- who by this point were almost the only artist that all four members of the Who agreed were any good, because Daltrey was now fully committed to the R&B music he'd originally dismissed, and disliked what he thought was the pretentiousness of the music Townshend was listening to, while Keith Moon was primarily a fan of the Beach Boys. But everyone could agree that the Everlys, with their sensitive interpretations, exquisite harmonies, and Bo Diddley-inflected guitars, were great, and so the group added several songs from the Everlys' 1965 albums Rock N Soul and Beat N Soul to their set, like "Man With Money": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Man With Money"] Despite Daltrey's objections to diluting the purity of the group's R&B sound, Townshend brought all these influences into his songwriting. The first song he wrote to see release was not actually recorded by the Who, but a song he co-wrote for a minor beat group called the Naturals, who released it as a B-side: [Excerpt: The Naturals, "It Was You"] But shortly after this, the group got their first big break, thanks to Lambert's personal assistant, Anya Butler. Butler was friends with Shel Talmy's wife, and got Talmy to listen to the group. Townshend in particular was eager to work with Talmy, as he was a big fan of the Kinks, who were just becoming big, and who Talmy produced. Talmy signed the group to a production deal, and then signed a deal to license their records to Decca in America -- which Lambert and Stamp didn't realise wasn't the same label as British Decca. Decca in turn sublicensed the group's recordings to their British subsidiary Brunswick, which meant that the group got a minuscule royalty for sales in Britain, as their recordings were being sold through three corporate layers all taking their cut. This didn't matter to them at first, though, and they went into the studio excited to cut their first record as The Who. As was typical at the time, Talmy brought in a few session players to help out. Clem Cattini turned out not to be needed, and left quickly, but Jimmy Page stuck around -- not to play on the A-side, which Townshend said was "so simple even I could play it", but the B-side, a version of the old blues standard "Bald-Headed Woman", which Talmy had copyrighted in his own name and had already had the Kinks record: [Excerpt: The Who, "Bald-Headed Woman"] Apparently the only reason that Page played on that is that Page wouldn't let Townshend use his fuzzbox. As well as Page and Cattini, Talmy also brought in some backing vocalists. These were the Ivy League, a writing and production collective consisting at this point of John Carter and Ken Lewis, both of whom had previously been in a band with Page, and Perry Ford. The Ivy League were huge hit-makers in the mid-sixties, though most people don't recognise their name. Carter and Lewis had just written "Can You Hear My Heartbeat" for Herman's Hermits: [Excerpt: Herman's Hermits, "Can You Hear My Heartbeat?"] And, along with a couple of other singers who joined the group, the Ivy League would go on to sing backing vocals on hits by Sandie Shaw, Tom Jones and others. Together and separately the members of the Ivy League were also responsible for writing, producing, and singing on "Let's Go to San Francisco" by the Flowerpot Men, "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band, "Beach Baby" by First Class, and more, as well as their big hit under their own name, "Tossing and Turning": [Excerpt: The Ivy League, "Tossing and Turning"] Though my favourite of their tracks is their baroque pop masterpiece "My World Fell Down": [Excerpt: The Ivy League, "My World Fell Down"] As you can tell, the Ivy League were masters of the Beach Boys sound that Moon, and to a lesser extent Townshend, loved. That backing vocal sound was combined with a hard-driving riff inspired by the Kinks' early hits like "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night", and with lyrics that explored inarticulacy, a major theme of Townshend's lyrics: [Excerpt: The Who, "I Can't Explain"] "I Can't Explain" made the top ten, thanks in part to a publicity stunt that Lambert came up with. The group had been booked on to Ready, Steady, Go!, and the floor manager of the show mentioned to Lambert that they were having difficulty getting an audience for that week's show -- they were short about a hundred and fifty people, and they needed young, energetic, dancers. Lambert suggested that the best place to find young, energetic, dancers, was at the Marquee on a Tuesday night -- which just happened to be the night of the Who's regular residency at the club. Come the day of filming, the Ready, Steady, Go! audience was full of the Who's most hardcore fans, all of whom had been told by Lambert to throw scarves at the band when they started playing. It was one of the most memorable performances on the show. But even though the record was a big hit, Daltrey was unhappy. The man who'd started out as guitarist in a Shadows cover band and who'd strenuously objected to the group's inclusion of R&B material now had the zeal of a convert. He didn't want to be doing this "soft commercial pop", or Townshend's art-school nonsense. He wanted to be an R&B singer, playing hard music for working-class men like him. Two decisions were taken to mollify the lead singer. The first was that when they went into the studio to record their first album, it was all soul and R&B apart from one original. The album was going to consist of three James Brown covers, three Motown covers, Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man", and a cover of Paul Revere and the Raiders' "Louie Louie" sequel "Louie Come Home", retitled "Lubie". All of this was material that Daltrey was very comfortable with. Also, Daltrey was given some input into the second single, which would be the only song credited to Daltrey and Townshend, and Daltrey's only songwriting contribution to a Who A-side. Townshend had come up with the title "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere" while listening to Charlie Parker, and had written the song based on that title, but Daltrey was allowed to rewrite the lyrics and make suggestions as to the arrangement. That record also made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Who, "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere"] But Daltrey would soon become even more disillusioned. The album they'd recorded was shelved, though some tracks were later used for what became the My Generation album, and Kit Lambert told the Melody Maker “The Who are having serious doubts about the state of R&B. Now the LP material will consist of hard pop. They've finished with ‘Smokestack Lightning'!” That wasn't the only thing they were finished with -- Townshend and Moon were tired of their band's leader, and also just didn't think he was a particularly good singer -- and weren't shy about saying so, even to the press. Entwistle, a natural peacemaker, didn't feel as strongly, but there was a definite split forming in the band. Things came to a head on a European tour. Daltrey was sick of this pop nonsense, he was sick of the arty ideas of Townshend, and he was also sick of the other members' drug use. Daltrey didn't indulge himself, but the other band members had been using drugs long before they became successful, and they were all using uppers, which offended Daltrey greatly. He flushed Keith Moon's pill stash down the toilet, and screamed at his band mates that they were a bunch of junkies, then physically attacked Moon. All three of the other band members agreed -- Daltrey was out of the band. They were going to continue as a trio. But after a couple of days, Daltrey was back in the group. This was mostly because Daltrey had come crawling back to them, apologising -- he was in a very bad place at the time, having left his wife and kid, and was actually living in the back of the group's tour van. But it was also because Lambert and Stamp persuaded the group they needed Daltrey, at least for the moment, because he'd sung lead on their latest single, and that single was starting to rise up the charts. "My Generation" had had a long and torturous journey from conception to realisation. Musically it originally had been inspired by Mose Allison's "Young Man's Blues": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Young Man's Blues"] Townshend had taken that musical mood and tied it to a lyric that was inspired by a trilogy of TV plays, The Generations, by the socialist playwright David Mercer, whose plays were mostly about family disagreements that involved politics and class, as in the case of the first of those plays, where two upwardly-mobile young brothers of very different political views go back to visit their working-class family when their mother is on her deathbed, and are confronted by the differences they have with each other, and with the uneducated father who sacrificed to give them a better life than he had: [Excerpt: Where the Difference Begins] Townshend's original demo for the song was very much in the style of Mose Allison, as the excerpt of it that's been made available on various deluxe reissues of the album shows: [Excerpt: Pete Townshend, "My Generation (demo)"] But Lambert had not been hugely impressed by that demo. Stamp had suggested that Townshend try a heavier guitar riff, which he did, and then Lambert had added the further suggestion that the music would be improved by a few key changes -- Townshend was at first unsure about this, because he already thought he was a bit too influenced by the Kinks, and he regarded Ray Davies as, in his words, "the master of modulation", but eventually he agreed, and decided that the key changes did improve the song. Stamp made one final suggestion after hearing the next demo version of the song. A while earlier, the Who had been one of the many British groups, like the Yardbirds and the Animals, who had backed Sonny Boy Williamson II on his UK tour. Williamson had occasionally done a little bit of a stutter in some of his performances, and Daltrey had picked up on that and started doing it. Townshend had in turn imitated Daltrey's mannerism a couple of times on the demo, and Stamp thought that was something that could be accentuated. Townshend agreed, and reworked the song, inspired by John Lee Hooker's "Stuttering Blues": [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "Stuttering Blues"] The stuttering made all the difference, and it worked on three levels. It reinforced the themes of inarticulacy that run throughout the Who's early work -- their first single, after all, had been called "I Can't Explain", and Townshend talks movingly in his autobiography about talking to teenage fans who felt that "I Can't Explain" had said for them the things they couldn't say th

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Artribune
Elio Fiorucci Gillo Dorfles Giovanni Allevi - Contemporaneamente a cura di Mariantonietta Firmani

Artribune

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 22, 2021 76:27


In questo audio il prezioso incontro con Elio Fiorucci imprenditore e mecenate, Gillo Dorfles storico, Giovanni Allevi musicista. L'intervista con Elio Fiorucci, Gillo Dorfles e Giovanni Allevi nata per Parallelo42 09 collection, è nel podcast Contemporaneamente a cura di Mariantonietta Firmani, il podcast pensato per Artribune. In Contemporaneamente podcast trovate incontri tematici con autorevoli interpreti del contemporaneo tra arte e scienza, letteratura, storia, filosofia, architettura, cinema e molto altro. Per approfondire questioni auliche ma anche cogenti e futuribili. Dialoghi straniati per accedere a nuove letture e possibili consapevolezze dei meccanismi correnti: tra locale e globale, tra individuo e società, tra pensiero maschile e pensiero femminile, per costruire una visione ampia, profonda ed oggettiva della realtà.Con Elio Fiorucci, Gillo Dorfles e Giovanni Allevi parliamo di Love therapy luogo possibile di una società più a misura d'uomo e di libertà. A fronte dell'enorme sviluppo tecnologico, che rende la cultura e l'arte accessibili a molti, non c‘è stato un parallelo sviluppo delle relazioni interpersonali. Nonostante le tecnologie, la politica che governa e indirizza i popoli, che nel secolo scorso ha prodotto la follia delle guerre, è cambiata molto poco. Certo il nuovo non può che derivare dallo studio del passato, tuttavia è disgustoso il conformismo che prevale dappertutto. La comunione tra gli uomini è la felicità, e poter scegliere resta un grande lusso. La bellezza costa cultura, per questo l'arte dovrebbe essere insegnata nelle scuole elementari, riscoprendo anche la fisicità della creatività; e molto altro. BREVI NOTE BIOGRAFICHE DEGLI AUTORI Gillo Dorfles nasce in aprile 1910 scomparso nel marzo 2018. Testimone eccellente di tutto il Novecento, è uno dei più stimati intellettuali del panorama culturale italiano. Dopo una laurea in medicina, con specializzazione in psichiatria, segue con passione la storia e l'evoluzione dell'arte non solo come critico e studioso, ma anche come attore e protagonista. Infatti diventa negli anni, critico e filosofo d'arte oltre che professore universitario di estetica.Ha insegnato nelle Università di Milano, di Firenze, di Cagliari e di Trieste; numerose lectio magistralis in istituzioni e accademie nazionali e internazionali. Nel 1948 fonda, con Atanasio Soldati, Galliano Mazzon, Gianni Monnet, Bruno Munari e molti altri intellettuali dell'epoca, il Movimento Arte Concreta (MAC). Il MAC promuove l'arte non figurativa e sostiene un astrattismo ‘concreto' e geometrico, svincolato da qualsiasi tensione imitativa e lontano da ogni finalità lirica.Energico, instancabile scrittore e saggista, scrive oltre 30 volumi. Tra le sue opere Il divenire delle arti (1959), Nuovi riti nuovi miti (1965), Le oscillazioni del gusto (1970), Il Kitsch. Antologia del cattivo gusto (1972), L'intervallo perduto (2006). Horror Pleni, La (in)civiltà del rumore (2008), Conformisti (2009) e Fatti e Fattoidi (2009). Inoltre scrive numerose monografie su artisti e pittori fondanti nella storia dell'arte, tra cui Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer e Antonio Scialoja, e volumi dedicati all'Architettura. Tra le numerose la onorificenze ricevute, ricordiamo: il Compasso d'Oro assegnato dall'Associazione per il Design Industriale (ADI), la Medaglia d'Oro della Triennale. Ed ancora, il Premio della Critica Internazionale di Girona, Franklin J. Matchette Prize for Aesthetics. Accademico Onorario di Brera, membro dell'Accademia del Disegno di Città del Messico, Fellow della World Academy of Art and Science. Dottore honoris causa del Politecnico di Milano e dell'Università Autonoma di Città del Messico. Elio Fiorucci nato nel giugno 1935 scomparso nel luglio 2015, è stato un grandissimo imprenditore e straordinario creativo, grande mecenate divulgatore dello spirito giovane contemporaneo. Nel 1967 il primo negozio in Galleria Passarella a Milano, disegnato dalla scultrice Amalia Del Ponte e con l'impianto musicale curato da Cesare Fiorese noto progettista di discoteche. Il Fiorucci Store propone le novità di Carnaby Street, le hit parade londinesi e statunitensi, qui nel 1983 Mendini realizzò il “Grande Metafisico”. Nel 1970 inizia la produzione di abiti per il tempo libero, jeans in particolare, con il marchio Fiorucci.I suoi prodotti vengono distribuiti anche all'estero, prima in Europa e poi in Giappone, Stati Uniti e Sud America. Poi, nel 1975 apre il primo negozio a Londra, in Kings Road, nel 1976 nasce il Fiorucci Store di New York. Nel 1979 un nuovo negozio a Los Angeles nel quartiere di Beverly Hills e nel 1982 a Parigi. I suoi prodotti divengono subito un fatto di costume e finiscono con l'attrarre l'attenzione del jet set internazionale. Nel 1978 Elio Fiorucci collabora con Alfa Romeo e propone un intervento di Sottsass e Branzi, sulla Giulietta. Ancora, nel 1981 produce un lungometraggio sulla vita di Basquiat uscito con il titolo “Downtown 81”. Nello stesso anno, dopo un viaggio a Disneyland nasce la moda “fashi-oon” ovvero fashion+cartoon. Nasce la collezione di T-Art di felpe illustrate con immagini di Walt Disney. un successo enorme che porta Fiorucci nel libro d'oro della grande multinazionale.L'80 è il decennio della Fiorucci-dipendenza. I paninari non possono fare a meno del marchio colorato. Nel 1982 Du Pont lancia la Lycra e Fiorucci la mischia al denim, nasce il primo jeans stretch, femminile, aderente e seducente. Dopo, il film "Flashdance" (1983) Fiorucci lancia la moda body, scalda-muscoli, fasce antisudore e leggings. Nel 1984, nasce la serie di figurine Panini che pubblicano tutte le immagini grafiche del lavoro di 30 anni di attività: la collezione vende 25 milioni di bustine in un anno. Dopo 30 anni di attività, nel 1990 cede l'attività alla società giapponese Edwin International che mantiene a Milano il centro di design del gruppo. Ma la creatività di Fiorucci non si arresta e nel 2003 nasce il progetto Love Therapy, che comprende jeans, felpe, abiti e accessori. Nello stesso anno il progetto per la Citroën Berligno un'auto che voleva essere una “casa-guscio accogliente e in movimento”.Ed ancora, nel 2006 nasce “Baby Angel” la collezione di Elio Fiorucci progettata per il restyling e un nuovo processo di internazionalizzazione del Oviesse Industry. A partire dal 2007 nascono store Baby Angel in franchising nel mondo, nel 2008 il Gruppo Coin acquisisce la licenza esclusiva del marchio Love Therapy. L'enorme contributo di Fiorucci alla cultura contemporanea viene riconosciuto con numerosi premi tra i quali: premio talent scout imprenditore e comunicatore (2004), l'Ambrogino D'Oro (2006). Nel 2007 al Triennale gli dedica "Fiorucciland" simbolo della rivoluzione del costume degli anni '70, nella mostra "Anni settanta, il decennio lungo del secolo breve". Infine il suo grande impegno per la società, lo portano dal 2011 è fra i garanti del manifesto “La coscienza degli animali”. Inoltre, dal 2014 crea opere t-shirt esclusive a sostegno del Progetto Amazzonia del WWF e con una t-shirt denuncia contro le pellicce d'angora. Giovanni Allevi nasce in aprile 1969. Si diploma al conservatorio Francesco Morlacchi di Perugia nel 1990 in pianoforte; nel 1998 si laurea in Filosofia con lode con la tesi "Il vuoto nella Fisica contemporanea". Nel 2001 consegue il diploma in composizione al Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi di Milano e frequenta l'"Accademia Internazionale di Alto Perfezionamento" di Arezzo, sotto la guida del maestro Carlo Alberto Neri. Frequenta i corsi di "Bio-musica e musicoterapia" di Mario Corradini, in cui analizza il potere della musica di rendere liberi, evocare ricordi, immagini ed emozioni.Compone la musica per la tragedia "Le Troiane" di Euripide che è rappresentata al Festival Internazionale del Dramma Antico di Siracusa (1996). E nel 1997 vince le selezioni internazionali per giovani concertisti al "Teatro San Filippo" di Torino. Pubblica i suoi primi due album per pianoforte solo con Lorenzo Cherubini e "Universal Italia": "13 dita" (1997) e "Composizioni" (2003). Allevi con il suo pianoforte, apre i concerti di Jovanotti durante i tour. Nel 1998 sempre con la produzione di Saturnino realizza la colonna sonora del cortometraggio "Venceremos" presentato al Sundance Film Festival negli Stati Uniti.Nel 1999 la musicista giapponese Nanae Mimura, solista di "marimba", propone alcuni brani di "13 dita" trascritti per il suo strumento al Teatro di Tokyo ed in un concerto alla Carnegie Hall di New York. Con l'attività di pianista Giovanni Allevi si conferma musicista eclettico, esibendosi in prestigiose rassegne concertistiche di musica classica, in importanti teatri italiani, e nei festival di musica rock e jazz, in tutto il mondo. Nel 2008 esce il suo quinto lavoro per pianoforte e orchestra dal nome "Evolution", il primo album in cui è accompagnato da un'orchestra sinfonica.Il 21 dicembre 2008 suona al consueto concerto di Natale presso l'aula del Senato della Repubblica Italiana. All'evento presenzia il capo dello Stato, Giorgio Napolitano, nonché le più alte cariche istituzionali. Allevi dirige l'orchestra sinfonica de "I virtuosi italiani". Nell'occasione oltre alle proprie composizioni, esegue musiche del maestro Puccini in ricordo del 150° anniversario della nascita. I proventi di tale concerto vengono devoluti all'Ospedale pediatrico Bambino Gesù di Roma e tutto l'evento è trasmesso in diretta su Rai Uno. Nel 2008 vengono pubblicati due volumi: il diario autobiografico "La musica in testa" e il libro fotografico "In viaggio con la strega". E molto altro.

Outspoken Beauty
Danny Gray: Men, Makeup and Mental Health

Outspoken Beauty

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 21, 2021 33:22


In this episode I get to meet the man who is making a stand and encouraging men to fight the status quo and wear makeup if that's what they want to do.Danny Gray has opened the world's first men's makeup store on London's Carnaby Street and his message is clear...makeup has the power to empower men and give them confidence much like it does women. All we need to do is change our way of thinking.During the episode Danny opens up about how being bullied for his appearance as a child affected him and inspired his brand. We chat about his experience of Dragon's Den, his career journey and why Warpaint is about so much more about makeup.Danny is an absolute force of nature and I love what he's doing with Warpaint and his message. I have a feeling that this episode is going to really inspire you.

Rock is here: Londres
Sanctum Hotel

Rock is here: Londres

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 3, 2021 8:53


Hoy vamos a visitar un hotel en pleno centro londinense que dedicó una habitación a Chris Squire, fundador y bajista del grupo Yes.Christopher Russell Edward Squire había nacido en marzo de 1948 en Kingsbury, un suburbio al noroeste de Londres. A los 20 años conoció a Jon Anderson en el club La Chasse (al cual ya le hemos dedicado un episodio), y al poco tiempo comienza la carrera de Yes, una de las bandas esenciales del rock progresivo que ha publicado más de 40 discos, grabados en estudio y en vivo.Chris Squire murió de leucemia en Phoenix, Arizona, a los 67 años. Y como homenaje, su amigo y dueño del Hotel Sanctum, ubicado en pleno Soho, bautizó a una de sus mejores habitaciones, la 401, como "The Fish Tank". The Fish no es solamente una canción de Squire, incluída en el disco "Fragile", sino que es el apodo con el que era conocido, aparentemente por su costumbre de tomarse largas duchas.El dueño del hotel, además, colocó una placa en la puerta del edificio, en la que menciona otro de sus apodos: "The late". Un juego de palabras con el clásico humor inglés, ya que "late" puede usarse tanto para referirse a "el difunto" como para "el que llega tarde". Squire pasó a la fama por su estilo tan personal en el bajo, pero también por no llegar nunca a tiempo a las citas.El Sanctum Soho Hotel hoy en día es un hotel 4 estrellas con muy buenas calificaciones en los portales de reservas y valores que no bajan de 200 dólares la noche por una habitación doble. Está ubicado en el 20 de Warwick St, a muy pocas cuadras de Piccadilly Circus y de Carnaby Street, por ejemplo, y podés llegar hasta ahí en subte, con las líneas Bakerloo o Piccadilly.Nos despedimos, lógicamente homenajeando a Chris Squire con el track "The fish", original de "Fragile", pero en una versión en vivo incluida en "Yessongs", primer disco en vivo de la banda y considerado el álbum en directo más importante del rock progresivo de los ‘70s.Tracklist"The Fish""Starship Trooper""Beyond and Before""Looking Around""Harold Land""Long distance runaround / The Fish", en vivo, del disco "Yessongs" See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Bubble
The Bubble 23 – vintage clothes (with Pillowheat)

The Bubble

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 16, 2021 69:25


This month's feature episode tells the amazing story of Henry Davies, otherwise known as Pillowheat. Henry owns a store on Carnaby Street, one of the world's most exclusive shopping streets, but sells something unusual – exclusive pre-1997 Vans shoes and clothing. What started as a collection of vintage clothing has turned into a business, and an utterly unique one at that. Learn all about his journey from Sydney to London, his discovery of original Vans, his obsession with Skate culture and how it bumped up against his education in natural healing, and why he broke into an abandoned house in Italy.Watch Dogtown and the Z-Boys here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dogtown-Z-Boys-Sean-Penn/dp/B00ET086FIFollow Pillowheat on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/pillowheat/?hl=enBrought to you by the team behind the Craft Beer Channel, The Bubble takes an irreverent look at beer from the outside, inviting new people to give us their perspective on the world we're all obsessed with. You're listening to the bubble, the podcast turning beer inside out.SUPPORT US!Pledge on Patreon and get some cool merch & videos: https://www.patreon.com/craftbeerchannelCheck out our sponsor Beer Merchants and support the show via Patreon!Twitter – @beerchannelFacebook – http://www.facebook.com/thecraftbeerchannelInstagram – @craftbeerchannelRemember to drink responsibly(ish) and not be that guy...Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/craftbeerchannel)

In the Markets with Fred & Rory
July 2021: Chris Ward, Carnaby Street & Covid-19

In the Markets with Fred & Rory

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 15, 2021 35:35


Fred & Rory have the pleasure of speaking to Chris Ward, Chief Financial Officer of Shaftesbury Plc (owner of 16 acres across West End London including Carnaby Street and swathes of Soho, Covent Garden and Chinatown).  As one would expect, the once busy West End was hugely impacted by the pandemic, but as a result of Shaftesbury's sustainable policies and genuine passion for cultivating unique villages, footfall has returned to two-thirds of pre-pandemic levels and loyalty from their retailers could not be more obvious. Tune in to find out what they look for when selecting retailers, what new vendors we should expect to see and some great recommendations on where to eat and shop on your next visit to London. For any questions, please email podcast@church-house.co.uk

Londres tiene podcast
Carnaby Street y la moda | Ep. 11

Londres tiene podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 5, 2021 36:19


¡Bienvenidos a Londres tiene... podcast! En este undécimo episodio te vamos a contar la historia de esta calle tan icónica de Londres, históricamente ligada a la moda y a la juventud. Si querés conocer por qué Carnaby Street es una de las calles más conocidas de la ciudad, ¡no te pierdas este episodio!