Podcasts about ewan maccoll

En este país, y dependiendo de quién se trate, se han subvertido por completo las garantías procesales. Ya no eres inocente hasta que se pruebe tu culpabilidad, no, ahora de entrada eres culpable hasta que en un juicio demuestres tu inocencia. Y a esto hay que añadirle la falta de información, la desinformación, por no decir directamente la tergiversación de los hechos. Una vez más, los medios no cumplen con su obligación de aclarar las cosas, sino que contribuyen, por acción u omisión a embarrarlas aún más. Min. 01 Seg. 49 – Intro Min. 08 Seg. 43 – Una resolución incomprensible Min. 18 Seg. 30 – Si no se hace nada volverá a suceder Min. 22 Seg. 50 – Juez, jurado y verdugo Min. 31 Seg. 14 – Culpable hasta que demuestres ser inocente Min. 35 Seg. 57 – Adiós a la presunción de inocencia Min. 41 Seg. 18 – ¿Por qué sólo uno es vilipendiado? Min. 46 Seg. 39 – Mejor suplente, no sea que marque muchos goles Min. 50 Seg. 35 – Consejos vendo, pero para mí no tengo Min. 54 Seg. 54 – Despedida Dee Snider - We're Not Gonna Take It (Wacken 01/08/2015) Roberta Flack (Sheffield 22/10/1984) Jesse The Closer I Get To You The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face Making Love Feel Like Makin' Love River Killing Me Softly With His Song The Water Is Wide Keep Forgettin' Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger - The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (Freeborn Man, 1983) Burland, Capstick & Gaughan‎ - The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face > Sweet Thames Flow Softly (Songs Of Ewan MacColl,1978)

Editor's note: For this episode, we invited our friend Dawn Landes to interview Peggy Seeger. Dawn was the perfect choice to interview the feminist folk icon. She recently joined us on a special episode with Aoife O'Donovan to discuss their feminist-themed new albums. We're thrilled to welcome Dawn back as guest host!I can't believe it took me 40 years to come across Peggy Seeger's music. I'm a little mad about this honestly, and have been trying to make up for lost time by diving deep into her songs and her story. I've been a fan of her older brother, Pete Seeger since I was a kid but didn't realize the depth of talent and reach in the Seeger family …they are truly Folk Royalty! Peggy Seeger is the daughter of a celebrated modernist composer and a musicologist who grew up with people like Alan Lomax and Elizabeth Cotten hanging out in her family home. At 89 years old she's released 24 solo recordings and been a part of over a hundred more. She's built her career on wit, incredible musicianship and unflappable activism.On this episode of Basic Folk, I am honored to talk with Peggy Seeger about her beginnings in feminism, her decades-long partnership with Scottish singer Ewan MacColl, the creation of the BBC Radio Ballads, the importance of hope and her dream tattoos! She even sang us a song from memory that I doubt she had sung in many years. Peggy is a repository of traditional songs and continues to tour and play music with her family as she's done throughout her whole life. Although she claims that she doesn't write anthems, Seeger's songs have become synonymous with women's rights and environmental activism. Coming from a woman who once sang her defense in a courtroom, we should all take Peggy's advice…“Something wrong? Make a song!”--- Dawn LandesFollow Basic Folk on social media: https://basicfolk.bio.link/Sign up for Basic Folk's newsletter: https://bit.ly/basicfolknewsHelp produce Basic Folk by contributing: https://basicfolk.com/donate/Interested in sponsoring us? Contact BGS: https://bit.ly/sponsorBGSpodsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Folk singer Peggy Seeger and her partner, Irene Pyper-Scott, live on different continents. Peggy has written dozens of poems and songs for Irene, and one for the man she spent 33 years with before that – Ewan MacColl. “He loved me the way I loved Irene.” Ewan MacColl wrote the famous love song – “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” – about Peggy in 1957. Peggy Seeger's book is First Time Ever: A Memoir. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2BmMZr5 Want to listen to This is Love ad-free? Sign up for Criminal Plus – you'll get This is Love, Criminal, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery ad-free. Plus, behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal and other exclusive benefits. Learn more and sign up here. We also make Criminal and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

LA QUESTION avec Carla Pallone Mica Levi – Lipstick to Void AVANT/APRÈS – First Time Ever I Saw Your Face Peter, Paul & Mary – First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (1965) Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger – First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (1958) Elvis Presley – First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (1972) Johnny Cash – First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (2002) FOCUS – Fabiana Palladino Fabiana Palladino – Can You Look in the Mirror ? Fabiana Palladino – I Care Fabiana Palladino – Stay with Me through the Night LE GRAND ZIGZAG Dana Gavanski – Late Slap Discovery Zone – All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go Mount Kimbie – Boxing (feat. King Krule) Broadcast – Lights Out (Black Session 2000) Stereolab – Contronatura (Demo) Fievel is Glauque – Decoy Love Apple – Man On The Side Lou Ragland – Understand Each Other Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee Noël – Au Revoir Blossom Dearie – Some Other Time

Podcast Jarasaseasongi powstał niechcący, przy okazji tworzenia audycji dla Radia Danielka. A Radio Danielka skończyło już 3 lata. Na tę okoliczność pasowałoby więc w Jarasaseasongach o radiu. Już kiedyś opowiadałem o prekursorach nowoczesnego radiowego dziennikarstwa, dziś opowiem więcej o ich rewolucyjnej audycji. Nasze radio – Danielkę robi grupa zapaleńców, profesjonalistów i amatorów choćby takich jak ja. Dzięki rewolucji technologicznej możemy to robić bez potężnego zaplecza technicznego. Ha, albo może właśnie z potężnym zapleczem… zaklętym w miniaturowych, prostych w obsłudze urządzeniach. Może właśnie tak. Ale kształt naszych audycji to nie tylko technologia, to suma naszych pasji i doświadczeń pokoleń radiowców, doświadczeń zebranych, podpatrzonych, no i przede wszystkim podsłuchanych. Nie musieliśmy wyważać drzwi i wymyślać koła, zrobili to za nas inni. Mi szczególnie bliskie są dokonania najbardziej folkowej pary wszech czasów Peggy Seeger i Ewana MacColla. Otóż pod koniec lat 50 ubiegłego wieku Ewan i Peggy, nawiązali współpracę z angielskim producentem radiowym Charlsem Parkerem. Postanowili stworzyć dla BBC cykl audycji poświęconych różnym aspektom życia na wyspach brytyjskich. Na przestrzeni 6 lat powstało osiem audycji o różnorodnej tematyce. Cykl nosił nazwę „Radio Ballad” i zapisał się na stałe na kartach historii dziennikarstwa. Nasi folkowcy wpadli na pomysł, żeby połączyć w jednej audycji cztery fundamentalne elementy dotąd nie wykorzystywane w komplecie. Mianowicie: muzykę instrumentalną, efekty dźwiękowe, piosenki i nagrane wypowiedzi zwyczajnych ludzi. Dziś nie brzmi to zaskakująco ale w latach 50 była to rewolucja. Samo połączenie różnych form nie było może szczególnie zaskakujące, nowością był sposób emitowania wypowiedzi bohaterów. W tamtych czasach w audycjach radiowych wypowiedzi zwyczajnych ludzi były transkrybowane a następnie czytane przez zawodowych lektorów. MacColl, Seeger i Parker, do każdej audycji gromadzili setki taśm z nagranymi rozmowami …spośród nich wybierali najciekawsze i, uwaga w ORYGINALE puszczali w eter. W tamtych latach - szok. Powstały programy autentyczne, zabawne, pouczające i poetyckie, w których poszczególne elementy przenikały się nawzajem. Zatem o Radio Ballad opowiadam w dzisiejszym podcaście. Ale, jako że Jarasaseasongi to przecież rzecz o piosenkach, to posłuchamy piosenek z tego cyklu. Wszakże w Radio Ballad śpiewane były utwory napisane specjalnie do każdej audycji przez Ewana MacColla. Posłuchajcie zatem jak piosenki Ewana z rewolucyjnego cyklu audycji śpiewają inni artyści.   Audycja zawiera utwory: “Song of the Iron Road”, wyk. Luke Kelly i The Dubliners, sł. i muz. Ewan MacColl “Just a Note”, wyk. Karan Casey, sł. i muz. Ewan MacColl “Niech zabrzmi pieśń ”, wyk. Cztery Refy, sł. Ewan MacColl, tłum. Jerzy Rogacki muz. Ewan MacColl “On the North Sea Holes”, “The Big Hewer”, wyk. David Coffin, sł. i muz. Ewan MacColl “Morrissey and the Russian Sailor”, wyk. Seán 'ac Dhonnchadha, sł. i muz. trad. “Moving On Song”, wyk. MacColl Brothers, Chris Wood i Karine Polwart, sł. i muz. Ewan MacColl #music #history #folk #szanty #shanties #shanty #żeglarstwo #muzyka #historia #historie #piosenki

Love har lyssnat på kvinnan som Todd Rundgren ville låta som, Robert har upptäckt halvny konspirationsteoretisk hårdrock från Gnarps finest. Sedan blir det proto-twee med Dolly Mixture (ej att förväxla med Dolly Style), vilket leder vidare till Saint Etienne, Mo Tucker, Shangri-Las och Tammys. Robert har gjort en mashup på Monkey Island-musik, Ewan MacColl och en dryckesvisa från 1600-talet. Love har sammanfattat en skiva med "avig pop" som en spänstig och fräsch mix, vilket leder till associationer med Josef K och Biljardakademin. Ett gammalt fast inslag tar ett triumfatoriskt ärevarv för att fira sin fullständiga seger, med Alcest och Maudlin of the Well. I Roberts Last.fm-historik har vi kommit fram till 2017 - 2018 och hör Teleman (ej att förväxla med Georg Philipp Telemann) och Danny L Harle. Vi hör Beatles i skrattspegelversion och en avig kärleksförklaring till Gene Krupa och hans blänkande trumset, och så har Love gjort en låt. Dessutom beslår vi Orup (ej att förväxla med Lars Orup) med lögn. Errata: Love refererade till Factory Records när han i själva verket menade Postcard. Gör oss sällskap på Discord: ⁠https://discord.gg/Cywtq7vaqZ⁠ Gilla, kommentera och recensera på The Facebook: ⁠https://facebook.com/musikensmaktpodcast/⁠ Bidra till Loves fysiska överlevnad och få lite bonusmaterial: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/musikensmakt⁠

Love har lyssnat på kvinnan som Todd Rundgren ville låta som, Robert har upptäckt halvny konspirationsteoretisk hårdrock från Gnarps finest. Sedan blir det proto-twee med Dolly Mixture (ej att förväxla med Dolly Style), vilket leder vidare till Saint Etienne, Mo Tucker, Shangri-Las och Tammys. Robert har gjort en mashup på Monkey Island-musik, Ewan MacColl och en dryckesvisa från 1600-talet. Love har sammanfattat en skiva med "avig pop" som en spänstig och fräsch mix, vilket leder till associationer med Josef K och Biljardakademin. Ett gammalt fast inslag tar ett triumfatoriskt ärevarv för att fira sin fullständiga seger, med Alcest och Maudlin of the Well. I Roberts Last.fm-historik har vi kommit fram till 2017 - 2018 och hör Teleman (ej att förväxla med Georg Philipp Telemann) och Danny L Harle. Vi hör Beatles i skrattspegelversion och en avig kärleksförklaring till Gene Krupa och hans blänkande trumset, och så har Love gjort en låt. Dessutom beslår vi Orup (ej att förväxla med Lars Orup) med lögn. Errata: Love refererade till Factory Records när han i själva verket menade Postcard.

After a series of terrible contracts leaving workers struggling with long hours, poor conditions, and low pay, the Teamsters at UPS knew that they had a fight to win. After years of organizing, 185,000 workers stood up to one of the largest shipping companies in the United States. Music: Champion At Keeping Them Rolling by Ewan MacColl, arranged and performed by Young Sam James.Support the showhttps://linktr.ee/laborjawn

The beloved baggy cloth cat Bagpuss is fifty years old in 2024. We celebrate his birthday by visiting Sandra Kerr at her home in the Northumberland village of Warkworth. Sandra co-wrote and arranged the music for the series and provided some of the voices. In her cosy music room she shows us her Bagpuss souvenirs, reflects on the show's enduring appeal and sings one of the songs. Then, on a walk along the River Coquet, Sandra looks back to the folk revival of the 1960s, recalling working as a nanny for Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger in exchange for music lessons. Finally, she's joined by her daughter Nancy Kerr to play traditional Northumbrian dance tunes. A warm, fascinating and entertaining meeting with one of the enduring stars of the folk world. --- We rely entirely on support from our listeners to keep this show on the road. If you like what we do please either... Become a patron and get great rewards: patreon.com/folkonfoot Or just buy us a coffee: ko-fi.com/folkonfoot Sign up for our newsletter at www.folkonfoot.com Follow us on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram: @folkonfoot --- Find out more about Sandra at https://www.sandrakerr.net/

More discussions of Waits's unreleased recordings brings us to the 1980s, featuring several demos, a bunch of covers, and significant collaborations with other musicians, both big and small. Highlights this week include his contribution to a poetry documentary, a live Ewan MacColl cover, and his evening of collaborations with The Replacements. website: songbysongpodcast.com twitter: @songbysongpod e-mail: songbysongpodcast@gmail.com Music extracts used for illustrative/review purposes include: Purple Avenue / Empty Pockets, live recording, Expo Theatre, Montreal Canada (3 July 1981) Smuggler's Waltz / Bronx Lullaby, from Poetry In Motion, dir. Ron Mann (1982) Carnivalins, unreleased recording, Frank's Wild Demos (1986?) Vegas Theme, unreleased recording, Frank's Wild Demos (1986?) Downtown Train (alt take), NME's Big Four 7" EP, Tom Waits (1986) Harlem Shuffle, Dirty Work, The Rolling Stones (1986) I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Knew (About Her), live recording, Beverly Theatre, Los Angeles CA, Tom Waits with Elvis Costello and Lou Reed, w. Cecil Null (4 October 1986) Papa's Got A Brand New Bag, live recording, Massey Hall, Toronto Canada, w. James brown (7 October 1987) Mack The Knife, live recording, Freie Volksbuhne, Berlin Germany, w. Bertolt Brecht / Kurt Weill (8 December 1987) Big Rock Candy Mountain, from the film Ironweed, dir. Hector Babenco (1987) Once More Before I Go, from the film Candy Mountain, dir. Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer (1988) Date To Church, single b-side, The Replacements / Tom Waits (1989) Lowdown Monkey Blues, Dead Man's Pop, The Replacements / Tom Waits (1989/2019) If Only You Were Lonely, Dead Man's Pop, The Replacements / Tom Waits (1989/2019) I Can Help, studio outtake / Dead Man's Pop, The Replacements / Tom Waits, w. Billy Swan (1989/2019) We Know The Night - Rehearsal Version, Dead Man's Pop, The Replacements / Tom Waits (1989/2019) Take It As It Comes, live recording, Wiltern Theatre, Los Angeles CA, w. The Doors (31 December 1988) Pennies From Heaven, live recording, Wiltern Theatre, Los Angeles CA, w. Arthur Johnston and Johnny Burke (31 December 1988) Dirty Old Town, live recording, Wiltern Theatre, Los Angeles CA, w. Ewan MacColl (31 December 1988) Hound Dog, live recording, Wiltern Theatre, Los Angeles CA, w. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller (31 December 1988) Dirty Old Town, Rum Sodomy and The Lash, The Pogues (1985) We think your Song by Song experience will be enhanced by hearing, in full, the songs featured in the show, which you can get hold of from your favourite record shop or online platform. Please support artists by buying their music, or using services which guarantee artists a revenue - listen responsibly.

“This sparky woman has done so much, lived so much, crammed so much in. Most of all, she has informed our appreciation of British and North American folk music, like very, very few people have. Then factor in her multiple roles in illuminating the folk, political song and feminist scenes and how her songs have enriched the folk idiom, and you have somebody worth getting amazed about.” - Ken Hunt / Folk Roots Magazine. PEGGY SEEGER was born on 17 June, 1935 in New York City. She is one of the most important figures in the history of folk music. An American folk singer who also achieved renown in Britain, where she lived for more than 30 years, as the wife of songwriter and activist Ewan MacColl. Seeger's father was Charles Seeger (1886–1979), an important folklorist and musicologist; her mother was Seeger's second wife, Ruth Porter Crawford. Ruth Crawford Seeger, who died in 1953, was a modernist composer and was one of the first women to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. One of her brothers is Mike Seeger, and the well-known songwriter Pete Seeger is her half-brother. Among Peggy Seeger's first recordings in 1955 was ‘American Folk Songs for Children', considered one of her most enduring, and probably the best-selling, collection of children's songs ever recorded. Together with MacColl, Seeger joined The Critics Group, performing satirical songs in a mixture of theatre, comedy and song. Seeger and MacColl recorded as a duo and as solo artists; MacColl wrote "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" in Peggy's honour. Her critically acclaimed classic biography, ‘First Time Ever – A Memoir' was published in 2018. We were delighted to welcome Peggy to The CAT Club for a memorable evening. A splendid time was had by all. CAT Club stalwart IAN CLAYTON was in the interviewer's chair. This event took place on 16 July 2023 in the Pigeon Loft at The Robin Hood, Pontefract, West Yorkshire. To find out more about the CAT Club please visit: www.thecatclub.co.uk Music used in this podcast by kind permission of Peggy Seeger. Happy Trails.

It's been a while, hasn't it? But, like buses, you wait ages for an Old Songs Podcast episode and then two come along in quick succession. Because this edition is the first in a two-part thing. Today, we're chatting to Jim Moray about passing the two-decade mark as a professional musician, about one of my favourite of his traditional arrangements, the ballad 'Lord Douglas' [Roud 23], about a new album coming soon, and about an upcoming festival in his name. The second part to this podcast is going to be recorded live, in front of an audience - possibly even you, dear listener - at the Jim Moray festival on Jun 17th at Cecil Sharp House in Camden, North London, where we'll be joined by Jim, Nick Hart and a number of other guests. I'll stick the tickets link on the page accompanying this episode. We're focusing this episode loosely around the song, 'Lord Douglas', which Jim originally released 10 years ago, winning Best Traditional Track at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards in the process. We're also using it as an opportunity to talk to Jim about his career so far. Listen out for tales about the time Amy Winehouse mistook him for a photographer's assistant, his relationship with folk music and gadgetry, and his theories on how arranging traditional ballads is like writing a week's worth of Eastenders.  And, as an extra special treat, listen out for the final track in the podcast - usually an unaccompanied ballad, but this time an exclusive - a recording of 'Lord Douglas' from the Abbey Road sessions that make up his new album. Once again, our thanks to the English Folk Dance and Song Society for their ongoing support, and we hope to see some of you at JimFest on June 17th. Tickets for the Jim Moray Festival are available now from this link. The Old Songs Podcast is supported by the English Folk Dance and Song Society.‘Lord Douglas' podcast notesThis article is accompanied by a partial transcript of the sections that discuss Jim's career. You can find that in our Jim Moray interview.LinksThe English Folk Dance and Song SocietyThe Vaughan Williams Memorial LibraryThe Jim Moray FestivalTrack listing‘Lord Douglas', Jim Moray, taken from the album Skulk (2012)‘Lucy Wan', Frankie Archer, taken from the single Lucy Wan (2022)‘Earl Brand', Gigspanner, taken from the album Natural Invention (2020)‘The Douglas Tragedy', Ewan MacColl, taken from the album The English & Scottish Popular Ballads (The Child Ballads) Vol​.​5 (1956)‘Lord Douglas', Moonaroon, taken from the EP Seeds

Mick has discovered an excellent book - “The Number Ones – Twenty chart-topping hits that reveal the history of pop music” by Tom Breihan (Hachette Books, NY) - one of the best books ever written on how songs get, or don't get, to the top of the charts. Gems from the book include:  The Miracles' “Shop Around”, Motown's first hit, was kept out of the top spot by "Calcutta" by Lawrence Welk (Who?  WTF?) “The Twist”, by Chubby Checker, led to a wave of “Twist”-labelled hits. Except that, in this case, it was made “nicer” for white audiences, so that white DJs would play it.  The first “rap” single to top the charts was  “Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice, in a story with more twists than an Agatha Christie novel! All the money Vanilla Ice made from his hit was gobbled up by lawyers for David Bowie & Queen! Human League's “Don't You Want Me, Baby?” became a breakthrough hit simply because MTV needed video clips when they started up, and most existing bands weren't set up to provide them. Our album you must hear before you die (with thanks to Robert Dimery) is The Pogues' “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash” from 1985. The title is based on Winston Churchill's quote that “English Naval tradition was nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.”  Elvis Costello, who produced the album, saw his role as capturing the Pogues' “dilapidated glory”, with the band heavily influenced by alcohol, and their name meaning, in Gaelic, “Pogue mahone”, or “up your arse”!  Musical gems abound on the album, not least in Ewan MacColl's “Dirty Old Town”, and Eric Bogle's “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” (listed as one of the 30 Greatest Australian songs of all time). We love The Pogues, and you should, too. Jeff has uncovered some gems from the mind of Donald Trump and his supporters, as well as discovering that the man has an ego bigger than the most deranged rock star. Another jam-packed episode!  _______________________________________________________________ Books “The Number Ones.  Twenty chart-topping hits that reveal the history of pop music” Tom Breihan, Hachette Books, New York The Show PlaylistTrump Justice for AllTrump the Best

Tunes: Straloch: Gallua Tom Walsh: Gallaway Tom Vickers (Same as walsh): The Gold Ring Oswald: Gallaway Tom Scots Musical Museum: Galloway Tam Niel Gow: Kelso Races Sutherland: Kelso Races O'Farrell: Galloway Tom, Tuhy's Frolic Goodman: Humours of Limerick Ennis: The Lark's March O'Neill: The Little Yellow Boy, The House in the Glen, The Lark in the Morning Hugh McDermot: A Western Lilt James Morrison: The Lark In the Morning Dave Rickard: The Lark in the Morning Angus McKay: The Hills of Glenorchy James Aird: The Humours of Limerick David Young: Tom Come Tickle me Ryan: Lark in the Morning +X+X+X+ 1627: Gullua Tom From Straloch Lute MS (Courtesy of Traditional Tune Archive) https://tunearch.org/wiki/Annotation:Gallua_Tom 1745: Gallaway Tom in Walsh's Caledonian Country Dances: https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/94558476 1770s: Gallaway Tom From Vickers: http://www.farnearchive.com/farneimages/jpgs/R0312100.jpg 1754: Gallaway Tom in Oswald's Caledonian Pocket Companion: https://archive.org/details/caledonianpocket01rugg/page/24/mode/2up 1792: O Galloway Tam From Scots Musical Museum https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/87798448 Performed by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YHWFF0sDw0 +X+X+ 1784: Kelso Races from First Book of Niel Gow's Reels, 2d edition: https://hms.scot/prints/copy/8/ 1816: Kelso Races from Sutherland's Edinburgh Repository of Music: https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/91461944 +X+X+ 1806: Galloway Tom, From O'Farrel Pocket Companion Vol 1: https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/87779678 1806: Tuhy's Frolic From O'Farrell's Pocket Companion: https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/87780878 +X+X+ 1860s: Humours of Limerick (Jackson) From Goodman http://goodman.itma.ie/volume-two#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=99&z=-957.4682%2C950.6699%2C11615.1632%2C4196.3988 1963: The Lark's March and Story from Seamus Ennis, Masters of Irish Music: Seamus Ennis. https://youtu.be/ryB-N3RIdm8 1903: The Little Yellow Boy (From O'Neill's Music of Ireland) http://www.oldmusicproject.com/AA3Sheet/0701-1200/Sheet-0701-0800/0706-LittleYellowBoy.gif 1907: The House in the Glen From O'Neill's Dance Music of Ireland https://imslp.org/wiki/TheDanceMusicofIreland(O%27Neill%2CFrancis) 1926: The Lark in the Morning performed by James Morrison: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/James_Morrison/ +X+X+ Hills of Glenorchy from Angus Mackay https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/105007069 1780s: The Humours of Limerick from Aird's Selection of Scotch, Irish, English and Foreign Airs https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/87704991 1740s: Tom Come Tickle Me: From David Young: https://rmacd.com/music/macfarlane-manuscript/collection/ 1903: Lark in the Morning: From O'Neill's Music of Ireland: http://www.oldmusicproject.com/AA3Sheet/0701-1200/Sheet-1001-1100/1019-LarkMorning.gif 1883: Lark in the Morning: From Ryan's Mammoth Collection: (Page 114) https://violinsheetmusic.org/collections/ 1770s: The Gold Ring, From William Vicker's Manuscript http://www.farnearchive.com/farneimages/jpgs/R0312400.jpg +X+X+X+ FIN Here are some ways you can support the show: You can support the Podcast by joining the Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/wetootwaag You can also take a minute to leave a review of the podcast if you listen on Itunes! Tell your piping and history friends about the podcast! Checkout my Merch Store on Bagpipeswag: https://www.bagpipeswag.com/wetootwaag You can also support me by Buying my First Album on Bandcamp: https://jeremykingsbury.bandcamp.com/album/oyster-wives-rant-a-year-of-historic-tunes or my second album on Bandcamp! https://jeremykingsbury.bandcamp.com/album/pay-the-pipemaker or my third album on Bandcamp! https://jeremykingsbury.bandcamp.com/album/bannocks-of-barley-meal You can now buy physical CDs of my albums using this Kunaki link: https://kunaki.com/msales.asp?PublisherId=166528&pp=1 You can just send me an email at wetootwaag@gmail.com letting me know what you thought of the episode! Listener mail keeps me going! Finally I have some other support options here: https://www.wetootwaag.com/support Thanks! Listen on Itunes/Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wetootwaags-bagpipe-and-history-podcast/id129776677 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5QxzqrSm0pu6v8y8pLsv5j?si=QLiG0L1pT1eu7B5_FDmgGA

The song was written for her by her lover Ewan MacColl in early 1957. He sang it down a crackling transatlantic phone line to Peggy who had returned to the USA, unwilling to continue an affair with a married man. That was the only time he ever sang the song which went on to become one of the greatest love songs of all time. “It was a hell of a way to woo me back!” says Peggy. With a simple and moving piano accompaniment, Peggy's new interpretation reflects on the memory of overwhelming love, now tempered with a deep mature knowledge of its fragility and fleetingness. The final verse is telling; often recorded by others as “I knew our joy would fill the earth”, Peggy sings the original and far more poignant “I thought our joy would fill the earth and last til the end of time”. Peggy says, “I've had two life partners, one male and one female, and I have three children and 9 grandchildren. I've come to realise that the lyrics can be interpreted in so many ways. Ewan wrote the tune to mimic the heartbeat of someone wildly in love and I used to feel like a soaring bird when I sang this song. Now I'm grounded within it and that makes me happy.” The 2023 recording is a family affair with Peggy & Ewan's sons Neill & Calum MacColl, and the official video by their daughter Kitty MacColl. It's released for the 67th anniversary of verse 2 (The first time ever I kissed your mouth…..) There are over 1000 cover versions on Spotify alongside Roberta Flack's iconic recording. Artists including Elvis, Johnny Cash, Shirley Bassey, Johnny Mathis, Celine Dion, George Michael, Janet Kay, Miley Cyrus, Paul Potts & James Blake have all stamped their personal marks. In 2022 The Killers performed it live on a world tour. Peggy says, “I love hearing all the different ways that singers make the song their own. It's testament to the universal story and the brilliant storytelling - it's deceptively simple yet so powerful.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neill MacColl is the eldest son of folk pioneers Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger and the half brother of Kirsty MacColl. He is also a musician, songwriter and producer in his own right. He has produced albums for many artists including Bombay Bicycle Club, where Neill eldest son Jamie is the guitarist, and toured as a seasoned session guitarist with artists such as David Gary, David Gilmour, Jesse Buckley and Nadine Shah. He has composed for film and TV, films such as Fever Pitch, 24/7, Far From The Madding Crowd and My Cousin Rachel. He also wrote and recorded an amazing album with me called Two, as well as writing songs such as Heart Shaped Stone for the Crown Electric album and the song Me For You on my latest record Night Drives. In this episode he gets quite vehement about cushions, and talks of being in the wilderness as his most at home place. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode Richard and Dr. Jennifer Paxton of The Catholic University of America   search for a historical Robin Hood and explore the medieval and Tudor stories about the heroic outlaw and his band of merry men. This is the first of a two-part series.  The follow on episode will be on Robin Hood in movies and television.CreditsThe podcast's introductory and exist music is composed by the talented and generous Alexander Nakarada (https://alexandernakarada.bandcamp.com/album/collection-celtic-medieval).The opening to the folksong "Lord Randall, My Son" is by Ewan MacColl from his album, "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Child Ballads)"  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0dRGi4rx0c)The modern English translation of "A Geste of Robin Hood" is by Robin Landis Frank (https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~ohlgren/gesttrans.html)

David Rovics continues a long line of travelling musical storytellers. Woody Guthrie, Ewan MacColl, Peggy and Pete Seeger, Utah Phllips come to mind, and David would not be out of place in that company. Enjoy a bunch of Davids songs as we play telephone tag to continue our conversation!

Folk musician Johnny Campbell is recording an album of songs from the summits and industrial hotspots of northern England. Jez Lowe joins him at Kinder Scout in Derbyshire to celebrate ninety years since the ‘Right to Roam' movement began and explore the traditional songs of the Peak District. Jez meets local singer Bella Hardy to hear how her home in Edale has inspired and influenced her work, and writer Roly Smith who can explain the history of Kinder and the 1932 mass trespass. It may be ninety years ago, but for young global folk stars Kate Griffin and Ford Collier of Mishra, the call for a right to roam is still relevant. They have recorded a version of Ewan MacColl's ‘Manchester Rambler', a song inspired by the Kinder trespass. Jez meets Kate, Ford, Johnny and Bella to hear how a new generation of musicians are continuing MacColl's legacy of folk singers fighting for our rights in the countryside. Produced by Helen Lennard

Episode one hundred and fifty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “See Emily Play", the birth of the UK underground, and the career of Roger Barrett, known as Syd. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "First Girl I Loved" by the Incredible String 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, due to the number of Pink Floyd songs. I referred to two biographies of Barrett in this episode -- A Very Irregular Head by Rob Chapman is the one I would recommend, and the one whose narrative I have largely followed. Some of the information has been superseded by newer discoveries, but Chapman is almost unique in people writing about Barrett in that he actually seems to care about the facts and try to get things right rather than make up something more interesting. Crazy Diamond by Mike Watkinson and Pete Anderson is much less reliable, but does have quite a few interview quotes that aren't duplicated by Chapman. Information about Joe Boyd comes from Boyd's book White Bicycles. In this and future episodes on Pink Floyd I'm also relying on Nick Mason's Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd and Pink Floyd: All the Songs by Jean-Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin. The compilation Relics contains many of the most important tracks from Barrett's time with Pink Floyd, while Piper at the Gates of Dawn is his one full album with them. Those who want a fuller history of his time with the group will want to get Piper and also the box set Cambridge St/ation 1965-1967. Barrett only released two solo albums during his career. They're available as a bundle here. Completists will also want the rarities and outtakes collection Opel.  ERRATA: I talk about “Interstellar Overdrive” as if Barrett wrote it solo. The song is credited to all four members, but it was Barrett who came up with the riff I talk about. And annoyingly, given the lengths I went to to deal correctly with Barrett's name, I repeatedly refer to "Dave" Gilmour, when Gilmour prefers David. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A note before I begin -- this episode deals with drug use and mental illness, so anyone who might be upset by those subjects might want to skip this one. But also, there's a rather unique problem in how I deal with the name of the main artist in the story today. The man everyone knows as Syd Barrett was born Roger Barrett, used that name with his family for his whole life, and in later years very strongly disliked being called "Syd", yet everyone other than his family called him that at all times until he left the music industry, and that's the name that appears on record labels, including his solo albums. I don't believe it's right to refer to people by names they choose not to go by themselves, but the name Barrett went by throughout his brief period in the public eye was different from the one he went by later, and by all accounts he was actually distressed by its use in later years. So what I'm going to do in this episode is refer to him as "Roger Barrett" when a full name is necessary for disambiguation or just "Barrett" otherwise, but I'll leave any quotes from other people referring to "Syd" as they were originally phrased. In future episodes on Pink Floyd, I'll refer to him just as Barrett, but in episodes where I discuss his influence on other artists, I will probably have to use "Syd Barrett" because otherwise people who haven't listened to this episode won't know what on Earth I'm talking about. Anyway, on with the show. “It's gone!” sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. “So beautiful and strange and new. Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. No! There it is again!” he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound. “Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,” he said presently. “O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.” That's a quote from a chapter titled "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" from the classic children's book The Wind in the Willows -- a book which for most of its length is a fairly straightforward story about anthropomorphic animals having jovial adventures, but which in that one chapter has Rat and Mole suddenly encounter the Great God Pan and have a hallucinatory, transcendental experience caused by his music, one so extreme it's wiped from their minds, as they simply cannot process it. The book, and the chapter, was a favourite of Roger Barrett, a young child born in Cambridge in 1946. Barrett came from an intellectual but not especially bookish family. His father, Dr. Arthur Barrett, was a pathologist -- there's a room in Addenbrooke's Hospital named after him -- but he was also an avid watercolour painter, a world-leading authority on fungi, and a member of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society who was apparently an extraordinarily good singer; while his mother Winifred was a stay-at-home mother who was nonetheless very active in the community, organising a local Girl Guide troupe. They never particularly encouraged their family to read, but young Roger did particularly enjoy the more pastoral end of the children's literature of the time. As well as the Wind in the Willows he also loved Alice in Wonderland, and the Little Grey Men books -- a series of stories about tiny gnomes and their adventures in the countryside. But his two big passions were music and painting. He got his first ukulele at age eleven, and by the time his father died, just before Roger's sixteenth birthday, he had graduated to playing a full-sized guitar. At the time his musical tastes were largely the same as those of any other British teenager -- he liked Chubby Checker, for example -- though he did have a tendency to prefer the quirkier end of things, and some of the first songs he tried to play on the guitar were those of Joe Brown: [Excerpt: Joe Brown, "I'm Henry VIII I Am"] Barrett grew up in Cambridge, and for those who don't know it, Cambridge is an incubator of a very particular kind of eccentricity. The university tends to attract rather unworldly intellectual overachievers to the city -- people who might not be able to survive in many other situations but who can thrive in that one -- and every description of Barrett's father suggests he was such a person -- Barrett's sister Rosemary has said that she believes that most of the family were autistic, though whether this is a belief based on popular media portrayals or a deeper understanding I don't know. But certainly Cambridge is full of eccentric people with remarkable achievements, and such people tend to have children with a certain type of personality, who try simultaneously to live up to and rebel against expectations of greatness that come from having parents who are regarded as great, and to do so with rather less awareness of social norms than the typical rebel has. In the case of Roger Barrett, he, like so many others of his generation, was encouraged to go into the sciences -- as indeed his father had, both in his career as a pathologist and in his avocation as a mycologist. The fifties and sixties were a time, much like today, when what we now refer to as the STEM subjects were regarded as new and exciting and modern. But rather than following in his father's professional footsteps, Roger Barrett instead followed his hobbies. Dr. Barrett was a painter and musician in his spare time, and Roger was to turn to those things to earn his living. For much of his teens, it seemed that art would be the direction he would go in. He was, everyone agrees, a hugely talented painter, and he was particularly noted for his mastery of colours. But he was also becoming more and more interested in R&B music, especially the music of Bo Diddley, who became his new biggest influence: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Who Do You Love?"] He would often spend hours with his friend Dave Gilmour, a much more advanced guitarist, trying to learn blues riffs. By this point Barrett had already received the nickname "Syd". Depending on which story you believe, he either got it when he started attending a jazz club where an elderly jazzer named Sid Barrett played, and the people were amused that their youngest attendee, like one of the oldest, was called Barrett; or, more plausibly, he turned up to a Scout meeting once wearing a flat cap rather than the normal scout beret, and he got nicknamed "Sid" because it made him look working-class and "Sid" was a working-class sort of name. In 1962, by the time he was sixteen, Barrett joined a short-lived group called Geoff Mott and the Mottoes, on rhythm guitar. The group's lead singer, Geoff Mottlow, would go on to join a band called the Boston Crabs who would have a minor hit in 1965 with a version of the Coasters song "Down in Mexico": [Excerpt: The Boston Crabs, "Down in Mexico"] The bass player from the Mottoes, Tony Sainty, and the drummer Clive Welham, would go on to form another band, The Jokers Wild, with Barrett's friend Dave Gilmour. Barrett also briefly joined another band, Those Without, but his time with them was similarly brief. Some sources -- though ones I consider generally less reliable -- say that the Mottoes' bass player wasn't Tony Sainty, but was Roger Waters, the son of one of Barrett's teachers, and that one of the reasons the band split up was that Waters had moved down to London to study architecture. I don't think that's the case, but it's definitely true that Barrett knew Waters, and when he moved to London himself the next year to go to Camberwell Art College, he moved into a house where Waters was already living. Two previous tenants at the same house, Nick Mason and Richard Wright, had formed a loose band with Waters and various other amateur musicians like Keith Noble, Shelagh Noble, and Clive Metcalfe. That band was sometimes known as the Screaming Abdabs, The Megadeaths, or The Tea Set -- the latter as a sly reference to slang terms for cannabis -- but was mostly known at first as Sigma 6, named after a manifesto by the novelist Alexander Trocchi for a kind of spontaneous university. They were also sometimes known as Leonard's Lodgers, after the landlord of the home that Barrett was moving into, Mike Leonard, who would occasionally sit in on organ and would later, as the band became more of a coherent unit, act as a roadie and put on light shows behind them -- Leonard was himself very interested in avant-garde and experimental art, and it was his idea to play around with the group's lighting. By the time Barrett moved in with Waters in 1964, the group had settled on the Tea Set name, and consisted of Waters on bass, Mason on drums, Wright on keyboards, singer Chris Dennis, and guitarist Rado Klose. Of the group, Klose was the only one who was a skilled musician -- he was a very good jazz guitarist, while the other members were barely adequate. By this time Barrett's musical interests were expanding to include folk music -- his girlfriend at the time talked later about him taking her to see Bob Dylan on his first UK tour and thinking "My first reaction was seeing all these people like Syd. It was almost as if every town had sent one Syd Barrett there. It was my first time seeing people like him." But the music he was most into was the blues. And as the Tea Set were turning into a blues band, he joined them. He even had a name for the new band that would make them more bluesy. He'd read the back of a record cover which had named two extremely obscure blues musicians -- musicians he may never even have heard. Pink Anderson: [Excerpt: Pink Anderson, "Boll Weevil"] And Floyd Council: [Excerpt: Floyd Council, "Runaway Man Blues"] Barrett suggested that they put together the names of the two bluesmen, and presumably because "Anderson Council" didn't have quite the right ring, they went for The Pink Floyd -- though for a while yet they would sometimes still perform as The Tea Set, and they were sometimes also called The Pink Floyd Sound. Dennis left soon after Barrett joined, and the new five-piece Pink Floyd Sound started trying to get more gigs. They auditioned for Ready Steady Go! and were turned down, but did get some decent support slots, including for a band called the Tridents: [Excerpt: The Tridents, "Tiger in Your Tank"] The members of the group were particularly impressed by the Tridents' guitarist and the way he altered his sound using feedback -- Barrett even sent a letter to his girlfriend with a drawing of the guitarist, one Jeff Beck, raving about how good he was. At this point, the group were mostly performing cover versions, but they did have a handful of originals, and it was these they recorded in their first demo sessions in late 1964 and early 1965. They included "Walk With Me Sydney", a song written by Roger Waters as a parody of "Work With Me Annie" and "Dance With Me Henry" -- and, given the lyrics, possibly also Hank Ballard's follow-up "Henry's Got Flat Feet (Can't Dance No More) and featuring Rick Wright's then-wife Juliette Gale as Etta James to Barrett's Richard Berry: [Excerpt: The Tea Set, "Walk With Me Sydney"] And four songs by Barrett, including one called "Double-O Bo" which was a Bo Diddley rip-off, and "Butterfly", the most interesting of these early recordings: [Excerpt: The Tea Set, "Butterfly"] At this point, Barrett was very unsure of his own vocal abilities, and wrote a letter to his girlfriend saying "Emo says why don't I give up 'cos it sounds horrible, and I would but I can't get Fred to join because he's got a group (p'raps you knew!) so I still have to sing." "Fred" was a nickname for his old friend Dave Gilmour, who was playing in his own band, Joker's Wild, at this point. Summer 1965 saw two important events in the life of the group. The first was that Barrett took LSD for the first time. The rest of the group weren't interested in trying it, and would indeed generally be one of the more sober bands in the rock business, despite the reputation their music got. The other members would for the most part try acid once or twice, around late 1966, but generally steer clear of it. Barrett, by contrast, took it on a very regular basis, and it would influence all the work he did from that point on. The other event was that Rado Klose left the group. Klose was the only really proficient musician in the group, but he had very different tastes to the other members, preferring to play jazz to R&B and pop, and he was also falling behind in his university studies, and decided to put that ahead of remaining in the band. This meant that the group members had to radically rethink the way they were making music. They couldn't rely on instrumental proficiency, so they had to rely on ideas. One of the things they started to do was use echo. They got primitive echo devices and put both Barrett's guitar and Wright's keyboard through them, allowing them to create new sounds that hadn't been heard on stage before. But they were still mostly doing the same Slim Harpo and Bo Diddley numbers everyone else was doing, and weren't able to be particularly interesting while playing them. But for a while they carried on doing the normal gigs, like a birthday party they played in late 1965, where on the same bill was a young American folk singer named Paul Simon, and Joker's Wild, the band Dave Gilmour was in, who backed Simon on a version of "Johnny B. Goode". A couple of weeks after that party, Joker's Wild went into the studio to record their only privately-pressed five-song record, of them performing recent hits: [Excerpt: Joker's Wild, "Walk Like a Man"] But The Pink Floyd Sound weren't as musically tight as Joker's Wild, and they couldn't make a living as a cover band even if they wanted to. They had to do something different. Inspiration then came from a very unexpected source. I mentioned earlier that one of the names the group had been performing under had been inspired by a manifesto for a spontaneous university by the writer Alexander Trocchi. Trocchi's ideas had actually been put into practice by an organisation calling itself the London Free School, based in Notting Hill. The London Free School was an interesting mixture of people from what was then known as the New Left, but who were already rapidly aging, the people who had been the cornerstone of radical campaigning in the late fifties and early sixties, who had run the Aldermaston marches against nuclear weapons and so on, and a new breed of countercultural people who in a year or two would be defined as hippies but at the time were not so easy to pigeonhole. These people were mostly politically radical but very privileged people -- one of the founder members of the London Free School was Peter Jenner, who was the son of a vicar and the grandson of a Labour MP -- and they were trying to put their radical ideas into practice. The London Free School was meant to be a collective of people who would help each other and themselves, and who would educate each other. You'd go to the collective wanting to learn how to do something, whether that's how to improve the housing in your area or navigate some particularly difficult piece of bureaucracy, or how to play a musical instrument, and someone who had that skill would teach you how to do it, while you hopefully taught them something else of value. The London Free School, like all such utopian schemes, ended up falling apart, but it had a wider cultural impact than most such schemes. Britain's first underground newspaper, the International Times, was put together by people involved in the Free School, and the annual Notting Hill Carnival, which is now one of the biggest outdoor events in Britain every year with a million attendees, came from the merger of outdoor events organised by the Free School with older community events. A group of musicians called AMM was associated with many of the people involved in the Free School. AMM performed totally improvised music, with no structure and no normal sense of melody and harmony: [Excerpt: AMM, "What Is There In Uselesness To Cause You Distress?"] Keith Rowe, the guitarist in AMM, wanted to find his own technique uninfluenced by American jazz guitarists, and thought of that in terms that appealed very strongly to the painterly Barrett, saying "For the Americans to develop an American school of painting, they somehow had to ditch or lose European easel painting techniques. They had to make a break with the past. What did that possibly mean if you were a jazz guitar player? For me, symbolically, it was Pollock laying the canvas on the floor, which immediately abandons European easel technique. I could see that by laying the canvas down, it became inappropriate to apply easel techniques. I thought if I did that with a guitar, I would just lose all those techniques, because they would be physically impossible to do." Rowe's technique-free technique inspired Barrett to make similar noises with his guitar, and to think less in terms of melody and harmony than pure sound. AMM's first record came out in 1966. Four of the Free School people decided to put together their own record label, DNA, and they got an agreement with Elektra Records to distribute its first release -- Joe Boyd, the head of Elektra in the UK, was another London Free School member, and someone who had plenty of experience with disruptive art already, having been on the sound engineering team at the Newport Folk Festival when Dylan went electric. AMM went into the studio and recorded AMMMusic: [Excerpt: AMM, "What Is There In Uselesness To Cause You Distress?"] After that came out, though, Peter Jenner, one of the people who'd started the label, came to a realisation. He said later "We'd made this one record with AMM. Great record, very seminal, seriously avant-garde, but I'd started adding up and I'd worked out that the deal we had, we got two percent of retail, out of which we, the label, had to pay for recording costs and pay ourselves. I came to the conclusion that we were going to have to sell a hell of a lot of records just to pay the recording costs, let alone pay ourselves any money and build a label, so I realised we had to have a pop band because pop bands sold a lot of records. It was as simple as that and I was as naive as that." Jenner abandoned DNA records for the moment, and he and his friend Andrew King decided they were going to become pop managers. and they found The Pink Floyd Sound playing at an event at the Marquee, one of a series of events that were variously known as Spontaneous Underground and The Trip. Other participants in those events included Soft Machine; Mose Allison; Donovan, performing improvised songs backed by sitar players; Graham Bond; a performer who played Bach pieces while backed by African drummers; and The Poison Bellows, a poetry duo consisting of Spike Hawkins and Johnny Byrne, who may of all of these performers be the one who other than Pink Floyd themselves has had the most cultural impact in the UK -- after writing the exploitation novel Groupie and co-writing a film adaptation of Spike Milligan's war memoirs, Byrne became a TV screenwriter, writing many episodes of Space: 1999 and Doctor Who before creating the long-running TV series Heartbeat. Jenner and King decided they wanted to sign The Pink Floyd Sound and make records with them, and the group agreed -- but only after their summer holidays. They were all still students, and so they dispersed during the summer. Waters and Wright went on holiday to Greece, where they tried acid for the first of only a small number of occasions and were unimpressed, while Mason went on a trip round America by Greyhound bus. Barrett, meanwhile, stayed behind, and started writing more songs, encouraged by Jenner, who insisted that the band needed to stop relying on blues covers and come up with their own material, and who saw Barrett as the focus of the group. Jenner later described them as "Four not terribly competent musicians who managed between them to create something that was extraordinary. Syd was the main creative drive behind the band - he was the singer and lead guitarist. Roger couldn't tune his bass because he was tone deaf, it had to be tuned by Rick. Rick could write a bit of a tune and Roger could knock out a couple of words if necessary. 'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun' was the first song Roger ever wrote, and he only did it because Syd encouraged everyone to write. Syd was very hesitant about his writing, but when he produced these great songs everyone else thought 'Well, it must be easy'" Of course, we know this isn't quite true -- Waters had written "Walk with me Sydney" -- but it is definitely the case that everyone involved thought of Barrett as the main creative force in the group, and that he was the one that Jenner was encouraging to write new material. After the summer holidays, the group reconvened, and one of their first actions was to play a benefit for the London Free School. Jenner said later "Andrew King and myself were both vicars' sons, and we knew that when you want to raise money for the parish you have to have a social. So in a very old-fashioned way we said 'let's put on a social'. Like in the Just William books, like a whist drive. We thought 'You can't have a whist drive. That's not cool. Let's have a band. That would be cool.' And the only band we knew was the band I was starting to get involved with." After a couple of these events went well, Joe Boyd suggested that they make those events a regular club night, and the UFO Club was born. Jenner and King started working on the light shows for the group, and then bringing in other people, and the light show became an integral part of the group's mystique -- rather than standing in a spotlight as other groups would, they worked in shadows, with distorted kaleidoscopic lights playing on them, distancing themselves from the audience. The highlight of their sets was a long piece called "Interstellar Overdrive", and this became one of the group's first professional recordings, when they went into the studio with Joe Boyd to record it for the soundtrack of a film titled Tonite Let's All Make Love in London. There are conflicting stories about the inspiration for the main riff for "Interstellar Overdrive". One apparent source is the riff from Love's version of the Bacharach and David song "My Little Red Book". Depending on who you ask, either Barrett was obsessed with Love's first album and copied the riff, or Peter Jenner tried to hum him the riff and Barrett copied what Jenner was humming: [Excerpt: Love, "My Little Red Book"] More prosaically, Roger Waters has always claimed that the main inspiration was from "Old Ned", Ron Grainer's theme tune for the sitcom Steptoe and Son (which for American listeners was remade over there as Sanford and Son): [Excerpt: Ron Grainer, "Old Ned"] Of course it's entirely possible, and even likely, that Barrett was inspired by both, and if so that would neatly sum up the whole range of Pink Floyd's influences at this point. "My Little Red Book" was a cover by an American garage-psych/folk-rock band of a hit by Manfred Mann, a group who were best known for pop singles but were also serious blues and jazz musicians, while Steptoe and Son was a whimsical but dark and very English sitcom about a way of life that was slowly disappearing. And you can definitely hear both influences in the main riff of the track they recorded with Boyd: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "Interstellar Overdrive"] "Interstellar Overdrive" was one of two types of song that The Pink Floyd were performing at this time -- a long, extended, instrumental psychedelic excuse for freaky sounds, inspired by things like the second disc of Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention. When they went into the studio again with Boyd later in January 1967, to record what they hoped would be their first single, they recorded two of the other kind of songs -- whimsical story songs inspired equally by the incidents of everyday life and by children's literature. What became the B-side, "Candy and a Currant Bun", was based around the riff from "Smokestack Lightnin'" by Howlin' Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] That song had become a favourite on the British blues scene, and was thus the inspiration for many songs of the type that get called "quintessentially English". Ray Davies, who was in many ways the major songwriter at this time who was closest to Barrett stylistically, would a year later use the riff for the Kinks song "Last of the Steam-Powered Trains", but in this case Barrett had originally written a song titled "Let's Roll Another One", about sexual longing and cannabis. The lyrics were hastily rewritten in the studio to remove the controversial drug references-- and supposedly this caused some conflict between Barrett and Waters, with Waters pushing for the change, while Barrett argued against it, though like many of the stories from this period this sounds like the kind of thing that gets said by people wanting to push particular images of both men. Either way, the lyric was changed to be about sweet treats rather than drugs, though the lascivious elements remained in. And some people even argue that there was another lyric change -- where Barrett sings "walk with me", there's a slight "f" sound in his vocal. As someone who does a lot of microphone work myself, it sounds to me like just one of those things that happens while recording, but a lot of people are very insistent that Barrett is deliberately singing a different word altogether: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "Candy and a Currant Bun"] The A-side, meanwhile, was inspired by real life. Both Barrett and Waters had mothers who used  to take in female lodgers, and both had regularly had their lodgers' underwear stolen from washing lines. While they didn't know anything else about the thief, he became in Barrett's imagination a man who liked to dress up in the clothing after he stole it: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "Arnold Layne"] After recording the two tracks with Joe Boyd, the natural assumption was that the record would be put out on Elektra, the label which Boyd worked for in the UK, but Jac Holzman, the head of Elektra records, wasn't interested, and so a bidding war began for the single, as by this point the group were the hottest thing in London. For a while it looked like they were going to sign to Track Records, the label owned by the Who's management, but in the end EMI won out. Right as they signed, the News of the World was doing a whole series of articles about pop stars and their drug use, and the last of the articles talked about The Pink Floyd and their association with LSD, even though they hadn't released a record yet. EMI had to put out a press release saying that the group were not psychedelic, insisting"The Pink Floyd are not trying to create hallucinatory effects in their audience." It was only after getting signed that the group became full-time professionals. Waters had by this point graduated from university and was working as a trainee architect, and quit his job to become a pop star. Wright dropped out of university, but Mason and Barrett took sabbaticals. Barrett in particular seems to have seen this very much as a temporary thing, talking about how he was making so much money it would be foolish not to take the opportunity while it lasted, but how he was going to resume his studies in a year. "Arnold Layne" made the top twenty, and it would have gone higher had the pirate radio station Radio London, at the time the single most popular radio station when it came to pop music, not banned the track because of its sexual content. However, it would be the only single Joe Boyd would work on with the group. EMI insisted on only using in-house producers, and so while Joe Boyd would go on to a great career as a producer, and we'll see him again, he was replaced with Norman Smith. Smith had been the chief engineer on the Beatles records up to Rubber Soul, after which he'd been promoted to being a producer in his own right, and Geoff Emerick had taken over. He also had aspirations to pop stardom himself, and a few years later would have a transatlantic hit with "Oh Babe, What Would You Say?" under the name Hurricane Smith: [Excerpt: Hurricane Smith, "Oh Babe, What Would You Say?"] Smith's production of the group would prove controversial among some of the group's longtime fans, who thought that he did too much to curtail their more experimental side, as he would try to get the group to record songs that were more structured and more commercial, and would cut down their improvisations into a more manageable form. Others, notably Peter Jenner, thought that Smith was the perfect producer for the group. They started work on their first album, which was mostly recorded in studio three of Abbey Road, while the Beatles were just finishing off work on Sgt Pepper in studio two. The album was titled The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, after the chapter from The Wind in the Willows, and other than a few extended instrumental showcases, most of the album was made up of short, whimsical, songs by Barrett that were strongly infused with imagery from late-Victorian and Edwardian children's books. This is one of the big differences between the British and American psychedelic scenes. Both the British and American undergrounds were made up of the same type of people -- a mixture of older radical activists, often Communists, who had come up in Britain in the Ban the Bomb campaigns and in America in the Civil Rights movement; and younger people, usually middle-class students with radical politics from a privileged background, who were into experimenting with drugs and alternative lifestyles. But the  social situations were different. In America, the younger members of the underground were angry and scared, as their principal interest was in stopping the war in Vietnam in which so many of them were being killed. And the music of the older generation of the underground, the Civil Rights activists, was shot through with influence from the blues, gospel, and American folk music, with a strong Black influence. So that's what the American psychedelic groups played, for the most part, very bluesy, very angry, music, By contrast, the British younger generation of hippies were not being drafted to go to war, and mostly had little to complain about, other than a feeling of being stifled by their parents' generation's expectations. And while most of them were influenced by the blues, that wasn't the music that had been popular among the older underground people, who had either been listening to experimental European art music or had been influenced by Ewan MacColl and his associates into listening instead to traditional old English ballads, things like the story of Tam Lin or Thomas the Rhymer, where someone is spirited away to the land of the fairies: [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl, "Thomas the Rhymer"] As a result, most British musicians, when exposed to the culture of the underground over here, created music that looked back to an idealised childhood of their grandparents' generation, songs that were nostalgic for a past just before the one they could remember (as opposed to their own childhoods, which had taken place in war or the immediate aftermath of it, dominated by poverty, rationing, and bomb sites (though of course Barrett's childhood in Cambridge had been far closer to this mythic idyll than those of his contemporaries from Liverpool, Birmingham, Newcastle, or London). So almost every British musician who was making music that might be called psychedelic was writing songs that were influenced both by experimental art music and by pre-War popular song, and which conjured up images from older children's books. Most notably of course at this point the Beatles were recording songs like "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" about places from their childhood, and taking lyrical inspiration from Victorian circus posters and the works of Lewis Carroll, but Barrett was similarly inspired. One of the books he loved most as a child was "The Little Grey Men" by BB, a penname for Denys Watkins-Pitchford. The book told the story of three gnomes,  Baldmoney, Sneezewort, and Dodder, and their adventures on a boat when the fourth member of their little group, Cloudberry, who's a bit of a rebellious loner and more adventurous than the other three, goes exploring on his own and they have to go off and find him. Barrett's song "The Gnome" doesn't use any precise details from the book, but its combination of whimsy about a gnome named Grimble-gromble and a reverence for nature is very much in the mould of BB's work: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "The Gnome"] Another huge influence on Barrett was Hillaire Belloc. Belloc is someone who is not read much any more, as sadly he is mostly known for the intense antisemitism in some of his writing, which stains it just as so much of early twentieth-century literature is stained, but he was one of the most influential writers of the early part of the twentieth century. Like his friend GK Chesterton he was simultaneously an author of Catholic apologia and a political campaigner -- he was a Liberal MP for a few years, and a strong advocate of an economic system known as Distributism, and had a peculiar mixture of very progressive and extremely reactionary ideas which resonated with a lot of the atmosphere in the British underground of the time, even though he would likely have profoundly disapproved of them. But Belloc wrote in a variety of styles, including poems for children, which are the works of his that have aged the best, and were a huge influence on later children's writers like Roald Dahl with their gleeful comic cruelty. Barrett's "Matilda Mother" had lyrics that were, other than the chorus where Barrett begs his mother to read him more of the story, taken verbatim from three poems from Belloc's Cautionary Tales for Children -- "Jim, Who Ran away from his Nurse, and was Eaten by a Lion", "Henry King (Who chewed bits of String, and was cut off in Dreadful Agonies)", and "Matilda (Who Told Lies and Was Burned to Death)" -- the titles of those give some idea of the kind of thing Belloc would write: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "Matilda Mother (early version)"] Sadly for Barrett, Belloc's estate refused to allow permission for his poems to be used, and so he had to rework the lyrics, writing new fairy-tale lyrics for the finished version. Other sources of inspiration for lyrics came from books like the I Ching, which Barrett used for "Chapter 24", having bought a copy from the Indica Bookshop, the same place that John Lennon had bought The Psychedelic Experience, and there's been some suggestion that he was deliberately trying to copy Lennon in taking lyrical ideas from a book of ancient mystic wisdom. During the recording of Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the group continued playing live. As they'd now had a hit single, most of their performances were at Top Rank Ballrooms and other such venues around the country, on bills with other top chart groups, playing to audiences who seemed unimpressed or actively hostile. They also, though made two important appearances. The more well-known of these was at the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream, a benefit for International Times magazine with people including Yoko Ono, their future collaborator Ron Geesin, John's Children, Soft Machine, and The Move also performing. The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream is now largely regarded as *the* pivotal moment in the development of the UK counterculture, though even at the time some participants noted that there seemed to be a rift developing between the performers, who were often fairly straightforward beer-drinking ambitious young men who had latched on to kaftans and talk about enlightenment as the latest gimmick they could use to get ahead in the industry, and the audience who seemed to be true believers. Their other major performance was at an event called "Games for May -- Space Age Relaxation for the Climax of Spring", where they were able to do a full long set in a concert space with a quadrophonic sound system, rather than performing in the utterly sub-par environments most pop bands had to at this point. They came up with a new song written for the event, which became their second single, "See Emily Play". [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "See Emily Play"] Emily was apparently always a favourite name of Barrett's, and he even talked with one girlfriend about the possibility of naming their first child Emily, but the Emily of the song seems to have had a specific inspiration. One of the youngest attendees at the London Free School was an actual schoolgirl, Emily Young, who would go along to their events with her schoolfriend Anjelica Huston (who later became a well-known film star). Young is now a world-renowned artist, regarded as arguably Britain's greatest living stone sculptor, but at the time she was very like the other people at the London Free School -- she was from a very privileged background, her father was Wayland Young, 2nd Baron Kennet, a Labour Peer and minister who later joined the SDP. But being younger than the rest of the attendees, and still a little naive, she was still trying to find her own personality, and would take on attributes and attitudes of other people without fully understanding them,  hence the song's opening lines, "Emily tries, but misunderstands/She's often inclined to borrow somebody's dream til tomorrow". The song gets a little darker towards the end though, and the image in the last verse, where she puts on a gown and floats down a river forever *could* be a gentle, pastoral, image of someone going on a boat ride, but it also could be a reference to two rather darker sources. Barrett was known to pick up imagery both from classic literature and from Arthurian legend, and so the lines inevitably conjure up both the idea of Ophelia drowning herself and of the Lady of Shallot in Tennyson's Arthurian poem, who is trapped in a tower but finds a boat, and floats down the river to Camelot but dies before the boat reaches the castle: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "See Emily Play"] The song also evokes very specific memories of Barrett's childhood -- according to Roger Waters, the woods mentioned in the lyrics are meant to be woods in which they had played as children, on the road out of Cambridge towards the Gog and Magog Hills. The song was apparently seven minutes long in its earliest versions, and required a great deal of editing to get down to single length, but it was worth it, as the track made the top ten. And that was where the problems started. There are two different stories told about what happened to Roger Barrett over the next forty years, and both stories are told by people with particular agendas, who want particular versions of him to become the accepted truth. Both stories are, in the extreme versions that have been popularised, utterly incompatible with each other, but both are fairly compatible with the scanty evidence we have. Possibly the truth lies somewhere between them. In one version of the story, around this time Barrett had a total mental breakdown, brought on or exacerbated by his overuse of LSD and Mandrax (a prescription drug consisting of a mixture of the antihistamine diphenhydramine and the sedative methaqualone, which was marketed in the US under the brand-name Quaalude), and that from late summer 1967 on he was unable to lead a normal life, and spent the rest of his life as a burned-out shell. The other version of the story is that Barrett was a little fragile, and did have periods of mental illness, but for the most part was able to function fairly well. In this version of the story, he was neurodivergent, and found celebrity distressing, but more than that he found the whole process of working within commercial restrictions upsetting -- having to appear on TV pop shows and go on package tours was just not something he found himself able to do, but he was responsible for a whole apparatus of people who relied on him and his group for their living. In this telling, he was surrounded by parasites who looked on him as their combination meal-ticket-cum-guru, and was simply not suited for the role and wanted to sabotage it so he could have a private life instead. Either way, *something* seems to have changed in Barrett in a profound way in the early summer of 1967. Joe Boyd talks about meeting him after not having seen him for a few weeks, and all the light being gone from his eyes. The group appeared on Top of the Pops, Britain's top pop TV show, three times to promote "See Emily Play", but by the third time Barrett didn't even pretend to mime along with the single. Towards the end of July, they were meant to record a session for the BBC's Saturday Club radio show, but Barrett walked out of the studio before completing the first song. It's notable that Barrett's non-cooperation or inability to function was very much dependent on circumstance. He was not able to perform for Saturday Club, a mainstream pop show aimed at a mass audience, but gave perfectly good performances on several sessions for John Peel's radio show The Perfumed Garden, a show firmly aimed at Pink Floyd's own underground niche. On the thirty-first of July, three days after the Saturday Club walkout, all the group's performances for the next month were cancelled, due to "nervous exhaustion". But on the eighth of August, they went back into the studio, to record "Scream Thy Last Scream", a song Barrett wrote and which Nick Mason sang: [Excerpt: Pink Floyd, "Scream Thy Last Scream"] That was scheduled as the group's next single, but the record company vetoed it, and it wouldn't see an official release for forty-nine years. Instead they recorded another single, "Apples and Oranges": [Excerpt: Pink Floyd, "Apples and Oranges"] That was the last thing the group released while Barrett was a member. In November 1967 they went on a tour of the US, making appearances on American Bandstand and the Pat Boone Show, as well as playing several gigs. According to legend, Barrett was almost catatonic on the Pat Boone show, though no footage of that appears to be available anywhere -- and the same things were said about their performance on Bandstand, and when that turned up, it turned out Barrett seemed no more uncomfortable miming to their new single than any of the rest of the band, and was no less polite when Dick Clark asked them questions about hamburgers. But on shows on the US tour, Barrett would do things like detune his guitar so it just made clanging sounds, or just play a single note throughout the show. These are, again, things that could be taken in two different ways, and I have no way to judge which is the more correct. On one level, they could be a sign of a chaotic, disordered, mind, someone dealing with severe mental health difficulties. On the other, they're the kind of thing that Barrett was applauded and praised for in the confines of the kind of avant-garde underground audience that would pay to hear AMM or Yoko Ono, the kind of people they'd been performing for less than a year earlier, but which were absolutely not appropriate for a pop group trying to promote their latest hit single. It could be that Barrett was severely unwell, or it could just be that he wanted to be an experimental artist and his bandmates wanted to be pop stars -- and one thing absolutely everyone agrees is that the rest of the group were more ambitious than Barrett was. Whichever was the case, though, something had to give. They cut the US tour short, but immediately started another British package tour, with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Move, Amen Corner and the Nice. After that tour they started work on their next album, A Saucerful of Secrets. Where Barrett was the lead singer and principal songwriter on Piper at the Gates of Dawn, he only sings and writes one song on A Saucerful of Secrets, which is otherwise written by Waters and Wright, and only appears at all on two more of the tracks -- by the time it was released he was out of the group. The last song he tried to get the group to record was called "Have You Got it Yet?" and it was only after spending some time rehearsing it that the rest of the band realised that the song was a practical joke on them -- every time they played it, he would change the song around so they would mess up, and pretend they just hadn't learned the song yet. They brought in Barrett's old friend Dave Gilmour, initially to be a fifth member on stage to give the band some stability in their performances, but after five shows with the five-man lineup they decided just not to bother picking Barrett up, but didn't mention he was out of the group, to avoid awkwardness. At the time, Barrett and Rick Wright were flatmates, and Wright would actually lie to Barrett and say he was just going out to buy a packet of cigarettes, and then go and play gigs without him. After a couple of months of this, it was officially announced that Barrett was leaving the group. Jenner and King went with him, convinced that he was the real talent in the group and would have a solo career, and the group carried on with new management. We'll be looking at them more in future episodes. Barrett made a start at recording a solo album in mid-1968, but didn't get very far. Jenner produced those sessions, and later said "It seemed a good idea to go into the studio because I knew he had the songs. And he would sometimes play bits and pieces and you would think 'Oh that's great.' It was a 'he's got a bit of a cold today and it might get better' approach. It wasn't a cold -- and you knew it wasn't a cold -- but I kept thinking if he did the right things he'd come back to join us. He'd gone out and maybe he'd come back. That was always the analogy in my head. I wanted to make it feel friendly for him, and that where we were was a comfortable place and that he could come back and find himself again. I obviously didn't succeed." A handful of tracks from those sessions have since been released, including a version of “Golden Hair”, a setting by Barrett of a poem by James Joyce that he would later revisit: [Excerpt: Syd Barrett, “Golden Hair (first version)”] Eleven months later, he went back into the studio again, this time with producer Malcolm Jones, to record an album that later became The Madcap Laughs, his first solo album. The recording process for the album has been the source of some controversy, as initially Jones was producing the whole album, and they were working in a way that Barrett never worked before. Where previously he had cut backing tracks first and only later overdubbed his vocals, this time he started by recording acoustic guitar and vocals, and then overdubbed on top of that. But after several sessions, Jones was pulled off the album, and Gilmour and Waters were asked to produce the rest of the sessions. This may seem a bit of a callous decision, since Gilmour was the person who had replaced Barrett in his group, but apparently the two of them had remained friends, and indeed Gilmour thought that Barrett had only got better as a songwriter since leaving the band. Where Malcolm Jones had been trying, by his account, to put out something that sounded like a serious, professional, record, Gilmour and Waters seemed to regard what they were doing more as producing a piece of audio verite documentary, including false starts and studio chatter. Jones believed that this put Barrett in a bad light, saying the outtakes "show Syd, at best as out of tune, which he rarely was, and at worst as out of control (which, again, he never was)." Gilmour and Waters, on the other hand, thought that material was necessary to provide some context for why the album wasn't as slick and professional as some might have hoped. The eventual record was a hodge-podge of different styles from different sessions, with bits from the Jenner sessions, the Jones sessions, and the Waters and Gilmour sessions all mixed together, with some tracks just Barrett badly double-tracking himself with an acoustic guitar, while other tracks feature full backing by Soft Machine. However, despite Jones' accusations that the album was more-or-less sabotaged by Gilmour and Waters, the fact remains that the best tracks on the album are the ones Barrett's former bandmates produced, and there are some magnificent moments on there. But it's a disturbing album to listen to, in the same way other albums by people with clear talent but clear mental illness are, like Skip Spence's Oar, Roky Erickson's later work, or the Beach Boys Love You. In each case, the pleasure one gets is a real pleasure from real aesthetic appreciation of the work, but entangled with an awareness that the work would not exist in that form were the creator not suffering. The pleasure doesn't come from the suffering -- these are real artists creating real art, not the kind of outsider art that is really just a modern-day freak-show -- but it's still inextricable from it: [Excerpt: Syd Barrett, "Dark Globe"] The Madcap Laughs did well enough that Barrett got to record a follow-up, titled simply Barrett. This one was recorded over a period of only a handful of months, with Gilmour and Rick Wright producing, and a band consisting of Gilmour, Wright, and drummer Jerry Shirley. The album is generally considered both more consistent and less interesting than The Madcap Laughs, with less really interesting material, though there are some enjoyable moments on it: [Excerpt: Syd Barrett, "Effervescing Elephant"] But the album is a little aimless, and people who knew him at the time seem agreed that that was a reflection of his life. He had nothing he *needed* to be doing -- no  tour dates, no deadlines, no pressure at all, and he had a bit of money from record royalties -- so he just did nothing at all. The one solo gig he ever played, with the band who backed him on Barrett, lasted four songs, and he walked off half-way through the fourth. He moved back to Cambridge for a while in the early seventies, and he tried putting together a new band with Twink, the drummer of the Pink Fairies and Pretty Things, Fred Frith, and Jack Monck, but Frith left after one gig. The other three performed a handful of shows either as "Stars" or as "Barrett, Adler, and Monck", just in the Cambridge area, but soon Barrett got bored again. He moved back to London, and in 1974 he made one final attempt to make a record, going into the studio with Peter Jenner, where he recorded a handful of tracks that were never released. But given that the titles of those tracks were things like "Boogie #1", "Boogie #2", "Slow Boogie", "Fast Boogie", "Chooka-Chooka Chug Chug" and "John Lee Hooker", I suspect we're not missing out on a lost masterpiece. Around this time there was a general resurgence in interest in Barrett, prompted by David Bowie having recorded a version of "See Emily Play" on his covers album Pin-Ups, which came out in late 1973: [Excerpt: David Bowie, "See Emily Play"] At the same time, the journalist Nick Kent wrote a long profile of Barrett, The Cracked Ballad of Syd Barrett, which like Kent's piece on Brian Wilson a year later, managed to be a remarkable piece of writing with a sense of sympathy for its subject and understanding of his music, but also a less-than-accurate piece of journalism which led to a lot of myths and disinformation being propagated. Barrett briefly visited his old bandmates in the studio in 1975 while they were recording the album Wish You Were Here -- some say even during the recording of the song "Shine On, You Crazy Diamond", which was written specifically about Barrett, though Nick Mason claims otherwise -- and they didn't recognise him at first, because by this point he had a shaved head and had put on a great deal of weight. He seemed rather sad, and that was the last time any of them saw him, apart from Roger Waters, who saw him in Harrod's a few years later. That time, as soon as Barrett recognised Waters, he dropped his bag and ran out of the shop. For the next thirty-one years, Barrett made no public appearances. The last time he ever voluntarily spoke to a journalist, other than telling them to go away, was in 1982, just after he'd moved back to Cambridge, when someone doorstopped him and he answered a few questions and posed for a photo before saying "OK! That's enough, this is distressing for me, thank you." He had the reputation for the rest of his life of being a shut-in, a recluse, an acid casualty. His family, on the other hand, have always claimed that while he was never particularly mentally or physically healthy, he wasn't a shut-in, and would go to the pub, meet up with his mother a couple of times a week to go shopping, and chat to the women behind the counter at Sainsbury's and at the pharmacy. He was also apparently very good with children who lived in the neighbourhood. Whatever the truth of his final decades, though, however mentally well or unwell he actually was, one thing is very clear, which is that he was an extremely private man, who did not want attention, and who was greatly distressed by the constant stream of people coming and looking through his letterbox, trying to take photos of him, trying to interview him, and so on. Everyone on his street knew that when people came asking which was Syd Barrett's house, they were meant to say that no-one of that name lived there -- and they were telling the truth. By the time he moved back, he had stopped answering to "Syd" altogether, and according to his sister "He came to hate the name latterly, and what it meant." He did, in 2001, go round to his sister's house to watch a documentary about himself on the TV -- he didn't own a TV himself -- but he didn't enjoy it and his only comment was that the music was too noisy. By this point he never listened to rock music, just to jazz and classical music, usually on the radio. He was financially secure -- Dave Gilmour made sure that when compilations came out they always included some music from Barrett's period in the group so he would receive royalties, even though Gilmour had no contact with him after 1975 -- and he spent most of his time painting -- he would take photos of the paintings when they were completed, and then burn the originals. There are many stories about those last few decades, but given how much he valued his privacy, it wouldn't be right to share them. This is a history of rock music, and 1975 was the last time Roger Keith Barrett ever had anything to do with rock music voluntarily. He died of cancer in 2006, and at his funeral there was a reading from The Little Grey Men, which was also quoted in the Order of Service -- "The wonder of the world, the beauty and the power, the shapes of things, their colours lights and shades; these I saw. Look ye also while life lasts.” There was no rock music played at Barrett's funeral -- instead there were a selection of pieces by Handel, Haydn, and Bach, ending with Bach's Allemande from the Partita No. IV in D major, one of his favourite pieces: [Excerpt: Glenn Gould, "Allemande from the Partita No. IV in D major"]  As they stared blankly in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realised all they had seen and all they had lost, a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces; and with its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift that the kindly demi-god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and lighthearted as before. Mole rubbed his eyes and stared at Rat, who was looking about him in a puzzled sort of way. “I beg your pardon; what did you say, Rat?” he asked. “I think I was only remarking,” said Rat slowly, “that this was the right sort of place, and that here, if anywhere, we should find him. And look! Why, there he is, the little fellow!” And with a cry of delight he ran towards the slumbering Portly. But Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, and can re-capture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty of it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties; so Mole, after struggling with his memory for a brief space, shook his head sadly and followed the Rat.

1. Marlon Williams 2. The Beatles 3. Jenny Mitchell 4. Suede 5. Spizzenergi 6. Colleen Sexton et al 7. Shriekback 8. Shawn Colvan/Steve Earle 9. The Romantics 10. Tom Waits 11. Pixies 12. Ewan MacColl 13. The Chills 14. Son Vault 15. The Afghan Whigs 16. Buddy Guy w/Wendy Moten

Dziś o małej radiowej rewolucji, może nawet nie takiej małej. Otóż pod koniec lat 50 ubiegłego wieku dwóch naszych dobrych znajomych, wielkich, zaprzyjaźnionych pieśniarzy folkowych Ewan MacColl i Pete Seeger, nawiązało współpracę z producentem radiowym Charlsem Parkerem (żeby było ciekawiej, Charles też śpiewał i był animatorem ruchu folkowego). Postanowili stworzyć dla BBC cykl audycji poświęconych różnym aspektom życia na wyspach brytyjskich. Na przestrzeni 6 lat powstało osiem audycji o brytyjskich kolejarzach, budowniczych autostrad, rybakach, górnikach, bokserach, nastolatkach, obieżyświatach, majsterkowiczach, a nawet osobach chorych na polio. Cykl nosił nazwę „Radio ballads”. Panowie tworzyli audycje z czterech fundamentalnych elementów: muzyki instrumentlnej, efektów dźwiękowych, piosenek i nagranych wypowiedzi ludzi, których dotyczyła tematyka. Dziś nie brzmi to zaskakująco ale w latach 50 była to rewolucja. Samo połączenie różnych form nie było niczym nowym, nowością był sposób emitowania wypowiedzi bohaterów. W tamtych czasach w audycjach radiowych wypowiedzi zwyczajnych ludzi były transkrybowane a następnie czytane przez zawodowych lektorów. MacColl, Seeger i Parker do każdej audycji gromadzili setki taśm z nagranymi wypowiedziami rozmówców, spośród nich wybierali najciekawsze i, uwaga, w oryginale puszczali w eter. Szok. Powstały programy zabawne, pouczające, poetyckie i zarazem bardzo autentyczne. 62 lata temu, w sierpniu 1960 roku premierę miał trzeci odcinek cyklu „Singing the Fishing” będący hołdem dla rybackich społeczności wschodniej Anglii i północno-wschodniej Szkocji. Odcinek ważny, i to z co najmniej trzech powodów powodów. Pierwszy to ten, że „Singing the Fishing” było pierwszym w cyklu dziełem w pełni zintegrowanym, wykorzystującym dopracowane już innowacyjne techniki wplatania muzyki w dokumentalną treść, dziełem które ustaliło ostateczny standard dla pozostałych oddcinków cyklu i wyznaczyło kierunek rozwoju tzw. „oral history” w radiu. Drugi powód to taki, że „Singing the Fishing” rozsławiło Cykl na całym świecie. Po zdobyciu Prix d'Italia dla radiowego dokumentu w październiku 1960 roku, audycja została wyemitowana w 86 krajach. No a trzecim powodem jest niezwykła piosenka. No właśnie - niezwykła. W „Radio Ballads” śpiewane były piosenki specjalnie na tę okoliczność napisane przez Ewana MacColla. Podczas nagrań do „Singing the Fishing” Ewan MacColl poznał starego rybaka Sama Larnera. Samuel jako 13 latek pod koniec XIX wieku pływał już jako chłopiec okrętowy, po 2 latach zamustrował na rybaki i wypływał na łowiska przez kolejne 39 lat. Na emeryturze jeździł po Anglii i śpiewał poznane w rybackich portach pieśni. Życie Sama zafascynowało Ewana do tego stopnia, że napisał w hołdzie rybakowi piosenkę. Powstała moja ulubiona pieśń rybacka „The Shoals of Herring” - Ławice Śledzi. W Polsce z nieco zmienionym rytmem, pod tytułem „Ławice” śpiewają ją Cztery Refy do słów Andrzeja Mendygrała. Ale prawdziłą perłą jest oryginał, koniecznie z prologiem i epilogiem, których brakuje w polskiej wersji. Liam Clancy, autor mojego ulubionego wykonania, pięknie o „The Shoals of Herring” opowiada, twierdząc, że MacColl przed programem nagrał na taśmach wszystkich starych rybaków ze wschodniego wybrzeża Anglii i w piosence nie użył ani jednego własnego słowa. ... zrymował fragmenty nagranych wypowiedzi rybaków, dorzucił króciutki cytat z Shakespeara, i uczynił z tego piosenkę. Dla mnie arcydzieło. Sail Ho Audycja zawiera utwory: Fragment audycji „Singing the Fishing” z cyklu „Radio ballads”, wyemitowanej 16 sierpnia 1960 roku w BBC Radio, autorzy: Ewan MacColl, Pete Seeger i Charls Parker “Ławice” w wykonaniu zespołu „Cztery Refy”, słowa: Andrzej Mendygrał, muzyka: Ewan MacColl “The Shoals of Herring” w wykonaniu Liama Clancy z zespołem, słowa i muzyka: Ewan MacColl

When did you last take part in a protest? Perhaps you signed a petition; joined a debate on social media; wrote to your MP or read an impassioned poem. In this episode Lemn is joined by Shami Chakrabarti to examine how campaigners have used language to further their aims throughout the centuries. Together, they listen to inspiring voices from the British Library Sound Archive, from leaders such as Nelson Mandela to campaigners fighting for LGBTQ rights, punk musicians and suffragettes such as Christabel Pankhurst.  Described in The Times as "probably the most effective public affairs lobbyist of the past 20 years," Shami Chakrabarti is a barrister and human rights activist, as well as Member of the House of Lords and former Director of advocacy organisation Liberty. Recordings in the episode in order of appearance:  Christabel Pankhurst speaking after her release from Holloway Prison on 18th December 1908.  British Library shelfmark: 1CL0025836    An extract from Nelson Mandela's speech made in April 1964 at The Rivonia Trial. Restored and transferred by the British Library from the dictabelt originals loaned by The National Archives of South Africa and © The National Archives of South Africa.  British Library shelfmark: C985   An oral history interview recorded with Mr Kemp from Nottingham, in November 1982. Part of the Nottinghamshire Oral History Collection: Making Ends Meet Project. British Library shelfmark: UUOL066/14    Member of the Gay Liberation Front, Luchia Fitzgerald, speaks to Dr. Sarah Feinstein in 2016 as part of Manchester Pride's OUT! oral history project. Thanks to Archives+ in Manchester for this extract. © Luchia Fitzgerald and Archives+. British Library shelfmark: UAP007  The Hooters perform ‘We shall Overcome' at the Hooters' club in Birkenhead in 1965. The recording was found at Archives+, Manchester, it's part of the Stan Mason folk music archive and was digitised as part of the Unlocking our Sound Heritage (UOSH) project.  British Library shelfmark: UAP004/5 S2 C1  Barack Obama speaking to his supporters in January 2008, after losing New Hampshire's Democratic primary to Hilary Clinton. Popularly known as the ‘Yes we can' speech. © Barack Obama. British Library shelfmark: 1SS0009809  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2018 PEN Pinter Prize acceptance speech. The recording was made at the British Library. With thanks to The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.  British Library shelfmark: C927/1981  Labour MP Jess Phillips's address to the House of Commons in January 2019. Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0.  Alice Walker reads her poem ‘First they said'. The recording was made at the Africa Centre in May 1985 and it is part of the African Centre Collection, digitised by the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project.  British Library shelfmark: C48/56  Adrienne Rich reads her poem ‘Power' at Conway Hall in June 1984 as part of the 1st International Feminist Book Fair collection. The recording was digitised by the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project.  British Library shelfmark: C154/2  Benjamin Zephaniah performing his poem ‘This policeman keeps on kicking me' at the Poetry Olympics festival, 1982. Recorded by the British Library at the Young Vic Theatre.  British Library shelfmark: C92/2 C43  ‘Black and White for Apartheid' performed by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger in December 1964. It is part of the African Writers Club collection of radio programmes recorded in the 1960s in London.  British Library shelfmark: C134/375  Extracts from the British Library event called ‘Banned Books Week: Poetry in Protest' in September 2021. Myanmarese-British poet Ko Ko Thett and Dr Choman Hardi, poet and scholar, speak to columnist Kate Maltby.  An extract from ‘Oh Bondage Up Yours', the 1977 debut single by X-Ray Spex. © BMG, X-Ray Spex/Poly Styrene, Westminster Music Ltd/TRO Essex Group.  British Library shelfmark: 1CD0198888 

Przemysłowe miasto w Anglii i robotnicza dzielnica w Polsce. Dwa przyczynki do świetnych piosenek. Zacznijmy od Wysp Brytyjskich. Pierwszy przystanek to Salford, w hrabstwie Greater Manchester w Anglii. Stare, przemysłowe miasto, a co za tym idzie miasto robotnicze. Tak bardzo robotnicze, że to właśnie tu Marx i Engels pomieszkiwali aby studiować ciężkie życie brytyjskiego proletariatu. Ale nie oni są dla nas dzisiaj najważniejsi. W Salford urodził się i wychował James Henry Miller. Znamy go bardzo dobrze. Tworzył, nagrywał i występował pod pseudonimem Ewan MacColl – prawdziwa ikona angielskiego, a w zasadzie światowego folku. Zanim świat go poznał jako folkowego barda, Ewana MacColl próbował być dramaturgiem, współtworzył lewicującą grupę teatralną i pisał sztuki. Akcję jednej z nich „Landscape with Chimney” umieścił właśnie w swoim rodzinnym mieście. Żeby umilić widzom przerwę niezbędną do zmieniany dekoracji, Ewan napisał piosenkę. Ot historyjkę przywołującą młodzieńcze wspomnienia z przemysłowego Sulford, randki pod gazownią, spacery nad starym kanałem i pierwsze pocałunki pod fabrycznym murem. Nad tym wszystkim rozciąga się przemysłowy smród i odgłosy pracującego miasta. Brudnego, starego miasta. No właśnie, no to tytuł mógł być tylko jeden „ Dirty Old Town”. Nie przypuszczał Ewan, że pisząc niewinny przerywnik do sztuki teatralnej stworzy jeden z największych przebojów wyspiarskiego folku, śpiewany w pubuch i na scenach dosłownie na całym świecie. Pierwsze nagranie autor zrealizował w 52 roku. Piosenka szybko przyjęła się w nowopowstających klubach folkowych. Wkrótce swoją wersję nagrał znany folklorysta Alan Lomax i piosenka poszła w świat. No i „Dirty Old Town” zapragnęli mieć w swoim repertuarze chyba wszyscy artyści choć trochę ocierający się o folk. A słynni The Dubliners w 68 roku dokonali tak porywającego nagrania, że wielu słuchaczy do dziś ma wrażenie że „Dirty Old Town” to irlandzki kawałek. Ale my nie gęsi. Też mamy swoje stare miasta i ich brudne dzielnice. Szczecin. Miasto nie tak stare jak Salford ale stare. Dzielnica również stara. Pierwsze wzmianki o niej pochodzą z XIII wieku. W XIV już była wymieniana jako wieś pod nazwą Zabelsdorf. W XIX wcielona do granic administracyjnych Szczecina. Dziś jest największą dzielnicą tego miasta i nosi nazwę Niebuszewo. Dzielnica w XIX i na początku XX wieku całkiem prężnie się rozwijała, była dzielnicą przemysłowo mieszkalną, z ciekawą architekturą, której niestety nieliczne ślady pozostały do dzisiaj. Kres rozwojowi przyniosła II wojna światowa. Po wojnie dzielnica została zasiedlona powracającymi z innych terenów Niemcami, Żydami i oczywiście Polakami. Póżniej Niebuszewo zaczęli opuszczać bardziej zamożni mieszkańcy. Dzielnica podupadała, z czasem zyskała złą sławę. Winna temu była wysoka przestępczość. Dziś Niebuszewo jest umieszczane wysoko w zestawieniach polskich niebezpiecznych dzielnic. Ale w brudnej, niebezpiecznej dzielnicy też można mieć szczęśliwe dzieciństwo i bujną młodość. Sulford miało swojego barda – Niebuszewo ma swojego. Tu pierwszych win próbował, tu pierwsze bójki toczył i tu przemierzał szlaki piwnic i strychów lider szczecińskiej punk folkowej formacji Emerald – Leszek Czarnecki. I jak Ewan o Sulford, tak Leszek o swoim dorastaniu w Niebuszewie napisał piosenkę. I to jaką. „Niebuszewo”, bo taki prosty tytuł nosi, to miejski folk najwyższej próby. Ja od pierwszego przesłuchania jestem oczarowany. Świetny tekst i kompozycja, wspaniała, niebanalna aranżacja. No i wykonanie, nie przesadzę jak powiem, że Pana Czarneckiego z zespołem spokojnie możemy umieścić na tej samej półce co MacGowana z Poguesami. Sail ho Audycja zawiera utwory: “Dirty Old Town” w wykonaniu „The Pogues”, słowa I muzyka: Ewan MacColl „Niebuszewo” w wykonaniu zespołu „Emerald”, słowa i muzyka: Leszek Czarnecki

This episode continues a monthly, ten-part series celebrating the tenth anniversary of TEMPEST, featuring the second track on the album, "Soon After Midnight," through songs that influenced its composition, live versions, cover versions, and also through a consideration of the song's meaning and allusions. In "20 Pounds of Headlines," we round up news from the world of Bob Dylan, which includes an overview of Dylan's tour itinerary for the upcoming week, a report on Dylan's sale of his Traveling Wilburys share of master royalties and neighboring rights royalties to Primary Wave Music, a report that T-Bone Burnett is still looking to release 20 more recordings by the New Basement Tapes of songs created from unfinished BASEMENT TAPES era lyrics, and a happy birthday to a special figure of cultural significance. In "Who Did It Better?" we ask you to vote this week to tell us who did "Soon After Midnight" better: Aoife O'Donovan or John Glase & The Burnt Remains? Listen to the episode, then go to our Twitter page @RainTrains to vote!

Frank Vincent Zappa (December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993) was an American musician, singer, composer, songwriter and bandleader. His work is characterized by nonconformity, free-form improvisation, sound experiments, musical virtuosity and satire of American culture. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa composed rock, pop, jazz, jazz fusion, orchestral and musique concrète works, and produced almost all of the 60-plus albums that he released with his band the Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist. Zappa also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed album covers. He is considered one of the most innovative and stylistically diverse musicians of his generation. On a number of occasions Zappa appeared in radio show slots, airing and generally discussing his favored music, or occasionally guesting on a 'club turntable', describing himself as a 'Fraudulent DJ'. In this episode, part one of a series of two, all the tracks in chronological order as selected by Zappa (with exception of most of his own tracks) for all his DJ appearances that have been documented, and that took place between 1968 and 1984. Lineup: Frank Zappa, The Mothers Of Invention, Ewan MacColl, The Hollywood Persuaders, Pierre Boulez, Hilary Summers, Ensemble Intercontemporain, The Dreamlovers, The Penguins, Charles Mingus, Frankie Lee Sims, Vernon Green & The Medallions, Richard Berry & The Dreamers, The Paragons, Big Moose, The Turbans, Johnny Guitar Watson, The Spaniels, J.B. Lenoir, Vernon Green, The Medallions, Bill Haley & His Comets, The Chips, The Velvets, Richard Berry & The Pharaohs, Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, The Feathers, Don & Dewey, The Jewels, The Cufflinks, Johnny Ace, Wilbur Whitfield & The Pleasers, Hank Ballard & The Midnighters, Jackie & The Starlites, The Cellos, The Rolling Crew, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Paul Robeson, Huey 'Piano' Smith, Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown, The Six Teens, The Laurie Sisters, Lloyd Terrell, Ruben And The Jets, The Hawks, The Olympics, Andre Williams, The Gaylarks, Little Sunny Day and the Clouds, The Clovers, The Harptones, Baby Ray And The Ferns, Muddy Waters, The Shaggs, Richard Berry, The Robins, Bob Landers, Willie Joe, Tony Allen, Peppermint Harris, The El Dorados, The 5 Campbells, Elmore James, The Moonlighters, Don Julian, The Larks, Lloyd Price, The Solitaires, Black Oak Arkansas, Edgard Varèse, Frederic Waldman, NY Wind Ensemble, Olivier Messiaen, BBC Symphony OrchestraAntal Dorati, Antal Doráti, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Anton Webern, Nürnberg Symphony Orchestra, Othmar Maga

“Todo iba bien hasta que Lady Saw comenzó a hacer todo aquel rap patois que era claramente sexual, mencionando a John y más o menos proponiéndole. El pobre John se puso colorado y no sabía dónde mirar. Hermeet y yo estábamos luchando para parar de reírnos”. Louise Kattenhorn Con José Manuel Corrales.

“Todo iba bien hasta que Lady Saw comenzó a hacer todo aquel rap patois que era claramente sexual, mencionando a John y más o menos proponiéndole. El pobre John se puso colorado y no sabía dónde mirar. Hermeet y yo estábamos luchando para parar de reírnos”. Louise Kattenhorn Con José Manuel Corrales.

Episode XXXI looks at possible influences for the tune to a Ewan MacColl song and features piping, fiddling, singing, tunes that sound like other tunes, the Cradle ov Filth and more! Tracklist: Peat and Diesel – Western Isles Joe Byrne – Snowy Breasted Pearl Luke Kelly – The Bonnie Shoals of Herring Ewan MacColl – The Famous Flower of Serving Men Matt Cranitch, Paul De Grae & Jackie Daly – Sliabh na mBan Mama's Broke – Just Pick One Unknown Suonata For Bagpipe And Triangle Rättviks Spelmanslag - Gärdebylåten, gånglåt (Marching Tune from Gärdeby) Elizabeth Cronin – Níl Mo Shláinte ar Fónamh Elizabeth Cronin – Ten Weary Years Early Grave Band – Nuke Power C.B. Fernando & H.D Manuel – Manaram Sidevi The Clovers – Rotten Cocksucker's Ball https://campsite.bio/firedrawnear

Membership in the Knights of Labor declines due to competition from other unions as well as their alleged involvement in the Chicago Haymarket Affair. Music: Come My Little Son by Ewan MacColl, arranged and performed by Sam James.

Wapx078 Dans cet épisode : Flavien Le Bailly Dreaming about space Matthew Kent Turning classical music into pop songs Joseph Magdelaine RTL remix The Beatles Music Machine Covers : Robyn Adele Anderson : Smoke on the water WDR Funhausorchester : Thriller Mark Snow : XFiles theme Betraying the martyrs : Let it go Les Enfants du Rock : Peter Gabriel et son Fairlight Sons zarbi : Dr Kritz : COVID song Benn : Eh ben c'est bien, Nils Greg Solomon : Cornemuse Klaudia Sobotka : Wannabe Red Hot - Show must go on as a James Bond Theme Giorno Giovanna meets electricity Them Viral Musicians Andrew Huang : Making music with soap Jacob Collier harmonise son public Trucs en vrac : Polyphone Philip Bowen : violon sur Coolio The Beatles vs Li'l Nas X 14 strings guitar solo Shine on you crazy diamond dans la rue et par David Gilmour La +BCdM : Roberta Flack : First time ever I saw your face par Peggy Seeger - The Kingston Trio - Peter, Paul & Mary - Elvis Presley - Joe & Eddie - Johnny Cash Scarborough Fair par Ewan MacColl et par Simon & Garfunkel La Playlist de la +BCdM : sur le Tube à Walter sur Spotify (merci John Cytron) sur Deezer (merci MaO de Paris) sur Amazon Music (merci Hellxions) et sur Apple Music (merci Yawourt) Voter pour la Plus Belle Chanson du Monde Le son mystère (41'20) : Alfred Hitchcock - 1969 Avec : Fanny Gauthier MaO Aude Danny Mist-e-Fire Cirbafe Pop goes the WZA Picaboubx Grincheux Fabrice Pincho David Merci à : Guillaume Pierre Journel K Rot Mr Johns Barberouss Phil Goud Christophe Randall Flagg Didier Gauthier Che Averell Stéphane LYC Podcasts & liens cités : La Chaîne Guitare Les Yeux Clos La Nuit sans image Hervé Coiral SplitScreen Oxymut Le générique de fin est signé Cousbou walter@linaudible.com

The red-haired Joanna Hiffernan was James McNeill Whistler's Woman in White. An exhibition curated by Margaret MacDonald for the Royal Academy of Arts, London and the National Gallery of Art, Washington uncovers the role she played in his career. An instagram account about the women painted by Viennese artist Egon Schiele has amassed over 100,000 followers. Now Sophie Haydock is publishing a novel called The Flames, which imagines the story of Schiele's wife and three other women who modelled for him. Ilona Sagar has been working for over 2 years in social care services and community settings in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham to make art reflecting the consequences of asbestos exposure involving social workers, carers, organisers and residents. Shahidha Bari hosts a conversation about famous artists and their sometimes less famous models. Whistler's Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan runs at the Royal Academy in London from 26 February — 22 May 2022 https://www.ilonasagar.com/ https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/radio-ballads/ On view at Serpentine (31 March – 29 May) and Barking Town Hall and Learning Centre (2-17 April), Radio Ballads presents new film commissions alongside paintings, drawings and contextual materials that share each project's collaborative research process. The original documentary series Radio Ballads produced by musicians Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, working with radio producer Charlie Parker, were broadcast by the BBC from 1957–64. Sophie Haydock's novel The Flames is published in March 2022. Producer: Torquil MacLeod You can find a playlist on the Free Thinking website exploring Art, Architecture, Photography and Museums with discussions on colour, trompe l'oeil, world's fairs, and guests including Veronica Ryan, Jennifer Higgie, Eric Parry and Alison Brooks, the directors of museums in London, Paris, Singapore, Los Angeles, Washington https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p026wnjl

Invité : Benoît de Tréglodé, directeur du domaine « Afrique, Asie, Moyen-Orient » à l'IRSEM, 3:00 La naissance du Vietnam par opposition à l'occupation et à la présence chinoise 8:30 L'arrivée de la France et la parenthèse coloniale française 18:30 La montée du communisme au Vietnam 23:00 L'indépendance vietnamienne, et la bipartition à la sortie de la guerre d'indépendance 31:00 La sortie de la guerre du Vietnam et l'occupation du Cambodge 46:00 Les mues de l'appareil militaire vietnamien et la réorientation vers la mer 49:30 La question posées en mer de Chine du sud 59:00 Le Vietnam et les puissances régionales face à la montée chinoise Extrait audio : Ewan MacColl with the London Critics Group, "The Ballad of Hô Chi Minh", 1954 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjzMWumVhV8

"My function is not to reassure people. I want to make them uncomfortable." - Ewan MacColl

RESISTANCE AT RED HILL VALLEY - How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down? Radio Free School - Originally aired on CFMU 93.3 FM in Hamilton Ontario, Wednesday, August 20, 2003 music - Legal/Illegal, Ewan MacColl, Best of Broadside interviews - kids aged 8 to 11-years at Greenhill Avenue supporting efforts to prevent the Red Hill Creek Expressway from ruining their play area/lungs/quality of life, etc. music - parkette, Bob Snider, Caterwaul & Doggerel interview - Heather Wilson & children at the Greenhill Community Garden of Hope, and Heather at Dufferin Construction Headquarters "cementing our memories" music - The World Turned Upside Down, Billy Bragg, Back to Basics interview - Don McLean (Friends of Red Hill Valley) and Larry DiIanni (city councillor and chair Expressway Implementation Committee) about the threat of civil suits levelled at protesters by the city...and anarchy. music - Out of nothing comes nothing, Randy, You Can't Keep a Good Band Down interview - The need to act, Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States music - We shall not be moved, SNCC Freedom Singers led by Rutha Harris, Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs 1960-1966. interview - Joe Staruck, neighbour whose property backs onto the proposed construction site for the Expressway on-ramp at Greenhill music - Know your rights, the Clash, Combat Rock interview - Brian Tammi, picket at Albright Road on the first day of blockades. music - Which side are you on? Billy Bragg, Back to Basics interview - Ken Stone, on the megaphone (that rhymes!) music - Will the circle be unbroken, Jimmy Collier and the Movement SIngers led by Diane Smith Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs 1960-1966. tech - randy

Pianist Igor Levit talks to Tom Service about his latest epic recording project – three and a half hours of music by Dmitri Shostakovich and the Scottish composer Ronald Stevenson. No stranger to large-scale works he live-streamed Erik Satie's Vexations during lockdown playing 840 repetitions over 16 hours as part of his online House Concerts. He discusses the huge challenges on every page of Stevenson's Passacaglia and the contradictions of his life as a pianist and his political beliefs. Folk singer Martin Carthy and former High Court judge and part-time song collector Stephen Sedley join Tom to talk about their new book, ‘Who Killed Cock Robin: British Folk Songs of Crime and Punishment', which explores the legal and moral basis of some of the most moving songs in the folk traditions of the country. We hear recordings by Martin Carthy, Shirley Collins, Rachel Newton and a 1953 archive recording of Ewan MacColl singing ‘McCaffery', provided by the School of Scottish Studies Archives. As Russians go to the polls, we look at what the recent decline in freedoms means for artists and musicians in and out of the country. Tom speaks to Masha Alekhina, co-founder of the musical and protest collective Pussy Riot, who has just been sentenced to a year of ‘restricted freedom' for promoting protests in support of the jailed opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. We're also joined by the BBC's Moscow correspondent Sarah Rainsford who was recently expelled from Russia after more than 20 years of reporting from Moscow, and pianist Katya Apekisheva who, alongside hundreds of other classical musicians, signed a letter to Vladimir Putin in February calling for the release of Alexei Navalny. And composer Joseph Horovitz shares stories from his life in music. Having fled Vienna as a child in 1938, he began his musical career in Britain as a music lecturer for the army before working as a ballet conductor and finally a composer. His music draws on a huge range of styles, especially jazz, as can be heard in his Jazz Harpsichord Concerto which was performed by Mahan Esfahani and the Manchester Collective at this year's Proms. He talks to Tom about how his deeply personal fifth string quartet reflects his experiences of escaping Vienna, and how he finds new inspiration every day from the music around him.

“When I Hear The Music” Indira May has the kind of voice that will bring you to your knees. Self-possessed, sonorous and imbued with the kind of phrasing that's so emotionally precise it almost feels supernatural, May is a revelation. Her new EP Simpler Things is a ravishing blend of trip-hop, jazz and indie soul—trust us: it's a straight up stunner and one listen makes it clear that for this artist the sky is indeed the limit. And, Indira's got her own music and production company called Trash Films and Music and her company is really one to watch. Yes, she's learned by having cool parents and paying attention to their work ethic and their grace, but Indira is now making her own mark on the music world and setting examples of her own. Now a while back we had her dad Tim May on the program—Tim was in a band in the '80s called The Righteous Boys that signed with CBS, and after that band ended he went on to become a filmmaker, making documentaries for the BBC's multi-award winning arts strand Arena. There his subjects included Paul McCartney and folk legend, Ewan MacColl; He runs Strange Films and Music with his wife, the writer and director Karen Stowe—they produce films for agencies, brands and companies. And they make documentaries. Their latest is You Can't Go Back, which is a fabulous movie about Del Amitri and if you think Tim sounds busy, he is. His band Aliens are set to release their brilliant new album and we could go on and on about Aliens because we love them, but there's so much Aliens news happening, we'll revisit it on a future show. In this chat, Indira talks to us about her vision for Trash Films And Music, growing up feeling supported in her music by her parents and how she triumphed over adversity to film the winning video for the EP's first single, “When I Hear The Music.” www.trashfilmsandmusic..com www.strangefilmsandmusic.com www.bombshellradio.com Stereo Embers Twitter: @emberseditor Instagram: @emberspodcast Email: editor@stereoembersmagazine.com

Ewan MacColl sang "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" to Peggy Seeger down the phone. When they met, Peggy says, he was in the grip of his midlife crisis. "I'm fond of saying the poor boy didn't stand a chance," she tells Matthew Parris. This programme is her attempt to set the record straight. "I'd like to do a bit of justice to him, because there's an awful lot of myths, an awful lot of bad talk, misunderstandings." Ewan MacColl was born Jimmy Miller in Salford, which he wrote about in 1949 in his song, "Dirty Old Town." He made his name in theatre, was married to Joan Littlewood, and after the Second World War he was a powerful force behind the folk revival. He also with Peggy Seeger and Charles Parker created the famous Radio Ballads. Peggy is joined in discussion by Peter Cox, author of Set Into Song. The programme is heavily illustrated with MacColl's music and his voice. The producer for BBC audio in Bristol is Miles Warde

You know, as long as there've been lady parts and attendant man parts to go into them, abortion has been practiced. It always will be. No law can change it either way. The only thing that laws like Roe do is give a safe, clean room in which to practice the fetal cell-smooshing arts for the poorest and least advantaged of us. That seems to be the real reason people wave signs and chant their religious nonsense. Taking things away from people they think are less deserving. Because as my old mistress Missy Quinn said (and I'm paraphrasing) if you can't trust a woman with a choice, how can you trust her with a child?    Bill Seluga - Dancin' Johnson (1978) Bill Seluga was a founding member of the improv comedy troupe Ace Trucking Company. His Raymond J. Johnson bit was pretty much that, a bit. He was probably best known for the bit "But ya doesn't have to call me Johnson". It was the voice and the repetitiveness that was supposed to be funny. In the '70s, it was. The Ace Trucking Company was active from the late '60s through the mid-'70s and was frequently on variety programs like The Tonight Show, Mike Douglas, Dick Cavett, and The Midnight Special. Fred Willard was in this group So was Patty Deutsch, who was also in the later incarnation of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, as well as the Exorcist parody album The Hexorcist. I could go on and on.  Cold Chisel - Choirgirl (1980) Kinky Friedman - Rapid City, South Dakota (1974)  Abortion Suite:  Victor Buono - I Am (1971) American actor and comedian. Six foot four and tipping the scales at some 400 pounds, Victor Buono often played the "heavy" on screen. A 1971 album Heavy! charted, thanks in no small part to Victor's performance of the "Fat Man's Prayer" on The Tonight Show. He also played the role of King Tut in the '60s Batman series.  The Gaunga Dyns - Rebecca Rodifer (1967) Peggy Seeger - Nine-Month Blues (1979) Discogs: Peggy Seeger (born June 17, 1935, New York City) is an American folksinger. She is also well known in Britain, where she lived for more than 30 years with her husband, songwriter Ewan MacColl. The well-known Pete Seeger is her half-brother. Gary Paxton - The Big "A" = The Big "M" (1978) Malvina Reynolds - Rosie Jane (1975) Lee Hazlewood - I'll Live Yesterdays (1971) Harry Chapin - Woman Child (1972) Sylvain Sylvain - Formidable (1981) Lorene Mann - Hide My Sin (A-b-o-r-t-i-o-n N-e-w Y-o-r-k) (1972) Hmm. Same label and backing vocalists as Elvis.  End of Abortion Suite.    Adam & Eve - Hey Neandertal Man (1970) I Nuovi Angeli - L'uomo di Neanderthal (1970)  Harlem Underground Band - Smokin Cheeba Cheeba (1976) John Farrar - Falling (1980) Kin Ping Meh - Come Together (1972) Syreeta - How Many Days (1972) Dave Clark Five - Good Old Rock and Roll (1969) The Holy Mackerel - Wildflowers (1968)  Todd Rundgren - Tin-Foil Hat (2017) Featuring Donald Fagen.  John Travolta - What Would They Say (1978) American Spring - This Whole World (1972) Denny Laine - The Blues (1973) Three Dog Night - A Change is Gonna Come (1969) Michael Nagy (Naj) - A Clever Man (1998) Adriano Celentano - Pregherò (1962) Barry McGuire - This Precious Time (1965) Cindy und Bert - Im Fieber Der Nacht (1978) Elvis Presley - Proud Mary (1972) Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons - Hickory (1974) Gary Lewis and the Playboys - Then Again Maybe (1972)  Frank Zappa - I Don't Wanna Get Drafted (1980)  

Episode one hundred and twenty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Mr. Tambourine Man" by the Byrds, and the start of LA folk-rock. 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 "I Got You Babe" by Sonny and Cher. 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/ Erratum The version of this originally uploaded got the date of the Dylan tour filmed for Don't Look Back wrong. I edited out the half-sentence in question when this was pointed out to me very shortly after uploading. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with the exception of the early Gene Clark demo snippet, which I've not been able to find a longer version of). For information on Dylan and the song, I've mostly used these books: Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. While for the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography. This three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings, while this contains the pre-Byrds recordings the group members did with Jim Dickson. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to take a look at one of the pivotal recordings in folk-rock music, a track which, though it was not by any means the first folk-rock record, came to define the subgenre in the minds of the listening public, and which by bringing together the disparate threads of influence from Bob Dylan, the Searchers, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys, manages to be arguably the record that defines early 1965. We're going to look at "Mr. Tambourine Man" by the Byrds: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Folk-rock as a genre was something that was bound to happen sooner rather than later. We've already seen how many of the British R&B bands that were becoming popular in the US were influenced by folk music, with records like "House of the Rising Sun" taking traditional folk songs and repurposing them for a rock idiom. And as soon as British bands started to have a big influence on American music, that would have to inspire a reassessment by American musicians of their own folk music. Because of course, while the British bands were inspired by rock and roll, they were all also coming from a skiffle tradition which saw Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, and the rest as being the people to emulate, and that would show up in their music. Most of the British bands came from the bluesier end of the folk tradition -- with the exception of the Liverpool bands, who pretty much all liked their Black music on the poppy side and their roots music to be more in a country vein -- but they were still all playing music which showed the clear influence of country and folk as well as blues. And that influence was particularly obvious to those American musicians who were suddenly interested in becoming rock and roll stars, but who had previously been folkies. Musicians like Gene Clark. Gene Clark was born in Missouri, and had formed a rock and roll group in his teens called Joe Meyers and the Sharks. According to many biographies, the Sharks put out a record of Clark's song "Blue Ribbons", but as far as I've been able to tell, this was Clark embellishing things a great deal -- the only evidence of this song that anyone has been able to find is a home recording from this time, of which a few seconds were used in a documentary on Clark: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "Blue Ribbons"] After his period in the Sharks, Clark became a folk singer, starting out in a group called the Surf Riders. But in August 1963 he was spotted by the New Christy Minstrels, a fourteen-piece ultra-commercial folk group who had just released a big hit single, "Green Green", with a lead sung by one of their members, Barry McGuire: [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Green Green"] Clark was hired to replace a departing member, and joined the group, who as well as McGuire at that time also included Larry Ramos, who would later go on to join The Association and sing joint lead on their big hit "Never My Love": [Excerpt: The Association, "Never My Love"] Clark was only in the New Christy Minstrels for a few months, but he appeared on several of their albums -- they recorded four albums during the months he was with the group, but there's some debate as to whether he appeared on all of them, as he may have missed some recording sessions when he had a cold. Clark didn't get much opportunity to sing lead on the records, but he was more prominent in live performances, and can be seen and heard in the many TV appearances the group did in late 1963: [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Julianne"] But Clark was not a good fit for the group -- he didn't put himself forward very much, which meant he didn't get many lead vocals, which meant in turn that he seemed not to be pulling his weight. But the thing that really changed his mind came in late 1963, on tour in Canada, when he heard this: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Loves You"] Clark knew instantly that that was the kind of music he wanted to be making, and when "I Want to Hold Your Hand" came out in the US soon afterwards, it was the impetus that Clark needed in order to quit the group and move to California. There he visited the Troubadour club in Los Angeles, and saw another performer who had been in an ultra-commercial folk group until he had been bitten by the Beatle bug -- Roger McGuinn. One note here -- Roger McGuinn at this point used his birth name, but he changed it for religious reasons in 1967.  I've been unable to find out his views on his old name -- whether he considers it closer to a trans person's deadname which would be disrespectful to mention, or to something like Reg Dwight becoming Elton John or David Jones becoming David Bowie. As I presume everyone listening to this has access to a search engine and can find out his birth name if at all interested, I'll be using "Roger McGuinn" throughout this episode, and any other episodes that deal with him, at least until I find out for certain how he feels about the use of that name. McGuinn had grown up in Chicago, and become obsessed with the guitar after seeing Elvis on TV in 1956, but as rockabilly had waned in popularity he had moved into folk music, taking lessons from Frank Hamilton, a musician who had played in a group with Ramblin' Jack Elliot, and who would later go on to join a 1960s lineup of the Weavers. Hamilton taught McGuinn Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie songs, and taught him how to play the banjo. Hamilton also gave McGuinn an enthusiasm for the twelve-string guitar, an instrument that had been popular among folk musicians like Lead Belly, but which had largely fallen out of fashion. McGuinn became a regular in the audience at the Gate of Horn, a folk club owned by Albert Grossman, who would later become Bob Dylan's manager, and watched performers like Odetta and Josh White. He also built up his own small repertoire of songs by people like Ewan MacColl, which he would perform at coffee shops. At one of those coffee shops he was seen by a member of the Limeliters, one of the many Kingston Trio-alike groups that had come up during the folk boom. The Limeliters were after a guitarist to back them, and offered McGuinn the job. He turned it down at first, as he was still in school, but as it turned out the job was still open when he graduated, and so young McGuinn found himself straight out of school playing the Hollywood Bowl on a bill including Eartha Kitt. McGuinn only played with the Limeliters for six weeks, but in that short time he ended up playing on a top five album, as he was with them at the Ash Grove when they recorded their live album Tonight in Person: [Excerpt: The Limeliters, "Madeira, M'Dear"] After being sacked by the Limeliters, McGuinn spent a short while playing the clubs around LA, before being hired by another commercial folk group, the Chad Mitchell Trio, who like the Limeliters before them needed an accompanist. McGuinn wasn't particularly happy working with the trio, who in his telling regarded themselves as the stars and McGuinn very much as the hired help. He also didn't respect them as musicians, and thought they were little to do with folk music as he understood the term. Despite this, McGuinn stayed with the Chad Mitchell Trio for two and a half years, and played on two albums with them -- Mighty Day on Campus, and Live at the Bitter End: [Excerpt: The Chad Mitchell Trio, "The John Birch Society" ] McGuinn stuck it out with the Chad Mitchell trio until his twentieth birthday, and he was just about to accept an offer to join the New Christy Minstrels himself when he got a better one. Bobby Darin was in the audience at a Chad Mitchell Trio show, and approached McGuinn afterwards. Darin had started out in the music business as a songwriter, working with his friend Don Kirshner, but had had some success in the late fifties and early sixties as one of the interchangeable teen idol Bobbies who would appear on American Bandstand, with records like "Dream Lover" and "Splish Splash": [Excerpt: Bobby Darin, "Splish Splash"] But Darin had always been more musically adventurous than most of his contemporaries, and with his hit version of "Mack the Knife" he had successfully moved into the adult cabaret market. And like other singers breaking into that market, like Sam Cooke, he had decided to incorporate folk music into his act. He would do his big-band set, then there would be a fifteen-minute set of folk songs, backed just by guitar and stand-up bass. Darin wanted McGuinn to be his guitarist and backing vocalist for these folk sets, and offered to double what the Chad Mitchell Trio was paying him. Darin wasn't just impressed with McGuinn's musicianship -- he also liked his showmanship, which came mostly from McGuinn being bored and mildly disgusted with the music he was playing on stage. He would pull faces behind the Chad Mitchell Trio's back, the audience would laugh, and the trio would think the laughter was for them. For a while, McGuinn was happy playing with Darin, who he later talked about as being a mentor. But then Darin had some vocal problems and had to take some time off the road. However, he didn't drop McGuinn altogether -- rather, he gave him a job in the Brill Building, writing songs for Darin's publishing company. One of the songs he wrote there was "Beach Ball", co-written with Frank Gari. A knock-off of "Da Doo Ron Ron", retooled as a beach party song, the recording released as by the City Surfers apparently features McGuinn, Gari, Darin on drums and Terry Melcher on piano: [Excerpt: The City Surfers, "Beach Ball"] That wasn't a hit, but a cover version by Jimmy Hannan was a local hit in Melbourne, Australia: [Excerpt: Jimmy Hannan “Beach Ball”] That record is mostly notable for its backing vocalists, three brothers who would soon go on to become famous as the Bee Gees. Darin soon advised McGuinn that if he really wanted to become successful, he should become a rock and roll singer, and so McGuinn left Darin's employ and struck out as a solo performer, playing folk songs with a rock backbeat around Greenwich Village, before joining a Beatles tribute act playing clubs around New York. He was given further encouragement by Dion DiMucci, another late-fifties singer who like Darin was trying to make the transition to playing for adult crowds. DiMucci had been lead singer of Dion and the Belmonts, but had had more success as a solo act with records like "The Wanderer": [Excerpt: Dion, "The Wanderer"] Dion was insistent that McGuinn had something -- that he wasn't just imitating the Beatles, as he thought, but that he was doing something a little more original. Encouraged by Dion, McGuinn made his way west to LA, where he was playing the Troubadour supporting Roger Miller, when Gene Clark walked in. Clark saw McGuinn as a kindred spirit -- another folkie who'd had his musical world revolutionised by the Beatles -- and suggested that the two become a duo, performing in the style of Peter and Gordon, the British duo who'd recently had a big hit with "World Without Love", a song written for them by Paul McCartney: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "World Without Love"] The duo act didn't last long though, because they were soon joined by a third singer, David Crosby. Crosby had grown up in LA -- his father, Floyd Crosby, was an award-winning cinematographer, who had won an Oscar for his work on Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, and a Golden Globe for High Noon, but is now best known for his wonderfully lurid work on a whole series of films starring Vincent Price, including The Pit and the Pendulum, House of Usher, Tales of Terror, and Comedy of Terrors. Like many children of privilege, David had been a spoiled child, and he had taken to burglary for kicks, and had impregnated a schoolfriend and then run off rather than take responsibility for the child. Travelling across the US as a way to escape the consequences of his actions, he had spent some time hanging out with musicians like Fred Neil, Paul Kantner, and Travis Edmondson, the latter of whom had recorded a version of Crosby's first song, "Cross the Plains": [Excerpt: Travis Edmondson, "Cross the Plains"] Edmondson had also introduced Crosby to cannabis, and Crosby soon took to smoking everything he could, even once smoking aspirin to see if he could get high from that. When he'd run out of money, Crosby, like Clark and McGuinn, had joined an ultra-commercial folk group. In Crosby's case it was Les Baxter's Balladeers, put together by the bandleader who was better known for his exotica recordings. While Crosby was in the Balladeers, they were recorded for an album called "Jack Linkletter Presents A Folk Festival", a compilation of live recordings hosted by the host of Hootenanny: [Excerpt: Les Baxter's Balladeers, "Ride Up"] It's possible that Crosby got the job with Baxter through his father's connections -- Baxter did the music for many films made by Roger Corman, the producer and director of those Vincent Price films. Either way, Crosby didn't last long in the Balladeers. After he left the group, he started performing solo sets, playing folk music but with a jazz tinge to it -- Crosby was already interested in pushing the boundaries of what chords and melodies could be used in folk. Crosby didn't go down particularly well with the folk-club crowds, but he did impress one man. Jim Dickson had got into the music industry more or less by accident -- he had seen the comedian Lord Buckley, a white man who did satirical routines in a hipsterish argot that owed more than a little to Black slang, and had been impressed by him. He had recorded Buckley with his own money, and had put out Buckley's first album Hipsters, Flipsters and Finger Poppin' Daddies, Knock Me Your Lobes on his own label, before selling the rights of the album to Elektra records: [Excerpt: Lord Buckley, "Friends, Romans, Countrymen"] Dickson had gone on to become a freelance producer, often getting his records put out by Elektra, making both jazz records with people like Red Mitchell: [Excerpt: Red Mitchell, "Jim's Blues"] And country, folk, and bluegrass records, with people like the Dillards, whose first few albums he produced: [Excerpt: The Dillards, "Duelling Banjos"] Dickson had also recently started up a publishing company, Tickson Music, with a partner, and the first song they had published had been written by a friend of Crosby's, Dino Valenti, with whom at one point Crosby had shared a houseboat: [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Get Together"] Unfortunately for Dickson, before that song became a big hit for the Youngbloods, he had had to sell the rights to it, to the Kingston Trio's managers, as Valenti had been arrested and needed bail money, and it was the only way to raise the funds required. Dickson liked Crosby's performance, and became his manager. Dickson had access to a recording studio, and started recording Crosby singing traditional songs and songs to which Dickson owned the copyright -- at this point Crosby wasn't writing much, and so Dickson got him to record material like "Get Together": [Excerpt: David Crosby, "Get Together"] Unfortunately for Crosby, Dickson's initial idea, to get him signed to Warner Brothers records as a solo artist using those recordings, didn't work out. But Gene Clark had seen Crosby perform live and thought he was impressive. He told McGuinn about him, and the three men soon hit it off -- they were able to sing three-part harmony together as soon as they met. ( This is one characteristic of Crosby that acquaintances often note -- he's a natural harmony singer, and is able to fit his voice into pre-existing groups of other singers very easily, and make it sound natural). Crosby introduced the pair to Dickson, who had a brainwave. These were folkies, but they didn't really sing like folkies -- they'd grown up on rock and roll, and they were all listening to the Beatles now. There was a gap in the market, between the Beatles and Peter, Paul, and Mary, for something with harmonies, a soft sound, and a social conscience, but a rock and roll beat. Something that was intelligent, but still fun, and which could appeal to the screaming teenage girls and to the college kids who were listening to Dylan. In Crosby, McGuinn, and Clark, Dickson thought he had found the people who could do just that. The group named themselves The Jet Set -- a name thought up by McGuinn, who loved flying and everything about the air, and which they also thought gave them a certain sophistication -- and their first demo recording, with all three of them on twelve-string guitars, shows the direction they were going in. "The Only Girl I Adore", written by McGuinn and Clark, has what I can only assume is the group trying for Liverpool accents and failing miserably, and call and response and "yeah yeah" vocals that are clearly meant to evoke the Beatles. It actually does a remarkably good job of evoking some of Paul McCartney's melodic style -- but the rhythm guitar is pure Don Everly: [Excerpt: The Jet Set, "The Only Girl I Adore"] The Jet Set jettisoned their folk instruments for good after watching A Hard Day's Night -- Roger McGuinn traded in his banjo and got an electric twelve-string Rickenbacker just like the one that George Harrison played, and they went all-in on the British Invasion sound, copying the Beatles but also the Searchers, whose jangly sound was perfect for the Rickenbacker, and who had the same kind of solid harmony sound the Jet Set were going for. Of course, if you're going to try to sound like the Beatles and the Searchers, you need a drummer, and McGuinn and Crosby were both acquainted with a young man who had been born Michael Dick, but who had understandably changed his name to Michael Clarke. He was only eighteen, and wasn't a particularly good drummer, but he did have one huge advantage, which is that he looked exactly like Brian Jones. So the Jet Set now had a full lineup -- Roger McGuinn on lead guitar, Gene Clark on rhythm guitar, David Crosby was learning bass, and Michael Clarke on drums. But that wasn't the lineup on their first recordings. Crosby was finding it difficult to learn the bass, and Michael Clarke wasn't yet very proficient on drums, so for what became their first record Dickson decided to bring in a professional rhythm section, hiring two of the Wrecking Crew, bass player Ray Pohlman and drummer Earl Palmer, to back the three singers, with McGuinn and Gene Clark on guitars: [Excerpt: The Beefeaters, "Please Let Me Love You"] That was put out on a one-single deal with Elektra Records, and Jim Dickson made the deal under the condition that it couldn't be released under the group's real name -- he wanted to test what kind of potential they had without spoiling their reputation. So instead of being put out as by the Jet Set, it was put out as by the Beefeaters -- the kind of fake British name that a lot of American bands were using at the time, to try and make themselves seem like they might be British. The record did nothing, but nobody was expecting it to do much, so they weren't particularly bothered. And anyway, there was another problem to deal with. David Crosby had been finding it difficult to play bass and sing -- this was one reason that he only sang, and didn't play, on the Beefeaters single. His bass playing was wooden and rigid, and he wasn't getting better. So it was decided that Crosby would just sing, and not play anything at all. As a result, the group needed a new bass player, and Dickson knew someone who he thought would fit the bill, despite him not being a bass player. Chris Hillman had become a professional musician in his teens, playing mandolin in a bluegrass group called the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers, who made one album of bluegrass standards for sale through supermarkets: [Excerpt: The Scottsville Squirrel Barkers, "Shady Grove"] Hillman had moved on to a group called the Golden State Boys, which featured two brothers, Vern and Rex Gosdin. The Golden State Boys had been signed to a management contract by Dickson, who had renamed the group the Hillmen after their mandolin player -- Hillman was very much in the background in the group, and Dickson believed that he would be given a little more confidence if he was pushed to the front. The Hillmen had recorded one album, which wasn't released until many years later, and which had featured Hillman singing lead on the Bob Dylan song "When the Ship Comes In": [Excerpt: The Hillmen, "When the Ship Comes In"] Hillman had gone on from there to join a bluegrass group managed by Randy Sparks, the same person who was in charge of the New Christy Minstrels, and who specialised in putting out ultra-commercialised versions of roots music for pop audiences. But Dickson knew that Hillman didn't like playing with that group, and would be interested in doing something very different, so even though Hillman didn't play bass, Dickson invited him to join the group. There was almost another lineup change at this point, as well. McGuinn and Gene Clark were getting sick of David Crosby's attitude -- Crosby was the most technically knowledgeable musician in the group, but was at this point not much of a songwriter. He was not at all shy about pointing out what he considered flaws in the songs that McGuinn and Clark were writing, but he wasn't producing anything better himself. Eventually McGuinn and Clark decided to kick Crosby out of the group altogether, but they reconsidered when Dickson told them that if Crosby went he was going too. As far as Dickson was concerned, the group needed Crosby's vocals, and that was an end of the matter. Crosby was back in the group, and all was forgotten. But there was another problem related to Crosby, as the Jet Set found out when they played their first gig, an unannounced spot at the Troubadour. The group had perfected their image, with their Beatles suits and pose of studied cool, but Crosby had never performed without an instrument before. He spent the gig prancing around the stage, trying to act like a rock star, wiggling his bottom in what he thought was a suggestive manner. It wasn't, and the audience found it hilarious. Crosby, who took himself very seriously at this point in time, felt humiliated, and decided that he needed to get an instrument to play. Obviously he couldn't go back to playing bass, so he did the only thing that seemed possible -- he started undermining Gene Clark's confidence as a player, telling him he was playing behind the beat. Clark -- who was actually a perfectly reasonable rhythm player -- was non-confrontational by nature and believed Crosby's criticisms. Soon he *was* playing behind the beat, because his confidence had been shaken. Crosby took over the rhythm guitar role, and from that point on it would be Gene Clark, not David Crosby, who would have to go on stage without an instrument. The Jet Set were still not getting very many gigs, but they were constantly in the studio, working on material. The most notable song they recorded in this period is "You Showed Me", a song written by Gene Clark and McGuinn, which would not see release at the time but which would later become a hit for both the Turtles and the Lightning Seeds: [Excerpt: The Jet Set, "You Showed Me"] Clark in particular was flourishing as a songwriter, and becoming a genuine talent. But Jim Dickson thought that the song that had the best chance of being the Jet Set's breakout hit wasn't one that they were writing themselves, but one that he'd heard Bob Dylan perform in concert, but which Dylan had not yet released himself. In 1964, Dylan was writing far more material than he could reasonably record, even given the fact that his albums at this point often took little more time to record than to listen to. One song he'd written but not yet put out on an album was "Mr. Tambourine Man". Dylan had written the song in April 1964, and started performing it live as early as May, when he was on a UK tour that would later be memorialised in D.A. Pennebaker's film Don't Look Back. That performance was later released in 2014 for copyright extension purposes on vinyl, in a limited run of a hundred copies. I *believe* this recording is from that: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man (live Royal Festival Hall 1964)"] Jim Dickson remembered the song after seeing Dylan perform it live, and started pushing Witmark Music, Dylan's publishers, to send him a demo of the song. Dylan had recorded several demos, and the one that Witmark sent over was a version that was recorded with Ramblin' Jack Elliot singing harmony, recorded for Dylan's album Another Side of Bob Dylan, but left off the album as Elliot had been off key at points: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and Ramblin' Jack Elliot, "Mr. Tambourine Man" (from Bootleg Series vol 7)] There have been all sorts of hypotheses about what "Mr. Tambourine Man" is really about. Robert Shelton, for example, suspects the song is inspired by Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater. de Quincey uses a term for opium, "the dark idol", which is supposedly a translation of the Latin phrase "mater tenebrarum", which actually means "mother of darkness" (or mother of death or mother of gloom). Shelton believes that Dylan probably liked the sound of "mater tenebrarum" and turned it into "Mister Tambourine Man". Others have tried to find links to the Pied Piper of Hamelin, or claimed that Mr. Tambourine Man is actually Jesus. Dylan, on the other hand, had a much more prosaic explanation -- that Mr. Tambourine Man was a friend of his named Bruce Langhorne, who was prominent in the Greenwich Village folk scene. As well as being a guitarist, Langhorne was also a percussionist, and played a large Turkish frame drum, several feet in diameter, which looked and sounded quite like a massively oversized tambourine. Dylan got that image in his head and wrote a song about it. Sometimes a tambourine is just a tambourine. (Also, in a neat little coincidence, Dylan has acknowledged that he took the phrase “jingle jangle” from a routine by Jim Dickson's old client, Lord Buckley.) Dickson was convinced that "Mr. Tambourine Man" would be a massive hit, but the group didn't like it. Gene Clark, who was at this point the group's only lead singer, didn't think it fit his voice or had anything in common with the songs he was writing. Roger McGuinn was nervous about doing a Dylan song, because he'd played at the same Greenwich Village clubs as Dylan when both were starting out -- he had felt a rivalry with Dylan then, and wasn't entirely comfortable with inviting comparisons with someone who had grown so much as an artist while McGuinn was still very much at the beginning of his career. And David Crosby simply didn't think that such a long, wordy, song had a chance of being a hit. So Dickson started to manipulate the group. First, since Clark didn't like singing the song, he gave the lead to McGuinn. The song now had one champion in the band, and McGuinn was also a good choice as he had a hypothesis that there was a space for a vocal sound that split the difference between John Lennon and Bob Dylan, and was trying to make himself sound like that -- not realising that Lennon himself was busily working on making his voice more Dylanesque at the same time. But that still wasn't enough -- even after Dickson worked with the group to cut the song down so it was only two choruses and one verse, and so came in under two minutes, rather than the five minutes that Dylan's original version lasted, Crosby in particular was still agitating that the group should just drop the song. So Dickson decided to bring in Dylan himself. Dickson was acquainted with Dylan, and told him that he was managing a Beatles-style group who were doing one of Dylan's songs, and invited him to come along to a rehearsal. Dylan came, partly out of politeness, but also because Dylan was as aware as anyone of the commercial realities of the music business. Dylan was making most of his money at this point as a songwriter, from having other people perform his songs, and he was well aware that the Beatles had changed what hit records sounded like. If the kids were listening to beat groups instead of to Peter, Paul, and Mary, then Dylan's continued commercial success relied on him getting beat groups to perform his songs. So he agreed to come and hear Jim Dickson's beat group, and see what he thought of what they were doing with his song. Of course, once the group realised that Dylan was going to be coming to listen to them, they decided that they had better actually work on their arrangement of the song. They came up with something that featured McGuinn's Searchers-style twelve-string playing, the group's trademark harmonies, and a rather incongruous-sounding marching beat: [Excerpt: The Jet Set, "Mr. Tambourine Man (early version)"] Dylan heard their performance, and was impressed, telling them "You can DANCE to it!" Dylan went on a charm offensive with the group, winning all of them round except Crosby -- but even Crosby stopped arguing the point, realising he'd lost. "Mr. Tambourine Man" was now a regular part of their repertoire. But they still didn't have a record deal, until one came from an unexpected direction. The group were playing their demos to a local promoter, Benny Shapiro, when Shapiro's teenage daughter came in to the room, excited because the music sounded so much like the Beatles. Shapiro later joked about this to the great jazz trumpet player Miles Davis, and Davis told his record label about this new group, and suddenly they were being signed to Columbia Records. "Mr. Tambourine Man" was going to be their first single, but before that they had to do something about the group's name, as Columbia pointed out that there was already a British group called the Jet Set. The group discussed this over Thanksgiving turkey, and the fact that they were eating a bird reminded Gene Clark of a song by the group's friend Dino Valenti, "Birdses": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Birdses"] Clark suggested "The Birdses", but the group agreed it wasn't quite right -- though McGuinn, who was obsessed with aviation, did like the idea of a name that was associated with flight. Dickson's business partner Eddie Tickner suggested that they just call themselves "The Birds", but the group saw a problem with that, too -- "bird" being English slang for "girl", they worried that if they called themselves that people might think they were gay. So how about messing with the vowels, the same way the Beatles had changed the spelling of their name? They thought about Burds with a "u" and Berds with an "e", before McGuinn hit on Byrds with a y, which appealed to him because of Admiral Byrd, an explorer and pioneering aviator. They all agreed that the name was perfect -- it began with a "b", just like Beatles and Beach Boys, it was a pun like the Beatles, and it signified flight, which was important to McGuinn. As the group entered 1965, another major event happened in McGuinn's life -- the one that would lead to him changing his name. A while earlier, McGuinn had met a friend in Greenwich Village and had offered him a joint. The friend had refused, saying that he had something better than dope. McGuinn was intrigued to try this "something better" and went along with his friend to what turned out to be a religious meeting, of the new religious movement Subud, a group which believes, among other things, that there are seven levels of existence from gross matter to pure spirit, and which often encourages members to change their names. McGuinn was someone who was very much looking for meaning in his life -- around this time he also became a devotee of the self-help writer Norman Vincent Peale thanks to his mother sending him a copy of Peale's book on positive thinking -- and so he agreed to give the organisation a go. Subud involves a form of meditation called the laithan, and on his third attempt at doing this meditation, McGuinn had experienced what he believed was contact with God -- an intense hallucinatory experience which changed his life forever. McGuinn was initiated into Subud ten days before going into the studio to record "Mr. Tambourine Man", and according to his self-description, whatever Bob Dylan thought the song was about, he was singing to God when he sang it -- in earlier interviews he said he was singing to Allah, but now he's a born-again Christian he tends to use "God". The group had been assigned by CBS to Terry Melcher, mostly because he was the only staff producer they had on the West Coast who had any idea at all about rock and roll music, and Melcher immediately started to mould the group into his idea of what a pop group should be. For their first single, Melcher decided that he wasn't going to use the group, other than McGuinn, for anything other than vocals. Michael Clarke in particular was still a very shaky drummer (and would never be the best on his instrument) while Hillman and Crosby were adequate but not anything special on bass and guitar. Melcher knew that the group's sound depended on McGuinn's electric twelve-string sound, so he kept that, but other than that the Byrds' only contribution to the A-side was McGuinn, Crosby, and Clark on vocals. Everything else was supplied by members of the Wrecking Crew -- Jerry Cole on guitar, Larry Knechtel on bass, Leon Russell on electric piano, and Hal Blaine on drums: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Indeed, not everyone who performed at the session is even clearly audible on the recording. Both Gene Clark and Leon Russell were actually mixed out by Melcher -- both of them are audible, Clark more than Russell, but only because of leakage onto other people's microphones. The final arrangement was a mix of influences. McGuinn's twelve-string sound was clearly inspired by the Searchers, and the part he's playing is allegedly influenced by Bach, though I've never seen any noticeable resemblance to anything Bach ever wrote. The overall sound was an attempt to sound like the Beatles, while Melcher always said that the arrangement and feel of the track was inspired by "Don't Worry Baby" by the Beach Boys. This is particularly noticeable in the bass part -- compare the part on the Beach Boys record: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Worry Baby (instrumental mix with backing vocals)"] to the tag on the Byrds record: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Five days before the Byrds recorded their single, Bob Dylan had finally recorded his own version of the song, with the tambourine man himself, Bruce Langhorne, playing guitar, and it was released three weeks before the Byrds' version, as an album track on Dylan's Bringing it All Back Home: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Dylan's album would become one of the most important of his career, as we'll discuss in a couple of weeks, when we next look at Dylan. But it also provided an additional publicity boost for the Byrds, and as a result their record quickly went to number one in both the UK and America, becoming the first record of a Dylan song to go to number one on any chart. Dylan's place in the new pop order was now secured; the Byrds had shown that American artists could compete with the British Invasion on its own terms -- that the new wave of guitar bands still had a place for Americans; and folk-rock was soon identified as the next big commercial trend. And over the next few weeks we'll see how all those things played out throughout the mid sixties.

The fifth edition of the “Sitting In” miniseries features a new project by international touring Irish musician Dylan Walshe. Steeped in the traditions of folk, Irish, Blues, Singer-songwriter and roots music, Dylan has received wide acclaim from all over, including Dave King of Flogging Molly who has said that “The future of songwriting is safe in the hands of this man.” This episode features Dylan's new music podcast, The Stirring Foot, and the first 20 minutes of a conversation he had with none other than Ramblin' Jack Elliot, who Dylan first met at Tennessee's Muddy Roots Music Festival back in 2015. If you're not familiar with the legendary Ramblin' Jack, you should be. Now 90 years old, he's been described as the "son of Woody Guthrie & the father of Bob Dylan". They talked about trips to Ireland, Europe & the UK, The Clancy Brothers, Frank Zappa, Bob Dylan, Odetta, The Grateful Dead, Margaret Barry, Ewan MacColl, and Woody Guthrie. You can hear the entire show through the tags below, or by searching for “The Stirring Foot” wherever you get your podcasts. Enjoy! Follow on Instagram @dylanwalshe @AmericanSongcatcher Links: The Stirring Foot Dylan's Official Site Ramblin Jack Elliott's Official Site -- Support American Songcatcher! Join the Patreon Community for as little as $3 a month - https://www.Patreon.com/AmericanSongcatcher Send a one-time donation via: Venmo - https://www.venmo.com/AmericanSongcatcher PayPal - https://paypal.me/AmericanSongcatcher --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/americansongcatcher/support

On today's episode I talk to musician Peggy Seeger. Sister of Pete Seeger (the great-grandfather of USA folk revival) and partner of the late Ewan MacColl (theorist and practitioner of UK folk revival), she has carved a special niche for herself in both these countries. Trained in both classical and folk music, her experience spans 55 years of performing, travel and songwriting. A multi-instrumentalist (piano, guitar, 5-string banjo, autoharp, English concertina and Appalachian dulcimer), she is probably best known for her feminist songs and for The Ballad of Springhill, which is rapidly becoming regarded as a traditional song. Born in 1935, she regards herself as "seasoned and in my prime". She has made 23 solo recordings and has participated in over a hundred recordings with other artists. Her 24th album FIrst Farewell was just released on Red Grape Music, and she is playing a number of dates in the UK in May and October, please check her website for when those are happening. This is the website for Beginnings, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, follow me on Twitter.

For our fifth podcast series, writer and broadcaster Laura Barton looks to the theme of Rhythm, exploring the ways in which it is harnessed creatively to stir the senses, how it forms in us, how we carry it and where it can lead us. From the rhythmic pattern that propels you into a poem, the expressiveness of a musical composition to the cadence of speech on stage or sculpting intimate scenes on a film set. Join Laura as she interviews six guests who have each developed their own unique sense of rhythm in their work. The episodes will be released weekly throughout April and May and are presented by Laura Barton and produced by Geoff Bird. Music for this season was written and performed by Laura James. All views expressed in the podcast are the interviewees own and not necessarily those of TOAST. Peggy Seeger Kicking off our fifth series, Laura Barton joins Peggy Seeger at home in Oxfordshire where they spoke about where rhythm sits in Peggy’s own relationship with music, growing up a member of America’s famous folk family, the music that carried her to the UK, her partnership with Ewan MacColl, and why music can never be in the background of her life.

With Wall Street declaring that they want Covid over and done with by April Alex & Leila examine the states in the US reopening.  They reiterate the case against lockdowns, talk about the gigantic amount of bad science created in the last year and examine the "great reset" theory.   Outro music is "The Ballad of Accounting" - Written by Ewan Maccoll and performed by Maccoll and Peggy Seeger 

In this episode we invite James "Midge" Ure to talk us through his wonderfully convoluted career in a conversation that stretches from Slik to Visage — via the Rich Kids, the Blitz club and Live Aid — to his present-day Backstage Lockdown Club. With a special focus on the New Romantics, RBP's hosts ask Midge about Ultravox, whose classic Vienna album is 40 years old this week, and touch on the "manifesto" that Sounds' Betty Page put together with Spandau Ballet in that same year.Midge also pitches in on the passing of guitar-shredder extraordinaire Eddie Van Halen, whose sad loss prompts a general celebration of the pop-metal band that was Eddie's namesake. We also pay our respects to U.S. soul singer turned reggae ambassador Johnny Nash and to country-MOR singer-songwriter Mac ('In The Ghetto') Davis. The week's new audio interview being Steven Daly's 1998 conversation with R&B mega diva Mariah Carey, we hear two clips from this very entertaining chinwag ... and then ponder the pros and cons of Carey's career and oeuvre. Mark then walks and talks us through his highlights of the week's new intake of library articles , including seminal pieces on Otis Redding (1966), Ewan MacColl (1975) and Kraftwerk (1977), while Jasper rounds matters off with remarks on reviews of Ricky Martin, Jack White... and Midge Ure live in February this year!Many thanks to special guest Midge Ure. Join Midge's Backstage Lockdown Club at www.patreon.com/midgeure, and check out the deluxe 40th anniversary version of Ultravox's Vienna.Pieces discussed: Visage, Spandau Ballet, New Romantics, Van Halen @ Whisky a Go Go, Van Halen, Van Halener, Van Halenest, Johnny Nash, Mac Davis, Bunny "Striker" Lee, Mariah Carey audio, Otis Redding, Jackson Five, Ewan MacColl, Kraftwerk, ABC, Radiohead, Natalie Imbruglia, Dis-Education of Rock 'n' Roll, Ricky Martin, Lester Bangs, Jack White and Midge Ure.This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts

In this episode we invite James "Midge" Ure to talk us through his wonderfully convoluted career in a conversation that stretches from Slik to Visage — via the Rich Kids, the Blitz club and Live Aid — to his present-day Backstage Lockdown Club. With a special focus on the New Romantics, RBP's hosts ask Midge about Ultravox, whose classic Vienna album is 40 years old this week, and touch on the "manifesto" that Sounds' Betty Page put together with Spandau Ballet in that same year.Midge also pitches in on the passing of guitar-shredder extraordinaire Eddie Van Halen, whose sad loss prompts a general celebration of the pop-metal band that was Eddie's namesake. We also pay our respects to U.S. soul singer turned reggae ambassador Johnny Nash and to country-MOR singer-songwriter Mac ('In The Ghetto') Davis. The week's new audio interview being Steven Daly's 1998 conversation with R&B mega diva Mariah Carey, we hear two clips from this very entertaining chinwag ... and then ponder the pros and cons of Carey's career and oeuvre. Mark then walks and talks us through his highlights of the week's new intake of library articles , including seminal pieces on Otis Redding (1966), Ewan MacColl (1975) and Kraftwerk (1977), while Jasper rounds matters off with remarks on reviews of Ricky Martin, Jack White... and Midge Ure live in February this year!Many thanks to special guest Midge Ure. Join Midge's Backstage Lockdown Club at www.patreon.com/midgeure, and check out the deluxe 40th anniversary version of Ultravox's Vienna.Pieces discussed: Visage, Spandau Ballet, New Romantics, Van Halen @ Whisky a Go Go, Van Halen, Van Halener, Van Halenest, Johnny Nash, Mac Davis, Bunny "Striker" Lee, Mariah Carey audio, Otis Redding, Jackson Five, Ewan MacColl, Kraftwerk, ABC, Radiohead, Natalie Imbruglia, Dis-Education of Rock 'n' Roll, Ricky Martin, Lester Bangs, Jack White and Midge Ure.This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts

Welcome to the first episode "Of Song and Bone," a podcast exploring ancestral arts and people's history through song, story, and poetry. In this episode, we explore the old Scottish Ballad "The Elfin Knight" and its relationship to other folkloric and mythic stories from Northwest Europe. Let's dive into tales of clever lasses, riddle-weaving giants, and otherworldly heroes. Features the old recording of "The Elfin Knight" by Ewan Maccoll. Learn more at: ofsongandbone.wordpress.com

When folklorist Jean Freedman first met Peggy Seeger in 1979, Freedman was an undergraduate on her junior year abroad in London, while her American compatriot had been living in the UK for two decades. Their encounter took place in the Singers' Club, a folk music venue that Seeger and her husband Ewan MacColl founded in the early 1960s and to which Freedman returned many times during her London sojourn. After Freedman returned to the States, the pair kept in touch for a while but their contact became increasingly sporadic. However, it began again in earnest when the folklorist emailed Seeger to check some facts for a writing assignment. During their subsequent exchange, Seeger asked if Freedman might know of anyone who would be interested in writing her biography. Immediately, Freedman volunteered herself. Eight years, many interviews, and much text-based research later, Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics (University of Illinois Press, 2017) is the result. As the book's subtitle suggests, Freedman covers multiple aspects of her subject's rich story, including Seeger's upbringing within a privileged musical family; her relationship with the aforementioned leftwing folksinger and songwriter, actor and playwright Ewan MacColl; her involvement in the production of the groundbreaking BBC Radio Ballads; her musical endeavors, many of which were collaborative; her involvement in the establishment of various initiatives such as the Critics Group, a key aim of which was to help young singers perform folk material in an appropriate manner; and her political activism. Freedman also writes about Seeger's return to America in the early 1990s following MacColl's death, then her subsequent relocation to Britain in 2010 where she continues to live and be astonishingly active. Seeger's most recent album, Everything Changes, was released in 2014, and when this New Books in Folklore interview with Freedman was recorded in March 2018, she already had another one in the works. Freedman's Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics is the first full length study of an important cultural figure and has been very well received since its publication last year. A recent review in the Journal of Folklore Research described the book as offering a comprehensive overview of Peggy Seeger's life along with an absorbing history of the folk music revival. It also praises Freedman's prose for being as approachable and entertaining as Seeger's lyrics and informal, intimate performance style. Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip Dodd talks to one of the icons of what used to be called the counter-culture, Peggy Seeger. Another chance to hear a conversation recorded earlier this year before Peggy Seeger joins the line up of guests performing at Sage Gateshead over Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival this weekend. Peggy Seeger's voice and career are emblematic of a life lived against the establishment grain. Born in New York in 1935 she first made her name as one of the leaders of the British Folk Revival, and with her partner Ewan MacColl, she helped to create one of the most innovative radio series of the last fifty years, the Radio Ballads, which blended original music, sound effects, and first-person interviews. In the 1950s she had her US passport withdrawn following a visit to China and chose to stay in Europe. It wasn't wholly unexpected. She had long aligned herself with the radical left and was an outspoken champion of feminism - one of her most famous songs being "I'm Gonna Be an Engineer". When official US attitudes softened after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1994 she returned to live in the States, but recently moved back to the United Kingdom and is still recording and releasing albums, including her latest CD Everything Changes.

Peggy Seeger has a wealth of recordings from the 50+ years she's been performing, on her own, with her husband, Ewan MacColl, with her brothers, Mike & Pete Seeger, and other folks. Traditional folk music is where she started from and she has enriched them with her own songs on feminist, peace and other themes.