Podcast appearances and mentions of Norman Smith

Every year, a number of snowy owls (aka Arctic owls) find their way to an unlikely haven: Boston Logan International Airport. Owl expert Norman Smith has been leading the way to study these birds and figure out why they love to land at one of the busiest airports in the country.

Musician, producer, engineer, and author Jerry Hammack is a first-time guest. He's on the show to talk about his new book The Beatles' Recording Techniques. Step back in time to the iconic EMI Recording Studios in London during the revolutionary 60s where legendary music acts like The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and countless others crafted their timeless sound.The Beatles' Recording Techniques was meticulously researched by Hammack, and offers an intimate understanding of the innovative recording techniques that producer George Martin and groundbreaking engineers Norman Smith, Geoff Emerick, Ken Scott, and Glyn Johns pioneered. A deep dive into their creative process, this is a fascinating read for fans of The Beatles and music. And if you are a musician, producer, or engineer interested in harnessing the same methodologies behind the Beatles music to shape your own musical masterpieces, this is the book for you.  Jerry is about to take us back in time and behind the boards for so many Beatles classics. This was a fascinating conversation. Purchase a copy of The Beatles' Recording TechniquesVisit Jerry Hammack's websiteVisit The Beatles Recording Techniques websiteVisit The Beatles Recording Reference Manuals website Playlist Of Beatles Songs Covered In This Episode---------- BookedOnRock.com The Booked On Rock YouTube Channel Follow The Booked On Rock with Eric Senich:FACEBOOKINSTAGRAMTIKTOKX Find Your Nearest Independent Bookstore Contact The Booked On Rock Podcast: thebookedonrockpodcast@gmail.com The Booked On Rock Music: “Whoosh” by Crowander / “Last Train North” & “No Mercy” by TrackTribe

Today at the Table, Melissa and Amanda are joined by podcaster and missionary Norman Smith. You won't want to miss this amazing discussion about Norman's Run with Horses Podcast, as well as the struggles and triumphs of living full time in Japan. The insight Norman brings to the table on sharing the gospel and how the church in America compares to those elsewhere is amazing!You can learn more about Norman and listen to Run with Horses at his website:https://runwithhorses.netThank you for joining Melissa and Amanda at the Table! This has been a production of Asha Media. Please share the Tablecast with other women by leaving us a rating on your listening platform. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us share it more with other women just like you by leaving us a rating!

This week we paddle the two-man kayak of curiosity across the rock and roll seafront and make a few stops on the way, among them … … “the future is always in the past”. … the pure theatre of the E Street Band and its cast of characters – “our lives are repaired by the fact that they're still together”. … the growing appeal of Country & Western - and even “shronking” jazz – as you get older. … Bless the Barn, Featherwash and Franny Wisp, Portlandia's low-volume crowd-pleasers. … the ‘Barry' TV series (starring Bill Hader): that rare beast, a contract killer who's a nice bloke. … the 60th anniversary of the recording of She Loves You, why engineer Norman Smith predicted a flop and the fan break-in at Abbey Road that energised the session. … is the success of Nick Drake partly an antidote to the age of technology? … how our concept of ‘old' has changed: McCartney at Live Aid was a coffin-dodging 43, same age as Kelis at Glastonbury. … is cricket now the drunkest spectator sport? And which is the greater agony, seeing England doing badly when you're there or watching at home with the commentary? … and the Elton John Band have been together 53 years – but that's only six years longer than Madness. … plus birthday guests Andrew Stocks and Patrick Cleasby and a roll-call of new patreon supporters.Grab your EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal by going to https://nordvpn.com/yourear to get up a Huge Discount off your NordVPN Plan + 4 months for free! It's completely risk free with Nord's 30 day money-back guarantee!Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free! - access to all of our content!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we paddle the two-man kayak of curiosity across the rock and roll seafront and make a few stops on the way, among them … … “the future is always in the past”. … the pure theatre of the E Street Band and its cast of characters – “our lives are repaired by the fact that they're still together”. … the growing appeal of Country & Western - and even “shronking” jazz – as you get older. … Bless the Barn, Featherwash and Franny Wisp, Portlandia's low-volume crowd-pleasers. … the ‘Barry' TV series (starring Bill Hader): that rare beast, a contract killer who's a nice bloke. … the 60th anniversary of the recording of She Loves You, why engineer Norman Smith predicted a flop and the fan break-in at Abbey Road that energised the session. … is the success of Nick Drake partly an antidote to the age of technology? … how our concept of ‘old' has changed: McCartney at Live Aid was a coffin-dodging 43, same age as Kelis at Glastonbury. … is cricket now the drunkest spectator sport? And which is the greater agony, seeing England doing badly when you're there or watching at home with the commentary? … and the Elton John Band have been together 53 years – but that's only six years longer than Madness. … plus birthday guests Andrew Stocks and Patrick Cleasby and a roll-call of new patreon supporters.Grab your EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal by going to https://nordvpn.com/yourear to get up a Huge Discount off your NordVPN Plan + 4 months for free! It's completely risk free with Nord's 30 day money-back guarantee!Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free! - access to all of our content!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we paddle the two-man kayak of curiosity across the rock and roll seafront and make a few stops on the way, among them … … “the future is always in the past”. … the pure theatre of the E Street Band and its cast of characters – “our lives are repaired by the fact that they're still together”. … the growing appeal of Country & Western - and even “shronking” jazz – as you get older. … Bless the Barn, Featherwash and Franny Wisp, Portlandia's low-volume crowd-pleasers. … the ‘Barry' TV series (starring Bill Hader): that rare beast, a contract killer who's a nice bloke. … the 60th anniversary of the recording of She Loves You, why engineer Norman Smith predicted a flop and the fan break-in at Abbey Road that energised the session. … is the success of Nick Drake partly an antidote to the age of technology? … how our concept of ‘old' has changed: McCartney at Live Aid was a coffin-dodging 43, same age as Kelis at Glastonbury. … is cricket now the drunkest spectator sport? And which is the greater agony, seeing England doing badly when you're there or watching at home with the commentary? … and the Elton John Band have been together 53 years – but that's only six years longer than Madness. … plus birthday guests Andrew Stocks and Patrick Cleasby and a roll-call of new patreon supporters.Grab your EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal by going to https://nordvpn.com/yourear to get up a Huge Discount off your NordVPN Plan + 4 months for free! It's completely risk free with Nord's 30 day money-back guarantee!Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free! - access to all of our content!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Are you using your fiction platform for Kingdom causes? Our guest shares how using fiction for kingdom causes can improve our writing.Welcome to Your Best Writing Life, an extension of the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference held in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mts of NC. I'm your host Linda Goldfarb. I'm so glad you're listening in. During this episode, you'll learn how to use Fiction as a platform for Kingdom causes and improve your writing.My industry expert is Heather Norman Smith - Heather Norman Smith is an author of Christian Fiction set in her home state of North Carolina. Her goal is to entertain and encourage readers while illuminating the redemptive love of God. She lives just outside Winston-Salem, NC, with her husband, their four children, and several pets.Today we discuss:What do you mean by “Kingdom causes”?In addition to the gospel, what are some Biblical themes Fiction writers utilize to build a story? Biblical references: James 1:27, Psalm 139:13-14, Hebrews 13:3, Proverbs 19:37How does focusing on spiritual themes help you as a writer?What advice do you have for a Fiction writer who gets stuck in their writing?How do you incorporate spiritual themes organically into a story?LINKSHeather Norman SmithTimeout for Jesus DownloadSongs for Sunday BookIf you enjoy Your Best Writing Life's content- consider a monthly donation through Patreon. Support Your Best Writing Life podcast.About your host - Linda GoldfarbBesides hosting Your Best Writing Life, Linda Goldfarb is a multi-published award-winning author, audiobook narrator, international speaker, board-certified Christian life coach, co-owner, co-founder of the LINKED® Personality System, and co-author of the LINKED® Quick Guide to Personality series. Linda also hosts the Staying REAL About Faith & Family podcast - Check it out!Visit Your Best Writing Life website.Join our Facebook group, Your Best Writing LifeAbout your host - Linda GoldfarbSponsored by Access More!

Gabriel Harber talks with storm chasers about the events of 5-6-23! The first week of May was unusually quiet, but that all changed on Saturday night. Cameron Nixon and Norman Smith recount their run-in with a nocturnal Missouri wedge, while Alex Resel struck unlikely gold in South Dakota! Follow Cameron Nixon on Twitter. Follow Norman […] The post 5-6-23 Chaser Recap: Missouri and South Dakota Produce appeared first on Fear The Beard Media.

Thanks for listening to Simply for Women.  This show is for that mom who knows the chaos of life, that daughter who knows the challenges of the day, and for those women who want to deepen their faith. God invites us to take Him off our to-do list and to simply be - to simply be with him. www.Jennifer-Jackson.org Learn more about the host, Jennifer Jackson Invite Jennifer to speak at your event Healing Prayer: Shower of Power (free download) Simply for Women online store (books, merch)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to Simply for Women.  This show is for that mom who knows the chaos of life, that daughter who knows the challenges of the day, and for those women who want to deepen their faith. God invites us to take Him off our to-do list and to simply be - to simply be with him. www.Jennifer-Jackson.org Learn more about the host, Jennifer Jackson Invite Jennifer to speak at your event Healing Prayer: Shower of Power (free download) Simply for Women online store (books, merch)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.

Gabriel Harber interviews storm chaser Norman Smith on the Chaser Chat storm chasing podcast! Podcast with Storm Chaser Nicholas Isabella Follow Norman on Twitter. Subscribe to his YouTube channel. More About This Tornado and Storm Chasing Podcast Gabriel Harber interviews members of the storm chasing community. Listen to more episodes of the Chaser Chat storm […] The post Interview with Storm Chaser Norman Smith appeared first on Fear The Beard Media.

Norman Smith ran away from his home on May 12 and was spotted by family or associates in Vancouver up until May 19. https://loom.ly/iCCTqDc #VancouverPoliceDepartment #VPD #MissingTeen #NormanSmith #MissingVancouverTeen #911 #SeachForMissingTeen #VancouverWa #ClarkCountyWa #ClarkCountyNews #ClarkCountyToday

Very unique edition of the Last Christian Radio Show includes an Exclusive interview with Norman Smith. Mr. Smith along with his family serve as Missionaries in Japan, And have done so for the Last 20 years. Norman tells us about his Podcast "Run With Horses". A Podcast which runs every Monday, Wednesday and Friday each week and now being extending to 3 Radio Shows each Week on Revelation Radio (www.revelationradio.net) also every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7:00pm Central. The Saturday Jun11th Radio Show also includes excerpts from the 911 call made at the time of the attempted Assassination attempt on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. And how the News media and certain politicians in Washington DC have virtually ignored that criminal attempt. As well as how they continue their politically motivated attempts to distract the American Public from the real issues facing the United States. Remember, every edition of the Last Christian Radio Show may be heard on both Evangelism Radio and KRRB Revelation Radio (www.revelaationradio.net) at 7:30 pm every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. And at that same time on virtually every Podcast Platform and at www.lastchristian.net.

Very unique edition of the Last Christian Radio Show includes an Exclusive interview with Norman Smith. Mr. Smith along with his family serve as Missionaries in Japan, And have done so for the Last 20 years. Norman tells us about his Podcast "Run With Horses". A Podcast which runs every Monday, Wednesday and Friday each week and now being extending to 3 Radio Shows each Week on Revelation Radio (www.revelationradio.net) also every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7:00pm Central. The Saturday Jun11th Radio Show also includes excerpts from the 911 call made at the time of the attempted Assassination attempt on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. And how the News media and certain politicians in Washington DC have virtually ignored that criminal attempt. As well as how they continue their politically motivated attempts to distract the American Public from the real issues facing the United States. Remember, every edition of the Last Christian Radio Show may be heard on both Evangelism Radio and KRRB Revelation Radio (www.revelaationradio.net) at 7:30 pm every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. And at that same time on virtually every Podcast Platform and at www.lastchristian.net.

We discover ways of adding spice to your travels by undertaking special or unusual quests. The "route of the dovecotes" in southern France, the grounded solar system in Zagreb and the Shakespeare trail in Stratford-upon-Avon are all on the itinerary. Thanks to Norman Smith, Tim Neale and Gary Knapper for taking part.

A Christadelphian Production Most of these titles are available as videos from our site https://christadelphianvideo.org/latest-posts/ Follow us on our dedicated Facebook pages www.facebook.com/BibleTruthandProphecy/ https://www.facebook.com/OpenBibles or our group https://www.facebook.com/groups/ChristadelphianVideos/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheChristadelphianWatchman/ Or our website https://christadelphianvideo.org/ Sign up for our periodical newsletter here... http://eepurl.com/bXWRqn Note: Bad language and comments with links to other videos or websites will be removed. Download our 'Free' Bible APP - 'KeyToThe Bible' for i-phone or Android http://thetruthonline.org/bible-app/ Please share on your timelines and with anyone /ecclesial pages etc that you believe may benefit from this material. Other links to share; https://cdvideo.org/podcast https://anchor.fm/Christadelphians-Talk Watch / read / Listen to other thoughts for the day on our site here https://christadelphianvideo.org/tftd/ #Christadelphianvideo #christadelphianstalk #Christadelphians #open bible #Gospel truth --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/christadelphians-talk/message

The co-hosts continue their interview with David Norman Smith (https://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/episode-36-trumps-base-interview-with-david-norman-smith-part-1), a sociologist at the University of Kansas, about his research into the characteristics of Trump supporters and why they support Trump. Smith discusses questions about authoritarian attitudes that he contributed to a major voter survey, links between prejudice and desire for authoritarian leadership, and how Trump supporters’ attitudes compare to those of other voters. He and the co-costs also explore different views of economic policy within Trump’s base and whether support for Trump is due to “economic anxiety.” Much of the discussion deals with the “74.2 Million Question”––why is support for Trump so unshakeable?––and what to do in light of that. Smith criticizes as utopian the presumption that mass support for Trump is rooted in ignorance and can thus be countered by fact-based appeals. The episode’s current-events segment is about Tommy Craggs’ recent discussion (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/12/whats-the-matter-with-cultural-politics/) of Stanley Greenberg’s famous focus groups (https://democracycorps.com/wp-content/uploads/1996/03/Middle-Class-Dreams-Chapter-2-Macomb-in-the-American-Mind.pdf) of “ Reagan Democrats” in Macomb County, Michigan, which offers further evidence that Trumpism was a pre-existing condition. * ~ * ~ * ~ * Radio Free Humanity is a podcast covering news, politics and philosophy from a Marxist-Humanist perspective. It is co-hosted by Brendan Cooney and Andrew Kliman. We intend to release new episodes every two weeks. Radio Free Humanity is sponsored by Marxist-Humanist Initiative (MHI), but the views expressed by the co-hosts and guests of Radio Free Humanity are their own. They do not necessarily reflect the views and positions of MHI. We welcome and encourage listeners’ comments, posted on this episode’s page of the MHI website. Please visit MHI’s website for information on philosophy & organization, Marxist-Humanist archives, and its online publication, “With Sober Senses”: https://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/

The co-hosts interview David Norman Smith, a sociologist at the University of Kansas, about his research into the characteristics of Trump supporters and why they support Trump. Smith discusses questions about authoritarian attitudes that he contributed to a major voter survey, links between prejudice and desire for authoritarian leadership, and how Trump supporters’ attitudes compare to those of other voters. He and the co-costs also explore different views of economic policy within Trump’s base and whether support for Trump is due to “economic anxiety.” Much of the discussion deals with the “74.2 Million Question”––why is support for Trump so unshakeable?––and what to do in light of that. Smith criticizes as utopian the presumption that mass support for Trump is rooted in ignorance and can thus be countered by fact-based appeals. Owing to the length and wide-ranging nature of the interview, we have split it into two parts. Part 2 will air in the near future. The episode’s current-events segment is about how racial and social inequality are distorting access to COVID-19 vaccinations, nationally and internationally, and how this hinders the fight against the virus. * ~ * ~ * ~ * Radio Free Humanity is a podcast covering news, politics and philosophy from a Marxist-Humanist perspective. It is co-hosted by Brendan Cooney and Andrew Kliman. We intend to release new episodes every two weeks. Radio Free Humanity is sponsored by Marxist-Humanist Initiative (MHI), but the views expressed by the co-hosts and guests of Radio Free Humanity are their own. They do not necessarily reflect the views and positions of MHI. We welcome and encourage listeners’ comments, posted on this episode’s page of the MHI website. Please visit MHI’s website for information on philosophy & organization, Marxist-Humanist archives, and its online publication, “With Sober Senses”: https://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/

This week's episode looks at "She Loves You", the Beatles in 1963, and the start of Beatlemania in the UK. 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 "Glad All Over" by the Dave Clark Five. 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/ ----more---- Resources As usual, I have created a Mixcloud playlist containing every song heard in this episode (except for the excerpt of a Beatles audience screaming, and the recording of me singing, because nobody needs those.) While there are many books on the Beatles, and I have read dozens of them,  All These Years Vol 1: Tune In by Mark Lewisohn is simply the *only* book worth reading on the Beatles' career up to the end of 1962. It is the most detailed, most accurate, biography imaginable, and the gold standard by which all other biographies of musicians should be measured. I only wish volumes two and three were available already so I could not expect my future episodes on the Beatles to be obsolete when they do come out. There are two versions of the book -- a nine-hundred page mass-market version and a 1700-page expanded edition. I recommend the latter.  I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them, but the ones I specifically referred to while writing this episode, other than Tune In, were: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology.   "She Loves You" can be found on Past Masters, a 2-CD compilation of the Beatles' non-album tracks that includes the majority of their singles and B-sides.    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 look at a record that is one of the most crucial turning points in the history of rock music, and of popular culture as a whole, a record that took the Beatles from being a very popular pop group to being the biggest band in Britain -- and soon to be the world. We're going to look at "She Loves You" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Loves You"] When we left the Beatles, they had just released their first single, and seen it make the top twenty -- though we have, of course, seen them pop up in other people's stories in the course of our narrative, and we've seen how Lennon and McCartney wrote a hit for the Rolling Stones. But while we've been looking the other way, the Beatles had become the biggest band in Britain. Even before "Love Me Do" had been released, George Martin had realised that the Beatles had more potential than he had initially thought. He knew "Love Me Do" would be only a minor hit, but he didn't mind that -- over the sessions at which he'd worked with the group, he'd come to realise that they had real talent, and more than that, they had real charisma.  The Beatles' second single was to be their real breakthrough. "Please Please Me" was a song that had largely been written by John, and which had two very different musical inspirations. The first was a song originally made famous by Bing Crosby in 1932, "Please": [Excerpt: Bing Crosby, "Please"] Lennon had always been fascinated by the pun in the opening line -- the play on the word "please" -- and wanted to do something similar himself. The other influence is less obvious in the finished record, but makes sense once you realise it. A lot of Roy Orbison's records have a slow build up with a leap into falsetto, like "Crying": [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Crying"] Now, I'm going to have to do something I'm a little uncomfortable with here, and which I've honestly been dreading since the start of this project two years ago -- to demonstrate the similarity between "Please Please Me" and an Orbison song, I'm going to have to actually sing. I have a terrible voice and appalling pitch, and I could easily win an award for "person who has the least vocal resemblance to Roy Orbison of anyone in existence", so this will not be a pleasant sound, but it will hopefully give you some idea of how Lennon was thinking when he was writing "Please Please Me": [Excerpt: Me singing "Please Please Me"] I'm sorry you had to hear that, and I hope we can all move past it together. I promise that won't be a regular feature of the podcast. But I hope it gets the basic idea across, of how the song that's so familiar now could have easily been inspired by Orbison. Lennon had played that to George Martin very early on, but Martin had been unimpressed, thinking it a dirge. At Martin's suggestion, they took the song at a much faster tempo, and they rearranged the song so that instead of Lennon singing it solo, he and McCartney sang it as a duo with Everly Brothers style harmonies. They also changed the ascending "come on" section to be a call and response, like many of the Black vocal groups the Beatles were so influenced by, and by taking elements from a variety of sources they changed what had been a derivative piece into something totally original. For good measure, they overdubbed some harmonica from Lennon, to provide some sonic continuity with their earlier single. The result was a very obvious hit: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Please Please Me"] After they'd finished recording that, George Martin said to them, "Gentlemen, you've just made your first number one" -- there are a number of slight variations of the wording depending on when Martin was telling the story, but it was something very close to that. Now that the Beatles had recorded something that really displayed their talents, they were clearly on their way to becoming very big, and it was at this point that George Martin brought in the final part of the team that would lead to that success; someone who would work closely with himself, the Beatles, and Brian Epstein. Dick James was someone who had himself had been a successful performer -- he's most famous now for having recorded the theme tune for the 1950s Robin Hood TV series: [Excerpt: Dick James, "Robin Hood"] That record had been produced by George Martin, as had several of James' other records, but James had recently retired from singing -- in part because he had gone prematurely bald, and didn't look right -- and had set up his own publishing company. George Martin had no great love for the people at Ardmore and Beechwood -- despite them having been the ones who had brought the Beatles to him -- and so he suggested to Brian Epstein that rather than continue with Ardmore and Beechwood, the group's next single should be published by Dick James. In particular, he owed James a favour, because James had passed him "How Do You Do It?", and Martin hadn't yet been able to get that recorded, and he thought that giving him the publishing for another guaranteed hit would possibly make up for that, though he still intended to get "How Do You Do It?" recorded by someone. Epstein had been unsure about this at first -- Epstein was a man who put a lot of stock in loyalty, but he ended up believing that Ardmore and Beechwood had done nothing to promote "Love Me Do" -- he possibly never realised that in fact it was them who were responsible for the record having come out at all, and that they'd had a great deal to do with its chart success. He ended up having a meeting with James, who was enthused by "Please Please Me", and wanted the song. Epstein told him he could have it, if he could prove he would be more effective at promoting the song than Ardmore and Beechwood had been with "Love Me Do". James picked up the telephone and called the producer of Thank Your Lucky Stars, one of the most popular music programmes on TV, and got the group booked for the show. He had the publishing rights. "Please Please Me" and its B-side "Ask Me Why" were published by Dick James Music, but after that point, any songs written by the Beatles for the next few years were published by a new company, Northern Songs. The business arrangements behind this have come in for some unfair criticism over the years, because Lennon and McCartney have later said that they were under the impression that they owned the company outright, but in fact they owned forty percent of the company, with Epstein owning ten percent, and the remaining fifty percent owned by Dick James and his business partner Charles Silver.  Obviously it's impossible to know what Lennon and McCartney were told about Northern Songs, and whether they were misled, but at the time this was very far from a bad deal. Most songwriters, even those with far more hits under their belt at the time, wrote for publishing companies owned by other people -- it was almost unheard of for them to even have a share in their own company. And at this time, it was still normal for publishing companies to actually have to work for their money, to push songs and get cover versions of them from established artists. Obviously the Beatles would change all that, and after them the job of a publisher became almost nonexistent, but nobody could have predicted how much the entire world of music was about to change, and so the deal that Lennon and McCartney got was an astonishingly good one for the time. This is something that's also true of a lot of the business decisions that Epstein made for the group early on. The Beatles earned incalculably less than they would have if they'd got the kind of contracts that people who started even a year or so after them got -- but their contracts were still vastly superior to anything that other performers in British music at the time were getting. Remember that Larry Parnes' teen idols were on a fixed salary, as were, for example, all the members of the Dave Clark Five except Clark himself, and you can see that the assumptions that apply when you look at later acts don't apply here. Either way, Dick James now had the publishing of what became the Beatles' first number one: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Please Please Me"] At least, it became the Beatles' first number one as far as anyone paying attention in 1963 was concerned. But it's not their first number one according to any modern reference. These days, the British charts are compiled by a company called the Official Charts Company. That company started, under another name, in 1969, and is run by a consortium of record companies and retailers. If you see anywhere referring to "the UK charts" after 1969, that's always what they're referring to. In 1963, though, there were multiple singles charts in Britain, published by different magazines, and no single standard music-industry one. "Please Please Me" went to number one in the charts published by the NME and Melody Maker, two general-interest magazines whose charts were regarded by most people at the time as "the real charts", and which had huge audiences. However, it only made number two in the chart published by Record Retailer, a smaller magazine aimed at music industry professionals and the trade, rather than at the wider public. However, because the Official Charts Company is an industry body, the people who ran it were the people Record Retailer was aimed at, and so when they provide lists of historical charts, they use the Record Retailer one for the period from 1960 through 69 (they use the NME chart for 1952 through 59). So retroactively, "Please Please Me" does not appear as a number one in the history books, but as far as anyone at the time was concerned, it was. The record that kept "Please Please Me" off the top on the Record Retailer charts was "The Wayward Wind" by Frank Ifield: [Excerpt: Frank Ifield, "The Wayward "Wind"] Oddly, Ifield would himself record a version of "Please", the song that had inspired "Please Please Me", the next year: [Excerpt: Frank Ifield, "Please"] As a result of the success of "Please Please Me", the group were quickly brought into the studio to record an album. George Martin had originally intended to make that a live album, recorded at the Cavern, but having visited it he decided that possibly the huge amounts of condensation dripping from the ceiling might not be a good idea to mix with EMI's expensive electronic equipment. So instead, as we talked about briefly a couple of months back, the group came into Abbey Road on a rare day off from a package tour they were on, and recorded ten more songs that would, with the A- and B-sides of their first two singles, round out an album. Those tracks were a mixture of six songs that they performed regularly as part of their normal set -- covers of songs by the Cookies, the Shirelles, and Arthur Alexander, plus "Twist and Shout" and the soft pop ballad "A Taste of Honey", all of which they'd performed often enough that they could turn out creditable performances even though they all had colds, and Lennon especially was definitely the worse for wear (you can hear this in some of his vocals -- his nose is particularly congested on "There's a Place"), plus four more  recent Lennon and McCartney originals. By the time that first album came out, Lennon and McCartney had also started expanding their songwriting ambitions, offering songs to other performers. This had always been something that McCartney, in particular, had considered as part of their long-term career path -- he knew that the average pop act only had a very small time in the spotlight, and he would talk in interviews about Lennon and McCartney becoming a songwriting team after that point. That said, the first two Lennon/McCartney songs to be released as singles by other acts -- if you don't count a version of "Love Me Do" put out by a group of anonymous session players on a budget EP of covers of hits of the day, anyway -- were both primarily Lennon songs, and were both included on the Please Please Me album. "Misery" was written by Lennon and McCartney on a tour they were on in the early part of the year. That tour was headlined by Helen Shapiro, a sixteen-year-old whose biggest hits had been two years earlier, when she was fourteen: [Excerpt: Helen Shapiro, "Walking Back to Happiness"] Shapiro had also, in 1962, appeared in the film It's Trad, Dad!, which we've mentioned before, and which was  the first feature film directed by Richard Lester, who would later play a big part in the Beatles' career. Lennon and McCartney wrote "Misery" for Shapiro, but it was turned down by her producer, Norrie Paramor, without Shapiro ever hearing it -- it's interesting to wonder if that might have been, in part, because of the strained relationship between Paramor and George Martin. In the event, the song was picked up by one of the other artists on the tour, Kenny Lynch, who recorded a version of it as a single, though it didn't have any chart success: [Excerpt: Kenny Lynch, "Misery"] Lennon apparently disliked that record, and would mock Lynch for having employed Bert Weedon as the session guitarist for the track, as he regarded Weedon as a laughable figure. The other non-Beatles single of Lennon/McCartney songs that came out in early 1963 was rather more successful. Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas were another act that Brian Epstein managed and who George Martin produced. Their first single, "Do You Want To Know A Secret?" was a cover of a song mostly written by Lennon, which had been an album track on Please Please Me. Kramer's version went to number two on the charts (or number one on some charts): [Excerpt: Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, "Do You Want To Know A Secret?"] They also gave a song to Kramer for the B-side -- "I'll Be On My Way", which the group never recorded in the studio themselves, though they did do a version of it on a radio show, which was later released on the Live at the BBC set. In 1963 and 64 Lennon and McCartney would write a further three singles for Kramer, "I'll Keep You Satisfied", "Bad to Me", and "From a Window", all of which also became top ten hits for him. and none of which were ever recorded by the Beatles. They also gave him "I Call Your Name" as a B-side, but they later recorded that song themselves. As well as the Rolling Stones, who we've obviously looked at a few weeks back, Lennon and McCartney also wrote hits in 1963 and early 64 for The Fourmost: [Excerpt: The Fourmost, "I'm In Love"] Cilla Black: [Excerpt: Cilla Black, "It's For You"] And Peter & Gordon: [Excerpt: Peter & Gordon, "World Without Love"] As well as a flop for Tommy Quickly: [Excerpt: Tommy Quickly, "Tip of My Tongue"] Kramer, the Fourmost, and Black were all managed by Epstein and produced by Martin, while Quickly was also managed by Epstein, and they were part of a massive shift in British music that started with "Please Please Me", and then shifted into gear with Gerry and the Pacemakers, another act managed by Epstein, who Martin also produced. Their first single was a version of "How Do You Do It?", the song that Dick James had published and that Martin had tried to get the Beatles to record: [Excerpt: Gerry and the Pacemakes, "How Do You Do It?"] "How Do You Do It?" went to number one, and when it dropped off the top of the charts, it was replaced by the Beatles' next single. "From Me to You" was a song they wrote on the tour bus of that Helen Shapiro tour, and lyrically it was inspired by the NME's letter column, which had the header "From You To Us": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "From Me To You"] "From Me To You" often gets dismissed when talking about the Beatles' early hits, but it has a few points worth noticing. Firstly, it's the first Beatles single to be written as a true collaboration. Both sides of the "Love Me Do" single had been written by McCartney, with Lennon helping him fix up a song he'd started and largely finished on his own. And in turn, both "Please Please Me" and its B-side were Lennon ideas, which McCartney helped him finish. "From Me to You" and its B-side "Thank You Girl" were written together, "one on one, eyeball to eyeball", to use Lennon's famous phrase, and that would be the case for the next two singles. It's also an interesting stepping stone. The song retains the harmonica from the first two singles, which would be dropped by the next single, and it also has the octave leap into falsetto that "Please Please Me" has, on the line "If there's anything I can do", but it also has the "ooh" at the end of the middle eight leading back into the verse, a trick they'd picked up from "Twist and Shout", and an opportunity for Lennon and McCartney to shake their heads while making a high-pitched noise, a bit of stagecraft that set the audiences screaming and which turned up again in the next single. The other notable aspect is that the song is more harmonically sophisticated than their previous work. McCartney always singles out the change to the minor of the dominant at the start of the middle eight (on the word  "arms") as being interesting: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "From Me To You"] And that is an interesting change, and it sets up an unexpected key change to F, but I'd also note the change from G to G augmented at the end of the middle eight, on the "fied" of "satisfied". That's a very, very, Lennon chord change -- Lennon liked augmented chords in general, and he'd already used one in "Ask Me Why", but the G augmented chord in particular is one he would use over and over again. For those who don't understand that -- chords are normally made up of three notes, the first, third, and fifth of the scale for a major chord, and the flrst, flattened third, and fifth of a scale for a minor chord. But you can get other chords that have unexpected notes in them, and those can be particularly useful if you want to change key or move between two chords that don't normally go together. All the Beatles had particular favourite odd chords they would use in this way -- Paul would often use a minor fourth instead of a major one, and John would use it occasionally too, so much so that some people refer to a minor fourth as "the Beatle chord". George, meanwhile, would often use a diminished seventh in his songwriting, especially a D diminished seventh. And John's chord was G augmented. An augmented chord is one where the fifth note is raised a semitone, so instead of the first, third and fifth: [demonstrates] it's the first, third, and sharpened fifth: [demonstrates] In this case, John moves from G to G augmented right as they're going into the climax of the middle eight, so the top note of the chord goes higher than you'd normally expect, giving an impression of being so excited you just can't stop going up. "From Me To You" knocked "How Do You Do It" off the top of the charts, and at this point, the British music scene had been changed irrevocably. While we've seen that, according to the Official Charts Company, the number one records in the UK for eleven of the first fourteen weeks of 1963 were by either Cliff Richard, the Shadows, or ex-members of the Shadows, with only Frank Ifield breaking their dominance, between the eleventh of April 1963 and the sixteenth of January 1964, thirty-two out of forty weeks at the top were taken up by the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas -- all acts from Liverpool, managed by Brian Epstein and produced by George Martin. And two of the other acts to hit number one in that period were Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, who were a London band, but doing a Motown cover, "Do You Love Me?", in a style clearly inspired by the Beatles' version of "Twist and Shout", and The Searchers, another band from Liverpool who rose to prominence as a result of the sudden dominance of Liverpudlian acts, and who we'll be looking at next week. The only pre-April acts to go to number one for the rest of 1963 were Frank Ifield and Elvis. In 1964 there was only Roy Orbison. There would be occasional number one hits by older acts after that -- Cliff Richard would have several more over his career -- but looking at the charts from this time it's almost as if there's a switch thrown, as if when people heard "Please Please Me", they decided "that's what we want now, that's what music should be", and as soon as there was more supply of stuff like that, as soon as the next Merseybeat single came out, they decided they were going to get that in preference to all other kinds of music. And of course, they were choosing the Beatles over every other Merseybeat act. The Beatles were, of course, a great band, and they are still nearly sixty years later the most commercially successful band ever, but so much has focused on what happened once they hit America, and so much time has passed, that it becomes almost impossible to see clearly just how huge they became how quickly in Britain. But they dominated 1963 culturally in the UK in a way that nothing else has before or since.  And the song that cemented that dominance was their next single, "She Loves You": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Loves You"] "She Loves You" was another step forward in the group's songwriting, and in the technical aspects of their recording. The group were, at this point, still only recording on two-track machines, but Norman Smith, the engineer, and his assistant Geoff Emerick, came up with a few techniques to make the sound more interesting. In particular, Emerick decided to use separate compressors on the drums and bass, rather than putting them both through the same compressor, and to use an overhead mic on Ringo's drums, which he'd never previously used.  But it was the songwriting itself that was, once again, of most interest. The idea for "She Loves You" came from McCartney, who was particularly inspired by a hit by one of the interchangeable Bobbies, Bobby Rydell, who was in the charts at the time with "Forget Him": [Excerpt: Bobby Rydell, "Forget Him"] McCartney took the idea of having a song be one side of a conversation with someone about their relationship, and decided that it would be an interesting idea to have the song be telling someone else "she loves you", rather than be about the singer's own relationships, as their previous singles had been. Everything up to that point had been centred around the first person addressing the second -- "Love ME Do", "PS I Love You", "Please Please ME", "Ask ME Why", "From ME to You", "Thank You Girl". This would be about addressing the second person about a third. While the song was McCartney's idea, he and Lennon wrote it together, but it was Harrison who added a crucial suggestion -- he came up with the idea that the final "Yeah" at the end of the chorus should be a major sixth instead of a normal chord, and that they should end with that as well: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Loves You"] George Martin was not keen on that -- while the Beatles saw it as something exciting and new, something they'd not done before, to Martin it was reminiscent of the 1940s -- both the Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller would use similar tricks, and it was quite dated even then, being a standard technique of barbershop harmony. But to the Beatles, on the other hand, it didn't matter if other people had done it before, *they'd* not done it before, and while they agreed to try it both ways, Martin eventually agreed that it did sound better the way they were doing it. "She Loves You" took, by the standards of the Beatles in 1963, an inordinately long time to record -- though by today's standards it was ridiculously quick. While they had recorded ten tracks in ten hours for the Please Please Me album, they took six hours in total to record just "She Loves You" and its B-side "I'll Get You". This is partly explained by the fact that Please Please Me consisted of songs they'd been playing every night for years, while John and Paul finished writing "She Loves You" only four days before they went into the studio to record it. The arrangement had to be shaped in the studio -- apparently it was George Martin's idea to start with the chorus -- and there are clear edits in the final version, most audibly just before and after the line "you know it's up to you/I think it's only fair" [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Loves You"] For those of you who want to see if you can spot the edits, they're most audible on the original CD issue of Past Masters vol. 1 from the eighties -- the later CD versions I have (the 2009 Mono Masters CD and the 2015 reissue of the 1 compilation) have been mastered in a way that makes the edits less obvious. As far as I can tell, there are six audible edit points in the song, even though it's only two minutes twenty-one -- a clear sign that they had to do a lot of studio work to get the song into a releasable shape. That work paid off, though. The single sold half a million advance copies before being released, quickly sold over a million, and became the biggest-selling single in British history -- there wouldn't be another single that sold more until fourteen years later, when Paul McCartney's solo single "Mull of Kintyre" overtook it. While "Please Please Me" and "From Me To You" had been big hits, it was "She Loves You" that caught the cultural moment in the UK. The "Yeah Yeah Yeah" chorus, in particular, caught on in a way few if any cultural phenomena ever had before. The phenomenon known as Beatlemania had, by this point, started in earnest. As the Beatles started their first national tour as headliners, their audiences could no longer hear them playing -- every girl in the audience was screaming at the top of her lungs for the entire performance.  Beatlemania is something that's impossible to explain in conventional terms. While I'm sure everyone listening to this episode has seen at least some of the footage, but for those who haven't, the only way to explain it is to hear the level of the screaming compared to the music. This is from some newsreel footage of the Beatles playing what was then the ABC in Ardwick. It's fascinating because most of the footage of Beatlemania shows gigs in the US at places like Shea Stadium or the Hollywood Bowl -- places where you get enough people that you can understand how they made that much noise. But this is a medium-sized theatre, and having been there many times myself (it's now the Manchester Apollo) I actually can't imagine how a crowd in that venue could make this much noise: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Twist and Shout", Ardwick ABC] I won't be including that on the Mixcloud, by the way, as the noise makes it unlistenable, but the footage can easily be found on YouTube and is worth watching.  After "She Loves You" came their second album, With The Beatles, another album very much along the same lines as the first -- a mixture of Lennon/McCartney songs and covers of records by Black American artists, this time dominated by Motown artists, with versions of "Money", "Please Mr Postman", and the Miracles' "You Really Got A Hold On Me", all with Lennon lead vocals. That went to number one on the album charts, knocking Please Please Me down to number two. "She Loves You", meanwhile, remained at number one for a month, then dropped down into the top three, giving Brian Poole and the Tremeloes and Gerry and the Pacemakers a chance at the top spot, before it returned to number one for a couple of weeks -- the last time a record would go back to number one after dropping off the top until "Bohemian Rhapsody" went back to number one after Freddie Mercury died, nearly thirty years later. But while all this had been going on in Britain, the Beatles had had no success at all in the USA. Capitol, the label that had the right of first refusal for EMI records in the US, had a consistent pattern of turning down almost every British record, on the grounds that there was no market in the US for foreign records. This also meant that any record that EMI tried to license to any other label, that label knew had been turned down by Capitol. So the Beatles' first singles and album were licensed by a small label, VeeJay, who mostly put out soul records but also licensed Frank Ifield's material and had a hit act in The Four Seasons. VeeJay was close to bankruptcy, though, and didn't do any promotion of the Beatles' music. "She Loves You" was put out by an even smaller label, Swan, whose biggest hit act was Freddie "Boom Boom" Cannon. But Brian Epstein and George Martin were convinced that the Beatles could break America, and the group's next single was written specifically with the American audience in mind, and recorded using the unbelievably advanced technology of four-track tape machines -- the first time they'd used anything other than two-track: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Want To Hold Your Hand"] "I Want To Hold Your Hand" went to number one in the UK, of course, replacing "She Loves You" -- the only time that an artist would knock themselves off the number one spot until 1981, when John Lennon did it as a solo artist in far more tragic circumstances. At this point, the Beatles had the number one and two spots on the singles chart, the number one and two positions on the album charts, and were at numbers one, two and three on the EP chart.  It would also be the start of Beatlemania in the USA. After the Beatles' famous appearance on the Royal Variety Performance, at the time the most prestigious booking an entertainer could get in the UK, Brian Epstein flew to New York, with a few aims in mind. He brought Billy J. Kramer with him, as he thought that Kramer had some potential as a lounge singer and could maybe get some club work in the US, but mostly he was there to try to persuade Capitol to release "I Want to Hold Your Hand", using the news coverage of Beatlemania as a reason they should pick up on it. By this time, Capitol were running out of excuses. Given the group's popularity was at a different level from any other British artist ever, they had no reason not to release "I Want to Hold Your Hand". They agreed they would put it out on January the thirteenth 1964. [Excerpt: The Beatles, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”] Epstein also had two more meetings while he was in New York. One was with the makers of the Ed Sullivan Show -- Sullivan had been in London and been at the airport when the Beatles had arrived back from a trip abroad, and had seen the response of the crowds there. He was mildly interested in having the group on his show, and he agreed to book them. The other meeting was with Sid Bernstein, a promoter who had been in the UK and was willing to take a gamble on putting the group on at Carnegie Hall. Both of these were major, major bookings for a group who had so far had no commercial success whatsoever in the US, but by this point the Beatles were *so* big in the UK that people were willing to take a chance on them. But it turned out that they weren't taking a chance at all. In November, a CBS journalist had done a quick "look at those wacky Brits" piece to use as a filler in the evening news, including some footage of the Beatles performing "She Loves You". That had originally been intended to be shown on November the 22nd, but with President Kennedy's murder, the news had more important things to cover. It was eventually shown, introduced by Walter Cronkite, on December the tenth. Cronkite's broadcast got the attention of his friend Ed Sullivan, who had already more or less forgotten that he'd booked this British group whose name he couldn't even remember. He phoned Cronkite and asked him about these "Bugs, or whatever they call themselves", and started actually promoting their appearance on his show. At the same time, a fifteen-year-old girl named Marsha Albert in Maryland was very impressed with "She Loves You", after seeing the news report and wrote to a DJ called Carroll James, asking "Why can't we have this music in America?" James got a friend who worked as a flight attendant to bring him a copy of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" on her next return from the UK, and started playing it on December the seventeenth. He played it a *lot*, because the audience loved it and kept calling in for more. Capitol tried to get him to stop playing the record -- they weren't planning on releasing it for another month yet! What was he doing, actually promoting this record?!  Unfortunately for Capitol, by the time they got round to this, DJs at a couple of other stations had heard about the reaction the record was getting, and started playing their own copies as well. Capitol changed the release date, and put the record out early, on December the twenty-sixth. It sold a quarter of a million copies in the first three days. By the week of its originally scheduled release date, it was at number one on the Cashbox chart, and it would hit the same position on Billboard soon after. By the time the Beatles arrived in America for their Ed Sullivan show, it was half-way through a seven-week run at the top of the charts, and only got knocked off the top spot by "She Loves You", which was in its turn knocked off by "Can't Buy Me Love". The Beatles had hit America, and the world of music would never be the same again.

#ASPANISHPIECE Episode 27 covers the 1969 third studio album/first soundtrack album "More" by Pink Floyd. Released as the official soundtrack to the 1969 drama-romance film of the same name, Pink Floyd also considers this their third studio album, but was that such a good idea? Syd Barrett 100% out of the band at this point and no Norman Smith in the producer's chair, can the remaining members handle a full studio album without them? Mark, Kevin, Alex, and Chris take you on a historical journey surrounding the album as well as share our favorites and not-so favorites from the record. We go on a deep dive track-by-track listen of this psychedelic rock album as well as share personal stories of discovering Pink Floyd's "More." Tune in next week for Episode 28 covering the fourth Pink Floyd studio album/live album "Ummagumma."Follow "Light the Sky Podcast" on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to stay up-to-date with all things LTS. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lighttheskypodcast/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LighttheSkyPod1Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LightTheSkyPodcast/

On 30th July 2020, Norman Smith announced his farewell from the BBC. He joined the BBC as a local radio reporter in 1986, becoming a parliamentary correspondent in 1993, appearing on BBC Radio 4 on Today and Yesterday In Parliament. Assistant political editor since 2014, his 6.33 morning appearances were a familiar part of the Today routine.

Brothers & Sisters.....A giant of British R&B, Blues and Psych has assumed room temperature...the great Phil May of The Pretty Things has passed.....This is an internet broadcast of S.F. Sorrow performed at Abbey Road Studios on September 6th 1998.The Performers are:*Phil May_vocals*Dick Taylor_lead guitar & vocals*John Povey_ all keyboards, vocals, percussion, sitar*Wally Waller_bass * vocals*Skip Allen_drums & percussionSupporting musicians:*David Gilmour_guitar*Arthur Brown_narrator*Dov Skipper_drums & percussion*Frankie Richard_guitar / acoustic*Mark St. John_percussion / vocalsFrom the pen of Phil May....."Excuse me please as I wipe a tear away from an eye...." It's sometime after 10:30pm on Sunday 6th September ' 98. I'm in the artist suite at the Abbey Road Studios, London, that deceptive Victorian edifice that at some point in the mid 1960'sbecame the second Liverpool cathedral. As the first ever live performance of S.F. Sorrow fades away down these hallowed corridors the memories kick in. Twist, Shout, Help soaked deep into the brickwork. 1967, Beatles on one side, Pink Floyd on the other and with Norman Smith as fellow traveller we are incarcerated here for almost a year in Studio 2 turning a short story of mine into the first 'rock opera', S.F. Sorrow. Fuelled on acid, night bleeding into day we worked on an idea and a direction that we hoped would give us a reason for staying on and playing on in a business that had become narrow and stale. That's the past, the present has just happened. After the big hand has swept across 30 rainbow years, the original cast reassembled with Mark St John in place of Norman Smith plus added family and friends. Tonight we finally got through the universal communication of the internet, to dot the I's and cross the T's....scatter the seeds with Bracelets of Fingers and in front of an audience made up of a scrapbook of faces from the journey performed S. F. Sorrow live. From Studio 2 there came the cry.....Phil May, Nottinghill Sept. '98

Hoy nos acompaña un compatriota mío Argentino, originario de Buenos Aires, que tiene una historia muy particular en el hecho, que nunca tomo el camino fácil y siempre fue por más en la vida gracias a la influencia de su madre a una edad temprana. Desde renunciar a un camino certero en el mundo del Basquetbol en Argentina, decidió dejar todo y venirse a Miami para buscar una vida mejor gracias a una oportunidad en el mundo del modelaje. En esta instancia también trabajando como camarero en un restaurant, su voluntad y determinación a estar siempre abierto a oportunidades, le iba a cambiar la vida para siempre.

This in-depth DVD review of David Gilmour’s career features comment and critical analysis by a team of leading rock journalists including legendary broadcaster Bob Harris and veteran rock writer Hugh Fielder. There are also interviews with those involved with Gilmour’s career including producer Norman Smith; and there are fascinating archive interviews with Gilmour himself, plus the thoughts of Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Richard Wright.

If you're on social media for any amount of time, you frequently stumble across a meme reminding you, you should stop and smell the roses. Most of us would agree with that advice. But we're too busy to do anything about it. If you really did take the time to stop and appreciate everything around you, you'd be aware of lot of things that you take for granted. For example, how often do you stand in front of your house and remark, "It's a great day. My house didn't burn down today." Norman Smith's working life is devoted to making sure your house doesn't catch fire. Norman's company is called A Noble Chimney Sweep Services. Norman and his fleet of three trucks and 6 guys do, in fact, clean chimneys. They also prevent fire hazards with a host of services, including maintaining clothes dryer vents - a significant cause of house fires. Another thing you probably take for granted is what's called Executive Functioning: that list of stuff you need to get done today. You might have another list for the week, and you probably have stuff on the calendar for next month and beyond. Imagine for a second that these Executive Functioning skills don't come naturally to you. You miss appointments. You might even forget to pay your rent or house note. If you're a kid in school, you don't get your homework done, you have poor study skills, and you end up struggling, or failing. Working with kids and older people who struggle with Executive Functioning issues is just one aspect of the work Jeanne Develle does at the Jefferson Speech and Language Center. Jeanne also works with people who have difficulties with speech, hearing, social skills, and all aspects of communication Photos over lunch at Commander's Palace by Jill Lafleur. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A tribute to the recording engineer whose in-studio innovations helped shape The Beatles’ sound—and alter the course of popular music. Geoffrey Emerick (born 5th December 1945, died 2nd October 2018) was just 16-years-old when, on 6th June 1962, he joined the EMI Studios on Abbey Road as a tape operator. Two days later, he attended the group’s first recording session with Ringo Starr on drums. He subsequently assisted on a number of sessions, including those for ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, before replacing Norman Smith as The Beatles’ chief engineer in early 1966 and diving straight into the deep end with the first track committed to tape for their landmark ‘Revolver’ LP: the revolutionary, now-legendary ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. The following year, ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ won him his first of four Grammy Awards. In this episode, Richard, Erik, Allan and Craig examine how, together with producer George Martin, Geoff helped realize The Beatles’ most far-flung creative ambitions. And there is also an enlightening interview with multi-award-winning engineer John Kurlander, who assisted Geoff on the group’s final album, ‘Abbey Road’. Featured Tracks Tomorrow Never Knows (STTS remix) Yer Blues Good Day Sunshine Good Morning Good Morning Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End (STTS remix) I’m Only Sleeping A Day in the Life (STTS remix)

Roger Bolton returns with a new series, answering your comments, complaints and queries about BBC radio. BBC Radio 2 is the most popular radio station in the UK with around 15.6 million listeners a week and the Simon Mayo Drivetime show was one of its success stories with a weekly audience of nearly 6 million. But last month the programme was relaunched, with Jo Whiley joining Simon as co-presenter. Many listeners were outraged at the decision and have been bombarding social media and the Feedback inbox with complaints ever since. Lewis Carnie, the Head of Radio 2, explains why he decided to change a successful programme. Roger also speaks to BBC Head of Current Affairs, Joanna Carr, about The Grenfell Tower Inquiry podcast, fronted by Eddie Mair, which day-by-day follows the inquiry into the deaths of 72 people in the West London tower block fire. The BBC's Assistant Political Editor, Norman Smith, gives the inside track on reporting on a tumultuous week in UK politics, and we find out why Radio 3's Evensong came to an abrupt halt half way through a live performance. Presenter: Roger Bolton Producer: Will Yates Assistant Producer: Karen Pirie Executive Producer: Katherine Godfrey A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.

Habíamos dejado a los Beatles disfrutando de las mieles del éxito que les propocionaba su primera película y el LP del mismo título “Que noche la de aquel día”. Y desde luego no era poco. Esta película, estrenada en Londres y Nueva York en julio y agosto de 1.964 respectivamente, ?fue un éxito internacional. Pero The Beatles no paraban y su capacidad creativa se demostró como extraordinaria. Practicamente, sin descanso, se fraguo su cuarto LP de estudio, Beatles for Sale, que dio paso al conflicto entre el comercialismo y la creatividad. ? Este “no repley” que está sonando es el primer corte de este LP: Grabado entre agosto y octubre de 1964, se tuvo la intención de continuar con el formato establecido en A Hard Day's Night, y que a diferencia de los primeros dos LP, éste incluyera únicamente composiciones originales. Pero no pudo ser, los conciertos por todo el mundo y su frenética actividad impidieron completar este trabajo con producción propia. Finalmente, se incluyeron seis versiones en su nuevo álbum de estudio. Lanzado a principios de diciembre, sus ocho canciones originales destacaron por la creciente madurez que mostraba el material producido por la asociación Lennon-McCartney. En lo que hace referencia a las versiones, un ejemplo es el trepidante Rock and Roll Music de Chuck Berry, interpretada por John Lennon. La cara dos del disco se abría con «Eight Days a Week», tema muy significativo porque fue uno de los primeros ejemplos de experimentación en el estudio que la banda repetiría en el futuro. En dos sesiones de grabación del 6 de octubre, que totalizaron cerca de siete horas, y que estaba dedicado exclusivamente a este tema, Lennon y McCartney intentaron una técnica de grabación tras otra antes de que pudiesen fijar el arreglo definitivo de esta canción. Por fin, la introducción de la guitarra al principio de la canción sería grabada en una sesión diferente y añadida al resto de las grabaciones más tarde. Aunque inicialmente compuesta por Lennon, la idea era de Paul, a quien le llamó la atención una frase de su chófer —«trabajando siempre, trabajando ocho días a la semana»— cuando lo llevaba a casa de John; una vez allí, éste compuso la canción inmediatamente. En abril de 1965, estando Lennon y Harrison cenando por invitación en casa de su dentista, consumieron LSD que este último había añadido en sus cafés. Posteriormente, ambos músicos experimentaron deliberadamente con esta droga, uniéndose a ellos Ringo en una ocasión. McCartney se mostró al principio renuente a probarla, pero finalmente lo hizo en 1966, y más tarde se convirtió en el primero en hablar públicamente sobre ello. La controversia surgió en junio de 1965, cuando la Reina Isabel II los designó como miembros de la Orden del Imperio Británico. Los propuso el Primer Ministro Harold Wilson, el que fuera antes miembro del Parlamento por el distrito de Liverpool. El nombramiento —en ese tiempo concedido fundamentalmente a veteranos de guerra y a líderes civiles— provocó que algunos receptores de este galardón protestasen devolviendo la insignia. Nos despedidos de este LP con una canción que Paul compuso cuando tenía 16 años y que fue recuperada para esta ocasión: I’ll follow the sun La segunda película de The Beatles, Help!, de nuevo dirigida por Lester, fue estrenada en julio de 1965. Descrita principalmente como «una parodia de las películas de James Bond», el filme fue recibido tibiamente por la crítica y por ellos mismos. McCartney comentó: «Help! era estupenda, pero no fue nuestra película, éramos como una especie de estrellas invitadas. Fue divertido, pero básicamente, como idea para una película, estuvo un poco errada». Su banda sonora, el quinto álbum de estudio del grupo, contenía material original con solo dos canciones versionadas. Lennon era el cantante y compositor dominante en ella, incluyendo los dos sencillos extraídos del álbum: «Help!» y «Ticket to Ride». En Help! se les vio con una mayor utilización de doblajes vocales y la incorporación de instrumentos clásicos en sus arreglos, especialmente el cuarteto de cuerdas de la balada «Yesterday». Compuesta por McCartney, «Yesterday» posee el récord de ser la canción más versionada de la historia de la música. La pista de cierre del LP, «Dizzy Miss Lizzy», se convirtió en el último tema que versionaron e incluyeron en un álbum. Con la excepción del álbum Let It Be, que contenía la canción popular tradicional de Liverpool «Maggie Mae», todos sus discos posteriores incluyeron sólo material original. Y con el exclusivo fin de llevar la contraria a los más puristas beatlemaniacos que, por motivos que se me escapan, reniegan de esta cación, vamos a escuchar Yesterday porque… es preciosa. George Harrison contribuyó en el álbum con las canciones «I Need You» y «You Like Me Too Much», sus primeras canciones en ser incluidas en un disco de los Beatles desde With the Beatles. El 15 de agosto, en su tercera visita a Estados Unidos, llevaron a cabo el multitudinario concierto en el Shea Stadium de Nueva York . Otros nueve conciertos le siguieron en otras ciudades de Estados Unidos, también con gran éxito. Hacia el final de la gira, el 27 de agosto de 1965, visitaron a Elvis Presley en su mansión de Bel-Air. En la sala de Elvis tocaron y discutieron sobre el negocio de la música e intercambiaron anécdotas personales. En septiembre de 1965 se estrenó una serie estadounidense de dibujos animados de The Beatles, transmitida los sábados por la mañana en la televisión que los tenía como protagonistas. La serie se hacía eco del humor de la película A Hard Day's Night. Los episodios originales, aunque producidos hasta 1967, siguieron apareciendo durante dos años más, hasta 1969. Nos despedidos de Help con la única canción del álbum que no estaba firmada por The Beatles: Dizzy Miss Lizzy Rubber Soul, lanzado a principios de diciembre, fue aclamado por la crítica como un gran paso en la madurez y la complejidad de su música. El biógrafo y crítico musical Ian MacDonald comentó que con Rubber Soul, The Beatles «recuperaron la dirección que habían comenzado a perder durante las últimas etapas con su trabajo en Beatles for Sale». Después de que en Help! se adentraran en el mundo de la música clásica con cuerdas y flautas, la utilización en Rubber Soul de un sitar marcó un avance más allá de los límites tradicionales de la música rock. Además, también demostró que Lennon y McCartney estaban menos complementados en sus composiciones, cada vez más diferentes entre sí (aunque seguían compartiendo crédito oficial). A pesar de ello, y como sus letras se hicieron más ingeniosas, los fanáticos comenzaron a estudiarlas para encontrar su verdadero significado. Por ejemplo, se especuló que «Norwegian Wood» podría referirse al cannabis. Bueno. En 2003, la revista Rolling Stone clasificó a Rubber Soul en el puesto número 5 de «los 500 mejores álbumes de todos los tiempos. Aunque, si hacemos caso a Lennon y McCartney, sin embargo, este fue «sólo un álbum más». El ingeniero Norman Smith vio claros signos de los crecientes conflictos que tenían durante las sesiones de Rubber Soul; Smith dijo más tarde que «el enfrentamiento entre John y Paul se hacía cada vez más evidente» y «en lo que se refiere a Paul, George no podía hacer nada bien». Ya empezamos!!! «Drive My Car», la canción que abre el álbum y que estábamos oyendo, fue compuesta por McCartney y Lennon en la casa de este último. Después de algunas dificultades para escribir la canción, McCartney dijo que fue una de las sesiones de composición «más pegajosas».? La letra es la narración de un hombre sobre una mujer que le ofrece la oportunidad de ser su chofer, y aunque ella no tiene un coche «encontró un conductor y eso es un comienzo.» ? McCartney explicó que la frase «Drive my car» era en el viejo blues un eufemismo sobre el sexo. Durante la época de la grabación, Harrison había estado escuchando la canción «Respect» de Otis Redding, cuya influencia se hizo notar en la pista rítmica de la canción, la cual fue creada por McCartney en estrecha colaboración con Harrison. Con «Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)», The Beatles ampliaron los recursos instrumentales del rock and roll con la inclusión de un sitar indio ejecutado por Harrison, quien se había interesado en la música tradicional hindú y el sitar a principios de ese mismo año, durante el rodaje de la película Help!. La letra de «Norwegian Wood», escrita por Lennon, muestra de nuevo la clara influencia que Dylan ejerció en las composiciones del grupo. En una entrevista de 1966, McCartney afirmó que la canción se refería a una prostituta. «Nowhere Man» fue quizás la primera canción de The Beatles en ir más allá de un tema romántico. Escrita e interpretada por Lennon, la canción cuenta con elaboradas armonías vocales realizadas por McCartney y Harrison, que, por cierto, utilizó una guitarra Fender Stratocaster en uno de los primeros usos de este modelo en una grabación del grupo. Durante una entrevista de 1980, Lennon describió cómo compuso la canción, diciendo, «Me había pasado cinco horas aquella mañana intentando componer una canción llena de sentido, que fuera buena, hasta que lo dejé y me tumbé. Y al tumbarme me vino 'Nowhere Man', letra y música, absolutamente todo.» Otra innovación se llevó a cabo en «The Word», donde la producción utilizó un procesamiento de sonido electrónico en los instrumentos, dándoles un efecto distintivo que pronto se hizo muy popular en el género de la música psicodélica. Musicalmente, la canción se basa en un ritmo con pocos cambios de acordes y una melodía simple. También, cuenta con la colaboración de George Martin tocando el armonio. Ha sido citada como una de las primeras canciones en que The Beatles escribían sobre el amor en términos más abstractos. Durante una entrevista, Lennon habló sobre la composición de la canción, «Escribimos 'The Word' juntos [Lennon y McCartney], pero es sobre todo mía. La letra habla de (...) volverse inteligente. Es la época de la marihuana. Es el amor, todo aquello de amor y paz. La palabra ('The Word') es 'amor' ¿no?» McCartney dijo sobre la canción, «A John y a mí nos gustaba hacer canciones con una sola nota como en «Long Tall Sally». Y así lo hicimos en 'The Word' La canción «Michelle», compuesta principalmente por McCartney, es una balada acústica, en la que se destaca la utilización de líneas en francés. McCartney lo explicó diciendo, «Tenía ganas de escribir algunas palabras en francés (...) Tenía un amigo cuya mujer enseñaba francés (...) y le pregunté qué podíamos poner en ese idioma. Y pusimos 'palabras que ligan bien' («Sont les mots qui vont très bien ensemble », —verso de la canción—).» El distintivo sonido de la guitarra (una Epiphone Texan tocada por McCartney) fue logrado utilizando una nueva cuyo sonido dejó sorprendido a McCartney después de oír una canción de Chet Atkins. «Girl», una balada acústica compuesta por Lennon, describe los problemas de un chico a causa de un amor no correspondido. El apoyo de los puentes de la canción es un estribillo cantado por Lennon, mientras que McCartney y Harrison en varias ocasiones cantan una sílaba para la percusión vocal (que se supone que es «dit-dit-dit-dit», pero decidieron cantar «tit-tit-tit-tit» como una broma [la traducción de «tit» es «teta» al español]). Hay rumores acerca de que las respiraciones profundas en el coro simbolizan una inhalación larga de marihuana. La siguiente canción «In My Life», considerada una de las mejores canciones de The Beatles, fue compuesta por Lennon inicialmente como un poema, en el que mencionaba cada uno de los lugares importantes de su infancia. Sin embargo, encontró esto algo ridículo y reelaboró algunos pasajes de la letra con la ayuda de McCartney. De acuerdo con el amigo y biógrafo de Lennon, Peter Shotton, las líneas «Algunos [amigos] han muerto, otros están vivos/En mi vida los he amado a todos» se refieren a Stuart Sutcliffe (quien murió en 1962) y al mismo Shotton. En la parte central de la canción, se incluye un solo de piano tocado por George Martin, para crear un «sonido barroco». Martin escribió la parte del solo influenciado por Bach. McCartney explicó que el tema está en parte inspirado en la melodía de las canciones de Smokey Robinson and The Miracles. El último tema «Run for Your Life», fue escrito por Lennon y declaró que era su «canción menos favorita de The Beatles» durante una entrevista de 1973, en contraste con Harrison, para quien era una de las favoritas de Lennon en el álbum. El narrador la canta de manera amenazante hacia su novia (a la cual llama 'pequeña chica' en la canción), exclamando «Preferiría verte muerta, muchacha/Antes que con otro hombre». La línea fue tomada de la canción de Elvis Presley «Baby, Let's Play House» escrita por Arthur Gunter. Hoy estas letras no estarían muy bien vistas. Y, por hoy, esto ha sido todo. Hemos terminado con este agotador año 1965 pero prometemos seguir adentrándonos en la ingente obra de uno de los mejores grupos (o el mejor?) de todos los tiempos. Pronto volveremos con ellos.

Habíamos dejado a los Beatles disfrutando de las mieles del éxito que les propocionaba su primera película y el LP del mismo título “Que noche la de aquel día”. Y desde luego no era poco. Esta película, estrenada en Londres y Nueva York en julio y agosto de 1.964 respectivamente, ?fue un éxito internacional. Pero The Beatles no paraban y su capacidad creativa se demostró como extraordinaria. Practicamente, sin descanso, se fraguo su cuarto LP de estudio, Beatles for Sale, que dio paso al conflicto entre el comercialismo y la creatividad. ? Este “no repley” que está sonando es el primer corte de este LP: Grabado entre agosto y octubre de 1964, se tuvo la intención de continuar con el formato establecido en A Hard Day's Night, y que a diferencia de los primeros dos LP, éste incluyera únicamente composiciones originales. Pero no pudo ser, los conciertos por todo el mundo y su frenética actividad impidieron completar este trabajo con producción propia. Finalmente, se incluyeron seis versiones en su nuevo álbum de estudio. Lanzado a principios de diciembre, sus ocho canciones originales destacaron por la creciente madurez que mostraba el material producido por la asociación Lennon-McCartney. En lo que hace referencia a las versiones, un ejemplo es el trepidante Rock and Roll Music de Chuck Berry, interpretada por John Lennon. La cara dos del disco se abría con «Eight Days a Week», tema muy significativo porque fue uno de los primeros ejemplos de experimentación en el estudio que la banda repetiría en el futuro. En dos sesiones de grabación del 6 de octubre, que totalizaron cerca de siete horas, y que estaba dedicado exclusivamente a este tema, Lennon y McCartney intentaron una técnica de grabación tras otra antes de que pudiesen fijar el arreglo definitivo de esta canción. Por fin, la introducción de la guitarra al principio de la canción sería grabada en una sesión diferente y añadida al resto de las grabaciones más tarde. Aunque inicialmente compuesta por Lennon, la idea era de Paul, a quien le llamó la atención una frase de su chófer —«trabajando siempre, trabajando ocho días a la semana»— cuando lo llevaba a casa de John; una vez allí, éste compuso la canción inmediatamente. En abril de 1965, estando Lennon y Harrison cenando por invitación en casa de su dentista, consumieron LSD que este último había añadido en sus cafés. Posteriormente, ambos músicos experimentaron deliberadamente con esta droga, uniéndose a ellos Ringo en una ocasión. McCartney se mostró al principio renuente a probarla, pero finalmente lo hizo en 1966, y más tarde se convirtió en el primero en hablar públicamente sobre ello. La controversia surgió en junio de 1965, cuando la Reina Isabel II los designó como miembros de la Orden del Imperio Británico. Los propuso el Primer Ministro Harold Wilson, el que fuera antes miembro del Parlamento por el distrito de Liverpool. El nombramiento —en ese tiempo concedido fundamentalmente a veteranos de guerra y a líderes civiles— provocó que algunos receptores de este galardón protestasen devolviendo la insignia. Nos despedidos de este LP con una canción que Paul compuso cuando tenía 16 años y que fue recuperada para esta ocasión: I’ll follow the sun La segunda película de The Beatles, Help!, de nuevo dirigida por Lester, fue estrenada en julio de 1965. Descrita principalmente como «una parodia de las películas de James Bond», el filme fue recibido tibiamente por la crítica y por ellos mismos. McCartney comentó: «Help! era estupenda, pero no fue nuestra película, éramos como una especie de estrellas invitadas. Fue divertido, pero básicamente, como idea para una película, estuvo un poco errada». Su banda sonora, el quinto álbum de estudio del grupo, contenía material original con solo dos canciones versionadas. Lennon era el cantante y compositor dominante en ella, incluyendo los dos sencillos extraídos del álbum: «Help!» y «Ticket to Ride». En Help! se les vio con una mayor utilización de doblajes vocales y la incorporación de instrumentos clásicos en sus arreglos, especialmente el cuarteto de cuerdas de la balada «Yesterday». Compuesta por McCartney, «Yesterday» posee el récord de ser la canción más versionada de la historia de la música. La pista de cierre del LP, «Dizzy Miss Lizzy», se convirtió en el último tema que versionaron e incluyeron en un álbum. Con la excepción del álbum Let It Be, que contenía la canción popular tradicional de Liverpool «Maggie Mae», todos sus discos posteriores incluyeron sólo material original. Y con el exclusivo fin de llevar la contraria a los más puristas beatlemaniacos que, por motivos que se me escapan, reniegan de esta cación, vamos a escuchar Yesterday porque… es preciosa. George Harrison contribuyó en el álbum con las canciones «I Need You» y «You Like Me Too Much», sus primeras canciones en ser incluidas en un disco de los Beatles desde With the Beatles. El 15 de agosto, en su tercera visita a Estados Unidos, llevaron a cabo el multitudinario concierto en el Shea Stadium de Nueva York . Otros nueve conciertos le siguieron en otras ciudades de Estados Unidos, también con gran éxito. Hacia el final de la gira, el 27 de agosto de 1965, visitaron a Elvis Presley en su mansión de Bel-Air. En la sala de Elvis tocaron y discutieron sobre el negocio de la música e intercambiaron anécdotas personales. En septiembre de 1965 se estrenó una serie estadounidense de dibujos animados de The Beatles, transmitida los sábados por la mañana en la televisión que los tenía como protagonistas. La serie se hacía eco del humor de la película A Hard Day's Night. Los episodios originales, aunque producidos hasta 1967, siguieron apareciendo durante dos años más, hasta 1969. Nos despedidos de Help con la única canción del álbum que no estaba firmada por The Beatles: Dizzy Miss Lizzy Rubber Soul, lanzado a principios de diciembre, fue aclamado por la crítica como un gran paso en la madurez y la complejidad de su música. El biógrafo y crítico musical Ian MacDonald comentó que con Rubber Soul, The Beatles «recuperaron la dirección que habían comenzado a perder durante las últimas etapas con su trabajo en Beatles for Sale». Después de que en Help! se adentraran en el mundo de la música clásica con cuerdas y flautas, la utilización en Rubber Soul de un sitar marcó un avance más allá de los límites tradicionales de la música rock. Además, también demostró que Lennon y McCartney estaban menos complementados en sus composiciones, cada vez más diferentes entre sí (aunque seguían compartiendo crédito oficial). A pesar de ello, y como sus letras se hicieron más ingeniosas, los fanáticos comenzaron a estudiarlas para encontrar su verdadero significado. Por ejemplo, se especuló que «Norwegian Wood» podría referirse al cannabis. Bueno. En 2003, la revista Rolling Stone clasificó a Rubber Soul en el puesto número 5 de «los 500 mejores álbumes de todos los tiempos. Aunque, si hacemos caso a Lennon y McCartney, sin embargo, este fue «sólo un álbum más». El ingeniero Norman Smith vio claros signos de los crecientes conflictos que tenían durante las sesiones de Rubber Soul; Smith dijo más tarde que «el enfrentamiento entre John y Paul se hacía cada vez más evidente» y «en lo que se refiere a Paul, George no podía hacer nada bien». Ya empezamos!!! «Drive My Car», la canción que abre el álbum y que estábamos oyendo, fue compuesta por McCartney y Lennon en la casa de este último. Después de algunas dificultades para escribir la canción, McCartney dijo que fue una de las sesiones de composición «más pegajosas».? La letra es la narración de un hombre sobre una mujer que le ofrece la oportunidad de ser su chofer, y aunque ella no tiene un coche «encontró un conductor y eso es un comienzo.» ? McCartney explicó que la frase «Drive my car» era en el viejo blues un eufemismo sobre el sexo. Durante la época de la grabación, Harrison había estado escuchando la canción «Respect» de Otis Redding, cuya influencia se hizo notar en la pista rítmica de la canción, la cual fue creada por McCartney en estrecha colaboración con Harrison. Con «Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)», The Beatles ampliaron los recursos instrumentales del rock and roll con la inclusión de un sitar indio ejecutado por Harrison, quien se había interesado en la música tradicional hindú y el sitar a principios de ese mismo año, durante el rodaje de la película Help!. La letra de «Norwegian Wood», escrita por Lennon, muestra de nuevo la clara influencia que Dylan ejerció en las composiciones del grupo. En una entrevista de 1966, McCartney afirmó que la canción se refería a una prostituta. «Nowhere Man» fue quizás la primera canción de The Beatles en ir más allá de un tema romántico. Escrita e interpretada por Lennon, la canción cuenta con elaboradas armonías vocales realizadas por McCartney y Harrison, que, por cierto, utilizó una guitarra Fender Stratocaster en uno de los primeros usos de este modelo en una grabación del grupo. Durante una entrevista de 1980, Lennon describió cómo compuso la canción, diciendo, «Me había pasado cinco horas aquella mañana intentando componer una canción llena de sentido, que fuera buena, hasta que lo dejé y me tumbé. Y al tumbarme me vino 'Nowhere Man', letra y música, absolutamente todo.» Otra innovación se llevó a cabo en «The Word», donde la producción utilizó un procesamiento de sonido electrónico en los instrumentos, dándoles un efecto distintivo que pronto se hizo muy popular en el género de la música psicodélica. Musicalmente, la canción se basa en un ritmo con pocos cambios de acordes y una melodía simple. También, cuenta con la colaboración de George Martin tocando el armonio. Ha sido citada como una de las primeras canciones en que The Beatles escribían sobre el amor en términos más abstractos. Durante una entrevista, Lennon habló sobre la composición de la canción, «Escribimos 'The Word' juntos [Lennon y McCartney], pero es sobre todo mía. La letra habla de (...) volverse inteligente. Es la época de la marihuana. Es el amor, todo aquello de amor y paz. La palabra ('The Word') es 'amor' ¿no?» McCartney dijo sobre la canción, «A John y a mí nos gustaba hacer canciones con una sola nota como en «Long Tall Sally». Y así lo hicimos en 'The Word' La canción «Michelle», compuesta principalmente por McCartney, es una balada acústica, en la que se destaca la utilización de líneas en francés. McCartney lo explicó diciendo, «Tenía ganas de escribir algunas palabras en francés (...) Tenía un amigo cuya mujer enseñaba francés (...) y le pregunté qué podíamos poner en ese idioma. Y pusimos 'palabras que ligan bien' («Sont les mots qui vont très bien ensemble », —verso de la canción—).» El distintivo sonido de la guitarra (una Epiphone Texan tocada por McCartney) fue logrado utilizando una nueva cuyo sonido dejó sorprendido a McCartney después de oír una canción de Chet Atkins. «Girl», una balada acústica compuesta por Lennon, describe los problemas de un chico a causa de un amor no correspondido. El apoyo de los puentes de la canción es un estribillo cantado por Lennon, mientras que McCartney y Harrison en varias ocasiones cantan una sílaba para la percusión vocal (que se supone que es «dit-dit-dit-dit», pero decidieron cantar «tit-tit-tit-tit» como una broma [la traducción de «tit» es «teta» al español]). Hay rumores acerca de que las respiraciones profundas en el coro simbolizan una inhalación larga de marihuana. La siguiente canción «In My Life», considerada una de las mejores canciones de The Beatles, fue compuesta por Lennon inicialmente como un poema, en el que mencionaba cada uno de los lugares importantes de su infancia. Sin embargo, encontró esto algo ridículo y reelaboró algunos pasajes de la letra con la ayuda de McCartney. De acuerdo con el amigo y biógrafo de Lennon, Peter Shotton, las líneas «Algunos [amigos] han muerto, otros están vivos/En mi vida los he amado a todos» se refieren a Stuart Sutcliffe (quien murió en 1962) y al mismo Shotton. En la parte central de la canción, se incluye un solo de piano tocado por George Martin, para crear un «sonido barroco». Martin escribió la parte del solo influenciado por Bach. McCartney explicó que el tema está en parte inspirado en la melodía de las canciones de Smokey Robinson and The Miracles. El último tema «Run for Your Life», fue escrito por Lennon y declaró que era su «canción menos favorita de The Beatles» durante una entrevista de 1973, en contraste con Harrison, para quien era una de las favoritas de Lennon en el álbum. El narrador la canta de manera amenazante hacia su novia (a la cual llama 'pequeña chica' en la canción), exclamando «Preferiría verte muerta, muchacha/Antes que con otro hombre». La línea fue tomada de la canción de Elvis Presley «Baby, Let's Play House» escrita por Arthur Gunter. Hoy estas letras no estarían muy bien vistas. Y, por hoy, esto ha sido todo. Hemos terminado con este agotador año 1965 pero prometemos seguir adentrándonos en la ingente obra de uno de los mejores grupos (o el mejor?) de todos los tiempos. Pronto volveremos con ellos.

It’s half-term and Adam is alone, but Boris Johnson has made a ‘major’ speech about Brexit, so he’s found some friends (the Beeb’s very own Norman Smith and Kate McCann from The Telegraph) to listen to it so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.

As parliament starts the summer recess, the BBC's assistant political editor Norman Smith looks back at a tumultuous few months in Westminster, talking with Roger Bolton about the challenges of working under intense scrutiny and accusations of bias from MPs and on social media. This week, the BBC released its annual report, including the names and wage brackets of 96 of its on-air talent who are all paid over 150 thousand pounds a year. Licence fee payers give us their thoughts on presenter pay. In last week's programme, we discussed listener complaints about an exceptionally graphic story in Bridget Kendall's Cold War: Stories from the Big Freeze. To make sense of the discussion, Feedback chose to re-broadcast the clip. Were we right to do so? Listeners share their differing views on the issue. Finally, Roger continues his series of Open Mic interviews with prominent BBC presenters. This week, he's joined by Clive Anderson of Loose Ends and Unreliable Evidence. Has Clive's notoriously sharp-edged humour mellowed over time? Producer: Will Yates A Whistledown production for BBC radio 4.

Un día como hoy pero de 1962, era miércoles y bajo la producción de George Martin y Norman Smith, tuvieron su primera sesión de grabación:John, Paul, George y... ¡Pete Best!La canción es muy conocida por ti: ¡Bésame Mucho!

Un día como hoy pero de 1962, era miércoles y bajo la producción de George Martin y Norman Smith, tuvieron su primera sesión de grabación:John, Paul, George y... ¡Pete Best!La canción es muy conocida por ti: ¡Bésame Mucho!

Most amusing. The BBC reporter Ben Brown interviewed Norman Smith, another BBC staffer, about the Labour party manifesto. That's when it got interesting. Or rather, to be more accurate, that's That's when it got amusing. It would seem that the BBC has a hands-on approach to street interviews.Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGwCncsQ8nl59ElDWQuKP7gFacebook https://www.facebook.com/goodnewsthismorning?ref=hlTwitter https://twitter.com/goodnewsthisPete's blog http://petertimothycooper.comPodcasts featuring Pete:Mark and Pete http://www.markandpete.comThe Good News Show http://www.tgnsuk.comDaily Devotional Preaching http://www.dailydevotionalpreaching.comGood News This Morning is:Personal updates from Pete, his family and Friends. comment on interesting, moving and humorous news and articles of the day from a Christian perspective.This channel is dedicated to presenting a sideways look at breaking Christian news and and fascinating features of theology. In these Christian videos, pastor Peter Cooper takes a look at Christian issues of the day, sometimes serious and sometimes whacky: its a Christian video blog.

Most amusing. The BBC reporter Ben Brown interviewed Norman Smith, another BBC staffer, about the Labour party manifesto. That's when it got interesting. Or rather, to be more accurate, that's That's when it got amusing. It would seem that the BBC has a hands-on approach to street interviews. Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGwCncsQ8nl59ElDWQuKP7g Facebook https://www.facebook.com/goodnewsthismorning?ref=hl Twitter https://twitter.com/goodnewsthis Pete's blog http://petertimothycooper.com Podcasts featuring Pete: Mark and Pete http://www.markandpete.com The Good News Show http://www.tgnsuk.com Daily Devotional Preaching http://www.dailydevotionalpreaching.com Good News This Morning is: Personal updates from Pete, his family and Friends. comment on interesting, moving and humorous news and articles of the day from a Christian perspective.This channel is dedicated to presenting a sideways look at breaking Christian news and and fascinating features of theology. In these Christian videos, pastor Peter Cooper takes a look at Christian issues of the day, sometimes serious and sometimes whacky: its a Christian video blog.

En 1963, que este sello se encarga de editar en Inglaterra el segundo single de los Beatles: “Please Please Me”.Los dos sencillos se grabaron el 26 de noviembre de 1962 en el estudio 2 de Abbey Road con la dirección de George Martin y Norman Smith como ingeniero de sonido.

En 1963, que este sello se encarga de editar en Inglaterra el segundo single de los Beatles: “Please Please Me”.Los dos sencillos se grabaron el 26 de noviembre de 1962 en el estudio 2 de Abbey Road con la dirección de George Martin y Norman Smith como ingeniero de sonido.

Roger Bolton explores listener reaction to BBC radio. The death of boxing legend Muhammad Ali blazed across BBC output in the last week - but did this coverage fail to portray the two sides of his character? Listeners questioned whether the reporting focused too heavily on his success and iconic image and neglected his more controversial moments. Controller of daily news programmes Gavin Allen explains how these decisions are made in the editorial process and what he feels the news programmes achieved. In the age of audiences having streaming websites and personal playlists at their fingertips, is there a place for music presenters to curate our listening? BBC 6 Music believe there is as it broadcasts its annual 6 Music Recommends Day. Reporter Rob Crossan goes behind the scenes with musicians and presenters to find out how they put together a 12 hour playlist of brand new music that will please a diverse set of listeners. He speaks to presenters Cerys Matthews, Steve Lamacq and Shaun Keaveny, as well as Head of Music Jeff Smith and Head of Programmes Paul Rogers. Roger Bolton also puts listener questions to BBC 6 Music Controller Bob Shennan, asking the station has evolved since its launch in 2002 and where it fits into the range of music radio stations. And in last week's Feedback, the BBC's assistant political editor Norman Smith explained how he feels the corporation's impartiality may affect reporting of the EU Referendum. It's a debate that many Feedback listeners felt compelled to join in. Produced by Kate Dixon. A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.

Albert speaks to Norman Smith from the Church of Scotland’s Mission and Discipleship Council

With one of the biggest national decisions inching closer, listeners give their verdict on the BBC's referendum coverage so far. Some feel that the network is giving more attention to one side of the campaign - particularly in its headline reporting - others are concerned that the BBC is only reflecting a limited set of views. Most pertinently, those following the coverage ask whether the corporation's impartiality restricts its reporters from digging out hard facts. Assistant political editor Norman Smith responds to these queries and discusses how he deals with this turbulent political story. Have you ever wondered about the class background of the BBC's producers, presenters and even on-air guests? Do you want a run-down of whether interviewees on Radio 4's Today programme are from a certain class hierarchy? These are the probing questions from certain Feedback listeners - some of whom wonder if this gives Radio 4 an overall middle-class tone. Katherine Godfrey, a Feedback producer, drills down into the BBC's statistics and asks what the corporation is doing to better reflect the class composition of Britain. On-going Radio 4 series Born in Bradford follows one of the biggest medical research projects in the UK. Beginning in 2007, the programmes investigate child development and how this might explain the causes of some diseases. In the latest edition presented by Winifred Robinson (You and Yours), emotional and difficult conversations with pregnant women moved many listeners. And fans of From Our Home Correspondent explain why this sister programme offers a unique quality to their radio listening. Produced by Karen Pirie. A Whistledown Production for BBC Radio 4.

www.TheCubeatMidtown.com www.SageIntl.com www.CBENNV.com The Center for Unique Business Enterprises AKA The “CUBE” is a Reno Nevada based Startup Accelerator, Business Incubator, and Startup Community Center. Norman Smith, Director of Mentoring and Investor Relations for The Cube has 30 years executive management experience specializing in startups and cutting edge innovations in retail, technology, manufacturing, and international business development. He founded 9 successful startups and raised over $250 million in startup funding taking their annual revenue from startup to over $100 million. Ky Good, Director of Academic & Community Relations co-founded the CUBE in 2006 with a vision to establish an Incubator in Northern Nevada to help bridge the “gap” between entrepreneurs and industry and contribute to bringing start-up companies into the region. In 2003, Ky co-founded iN3 Partners, which is an on-going business development and consulting firm that focuses at working with entrepreneurs and early stage growth companies. Business incubators offer low-cost space, shared equipment, and the comradeship of fellow entrepreneurs. An incubator usually houses about a dozen tenants, who stay two to three years, then 'graduate' to commercial space. At their best, incubators help new firms create jobs and revive communities. Indeed, statistics indicate that incubator firms have a significantly greater chance of survival than do other start-up businesses. www.CheriHillShow.com

By the time I Want To Hold Your Hand was recorded (October 1963), EMI had installed 4-track recorders at Abbey Road. The results are immediately audible: guitars are double tracked amd distributed over different tracks. The Single was - of course - released in glorious mono. Since I Want To Hold Your hand was not included on With The Beatles, no stereo version was released in the UK. it features on a Capitol album in the US in stereo, but this sounds like 'fake stereo' to me (highs on the right, lows on the left). A Stereo mix had been by George Martin on 21 October 1963: this version was released in Australia in 1963, and true to the then current tradition: vocals on the right, all the instruments on the left. Thanks to the fact that I Want To Hold Your Hand was recorded on 4-track, it was possible to produce different stereo versions; on 8 June 1965 Norman Smith made a new remix, with the vocals placed in the centre. It was never used. For the UK release 'Collection Of Beatles Oldies' another stereo remix ws made on November 7th 1966. The same version is found on the Past Masters and Remasters releases. In this latest version, the vocals are centered, drums + bass on the left, solo guitar on the right. A clear improvement over te 1963 mix, but.... still sounding awkward: the vocals come in rather abruptly, and drums + bass are only mixed in the left channel. Is it possible to centre the vocals, drums and bass, and leave the guitars separated ? Only in BDJ studios, where the state of the art technology (3-D Spectral Extractor) churned away for quite a while to achieve this feat. But it's worth it, since the stereo picture is now more natural, and drums and bass more powerful than ever heard before.