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In this episode, we discuss why employers use background checks in the hiring process, why types of background checks can be done, employer requirements and more. Subscribe to our podcast today to stay up to date on employment issues from law experts worldwide. Read Evan's article here. Host: Susan Deniker (email) (Steptoe & Johnson PLLC / West Virginia)Guest Speaker: Evan Way (email) (Crowe & Dunlevy / Oklahoma)Register on the ELA website here to receive email invitations to future programs.

On this episode, we discuss the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 and two important laws included in that act.    On December 29, 2022, President Biden signed this Act into law, which in addition to addressing government funding, included two laws that provide greater protections for pregnant and nursing employees in the workplace: The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, or the PWFA, and the Providing Urgent Maternal Protections for Nursing Mothers Act, or the PUMP Act.  Today's discussion will focus on how these new federal laws expand protections for pregnant and nursing employees, and how employers can adapt and implement policies and procedures in response to these changes. Subscribe to our podcast today to stay up to date on employment issues from law experts worldwide.Host: Susan Deniker (email) (Steptoe & Johnson PLLC / West Virginia)Guest Speaker: Veronica Yu Welsh (email) (Shawe Rosenthal LLP / Maryland)Register on the ELA website here to receive email invitations to future programs.

Episode 162 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Daydream Believer", and the later career of the Monkees, and how four Pinocchios became real boys. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Born to be Wild" by Steppenwolf. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this time, as even after splitting it into multiple files, there are simply too many Monkees tracks excerpted. The best versions of the Monkees albums are the triple-CD super-deluxe versions that used to be available from monkees.com , and I've used Andrew Sandoval's liner notes for them extensively in this episode. Sadly, though, none of those are in print. However, at the time of writing there is a new four-CD super-deluxe box set of Headquarters (with a remixed version of the album rather than the original mixes I've excerpted here) available from that site, and I used the liner notes for that here. Monkees.com also currently has the intermittently-available BluRay box set of the entire Monkees TV series, which also has Head and 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee. For those just getting into the group, my advice is to start with this five-CD set, which contains their first five albums along with bonus tracks. The single biggest source of information I used in this episode is the first edition of Andrew Sandoval's The Monkees; The Day-By-Day Story. Sadly that is now out of print and goes for hundreds of pounds. Sandoval released a second edition of the book in 2021, which I was unfortunately unable to obtain, but that too is now out of print. If you can find a copy of either, do get one. Other sources used were Monkee Business by Eric Lefcowitz, and the autobiographies of three of the band members and one of the songwriters — Infinite Tuesday by Michael Nesmith, They Made a Monkee Out of Me by Davy Jones, I'm a Believer by Micky Dolenz, and Psychedelic Bubble-Gum by Bobby Hart. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left the Monkees, they were in a state of flux. To recap what we covered in that episode, the Monkees were originally cast as actors in a TV show, and consisted of two actors with some singing ability -- the former child stars Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz -- and two musicians who were also competent comic actors, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork.  The show was about a fictional band whose characters shared names with their actors, and there had quickly been two big hit singles, and two hit albums, taken from the music recorded for the TV show's soundtrack. But this had caused problems for the actors. The records were being promoted as being by the fictional group in the TV series, blurring the line between the TV show and reality, though in fact for the most part they were being made by session musicians with only Dolenz or Jones adding lead vocals to pre-recorded backing tracks. Dolenz and Jones were fine with this, but Nesmith, who had been allowed to write and produce a few album tracks himself, wanted more creative input, and more importantly felt that he was being asked to be complicit in fraud because the records credited the four Monkees as the musicians when (other than a tiny bit of inaudible rhythm guitar by Tork on a couple of Nesmith's tracks) none of them played on them. Tork, meanwhile, believed he had been promised that the group would be an actual group -- that they would all be playing on the records together -- and felt hurt and annoyed that this wasn't the case. They were by now playing live together to promote the series and the records, with Dolenz turning out to be a perfectly competent drummer, so surely they could do the same in the studio? So in January 1967, things came to a head. It's actually quite difficult to sort out exactly what happened, because of conflicting recollections and opinions. What follows is my best attempt to harmonise the different versions of the story into one coherent narrative, but be aware that I could be wrong in some of the details. Nesmith and Tork, who disliked each other in most respects, were both agreed that this couldn't continue and that if there were going to be Monkees records released at all, they were going to have the Monkees playing on them. Dolenz, who seems to have been the one member of the group that everyone could get along with, didn't really care but went along with them for the sake of group harmony. And Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the production team behind the series, also took Nesmith and Tork's side, through a general love of mischief. But on the other side was Don Kirshner, the music publisher who was in charge of supervising the music for the TV show. Kirshner was adamantly, angrily, opposed to the very idea of the group members having any input at all into how the records were made. He considered that they should be grateful for the huge pay cheques they were getting from records his staff writers and producers were making for them, and stop whinging. And Davy Jones was somewhere in the middle. He wanted to support his co-stars, who he genuinely liked, but also, he was a working actor, he'd had other roles before, he'd have other roles afterwards, and as a working actor you do what you're told if you don't want to lose the job you've got. Jones had grown up in very severe poverty, and had been his family's breadwinner from his early teens, and artistic integrity is all very nice, but not as nice as a cheque for a quarter of a million dollars. Although that might be slightly unfair -- it might be fairer to say that artistic integrity has a different meaning to someone like Jones, coming from musical theatre and a tradition of "the show must go on", than it does to people like Nesmith and Tork who had come up through the folk clubs. Jones' attitude may also have been affected by the fact that his character in the TV show didn't play an instrument other than the occasional tambourine or maracas. The other three were having to mime instrumental parts they hadn't played, and to reproduce them on stage, but Jones didn't have that particular disadvantage. Bert Schneider, one of the TV show's producers, encouraged the group to go into the recording studio themselves, with a producer of their choice, and cut a couple of tracks to prove what they could do. Michael Nesmith, who at this point was the one who was most adamant about taking control of the music, chose Chip Douglas to produce. Douglas was someone that Nesmith had known a little while, as they'd both played the folk circuit -- in Douglas' case as a member of the Modern Folk Quartet -- but Douglas had recently joined the Turtles as their new bass player. At this point, Douglas had never officially produced a record, but he was a gifted arranger, and had just arranged the Turtles' latest single, which had just been released and was starting to climb the charts: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together"] Douglas quit the Turtles to work with the Monkees, and took the group into the studio to cut two demo backing tracks for a potential single as a proof of concept. These initial sessions didn't have any vocals, but featured Nesmith on guitar, Tork on piano, Dolenz on drums, Jones on tambourine, and an unknown bass player -- possibly Douglas himself, possibly Nesmith's friend John London, who he'd played with in Mike and John and Bill. They cut rough tracks of two songs, "All of Your Toys", by another friend of Nesmith's, Bill Martin, and Nesmith's "The Girl I Knew Somewhere": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (Gold Star Demo)"] Those tracks were very rough and ready -- they were garage-band tracks rather than the professional studio recordings that the Candy Store Prophets or Jeff Barry's New York session players had provided for the previous singles -- but they were competent in the studio, thanks largely to Chip Douglas' steadying influence. As Douglas later said "They could hardly play. Mike could play adequate rhythm guitar. Pete could play piano but he'd make mistakes, and Micky's time on drums was erratic. He'd speed up or slow down." But the takes they managed to get down showed that they *could* do it. Rafelson and Schneider agreed with them that the Monkees could make a single together, and start recording at least some of their own tracks. So the group went back into the studio, with Douglas producing -- and with Lester Sill from the music publishers there to supervise -- and cut finished versions of the two songs. This time the lineup was Nesmith on guitar, Tork on electric harpsichord -- Tork had always been a fan of Bach, and would in later years perform Bach pieces as his solo spot in Monkees shows -- Dolenz on drums, London on bass, and Jones on tambourine: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (first recorded version)"] But while this was happening, Kirshner had been trying to get new Monkees material recorded without them -- he'd not yet agreed to having the group play on their own records. Three days after the sessions for "All of Your Toys" and "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", sessions started in New York for an entire album's worth of new material, produced by Jeff Barry and Denny Randell, and largely made by the same Red Bird Records team who had made "I'm a Believer" -- the same musicians who in various combinations had played on everything from "Sherry" by the Four Seasons to "Like a Rolling Stone" by Dylan to "Leader of the Pack", and with songs by Neil Diamond, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Leiber and Stoller, and the rest of the team of songwriters around Red Bird. But at this point came the meeting we talked about towards the end of the "Last Train to Clarksville" episode, in which Nesmith punched a hole in a hotel wall in frustration at what he saw as Kirshner's obstinacy. Kirshner didn't want to listen to the recordings the group had made. He'd promised Jeff Barry and Neil Diamond that if "I'm a Believer" went to number one, Barry would get to produce, and Diamond write, the group's next single. Chip Douglas wasn't a recognised producer, and he'd made this commitment. But the group needed a new single out. A compromise was offered, of sorts, by Kirshner -- how about if Barry flew over from New York to LA to produce the group, they'd scrap the tracks both the group and Barry had recorded, and Barry would produce new tracks for the songs he'd recorded, with the group playing on them? But that wouldn't work either. The group members were all due to go on holiday -- three of them were going to make staggered trips to the UK, partly to promote the TV series, which was just starting over here, and partly just to have a break. They'd been working sixty-plus hour weeks for months between the TV series, live performances, and the recording studio, and they were basically falling-down tired, which was one of the reasons for Nesmith's outburst in the meeting. They weren't accomplished enough musicians to cut tracks quickly, and they *needed* the break. On top of that, Nesmith and Barry had had a major falling-out at the "I'm a Believer" session, and Nesmith considered it a matter of personal integrity that he couldn't work with a man who in his eyes had insulted his professionalism. So that was out, but there was also no way Kirshner was going to let the group release a single consisting of two songs he hadn't heard, produced by a producer with no track record. At first, the group were insistent that "All of Your Toys" should be the A-side for their next single: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "All Of Your Toys"] But there was an actual problem with that which they hadn't foreseen. Bill Martin, who wrote the song, was under contract to another music publisher, and the Monkees' contracts said they needed to only record songs published by Screen Gems. Eventually, it was Micky Dolenz who managed to cut the Gordian knot -- or so everyone thought. Dolenz was the one who had the least at stake of any of them -- he was already secure as the voice of the hits, he had no particular desire to be an instrumentalist, but he wanted to support his colleagues. Dolenz suggested that it would be a reasonable compromise to put out a single with one of the pre-recorded backing tracks on one side, with him or Jones singing, and with the version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" that the band had recorded together on the other. That way, Kirshner and the record label would get their new single without too much delay, the group would still be able to say they'd started recording their own tracks, everyone would get some of what they wanted. So it was agreed -- though there was a further stipulation. "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" had Nesmith singing lead vocals, and up to that point every Monkees single had featured Dolenz on lead on both sides. As far as Kirshner and the other people involved in making the release decisions were concerned, that was the way things were going to continue. Everyone was fine with this -- Nesmith, the one who was most likely to object in principle, in practice realised that having Dolenz sing his song would make it more likely to be played on the radio and used in the TV show, and so increase his royalties. A vocal session was arranged in New York for Dolenz and Jones to come and cut some vocal tracks right before Dolenz and Nesmith flew over to the UK. But in the meantime, it had become even more urgent for the group to be seen to be doing their own recording. An in-depth article on the group in the Saturday Evening Post had come out, quoting Nesmith as saying "It was what Kirshner wanted to do. Our records are not our forte. I don't care if we never sell another record. Maybe we were manufactured and put on the air strictly with a lot of hoopla. Tell the world we're synthetic because, damn it, we are. Tell them the Monkees are wholly man-made overnight, that millions of dollars have been poured into this thing. Tell the world we don't record our own music. But that's us they see on television. The show is really a part of us. They're not seeing something invalid." The press immediately jumped on the band, and started trying to portray them as con artists exploiting their teenage fans, though as Nesmith later said "The press decided they were going to unload on us as being somehow illegitimate, somehow false. That we were making an attempt to dupe the public, when in fact it was me that was making the attempt to maintain the integrity. So the press went into a full-scale war against us." Tork, on the other hand, while he and Nesmith were on the same side about the band making their own records, blamed Nesmith for much of the press reaction, later saying "Michael blew the whistle on us. If he had gone in there with pride and said 'We are what we are and we have no reason to hang our heads in shame' it never would have happened." So as far as the group were concerned, they *needed* to at least go with Dolenz's suggested compromise. Their personal reputations were on the line. When Dolenz arrived at the session in New York, he was expecting to be asked to cut one vocal track, for the A-side of the next single (and presumably a new lead vocal for "The Girl I Knew Somewhere"). When he got there, though, he found that Kirshner expected him to record several vocals so that Kirshner could choose the best. That wasn't what had been agreed, and so Dolenz flat-out refused to record anything at all. Luckily for Kirshner, Jones -- who was the most co-operative member of the band -- was willing to sing a handful of songs intended for Dolenz as well as the ones he was meant to sing. So the tape of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", the song intended for the next single, was slowed down so it would be in a suitable key for Jones instead, and he recorded the vocal for that: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You"] Incidentally, while Jones recorded vocals for several more tracks at the session -- and some would later be reused as album tracks a few years down the line -- not all of the recorded tracks were used for vocals, and this later gave rise to a rumour that has been repeated as fact by almost everyone involved, though it was a misunderstanding. Kirshner's next major success after the Monkees was another made-for-TV fictional band, the Archies, and their biggest hit was "Sugar Sugar", co-written and produced by Jeff Barry: [Excerpt: The Archies, "Sugar Sugar"] Both Kirshner and the Monkees have always claimed that the Monkees were offered "Sugar, Sugar" and turned it down. To Kirshner the moral of the story was that since "Sugar, Sugar" was a massive hit, it proved his instincts right and proved that the Monkees didn't know what would make a hit. To the Monkees, on the other hand, it showed that Kirshner wanted them to do bubblegum music that they considered ridiculous. This became such an established factoid that Dolenz regularly tells the story in his live performances, and includes a version of "Sugar, Sugar" in them, rearranged as almost a torch song: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Sugar, Sugar (live)"] But in fact, "Sugar, Sugar" wasn't written until long after Kirshner and the Monkees had parted ways. But one of the songs for which a backing track was recorded but no vocals were ever completed was "Sugar Man", a song by Denny Randell and Sandy Linzer, which they would later release themselves as an unsuccessful single: [Excerpt: Linzer and Randell, "Sugar Man"] Over the years, the Monkees not recording "Sugar Man" became the Monkees not recording "Sugar, Sugar". Meanwhile, Dolenz and Nesmith had flown over to the UK to do some promotional work and relax, and Jones soon also flew over, though didn't hang out with his bandmates, preferring to spend more time with his family. Both Dolenz and Nesmith spent a lot of time hanging out with British pop stars, and were pleased to find that despite the manufactured controversy about them being a manufactured group, none of the British musicians they admired seemed to care. Eric Burdon, for example, was quoted in the Melody Maker as saying "They make very good records, I can't understand how people get upset about them. You've got to make up your minds whether a group is a record production group or one that makes live appearances. For example, I like to hear a Phil Spector record and I don't worry if it's the Ronettes or Ike and Tina Turner... I like the Monkees record as a grand record, no matter how people scream. So somebody made a record and they don't play, so what? Just enjoy the record." Similarly, the Beatles were admirers of the Monkees, especially the TV show, despite being expected to have a negative opinion of them, as you can hear in this contemporary recording of Paul McCartney answering a fan's questions: Excerpt: Paul McCartney talks about the Monkees] Both Dolenz and Nesmith hung out with the Beatles quite a bit -- they both visited Sgt. Pepper recording sessions, and if you watch the film footage of the orchestral overdubs for "A Day in the Life", Nesmith is there with all the other stars of the period. Nesmith and his wife Phyllis even stayed with the Lennons for a couple of days, though Cynthia Lennon seems to have thought of the Nesmiths as annoying intruders who had been invited out of politeness and not realised they weren't wanted. That seems plausible, but at the same time, John Lennon doesn't seem the kind of person to not make his feelings known, and Michael Nesmith's reports of the few days they stayed there seem to describe a very memorable experience, where after some initial awkwardness he developed a bond with Lennon, particularly once he saw that Lennon was a fan of Captain Beefheart, who was a friend of Nesmith, and whose Safe as Milk album Lennon was examining when Nesmith turned up, and whose music at this point bore a lot of resemblance to the kind of thing Nesmith was doing: [Excerpt: Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, "Yellow Brick Road"] Or at least, that's how Nesmith always told the story later -- though Safe as Milk didn't come out until nearly six months later. It's possible he's conflating memories from a later trip to the UK in June that year -- where he also talked about how Lennon was the only person he'd really got on with on the previous trip, because "he's a compassionate person. I know he has a reputation for being caustic, but it is only a cover for the depth of his feeling." Nesmith and Lennon apparently made some experimental music together during the brief stay, with Nesmith being impressed by Lennon's Mellotron and later getting one himself. Dolenz, meanwhile, was spending more time with Paul McCartney, and with Spencer Davis of his current favourite band The Spencer Davis Group. But even more than that he was spending a lot of time with Samantha Juste, a model and TV presenter whose job it was to play the records on Top of the Pops, the most important British TV pop show, and who had released a record herself a couple of months earlier, though it hadn't been a success: [Excerpt: Samantha Juste, "No-one Needs My Love Today"] The two quickly fell deeply in love, and Juste would become Dolenz's first wife the next year. When Nesmith and Dolenz arrived back in the US after their time off, they thought the plan was still to release "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" with "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" on the B-side. So Nesmith was horrified to hear on the radio what the announcer said were the two sides of the new Monkees single -- "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", and "She Hangs Out", another song from the Jeff Barry sessions with a Davy vocal. Don Kirshner had gone ahead and picked two songs from the Jeff Barry sessions and delivered them to RCA Records, who had put a single out in Canada. The single was very, *very* quickly withdrawn once the Monkees and the TV producers found out, and only promo copies seem to circulate -- rather than being credited to "the Monkees", both sides are credited to '"My Favourite Monkee" Davy Jones Sings'. The record had been withdrawn, but "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" was clearly going to have to be the single. Three days after the record was released and pulled, Nesmith, Dolenz and Tork were back in the studio with Chip Douglas, recording a new B-side -- a new version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", this time with Dolenz on vocals. As Jones was still in the UK, John London added the tambourine part as well as the bass: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] As Nesmith told the story a couple of months later, "Bert said 'You've got to get this thing in Micky's key for Micky to sing it.' I said 'Has Donnie made a commitment? I don't want to go there and break my neck in order to get this thing if Donnie hasn't made a commitment. And Bert refused to say anything. He said 'I can't tell you anything except just go and record.'" What had happened was that the people at Columbia had had enough of Kirshner. As far as Rafelson and Schneider were concerned, the real problem in all this was that Kirshner had been making public statements taking all the credit for the Monkees' success and casting himself as the puppetmaster. They thought this was disrespectful to the performers -- and unstated but probably part of it, that it was disrespectful to Rafelson and Schneider for their work putting the TV show together -- and that Kirshner had allowed his ego to take over. Things like the liner notes for More of the Monkees which made Kirshner and his stable of writers more important than the performers had, in the view of the people at Raybert Productions, put the Monkees in an impossible position and forced them to push back. Schneider later said "Kirshner had an ego that transcended everything else. As a matter of fact, the press issue was probably magnified a hundred times over because of Kirshner. He wanted everybody thinking 'Hey, he's doing all this, not them.' In the end it was very self-destructive because it heightened the whole press issue and it made them feel lousy." Kirshner was out of a job, first as the supervisor for the Monkees and then as the head of Columbia/Screen Gems Music. In his place came Lester Sill, the man who had got Leiber and Stoller together as songwriters, who had been Lee Hazelwood's production partner on his early records with Duane Eddy, and who had been the "Les" in Philles Records until Phil Spector pushed him out. Sill, unlike Kirshner, was someone who was willing to take a back seat and just be a steadying hand where needed. The reissued version of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" went to number two on the charts, behind "Somethin' Stupid" by Frank and Nancy Sinatra, produced by Sill's old colleague Hazelwood, and the B-side, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", also charted separately, making number thirty-nine on the charts. The Monkees finally had a hit that they'd written and recorded by themselves. Pinocchio had become a real boy: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] At the same session at which they'd recorded that track, the Monkees had recorded another Nesmith song, "Sunny Girlfriend", and that became the first song to be included on a new album, which would eventually be named Headquarters, and on which all the guitar, keyboard, drums, percussion, banjo, pedal steel, and backing vocal parts would for the first time be performed by the Monkees themselves. They brought in horn and string players on a couple of tracks, and the bass was variously played by John London, Chip Douglas, and Jerry Yester as Tork was more comfortable on keyboards and guitar than bass, but it was in essence a full band album. Jones got back the next day, and sessions began in earnest. The first song they recorded after his return was "Mr. Webster", a Boyce and Hart song that had been recorded with the Candy Store Prophets in 1966 but hadn't been released. This was one of three tracks on the album that were rerecordings of earlier outtakes, and it's fascinating to compare them, to see the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. In the case of "Mr. Webster", the instrumental backing on the earlier version is definitely slicker: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (1st Recorded Version)"] But at the same time, there's a sense of dynamics in the group recording that's lacking from the original, like the backing dropping out totally on the word "Stop" -- a nice touch that isn't in the original. I am only speculating, but this may have been inspired by the similar emphasis on the word "stop" in "For What It's Worth" by Tork's old friend Stephen Stills: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (album version)"] Headquarters was a group album in another way though -- for the first time, Tork and Dolenz were bringing in songs they'd written -- Nesmith of course had supplied songs already for the two previous albums. Jones didn't write any songs himself yet, though he'd start on the next album, but he was credited with the rest of the group on two joke tracks, "Band 6", a jam on the Merrie Melodies theme “Merrily We Roll Along”, and "Zilch", a track made up of the four band members repeating nonsense phrases: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Zilch"] Oddly, that track had a rather wider cultural resonance than a piece of novelty joke album filler normally would. It's sometimes covered live by They Might Be Giants: [Excerpt: They Might Be Giants, "Zilch"] While the rapper Del Tha Funkee Homosapien had a worldwide hit in 1991 with "Mistadobalina", built around a sample of Peter Tork from the track: [Excerpt: Del Tha Funkee Homosapien,"Mistadobalina"] Nesmith contributed three songs, all of them combining Beatles-style pop music and country influences, none more blatantly than the opening track, "You Told Me", which starts off parodying the opening of "Taxman", before going into some furious banjo-picking from Tork: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "You Told Me"] Tork, meanwhile, wrote "For Pete's Sake" with his flatmate of the time, and that became the end credits music for season two of the TV series: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "For Pete's Sake"] But while the other band members made important contributions, the track on the album that became most popular was the first song of Dolenz's to be recorded by the group. The lyrics recounted, in a semi-psychedelic manner, Dolenz's time in the UK, including meeting with the Beatles, who the song refers to as "the four kings of EMI", but the first verse is all about his new girlfriend Samantha Juste: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The song was released as a single in the UK, but there was a snag. Dolenz had given the song a title he'd heard on an episode of the BBC sitcom Til Death Us Do Part, which he'd found an amusing bit of British slang. Til Death Us Do Part was written by Johnny Speight, a writer with Associated London Scripts, and was a family sitcom based around the character of Alf Garnett, an ignorant, foul-mouthed reactionary bigot who hated young people, socialists, and every form of minority, especially Black people (who he would address by various slurs I'm definitely not going to repeat here), and was permanently angry at the world and abusive to his wife. As with another great sitcom from ALS, Steptoe and Son, which Norman Lear adapted for the US as Sanford and Son, Til Death Us Do Part was also adapted by Lear, and became All in the Family. But while Archie Bunker, the character based on Garnett in the US version, has some redeeming qualities because of the nature of US network sitcom, Alf Garnett has absolutely none, and is as purely unpleasant and unsympathetic a character as has ever been created -- which sadly didn't stop a section of the audience from taking him as a character to be emulated. A big part of the show's dynamic was the relationship between Garnett and his socialist son-in-law from Liverpool, played by Anthony Booth, himself a Liverpudlian socialist who would later have a similarly contentious relationship with his own decidedly non-socialist son-in-law, the future Prime Minister Tony Blair. Garnett was as close to foul-mouthed as was possible on British TV at the time, with Speight regularly negotiating with the BBC bosses to be allowed to use terms that were not otherwise heard on TV, and used various offensive terms about his family, including referring to his son-in-law as a "randy Scouse git". Dolenz had heard the phrase on TV, had no idea what it meant but loved the sound of it, and gave the song that title. But when the record came out in the UK, he was baffled to be told that the phrase -- which he'd picked up from a BBC TV show, after all -- couldn't be said normally on BBC broadcasts, so they would need to retitle the track. The translation into American English that Dolenz uses in his live shows to explain this to Americans is to say that "randy Scouse git" means "horny Liverpudlian putz", and that's more or less right. Dolenz took the need for an alternative title literally, and so the track that went to number two in the UK charts was titled "Alternate Title": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The album itself went to number one in both the US and the UK, though it was pushed off the top spot almost straight away by the release of Sgt Pepper. As sessions for Headquarters were finishing up, the group were already starting to think about their next album -- season two of the TV show was now in production, and they'd need to keep generating yet more musical material for it. One person they turned to was a friend of Chip Douglas'. Before the Turtles, Douglas had been in the Modern Folk Quartet, and they'd recorded "This Could Be the Night", which had been written for them by Harry Nilsson: [Excerpt: The MFQ, "This Could Be The Night"] Nilsson had just started recording his first solo album proper, at RCA Studios, the same studios that the Monkees were using. At this point, Nilsson still had a full-time job in a bank, working a night shift there while working on his album during the day, but Douglas knew that Nilsson was a major talent, and that assessment was soon shared by the group when Nilsson came in to demo nine of his songs for them: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "1941 (demo)"] According to Nilsson, Nesmith said after that demo session "You just sat down there and blew our minds. We've been looking for songs, and you just sat down and played an *album* for us!" While the Monkees would attempt a few of Nilsson's songs over the next year or so, the first one they chose to complete was the first track recorded for their next album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, Ltd., a song which from the talkback at the beginning of the demo was always intended for Davy Jones to sing: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "Cuddly Toy (demo)"] Oddly, given his romantic idol persona, a lot of the songs given to Jones to sing were anti-romantic, and often had a cynical and misogynistic edge. This had started with the first album's "I Want to Be Free", but by Pisces, it had gone to ridiculous extremes. Of the four songs Jones sings on the album, "Hard to Believe", the first song proper that he ever co-wrote, is a straightforward love  song, but the other three have a nasty edge to them. A remade version of Jeff Barry's "She Hangs Out" is about an underaged girl, starts with the lines "How old d'you say your sister was? You know you'd better keep an eye on her" and contains lines like "she could teach you a thing or two" and "you'd better get down here on the double/before she gets her pretty little self in trouble/She's so fine". Goffin and King's "Star Collector" is worse, a song about a groupie with lines like "How can I love her, if I just don't respect her?" and "It won't take much time, before I get her off my mind" But as is so often the way, these rather nasty messages were wrapped up in some incredibly catchy music, and that was even more the case with "Cuddly Toy", a song which at least is more overtly unpleasant -- it's very obvious that Nilsson doesn't intend the protagonist of the song to be at all sympathetic, which is possibly not the case in "She Hangs Out" or "Star Collector". But the character Jones is singing is *viciously* cruel here, mocking and taunting a girl who he's coaxed to have sex with him, only to scorn her as soon as he's got what he wanted: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Cuddly Toy"] It's a great song if you like the cruelest of humour combined with the cheeriest of music, and the royalties from the song allowed Nilsson to quit the job at the bank. "Cuddly Toy", and Chip Douglas and Bill Martin's song "The Door Into Summer", were recorded the same way as Headquarters, with the group playing *as a group*, but as recordings for the album progressed the group fell into a new way of working, which Peter Tork later dubbed "mixed-mode". They didn't go back to having tracks cut for them by session musicians, apart from Jones' song "Hard to Believe", for which the entire backing track was created by one of his co-writers overdubbing himself, but Dolenz, who Tork always said was "incapable of repeating a triumph", was not interested in continuing to play drums in the studio. Instead, a new hybrid Monkees would perform most of the album. Nesmith would still play the lead guitar, Tork would provide the keyboards, Chip Douglas would play all the bass and add some additional guitar, and "Fast" Eddie Hoh, the session drummer who had been a touring drummer with the Modern Folk Quartet and the Mamas and the Papas, among others, would play drums on the records, with Dolenz occasionally adding a bit of acoustic guitar. And this was the lineup that would perform on the hit single from Pisces. "Pleasant Valley Sunday" was written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, who had written several songs for the group's first two albums (and who would continue to provide them with more songs). As with their earlier songs for the group, King had recorded a demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] Previously -- and subsequently -- when presented with a Carole King demo, the group and their producers would just try to duplicate it as closely as possible, right down to King's phrasing. Bob Rafelson has said that he would sometimes hear those demos and wonder why King didn't just make records herself -- and without wanting to be too much of a spoiler for a few years' time, he wasn't the only one wondering that. But this time, the group had other plans. In particular, they wanted to make a record with a strong guitar riff to it -- Nesmith has later referenced their own "Last Train to Clarksville" and the Beatles' "Day Tripper" as two obvious reference points for the track. Douglas came up with a riff and taught it to Nesmith, who played it on the track: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] The track also ended with the strongest psychedelic -- or "psycho jello" as the group would refer to it -- freak out that they'd done to this point, a wash of saturated noise: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] King was unhappy with the results, and apparently glared at Douglas the next time they met. This may be because of the rearrangement from her intentions, but it may also be for a reason that Douglas later suspected. When recording the track, he hadn't been able to remember all the details of her demo, and in particular he couldn't remember exactly how the middle eight went. This is the version on King's demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] While here's how the Monkees rendered it, with slightly different lyrics: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] I also think there's a couple of chord changes in the second verse that differ between King and the Monkees, but I can't be sure that's not my ears deceiving me. Either way, though, the track was a huge success, and became one of the group's most well-known and well-loved tracks, making number three on the charts behind "All You Need is Love" and "Light My Fire". And while it isn't Dolenz drumming on the track, the fact that it's Nesmith playing guitar and Tork on the piano -- and the piano part is one of the catchiest things on the record -- meant that they finally had a proper major hit on which they'd played (and it seems likely that Dolenz contributed some of the acoustic rhythm guitar on the track, along with Bill Chadwick, and if that's true all three Monkee instrumentalists did play on the track). Pisces is by far and away the best album the group ever made, and stands up well against anything else that came out around that time. But cracks were beginning to show in the group. In particular, the constant battle to get some sort of creative input had soured Nesmith on the whole project. Chip Douglas later said "When we were doing Pisces Michael would come in with three songs; he knew he had three songs coming on the album. He knew that he was making a lot of money if he got his original songs on there. So he'd be real enthusiastic and cooperative and real friendly and get his three songs done. Then I'd say 'Mike, can you come in and help on this one we're going to do with Micky here?' He said 'No, Chip, I can't. I'm busy.' I'd say, 'Mike, you gotta come in the studio.' He'd say 'No Chip, I'm afraid I'm just gonna have to be ornery about it. I'm not comin' in.' That's when I started not liking Mike so much any more." Now, as is so often the case with the stories from this period, this appears to be inaccurate in the details -- Nesmith is present on every track on the album except Jones' solo "Hard to Believe" and Tork's spoken-word track "Peter Percival Patterson's Pet Pig Porky", and indeed this is by far the album with *most* Nesmith input, as he takes five lead vocals, most of them on songs he didn't write. But Douglas may well be summing up Nesmith's *attitude* to the band at this point -- listening to Nesmith's commentaries on episodes of the TV show, by this point he felt disengaged from everything that was going on, like his opinions weren't welcome. That said, Nesmith did still contribute what is possibly the single most innovative song the group ever did, though the innovations weren't primarily down to Nesmith: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Nesmith always described the lyrics to "Daily Nightly" as being about the riots on Sunset Strip, but while they're oblique, they seem rather to be about streetwalking sex workers -- though it's perhaps understandable that Nesmith would never admit as much. What made the track innovative was the use of the Moog synthesiser. We talked about Robert Moog in the episode on "Good Vibrations" -- he had started out as a Theremin manufacturer, and had built the ribbon synthesiser that Mike Love played live on "Good Vibrations", and now he was building the first commercially available easily usable synthesisers. Previously, electronic instruments had either been things like the clavioline -- a simple monophonic keyboard instrument that didn't have much tonal variation -- or the RCA Mark II, a programmable synth that could make a wide variety of sounds, but took up an entire room and was programmed with punch cards. Moog's machines were bulky but still transportable, and they could be played in real time with a keyboard, but were still able to be modified to make a wide variety of different sounds. While, as we've seen, there had been electronic keyboard instruments as far back as the 1930s, Moog's instruments were for all intents and purposes the first synthesisers as we now understand the term. The Moog was introduced in late spring 1967, and immediately started to be used for making experimental and novelty records, like Hal Blaine's track "Love In", which came out at the beginning of June: [Excerpt: Hal Blaine, "Love In"] And the Electric Flag's soundtrack album for The Trip, the drug exploitation film starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and written by Jack Nicholson we talked about last time, when Arthur Lee moved into a house used in the film: [Excerpt: The Electric Flag, "Peter's Trip"] In 1967 there were a total of six albums released with a Moog on them (as well as one non-album experimental single). Four of the albums were experimental or novelty instrumental albums of this type. Only two of them were rock albums -- Strange Days by the Doors, and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones Ltd by the Monkees. The Doors album was released first, but I believe the Monkees tracks were recorded before the Doors overdubbed the Moog on the tracks on their album, though some session dates are hard to pin down exactly. If that's the case it would make the Monkees the very first band to use the Moog on an actual rock record (depending on exactly how you count the Trip soundtrack -- this gets back again to my old claim that there's no first anything). But that's not the only way in which "Daily Nightly" was innovative. All the first seven albums to feature the Moog featured one man playing the instrument -- Paul Beaver, the Moog company's West Coast representative, who played on all the novelty records by members of the Wrecking Crew, and on the albums by the Electric Flag and the Doors, and on The Notorious Byrd Brothers by the Byrds, which came out in early 1968. And Beaver did play the Moog on one track on Pisces, "Star Collector". But on "Daily Nightly" it's Micky Dolenz playing the Moog, making him definitely the second person ever to play a Moog on a record of any kind: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Dolenz indeed had bought his own Moog -- widely cited as being the second one ever in private ownership, a fact I can't check but which sounds plausible given that by 1970 less than thirty musicians owned one -- after seeing Beaver demonstrate the instrument at the Monterey Pop Festival. The Monkees hadn't played Monterey, but both Dolenz and Tork had attended the festival -- if you watch the famous film of it you see Dolenz and his girlfriend Samantha in the crowd a *lot*, while Tork introduced his friends in the Buffalo Springfield. As well as discovering the Moog there, Dolenz had been astonished by something else: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Hey Joe (Live at Monterey)"] As Peter Tork later put it "I didn't get it. At Monterey Jimi followed the Who and the Who busted up their things and Jimi bashed up his guitar. I said 'I just saw explosions and destruction. Who needs it?' But Micky got it. He saw the genius and went for it." Dolenz was astonished by Hendrix, and insisted that he should be the support act on the group's summer tour. This pairing might sound odd on paper, but it made more sense at the time than it might sound. The Monkees were by all accounts a truly astonishing live act at this point -- Frank Zappa gave them a backhanded compliment by saying they were the best-sounding band in LA, before pointing out that this was because they could afford the best equipment. That *was* true, but it was also the case that their TV experience gave them a different attitude to live performance than anyone else performing at the time. A handful of groups had started playing stadiums, most notably of course the Beatles, but all of these acts had come up through playing clubs and theatres and essentially just kept doing their old act with no thought as to how the larger space worked, except to put their amps through a louder PA. The Monkees, though, had *started* in stadiums, and had started out as mass entertainers, and so their live show was designed from the ground up to play to those larger spaces. They had costume changes, elaborate stage sets -- like oversized fake Vox amps they burst out of at the start of the show -- a light show and a screen on which film footage was projected. In effect they invented stadium performances as we now know them. Nesmith later said "In terms of putting on a show there was never any question in my mind, as far as the rock 'n' roll era is concerned, that we put on probably the finest rock and roll stage show ever. It was beautifully lit, beautifully costumed, beautifully produced. I mean, for Christ sakes, it was practically a revue." The Monkees were confident enough in their stage performance that at a recent show at the Hollywood Bowl they'd had Ike and Tina Turner as their opening act -- not an act you'd want to go on after if you were going to be less than great, and an act from very similar chitlin' circuit roots to Jimi Hendrix. So from their perspective, it made sense. If you're going to be spectacular yourselves, you have no need to fear a spectacular opening act. Hendrix was less keen -- he was about the only musician in Britain who *had* made disparaging remarks about the Monkees -- but opening for the biggest touring band in the world isn't an opportunity you pass up, and again it isn't such a departure as one might imagine from the bills he was already playing. Remember that Monterey is really the moment when "pop" and "rock" started to split -- the split we've been talking about for a few months now -- and so the Jimi Hendrix Experience were still considered a pop band, and as such had played the normal British pop band package tours. In March and April that year, they'd toured on a bill with the Walker Brothers, Cat Stevens, and Englebert Humperdinck -- and Hendrix had even filled in for Humperdinck's sick guitarist on one occasion. Nesmith, Dolenz, and Tork all loved having Hendrix on tour with them, just because it gave them a chance to watch him live every night (Jones, whose musical tastes were more towards Anthony Newley, wasn't especially impressed), and they got on well on a personal level -- there are reports of Hendrix jamming with Dolenz and Steve Stills in hotel rooms. But there was one problem, as Dolenz often recreates in his live act: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Purple Haze"] The audience response to Hendrix from the Monkees' fans was so poor that by mutual agreement he left the tour after only a handful of shows. After the summer tour, the group went back to work on the TV show and their next album. Or, rather, four individuals went back to work. By this point, the group had drifted apart from each other, and from Douglas -- Tork, the one who was still keenest on the idea of the group as a group, thought that Pisces, good as it was, felt like a Chip Douglas album rather than a Monkees album. The four band members had all by now built up their own retinues of hangers-on and collaborators, and on set for the TV show they were now largely staying with their own friends rather than working as a group. And that was now reflected in their studio work. From now on, rather than have a single producer working with them as a band, the four men would work as individuals, producing their own tracks, occasionally with outside help, and bringing in session musicians to work on them. Some tracks from this point on would be genuine Monkees -- plural -- tracks, and all tracks would be credited as "produced by the Monkees", but basically the four men would from now on be making solo tracks which would be combined into albums, though Dolenz and Jones would occasionally guest on tracks by the others, especially when Nesmith came up with a song he thought would be more suited to their voices. Indeed the first new recording that happened after the tour was an entire Nesmith solo album -- a collection of instrumental versions of his songs, called The Wichita Train Whistle Sings, played by members of the Wrecking Crew and a few big band instrumentalists, arranged by Shorty Rogers. [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith, "You Told Me"] Hal Blaine in his autobiography claimed that the album was created as a tax write-off for Nesmith, though Nesmith always vehemently denied it, and claimed it was an artistic experiment, though not one that came off well. Released alongside Pisces, though, came one last group-recorded single. The B-side, "Goin' Down", is a song that was credited to the group and songwriter Diane Hildebrand, though in fact it developed from a jam on someone else's song. Nesmith, Tork, Douglas and Hoh attempted to record a backing track for a version of Mose Allison's jazz-blues standard "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] But after recording it, they'd realised that it didn't sound that much like the original, and that all it had in common with it was a chord sequence. Nesmith suggested that rather than put it out as a cover version, they put a new melody and lyrics to it, and they commissioned Hildebrand, who'd co-written songs for the group before, to write them, and got Shorty Rogers to write a horn arrangement to go over their backing track. The eventual songwriting credit was split five ways, between Hildebrand and the four Monkees -- including Davy Jones who had no involvement with the recording, but not including Douglas or Hoh. The lyrics Hildebrand came up with were a funny patter song about a failed suicide, taken at an extremely fast pace, which Dolenz pulls off magnificently: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Goin' Down"] The A-side, another track with a rhythm track by Nesmith, Tork, Douglas, and Hoh, was a song that had been written by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, who you may remember from the episode on "San Francisco" as being a former songwriting partner of John Phillips. Stewart had written the song as part of a "suburbia trilogy", and was not happy with the finished product. He said later "I remember going to bed thinking 'All I did today was write 'Daydream Believer'." Stewart used to include the song in his solo sets, to no great approval, and had shopped the song around to bands like We Five and Spanky And Our Gang, who had both turned it down. He was unhappy with it himself, because of the chorus: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] Stewart was ADHD, and the words "to a", coming as they did slightly out of the expected scansion for the line, irritated him so greatly that he thought the song could never be recorded by anyone, but when Chip Douglas asked if he had any songs, he suggested that one. As it turned out, there was a line of lyric that almost got the track rejected, but it wasn't the "to a". Stewart's original second verse went like this: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] RCA records objected to the line "now you know how funky I can be" because funky, among other meanings, meant smelly, and they didn't like the idea of Davy Jones singing about being smelly. Chip Douglas phoned Stewart to tell him that they were insisting on changing the line, and suggesting "happy" instead. Stewart objected vehemently -- that change would reverse the entire meaning of the line, and it made no sense, and what about artistic integrity? But then, as he later said "He said 'Let me put it to you this way, John. If he can't sing 'happy' they won't do it'. And I said 'Happy's working real good for me now.' That's exactly what I said to him." He never regretted the decision -- Stewart would essentially live off the royalties from "Daydream Believer" for the rest of his life -- though he seemed always to be slightly ambivalent and gently mocking about the song in his own performances, often changing the lyrics slightly: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] The Monkees had gone into the studio and cut the track, again with Tork on piano, Nesmith on guitar, Douglas on bass, and Hoh on drums. Other than changing "funky" to "happy", there were two major changes made in the studio. One seems to have been Douglas' idea -- they took the bass riff from the pre-chorus to the Beach Boys' "Help Me Rhonda": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me Rhonda"] and Douglas played that on the bass as the pre-chorus for "Daydream Believer", with Shorty Rogers later doubling it in the horn arrangement: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] And the other is the piano intro, which also becomes an instrumental bridge, which was apparently the invention of Tork, who played it: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] The track went to number one, becoming the group's third and final number one hit, and their fifth of six million-sellers. It was included on the next album, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees, but that piano part would be Tork's only contribution to the album. As the group members were all now writing songs and cutting their own tracks, and were also still rerecording the odd old unused song from the initial 1966 sessions, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees was pulled together from a truly astonishing amount of material. The expanded triple-CD version of the album, now sadly out of print, has multiple versions of forty-four different songs, ranging from simple acoustic demos to completed tracks, of which twelve were included on the final album. Tork did record several tracks during the sessions, but he spent much of the time recording and rerecording a single song, "Lady's Baby", which eventually stretched to five different recorded versions over multiple sessions in a five-month period. He racked up huge studio bills on the track, bringing in Steve Stills and Dewey Martin of the Buffalo Springfield, and Buddy Miles, to try to help him capture the sound in his head, but the various takes are almost indistinguishable from one another, and so it's difficult to see what the problem was: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Lady's Baby"] Either way, the track wasn't finished by the time the album came out, and the album that came out was a curiously disjointed and unsatisfying effort, a mixture of recycled old Boyce and Hart songs, some songs by Jones, who at this point was convinced that "Broadway-rock" was going to be the next big thing and writing songs that sounded like mediocre showtunes, and a handful of experimental songs written by Nesmith. You could pull together a truly great ten- or twelve-track album from the masses of material they'd recorded, but the one that came out was mediocre at best, and became the first Monkees album not to make number one -- though it still made number three and sold in huge numbers. It also had the group's last million-selling single on it, "Valleri", an old Boyce and Hart reject from 1966 that had been remade with Boyce and Hart producing and their old session players, though the production credit was still now given to the Monkees: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Valleri"] Nesmith said at the time he considered it the worst song ever written. The second season of the TV show was well underway, and despite -- or possibly because of -- the group being clearly stoned for much of the filming, it contains a lot of the episodes that fans of the group think of most fondly, including several episodes that break out of the formula the show had previously established in interesting ways. Tork and Dolenz were both also given the opportunity to direct episodes, and Dolenz also co-wrote his episode, which ended up being the last of the series. In another sign of how the group were being given more creative control over the show, the last three episodes of the series had guest appearances by favourite musicians of the group members who they wanted to give a little exposure to, and those guest appearances sum up the character of the band members remarkably well. Tork, for whatever reason, didn't take up this option, but the other three did. Jones brought on his friend Charlie Smalls, who would later go on to write the music for the Broadway musical The Wiz, to demonstrate to Jones the difference between Smalls' Black soul and Jones' white soul: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and Charlie Smalls] Nesmith, on the other hand, brought on Frank Zappa. Zappa put on Nesmith's Monkee shirt and wool hat and pretended to be Nesmith, and interviewed Nesmith with a false nose and moustache pretending to be Zappa, as they both mercilessly mocked the previous week's segment with Jones and Smalls: [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith and Frank Zappa] Nesmith then "conducted" Zappa as Zappa used a sledgehammer to "play" a car, parodying his own appearance on the Steve Allen Show playing a bicycle, to the presumed bemusement of the Monkees' fanbase who would not be likely to remember a one-off performance on a late-night TV show from five years earlier. And the final thing ever to be shown on an episode of the Monkees didn't feature any of the Monkees at all. Micky Dolenz, who directed and co-wrote that episode, about an evil wizard who was using the power of a space plant (named after the group's slang for dope) to hypnotise people through the TV, chose not to interact with his guest as the others had, but simply had Tim Buckley perform a solo acoustic version of his then-unreleased song "Song to the Siren": [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Song to the Siren"] By the end of the second season, everyone knew they didn't want to make another season of the TV show. Instead, they were going to do what Rafelson and Schneider had always wanted, and move into film. The planning stages for the film, which was initially titled Changes but later titled Head -- so that Rafelson and Schneider could bill their next film as "From the guys who gave you Head" -- had started the previous summer, before the sessions that produced The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees. To write the film, the group went off with Rafelson and Schneider for a short holiday, and took with them their mutual friend Jack Nicholson. Nicholson was at this time not the major film star he later became. Rather he was a bit-part actor who was mostly associated with American International Pictures, the ultra-low-budget film company that has come up on several occasions in this podcast. Nicholson had appeared mostly in small roles, in films like The Little Shop of Horrors: [Excerpt: The Little Shop of Horrors] He'd appeared in multiple films made by Roger Corman, often appearing with Boris Karloff, and by Monte Hellman, but despite having been a working actor for a decade, his acting career was going nowhere, and by this point he had basically given up on the idea of being an actor, and had decided to start working behind the camera. He'd written the scripts for a few of the low-budget films he'd appeared in, and he'd recently scripted The Trip, the film we mentioned earlier: [Excerpt: The Trip trailer] So the group, Rafelson, Schneider, and Nicholson all went away for a weekend, and they all got extremely stoned, took acid, and talked into a tape recorder for hours on end. Nicholson then transcribed those recordings, cleaned them up, and structured the worthwhile ideas into something quite remarkable: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Ditty Diego"] If the Monkees TV show had been inspired by the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges, and by Richard Lester's directorial style, the only precursor I can find for Head is in the TV work of Lester's colleague Spike Milligan, but I don't think there's any reasonable way in which Nicholson or anyone else involved could have taken inspiration from Milligan's series Q.  But what they ended up with is something that resembles, more than anything else, Monty Python's Flying Circus, a TV series that wouldn't start until a year after Head came out. It's a series of ostensibly unconnected sketches, linked by a kind of dream logic, with characters wandering from one loose narrative into a totally different one, actors coming out of character on a regular basis, and no attempt at a coherent narrative. It contains regular examples of channel-zapping, with excerpts from old films being spliced in, and bits of news footage juxtaposed with comedy sketches and musical performances in ways that are sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes distasteful, and occasionally both -- as when a famous piece of footage of a Vietnamese prisoner of war being shot in the head hard-cuts to screaming girls in the audience at a Monkees concert, a performance which ends with the girls tearing apart the group and revealing that they're really just cheap-looking plastic mannequins. The film starts, and ends, with the Monkees themselves attempting suicide, jumping off a bridge into the ocean -- but the end reveals that in fact the ocean they're in is just water in a glass box, and they're trapped in it. And knowing this means that when you watch the film a second time, you find that it does have a story. The Monkees are trapped in a box which in some ways represents life, the universe, and one's own mind, and in other ways represents the TV and their TV careers. Each of them is trying in his own way to escape, and each ends up trapped by his own limitations, condemned to start the cycle over and over again. The film features parodies of popular film genres like the boxing film (Davy is supposed to throw a fight with Sonny Liston at the instruction of gangsters), the Western, and the war film, but huge chunks of the film take place on a film studio backlot, and characters from one segment reappear in another, often commenting negatively on the film or the band, as when Frank Zappa as a critic calls Davy Jones' soft-shoe routine to a Harry Nilsson song "very white", or when a canteen worker in the studio calls the group "God's gift to the eight-year-olds". The film is constantly deconstructing and commenting on itself and the filmmaking process -- Tork hits that canteen worker, whose wig falls off revealing the actor playing her to be a man, and then it's revealed that the "behind the scenes" footage is itself scripted, as director Bob Rafelson and scriptwriter Jack Nicholson come into frame and reassure Tork, who's concerned that hitting a woman would be bad for his image. They tell him they can always cut it from the finished film if it doesn't work. While "Ditty Diego", the almost rap rewriting of the Monkees theme we heard earlier, sets out a lot of how the film asks to be interpreted and how it works narratively, the *spiritual* and thematic core of the film is in another song, Tork's "Long Title (Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?)", which in later solo performances Tork would give the subtitle "The Karma Blues": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Long Title (Do I Have To Do This All Over Again?)"] Head is an extraordinary film, and one it's impossible to sum up in anything less than an hour-long episode of its own. It's certainly not a film that's to everyone's taste, and not every aspect of it works -- it is a film that is absolutely of its time, in ways that are both good and bad. But it's one of the most inventive things ever put out by a major film studio, and it's one that rightly secured the Monkees a certain amount of cult credibility over the decades. The soundtrack album is a return to form after the disappointing Birds, Bees, too. Nicholson put the album together, linking the eight songs in the film with collages of dialogue and incidental music, repurposing and recontextualising the dialogue to create a new experience, one that people have compared with Frank Zappa's contemporaneous We're Only In It For The Money, though while t

In this episode, host Yndia is in conversation with nationally-renowned children's book author and illustrator, Javaka Steptoe. Listen in as they discuss several topics, including: the intention and impact of his award-winning and NYT best-seller books “In Daddy's Arms I Am Tall” and “Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat” and collaborations with...

En este último episodio de #PodcastLaTrinchera para el 2022, Christian Sobrino habla con el Gobernador Luis Fortuño. ¿A qué se dedica Luis Fortuño hoy en día? ¿Por qué se muda a la capital federal luego de las elecciones del 2012? ¿De verdad le ofrecieron correr para Vice Presidente de los Estados Unidos? ¿Se pudiera haber evitado la quiebra si ganaba la reelección? ¿Nos darían la estadidad también? ¿Qué le ha parecido el desenlace del programa Ley 20/22? ¿Se arrepiente de algo durante su administración? Eso y mucho más se discute en este episodio. Luis Fortuño fue Comisionado Residente por Puerto Rico del 2004-2008 y  Gobernador de Puerto Rico del 2009-2012. Fortuño también fue Director Ejecutivo de la Compañía de Turismo y primer Secretario del Departamento de Desarrollo y Comercio en los años 90. Hoy labora como socio y director de la práctica corporativa del bufete internacional Steptoe en Washington D.C. y Presidente de la Junta de Directores de la fundación CRECE. Para contactar a Christian Sobrino y #PodcastLaTrinchera, nada mejor que mediante las siguientes plataformas:Facebook: @PodcastLaTrincheraTwitter: @zobrinovichInstagram: zobrinovich"Revolucionario en las ideas, liberal en los objetivos y conservador en los métodos." - Luis A. Ferré

Visit our store for more shows Audioshows.e-junkie.com We have all of the Classics and More Dad's Army , Round the Horne , Take it from Here, Benny Hill , Beyond Our Ken , Navy Lark, Westerns and many many more are being added day by Day. Instant Old radio Shows for Instant Downloads. at fantastic Prices Classic Old Radio Show Comedy Downloads. Steptoe and Son Harold Steptoe is thirty-seven and, since leaving the army, has been a drudge for his widowed, selfish father Albert, totting for goods to sell in their rag-and-bone business. One day Harold gets the offer of a better job and is determined to take it. Albert, however, fearing loneliness if Harold goes, knows just how to keep his son at home Classic Old Radio Show Comedy Downloads. OTR

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.

In our Travel Tuesdays series, we explore the 'need to know' items for doing business in various jurisdictions around the world. This week, we take a closer look at West Virginia. Stay tuned for more episodes!Host: Steve Hirschfeld (email) (Hirschfeld Kraemer LLP / California)Guest Speaker: Bryan Cokeley (email) (Steptoe & Johnson PLLC / West Virginia)Register on the ELA website here to receive email invitations to future programs.

Visit our store for more shows Audioshows.e-junkie.com We have all of the Classics and More Dad's Army , Round the Horne , Take it from Here, Benny Hill , Beyond Our Ken , Navy Lark, Westerns and many many more are being added day by Day. Instant Old radio Shows for Instant Downloads. at fantastic Prices Classic Old Radio Show Comedy Downloads. Steptoe and Son Harold Steptoe is thirty-seven and, since leaving the army, has been a drudge for his widowed, selfish father Albert, totting for goods to sell in their rag-and-bone business. One day Harold gets the offer of a better job and is determined to take it. Albert, however, fearing loneliness if Harold goes, knows just how to keep his son at home Classic Old Radio Show Comedy Downloads. OTR

Tales of the Unexpected was a British television series that aired between 1979 and 1988. Each episode told a story, often with sinister and wryly comedic undertones, with an unexpected twist ending.Every episode of series one, and a number of episodes in subsequent series were based on short stories by Roald Dahl, collected in the books Tales of the Unexpected, Kiss Kiss, and Someone Like You.Made by Anglia Television for ITV with interior scenes recorded at their Norwich studios, whilst location filming mainly occurred across East Anglia. The iconic theme music for the series was written by composer Ron ( Doctor Who, The Prisoner, Steptoe and Son) Grainer.Later episodes were set in different locations outside the United Kingdom, with many being made in the United States.On Saturday night April 16, 1983, Just after TJ Hooker, on ITV, the episode we watched tonight was aired."The Memory Man"Directed by Peter Duffell based on a story by prolific writer by Henry Slesar (By whom the term "coffee break" was coined) and Dramatised by Denis CannanThe episode featuredColin Blakely (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, A Man for All Seasons) Judy Geeson (To Sir, with Love, 10 Rillington Place, a couple of Star Trek Voyager episodes and still working today) John Biggerstaff (not known for much) John Judd (Scum , A Bridge Too Far and The Prince and the Pauper (1996). Incedendly He has been married to Helen Shapiro since 1988)And, the reason we are doing this episode, the late great, Bernard Cribbins Cribbins became known in the UK for his successful novelty records "The Hole in the Ground" and "Right Said Fred" and for his appearances in comedy films including Two-Way Stretch and the Carry On series. His other screen roles include the astronaut Vincent Mountjoy in The Mouse on the Moon , Albert Perks in The Railway Children, the barman Felix Forsythe in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (featured previously on General Witchfinders) and the pretentious hotel guest Mr Hutchinson in the Fawlty Towers episode "The Hotel Inspectors". On television, he was a regular and prolific reader for the BBC series Jackanory, clocking up 114 appearances between 1966 and 1991, he narrated the children's programme The Wombles and he played the title role in the CBeebies series Old Jack's Boat. In the 1966 film Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D., Cribbins portrayed Tom Campbell, a companion to Dr. Who. 41 years later, he began appearing in the revival series of Doctor Who as Wilfred Mott, the grandfather of regular companion Donna Noble and a temporary companion to the Tenth Doctor.$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$ Just in case anyone has too much money and wants to give a bit to us to help with our hosting n stuff. It would be amazing if you fancied sending us some pennies - thank you.https://supporter.acast.com/general-witchfinders $£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£ Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/general-witchfinders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Eric Solomon of Steptoe & Johnson LLP discusses the new excise tax on corporate stock buybacks and examines the issues that the IRS and Treasury will need to tackle before its implementation.For additional coverage, read these articles in Tax Notes:IRS Officials Turn Attention and Increased Resources to IRA Lawmakers Indefinite on SPAC Buyback Tax ReliefNew Trouble Ahead for SPACs: The Stock Buyback TaxBuyback Tax May Alter Equity Compensation and Retirement PlansWe want to hear from you, our listeners! To fill out a short, two-minute survey, visit taxnotes.co/podcastsurvey.Follow us on Twitter:Chandra Wallace: @ChandraSWallaceDavid Stewart: @TaxStewTax Notes: @TaxNotes**This episode is sponsored by SafeSend. For more information, visit safesend.com.This episode is sponsored by 360 Coverage Pros. For more information, visit 360coveragepros.com/taxnotes. ***CreditsHost: David D. StewartExecutive Producers: Jasper B. Smith, Paige JonesShowrunner and Audio Engineer: Jordan ParrishGuest Relations: Alexis Hart

Managing the firm's reputation is perhaps one of the most critical roles a legal marketing function can play. Actively managing how the firm is perceived, by both internal and external stakeholders, is key to its success. Someone with extensive experience in this area is Chris Hinze, Chief Marketing & Business Development Officer at Steptoe & Johnson. We're so lucky to be joined by Chris in this episode of the CMO Series to discuss why reputation is critical to a law firm and the role of marketing leaders in managing the firm's reputation across all stakeholders. Will and Chris cover:  Chris's journey to CMBDO at Steptoe and the point in his career it became clear that reputation management was going to be important The difference between Brand and Reputation The importance of reputation management to law firms today How reputation management works in practice  What actions firms should be taking day-to-day How a firm can diagnose if its reputation management is performing well or poorly Advice for others in the legal marketing community who are managing their firm's reputation   

Season 2 of The Player Development Pod continues to highlight those doing the work in this space. This week we are honored to have Syndric Steptoe join the show. Syndric is one of the few in the player development field who impacts the program he played for. Step was a decorated lettermen for the Arizona Wildcats Football. He uses all the lessons and transferable skills from his Wildcat and NFL days to lead the young men under his influence. In this episode Ed Jones II sits down with Syndric Steptoe, as he shares the strategic moves, he implemented in his career to get into the player development space. If you're a fan of strategic and calculated career moves, you will love this episode. Bear down, as Step details the impact he's making for the Arizona Football Team. Follow Syndric Steptoe here: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SyndricS Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/syndric/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/syndric-steptoe/ SAMPLE PLAYER DEVELOPMENT CHECKLIST: https://www.btfprogram.com/btf-program-resources/p/player-development-checklist-sample Thank you for taking time to listen to today's episode. PLEASE RATE AND REVIEW THE CONTENT. Visit Us: https://www.btfprogram.com/ Buy Me A Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/BTFProgram Follow Us: Twitter - https://twitter.com/BTF_Program Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/btf_program/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/BTFProgram Tag Us on Social: #ThePDPod #BeyondTheField --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/playerdevelopmentpodcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/playerdevelopmentpodcast/support

Sophie and Jane both have unexpected run-ins. **Content warnings: loud noises at 01:00 (sudden), 29:28-30:07, and 30:21-30:36, war violence, grief ** Opening and closing music: “Wellington Rain (Theme from The Pasithea Powder)” by Annie Moriondo. www.anniemoriondo.com Logo: Yutaan. http://yutaan.tumblr.com. Episode 26 script: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1My24894SF4_xdpEpVqTDUq6rnermZYp2aWdPPdXEC4E/edit?usp=sharing Additional transcripts: https://www.pasitheapowder.com/episodes Patreon: www.patreon.com/pasitheapowder Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/thepasitheapowder Voice credits: Jackie Hedeman was the voice of Sophie Green. Molly Olguín was Jane Gonzalez. Ian Andrews was the voice of Evelyn and Omikron, Moni Olguín was the voice of Sophie's Mom, Qia Seed voiced Anders Lee, and Theo Wampuzsyc was Thomas Glass. Cat Evans was "Steptoe." Tim Briggs was George Moreau, Lena Garcia was Carla de Luca. The voice of the computer was Cade Leebron, and the dashing Jackie Andrews was Elinor Lopez. https://www.pasitheapowder.com/artists Written by Molly Olguín & Jackie Hedeman. Sound design by Jackie Hedeman. Full sound credits may be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LNI0yO_HnvScoA9-zz0nHtJYRWOSp-tVe_Jf2lfYSg0/edit?usp=sharing This episode is followed by a trailer for Seven of Hearts: https://7ofheartspod.tumblr.com The Pasithea Powder is created by Bad Wine Productions. Follow us on Twitter twitter.com/PasitheaPowder!

In her third State of the Union Address on 14 September 2022, President von der Leyen will set out the EU's response to the political, economic, social and energy-related consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and set out the Union's policy priorities for the coming year. To mark this speech, the European Commission Representation in Ireland, the European Parliament Liaison Office in Ireland and the IIEA hosts a live-stream of the address, followed by a hybrid panel discussion with EU experts analysing President von der Leyen's address. About the Speakers: Senator Alice-Mary Higgins is an independent senator in Seanad Éireann where she leads the Civil Engagement Group and serves on the Committees for Environment and Climate Action, Finance and Public Expenditure and Reform, and on Disability Matters. She was policy coordinator at the National Women's Council of Ireland, member of the Executive of the European Women's Lobby in Brussels, and worked for the Older and Bolder alliance, Trócaire and Comhlámh NGOs on homecare, climate change, peace-building, and anti-racism issues. Brigid Laffan is Emerita Professor of political science, focusing on European integration. She has recently concluding her mandate as Director of the Robert Schuman Centre at the European University Institute (EUI). Before this, she was Professor of European Politics, Vice-President of UCD and Principal of the College of Human Sciences from 2004-2011. Professor John O'Brennan is Jean Monnet Chair in European Integration and Director of the Maynooth Centre for European and Eurasian Studies at Maynooth University. He is an internationally recognised expert on EU Enlargement policy, post-accession processes, ­­­­­­and the EU in the Western Balkans. David O'Sullivan is the IIEA Director General and Chair of the European Policy Centre's (EPC) Governing Board. He is also a former Secretary-General (2000-2005) and Director-General of DG Trade (2005-2010) of the European Commission. In a distinguished public service career over 30 years, he most recently served as the Ambassador of the EU to the United States (2014-2019). Before this, he was Chief Operating Officer in the European External Action Service (EEAS) and was responsible for establishing the EU's diplomatic service. Since his retirement from the public sector, he currently serves as a Senior Counsellor with Steptoe & Johnson LLP. The discussion was moderated by Dearbhail McDonald, journalist, author, and broadcaster.

What makes the world go round? It is increasingly obvious that today the answer is "data" – specifically, data about individuals that companies collect, transmit, and store. Understandably, governments seek access to that data to protect national security and public safety, but such access raises serious privacy concerns, both at home and abroad. This week's episode features an expert panel from our CLE conference this past February. The panel discusses the various angles of data privacy, as well as the national security benefits and risks of international data flows. To hear the entirety of this panel discussion, please visit our website: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_national_security/events_cle/national-security-law-cle-webinar-series-2022-emerging-critical-issues/recording-national-security-law-cle-conference-emerging-critical-issues/ For more information on our past CLE Conference: Emerging Critical Issues: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_national_security/events_cle/national-security-law-cle-webinar-series-2022-emerging-critical-issues/ This panel was moderated by Alex Joel, Scholar-in-Residence and Adjunct Professor at the Washington College of Law: https://www.wcl.american.edu/community/faculty/profile/ajoel/bio Ben Huebner is Chief, ODNI Civil Liberties, Privacy and Transparency Office: https://www.dni.gov/index.php/component/content/article?id=350&Itemid=800 Leonard Bailey is Head of Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section's (CCIPS) Cybersecurity Unit and Special Counsel for National Security in the Department of Justice's (DOJ) Criminal Division: https://www.law.georgetown.edu/national-security-center/our-team/leadership-staff/leonard-bailey/ Estelle Masse is Europe Legislative Manager and Global Data Protection Lead at Access Now: https://www.accessnow.org/profile/estelle-masse/ Stewart Baker is Of Counsel at Steptoe: https://www.steptoe.com/en/lawyers/stewart-baker.html References: Register for the 32nd Annual Review of the Field of National Security Law Conference – The Past, Present and Future: Celebrating 60 Years of the Standing Committee on Law and National Security – November 17th–18th, 2022: https://web.cvent.com/event/587890d9-7f23-4662-af87-6f106dedfece/summary The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): https://www.trade.gov/european-union-data-privacy-and-protection Carpenter v. United States: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf Riley v. California: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-132_8l9c.pdf Paul Ohm, "The Broad Reach of Carpenter v. United States." Just Security. June 27, 2018: https://www.justsecurity.org/58520/broad-reach-carpenter-v-united-states/ The Fourth Amendment Third Party Doctrine: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R43586.pdf Leaders of A Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department: https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/201495A.P.pdf Smith v. Maryland: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/442/735/ E.O. 12333: https://dpcld.defense.gov/Portals/49/Documents/Civil/eo-12333-2008.pdf

Silver Range Resources CEO Mike Power joined Steve Darling from Proactive to share news the company has optioned its Bellehelen Project to a non-public company in British Columbia. The Bellehelen Project is a silver-gold prospect approximately 70 km east of Tonopah, Nevada. Power telling Proactive the company will receive cash, stock, a royalty, and a 2 dollar per ounce payment on any defined resource. Powers also gave Proactive an update on a couple on interesting projects, Steptoe and East Goldfield.

Andre and Zac talk the state of professional baseball and professional football in Cleveland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In our Travel Tuesdays series, we explore the 'need to know' items for doing business in various jurisdictions around the world. This week, we take a closer look at Pennsylvania. Stay tuned for more episodes!Host: Steve Hirschfeld (email) (Hirschfeld Kraemer LLP / California)Guest Speaker: Zachary Bombatch (email) (Steptoe & Johnson PLLC / Western Pennsylvania)Visit the ELA website at www.ela.law.

Today, we are connecting with two academic scholars who will be sharing their insights about Title IX as well as the impact of constitutional issues for higher education communities. Subscribe to our podcast today to stay up to date on employment issues from law experts worldwide.Find Bill & Charlie's book here. Host: Susan Deniker (email) (Steptoe & Johnson PLLC / West Virginia)Guest Speakers: William Thro (University of Kentucky) & Charles Russo (University of Dayton)Visit the ELA website at www.ela.law.

In this episode, we reflect on Title IX – what it has meant to higher education and gender equity, how it has evolved, the 2022 proposed changes and where it might be headed in the future. The ELA is hosting an interactive webinar on Thursday, September 8, where we welcome our audience to submit thoughts on the 2022 proposed changes to Title IX.  These ideas will be considered for the ELA Higher Education Council's formal response to the Department of Education on (or before) September 12. Click here to register to the webinar and submit your thoughts. Subscribe to our podcast today to stay up to date on employment issues from law experts worldwide.Host: Tara Stingley (email) (Cline Williams Wright Johnson & Oldfather, LLP / Nebraska)Guest Speakers: Susan Deniker (email) (Steptoe & Johnson PLLC / West Virginia), Josh Salsburey (email) (Sturgill, Turner, Barker & Moloney / Kentucky) & Michael Porter (email) (Miller Nash / Oregon) Visit the ELA website at www.ela.law.

This week we review Steptoe & Son (Series 3 Episode 7)Living at Mews Cottage, Shepherd's Bush, Albert Steptoe and his son Harold are a family business. They are rag and bone men. With a yard full of battered furniture, tyres and scrap metal, Albert refuses to sell half of what Harold collects and keeps it, filling the house with worthless ornaments rather than pay the bills.Albert is a war veteran and lived at home with Harold since he was a child. His wife has passed on leaving just the father and son. Albert is so stuck with the same routine that it is impossible for his son to do anything without Albert devising some cunning ploy to stop him.Harold is in his late thirties and still lives at home. Not that he likes it; he hates everything about it. Paying bills, living in squalor and being on constant surveillance by his father are his biggest problems. Written by Ray Galton & Alan SimpsonProduced by Duncan WoodDirected by Duncan WoodA BBC tv Production.Steptoe & Son is available here: https://amzn.to/3JJ0DJP The Comedy Slab Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, Stitcher, iHeart Radio, Spotify and Youtube. Subscribe for a new episode each Tuesday. Get in touch - we're @ComedySlab on Twitter and ComedySlab on Facebook.

VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS: Fantasía sobre un tema de Thomas Tallis (16.12). Orq. de Cámara Inglesa. Dir.: Y. Menuhin. Norfolk Rhapsody nº 1 en Sol menor (11.12). Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Dir.: N. Marriner. 4 Last songs (Procris, Tired, Hands, eyes and heart, Menelaus) (9.01). P. Savidge (bar.), R. Steptoe (p.). Ah, love I've found you (Hugh the Drover or Love in the stocks) (9.31). S. Fox (sop.), A. Staples (ten.), I. Burnside (p.). Escuchar audio

VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS: Misa en Sol menor (23.35). M. Seers (sop.), M. Chance (contraten.), P. Salmon (ten.), J. Best (baj.), Corydon Singers. Dir.: M. Best. Two songs from Tennyson´s ‘The Princess’ (8.48). P. Savidge (bar.), R. Steptoe (p.). Hugh the Drover or Love in the stocks (selec.) (Sweet little linnet, Hugh´s song on the road, Gaily I go to die) (7.52). A. Staples (ten.), I. Burnside (p.). Escuchar audio

VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS: Sinfonía nº 8 en Re menor (27.24). Orq. Fil. de Londres. Dir.: A. Boult. Four Barnes Songs (Linden Lea, In the Spring, The Winter´s Willow, Blackmoor by the Stour) (8.49). P. Savidge (bar.), R. Steptoe (p.). The Pilgrim´s progress (The song of the pilgrims, The song of vanity fair, The woodcutter´s song) (arr. para voz y p.) (5.28). S. Fox (sop.), R. Williams (bar.), I. Burnside (p.). Escuchar audio

Welcome to the 'Bakery Bears Radio Show' Episode 62   In todays show we tackle a subject that is close to our hearts, books! Not the digital kind, but the ones you can pick up and touch. A question which has been worrying us is are we living through the end of the bookshop as we know it? On our walk today we talk through our history with books, our love of libraries and of course bookshops. But we also touch on audio books and digital books as we consider that perhaps there is a place for all of them.   Join Kay & Dan as they: Discuss lollipop ladies and gentlemen! Mention Steptoe & Son https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steptoe_and_Son Dan has started using dumbbells! Talk about their love of libraries when they were growing up Discuss their initial opinion of digital books and talk through why that initial opinion has changed Talk through the challenges that face bookshops Discuss digital, audio and physical books and try to decide which is most important Talk through how hard it is to donate books now Mention The Little Ripon Bookshop and discuss how much they love spending time trying before you buy! https://www.littleriponbookshop.co.uk Discuss how reading a book requires commitment and self discipline We'll be back in two weeks with our next 'Radio Show'! You can find past episodes of the Radio Show here: On Podbean : https://bakerybearsradioshow.podbean.com On Apple Podcasts : https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-bakery-bears-radio-show/id1474815454 Follow the Bakery Bears on Twitter https://twitter.com/bakerybears Follow the Bakery Bears on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/bakerybears/

Are cryptocurrencies going mainstream? And what should you know before you accept cryptocurrency as payment? Rachel Cannon, partner at Steptoe and Johnson LLP, reveals the truths of cryptocurrency and what you need to know now.Skip ahead to these topics::49 – About Rachel Cannon1:20 – How Rachel got interested in cryptocurrency3:00 – What is cryptocurrency and how did it start?5:30 – Who is engaging with cryptocurrency and why?7:00 – What should people consider before accepting cryptocurrency?9:33 – They myths surrounding cryptocurrency12:45 – Example of Russian community that leveraged cryptocurrency to bypass their local banking system15:25 – The merits of blockchain and cryptocurrency18:50 – The volatility of cryptocurrency22:00 – What are NFT's?26:25 – Why brands are using NFT's27:00 – Why artists love the blockchain28:10 – What does cryptocurrency regulation look like?33:30 – What is the future of cryptocurrency?35:05 – Sources to learn more about cryptocurrencyConnect with Rachel at rcannon@steptoe.comTo learn more about Data Dialogues: https://www.equifax.com/business/trends-insights/data-dialogues-podcast/

In this episode, James, Tim, Jon and Martin join the beatnik movement to review the brilliant radio episode The Poetry Society, from the final radio series.The team consider the extra dynamic that using guest actors such as Warren Mitchell and Fenella Fielding bring to the episode and how this episode which is a satire on modern art, the coffee bar culture and Hancock's own passion of philosophy, paved the way for Hancock's first film The Rebel. They also review in detail the avant garde poems featured in the episode and carefully consider whether turquoise vibrations are the ideal colour.The podcast also includes a rarely heard recording of Hancock's friend Damaris Hayman's reading of Plato which was intended for Hancock to take to Australia with him.The four musketeers, of course, get distracted and this time discuss how the early episodes of Steptoe and Son feature many of the same cast as Hancock's Half Hour and consider the only appearance of the infamous Dolly Clackett on screen. In Hancock updates, the team reveal the fantastic news that his 1963 series is scheduled for a DVD release in the Summer 2022.Don't forget to rate us and subscribe to the podcast. And, if you haven't done so already, why not join the Tony Hancock Appreciation Society - full details of how to join are at Tonyhancock.org.uk. We'll be back in two weeks when we will be looking at something completely different – the final episode of Hancock's 1956 television series The Tony Hancock Show which is out now on DVD - hope to see you then!

The year 1858 marked a watershed moment in the history of the confrontation between Native American tribes in the Evergreen State and the growing interests of the United States government. Fur traders, missionaries, and gold hunters were followed by farmers and stock raisers, who were able to expand their domains at the expense of the tribes while they continued to trade with them. The tensions created by the situation prompted the white settlers to organize militias and, eventually, to request the assistance of U.S. military to protect themselves. Fights erupted around the Puget Sound shoreline, the Yakima Valley, and the Walla Walla Valley during the summer of 1855. By 1858, things had begun to quiet down. Thus, Colonel Edward Steptoe had no reservations about leading a small and weakly equipped column of men through the heart of Columbia Plateau Indian territory. A crushing defeat at the Battle of Pine Creek pushed him on to seek vengeance against those who had dealt him such a humiliating defeat. Few months after the Steptoe fiasco, Colonel George Wright led a major display of military power through the Spokane Valley, ultimately eliminating the Natives' ability and desire to fight the government.Listen now to learn more!A special thank you goes out to Al Hirsch for providing the music for the podcast, check him out on YouTube.Find merchandise for the podcast now available at:     https://washington-history-by-jon-c.creator-spring.comIf you enjoy the podcast and would like to contribute, please visit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/EvergreenpodIf you have any questions, episode ideas you'd like to see explored, or just have a general comment, please reach out at Historyoftheevergreenstatepod@gmail.comTo keep up on news for the podcast and other related announcements, please like and follow:https://www.facebook.com/HistoryoftheevergreenstatepodcastThank you for listening!

Lieutenant Steptoe has been patiently waiting, but her patience is wearing thin. This previously Patreon-only extra takes place in the second half of Season 2. Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xduy1-B27Bbl6zBJ1drN0W4W8Sl1itYYKHJ-_Cdcti4/edit?usp=sharing Lieutenant Steptoe is portrayed by Cat Evans. Written by Jackie Hedeman. “Wellington Rain (Theme from The Pasithea Powder)” is by Annie Moriondo.

Mufaro's two daughters react in different ways to the King's search for a wife, one is aggressive and selfish, the other kind and dignified. The king disguises himself to learn the true nature of both the girls and chooses Nyasha, the kind and generous daughter, to be the queen. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/avant-garde-books/support

The Rising Edge D&O Podcast returns for a second season with Owen being joined by a stellar cast of gusts from the law firm Steptoe & Johnson to discuss the increasing prevalence of cryptocurrency in the corporate world and how this is manifesting itself in risks to directors and officers. Our expert speakers on cryptocurrency and the emerging risks associated are Alan Cohn, Co-lead of Steptoe's Blockchain & Cryptocurrency practice, advising clients on a range of blockchain and cryptocurrency related issues, from regulatory practices for cryptocurrency companies to legal issues associated with novel uses of blockchain technology. He has also previously served as a career official in senior policy position at The Department of Homeland Security in the US for almost a decade during both the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Rachel Cannon, Partner with a focus on trial work, investigations, white-collar criminal defence and complex litigation. She works extensively in cryptocurrency matters and advises entrepreneurs about regulatory issues surrounding cryptocurrencies, initial coin offering, and blockchain technology. Rachel previously served as an Assistant United States Attorney in Chicago where she supervised the bankruptcy fraud program and worked in the securities and commodities fraud section. Nate Kritzer, Partner and a seasoned trial attorney whose practice focuses on litigating investment disputes covering topics such as securities and shareholder litigation, real estate litigation, bankruptcy litigation and class action defence. Nate has represented all manner of clients ranging from household name corporations and major financial institutions to start-up companies and high net worth individuals. Charles Michael, a litigation Partner specialising in high stakes disputes and arbitrations. He has represented clients in regulatory and criminal investigations by the Securities Exchange Commission, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and The Department of Justice. He is also founder and editor of the SDNY blog which covers civil litigation and trial practice in the Southern District of New York. The Rising Edge D&O Podcast is presented by Owen Dacey, Head of Claims at Rising Edge, and Richard Cutcher, Executive Producer, and founder of the Global Captive Podcast. For more information on Rising Edge to sign up for updates and new episodes of the podcast, visit: risingedge.co/rising-edge-podcast-blog/ You can subscribe to the Rising Edge D&O Podcast on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any other podcast app.