In Celebration of Podcasts
Thursday 16 February 2023
Once, in Lerwick on the Shetland Islands, there lived a man called Peerie Willie Johnson. ‘Peerie’, in Scots, means small or slight, but Peerie Willie was not insignificant. Peerie Willie became a celebrated guitarist. He had a friend, a fiddler, called Tommy Anderson. Somewhere around 1936 Tommy built a crystal set – a rudimentary radio – and when the atmospheric conditions were just right, Peerie Willie and Tommy could pick-up and listen to commercial radio, broadcast from Schenectady in New York State. Peerie Willie was a traditional folk guitarist, but the crystal set allowed him to hear the jazz sounds of Eddie Lang, Django Reinhardt, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington, and these musicians, in turn, influenced Peerie Willie’s playing. He developed a distinctive, syncretic style, and he went on to inspire a generation of Scottish musicians. Now, every year in the Shetland Islands, you can attend the Peerie Willie Guitar Festival, and the folk musician, Michael Marra, immortalised Peerie Willie in his song that he called, aptly enough, ‘Schenectady Calling Peerie Willie Johnson’. You might think this is a story about incipient cultural globalisation. It could be, but I prefer to think of it as a story about old as the hills magic. The enduring magic of radio, that is.
During my own teenage years, radio and music were effectively indistinguishable. Selfsame and virtually synonymous, radio meant music. In your own adolescence you probably felt something similar. In my case BBC Radio 1 meant music. My mum and dad and their generation would sometimes listen to Radio 2 (pedestrian and uncool) or Radio Scotland on a Sunday afternoon (less cool country dance music). There was also BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. Radio 3 I imagined was reserved for funerals. Presumably someone listened to Radio 4, but mine was a working-class community and so I knew no one who did. You listened to Radio 1. You virtually studied it. Some DJs were better than others. John Peel was God. Even my more pious Roman Catholic friends with better record collections said that John Peel was God, and so he was. John Peel told you what refined taste was and you listened to his mellifluously pitched sagacity. Like Rex Bob Lowenstein, the imagined DJ of Mark Germino’s song, Peely’s musical taste was eclectic. Under his tutelage it became possible to like Captain Beefheart and The Velvet Underground, Cocteau Twins and The Smiths. Although I thought their music was like interminable toothache, Peely told you to worship The Fall, and so I did, or pretended to. You had to lie about your tastes. We all did. But Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart was the greatest 7-inch single ever, and that was the truth.
How was I to know that adult life would intervene to change my tune? But it did. I remember my conversion as a flashbulb memory. I had begun my 20s and moved to Cyprus to take on a job and responsibilities. I would drive to work past a lovely citrus orchard, reminiscent of the front cover of a Lawrence Durrell book I once owned. Taking this journey one particular morning, I recall very clearly ejecting a tape – that’s right – from the car stereo and tuning into the BBC World Service. As the reception moved in and out, the journalist, Misha Glenny, reported on what he thought was a perilous situation in the Balkans that could, he said, lead to war. Although I didn’t know Belgrade from Bosnia, I was oddly – perhaps morbidly – fascinated by this story. Quite quickly, it appears now, the music that had dominated my youth was displaced by the BBC World Service. I could hardly believe it myself, but it was the beginning of a long education. Since the World Service was entirely synchronous, you either listened or you didn’t. If you listened, the programmes shifted from news to documentary to business to sport to science. There was much to learn. There was even some music with ‘Whispering Bob’ Harris, and he wasn’t half bad.
After three wonderful years on that Mediterranean island, I returned to the wild west coast of Scotland, now quite obsessed by radio. Radio Scotland and – another truth I couldn’t share with childhood friends in Glasgow – Radio 4 became my stations. New bands had come of age on British shores in my absence – Oasis, The Verve, Blur, Suede – but I wasn’t much interested. Although country dance music never did become my thing, my education through radio was unrelenting.
Much later, but before the turn of the millennium, I moved to Sweden. Its northern parts. Here – this is true – I bought a small farm on the edge of a forest and settled in to my bucolic life. The Internet, by this point, was widespread, and it became possible to listen to Radio Scotland while watching the sheep and horses from my kitchen window as they grazed in the late light of a Swedish summer. It was a liminality that was wondrous and befuddling in equal measure. It was now possible to stand in my kitchen at 62 degrees north, cooking food indoors as winter temperatures plummeted outdoors, listening to live radio reports on Scottish football games: Alloa Athletic, five, Stenhousemuir, nil; Inverness Caledonian Thistle, two, Hamilton Academical, one. And so on. What a game changer the Internet was.
But you can’t chase errant sheep forever. In 2010, as you do, I sold the sheep and all else and moved from Sweden to Singapore. Once there, I took up running. Close to the equator seemed a good place to start my fitness phase. I entered a marathon. Why not? The training was slow going. Very slow. Fortunately, I had been alerted to something not quite new, but which I hadn’t really picked up on: podcasts. Podcasts didn’t help me run more quickly, but they did diminish the boredom of plodding pavements for hours. The first one I remember listening to were the stories and essays in This American Life, possibly the most downloaded podcast on iTunes at that time. After that, so it seemed, free from the traditional gatekeepers of radio, podcasts mushroomed and multiplied. I thought and still think it a wonderful thing. Instead of having to wait to hear a weekly literary salon, inconveniently broadcast at 11pm on Tuesdays and replayed at 6am on Thursdays, there are today many excellent (and some less good) literary radio shows that can be listened to whenever and wherever. Clearly, podcasts are about more than literature. As you know very well, there are podcasts about pretty much everything. As a radio disciple, podcasts are my promised land. Occasionally I can become maudlin for an old-time radio experience; recently rereading one of Paul Theroux’s travelogues, he burrows under his bed covers in freezing Mongolia, listening to the BBC World Service on his short-wave radio. Those were the days. Nostalgic moments apart, I don’t really want to turn the clock back. I’ve hung up running shoes, but I doubt my passion for podcasts will ever ebb. Here’s to them.
dmc
On the InThinking website, Tim and I recently completed work on Stephen Fry’s 7 Deadly Sins podcasts – a non-literary body of work for English A: Language and Literature teachers. There are eight (sic) pages of materials you can use with students. Subscribers can access the first one here.
Last year, we started making our own podcasts, interviewing interesting people in the Language and Literature world. We intend to continue in 2023. Here are our first three:
Looking for some inspiration? Here are a few of my recent favourite podcasts. In the comments section, below, feel free to add your own better recommendations. Or, maybe you just want to confirm that it’s true: Brett Easton Ellis and Irvine Welsh really are making a podcast together.