Dick Pountain /Idealog 366/ 05 Jan 2025 03:05
It’s January, when columnists feel obliged to reflect on the past year and who am I to refuse, though I’ll try to be different by not saying that 2024 was the year of AI. Instead I’m going to say that for me it was the year of the podcast. That’s partly because I got exposed to AI rather early via Stable Diffusion in 2022, and was bored stiff by the end of 2023. But it’s also because online services that had kept me amused for years, like FaceBook and YouTube, started sliding down a sloppily slippery slope into irrelevance during 2024. Feeds filled up with unwanted sponsored guff and AI-generated fluff, real friends abandoned platforms to be replaced by reels and clickbait that spread like digital cockroaches. In response I began to view more podcasts.
Just as reels were shrinking down to 30 seconds of inane pointlessness, podcasts started expanding into 3-hour epics. Of course our own excellent PC Pro podcasts, crafted by Barry, Tim, Jon, Lee and Rois, adopt a manageable one hour format, probably the optimum length for normal attention spans, but several other podcasts I consume started at that length then got carried away. Back in 2023 an old friend recommended an article about The Velvet Underground, of special interest to me as the first piece I ever had published was about my experience of working at Max’s in New York in 1970 while they were the house band. This piece was on a podcast called “A History Of Rock Music In 500 Songs” by Andrew Hickey, and it was three hours long…
Rather to my surprise I listened to all of it and was riveted: Hickey’s taste, depth of research, even his bluff Mancunian accent kept me enthralled. This episode on “White Light/White Heat” was only number 164 of the 500 he plans, in chronological order, but I was hooked and started listening from the beginning – number 1 was on Benny Goodman Sextet’s 1939 “Flying Home”, the first record with electric guitar, played by Charlie Christian. Andrew’s early episodes ran around 30 minutes, soon zoomed past the hour and now are regularly split into two or more parts – as for example The Beatles and Rolling Stones – reaching three hours plus. Thanks to his immense research efforts they remain quite engrossing. He’s now at episode 177 and intends to finish with a song from 1999 (which may take another 25 years at his current delivery rate).
Another mega-podcast I’ve listened to all through is Paul Cooper’s superb “Fall Of Civilisations” about the rise and fall of empires throughout human history. He has an advantage over Andrew Hickey in that they’re fewer of them, mostly long in the past, and he’s covered most of them in 19 episodes. While not an academic historian, Cooper like Hickey has invested huge research effort and is an excellent presenter, making every episode informative and exciting without resorting to sensationalism. Some online niggling about historical accuracy is only to be expected, but his interpretations are largely convincing, not grossly ideological biassed, and the video version of the podcast (free on YouTube) illustrates his arguments with a well-curated montage of photographic, film and literary evidence on par with the work of Adam Curtis. Turns out that my favourite dead empires were the Nabataean and the Pagan.
Cooper’s series, available in both audio and video, raises the question of when is a podcast actually a vlog, but I don’t much care. Among my favourites is a series of 80+ YouTube interviews with living musicians by the veteran jazz guitarist and producer Rick Beato, which is probably neither or both but his interview with Rick Rubin is priceless.
Have I ever podcasted myself? Only once because I don’t much like the sound of my own voice. It happened this way: in 1990 my brother-in-law Pip Hills and I took a road trip to Prague in his 1937 Lagonda saloon to witness Václav Havel’s inauguration as president of the Czech Republic. Following this trip another friend, Mark Williams, commissioned us to write about it for his magazine The Classic Motoring Review and subsequently the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, which Pip had founded in 1983, asked to reprint our article in their magazine and accompany it with a podcast. I charily agreed, and since I don’t possess a professional-grade microphone let alone a studio, performed my part over my Chromebook’s mic, using an audio editor called Lexis (my Android replacement for the wonderful Audacity with which I had 20 years of experience). I managed a usable take after two attempts, even including a snatch of music by Smetana at a pivotal point. Judge for yourself from the link below whether a career in voice-overs beckons…
[Dick Pountain’s Prague trip podcast is at https://unfiltered.smws.com/unfiltered-01-2024/smws-adventures-prague]
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