The Oral history of "Madchester": Part 1

This week it's the Oral History of Madchester as told by someone who was there to see it and make it happen. Gaz Whelan of the Happy Monday's! This really is something else...

Ian Thornley - In His Own Words: Part 2

The problem with so many interviews is that they can come across as interrogations…” I have a list of questions I must get through in the allotted time so let’s begin”… Depending on the circumstances, that’s sometimes the route you have to take…but there’s nothing more human than sitting down for a simple chat…if you can get some people in a room and just get them talking, then everyone forgets they’re being interviewed for something… They get into a groove and start remembering things and telling stories that aren’t included in any official bios or Wikipedia entries…this is the whole purpose of these occasional episodes I call “in their own words”… Not only do we learn about the artist, but we get to see them as proper human beings…we get to really know them in ways we otherwise might not…and that’s fantastic… I had a chance to chat with Ian Thornley…he’s one of Canada’s great guitar players, session guys, and performers…let’s hear more of what he had to sa...

Ian Thornley - In His Own Words: Part 1

Recently, I had a chance to sit down with Ian Thornley to talk about his career in our ongoing series of “in their own words” shows And this time we cover everything…and I mean everything…. This is Ian Thornley, in his own words, part 1…

100 Years of Radio: Part 2

One of the most robust creatures on the planet is the cockroach…gross things, but you have to admire ability to survive…I mean, they’ve been around for 280 million years… Not only can a cockroach hold its breath for 40 minutes, live for a month without food and run up to three miles per hour, but one can live for up to a week without its head…I repeat: without its head! Impressive, but there’s a tiny creature known as a tartigrade that’s even toucher…one of these things are about half millimeter long, but they’re almost impossible to kill… They can survive temperatures of -273.15 Celsius, which is absolute zero…you physically can’t get colder than this…that means a tartidgrade can survive in the vacuum of space and will get back to business if you warm them up… At the under end of the spectrum, a tardigrade can handle pressures six times greater than what you find at the bottom of the ocean…that’s about 30,000 time more than the atmosphere around us… You can even bo...

100 Years of Radio: Part 1

This episode begins shortly after 9 am on the Saturday I turned 6…for reasons that will forever remain mysterious, the present from my grandmother was a Lloyds portable transistor radio…model tr-62…made in Taiwan…built with 6 transistors… This thing revealed a wider world to me…I grew up in a small town with three tv stations (one of which was in French) and the only radio I heard was what mom and dad listened in the kitchen or in the car… But now that I had my own radio, I discovered that there were many, many, many other stations out there…and in the wintertime, when the atmosphere turned into a giant reflector for distant am signals, I started to listen to stations from Minneapolis, Denver, Chicago, Louisville, and many others… At some point, I decided that I wanted to be part of this world of news and information and entertainment and music…and to make a long story short, here I am…. ‘course, you may be listening to this as an internet stream or a podcast…but the or...

Big Picture Stuff: Part 2

In the olden days of newspapers—and I’m talking decades ago—there was a specific way printing photographs…photos were given to the printer who copied the picture using a special camera that converted everything to something known as “half-tone” so it could be put in the paper… If you looked closely at the resulting picture, you’d see that it was made up of a pattern of dots…each one was a different size and proportional to the blackness of the original photo in that particular location of the photograph… Viewed at a distance, it looked like a normal picture…but if you got up close, all you saw was the dots… Wait…try this…have you ever sat up close to a tv?...I mean really close…so close that you can see the individual pixels…that’s kind of cool because you get to see the tiniest components of the video that’s being broadcast… But looking at a pixel or two isn’t helpful when you’re actually hoping to understand anything that’s been broadcast…you’re too close…...

Big Picture Stuff: Part 1

When it comes to music, it’s so easy to get lost in the weeds…to become distracted by all the minutiae and trivia… There’s nothing wrong with that, of course…it’s the study of exactly this kind of granular stuff that pays my salary…however, there is a “can’t see the forest for the trees” angle to all this… Sometimes, we need to stand way back—and I mean way back—before some vital things come into focus… I’m not talking about just learning not just to see the trees but the forest, but the whole of the countryside…no, wait…more than that…we need altitude…not just for a 35,000-foot view, but maybe all the way up into geosynchronous orbit so we can assess everything about a certain subject… Wait…this metaphor is getting out of control…what I’m trying to say is that if we step back far enough, we can learn some really interesting things about why music is the way it is… What you’re about to hear may change the way you think about the history of music…this is big...

9 Great B Sides

Back in the day...when singles were released on vinyl...you needed to put a song on either side of the record. Sometimes it was another version of the same song, or just the same song again, or maybe a live version...or maybe something completely different. A song that the band didn't know what to do with. Something special...something unique. What I've gathered here are 9 great B-Sides. Some are landmark singles in a bands history, some are ones you might never have heard before...

Airplanes!

People often ask me where I come up with ideas for this program…my answer is always the same… you know that feeling when it’s Sunday night and you promise yourself you’ll start on that assignment that’s due the next morning as soon as “the Simpsons” is over?... Yeah, that’s me…every week…and after more than 700 of these one-hour assignments stretching back to 1993, I hit a wall…total writer’s block… I started to panic…there are hard deadlines…I have a contract…I’m expected to deliver another new show…there are radio stations all over the place that need new programming from me…what the hell am I gonna talk about this time when I got nothin’?... I mean, this is the seven hundredth and forty-sev— Wait…show number 747?...that’s the same as the airliner…what about stories of alt-rock and airplanes?... And so I started go back through all my files—and sure enough, there’s tons of stuff on the subject…plane crashes, near-misses, air rage, terrorist bombings… We...

Alt Rock Revivals Part 5: New Wave

It is a fact of life that there are periods where everything old is new again…if you look at Broadway, for example, old productions are always being brought back… Take “West Side Story,” for example…it first premiered in 1957 and was brought back in 1960, 1964, 1980, 2009, and 2020…that’s five revivals…the Gershwin musical “Porgy and Bess” has been brought back seventimes… Movies are always being rebooted… “Ghostbusters,” “Planet of the Apes,” “King Kong,” “Robocop,” “Willy Wonka,” “Halloween,” “Spider-Man”…“A Star is Born” first appeared in 1937 and was remade in 1954, 1976, and 2018… Then there are all the tv remakes…”MacGyver,” “90120,” “Dynasty,” “Lost in Space,” “Roseanne,” “Twin Peaks”…“Star Trek,” of course… And then there are musical reboots, scenes and sounds that are brought back by people who are sometimes generations removed from when this music first appeared… Maybe it starts with people who stumble on some old records…or...