I’ve made a radio series! I used to make a different one that was intended as a similar thing to Radio 4‘s ‘Desert Island Discs‘, but played full songs and didn’t force a bible on the guest. It was called ‘The Share Zone’ and the guest recruitment poster was a photocollage of me standing in a meadow of flowers filled with kittens and bunnies below butterflies and a rainbow in a beautiful blue sky, extending an arm out towards the reader, inviting them to “Join me… in The Share Zone”. Apparently it wasn’t all that inviting, as I had to ask a lot of guests personally if they’d like to come and talk about their favourite music. This wasn’t how I’d intended it – the idea was that the show would be a platform for people to have a couple of hours (it was two hours long!) to play and talk about their favourite music. Sometimes it was awkward, sometimes it was really fun, but I hope it always made the guest feel important.
The radio station the show went out on is called Soundart Radio, and it’s amazing. We’ve got an interview with founders Nell and Lucinda for the next issue, so hopefully you’ll get as excited about their unique rural community art radio as I do.
At the end of the season that The Share Zone was scheduled into, I knew I wanted to make another show for the station at some point. It took me a while, but I eventually came up with a show idea and got it going for the February-April 2010 season. The new show is called ‘A Crab In Your Conch‘. I describe it on the Soundart website as “a half-hour sound collage of timeless audio wonders and whatever we’ve found this week”. I don’t know why I refer to a “we” in that description, as it’s turned out to be almost entirely self-made. The Guy Show. The “sound collage” bit has turned out to be inaccurate too. I initially wanted to make a sort of vaguely-educational audio version of the horribly-labelled ‘bro- cam’ skate videos like the ‘Logan Kincade‘ series, the $lave and Roger promos, ‘Beez‘ videos and the Palace ‘Global Skateboarding News‘, splicing together film clips and “hijinx” (as coined by Baker filmer Beagle) with extreme sk8boarding action – except in my case it would have been an audio collage of conversations with friends, YouTube clip audio, recordings of Radio 4 and whatever else I might have happened to walk past..
The actual show format has changed hugely over the series:
- ‘Who’s In The Tom Tom Club?‘ – a rap-based introduction to the people mentioned in Tom Tom Club‘s ‘Genius Of Love’
- ‘What Does Teen Spirit Smell Like?‘ – a very subjective, incomplete history of cover versions
- ‘Was It Eleanor Rigby’s Birthday Yesterday?‘ – the four most-covered songs in the Western pop canon
- ‘Is Metal Still Heavy?‘ – a subjective history of metal’s relationship with the media [coming soon]
- ‘Skate Or Diatonics?’ – a history of the relationship between skateboarding and music
- ‘Who Starts The Dawn Chorus?‘ – the relationship between humans and animals in music
- ‘What’s Art For Aliens?‘ – excerpts from the Voyager Golden Record
- ‘Can Squares Play The Music Of The Spheres?‘ – the relationship between music and space
- ‘How Many Faces Does A Clock Have?‘ – the history of BT‘s speaking clock
- ‘Where’s Malice?‘ – an audio guide to Woking
- ‘Would You Listen To The Children On The Radio?‘ – children who make music
- ‘Who Were Daft Punk’s Teachers?‘ – mini-biographies of all the people mentioned in Daft Punk‘s ‘Teachers’
You can download MP3s of all the shows from my website – http://guy.eye-ball.info. I thought I should write about it here because its made with the same sort of approach as I take with Eye Ball. I hope you like it.