Ongoing History of New Music Curiouscast

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...

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 say…this is Ian Thornley, in his own words, part two…

 

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…

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 boil one of these little buggers in alcohol and it’ll be fine…and if things dry up, a tardigrade will shrivel into a little ball and can stay that way without water for years…

This is the only creature to survive all five of earth’s great extinctions…

So why am I going on about tardigrades and cockroaches?...because we’re about to get into more of the history of the longest-living electronic media we’ve ever known…many attempts have been made it kill it, but yet it’s still here…this is 100 years of radio, part two…

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 original construction of the program was for traditional, terrestrial over-the-air FM radio…

Radio is everywhere:  the clock radio, the kitchen, the stereo in the living room, the car, the office, the gym, the store…in fact, there are so many radios that they outnumber people in North America…there are thousands of FM stations and thousands of am stations….

But because radio is so ubiquitous, most people don’t give it much thought…it’s always been there, and it’s always been free and it’s so easy to use…radio has become so tightly integrated in our lives that we don’t notice it perhaps as much as we should…

And then there are those who maintain that radio is dead and that no one listens anymore…that’s rubbish, of course…I could cite you all kinds of all kinds of statistics to prove that radio is still very popular, powerful, and profitable—like almost 90% of the population listens to radio over the course of a week—but just take my word for it…

But radio is in a period of transition as new technologies come into play…however, the radio industry is very aware of what’s going on…

These are all reasons why I want to talk about radio….plus this will give me an excuse to play some great songs about the medium…

Oh—did I mention that radio has now officially been around for 100 years?....yes…yes, it has—and here’s its story…

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…there’s no perspective to anything…

Sometimes to really understand things, you need to sit back—waaaaaay back—in order to perceive things, to understand things, to appreciate things and why they are the way they are…in other words, you need the big picture…

 

To torture this metaphor even more, the same principles can be applied to music before certain things come into focus…and that’s what we’re about to do…this is part two of a program called “big picture stuff”…