Make Me A Mixtape (Radio 1) | BBC sounds
16 Sunsets (Antica and Telltale Studios) | Global player
Radio 3 Relax | BBC sounds
How to play: Holst’s The Planets with the Royal College of Music and Sibelius Academy Orchestra (BBC Radio 4) | BBC sounds
Ooh, a new season of one of the funniest music podcasts out there. On Make Me A Mixtapea celebrity invents a reason why they need a curated selection of songs and hosts Clara Amfo and Jordan Stephens comes with a playlist of six tracks each. We hear a little bit of each song, along with Amfo and Stephens’ justifications, before the celeb chooses their winning band. It’s a kind of sound clash.
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So, a pretty simple idea. Although, somehow, in the first few minutes of last week’s episode, A Gym Hype Mixtape for Munya ChawawaAmfo and Stephens do not quite manage to explain what is going on. This is mostly due to Stephens’ off-the-wall vibe; naturally funny and quick, he is also chaotic and therefore slightly unclear. (there are some extra elements to the show, like an unnamed famous friend suggesting a track, but if you didn’t already understand that, you wouldn’t from the intro). Still, it’s all fun, even as an actor Chawawa‘s competitive masculine energy means that everything is intensified. He wants a heavy-lifting workout playlist, but, he says, he can’t imagine Stephens knowing about it. “I imagine you’re doing really aggressive pilates,” Chawawa says, leading to a “how much do you bench” bro with Stephens who threatens to derail the whole thing.
In any case. Don’t let any of this put you off, because this is a great show, and Stephens’ frenetic approach is an essential ingredient. Amfo, who is upbeat but more relaxed and immensely knowledgeable about music (when someone mentions any track, she knows it), has the chops to keep everything in line.
Still, there’s no accounting for taste: in the end, Chawawa chose Stephens’ playlist, even though it was objectively worse. He has Turn Down for What and Barbie Girl! Amfo had Missy Elliott and Lethal Bizzle! Harrumph. You can hear the selected playlist at the end of the program. Or you can hop on a streaming service, pick the tracks you like and start a nice big playlist of your own.
16 Sunsets topped many listener charts last week, and it’s easy to see why. This is a well-crafted and researched story of Nasa’s space shuttle programme, from many of the team behind the BBC’s 13 minutes to the moon. 16 Sunsets crowdfunding itself came into being, but the essential components remain. Space expert Dr. Kevin Fong presents. He is clearly the right person to host this show, although I have some quibbles about his presentation style; he has a tendency to go for the same cadence in every sentence, which means you find your attention wandering, even in the opening minutes when we hear the countdown to start. Yet, once we get into the meat of the show, and interviews with those who worked at Nasa, you’re hooked.
16 Sunsets is hardly an unknown story – Fong himself made a BBC documentary about the Nasa program’s last flight 13 years ago – but the interviews are fresh, and the use of sound excellent, plus Christian Lundberg, of the Hans Zimmer composer collective, provides the score. As always, I would have liked less of the “I’ve always loved space” build-up and instead a dive straight into the story, but my patience for this-means-everything-to-me narrative and, in fact , for space exploration in general is shorter than most people’s. You will undoubtedly enjoy this show.
After fierce negotiations between the BBC and Ofcom, Radio 3 was allowed to launch a spin-off station, Radio 3 Relax. Radio 2 was not allowed to have his proposed spin-offa station that would focus on 50s, 60s and 70s music because Ofcom thought it would ruin commercial rivals like Boom Radio or the multitude of decade-specific radio stations from Global and Bauer. So I’m not quite sure why Unwind is OK, as it seems to tread heavily on the long established toes of Classic FM.
And actually, after listening to R3U, I’m not entirely sure why it was introduced at all. That’s so polite! There is no listener interaction whatsoever – no shout-outs to texts or emails – and the few presenters there are, in the breakfast and tea time slots, seem to have been told to tone it down to zombie soporific. Less relaxing, more dead. Maybe that’s because Unwind is billed as a 24/7 streaming service rather than an actual radio station. I listened to Edith Bowman’s weekday late afternoon show, Filmic soundtracks. She is a film computer and has interviewed numerous composers and directors for her film and music podcast soundtrackso why is she reduced to a few sentences between tinkling piano tracks? Jonathan Ross, who presents Classic FM’s film program on Friday and Saturday nights, is not so subdued; Neither did Mark Kermode when he presented a similar program on Scala. It seems silly to employ such a specialist host and then ask her to tone down her enthusiasm and knowledge. Let Edith speak!
For an example of how classical music (any music) can be invigorated by expertise, try How to play on Radio 4. Last week’s programme, a repeat of September, saw student musicians and conductors talk about how they play Holst’s The Planets. (Music that has of course been used a lot in movies and on TV, from Space 1999 on Bluish.) “Many people confuse quiet playing with less blowing,” says a flutist. “You want to blow more – that’s the shape of the hole in your mouth. The diaphragm should be smaller… like pulling spaghetti out of your mouth.” See? Enlightening.
