We are an optimistic species. Even in our stories about the end of the world, the world doesn’t actually end. In reality, it will. In the season one finale of Ghost Echoes, we study the apocalypse. Ragnarök. The Great Tribulation. The End. Alas, we're not alone -- we're with Nico.
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Music and Sound Notes:
-- This episode contains excerpts from “Femme Fatale,” by the Velvet Underground, and “These Days", “Eulogy to Lenny Bruce”, “Frozen Warnings”, “Nibelungen”, “You Forget to Answer”, “The End”, “Das Lied der Deutschen,” and “Win a Few", all by Nico.
Further reading, listening:
--For biographical information on Nico, see the documentary Nico: Icon and this Guardian story by Simon Reynolds. This episode also contains clips from Susanna Nicchiarelli’s excellent biopic Nico, 1988.
--For more on the 1910 Halley’s comet panic, read Matt Simon in Wired. And for more on the UFO cult Chen Tao, see Encyclopaedia Britannica.
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26:51
No. 9 - Lady June's Linguistic Leprosy
June Campbell Cramer, known to all as Lady June, was one of the greatest party hosts of her day. She was the connective tissue that held whole musical scene together. She was the counterculture’s landlady. And she was also an artist in her own right. On this episode of Ghost Echoes, we crash a house party and do a bit of psychedelic people watching.
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Music and Sound Notes:
--This episode contains excerpts of three tracks from Lady June’s Linguistic Leprosy: “Some Day Silly Twenty Three,” “To Whom It May Not Concern,” and “Am I.”
Further reading, listening:
--Details on Lady June’s life were gathered from Marcus O’Dair’s Robert Wyatt biography Different Every Time, as well as various online sources. These include her obituary in the Independent, an interview in Facelift Magazine, this feature on a fansite for Canterbury music, these reminiscences from June’s fellow Deia residents, the AllMusic review of Linguistic Leprosy, and Lady June’s own semi-autobiographical poem Rebella.
--The complete story of the wealthy Texan optician and Soft Machine patron Wes Brunson can be found on Aymeric Leroy’s blog about the Canterbury Scene.
--The full text of Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, complete with the prologue he wrote nearly thirty years later, can be found here. Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” is in Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
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14:30
Lost Echo: Roxy Music vs. King Crimson
Roxy Music and King Crimson shared a label. They nearly shared a lead singer. And Crimson’s lyricist produced Roxy’s debut album. In this deleted scene from the second episode of Ghost Echoes, we compare and contrast two bands that ought to have been more similar than they were.
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4:54
No. 8 - Hallelujah
On May 28, 1974, the worst orchestra in the world performed at the Royal Albert Hall. That’s not so unusual. The Albert Hall isn’t Carnegie Hall. It’s not an exclusive, prestigious venue where only the greatest may perform. It is simply London’s most historic gathering place. Many strange and marvelous things have happened there, including militant political rallies, beat poetry, and appearances by celebrity ghosts. In this episode of Ghost Echoes, we present you five extraordinary evenings at the Albert Hall.
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Music and Sound Notes:
-- The episode opens with the Portsmouth Sinfonia’s performance of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. The section on the opening concert of the RAH features the final chorus from Arthur Sullivan’s cantata On Shore and Sea, performed by the soloists, chorus and orchestra of the Imperial Opera, conducted by Michael Withers. The final section on the RAH in the 60s contains snippets from Cream’s performance of “Spoonful” in the hall, and Pink Floyd rehearsing “A Saucerful of Secrets” with Rick Wright on the grand organ, just before the show that got them “banned for life.”
Further reading, listening:
-- A great deal of basic information came from the official Royal Albert Hall website.
-- Information on the suffragette movement’s meetings in the RAH came from this piece by Susanne Keyte in the Telegraph, and History is a Weapon, where you can read Emmaline Pankhurst’s full speech.
-- This contemporaneous account in Time Magazine helped flesh out Arthur Conan Doyle’s seance. The audio of Conan Doyle speaking about spiritualism–as well as the audio of “Conan Doyle” speaking at a seance four years after his death–are from the collection of the British Library.
-- John Bennett’s Krayology was enormously useful for the section on the Kray twins. More detail came from Steve Bunce in the Independent.
-- The International Poetry Incarnation is discussed at some length in the documentary A Technicolour Dream. It is also the subject of the documentary Wholly Communion, which is where the clips of Ginsberg and company come from.
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19:23
No. 7 - Fear
After leaving the Velvet Underground, John Cale split his time between state-of-the-art experimental music and sweet symphonic pop. On his fourth solo album, 1974's Fear, those two sides finally converged. In the seventh episode of Ghost Echoes, we learn how and stumble into a revelation involving Velvet Underground's catalogue.
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Ghost Echoes is a music history podcast with secret rules. It begins in 1970 and it will proceed up to the present day, discussing one musical recording per episode. Some of them are famous and acclaimed, others utterly obscure. Some are classical, most are pop. The list of recordings that Ghost Echoes will focus on throughout its run is already decided and set in stone, having been chosen in accordance with the podcast’s non-negotiable rules, of which there are three: 1. REDACTED, 2. REDACTED, and 3. The first two rules are secret.These rules lead Ghost Echoes down countless historical side streets and blind alleys where it departs from music entirely and passes by Victorian booze palaces, angry Ontarian proletariats, inscrutable paintings about the space race, demolished movie theatres, drunk people, exceedingly large oval rugs, unlikely origin stories of venerable educational institutions, Charlie Brown cartoons, and conspiracy theories about extrajudicial assassinations by MI5.Ghost Echoes is the story of music -- and everything else
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