The Wonder of Stevie (Audible/Higher Ground)
Greatest Hits Radio 60s (Bauer Media)
Archive on 4: Reweaving Threads, 40 Years On (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman (Tortoise)
If you want some joy in your life then Stevie Wonder is often the answer, and The Wonder of Stevie, a new podcast about his 1970s imperial era, is packed full of the stuff. The delight is, of course, right there in the music –the series features more than 40 of Wonder’s songs – but it also bursts from host Wesley Morris’s presentation style, which is big and fun, wordy and charismatic. Morris, a New York Times critic, is a man given to jolliness. “Critics are free to change, sharpen, double down on their opinions,” he says cheerfully. Or, introducing a section about a gospel choir: “I wanna talk to y’all about moaning!”
The podcast devotes an episode each to Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale (Morris’s favourite) and Songs in the Key of Life, and boasts many musical heavyweights, as you might expect from a show that’s made by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, and features Questlove and Wonder himself as executive producers. (Barack, Michelle and Questlove are interviewed, and we hear from Smokey Robinson, Janelle Monáe, George Clinton, Babyface – the list goes on.) The final episode features Barack interviewing Wonder himself (I’ve not heard this). So: a big show for a big artist. Not exactly showbiz, but deep and rich and unassailable. Full-on.
Morris expands his remit forwards and backwards, barrelling through Wonder’s early years in the first episode and, in the penultimate one, making the case for Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants, so he can get to Hotter Than July, a 1980s pop wonder. Well, good! (Plants is interesting simply because it’s usually dismissed. Morris allies it to Wonder’s interest in future-thinking musical electronica.) The whole series gleams with talent and care. We get a recent history of Black America woven in too. From first to last, The Wonder of Stevie is unashamedly about Black excellence, because the excellence – the stone-cold genius – of Stevie Wonder can’t be denied. A series to be relished.
More songs in the key of (certain) lives: Greatest Hits Radio 60s launched on Monday, with the cosy-killer one-two of Ken Bruce and Joanna Lumley. Bruce was host, of course, with Lumley’s official job being “station voice”, though she provided Bruce with a smooth-voiced foil in the way that Moira Stuart used to do for the old Radio 2 Chris Evans show. “Sixties is absolutely my period,” Lumley said. “I have to say that the Everly Brothers captured my heart.” Bruce was as warm and welcoming as a fleece blanket, and the songs were undeniable: the Beatles’ She Loves You, the Monkees’ I’m a Believer, Martha and the Vandellas’ Dancing in the Street.
Greatest Hits Radio 60s, which is a Bauer station, follows Global’s recent launch of no less than 12 stations, including Capital Anthems, Heart Musicals, Smooth Soul, Radio X Chilled, Radio X 90s and Radio X 00s. And these follow Bauer’s Absolute brand’s diversification into niches: Absolute Radio 50s, Absolute Radio 60s and on, right up to 20s, plus Absolute Radio Country, Classic Rock, Terrace Anthems and Movies. It makes you wonder why the BBC was recently prevented from starting an online Radio 2 spin-off featuring songs from the 50s to the 70s; there are so many commercial ones out there now, surely they’re beginning to eat each other. Anyhow, it’s great, of course, to have a wider yet more specific offering for listeners. Perhaps we’ll end up with a station just devoted to a single year (James Acaster’s Perfect Sounds podcast almost does this), or even a single month. Radio Christmas, anyone? Oh. It exists already.
Just as nerdily specialist and even more enjoyable was Jude Rogers’s look at Threads for tonight’s Archive on 4. Threads was a terrifying 1984 TV drama about nuclear war, in which ordinary people from Sheffield go about their ordinary lives until, about 45 minutes in, a bomb is dropped, a mushroom cloud rises and everything is destroyed.
Rogers wrote about Threads in the Observer last weekend, but reading and listening are different, and there were some lovely little moments in this programme. Hearing from Michael Beecroft, who played the scary traffic warden, on an archive news programme (the presenter madly bright and bubbly, Beecroft utterly prosaic, unaware of the generational trauma he has caused); a fun interview with Reece Dinsdale, who played Jimmy; a fascinating one done by Rogers herself with the makeup artist Jan Nethercot. The soundtrack for the programme, a spooky delight, is by Jim Jupp of Belbury Poly.
Finally, you may have noticed some news stories about the pausing of film and TV productions involving Neil Gaiman’s work. These have stemmed from a Tortoise investigative podcast series, Master, which concerns sexual allegations against Gaiman. Tortoise brought the first four episodes out in July, but since then, three more women have come forward and the series is now six episodes long.
Be warned: it’s not an easy listen. Some of the descriptions of the sex are explicit and upsetting. Hosts Rachel Johnson and Paul Caruana Galizia assert that the women’s allegations, which stretch back to 1986, are “similar”. In some of the situations, Gaiman is decades older and far more powerful than the women involved. In some, an ordinary social situation appears to be swiftly turned into a flirty/sexual one, leaving the women (they say now) socially disoriented. In all cases, Gaiman denies sexual abuse and wrongdoing, and says his relationships – and conduct in them – were always consensual.
The series lets you make your own mind up about each of the women’s accounts, and I know of very differing reactions from people who have listened. It’s a careful investigation, the outcome of which remains unclear.
