Podcast Corner: Maradona and REM among the icons featuring in new shows
Diego Maradona, and Michael Stipe of REM.
From Spotify Studios (and thus exclusive to Spotify), this series was released to mark the first anniversary of the death of one of the greatest footballers of all time. Hosted by Thierry Henry, whose supple French tones are the podcast listener’s voice of dreams, the six-part series eschews going over what we already know of Diego Maradona’s storied playing career to delve into the controversial final years.
Pondering the price our idols pay when we put them on a pedestal, it dives into the ongoing court case in Argentina, with audio messages from the case file throughout, and asks what happened for Diego’s life to end the way it did last year.
Deirdre O’Donoghue and the Lost SNAP! Archives The ’80s US underground music scene is one of the most nostalgic and storied - Michael Azzered’s book, Our Band Could Be Your Life, captured the excitement brilliantly. From REM to the Replacements, and many less well-known names, there are so many old school tales of bands figuring things out on the fly. One of the themes of the decade was the rise of college radio in the US, with a DJ in every city championing such independent acts. The UK had John Peel, Ireland had Dave Fanning, and the burgeoning KCRW in Los Angeles had the shy Irish-American Deirdre O’Donoghue.
The latest series from Lost Notes - their previous season, about defining albums of the 1980s, was one of our favourites of last year - reclaims O’Donoghue’s tapes, literally. She was wildly possessive of playlists of her shows and recordings of its live performances - co-producers Bob Carlson (who worked on O’Donoghue’s show, SNAP!) and Myke Dodge Weiskopf spent the last two years transferring and restoring hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes of the show. Bent By Nature gives us insight into SNAP!; O’Donoghue had her troubles - she died in 2001 - but sounded like she was a music fan first and foremost.
We get snippets of O’Donoghue’s interviews with the likes of the Mighty Lemon Drops and Brian Wilson, and still to come before the end of the year are the real big-hitters: Michael Stipe, Julian Cope, and Henry Rollins. An accompanying online archive of the show promises hours of entertainment for music fans - don’t expect to hear much Morrissey though. After playing ‘Suedehead’ for the first time, O’Donoghue told her listeners, “I think it’s gonna take an awful lot of requests and probably a couple of well-written, passionate letters to get me to give that one any airplay.”
