Podcast Corner: Taking a sip of the capital's history
Turtle Bunbury presents an eight-part series on the story of Guinness. Picture: iStock
An eight-part series hosted by historian Turtle Bunbury, this is the first podcast series from the Guinness Storehouse.
The show was intentionally launched on April 1 - the day that the Guinness Harp was trademarked in 1876 - and the lore of the brand is evident throughout the series.
There are interviews with people associated, in some way, with the brand: DJ and rapper Mango - his Mango x Mathman project is due to end with a farewell show at Vicar Street on May 5 - talks about the ‘True Blue’ Dub blood on both sides of his family tree, while on the first episode - and the longest, at over 50 minutes - historian Liz Gillis says: “I was born in the Liberties… Guinness was just there… It’s always been with ya for my entire life.”
On the sheer size of the complex in Dublin 8, she says it’s like a mini city.
Other interviewees across the season include Guinness flavour essence manager Kate Curran, chairman Rory Guinness, and chef and fishmonger Niall Sabongi.
While we might now associate Mango with Guinness, another acclaimed Irish musician, Maija Sofia, we associate with Bridget Cleary - her song 'The Wife of Michael Cleary' is the standout of the 2019 debut album Bath Time.
While the long-running Irish History Podcast doesn’t feature Sofia’s song on its recent episode, The Burning of Bridget Cleary, the story is more than enough on its own.
As host Fin Dwyer says at the outset: “Cleary is often labelled as the last witch burned in Ireland. But this is a crass oversimplification of what happened to this woman in 1895.”
The latest episode of Three Castles Burning, meanwhile, focuses on another brand synonymous with Dublin in U2 and their recent documentary, A Sort of Homecoming.
If you’ve watched it already (Disney+), you will have seen podcast host Donal Fallon guiding David Letterman on a tour of Dublin.
He’s fleshed out that tour for this podcast episode, which culminates in the Clash’s gig at Trinity College in 1977 (a gig Fallon covered on the podcast in October 2020).
He says here: “Dave Fanning was unimpressed - actually Dave Fanning is probably the only person who was at the Clash at Trinity College and said it wasn’t that good a gig - but Bono was converted. It wasn’t so much a musical event, it was more like the Red Army had arrived on a cold October night to forcefeed a new cultural revolution - punk rock.”
