Two Music Fans. One Astonishing Fan-Led Review of Live & Electronic Music

0:00Welcome to the Drowning Sound podcast. In this episode, we are going to dive into the fan-led review of live and electronic music, which was commissioned by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee and led by Lord Kevin Brennan, who is a massive music fan. And I'm joined by another massive music fan and journalist and all sorts of other things. Helena Wadia, could you introduce yourself to our audience briefly? Hello. Who am I? Who are you? I don't know. Existential crisis question. that's too much for the first question of the day um yes okay i am a journalist i probably would lead with that yeah i run a podcast called media storm a very very good podcast thank you so much i think i'm technically allowed to say it's my favorite podcast without you blushing aren't i that's the best thing ever i guess um it's a news and current affairs podcast but it's not two boring men talking to each other about the news and their opinions on the news it is a podcast that teaches you how to read the news and also leads by lived experience so every topic that we cover whether it's about refugees or trans people or people who have been homeless we will only speak to people members of those communities uh when we cover the topic because they are so often talked about and very rarely spoken to and their voices are so powerful and listening to your podcast has inspired how we're approaching the drowning sound podcast so when you popped up on sounds like change one of our other podcasts network i didn't realize quite how much for music nerd you were and i was like i do need to find a co-host at some point because it's quite a lot carrying this on my own shoulders and um i thought it'd be good given this is a big government report and that it's got all sorts of political implications yeah and it's quite complex it'll be great for us to try going through it together and obviously drowning sound podcast has brought you in partnership with kobuz so so the audience can get to know you a little bit better we're going to make a playlist of some of your favorites that you can impose on our audience so if people go to dranninsound.org forward slash playlists you'll be able to find that and we're going to talk a little bit about what's on it towards the end of this episode.

2:19So let's get into discussing the fan-led review of live and electronic music.

2:35Welcome to the Drowning Sound podcast. In this season, like most of them, we're looking at power, corporate power, people abusing their power, and essentially how the music industry is going to be held to task by, not necessarily its own admissions, it's going to be subject to legal cases and government reviews. And today I'm going to discuss the fan-led review of live electronic music, which has just been commissioned by the UK government's Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Not actually the government, a committee that sits off of the government, an all-party group. And I am joined today by Helena Wadia.

3:12Hello. Hi, Sean. and we are going to talk through this report which over 4 000 music fans have responded to and i have been a little bit involved behind the scenes in this and i read it and i felt a bit emotional reading some of it because there's like kevin lord kevin brennan who led things is such a big music fan like he opens it by talking about seeing bob marley and joanie mitchell and playing in mp4 the group he's in with other mps that that blew my mind can i just say mp4 i need to listen to that group immediately the mc5 won't know what's here but yeah it was it's a really significant review and it's quite rare to see emotion in a government review i think that's what made you you know get all the feels yeah i like and i didn't expect like i knew that this report was coming for a while it's similar to what happened in football there was like they asked the fans because unlike a lot of other industries there's not a consumer group there's not like a fan association like there is in football and in loads of different sports you've got all these groups that represent fans most of the time the government is talking to featured artists coalition and the musicians union that represent musicians the bpi who represent the record companies uk music who represent kind of record labels and live music and all sorts of things the live trust music venues trust like all these organizations represent parts of the industry but none of them directly represent fans and so this has actually given fans a seat at the table and it's really underscored a report that was done last year or a survey that was done last year called the music fans voice and over 8 000 fans responded to that 15 minutes filling a survey that's a significant time period people have spent and i guess i wanted to talk people a little bit through what's in the report yeah i was really impressed with how thorough this review is there are over 50 recommendations in it and they all fall under these kind of categories so you've got ticketing safety celebration grassroots accessibility transport and voice so it's a pretty significant piece of it's the hundred page long legislation but yeah yeah well no it's like all the things they want the government to do in the next two months and i guess if people are listening to this going okay yeah they've done a report it's like well you need your mp councillor mayor to read it and act on it some of it is basic stuff like we need more public transport when gigs finish some of it is going to require changes to the law like the agent of change which is a bit complicated but it basically means that it's on the landlord to soundproof a new flat or a property not on the venue to keep its noise down yeah um i think that's an oversimplification quite a complicated piece of work um and i'm sure there will be several people that will correct me if i was wrong but there's i think for me the really big bits in amongst it was there's two months the government have already said they're going to do things like end ticket touting or secondary ticketing as it's politely known as and that seemed to be the thing which itv news and also the bbc all sorts of people really plucked out of it even though the government has agreed that they're already going to do it but it doesn't seem to be in the king's speech and that is something that happens in i think september time when the government say this is these are the laws that are being changed and this is this is all going through so i think that I was a bit overwhelmed reading the report because it is 100 pages the fans charter is those 50 recommendations and like the celebrate bit was just like really nice so nice so nice there was that bit that you you pulled out of it maybe maybe just read it because it's so it's so yeah it's so emotional embrace live music not just for money making but as a public good the report recognizes is that central to the ecology are the fans, yet they are the ones often excluded from decisions that shape the music sector, especially when it comes to live and electronic music events.

7:31I think it's like, we've listened, we get it. Yeah, and it's so rare. Why is it so rare to hear about the public good of music these days? I mean, it should be obvious. Like, we know as music fans how it feels to go to a show, how it feels to meet someone that just is into the same weird bands that you're into like to meet a person at a show that becomes a friend for 20 years just because you happen to be into the same music yeah and you can be into one direction or health or some strange sub-genre of jazz and you find a friend in that world and like that's good for your mental health the healing power of sound like we can just put on a record when we're in a bad place or in a good place our music lifts us up and i think that the music industry as an industry obviously focuses on the monetary value of music a lot like all the government reports like we had uk music ceo on the podcast before christmas they're talking about the like i think it's eight billion pounds that the music industry makes they're talking about soft power and all these things like but that's often adele taylor swift like the top one percent of the top one percent of artists who don't really they're sort of in a league of their own anyway so they don't really represent the music industry yeah as a whole and fans themselves like we know the joy of seeing your favorite band play your favorite song yeah like we know that people some people love a band enough to get them tattooed on them who are you talking about and which band might that be okay this is is this the beginning of when i can talk about my national fandom yeah okay everybody so this is my national the national tattoo um this is aaron destiner's long pond studio for people listening it's the it's from the cover of high violet sleep well beast well beast damn it i know nearly nearly there um i've Adapted it a little bit.

9:33Yes. So, I mean, we know the power of standing at the front of a national gig for five hours waiting for them to come on stage. No? Anybody else? Just me? Okay. Yeah. But that is something like I remember seeing the national the first time I saw them probably about three or four months after I'd really got into boxer, which was probably about a year after it came out. That was a bit of a, I was a bit of a late comer. like I think I didn't like Alligator that much so I was a bit slow to get into them. Hey I was way later than you I only I only heard of them when High Valet was already out. Okay well that's good that you've become such a big fan.

10:12Exactly. And I think that when we talk about like the public good of music like I can still feel the goosebumps from hearing them play Star of War for the first time and I don't know whether that's changed my body chemistry or my brain chemistry but the fact that it made the hair has the hair stand on end on my arms and even thinking about it now i feel a little bit emotional and like that is the power of music isn't it i think our public services our sense of community has been so systematically picked apart for the last i don't know 15 years and has been slowly kind of being pulled away from us slowly being destroyed corporations getting even more power the power imbalances are tipping away from you know the people the fans and this has been represented in music which is why it's quite rare to hear it just even acknowledged like oh yeah guys we need live music not just for the money but for our communities for our health for joy for being able to live to thrive yeah it's yeah it was special and i know we posted a video on instagram yesterday and we didn't have any music in the background of it and i instantly noticed i was like oh we really should have picked some something to put underneath it and like even just the way in which music can soundtrack moments yeah and ironically it was a video talking about moments of life being soundtrack right um and i think that the value of music like i i always joke that you can't really place like like when itunes was 99p a song it just felt so derivative of like what music's worth like you used to be able to buy like three of the greatest albums of all time in the front of hmv for a tenor yeah and yet a new release was 12 pounds and it's like why do we put these monetary values like why is a harry styles ticket 130 pounds but to go to a gig in candom tonight's 15 like the experience is going to be like almost that like if you paid on the way out yeah like at the edinburgh fringe where it's like pay pay what you want but it's never really pay what you want it's put some money in this bucket but yeah that vibe minimum 10 pounds please um but yeah i was just curious like obviously your background is much more political journalism as someone that watched the political processes like how different did a report like this seem to you because like to me i'm just used to the music industry spitting out these often quite dense reports and yes uk music will put all these great things in there about tourism and mental health and local cultures and all these different things.

13:09But how did it seem to you as someone that's maybe not as much in the soup of it all? I'm always so ready to be on the attack. So, okay, this government report comes out, I'm ready to tear it apart. You know, that's like basically what we do on my podcast. There's a headline that's come out that's completely misleading. I'm ready to tear it apart. Moore's on the attack. So you talk about this government review and I was thinking, oh yeah, okay, let's get into this. Let's really pull this apart. And then reading it, I'm like, oh no, I agree. Oh wow. What's that like? It's quite disconcerting. But I would also say, yes, it's amazing that the fan experience and the love of the genre and the power of community is all being acknowledged but i think it's also important to talk about that kind of like political money part of it because yes one thing that was clear was that fans should be at the center of the things that affect them but you know the music fans voice survey that you spoke about earlier found that on average highly engaged live music fans spend£478 a year on event entry.

14:28Well, isn't this just like an open goal for the government? Isn't this just something that they could sort out and then for once everybody would be happy with them? Shouldn't they just be grabbing this with both hands? Because for some people,£478 is what they pay to go see one show. Yeah, right. And often that was a ticket that was sold for£70 that they bought for that amount of money. Like from the way it works on the inside is you try and set your ticket price at kind of the medium that the audience can afford. So you just try not to price out people that can't afford high ticket price. And like, I'm assuming if you're like Olivia Rodrigo or someone, you want to make it so that a family of four could afford four tickets.

15:11Right, because you want to be aware that people are going to be bringing their kids to your show, yeah. Whereas a Bruce Springsteen ticket, you might be able to push it a bit higher because it's couples coming and you can have a slightly higher price. And I think that£478 on average, that is a lot of grassroots gigs. Yes. If someone goes to their local venue every week for£10 to£20 a show, that's a lot of shows. But for other people, it's one show or one festival. Glastonbury is like£350 or more, isn't it? And it's like, plus all the booking fees, which probably isn't included in that. Yeah. Which is something that the report really highlights.

15:49The booking fees. I mean, I am so sick of like being going to buy tickets for a gig and being like, OK, all right, fine, they're£50, right? OK, I'm going to I'm going to spend£50. Yeah, I'm going to budget that in and getting to the stupid little checkout page. And then it being like£7.23 for a booking fee and£5 for a processing fee. What on earth are those? What are they really? Well, the one that always gets me is the venue restoration fee. Like when you go to Wembley Arena, you pay like an extra£1.50 to help restore Wembley Arena. But the funny thing was when they launched the Co-op Live in Manchester, brand new venue, it had a restoration fee in it.

16:32I was like, I don't know if that was totally true, but someone told me that and I was like, surely that's a joke. That's ridiculous. Because it's one of those standard things they put in there. So what is that? Is that just profit grabbing? That is the venue suggesting that they need that in order to, I guess, put solar panels in or soundproofing. But I've never seen it on a small venue that probably needs the additional. Like if you're an artist playing Wembley Arena, your booking agent speaks to a promoter like a Live Nation or SJM or Kilimanjaro or one of the big companies. they then book the venue they hire the venue and pay the venue a very big fee in order to hire the venue um so the venue is getting money so i don't know why the venue needs an extra top up from the audience which won't go to the artist yeah which won't be part of the the settlement at the end of the show so most gigs you get offered a fee and that fee is 80 sales and then over that you get like a cut of the sellout shows often for some bands where they know they're going to sell out that doesn't happen but anyway it's a bit complicated but why does this need all these extra fees and like if a show's cancelled often you can't get the booking fee back oh completely you can't and if you want to give a ticket to a friend for example the other day i had gig tickets and i couldn't go in the end and i just felt so but i was like oh don't worry about the 10 pounds of booking fees.

18:04I just felt so bad because I was like, well, that's not really the price, but it is. This is why I guess like most people, I suppose, like I try and buy my tickets on dice because yes, all those fees are included, but at least you can just see them up front. At least you're not going to get a shock. I don't think the first time I went to America, I was a bit surprised when they put the tax on afterwards. You're like, oh, I thought this was going to be like eight pounds. And then suddenly like suddenly$12. so maybe in America maybe it's less um less of a surprise to people so is it in the review that they're going to try and stop these unnecessary fees I think I think they're going to be reviewed I think because fans have said we don't understand them like if I don't understand them if you don't understand them like it's a bit confusing but one of the fees that's in there is the grassroots levy which is a pound on stadium and arena tickets like we've talked about it on this podcast quite a bit like if you buy a ticket for a gig at the royal albert hall it's like a pound on every one of those tickets it's going into a fund which is funding artists grants so we talked to the featured artists coalition a few weeks ago and then funding grassroots venues so the music venues trust gets some of that money um and that is an added charge to a ticket which bizarrely the government takes VAT on so they instantly lose 20 20p of every pound um but that is money that's going in to fund the research and development of the grassroots of music yeah adding that pound is such a big thing and yet not everyone is and guess can you guess which company maybe isn't as quick as everyone else to get involved hmm could it possibly be Live Nation well they are in they've got some shows enta shikari and harry styles are both got tours with them coming up right and they're both doing it but so it can be done so is this is it down to the artists then rather than down to the corporation behind it it's i've been told a few different things i think basically in the process of confirming a show you have to opt into it rather than opt out of it um and i think that the artist has to basically say in advance we want to do this um or with some of the promoters they just do it by standard i don't know why any artist would not want to support them in a generation before yeah probably why would an artist not want to support probably a venue that helped them come up help them grow help them get into the industry even katie perry did it and she talked about what a great time she had at the water rats all right katie perry the only time you hear me defend katie perry

20:54this episode of the dronin sound podcast is presented in partnership with cobus the platform that pays artists four times more than the industry standard that has high quality audio that has human curation, which as a human curator is something that I truly value over the kind of algo slop that you get on some platforms. You can really hear the difference. I know lots of places talk about the audio qualities and as soon as I moved across it sort of felt like I was rediscovering music, which is one of the platform's slogans. If you're worried about your playlists, you can use Soundiz. It's a really good tool that's part of the sign-up process when you join Cobuzz.

21:34It just transfers everything across. If you'd like a free trial of this platform that's independently owned and made for music enthusiasts, head to drownedinsound.org forward slash playlists, where you can hear not only our playlists, but get a free trial. You can also find these details in the show notes to this episode. And now back to this episode of the Drowning Sound podcast, brought to you in partnership with Cobuzz.

22:10Are you as attached to certain venues, grassroots venues, as you are to certain bands? There's definitely some that are really nice. Like, have you ever been to the Trades Club in Hebden Bridge? I have not. It's like an outpost kind of town. Like, it's quite a... Lots of writers and people live there. And a beautiful place north of Manchester. kind of north of leeds a bit and um the venue itself is like an old working men's club like but it's now much more of like a community hub community center and the venue's on the top floor and it's just something about it it's like it's got soft red like curtains and um the crowd's always really lovely and tickets always sell really well there when i've taken artists i work with on tour and mal who runs it used to be in my life story i think was the band he was in who were big in the 90s and um there's yeah it's just like it's got a really nice vibe like Brudenell in Leeds is like great for going to see shows and it's got like you can see from everywhere in the room and the stage is high enough as a five foot one girly I really appreciate that yeah so yeah I've definitely got favorite venues but I I've not been to many grassroots venues that haven't been great like that either haven't had a labor of love or a kind of mad spirit of someone that's just like trying to keep it going despite the fact that it's probably financially quite challenging oh honestly it's what makes them i'm very attached to certain grassroots venues in bristol um where i studied and the louisiana the fleece oh my god like i don't think have ever been to louisiana oh i i mean i would have to look up if it's still running but it was basically just this room above a pub and it was so amazing to have no gap between where the stage ends and the audience begin was so beautiful so many times i've just stood so unnecessarily close to the person playing the music that I'm like, maybe I'm in the band.

24:21But that's special and that deserves to be protected. And I'm glad to see so much care about the way that they talk about grassroots venues in this fan-led review. It's like the love of people. There's so many quotes and I'd really urge people to go read it. It only takes about 15 minutes to read. It's not that. You can do it. You can do it. Although I said it's 100 pages, some of those pages have like 10 words on them okay there's like are they pretty pictures or yeah there's graph there's all sorts of bits that break it up there's a page of acknowledgements all those kinds of things so um but yeah one of the other things they talked about was transport safety and accessibility and i guess we live in near london so it's not as big a problem but like I guess in Bristol is pretty good for but have you been to shows and found like you can get home or especially like before the night tube and things like I sometimes go out on a week night in London and forget the night tubes not running and yeah I'm like oh I mean honestly right now I'm lucky enough to be living in zone two so can get home pretty late whenever i need to but for a long time i was living in zone five and as type of zone fives that's off the tube map um and i basically just wouldn't go to gigs because i'd be like okay this gig finishes at 10 30 the last train is at 10 45 i'm not going to make it and it just completely would yeah would just put me off going to them and we have seen like this kind of surge of artists acknowledging that obviously you've got annie mack with her before midnight you've got um los campesinos they're very good about posting their set times and also uh finishing early i think all their gigs recently have finished before 10 p.m.

26:27And it doesn't sound very rock and roll and it doesn't sound very punk, but my God, it's great to get home by 10 and be in bed. We've done it with the Anchoress and one of the things that some of the fans are like, that's great, I can get a trainer down to get a hotel. Yes. So that then means that person has more money that they can spend at the show. So anyone saying, oh, this is going to eat into our bar spend or anything like that, it's like, no, the people are going to be in the venue in the same amount of time. they're just going to be able to like we've done a lot of shows end at 10 and then had an hour to do merch and the amount of time that you can spend with a fan when you're not rushing them out the door in 15 minutes like that again is like we sold more merch and katherine got to meet the fans properly and for a lot of them they got to hang out with each other as well because you go to a gig you get there at eight o 'clock there's a support band on you've got 15 minutes to quickly get a drink band finishes and you go home and like queuing up for 10 15 minutes after a show people start chatting and like there's all these other benefits and like one of the things the report really underscores is that as fans even just knowing what time a show finishes because all we really get is door time i don't know about you but i've gone to doors at shows before and it says seven o 'clock and the first band's on at quarter past eight yes post your set time yeah I do wonder if some people who have support acts don't post their set times because they worry that maybe people will just turn up in a surge after the support acts.

27:59Well, that's the argument. But when we post on the Drowning Sound forums, everyone said they would more likely see the support because they're not guessing what time the supports are. Yeah, I completely agree. And also, I think you should always go see the support act. Have you ever seen anyone amazing open for someone when you went to a show? that's then gone on to be like a favorite or big or not that's gone on to be big but has gone on to be big in my in my world i went to see tegan and sarah play once and someone called ria may open for them and i ended up listening to that ria may album on repeat i think it you know was my top album of that year and i love it so much it's such a good album and i'm just like wow i would have never ever known about this but i can't think of anyone off the top of my head that's like oh suddenly they became oh maybe uh jacob alon saw opening for k tempest um and they're quite big at the moment uh what about you i miss i've seen so many i'm like i've mentioned on this podcast a few times about seeing muse extra cabin and they were the support band that night like but i did purposely gone to see them i'm thinking of people i've seen where i didn't know anything about them um because that's a bit rarer like i ended up signing back for lashes because a bunch of people saw her open for coco rosie and the description on the forums was so good i'm like who is this and they're playing with coco rosie who i loved um and i instantly just like looked looked up about flashes and got in touch trying to get hold of him she had no music out at the time so i had to like contact the manager to ask for some music and that's unbelievable and ended up releasing her debut single um so yeah but that wasn't even me being there um i've definitely seen some really special like especially when you get to a festival early and you you see someone that you were kind of maybe a tiny bit curious about like i remember seeing lizzo play to like 30 people in a town yes yes it's like that kind of thing is also anyway support bands will always thrill you or confuse you or excite you and I think the bigger the show is like Sophia Rizella who I adore like she opened for Taylor Swift at Wembley Stadium and like I'm loving the idea of people turning up and being very confused and there being about 10 % of that audience being like I've just seen like my new favorite thing that I never would have been exposed to right probably a lot of other people quite confused yeah i also think it's important to kind of make gig going a part of a routine rather than something that has to be this huge deal i think a lot of people get put off going to see anything live like even theater for example because they're so worried about planning their evening planning to get home but also yeah just being like how late is it going to be?

30:56Am I going to be tired for work the next day? And I think it's important to make it way more accessible where you can be like, oh, maybe I wasn't planning to catch this gig after work, but now I'm going to go. And that's how people are going to discover new things and build communities and make new friends. And really, we can only do that if every aspect is working together, if transport networks are working with us in order to make that happen. like i'm sure in most town centers they would like people to come from work at five o 'clock grab quick dinner go to a show for seven o 'clock get a cab home at 10 o 'clock or get a train home or like grab a kebab like whatever they might do and that's all going to help that local economy if someone is leaving work going home to have dinner going to a show for like 8 30 9 o 'clock then just coming straight home again because they've driven to the gig like that's not that's not good for anyone yeah and i mean i don't know about you but there have been many times where i mean i will never leave a gig early okay i feel like for me anyway that's sacrilege like i need to feel like every last moment but you know i have been in venues especially big venues recently Florence and the Machine at the O2 where the last song I know is playing it's super powerful I'm really enjoying it but in the back of my mind I'm just thinking oh god everyone's about to leave in a second oh my gosh I bet getting on that North Greenwich tube is going to be horrible no you just made me remember I've always been that person that stays I went to see Evan Dando play once sit at the metro and on which was on top on corner of tottenham court road and oxford street and um it got to like 11 20 and he still wasn't on stage and there was no gear on stage um and we were like is he actually gonna show up and he didn't like it was like waited till 11 20 yeah well he was i think he was meant to be on it like 10 10 30 right right and i think he was just playing acoustic so like we thought this could happen yeah we were like i we'll just carry on waiting um but yeah that's probably getting into my like patience for like i was like i have to go now to get my train yeah um but yeah there's definitely stuff with that

33:32so to close out this episode helena we should allow the audience to get to know you a little bit better because we've talked a lot about being a music fan in this episode how much of a music fan are you we've talked about your national tattoo already what what's your journey as a music fan being like were you on the barrier at shows and your teens were you obsessed with going to record shops like what's what's your relationship to music being like honestly sean i wish that that was my story like I wish I lived some kind of like one tree hill teen life where I was Peyton like listening to my emo bands and spending hours in a record shop but I wasn't at all it I don't know it's quite a weird story I suppose because I basically just didn't listen to music until I was about 16 17 listen to the charts kind of stuff um was interested in it I suppose but I never really knew about it.

34:36I didn't grow up in a household where music was played all the time. I mean, I knew a lot about Queen because I'm Parsi and Freddie Mercury is Parsi. And if you're Parsi, one of the prerequisites is that you must talk about Freddie Mercury being Parsi at all times. So I knew a lot about Queen and my parents did say like, oh, and we saw Queen in a pub when there were 11 people there and all of that but that's really as far as it went I didn't really know about it and then um what was the shift the shift was and I really you know I don't like attributing all of this to a boy but I did go out with somebody when I was about 16 17 who um played me a pixie song and I was listening to it and I just thought what what is this I just didn't know that music could be like this and that sparked off a whole journey um and thankfully indie rock music became my love not that boy because he was awful but that's a side note and so this was early noughties like is this when you started like that's a great time to have gotten into indie rock yes yeah sorry I was like how how old am I what's your media age 20 yeah so 2010 was like really when I got in stuff heard the national started going to gigs and you know I was at Bristol and Bristol is such an amazing city to discover that and then I started writing music reviews for the student magazine and just became really obsessed with going to every gig around basically and is that how you started writing for like line of best fit in places so that you could get into more gigs absolutely i put my english literature degree on hold and instead got really into student radio and writing music reviews and that's where i fell in love with it that's when i discovered i want to be a journalist started writing for the line of best fit music reviews gig reviews um and then developed you know a bit more into a bit of six music here and there and then um doing video interviews for NME but kind of alongside that um I was swept in by current affairs and became you know a local tv news reader and worked for big corporations like BBC and the Evening Standard and but you know I've never I see them as one and the same yeah music is politics politics is music culture is creativity this is exactly what this podcast is all about which is why i thought you'd be great to come in um today especially so when you were at the enemy let's do some clanging here were some of the names people you met okay when i asked you this question earlier you started with one of the biggest names like i wasn't sure what you were going to say and yeah okay the the the latest interview i did for enemy was probably the biggest one with pavement yeah which was amazing what were they like honestly very calm very chill really nice i think i feel like there was a bit of took a bit of getting into it but when it was into it so much fun um arlo parks i made arlo parks laugh and um that that always makes me happy and um so people can look up media storm subscribe to that it's great listen there's some really good episodes like i'm wondering if there's maybe like an episode you'd recommend people start with if there's because i feel like a lot of it's evergreen like it's not like oh gosh yeah so we're on our i mean not really that series markers means very much in podcasting now but i guess we're on our like eighth series but we've been going for about four or four and a half years i think what you start with is really what you care about do you care about um refugees do you care about the lgbt community do you care about if prison is working if the prison system is working or what do you want to find out more talking about like pregnant mothers yeah yaki are a great punk band but janie's day job is ensuring that women aren't pregnant in prison exactly like the the amount of work that she's done and the way in which she i mean i love the fact she went on like nick ferrari and like schooled him oh that's so funny i can't remember if you played that we play that clip yeah he keeps talking about lamb chops and jane he's like why why are you so obsessed with lamb chops like honestly it's amazing um well yeah so if people go to droninsound.org forward slash playlists they will hear a playlist of some of your favorites can you give us some clues of who might be on this playlist as you haven't made it yet okay i have thought about who I've put on it and I've thought about I did think about putting 17 national tracks on there but we're going to stray away from that obviously the national are going to be on there the great loves of my life and then I consistently come back to Los Campesinos a lot amazing we talk about the fusion of politics and music I mean hello that is Los Campesinos all over and the way that Gareth just like belches out those lyrics i mean i don't know how he does it it's incredible um we're gonna put kate nash on there just in honor of this episode um who else do i always come back to k tempest being on the journey with them from 2012 maybe so um the way that he has come into himself is just so beautiful to see uh i'm gonna put some women i love and adore on their self-esteem janelle monnet um lily allen's probably gonna be on there i don't know i haven't decided yet but it's it's it's all gonna be on there janelle's on almost all of my playlists how how can i be um thank you for joining me today and uh yeah i've been sean adams host of drannan sound podcast you have been i've been Helen Audier.

41:06And you have been you. Thank you for listening. Bye.