The Blagger’s Guide, et. al.

I had almost 12 hours in the car yesterday, and for most of that time I listening to various things on my iPod. Obviously there was some music–you can’t road trip without music–but these days I spend a lot more time on non-music content. I finished listening to a kids’ book I had been listening to with my daughterHey, I needed closure on the plot.. I wrapped up an audiobook of a science fiction book I read a few years ago, one of a series I’m working through again on audio when I’m driving.

I listened to some BBC radio plays: one a series of four episodes doing comedy history around the Crusades (with Hugh Grant, apparently), and one an adaptation of a Japanese SF story.

But the standout thing on this trip was the comedy history of music, The Blagger’s Guide. I listened to the complete first series while driving through Maine, and really, really enjoyed it. David Quantick amused me for more than a couple of hours.

It was available on BBC’s Listen Again service for a while, but it appears to not be there now. I’m sure I have no idea how someone could get a copy to listen to at the moment.

It didn’t start out utterly awesome–the first episode was interesting, but didn’t blow me away. During the second episode things suddenly turned from “pretty good” to “why yes, I shall listen to this entire series”. I can mark the exact point at when it happened to; it was during the “blagger’s guide to punk” section, right about here:

Lots of good stuff there, and then the third episode really cracked me up with an utter thrashing of “White Reggae”, which included this notable bit at the beginning:

Is it wrong that this little clip might have triggered some repressed and traumatic memories from the years when I lived one city over from North America’s largest Oktoberfest?

By the fifth episode I was enjoying things so much that I didn’t even mind when Quantick absolutely ravaged the music that got me through high school:

Actually as we got toward the end of that segment I was actually getting offended on behalf of my favourite band from high school days, a prog rock band that seemed to not even rate a mention as Quantick shredded the entire genre… and then he ended with this, which actually made me laugh out loud

How can someone hate prog that much, and still love Kate Bush as much as Quantick clearly does? It confuses me. Still, it’s entertaining to listen to.

When I ran out of episodes of that I was still in the music history mood, so I rolled into Alan Cross‘ Guide To Alternative Rock, in which I found a number of really weird facts and coincidences. The coverage in Cross’ stuff is in much greater detail–I only got through The Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie before I ran out of highway–and is a much less dynamic presentation than Quantick’s, but it shows a lot of research. And frankly, knowing some of the jobs Lou Reed had during various stages of his early career kind of freaks me out a little. And that whole thing about Iggy and Billy Joel as session musicians (who never met) on a well-known girl group single…

I’d recommend the Cross as well, but don’t listen to it right after Quantick, since the presentation suffers a bit by the comparison.