We all have a moment from our past that still weighs heavy in our thoughts. A point in time where life could have gone another way. A thing you should have done, something left unsaid, a moment that still feels definitive years after it happened.

And that is exactly what the Heavyweight podcast is all about. Originally from Gimlet Media – now a Spotify Studios production – each episode, host Jonathan Goldstein, works with someone who has contacted the show to go back to the past and readdress a situation or event that they feel has impacted their life in some way.

Over the seven years that the show has been running, Jonathan has helped people confront childhood bullies, fulfil dying wishes, reconnect with lost loves and answer the sorts of questions that drift into your head just before you fall asleep and keep you up all night.

I love this show. I would go as far to say that I’m obsessed. It’s the only podcast where I go back and listen to my favourite episodes in the way that some people rewatch episodes of Friends over and over again.

I think the reason for this is that the show is so incredibly human. Jonathan is trying to help real people, with real dilemmas. The sort of things that everybody will have thought about at some point in their lives.

I think we all wish we could track down a childhood bully and ask them why they chose us. Maybe you also sold your Grandad’s World War Two German handgun to buy drugs and want to get it back for him. Perhaps you’ve always wondered why your favourite babysitter just disappeared without saying goodbye or what happened to the person you sentenced to death while you were on jury duty. Maybe you’ve just been wondering why your whole family seems to have forgotten about the time you broke your arm as a child or why someone threw away the expensive painting that you rescued from a pile of rubbish on the street.

Some of these stories are huge and some don’t seem so big at all, but they are all important to the person whose story it is, and that is the beauty of the show. It’s real life. And just like real life, there isn’t always a happy ending or even an ending at all but every episode has more than one moment of real connection and genuine emotion.

Jonathan doesn’t always manage to help, but he approaches every episode with a level of compassion and humor that’s truly authentic and joyful to listen to. He starts every episode by phoning his friend Jackie and finds a way to wind her up or get on her nerves and this has absolutely nothing to do with the show itself, but it’s hilarious and a lovely insight into a long-term friendship. I love these interactions as much as the show itself! The show also has wonderful theme music, which as we all know is the mark of any decent podcast!

Heavyweight is a great example of someone using the podcast medium to do something completely different, something that wouldn’t work in any format other than a podcast. There really is nothing else like it!

My favorite episode is Episode 2 ‘Gregor’. If you’re looking for a place to start, jump in there! One of Jonathan’s oldest friends, Gregor, used to spend time with an aspiring DJ. They would hang out together, attend family gatherings and take long road trips and chat about music, religion and life. Over the years, he watched his friend’s career build momentum and start to take off. One day Gregor lent this friend a very rare CD box set called ‘Songs of the South’ and thought no more of it.
Except this friend ended up becoming the ‘bald headed, bespectacled, castle dwelling, multi million record selling’ artist called Moby and he took samples from Gregor’s boxset and these became the album ‘Play’ which went on to sell over 12 million copies and make Moby a global superstar. He never returned the CD’s and now, 20 years later, Gregor wants his CD’s back.

I’m not going to spoil the ending for you but Jonathan and Gregor end up on a road trip to LA and find themselves in Moby’s living room. Somewhere along the way Ru Paul gets involved but you’re going to have to listen to find out how this wonderful episode gets resolved.

Season 8 of Heavyweight starts on October 5th on all podcast platforms. For updates about the show head to Heavyweight | Gimlet  and follow on Twitter @heavyweight.

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Tom Davies is the host of the award-winning mental health podcast, Proper Mental. He started his show after his own challenges with mental ill health and has gone on to interview some of the world leading experts in mental health and mental illness. He also delivers talks about mental health, his own challenges and the learnings and insights he has gained from over 150 recorded conversations about all aspects of mental health. Proper Mental is available every Monday on all platforms. Instagram: @propermentalpodcast // Twitter @propermentalpod // propermentalpodcast.com

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In Hauser & Wirth London, Axel Kacoutié and Lou Mensah sit in front of a Amy Sherald painting titled “For love, and for country” (2022). The piece is part of an exhibition called The World We Make and it’s Amy’s first solo show in Europe. The piece is also the subject of ‘Interludes: Dream Recurred’, the fourth episode in the new season of the Shade Podcast, which this live podcast experience is launching.

Interludes is a collaboration between multi award-winning sound artist Axel Kacoutié and Shade, where six contemporary artists answer the question: What does healing sound like?

Lou Mensh and Axel Kacoutie. Photo credit: Kid Circus

In previous seasons of the Shade Podcast, host Lou would hold interviews between artists and herself regarding how art has moved through their life. It would result in conversations about what art means personally, but also beyond one person. A particularly harrowing season of Shade was after the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020 – season four reflected on how the media responded to the uprising.

Speaking to Lou before the show, she told me that though those conversations were timely, she felt that after this response the audience needed a place where they could find some sort of solace. “I just thought next season I want it to be a gift to the audience and for people who are listening, something that can hold them, comfort them and acknowledge the need for everyone just to take a step back – to take some respite and some selfcare. I just wanted to create a small space through this series with Axel that would help people do that.”

This is evident through Axel’s sonic response. At the launch, they play us a snippet of the episode ‘Dream Recurred’ – Amy discusses the piece “For love, and for country”. Her images depict Black Americans in ordinary everyday situations and also reimagines them in historical moments: This piece in particular was a recreation of the photograph VJ Day in Times Square (1945). She fondly mentions friends she cares deeply about and wanting them to be represented, and it is followed by Axel using audio of Amy simply repeating the words “love is love” – the words linger in the air and the audience take them in. After sitting in comfortable silence for some seconds, Axel explains why the use of repetition not only emphasises the statement but reminds us how grounding the listening experience can be.

Credit : Amy Sherald ‘For love, and for country.’ 2022

“I feel like there’s a lot that the body and ear can do and need and I wanted to speak to that intuitive response,” they continue, “to follow how sound and music works to encourage and evoke a stillness,” a stillness that is often difficult to find in podcasting.

Lou talked briefly about how as the Producer she broke the housekeeping rules of podcasting – there is no traditional intro and outro, no break for ads and sponsors. Lou wanted all of that removed, “I wanted it to be an audio but also a physical and an emotional space to rest. For people to just relax. In audio there’s a lot of talk, a lot of chat, there’s a lot of fast energy. There’s a lot of slick audio making but I feel like it misses that capacity to hold people emotionally. I just felt like it was something I would try and do.” I felt like this approach of break in structure from Lou and these moments of quietness and minimalism for Axel worked well together – healing itself is such a nuanced and deeply personal topic; it is never linear therefore giving the listener a moment of reflection and breaking tradition feels just.

For those who have been listening to Shade for a while, you may remember the first glimpse of collaboration between Axel and Lou was the final episode of the 2021 four-part series of conversations exploring anti-racism in the arts, co-curated by Shade and Convergence. They’ve wanted to work together since, both confirming that it had been a year long process to get Interludes made. However, to add a timeline to projects like these is reductive. In some of the Interludes episodes, the sounds Axel used draw inspiration from projects that were made ten years ago, “It’s all part of the healing process that being able to give life to things that you thought would never see the light of day,” Lou adds, “I’ve been working in the arts for nearly 30 years so there is no way that all the things I’ve experienced and been a part of, have not been a part of this series because they have, so it’s a lifelong process of memories and inspirations.”

This project was as much for the creators as it is for the listener.

Listen to Interludes on The Shade Podcast now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other popular podcast apps.

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Every family has myths – the stories from older family members that are half-remembered, or half-told. Like many families, my own family stories range from the sublime (my Polish grandmother walking across continents as a refugee) to the ridiculous (Billy Bragg hitting on my mum at a gig). Arguably, every family’s myths are worthy of a podcast. But when you throw in Soviet Russia, the world-renowned Mariinsky Ballet school and a daring escape from a locked hospital, you have the makings of great investigative podcast.

This is the starting point of Finding Natasha, the newest podcast from Message Heard. The company has made other shows investigating geopolitics through personal stories – such as Conflicted, where Aimen Dean (a former jihadist turned British double agent inside Al Qaeda) talks openly about ‘The War on Terror’. But Finding Natasha is more than an investigative podcast – it is research into the producer’s family history.

The podcast focuses on Debbie Gayle, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and one of Britain’s most promising young ballerinas in the 1970s. She is also lead producer Jake’s mum. In 1974, Debbie became the first Westerner to train with the world renowned Kirov (now the Mariinsky) in Russia. The first two episodes of this podcast looks at how this was both a dream come true for Debbie, and a great chance at cultural diplomacy for Britain and Russian.

But Debbie’s time is Russia was disastrous from the start. And after drinking contaminated water, Debbie was taken to an isolated room in a Soviet hospital, and left alone without treatment, and unable to escape. Natasha was the person who let Debbie out and helped her get back to England, and since then, Debbie has searched for Natasha. But she had little more than an Anglicised first name (the Russian would be Natalya) and a photo to go on.

I expected this search for Natasha to be the point of entry for highlighting aspects of a country and time in modern history that can seem impenetrable. And there were points that touched on this – the section that talked about Debbie preparing for the exchange sees a contrast between excitement, and foreboding warnings of the line to tread whilst over there. This was a time when there were dire consequences for simply owning Western currency whilst in Russia.

But rather than using Debbie’s personal story as the listener’s way into 1970s Russia, it plays out the other way around. Russia works as the backdrop to Debbie’s story, and the show doesn’t gloss over how close it is to the subject. Small things remind us that this is a real life family saga. Jake refers to Debbie as ‘Mum’ throughout (rather than using a more formal ‘my mother’) and Zoom recordings don’t edit out the despairing comments from Debbie about the state of her – and Jake’s – hair. It all adds to the realness of Debbie. And it makes the search for Natasha all the more important for both the show and the listener. This family myth is so grand, we feel like we need it to be corroborated. As Jake says at one point:

“As most of us with our parents, I only understood as much as [mum] had given away herself. Natasha was the only other person who was there.”

At five episodes long, Finding Natasha is about the right length. But it did leave me wanting to know more. I wanted to learn about Debbie, and I found myself Googling for images of her. I wanted to read the newspaper cuttings on the cover of the pod art (it would be great to have such resources released alongside the shownotes).

But more than that, Finding Natasha left me wanting to go away and learn more about my own family myths as well.

Finding Natasha launched on 18th May. Listen to the trailer and subscribe now on the Message Heard website, Spotify or your favourite podcast app.

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The podcast in question, Transmissions: The Definitive Story of Joy Division & New Order, takes listeners on a journey through the life and times of two of my personal favorite things to ever come from Manchester. But a question worth asking before diving into Transmissions is – when tales of both of these bands exist already in books and films, do we really need a podcast?

During lockdown, I’ve spent my time as many music fans have – watching all the documentaries I could get my eyes. One that I thoroughly enjoyed, New Order: Decades, should have satiated my desire for content around one of the greatest new wave bands of all time. And yet, when Transmissions fell into my lap, I dove right in and was wowed with what I found.

Narrated by the absolutely brilliant Maxine Peake, the eight-part series spins a long and winding tale about the creation, demise, and rebirth of some of the most truly iconic music. Not only are we treated to newly-recorded interviews with Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris, Gillian Gilbert and Peter Hook, but we also get the experience of hearing the impact of Joy Division and New Order’s music on the likes of Bono and Thurston Moore. Nothing is taboo – the episode in which they discuss the tragic death of Ian Curtis is heart wrenching (and at episode 4, is a good spot for a break.)

As an aforementioned Factory Records fan (with a Tony Wilson tattoo, if you’ll forgive me) the early episode about the birth of the label and, later, the definitive role of The Haçienda in shaping the direction of dance music is a powerful acknowledgement of the roles of Wilson, Alan Erasmus and Rob Gretton on the scene and sound we as fans so adore. And for the most dedicated music fans, you will not be let down by the deep-dive in episode eight into the best-selling 12-inch single of all time, “Blue Monday”. The band’s exploration of how the seven-and-a-half minute synth-pop masterpiece was created (and a brilliant note from Bernard about vinyl vs. digital for dance music) makes the final episode of the series 37 minutes of pure joy.

Will there be a second season? Knowing that the last album discussed on the show, “Power, Corruption and Lies”, is only the second album in New Order’s ten-album history to date, one can only hope so. There is far more story yet to be told, and thus we find the answer to our earlier question: do we really need a Joy Division/New Order podcast? From fans around the world comes a resounding yes, and we desperately need season two.

Transmissions: The Definitive Story of Joy Division & New Order is produced by Cup and Nuzzle and available on ACAST and everywhere you listen to podcasts.

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Stay with me here. You really haven’t heard it all when it comes to talking about race.

CA Davis, host of A Latto Thought. Photo by Joe Martinez Photography.

I imagine that you’ve been signposted to a few podcasts on this subject this year, and the usuals do the rounds – for good reason, we need them. But perhaps you’re tired of ‘learning.’ I get it. I think that we have reached a stalemate when it comes to race-based podcasts, which happens when any subject is thrust into the forefront of our everyday lives in a short space of time.

Following the BLM protests this summer we were overwhelmed with reading lists, more lists on how to be antiracist and podcast recommendations (my own show included). And I did wonder what everyone did with all this information. It was a lot to process. Maybe too much. And now it’s all died down, maybe it’s time to reflect on what content is not only available, but also dynamic and accessible. Podcasting needs to improve the dialogue on race and make the content more diverse, not only in terms of who is hosting, but also in terms of the content they cover. We don’t have too many podcasts on race – but they seem to be at each end of a spectrum with nothing bridging the gap.

We have shows that share personal accounts of racism – the anecdotal stories. We have the heavyweight conversations telling historical accounts of how we’ve got to where we are and what we need to do about it – the serious and instructive shows.

What’s missing is the engaging content that accompanies you through the events that have created the complex structures and misconceptions surrounding race, alongside real stories of people who were affected by these events… without leaving you feeling exhausted by the end of it. If you’ve yet to find a show like this, I’ve found one for you.

CA Davis, Host of A Latto Thought. Image by Joe Martinez Photography.

A LATTO thought is hosted by filmmaker, digital storyteller and producer, CA Davis. CA works at Northwestern University in a small department that supports humanities research and pedagogy. His role is to take professors’ research and locate the stories within their work to create films that both academic and non-academic audiences can enjoy.

CA takes you on a huge ride through some of the most important events in the history of racial stereotyping, including – importantly – contemporary mixed-race misconceptions. In the episode ‘takin’ it back’ you will hear why we have achieved a “false sense of progress” regarding mixed-race people (especially those in positions of power). Our bodies are used as momentary vapours to veil over the truth about how much we have progressed, in part due to the ‘cultural firsts’ such as electing a Black president and a Black female Vice President, or having a Black Royal Family member. Yet, these individuals are mixed-raced. And it’s mixed-race bodies that are wrongly used as markers of a racially progressive society.

In the latest episode ‘kinfolk, not skinfolk’, CA draws you right into the falsehoods of DNA testing until you are rewinding to hear every word. Just as you’ve grasped a new and complex idea, he pulls you right out of feeling comfortable with a thud of a great bassline, witty quip and lighter chat. The balance of sound, narration and the super-high, cinematic production quality, makes it an engaging listen.

A LATTO Thought is stimulating and educational. You’ll finish the show feeling contemplative but energised. That’s a rare thing in this genre of podcasts.

Listen to A LATTO Thought on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and on the A LATTO Thought website.

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Lou Mensah founded Shade Podcast to create a safe space for rigorous & inclusive conversations on Representation within the Arts.

Before launching Shade Lou worked on various commissions as a photographer, including stills for Directors Anthony Minghella & Sundance winner Marc Silver plus Mike Figgis; gaining awards for her work from Nick Knight and the late Alexander McQueen.

Launched just over a year ago, Shade Podcast has been received well by both the audience and press. Miranda Sawyer (The Guardian) said of Shade “Every episode gave me something new to think about. Inspiring!” – whilst Esquire has listed Shade as one of the ‘Best 2020 Podcasts you can listen too.”

Season 4 is due to be launched in Jan 2021. Listen on Acast, Spotify or Apple Podcasts. 

Read more reviews by the Pod Bible team.

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Photo from brianjackson.net

The first episode is a reflection on this years Independence Day, which Jackson describes as “One of the most unusual Independence Days ever.” They discuss the disconnect between the national holiday, and the African-American experience. We are led into the 34 minute chat as they read passages from Frederick Douglass’ Independence Day speech “This Forth of July is yours, not mine” as they move on to candidly share their thoughts on education, and how it’s failed children in part by its focus on everything over and above the valuing of the human experience. They both came late to learning about Douglass’, long after their traditional learning experience at school. LaMar muses over this and declares education as the “Mis-education system.”

“They teach you the value of money. They should teach you what real value means.”

The music section follows, focusing in this episode on John Coltrane. The hosts explore their adjacent healing journey’s through Coltrane’s work. LaMar’s situation comes throttling to the fore here:

“You have my body. I’m gonna take this pain and communicate it on the highest level. I can go back to my cell and put on John Coltrane and I’m on a completely different vantage point.”

These conversations are an invitation to explore this reckoning point in our history, honing the lens on the Judicial system which has failed us, and the music that has saved us.

“We’ve got lessons to learn and contributions to make. This was John’s contribution. I just want it to be said that I loved somebody. That’s what John Coltrane is saying.”

Jackson concludes “This universal consciousness that we’ve been through, is the understanding that we are all connected. If there is going to be a next evolutionary step, then this is it.”

As I revelled in the beauty of this conversation, I was pulled right back out of it with a reminder that the recording is taking place through the phone line from a prison. We hear an abrupt “You have one minute remaining” message interrupt the call. LaMar continues “Education strips us of the knowledge that we are connected. Strips us of who we are. To ourselves or each other. That’s the tragedy. We are being reminded of our connection by people like John Coltrane.”

And that was it. The call is cut off with an automated “Thank you for using GTL” (the inmate telephone service) as Jackson wraps the show. The conversations will stay with you, lift you and offer a re-connection with the work of both Coltrane and Jackson. But with the abruptness of that final phone click, a part of me is certainly reflecting on where we are as a society following this year’s resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement. As I do so, my heart is right there with LeMar in that cell.

Lou Mensah founded Shade Podcast to create a safe space for rigorous & inclusive conversations on Representation within the Arts.

Before launching Shade Lou worked on various commissions as a photographer, including stills for Directors Anthony Minghella & Sundance winner Marc Silver plus Mike Figgis; gaining awards for her work from Nick Knight and the late Alexander McQueen.

Launched just over a year ago, Shade Podcast has been received well by both the audience and press. Miranda Sawyer (The Guardian) said of Shade “Every episode gave me something new to think about. Inspiring!” – whilst Esquire has listed Shade as one of the ‘Best 2020 Podcasts you can listen too.”

Season 4 is due to be launched in Jan 2021. Listen on Acast, Spotify or Apple Podcasts. 

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