Queer the Music: Jake Shears on the Songs That Changed Lives | Mercury Studios
Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative | Radiotopia
Elis James and John Robins (BBC Radio 5 Live) | BBC Sounds
Queer the Music is a new interview podcast hosted by the charismatic Jake Shears, lead singer of Scissor Sisters. Each week, he takes a deep dive into an LBGTQ+ anthem, talking to the person who made it, or to the people around the artist at the time, and then plays the track in full.
The first episode, about Sylvester’s You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), is just great. Shears talks to Josh Gamson, writer of the late singer’s biography, and to Jeanie Tracy, who sang backing vocals for him. Gamson is articulate and accurate, describing the broader music world of 1978 (the gay scene in San Francisco at the time, the burning of disco records), and Tracy provides the anecdotes, both funny and touching. Her description of Sylvester’s appearance at Castro’s 1988 Gay Freedom Day parade while sick with Aids is immensely moving. He’d kept his illness quiet until that day.
“They had me in a pink Cadillac, and Sylvester was in front of me in a wheelchair and his doctor was pushing him,” she says. “As we were going down the street, I saw people’s faces, and they were smiling, like: ‘Oh, there’s Sylvester!’ Because they saw the sign first. And then they looked and saw him in the wheelchair. All the way down the street, I saw people smile and then start to cry, when they realised what they were looking at… He was very brave.”
Episode two features Rebecca Lucy Taylor, AKA Self Esteem, who discusses her track I Do This All the Time. Taylor and Shears are performing together in Cabaret in London at the moment (the episode was recorded before the show opened), so this is more like a chat between friends. Taylor is funny about some of the song’s lines, including: “But if I went to your barbecue, I’d feel uncomfortable and not be sure what to say anyway.” “I’d moved to Margate,” she says. “And it was a lot of really lovely people, but they were all couples moving out of London to have their babies. So all I did for a year was be invited to a barbecue, and I’d get there and be like: ‘I don’t have anything to say, and everything I stand for isn’t this.’” I’d have liked a little more about her live shows, especially the dancing, but that’s a quibble.
The third episode, with Andy Bell from Erasure, is also warm, and includes a section about him living in a housing cooperative in 1980s London with older gay people, among them the amazing Nick Partridge, former chief executive of the Terrence Higgins Trust. In every show, Shears is engaged and engaging, even confessing to a personal conflict about the very idea of “queer music”. “Is it a label to box us in?” he wonders. “Is it something you can willingly create? Does it even exist?” His openness and desire to drill into the creation and context of these brilliant records makes Queer the Music a lovely addition to the many music analysis/interview shows out there.
Jess Shane is a Canadian nonfiction audio-maker whose compelling 2022 single doc Accounts and Accountability, for Radio 4’s Lights Out, gave us the “audition” interviews of seven potential documentary subjects but without the full documentary payoff. In it, she deftly explored the relationship between storytellers and the people whose stories they’re telling.
Now she has a series, Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative, on Radiotopia that takes this idea even further. Of course, journalists having such crises is nothing new; in the late 1960s, Joan Didion wrote that “people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests… writers are always selling somebody out”. But in Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative, Shane pays more than just lip service to her doubts. She examines the established methodology of documentary-makers – don’t pay subjects; don’t let them have editorial input; charm them into revealing what you want; and then edit it all into something with a larger message – and turns it all on its head.
In episode one she reveals that she’s paying her subjects $20 an hour, and that they’ll collaborate with her on the programme about them. Ernesto, a twentysomething model, recently got sober from drug addiction; Judy, a woman in her 70s, became homeless after her husband’s death; Jess, a young punk musician, has found out they’re adopted and have a half-brother; and Michael, a middle-aged writer and rapper just out of prison, is trying to become a professional public speaker. All interesting. All with a story to tell.
And Shane and her subjects do tell their stories. Occasionally, she labours her points (do we really need a demo of how producers edit speech to make it more coherent?), but this is a refreshing and interesting series, made better – but harder for Shane – by the involvement of the subjects. “It’s easy to say: ‘I want him to steer the ship,’” she says. “But he doesn’t know how.”
Elis James and John Robins are back, thank God, to cheer us all up – though their longstanding Friday afternoon Radio 5 Live show is no longer. Instead, they’re bringing out two new BBC Sounds podcasts every week: one released on Tuesdays, which will be about 90 minutes long, the other, shorter one later in the week. Their 5 Live radio presence remains with an hour-long prerecorded show at 1pm on Fridays: an edited version (a highlights package) of their longer Tuesday podcast. Veteran Colin Murray has a new Friday afternoon show from 2pm to 4pm.
It sounds complicated, doesn’t it? And James and Robins made a joke of this from the start. Actually, Robins’s opening monologue had me laughing out loud, promising, as it did, a “podcast-first platform, in a biweekly edition with accompanying live, prerecorded, shorter, longer broadcast”. And also that they’ll be treading “a new path, but not with analogue shoes and feet. With digital shoes. And internet feet.” I loved their old show, and the new stuff is pretty much exactly the same. But, you know, with internet feet.