Albums that Changed My Life, with Tom Gatti, David Mitchell and Preti Taneja

Intelligence Squared

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4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2021

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

Our favourite albums are our most faithful companions. We listen to them over and over, we know them far better than any novel or film. These records don’t just soundtrack our lives – they work their way deep inside us, shaping our outlook and identity, forging our friendships and charting our love affairs. They become part of our story. In this special podcast for Intelligence Squared, journalist and music obsessive Tom Gatti – editor of Long Players, a new anthology of writing on albums – was in conversation with two of his contributors, acclaimed novelist David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet) and writer and activist Preti Taneja, author of the prize-winning novel We That Are Young. They discussed the power of certain records to act on us like Proustian madeleines, transporting us back to a particular time and place – Gatti, by his own admission, has listened to Radiohead’s The Bends more times than is strictly necessary; Mitchell’s great formative influence is Joni Mitchell’s Blue; Taneja grew up with Midnight Marauders by A Tribe Called Quest. And they explored how music influences their writing – directly in the case of Mitchell’s latest novel, Utopia Avenue, the epic tale of a psychedelic rock band’s rise to stardom in the late sixties. To find out more about Long Players click here: https://www.primrosehillbooks.com/product/long-players-writers-on-the-albums-that-shaped-them-tom-gatti/ To see the Spotify playlist that accompanies the book please go here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5bzkr33b38k4egE6laYQuC Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/intelligencesquared. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Rory Stewart, and I'd like to tell you about an intelligent squared event
0:04.8	I'm doing with the classicist author and broadcaster Mary Beard. Together we'll be discussing
0:10.1	politics and power from the Caesars to Sunack, who gets to Winpar, who is excluded. Does power
0:16.6	always corrupt or other examples of leaders who've maintained their integrity while an authority?
0:22.2	And how does the nature of power vary across different times and cultures? These are just
0:26.6	some of the questions that Mary and I will be trying to answer. In person tickets are now sold
0:31.4	out, but you can still watch online on the 13th of November at 7pm BST. Put your questions
0:37.0	to us live as we discuss power and politics down the ages.
0:41.0	Hello podcast listeners, I'm Connor and welcome to this week's episode of Intelligent Squared.
0:45.5	Today we're joined by self-described music obsessive and journalist Tom Gatti. He's the editor
0:50.4	of a new music anthology called Long Players, and in conversation with acclaimed novelist David
0:56.2	Mitchell and writer and activist Freddie Teneja, they discuss how our favourite albums become our
1:00.4	most faithful companions and the soundtracks to our lives. It's a really fascinating conversation,
1:04.9	and if you do enjoy it, you can find a link for Long Players in the podcast description.
1:08.8	But now let's go to the episode. Hello everybody, it's great to be here and thank you for joining us
1:14.1	on this Monday night. I've elbowed my way to the front of the theaters initially just because
1:21.5	I've been deputized to ask the deputy editor of the New Statesman Tom here about the genesis
1:28.6	of the book All Books Need a Creation Myth Mate, and so what is the creation myth of Long Players?
1:34.7	Well David, it charts back to the, I was going to say the Heady Days, but actually quite
1:42.4	gloomy days of 2016, when for a Christmas issue of the New Statesman, we put, we were thinking
1:51.0	of some nice cheery things that we could put in this special Christmas issue of the magazine,
1:56.1	and we decided to ask a bunch of writers to write about television shows, box sets that they loved,
	...

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