Café del Weirdo: The Madman's Orchestra with Edward Brooke-Hitching
We Can Be Weirdos
Global
4.9 • 793 Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2025
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to Café del Weirdo. This week’s guest is an explorer of the extraordinary. It's author, researcher, and professional curiosity collector Edward Brooke-Hitching.
Ed is the bestselling author behind The Phantom Atlas, The Madman’s Library, and his brand-new book The Madman’s Orchestra, an illustrated dive into the oddest stories from the history of music.
From cat organs and pig pianos to musical hoaxes, devilish tritones, and lost symphonies, Ed reveals the weird rhythms of history. Expect wild anecdotes, obscure facts, and a few Spotify playlists to soundtrack the madness.
If you're ready to find out which composer wrote music for the Devil, or how a black hole might sing, step into Café del Weirdo and find out.
Host: Dan Schreiber
Guest: Ed Brooke Hitching
Producer: Cassie Merritt
Senior Producer: Ben Tulloh
Head of Factual Podcasts: Al Riddell
Transcript
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| 0:35.3 | This is a Global Player Original Podcast. Ed! |
| 1:04.5 | Hey, Ed! |
| 1:07.1 | Mate, over here. |
| 1:09.0 | Oh, hey, mate. |
| 1:09.9 | How you doing? |
| 1:10.5 | Oh, it's you listen acting better acting |
| 1:15.2 | how you doing man you well yeah i'm good thanks uh just been sort of having a sort of solid |
| 1:21.2 | writing summer you know when everyone goes away and you don't get bothered by emails and you can |
| 1:26.0 | just disappear into a whole of research |
| 1:29.0 | and writing. So it's been great. Oh, that's exciting. So you're you're writing a new thing while |
| 1:34.3 | promoting an old thing, but your old thing is your new thing technically. Yeah. And the current thing |
| 1:41.2 | is always something that I started 10 years ago. |
| 1:48.7 | So this, but, but it also means, and I'm sure, you know, from like working on different projects, |
| 1:54.1 | you start getting really intensely grilled on something you wrote like two years ago, that you researched eight years ago. |
| 1:56.3 | Yeah. |
... |
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