Proms Plus: 1969 The Sound of a Summer
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2019
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
1996 was the summer of Woodstock, the moon landing, the Beatles’ Abbey Road and a gathering of beat poets at the Royal Albert Hall. Author and New Generation Thinker Preti Taneja is joined by poets Rachael Allen and Jacob Polley to take an un-nostalgic look at how the Sixties appear now. We'll also hear them perform some of their own poetry. The discussion is inspired by the programme for the Proms concert for Prom 11 The Sound of a Summer. For 30 days following the concert you can hear the music here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00070rj or find it on the Proms or BBC Radio 3 website.
Producer: Zahid Warley.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's |
| 0:27.5 | out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.9 | 1969 was the summer of Woodstock, the moon landings and the Beatles Abbey Road, |
| 0:42.3 | all events that were used to define an era, all events that happened before either I, |
| 0:48.3 | pre-Tenager, or my two guests, the poets Rachel Allen and Jacob Polly were born. |
| 0:59.0 | So we're going to be concentrating on how the 60s appear to us now, |
| 1:03.3 | unaffected by nostalgia and refracted by the passage of time. |
| 1:08.9 | When you hear the phrase, the 60s, what does it conjure up for you, Rachel? |
| 1:16.5 | I think about sort of hippies, Charles Manson, San Francisco Summers, but also personally, |
| 1:21.9 | I know there are a number of really innovative and brilliant poets working around that time. |
| 1:30.9 | I also think about certain poetic schools, books that were published during the 60s and sort of genre-defining sort of pieces of work that came out during that decade as well. |
| 1:35.2 | That's quite unusual because a lot of people would have sort of said flower power and fashion |
| 1:40.1 | and knee-high boots. What about you, Jacob? Well, I would have gone flower power in knee-high boots |
| 1:48.1 | and flares and all that. And I suppose I think that I was born in 1975, so I suppose when I think |
| 1:56.0 | about the 60s and I think about the end of the 60s and you know that that that moment when 69 turned into 70 |
| 2:04.1 | and the kind of a bit of the darkness really that seemed to be rising out of the 60s I think about |
| 2:11.5 | really how close it was to my kind of birth and you know despite the fact that I wasn't there so I kind of |
| 2:17.1 | think about |
| 2:18.6 | not not being here not in a not in a dark kind of macabre way but I think about those things |
| 2:24.6 | that I couldn't have experienced because I wasn't here and there's something very powerful |
... |
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