In the mid-70s, Anthony Wall was rock correspondent for the Morning Star. Because he was also working in BBC Radio at the time, his interviews with rock stars such as Chuck Berry were recorded in broadcast quality. The programme that is broadcast as Chuck Berry: 40 Years On (11 June, 1pm, 6 Music) was first offered to Radio 1 back in the 70s, and rejected on the grounds that it didn’t fit their formula, being a sprawling exploration of Berry’s life and work wound around a wide-ranging conversation with the musician that goes as far as having a professor of literature analyse the lyrics of Promised Land.
For someone whose reputation was founded on his unerring selection of the mot juste in his lyrics, in conversation Chuck’s choice of words could be downright weird. He’s the first performer I’ve heard refer, as he does here, to the audience as “the clientele”. We also hear the voices of bluesmen Muddy Waters and Memphis Slim, who suggests cultural appropriation isn’t as neat and tidy as music historians like to pretend. Chuck, he contends, was “the first black hillbilly”.
Catherine Carr approaches people all over the world and then asks them the question from which her delightful programme Where Are You Going? (14 June, 1pm, BBC World Service) flows and takes its name. This week she’s in Iceland, where locals are happy to tell her that they’re going to buy cinnamon buns or visit an international roller derby event or meet the boyfriend they recently met through Tinder. My mother, who could amuse herself for hours surveying her fellow humans and speculating about where they might be going, would have loved it.
The Damien Slash Mixtape (14 June, 11pm, Radio 4) is the radio debut of Daniel Barker, who made his name doing character comedy on YouTube and in Julia Davis’s Camping. His characters include trolls, hipsters, Morgan Freeman, a dog smoking a pipe and the presenter of a books programme, done 1Xtra style.
The first of The Reith Lectures (13 June, 9pm, Radio 4) by Hilary Mantel is called The Day Is for Living and deals with the role that history plays in our lives. The title came from her great-grandmother who could neither read nor write but was the person in her society charged with laying out the dead. Mantel relates her ancestor’s task with her own interest in the past. “It’s almost the definition of being human. We are the animals who mourn.”
Finally, if you’re the kind of person for whom the words “Common misconceptions about iTunes” or “Ten ways to connect your computer to your stereo” have a strange fascination then you might like the podcast from The Next Track, which is all about “how people listen to music today”. It’s hosted by two men called Doug and Kirk who could clearly talk about this sort of stuff for ever. Thanks to podcasting, they get the opportunity to do just that.
