The Life Scientific (R4) | iPlayer
From Punk Get Funk (R2) | iPlayer
Between the Ears: The Impossible Book (R3) | iPlayer
I like football, but there is going to be a lot of it over the next few weeks, plus the Olympics to follow, so I’ve opted for non-sportif listening this week. (This sports boycott may also have something to do with me tuning into the Andy Murray final on 5 Live last Sunday. Not good for the heart.) So, first up, Marcus du Sautoy on Radio 4’s The Life Scientific. Du Sautoy is so wonderfully enthusiastic about his job – he’s a mathematician, though he chews up and stretches that definition as though it were bubble gum – that I am happy to hear him waffling on about most things in life. But I especially like it when he goes big, talks about how maths is related to music, or viruses, or symmetry; when he explains that it isn’t just a series of equations but a way of describing a world, whether ours or an imaginary one. I just love that.
Du Sautoy did a lot of this on Tuesday, pulling away from Jim Al-Khalili’s questions and talking, really, about whatever he wanted. It’s not that he doesn’t listen, more that he spirals off, searches out the joy that he can find through thinking. “I look for patterns,” he said. Mathematicians look for patterns in order to find solutions; a beautiful, abstract way of arriving at an actual answer. If only the real world were so simple to solve.
Over on Radio 2, in From Punk Get Funk, lovely Norman Cook was examining how punk affected him when he was young, and how, in the end, it led him to dance music. I really enjoyed this show: pacy, interesting, it had a warm informality that’s missing from many Radio 2 documentaries. The set-up was clear, and it was exciting to hear ye olde Pistols v Bill Grundy interview again at the start. After that, though there were interviews, Norman just chatted, really: explaining what a track meant to him, where he first heard it, where it led him next. As befits a man with an eclectic musical career, he picked out unexpected songs. (He played the Slits’ I Heard it Through the Grapevine, one of my all-time favourite tracks, so thank you, Norm.) It was good to hear an old punk remembering the past without any of that “and now music’s rubbish” moaning. A zippy hour, with shake-’em-up tunes, that whizzed past.
And on Radio 3’s Between the Ears: The Impossible Book, I heard a properly esoteric soundscape, a strange hallucinogenic train ride that seemed to be a meditation on writing, and whether it exists if nobody reads it – but might equally have been about slack parenting. William Burroughs and Agatha Christie made appearances, we heard the sounds of a train rumbling over tracks, we slipped between time and space, hopped across parallel universes. The work of Iain Chambers, a composer known for using site-specific sounds, and Peter Blegvad, an American musician/illustrator, The Impossible Book wasn’t an easy listen, but it was a mesmerising one. I listened to it twice, and much preferred it the second time round. There was so much to grapple with, so many sounds to enjoy. Perfect for a late-night’s woozy contemplation, before we go fully football. (I’m ignoring the awful should-we-stay-or-should-we-go? EU discussions. No fun there.)
