Hello again lovely email friends. If you’re like me, you’re probably spending more time than you expected distracting yourself from, y’know, everything. If so, I can now recommend migrating your email provider and/or distancing yourself from a major tech brand. Take it from me, it’s much more time-consuming than you think. Good grief.
🖤 Resources for supporting the Black Lives Matter movement: a list of petitions to sign, funds and charities to donate to, and resources for educating yourself and those around you.
🎹 JazzKeys is my new favourite thing. As you type, every keystroke contributes to a unique piece of piano jazz. Type slow.
😞 Am I Depressed? The Coronavirus Mental-Health Crisis: Suddenly, many people meet the criteria for clinical depression. Doctors are scrambling to determine who needs urgent intervention, and who is simply the new normal.
🧤 UK Rave YouTube Comments is a Twitter account sharing YouTube comments from rave, acid house, UK hardcore and jungle videos: “Those years were a massive part of my life. Now I’m in my 40s and shopping in Ikea with the kids wondering where it went? back in 94 getting busted there with, erm tictacs only to rejoin the q and be back in 30 mins later. Don’t tell the kids though ;) they’d never believe it.”
🚲 Uber destroys thousands of bikes and scooters: having sold its Jump business to Lime, Uber destroyed thousands of older-model bikes apparently due to maintenance, liability and safety concerns.
💸 The Many Faces Of Housekeeping: How Wealth & Privilege Are Distorting Underground Music: What links a bland mainstream club EP to the structures of finance capital and gentrification? Journalist Ed Gillett discusses the ongoing creeping class issue of underground dance music in 2020.
🎛 Button it: A collection of control rooms, mostly Soviet. Power stations, control towers etc. I love this era’s aesthetic. When I’m in charge there’ll be a Cold War-era zone in the Crystal Maze.
👍 Happy Data is hopeful views of the world through data and drawings, from design agency Pentagram.
🧪 How can scientists best address the problems of today and the future? Science is the one culture that all humans share. What would it mean to create a scientifically literate future together?
What goes up might come down
When I was a boy, a family friend—I no longer remember exactly who—gave me a cassette labelled simply “Air Traffic Control”. It was an incomplete recording of a humorous aviation-themed after-dinner speech, and I listened to it so many times that I knew its every word and intonation. I never knew its source, until now.
David Gunson cuts a fine figure in front of his air desk at Birmingham Airport. Born and raised in Sheffield, he first went to work in a steel foundry before serving ten years in the RAF. On returning to civilian life he settled in Solihull and became an air-traffic controller at Birmingham. But at this time he was also quite the raconteur, invited to speak at several events including a meeting of the Solihull Round Table in March 1981.
South African-born Mike Steyn was a talented musician and classical conductor turned record producer, who’s credited with launching the international careers of influential African and Asian artists, through his folk label Tangent Records. Tangent was bankrolled off the back of Steyn’s first label, Big Ben Records, with an even more eclectic catalogue mostly recorded by Steyn himself. The most unusual of which must be 1968’s The Music Of Machinery: Volume One, Shrewsbury Pumping Station which is a mono 7" field recording of Coleham sewerage pumping station (as played by John Peel, characteristically at the wrong speed). There was no Volume Two.
Much greater commercial success came with releases from Northern comedians, notably explosives and demolition expert and stunt rider Derek “Blaster” Bates. It was probably demand for Bates as an after-dinner speaker that drew Steyn’s attention to David Gunson. Steyn recorded the speech at the Solihull Round Table meeting and released it on Big Ben under the title What Goes Up Might Come Down!. Their humour is very much of its time, but Gunson’s is gentler and more self-deprecating than Bates'.
This is noteworthy not so much for the dated recording itself, but because it hails from an era in which mysteries regularly persisted. Now I know what the recording is, it’s trivial to find it on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes and elsewhere. Online comments and reviews are overwhelmingly enthusiastic, nostalgic for the role it played in their earlier lives. The internet era makes it harder to remember the time before, when trivial little mysteries could go unsolved for thirty years. But it also makes it less likely that such things as these recordings will come about in the first place, let alone be valued in the same way.