Episode 7 — End of year space and slides special, with Chris Hadfield, Rosie Turton and 1201 Alarm
A year-end cosmic trombone special. This episode threads together three conversations with three trombonists — composer and moon-mission instigator Steve Thompson (1201_Alarm), UK jazz mainstay Rosie Turton and astronaut, author and musician Chris Hadfield — to explore how music, risk and exploration all bend space and time in their own ways.
We start at Wilton's Music Hall, where Steve Thompson explains how his 1201_Alarm album Hello World ended up aboard the Peregrine lunar lander, why it's stored on rugged digital media instead of vinyl, and how extreme lunar conditions destroy traditional formats. Then into the shed with Rosie Turton for a binaural Entertaining Noises deep dive into the trombone — slides, harmonics, portamento, comedy vs lyricism and the joy of non-hierarchical jazz education. Finally, a long-form conversation with Chris Hadfield on bone flutes, Voyager's Golden Record, guitars on the ISS, his album Space Sessions: Songs From a Tin Can, and why music is as fundamental to human exploration as rockets and airlocks.
What we cover
1201_Alarm & the moon: How a science-driven jazz/electronic project became one of the first albums sent on a lunar payload, and the Apollo 11 "1201 alarm" that inspired its name.
Physical media in hostile space: Heat, radiation, $/kg and why SD-card-style archives beat tapes and vinyl on the moon.
Trombone up close: With Rosie Turton — tenor, bass, alto and soprano trombones, the slide as fretless voice, harmonics, portamento and inviting kids into improvisation through silliness.
Serious + fun: Why experimental sounds, jokes and deep craft can (and should) live together.
Chris Hadfield on exploration & music: Travel as applied curiosity, instruments on Mir and the ISS, recording in a noisy tin can and playing for yourself, your crewmates and 7.7 billion people.
Bone flutes to space guitars: Ancient instruments, the Voyager Golden Record, Jewel in the Night and covering Space Oddity in orbit.
What's the point of music? Music as basic human infrastructure, not decoration.
Further listening & links
Full Transcript
Verbatim transcript, reflowed for readability only. No wording edits.
Hello, my name is Steve Pretty and I'm a musician, composer and performer from London. Welcome to my podcast, Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces. This is a show that helps you to hear and understand music in new ways. So, welcome back, everyone. I hope you've had a brilliant couple of weeks. Of course, if you celebrate it, it's been Christmas since the last episode. And yeah, it's been a busy couple of weeks for me. I did more, actually more Christmas gigs than usual. I don't tend to do a lot of Christmas theme gigs, but for one reason or another this year, I ended up doing a load of those, which was fine, broadly fine. And also, of course, we celebrated Christmas. I'm with my family, very lucky. I'm recording this in Suffolk. It's very windswept, so you might be able to hear the raging sea and the house being battered by strong winds. So apologies if the sound quality is slightly different from usual, but that's why. Thank you very much for the feedback you sent about the previous episode, episode six, featuring my very special guest, Nitin Sauny, the musical polymath, music producer and composer who took us through that interesting form of flamenco soleil. It went a lot deeper than we do usually in the show with Nitin because his breadth and depth of knowledge is just astonishing. So I kind of wanted to, you know, let him really go deep and I'm really glad that we did. It was really interesting. I was a little bit worried that it might have left some of you behind. So apologies if that was the case, but the feedback I've had from people has been pretty much universally good and the people found it really interesting. You know, quite heavy, heavy going to really concentrate, I think, in some of that because there's a lot of information there, but hopefully people found that enlightening and interesting. As always, if you've got any feedback about the show, please do drop me a line originofthepieces.com. You'll see my contact details there or at Steve Pretty in the various social media outlets. But yeah, thanks again to Nitin for that show. I was really, really proud of that one. I thought there was really interesting insights into that music, into music in general, and of course into the guitar, the beautiful flamenco guitar that he demonstrated so wonderfully. So onto today's show. Now we've got a slightly different format than usual, slightly longer today than usual because I've got three really special interviews for you. And actually this episode is gonna be no genre tombola. That's because I have got lost in exploring UK hardcore. I will explain more, but I've been busy making some UK hardcore music and I'm gonna be playing that next episode. And I thought since this episode was long enough already, we're gonna save that for the first episode back in the new year. Now, as you can hear, I'm quite congested like pretty much everyone else in the UK this time of year, as far as I can tell. So you'll be relieved to hear that you're not gonna be hearing much of me in this state today. Instead, I'm gonna be playing out these three very different interviews, but they've got an unexpected common thread between them, which is that they are all three trombonists.
First off, we're gonna be talking to Steve Thompson about sending his album to the moon. Steve is a brilliant trombonist and composer from London who I've known for many years. And then we've got another brilliant trombonist and composer, Rosie Turton, who's gonna be actually talking about the trombone and talking us through that and giving us some entertaining noises in my shed with the binaural mics on. You may remember you wanna put headphones on for that bit. And last up, we have an incredibly special guest in the shape of Commander Chris Hadfield, formerly of the International Space Station. An amazing astronaut, an amazing test pilot, an incredible musician. We talk about all sorts of things, music, what it's like to have to change guitar strings when you're orbiting 100 miles above the earth, how it is recording in space, the value of music, the point of music, how important music is to humanity, all sorts of things. I have a really fascinating extended interview with Chris. It was a real privilege talking to Chris because he doesn't normally give podcast interviews, but he made a rare exception for this show. So many thanks to Chris, many thanks to Rosie, and to Steve. So without further ado, let's get on with it. We've got a lot of stuff to get through. Here we go. So my first guest for this episode is Steve Thompson. Now, Steve is a great trombonist and musician, and he's played with Hackney Colliery Band. He and I did a show at the Shakespeare's Globe. I've played in his band, 1201 Alarm, which is what we're talking about today. He very kindly took me over to Singapore a number of years ago, and we did some gigs over there, which was amazing. And today we're talking about an amazing side of his project, 1201 Alarm, which is that he's sending his album, his first album, to the moon. It's gonna be the first album of music on the moon, which is quite a claim. And so we talk about that. We talk about his second album, which is kind of celebrating this moon. I met up with him at Wilton's Music Hall, which is of course where I'm going to be doing my show on the 20th of January, live podcast, recording and gig. Ticket's still available. There's more information about that later. But he and I met there for a drink and a chat. There's a bit of background noise, so apologies for that. But over to Steve Thompson in Wilton's Music Hall. Because you've got a new record. It's a celebration of the first album, Hello World, that you played on. I can't remember how many tracks you did. At least two. Yeah, a couple, yeah. A couple, I think, yeah, yeah. And that one was all inspired by science, technology and Endeavor. But we came down to a studio and we got a load of scientists who are also musicians to kind of play along. And we had like Helen Jertzky was playing Theramin. That's right. And Jim Alkalilly was playing guitar. And we have Libby Jackson, who's head of UK Space Exploration, was playing oboe. Do you remember? I do. It was such a mad band.
It was such a mad band, yeah. So plus obviously all the band as well. And Marcus DeSanto. Yeah, he was doing trumpet with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was good. So the whole album was kind of embraced by the science community. So what they did, they put it on board a spaceship called the Peregrine Lander. And it's been loaded with all that and it's gonna kind of be blasted off to the moon and they're gonna try and do a soft landing on the moon and then dump my record on the moon and it will become the first album on the moon. We were saying it's not as simple as just getting the, you can't just take a CD up there. You said you can't take a folder up there. Not really. So first of all, there's a couple of things. So roughly it's about a million dollars a kilogram. So that's one thing, which is- So like a heavyweight vinyl. A heavyweight vinyl, yeah. You don't want the 180 gram version. That's going to be a lot. But also on the moon is quite nasty conditions. I think when Apollo landed, it was like 96 degrees Celsius. So just four degrees below boiling water. And it gets up as much as about 200 and something and down as like minus 90 or something like that. So it's like a huge thing. So basically if you've got any traditional media, like records or tapes or CDs or something, they're just going to melt into like a ball in no time. They'll be destroyed in some way. I don't know. So what Astrobotic have done, which is the company that's taking it up, they've built like kind of data storage things like essentially SD cards. And so you kind of like have a little space for your SD card and that's in the payload and that goes up. So it's a digital version of the album. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean, yeah, it's what format works best on the moon is a tricky one. I mean, it's a tricky one actually, yeah. Yeah, it's quite interesting about how people don't realise like the incredible conditions. Like, so when 12 people have actually walked on the moon, like what they had to do to make that work. And it's back in the 60s and 70s when, you know, when technology was still, I don't know, in its kind of infancy of this sort of thing. It's good to see that, you know, physical media of some sort is making a comeback somewhere. We've got the tape revival on the SD card revival. SD card revival on the moon. So yeah, that's the whole thing. So the first moon colonists to go out there and discover this. Better take an SD card reader. They should take an SD card reader. I mean, will that be a thing? I don't know. When will moon colonists happen? I don't know. Yeah, well, they've got the soundtrack when they do. We've got the soundtrack when they do, exactly. I mean, it's really, for a start, it's a really cool thing. And every, like, you're the first person to do that, right? As far as I know, yeah. I mean, music has gone into space before. So
on the Voyager probes that went out in the 70s, there's an actual gold disc that has music. I think that Johnny B. Goode and there's, I don't know. Carl Sagan put it together, didn't he? I think Carl Sagan was a big person to put that together. So music is out there and that's now left the solar system. Yeah, so it's literally a vinyl-style golden record. That's right. It survives the rigs of space travel. I've got a copy of it at home, actually. It's got a gold vinyl, yeah. Excellent, that's one of the most famous examples, I think, of like the madness of music legal contracts because I think the Beatles were supposed to be on that rather than, do you want to be good? I think. Is that true? I think so. I think there's supposed to be a Beatles record on it, but then in the clause of the contract is like, it talks about exploitation of the rights to the track across the known universe. Right. And that meant it couldn't go on. No way, really, because I know Beatles have a thing that they're not allowed on any compilation albums. That's right. So maybe they didn't want to be put on with my other things. That's the first human constructed thing to leave the solo system. And the Beatles are like, no. Well, I don't think it was probably not them. They probably didn't quite for it, but somewhere along the line, the legal people are like, no, no, no, but think of the lost revenue. What are you talking about? In music lawyers, this is quite out of hand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe that's the thing. Maybe the Beatles would have crashed into a planet and they would have gone, this is amazing. And we can't monetize that now because we've given it to the universe. I suppose once it's out of your hands, you don't know what it's going to do with it. But what you're doing is really cool and unique. It's just fun. It's just ridiculous and fun. But you've got a quite classical background. I mean, so we're talking about you, here, man, you're talking about your record, which is not a classical. So a lot of it is quite jazzy. There is a symphony orchestra on it as well. So the Cape Town Philharmonic play, the string section. That's very cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the one, that's with Helen Charmant, who is Britain's first astronaut. Yep. A lot of people think that's Tim Peake. No, I know, I know. It's because he's the most recent one I've spoken about. Exactly, yeah, I think so. We both met and worked with Helen Charmant through Robin Inns. That's right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she's amazing. She's so wonderful, yeah. And I didn't realize that she's quite an accomplished pianist as well. Yeah, so she's on the record right now, as you say. That's right. So, so I mean, I basically just reached out to her and sort of said, Oh, Helen, you remember me, my album's going to the moon, which is a bit weird, but I thought you might be interested. And she wrote back and said, Yeah, I really am. That's great. And then I spoke to her agent, Diana, who sort of said, Helen, actually, is a really good pianist and, you know, let's, you know, if you're interested, I said, I'm 100% interested, let's, let's put this past Helen, see what she thinks. And so I wrote to her and said, Would you like to play on the album? And she said, Yeah. So I wrote her this piece and I wrote it in, because I didn't really know, like what Helen's ability would be on the piano, with all due respect, of course, you know, she's not a professional musician. So I was just like, right there, you know, so I didn't want to write anything like too phenomenally difficult. But I also wanted to kind of capture what I thought she might be feeling when she was looking down on, on earth from 250 miles and the kind of beauty and the majesty of the piano planet. Yeah, also, there's a little bit of danger in there as well, because obviously flying in space is not easy, you know. So and she was so brilliant that she came down to, we use a floating studio in London called Lightship 95, which is a fantastic place to record, it's really, really good. Yeah. But I wanted to record her on a particular keyboard and we had a bit of a pedal malfunction. Now a pedal on a piano is a really, really important expressive tool. So like to play without one is practically impossible. But you can't, you really can't do, can you just explain why that is on the piano? Yeah. So the pedal that I'm talking about in particular is a sustain pedal and it just holds on the notes for a little bit more. So you can actually hit a note on the piano and then lift it off. But if you're holding the pedal down, it will sustain that note and it makes everything beautifully fluid and just what we call legato, which means smoothly in music. So it just kind of gives you that kind of whole expression. It's really, really important and it wasn't working on the day. So we had to rig up this kind of manual thing that I was kind of like doing a pedal with my hands and everything while Helen was just doing it with her foot and I was like looking at her foot. Like any professional musician would have probably thrown their toys out of the pram and said, wow, can't work under these conditions. But we were really up against it. Studio Time was like kind of running out and it had to be somewhere, you know, all these sorts of things were happening. And so we made it work and she was completely unflappable. But the thing is, so the name of the project is 1201 Alarm, right? Yes. But that's quite relevant to this. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So that, the 1201 Alarm is something that happened on the Apollo 11 mission.
So Apollo 11 was the spacecraft that actually took the first humans, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong to the moon. And just when they were just about to land on the moon, this 1201 Alarm went off. And of course, back in those days, it's just like, what the heck's a 1201 Alarm? Nobody knows what that is. So they kind of like quickly looked it up and they say, it's the navigation computer and it's crashing. So we basically don't know where we are. So Buzz Aldrin was like, okay, I'm going to reboot the navigation computer and see if we can work out. Control out, delete. Turn it off and on again. Yeah, exactly. Turn it off and on again. I really don't know how he did it. It was obviously before the days of control out, delete, you know, but the nav computer just crashed again, then it produced a 1202 alarm and it's just like, what the hell's a 1202 alarm? Same thing, the nav computer's crashing. So in the end, the alarm song just went like, don't worry about it, I'll just look out the window and land. Which to me is just like, yeah, I'm paraphrasing, but that's just incredible, isn't it? I mean, I don't know about you, but I kind of go into a panic attack if I can't find my car keys, but let alone crashing into a planet without a navigation computer. A planet, Steve? Sorry, not a planet. It's a moon. Not a planet. But yeah, it's, I mean, but I think that is the thing about that spirit, isn't it? Of like, well, this isn't working, so we get a move. So we're just going to do it anyway. I think as musicians, there is something, I feel like I've been in quite a few scenarios where like, well, this isn't working and we've got to rely on our musical experience to get through it in some way. But that's actually one of the things that I'm saying this in front of everybody in the world now, but I really admire about you and I wish I was a bit more like that, because I'm a bit of a control freak and it probably comes from my classical kind of upbringing where it's very much like, don't deviate from the plan sort of thing. Yeah. I mean, that's not strictly true. If you go back to kind of like really old composers like Bach, it was very much improvised and all that sort of gershwin improvised most of Rhapsody in Blue on the first night that he played it because he hadn't actually got around to writing it yet. You know, so all of these things I know, right? I mean, generally the thing that we do in classical music is kind of, you know, there's a game plan and you stick to that game plan and you rehearse and rehearse and rehearse and rehearse and you get it exactly how you want it to be. And I think I really, one of the things when I started working with you guys is learning to embrace that, what I've called serendipity, it's just like, okay, that's not entirely, which is the jazz thing, isn't it? It is the jazz thing, but- It's not entirely what we wanted, but now we've discovered something even better. That's the thing, it is the jazz thing partly, but it's also, I find
it, with composing, I find that serendipity incredibly valuable and, you know, where basically, if I'm writing a piece of music and then something goes wrong with it, you know, it's all, of course, you're writing on the computer often these days, and so something will be, something, audio will be sent to the wrong place or some signal will be going to the wrong area or whatever, and you're like, why is this, and then you're like, you kind of take a step back and then actually, that sounds quite cool, I don't know what's happening there, I can't, I, you know, it wasn't deliberate, but whatever's gone wrong here, I think I prefer that. I think I had that moment actually on when I was composing the album, and I wanted to sort of discover some new and kind of like unearthly sort of sounds for this, and I used the new synth that I've not used before, and I couldn't work it, and I didn't really understand it. It kind of uses like samples, which basically means that they've recorded something. It could be anything. It could be a musical instrument, or it could be somebody sneezing, or it could be a squeaky table like we seem to have here today. There we go. Thank you, that's our table that's squeaky. It could be anything, and they kind of scratched all these things together and it kind of loops around and keeps playing all these different samples. And so I kind of started it and I didn't know what note I was going to get out of it. I started playing it. And it was just the weirdest thing. And it's great. I love it. It's produced this really, really spooky sort of weird sound, which I still don't know how to stop it. So it's probably still going. It's still going. Eight months after I wrote the track, it's still going. And my thanks once again to the brilliant Steve Thompson for that really interesting interview and chat about how to get an album onto the moon. Right, what's next? How do we follow an album going to the moon? I'll tell you how we follow it, with another trombonist in the shape of the brilliant Rosie Turton. Now, Rosie is a mainstay of the UK jazz scene, especially in and around London. She's part of the kind of new wave of jazz that has been taking over the airwaves in recent years. And I had her in the studio for a session that we were working on together, and she and I discussed the trombone, we discussed the different techniques, and we're going to take you into a little bit of an insight into that simultaneously very expressive and also quite comedic instrument. So over to Rosie in the studio. Now, once again, this is an interview that I did with a binaural microphone. So that means you'll get most out of this. You will be put in Rosie's own position of playing the trombone if you put your headphones on now. If you haven't got headphones, don't worry. Speakers will be fine. But headphones on if you can. Here we go, here's Rosie. Yeah, so would you mind introducing yourself for the sake of the podcast? Yeah, so hi, I'm Rosie Turton. I play trombone, also play dabble and modular synths. And you mainly play jazz, right? Yeah, the musical rights for my band is kind of influenced, I
suppose by modal jazz, if I were to put it in a category, which is kind of like a lot of one chord, two chord, sort of light jazz. I guess some artists to put out there would be, I suppose, Alice Coltrane, Ferris Landers, McCoy Tyner. My band is just named after me, Rosie Turton's band. Rosie Turton's band, I like it, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we've been doing some nice stuff today, we've been working on this project, but you also have been playing a bit with the Technicolour band this year, right? Which has been fun. Yeah, it's been really fun, we did some recording in the summer. For the new album, which was really fun. Yeah. Had a sneak preview of one of the tunes earlier, sounded amazing. That's right, that's right. And then, yeah, we've done a couple of gigs as well. Yeah, but so before we go any further, I'm gonna get you to talk about the trombone stuff, but I wonder if you could just play something. So just demonstrate, so basically, maybe just around what we've just been doing today, something on A minor, just a bit of blowing, so people could hear the trombone before we start talking about it. Cool. Nice, beautiful. So trombone, medium size brass instrument, it's pretty fair to say. So sort of double the length of the trumpet, right? Like more or less. Yeah, I guess so. Do you mean like the trumpet, if all the pipes were stretched out? Exactly, exactly. Yeah, that's true. I guess it is. Yeah, medium size. Medium size brass instrument. Yeah, so plays pretty low. So pretty low, but also pretty high. Yeah. And there are different types of trombone, right? There are, so this is kind of, I guess, yeah, the mid range in terms of pitch. I play the tenor trombone. You get alto trombones, which go higher. Bass trombones, which go lower. Contrabass trombones, which go even lower. And soprano trombones, which I actually... And soprano trombones. I have, but... Of course, I was trying to remember that was cool, which is the same pitch as a trumpet, right? It is. It's the same length of tubing as a trumpet. It's a very silly instrument, which I've got down here, which I can't really play, but I can make silly, waggly noises with. So that's that one, because I know what's showing off there, of course, is the most distinctive feature of the trombone, which is, of course- The slide, yeah. The slide, lots of silly noises in the slide. What drew you to the trombone? Why did you choose the trombone? That's a really good question. I'm not entirely sure. I feel maybe, maybe because it's like a fretless instrument.
Can you just explain what you mean by- So I guess by fretless, I suppose it has no buttons or nothing telling you where to put stuff in place. So I guess that makes it slidey. So like, and I guess kind of similar to string instruments as well, like violins, cellos, because I started on the violin actually, and then I tried out loads of different instruments and then somehow for some reason set a trombone. I don't remember why, but I think maybe what I liked about it is that I find it, I like the expression you can get from it. So I guess you can not use a slide but without sliding everywhere, but you can kind of like. Alright. Sort of thing like that. I guess that maybe that sound, I guess I just feel nice when I play it. It feels more vocal almost, you know, I think sort of you're able to slide up and down in the way that vocalists might, whereas with a trumpet, obviously we've got the buttons, the valves, or obviously with something like a piano, you've got none of that at all. You just put the key down and that's it. But yeah, you're able to slide. Another word for that I suppose is portamento, is that? Yeah, do you use that? Yeah, I think is that the kind of classic term. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Slide and glide. Slide and glide, exactly. Could you just, I wonder if you could just demonstrate, like playing a scale with the trombone, so playing individual notes and then kind of sliding the same distance. It doesn't need to be whole scale, do you know what I mean? So playing from like the same position. That's it. And then just sliding. Yeah, you're setting the slide as you go up. Yeah. And then sliding between them and then just sliding all the way up. Yeah, it's so funny even after playing trombones, it still makes me laugh. It is a common instrument, right? It's funny. It can be a common instrument, it's one of my favourite instruments, but I guess you must have had that many times over your career. Yeah, I remember if I do teaching a workshop with quite young people, they just want to hear the slide and then you play it and everyone goes like crazy. It's so funny because I feel like it should be like, oh, this is a serious instrument, but it still cracks me up. It can be both. Something that I feel really strongly about is that music doesn't need to be either serious or entertaining. It can be both. I think often, particularly in the words that we operate in, kind of jazz, improvised music, crossover, classical, that kind of thing, it sometimes can be in danger of taking itself too seriously and not being very inviting for audiences. In other words, it can sometimes push audiences away as opposed to bringing them with you. I think for me, the greatest way of approaching music as a musician or as a listener is as a bit of an adventure.
You can take it very seriously as we both do, take our careers very seriously and take music as a form very seriously. But also, you are allowed to have fun. And I think when you're teaching kids especially, that's important, I guess, right? Yeah, because I guess you want to find the enjoyment in it, I suppose. And I think it's important, I think especially when we're doing this professionally, I think it's important to remember what is fun about it, because it's very easy to get bogged down with all the kind of more technical sides of it and everything. Yeah, I remind myself of that often. I've chosen this because it is an enjoyable way to spend your time. And so the minute, I mean, you know, there are obviously bits of it that aren't always enjoyable. And I've talked about the difficulty of practicing when you're on holiday or practicing when you're away or any of those things. Really, it can be tricky or obviously all the technical side and it's competitive and financially unstable and the rest of it. So I think there's almost more responsibility because of all those things to keep it fun. Yeah, yeah, because if it's not fun, you wonder what you're doing. Yeah, why am I spending all the time on my own? Exactly, I spend time on my own in a small room. So speaking of fun, could you just demonstrate some of the stuff you would do in a workshop for kids, for example? Right, OK, so I guess the comical side of trombone. I guess you can kind of like do some sort of flutter tongue stuff. It was quite fun. Yeah, so it's quite a versatile instrument. Again, I think the fact that it can mimic the human voice in a way, it's got that kind of yearning quality about it, because it has got that kind of more mournful, expressive vocal quality. I wonder if you're just able to play something more kind of lyrical, using the slide a bit more as a mode of expression rather than of comedy. I'm sure. Um. Beautiful. So nice. So I played the last post a couple of weeks ago for Remembrance Day and we're talking about harmonics about the fact that on the trumpet, demonstrate the without moving any valves on the trumpet or anything. You can get these harmonics, right? And of course, the same thing, the trombone. So the same thing. I think it's the same structure on trombones, isn't it? So that's with the slide all the way in. And if you then go down to the, so put the slide out slightly to the next position. Yeah. And I guess it's the same concept of anyone that plays a guitar or something. It's like using the capo. Yes. On the guitar. You kind of just slide it up or down and then plays it the same. You get the same idea. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Same idea. Brilliant.
Yeah. All right. Well, I wonder, I feel like we should have maybe a bit more, a bit more playing just to show off the range of the trombone. Thank you Thank. Woo, beautiful. That's great, thanks so much. So my thanks once again to Rosie Turton there. Do look her up. She's got a lot of fascinating projects going on and a lot of beautiful music, and she can also be heard on the forthcoming Hackney Collary Band album, which you'll be hearing more about as 2024 progresses. Now, my final guest for this episode, and indeed for this year, is Chris Hadfield, Commander Chris Hadfield. Now, Chris is an astronaut, of course. He was commander of the International Space Station. He flew shuttle missions. He was aboard Mir, the Russian space station. He's had an absolutely unbelievable career as an astronaut, and before that, as a test pilot for the, I think, Canadian Air Force. He's an absolutely lovely man, as well, more importantly, and since coming back down to Earth, he has written a couple of books, one fantastic, it's kind of self-help book, I suppose, called An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, which I find really helpful. Actually, I do quite often come back to things in that book. I'm not a big self-help book kind of person, but actually, there's a few things in there that really have stayed with me, so I really recommend that book. He's got a new novel out as well called The Apollo Murders, which I urge you to check out. And he's a fantastic public speaker and educator. And of course, I know him as a musician as well. He is a guitarist and singer. One of the things that made him more of a household name than most astronauts are, I think, is that he recorded a brilliant version of David Bowie's Space Oddity while he was aboard the International Space Station. And he and I have played that song together. I've accompanied him with my little band as part of Robin Ince's shows with Brian Cox at the Hammersmith Apollo and the Royal Albert Hall. So I've done Space Oddity with Chris, was it probably three or four times, and some other songs too, including the song you may have heard last episode, which I put out, a little teaser episode around Christmas, of Chris singing his own space-themed Christmas carol. So you'll be hearing that again, and I've played that with him, and I've had the privilege of working with Chris quite a few times. And he's always been an absolute joy to work with. And so he was very kind to give me this interview because as I mentioned earlier, he really doesn't do podcast interviews. But because he and I have worked together, and because I wanted the interview to be focused around music and its links with exploration, I think he very kindly agreed to talk to me and give up some of his time. So enough of me, over to Chris Hadfield. So I should start off obviously by introducing my guest today is a very special guest, indeed. He is Commander Chris Hadfield, astronaut, test pilot, musician, amongst many other things, I'm sure. Chris, welcome. Thank you very much for coming on the show.
Hello, Steve. It is definitely my pleasure, and it's a pleasure to talk to a musician like yourself, someone who can compose so effortlessly and lead a disparate group of people to do something incredibly complex. I have great respect and happy to be talking with you. Oh, that's very kind indeed. That's very, very kind. So I want to talk to you. We've worked together a couple of times in a musical capacity. I have accompanied you singing Space Odyssey, of course, which you sung in the Space Station most memorably, and also a song of your own, which I think we might hear later on. I'm gonna start by talking about Hammersmith, if I may. And there you talked about your ideas around the evolution of travel and how we've gone as a species from traveling just across a mountain range to now, of course, going out into space. And you sort of talked about how that drives technology and technology drives us to do, there's a sort of interaction between technology and our willingness to explore. And I wondered as a traveler and musician, if you had any thoughts of the kind of commonalities between those two things, why do we travel and why do we make music? And is there any relation between those two things? Sure, I think fundamentally, travel is a safe form of exploration. It's not just a theoretical exploration of an idea like you might pursue at school or in a book or on a television or a computer screen, but you actually go and experience something in person. And that's hugely instructive, but it's really an exploration and therefore a deepening of yourself. And it's always been linked and limited by technology. If our only means of transportation is on foot, then of course it limits the parts of the world we can see. And for tens of thousands of years, that's all we had. We didn't domesticate horses till 6,000 years ago. Around the time that we invented the wheel, we didn't invent any sort of powered propulsion, maybe sail, but it was really the harnessing of ever increasing more complex technologies that allowed us to explore further and further until eventually our technology was so good we could explore to the north and the south pole and live in those places and then into the third dimension and all the way up as you say to a space station. And so to me is answering a fundamental human curiosity by applying the best of our ingenuity to try and better explain the universe to ourselves. And to me, that's what music is. Music is a way like all art. It's a way of trying to explain the universe to ourselves. Why would you write poetry or paint or sculpt or play music? It's another way to try and make sense of it all. And limiting ourselves to just the spoken word is pretty insular. I mean, wiggling this glottis and shaping the whistling of the air with our tongue and our teeth and our lips in an attempt to actually express what we're thinking and feeling. It's a very small bandwidth little way of sharing those things. So art is so much richer and music is within that. And I think the marrying of the two perhaps is interesting also in that some of the oldest human-made objects that we have are musical instruments from 40,000 years ago and every sailor who headed over
the horizon was carrying with them not only the tunes inside their head but musical instruments, horn pipes and fiddles and things. And even up on the space station, we have a small orchestra of instruments, a little battery-powered keyboard. We've had flutes and a sub-size saxophone, but we have a guitar up there. And it's a very portable and expressive instrument and gets played almost every day. So I think that combination of curiosity and an inability to express ourselves completely means that music will explore with us everywhere we go. I think, yeah, I think that's very interesting what you're saying about some of the earliest objects being musical instruments. I mean, for me, something that's endlessly fascinating is the fact that with these bone flutes and things that we've discovered 40, 50,000 years old, that's, I mean, it's absolutely staggering that that's about 40,000 years before we invented, you know, agriculture. It's bad that we're making flutes before, you know, for 50,000, 40,000 years before we started sort of domesticating wheat. You have to assume that our progenitors had already discovered, of course, percussion and whistling and melody, and they were just, someone must have picked up one of those hollow leg bones of a crane or whatever and blown in one end and it made a whistling noise and figured out a way to change the tonality. You know, it's just an extension, sort of like before there was ever a stone hinge, there were countless wood hinges. I'm sure there were all sorts of temporary instruments that we don't have record of, but finding the bone and the stone flutes and instruments, that's the permanent record of it. And as you say, it predates written word and predates our formation of any sort of complex society by tens of thousands of years. And I mean, I play the conch shell and that's the same thing. I just find that the thought process behind someone looking at a shell and then generation after generation, maybe picking it up and playing it in different ways, trying to find a way, I think somehow in our psyche, we're wired to think that we can make interesting noises out of inanimate objects like shells. And it must have taken many hundreds of years for someone to find just the right shell, just the right combination of shaving the right bit off at a certain place and suddenly this thing is alive. And I find that kind of fascination with making abstract sounds out of inanimate objects quite strange. Yeah, as an astronaut and a pilot and an aviator, I've always been envious of birds. But as a singer, I've also been envious of birds, the complexity of the sounds they make. And I suspect that 50,000 years ago, we weren't that much different. We would have loved to be able to fly. I would be loved able to make sound the way that some birds do. So I don't think we're that different than the other creatures. We just maybe express it to each other a little more in a more complex way. In a more complex way, yeah. And I suppose what you're saying about mirroring travel is that we're wanting to explore our world in abstract ways. And I think that the nature of music being abstract allows us to do something that if it was more demonstrative, we wouldn't be able to...
So I mean, I think often music can go beyond poetry because a particular sound frequency can kind of speak to us in a way that even the most beautiful set of words can't always, precisely because it is abstract. Yeah, everybody knows what a transition from a major chord to a minor chord means and what it feels like and what it reflects in human emotion. And it happens just by lifting one finger, but it has a very evocative impact on each of us. And that's a pretty tough thing to do with just the written word. So you're talking about instruments on the space station. I hadn't realized that there was a whole orchestra up there. I think you mentioned to me in the past that obviously there's a guitar there and a keyboard, but so do they get brought up over successive years or how does that? Well, right from the beginning, I think the first instrument up there was a harmonica. One of the early Gemini crews I think brought a harmonica because it was Christmas time and they didn't want to do jingle bells or something. But the Russians have had guitars on their space station since the 1970s. And when I was on the Russian space station in 1995, they had an old St. Petersburg guitar up there that they'd had on Mir since the beginning, which was launched in 86. But that same guitar had been on a previous space station on Salyut and they transferred that guitar from Salyut to Mir. So that guitar had been up there for a long time. But lots of astronauts and cosmonauts are musicians. And so they've always, if you're gonna spend six months somewhere, what's important for you to take with you? You mean you need all the basic necessities of life, but that doesn't exclude art. And so we have some astronauts who are singers and some who can play instruments. And so there's always music, just like on every exploration vessel, there's always been music. And depending on the skill in the background of the astronauts, we've had flutes and there's a ukulele up on the space station. And there's a harmonica or two and the guitar, just because they don't weigh very much. And if you can squeeze it into one of the resupply ships, why not throw it in there? And the crew can tuck it out of the way and play it for just like on Earth, for reflection, for special occasions, for celebration, for honoring traditions, and for fun. But yeah, I mean, it's just, I find that endlessly fascinating, that journey, as I say, from just the very short explorations over a mountain range and then to discovering around that same time, very primitive instruments and now flying them into space. It's a sort of interesting marrying of the two disciplines. And presumably, most astronauts obviously come from a science or a pilot background. But so it's interesting that I think also often we think of musicians and artists as separate from sciences and that sort of division between the two, but that's a mistake, I think. No, I've played in an all astronaut band for 25 years. In fact, we're getting together for a reunion and playing here very shortly. No, there's nothing exclusive about it. There's lots of crossover. There's a great scene in Master and Commander where the ship's surgeon and the ship's captain are
playing music together. And I think that's common. But it's also that music needs to travel in order often to evolve. And bluegrass wouldn't exist without taking the roots of music and the instruments that people brought with them and then evolved it. Or jazz, how did New Orleans create the music it did? It's because of people bringing their own traditions and their own forms of instruments and then adapting them both in a new place. So I'm really intrigued what the first bands on the moon will be like. After we've been living there for 30 years, there's no reason to think that music won't evolve to something that makes sense with one sixth gravity and probably a lower air pressure and a different set of circumstances. Music, just like it's always done, will evolve and reflect the new place that it's in. Yeah, I mean, and I think music at its best is like exploration and travel at its best, in that it's an all humanity effort. It requires cooperation across the different cultures and different skill sets, and you kind of can draw from one another's experience at its best. And as you say, New Orleans music kind of being a fusion of music from Africa and then music from Europe, and then suddenly becoming this amazing new thing, and then that itself taking a whole new direction. It's also primal and necessary. I played in a Celtic band for several years, and some of the Celtic music is pretty basic and sort of gets right into your feeling. It's hard to avoid. And I remember looking up while we were playing one of those thumping kind of songs that just catches your, gets your toe tapping and makes you want to dance. And there was a little one year old dancing, maybe 14 months, I don't know. This child had no idea what music was, had no words yet. No one had ever explained anything to them. They didn't have any role models for what all that should be, but that child was dancing. And just because the music meant something to someone who had such little experience on Earth. So it's fundamental to who we are and it's gonna continue to go with us everywhere that we travel and explore. You may remember I premiered a work by my daughter called Farting on the Sofa, which is an example of exactly that. She was two and I find it's very interesting. She was just improvising with music in the way that she improvises with language and she was sitting on the sofa, evidently farting and composed a little ditty. But it's funny that we sort of unlearn that. So as we get older, we continue to improvise with language all the time, but people are terrified of improvising with music because it feels like a separate thing, whereas actually I think the two are quite closely linked. As a space explorer, maybe you should just tell my listeners if they're not aware of all of your different missions you've run, some of the highlights of your space career and then some of the highlights of your musical career. Sure, I decided to be an astronaut when I was nine years old. That's about the same time I bought my first guitar. My brother and I ran an auction sale and a farm auction, which is fairly common in Canada. And in amongst all the tractors and household goods, there was this
old acoustic guitar went up for sale and we bought it for $5. And that was the very first instrument we bought. And I taught myself my first chords on that guitar. But at the same time, I was dreaming of flying in space. I've taken a guitar with me everywhere I've ever gone. I thumbed around Europe for six months and dragged an old Yamaha FG-180 to the top of a mountain in Narvik, Norway and to Turkey and all across Southern Europe. And I lived at the bottom of the sea for a while when I was training in astronaut preparation and had a guitar down there that had to be taken apart and brought down to the bottom. So I've always had a guitar with me, but it was really the pursuit of exploring space that drove a lot of my decision making. And I became an engineer and joined the Air Force and became a pilot. And then I was a fighter pilot in the height of the Cold War, intercepting Soviet bombers over the North Atlantic. And then I went to test pilot school. And several of my test pilot friends also became bandmates. Rick Husband, who was the commander of Columbia when it came apart and everyone died in February of 2003. He made his way through school as a singing waiter. Yeah, at Texas Tech. And he was very active in his church and a big strong choir kind of voice as well. And Rick and I sang and wrote music together at test pilot school. And Susan Helms, who I think she flew all of the shuttles and she lived on the space station. When I visited there on my second space flight, she was a terrific keyboardist. And so we all played music at test pilot school and then all of us got selected as astronauts, all coming from different backgrounds. And I was an astronaut, active astronaut for 21 years and flew in space three times and was NASA's director in Russia, helped build two space stations up in orbit, did a couple of spacewalks from the space shuttle Endeavour and then lived on the International Space Station for a little under half a year and was the commander of the International Space Station. So, and went around the world about 2,650 times. So that's my space background. And then in music, I've always, I played trombone in school and bass trombone, but hardly anybody ever says, please play trombone. You know, it's normally an accompaniment instrument at best. But guitar is much more portable and a more complete orchestral kind of thing. So I've always had a guitar with me. And it was only natural to try and have one on the space station. And I'm glad that the NASA medical health support team, the psychologists and psychiatrists, they're the ones who put the guitar in the space station, not I. And it was put up there. It's a Larry V. It's made in Vancouver. It's a slightly undersized guitar, what's called a parlor guitar. And they bought it in the summer of 2001. And they or they bought it in the spring of 2001 and then launched it in the summer on Atlantis. And it's been on the space station ever since. And you could do the math. That's, you know, 100,000 orbits plus. And it's been played by a generation of astronauts, self-included. And I played up on the space station, much as I do on Earth. I played as often as I could, often in the evening when things were
quiet, when things had settled down, when I was trying to explain my own thoughts to myself. It's nice to bring a guitar into your hands. And then I wrote and recorded a whole album of music late at night while I was on the space station, which is called Space Sessions, Songs from a Tin Can. And just recording it on board with a garage band and a floating microphone, floating weightlessly in front of me. And then I played along with some other bands from up in space with the Chieftains. I did a song and then I played along with, I had a long chat with Neil Young from the space station and it was funny playing Neil some of his songs from space so he could sing along with me. And then I covered a David Bowie tune that a lot of people have heard. I did a version of Space Oddity that hundreds of millions of people have since seen. So it's a nice way maybe to marry the two, the idea of what seems a remote and perhaps robotic very clinical existence and recognize that it's extremely human and shared and celebratory and fun. And I think through the music that I wrote and played on board the space station and then shared through social media, I think it helped people see what exploration is really like and what life on a spaceship is like and maybe a little glimpse of what it's going to be like when we go even further to the moon and beyond. I have two very nerdy music questions about that. The first of which is, do you have to take up spare strings when you go to space? Do they get flown up? The hard part of putting a guitar up, of course, is the guitar itself. But as each subsequent astronaut musician comes up, they think, well, what should I bring? Maybe some plectrums, you know, or do we have the right pickup? You have to be worried about the electromagnetic environment on a spaceship, so you can't just bring anything. But then strings. One of the beauties of a space station, and maybe it's your other question, is it's a better place for a guitar than on Earth because the humidity never changes, the temperature never changes, and the air pressure never changes. You're in this very carefully controlled bubble. You're sort of like in a guitar preservation case. That's where you're living. And so the guitar... Yeah, it stays in tune very well. So it's quite good for that, better than on Earth. But of course strings get a little tired and they corrode a little bit. And so often a crew as part of their personal kit will bring up some musical accoutrement like a new set of strings. So there were several new sets of strings. There's everything you need. So one astronaut musician will ask a previous one, hey, what all is up there? What do I need to bring? I can just throw it into the little bit of personal kit that you're allowed to take up with you. And so, yeah, essentially the most expensive guitar case of all time, if it's preserved up there. Well, Planet Earth is. Yes, I suppose that's true. And my other question was really about the acoustic. I mean, what's the acoustic in the Space Station like? I mean, obviously I've heard your fantastic album, but I mean, it must be quite a challenging place to sort of record or is it like
singing in the bathroom? Well, if you go to a hotel and you get into your nice little hotel room, it's kind of peaceful. But if you think about the hotel, there's a temperature control system, there's something controlling the power, there's an air recirculation system, there's all the pumps and the fans that are allowing the water to flow. In a spaceship, you're in the part of the machinery where all of those things are being processed. And it's noisy. If you go down in the basement and the bowels of any big building, it's a noisy place. And you live in the bowels in a space station. You can hear all of those things, like perhaps an infant in their mother's womb. You're constantly there with the gurgling and the heartbeat and the breathing and the digestion and everything else. And so space stations are noisy. The ambient noise level is somewhat akin to maybe riding in the back of a bus. So it's a tough place to record. And so I hunted around for the quietest little place I could find that also had some privacy because I didn't want to inflict myself on the other crew members who are all busy doing what they're doing. So I actually found the quietest place was in my little sleep pod, the little tiny sleep quarters, which is about the size of a coffin, I guess, inside. So if you could imagine a coffin with a sleeping bag. And that's, but if you could imagine lying in a coffin and turning the guitar, so it was sort of half parallel to your body, and then having garage bands on one side of the coffin next to you, and then a little microphone dangling in front of you. That's what it was like for recording all the music that I did. And because inside that sleep pod, I could close the little door and turn the fan down to a minimum, and it was from an ambient noise level, the quietest place I could find. And so that's where I recorded all the music. And as you say about disturbing other people, because of course you work on shifts around the clock. Is that right? We don't actually. You don't? I'm sorry. Not unless we have to. We've tried, but we found it's more efficient for everybody to work like a 16-hour day and sleep at the same time. But we don't always. But still, everyone, your time is scheduled by mission control down to five-minute slices for the entire six months that you're there. What you're doing now, what you're doing five minutes from now, five minutes after that. And the only real free time you have is when you're supposed to be asleep. And so that's often when we do things personal. You'll steal the first two hours of your designated sleep time to take pictures out the window or call your family or write about what's happening or think about it or study and get ready for the next day or play music. And you're not there for yourself either. You're there on behalf of 7.7 billion other people. So you take it pretty seriously. And I was very careful especially as the commander of the spaceship to make sure we got everything else done first. And we set records for the amount of science that we got done. And we even did an emergency space walk four days before we came home in
order to save the station from a big ammonia leak. So we still had lots of depth of reserve available because it would have been unconscionable to sort of sacrifice any of that just for a personal pursuit. But in addition to all that, I also wrote and recorded an album and shared it with the world. So it was the right balance. I struggled to finish an album here and I'm a full time musician. Well, it was harder than that, Steve, because all I did on orbit was multiple tracks of voice and guitar. And it wasn't produced. And then when I got back to Earth after about two years, I was like, well, I've got all these recordings. What are we going to do with them? And so I took them to a producer friend in Toronto and we added in some other instrumentals later to my guitar and voice. We didn't mess with my voice and guitar because that was the space component. But with the rest of it, the album has done quite well. So I find it sort of, it's the first complete work of art, I think, ever conceived and created and finished off the Earth. And so kind of an interesting project to be part of. And I'm really pleased that it captured a moment in history and a moment in time. Well, it's absolutely fantastic. And I think now I've got just a couple of very quick questions to ask you at the end. But I wonder maybe now if you wouldn't mind playing us Jewel in the Night. Is that going to be? Oh, yeah, sure. Sure. I have a Martin guitar here today. On my third space flight, we launched just around the 20th of December, 21st, depending where you are around the world. And that meant that for a lot of people's traditions, it was almost Christmas. And Christmas is a tradition of a star in the sky, leading the wise men and signifying historic birth. And my brother and I were thinking before launch of what would the stars look like from that vantage point, but also what would Bethlehem look like when you're going around the world every 90 minutes? What would the whole Middle East look like? Put things into a very different perspective. And the fact that we now, as a space station, are brighter than any star going around the world. It's the brightest thing in the sky after the sun and then the moon. So it becomes a different star in the night. And so I called the song Jewel in the Night. And I recorded it. I was in a hurry. I just slapped the iPad on the wall. I was trying to get so many. I hunted around on this iPad until I found something that said audio record. I had audio record, did one test call. Okay, sounds right. And then played one take of a, just like I'm doing right now, of Jewel in the Night. And then that was it. I didn't even listen to it. And I just sent it down to Earth. And then my son Evan put it out on SoundCloud. And before I knew it, you know, 75,000 people had heard it and we were away. But here's Jewel in the Night. The very first and only space carol, I guess.
I'll jump to the bridge. Oh, thank you so much. It's so lovely to hear that again. I think we've played that once or twice together, and it was a real honor orchestrating that for you. I love the version you did. I'm just plugging you back in here for audio. Yeah, it's an evocative song of those chord sequences from thousands of years ago. I like playing the song, and I'm delighted at the arrangement you put together, especially with some fiddle music on top. I've done it with Othello on accordion as well, and it really suits itself to that accordion sustained sound. Well, I think I was playing an ancient Indian instrument, which actually is over here, which is a shruti box, which is a kind of drone instrument, I think, on that version. Yeah, it really suits. It's lovely, that kind of, yeah, rich, sonorous sound. Essentially, this project is me trying to reconcile the fact that I'm just making silly noises for a living and trying to justify to myself that that's the thing that I... Oh, so you're a politician. That's right, exactly. Just trying to justify to myself that, I mean, I'm not that bad, but trying to justify to myself that, you know, this is a valid use of an adult life, because sometimes, and as you can see, I'm sitting in this sort of glorified shed in my garden, and it feels, you know, when I talk to people like yourself or people who've done really fantastic, incredible things that change, that move things on for humanity, and I sort of think sometimes tinkering away in a shed by myself, it can feel not the most, the best use of time and my education and all the rest of it. And so with that in mind, the question I'm sort of asking is, what's the point of music? Well, that's sort of almost like what is the point of thought? What is the point of language? What's the point of emotion? I don't think they're separable. Imagine, if you possibly could, a world without music. I mean, try and go an hour without hearing music or without playing anything in your head or humming a tune or whistling or... It's beyond necessary, I think. It's fundamental to who we are. So to explore it and to do it well is like anything else. There's a famous quote, I think, of what? 90% of everything is crap, right? But that's where the majority of life is. And so I think it's an intrinsic part of who we are. And so to be able to take that fundamental, deep, natural part of humanity and become very good at it, to become multi-talented at it. So it's not just a tune that you can hum, but an entire symphony that, in your case, you can create with all the cording and the complexity behind it. When I think about those cross-breeding group between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens in that cave above the Rhine 42,000 years ago, what intrigued me when the archaeologists or paleontologists picked up those bone flutes and figured out what they were and started blowing through them, was that to a large degree, they followed the same scale that we find natural. Do re mi fa sol la ti do, that whole normal sequence of notes. I realized that if somehow I could get
into a spaceship that could travel through time, and I could bring my Larry V guitar from the space station there, that I would bet within five minutes of walking into that cave, I could have everybody laughing, or I could have everybody crying. With no commonality of culture, definitely no commonality of language, apart from the fundamental human commonality of music. And so I wish I had both your gifts, but also your devotion and drive to become so good at music as you are. Because I think it's something that is far older than history itself and is not going anywhere. And it's one of the things that we all cherish when somebody truly masters it. Well, that's a very flattering answer. Thank you for that. That's beautiful. I think that's about it. That's fantastic. We've got a lot of really great stuff there. Great. So I just say for the show, thank you very much to my incredible guest today, Commander Chris Hadfield, formerly of the International Space Station and MIR and countless other missions amongst other things. And of course, sort of intergalactic, almost intergalactic troubadour. I'll go with orbital. Orbital, yeah. First chance between interplanetary or intergalactic. I'm all for it. Yes, I mean, yeah. Pleasure to talk with you, but I look forward to the next time we also get a chance to play music together, Steve. I'm sure it'll be soon. Thanks again, Chris, it's an absolute pleasure talking to you. Nice to talk with you, bye bye. Thanks, bye bye. So my huge thanks once again to Commander Chris Hadfield for giving up so much of his time to talk to me about music, exploration, space and so much more. What a privilege it was to have him on, especially as he doesn't do many podcasts. So if you enjoyed that chat with Chris Hadfield and earlier with Steve Thompson, it's a bit of a space special today, I know, but there's going to be a bit more space and music chat on the 20th of January at Wilton's Music Hall, where I'm going to be doing a live podcast recording and gig, and of course one of my guests is the brilliant Professor Chris Lintott, who is a professor of astronomy at Oxford and also the presenter of Sky At Night, which I believe is the longest running TV show of all time. So it's quite a claim to fame. And we also have, of course, other brilliant guests on that night. We have the Filament Choir, which I'm really excited about, a full choir down there. And we have Hackney Colliery Band, guys. We have Valeria on Harp, who you heard in episode two. All sorts of stuff. So yeah, 20th of January, tickets still available. Meanwhile, thanks to my other guests as well, Steve and Rosie, and of course to Angelique Kidjo for the theme song with Hackney Colliery Band. We're gonna be back on the 11th of January. And until then, please do pass on the word to any musically curious people you have in your
life. If they haven't heard of the show yet, put them in touch with us. And a reminder as well that if you'd like to support the show and get a load of extra bonus content, which is gonna be updated very soon, please head to my Patreon, which is, if you go to originandthepieces.com or Patreon slash originandthepieces, I think it is, search on Patreon for Origin and Pieces, you'll find it. Yeah, it will really, really help to support the show and help us make it the best it can be. Meanwhile, thank you very much for listening and we'll see you on the 11th of January. Stay musically curious. Bye.