Episode 10 — East Anglian cowpunk, trombone marathons, the 'i' word and reverb
This episode weaves together terminal diagnosis, ridiculous endurance, sound design nerdery and a genre experiment. Steve meets trombonist, teacher and ultramarathon runner Nathanial Dye in a noisy North London pub to talk about running the London Marathon while playing trombone to raise money for Macmillan Cancer Support, his brutally honest blog and fundraiser at bowelcancerbucketlist.com, and how music, teaching and dark humour look when you're living with stage four bowel cancer.
Back in the studio, Steve uses the 70th anniversary of Johnny "Guitar" Watson's Johnny "Guitar" Watson and his track "Space Guitar" to dig into reverb, ritual and why acoustics matter — from Wilton's Music Hall to shell recordings in the Natural History Museum. Then Genre Tombola lands on cowpunk, sending him into an East Anglian mash-up set in Lowestoft, Kessingland and Southwold, complete with bad bass, virtual banjo and a slide part played on a shovel guitar, with lyrics co-written (on purpose, and transparently) with AI.
What we cover
Nathanial Dye's story: Stage four diagnosis, trombone marathon for Macmillan, teaching, dark humour and grabbing opportunities while they exist.
Music as lifeline: Why making music with kids, ska bands and big bands remains the best use of Nathanial's time.
Reverb & space: From Space Guitar to Wilton's and the Natural History Museum — how acoustics, artificial and natural, shape how we hear.
Shells & resonance: Conch recordings in Hintze Hall and why certain notes light up a room.
Genre Tombola — cowpunk: Building a track that fuses country and punk aesthetics, gear choices, distortion and DIY attitude.
AI-assisted lyrics: Using AI (Bard) as a constrained writing tool for East Anglian cowpunk while keeping intent, politics and local detail human.
Further listening & links
bowelcancerbucketlist.com — Nathanial Dye's story & fundraiser
Johnny "Guitar" Watson & "Space Guitar"
Full Transcript
Verbatim transcript, reflowed for readability only. No wording edits.
Hello, my name is Steve Pretty, I am a musician, composer and performer from London, and welcome to my podcast, Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces. This is the show that helps you to hear and understand music in new ways. Yes, hello, welcome back. It's lovely to be here. As always, I hope you enjoyed the previous episode. If you check that one out, that was where I talked about the gig I did naked, playing trumpet and shells for a life drawing class a couple of weeks ago. It was very fun and enjoyable. And I also previewed a little bit of my Wilton's Music Hall show, which I did as a live podcast recording and gig back in January. And I played a little bit of the fantastic filament choir from that and also some of my Hackney Colliery Band colleagues doing a little kind of mini version of Hackney Colliery Band. If you're new to the show, I know we've got a lot of new people because of a very nice write up we had in The Guardian. Thank you to The Guardian for that. And also just people very kindly spreading the word because they've enjoyed the show. So thank you very much for that. And welcome to the new people. Yeah, there's a lot. This is episode 10 and we've covered a lot of ground in the last nine, 10 episodes. So do go back and have a listen. There's all sorts of interesting stuff. I hope you'll agree. We've had astronauts, we've had incredible musicians, performers, composers, and not just that, but also music lovers, people who don't necessarily make music themselves, but just love it and have a deep knowledge of it. I really try with this show to keep things quite broad and to embrace music, A, in all its forms, but B, in all its ways of being enjoyed, whether that's playing, whether that's composing, whether that's just listening. So yeah, welcome to you all, whatever state of musically curious you are. Whether you make music in any form or whether you're just curious about it, you're all very welcome. Now, before I go any further, we've got a lot of fun stuff coming up in this episode, which I'll talk about shortly. But before I do that, I mentioned the Wilton's Music Hall show that I did back in January and the choir recording you heard last week and some other bits. I'm very pleased to say that we now have that entire show recorded and filmed really beautifully by a wonderful filmmaker called Chris Lindsay. And that is gonna be up on my Patreon by the time you listen to this episode. So if you go to originofthepieces.com, there's links there to my Patreon, or it's Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces on Patreon. And just to remind you that that is $5 a month, and that gets you access to all sorts of bonus stuff, including in this case, the full Wilton show. I will be putting bits and bobs of it up on my YouTube channel, which is just Steve Pretty On YouTube. But I will also probably be keeping that full show just for Patreons for the time being, because I'm really, really proud of that show. I think we did a lot of really fun and interesting stuff. There were some incredible guests, Chris Lintot, the brilliant astronomer, and Valeria Clark, the harpist, and my colleagues from
Hackney Colliery Band, Luke, Ollie, and Ed. We did a little mini Hackney Colliery Band, as I mentioned. And of course, also the Filament Choir, the amazing 30-piece Filament Choir, all live on stage, led by Osnat Schmool. It was a really, really enjoyable show to do. I think there was a really lovely audience reception for it on the night as well. So if you missed it, or even if you were there and want to just relive some of those little bits, it will be available exclusively on Patreon. And of course, the main thing with Patreon, let's not beat around the bush, is there to help me make this show. I have incredibly ambitious plans for this show. We have all sorts of amazing guests coming up and really fantastic, some travel, which I'll talk about later. We're going to different locations, talking to people from all over the place about all manner of things musical. So yeah, it's quite a lot of work though to put it together. So just do this myself. It's just me in my glorified shed at the bottom of my garden. But I try and keep the production values as high as I can and do the best job I can. So if you enjoy what you hear, it would really, really help me out if you would join my Patreon for $5 a month. Yeah, it just helps support the show and you get loads of extra bonus bits as well. Anyway, plug over, on with the show. So, later in the show today, I am going to be finally doing my deep dive into cow punk. If you've heard the show before, you'll know that most episodes, I try and do this thing called the genre tombola, which is where I have the list of musical genres from Wikipedia, and it's about 1300 of them, and I feed it into a random list picker on the internet, and it picks a genre for me. And the genre it was picked a couple of weeks ago was cow punk, but because of the live show, and because of wanting to play a bit of the choir, I didn't do anything with cow punk on the last episode, but this episode I very much do. So stay tuned for my dive into the world of cow punk. And in a section of the show that I sometimes do called Music Theory, where we look at the sort of nuts and bolts of what music is, we take a quick look at reverb, courtesy of the Wilton's Music Hall show that I mentioned earlier, where I discussed reverb in its many forms. It might sound niche, but it's very important, as we'll discover in a bit. But first, I have a fantastic guest for this first part of the show today. I'm going to let him introduce himself, but just to say that he is a fabulous musician and has a really incredible story. As you'll discover, I think probably the worst word you can use for people in his position is inspiring, because they must hear it all the time and get very sick of it. In fact, we talked about that after we recorded this interview, but yeah, I'm afraid I do drop the word inspiring, the I word a couple of times, and hopefully you'll see why, because Nat's story is incredible. So I'm gonna hand over to a rather noisy pub. It's before a gig that I did with Nat last week. So forgive the noise. I've tried to reduce it as much as possible, but hopefully it will be okay. But this is a noisy pub before a gig in North London with the amazing Nathanial Dye.
My name is Nathanial Dye, and I'm a musician, that's kind of why I'm here. I'm also a music teacher, Ultramar from Runner. And unfortunately, I also have stage four bowel cancer, and I was diagnosed in autumn of 2022. And yeah, essentially I'm dying. So yeah, it's been an interesting year or so. Yeah, well, thank you so much for talking to me. We did a gig together this time last week. So we're playing with a band I'm going to be talking about a bit more on the show, and it's a Spanner big band, really fun big band, lots of interesting music, running from jazz to rock and funk and various other things, lots of fun. But you gave a little speech at the end, because we've met I think maybe on one gig before, but didn't know each other before that, really. But then you gave a little speech at the end to the audience in Jamboree and King's Cross in London about your situation, because you're raising money, right? Yeah. So I decided with joint passions in music and running and with a really good cause to raise money for, Macmillan Cancer Support, I decided to go for running the London Marathon, which is going to be in April, whilst playing the trombone. Yeah, that generally gets that kind of reaction. Yeah, I've in fact inquired with Guinness to see if it could be a world record, but they won't recognize it for some reason. Maybe because you could, I don't know, do a honk at the beginning and just run with it the whole time. I see you're on brand here, drinking the Guinness Zero, trying to get them onside. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's got to be the zero because I got liver cancer, so I probably shouldn't. But yeah, so I've decided to change myself with that, apart from just running whilst playing. So if you donate to my fundraiser, which you can find through bowelcancerbucketlist.com, then you can choose a song for me to have to learn and play whilst I'm running a London marathon. It's absolutely... I mean, I can't imagine running a marathon. I mean, it's the kind of marathon problem, isn't it? You can't imagine running a marathon until you've done it. I mean, I do a bit of running, you know, for like 15, 20 minutes here and there, and that's plenty for me. But so the thought of running a marathon full stop is terrifying, let alone playing a brass instrument all the way around and let alone with stage four bowcancerbucketlist. I mean, it's like absolutely insane challenge. Well, it feels insane at the moment, especially, because unfortunately I'm now going through chemo again. So I have various side effects, which means I get about maybe two runs in per three week cycle. So I'm just hoping I'll have a bit of a break by April in order to just do it. But I mean, people kind of say, well, if you can do it, that would be great. But for me, that's not good enough. I'm going to get to the start line, whatever. And it's got quite a generous kind of community feel, time limit of eight hours, I believe. So if I need to just make it into some kind of march rather than run, that's going to happen. It's just however you get to finish.
It's similar with the ultras as well, because I've got 400 miles to my name, the most recent of which... 400 miles? Well, four times 100 miles, you know. So the most recent of those was when I set up a challenge of running from Harwich in Essex, and there's a trail called the Essex Way that goes up to Epping, just outside of London. And then London's about another 20 miles, so it was 100 miles. And that was with all that's going on and the colostomy. Yeah, so I've definitely got the endurance. I've got the tough whilst running. Had a little bit of a go. I mean, uphill is a bit difficult. But I don't know. It's going to be just the best atmosphere. Yeah, yeah. And I've got Royal Music who make the Plastic Trombones, the P-Bone. Yeah. They've kindly sent me an instrument. Nice. I'm going to strap a speaker to my waist belt and play some backing tracks. Oh, great. So I hope I'm not just on my own. And I'm kind of scared of some of the repertoire that I'm going to get given, really. I've had some quite bonkers stuff like Mars From The Planet, which is in 5-4 and running whilst doing that. There's a Tchaikovsky Waltz, which is in 5-4 as well. But I think really long, slow stuff is going to be the enemy, potentially. Even on a gig, this long, slow stuff is the enemy, right? Let alone running with nothing. Yes, I'm not sure which is going to be worse, the lips or the lungs or the feet, because it can take me eight hours, but I haven't really played for eight hours either. On its own. How long do we end up playing brass instruments for? Maybe a couple of hours. Talk to me in the studio, sometimes six, eight hours, but with breaks and not running a marathon at the same time. Well, after this last gig where I did the shout out, I got a really, really generous song suggestion, which came with a donation, which was, have five minutes off. Have five minutes of silence. Surely 4.33, that's what you need to do. The John Cage piece, 4 minutes 33 seconds. Absolutely. A big part of that is just the incidental noises that happen in the audience in a silent space. Exactly. So sorry for clarity for people who are listening who don't know what that is. It's a piece by John Cage which has no notes in it. It's not silent, but it's all about listening to what the incidental noise and space is, as you say. So yeah, there you go. 433 is a good suggestion. Sponsor. Maybe I get 27 bonus seconds. Exactly. But yeah, that was pretty cool. So I've got at least one little period of respite. That's great. But just coming into the music, because when we were talking after the gig last week, we were talking about... Because
you've really... I mean, what was your background? What is your background? Well, I'm a classically trained musician, and I became a music teacher, you know, straight away. And I'm a primary school music teacher. Pretty successful, actually. I primary school run a national award recently. Just as things are going pretty badly for me personally, the professional life was hotting up. It's taking up for it, right? It took a music school group to the Albert Hall for the music field. All sorts of really, really good experiences. And well, actually, I'm really proud of one thing that a lot of people just think I'm bonkers for doing, which is after a load of cancer treatment, I had chemotherapy then, emergency surgery, because I got a bowel obstruction. And then I decided pretty much as soon as my body would let me to go back into the classroom, and people were looking at me and thinking, what on earth are you doing back here? You could take early retirement. You could go to a beach somewhere. I remember one musician telling me, God, what are you doing here on this gig? You could be anywhere else but here. You could be on a beach sunning yourself, just having the most comfortable life. But here am I just choosing to make music, choosing to make music with kids. And it took having all of that ripped away from me, I think, to really realize how amazingly rewarding and special being a musician and being a teacher is. And how I think this probably sounds a bit more profound than it is, but it's the best use of the time I've got left. I don't know, I don't know why, but I just feel like I need to still make that contribution, even though I don't have to, you know? It's very strange. But I think, isn't that just an extension of why we all do it? Because I think the idea that you become a musician for the money is obviously, if you're doing that, you're making a very strange choice. Oh, it's got very noisy in this pub, sorry. But so, in a sense, we all do it out of a sense of vocation and passion and drive to, because it's something we believe in and we believe in the communicative power of music to touch other people and all of those things. And obviously for you, that has been accelerated, but I guess it makes you focus in even more on your priorities. I think music now makes me feel in a different way. Like so many musical experiences just mean a little bit more. One of the first things I did when I was diagnosed and trying to process it all was I started writing a song, just like me and a piano, a kind of tear jerk, a ballad type thing about ringing the bell that you get to ring when you're cancer free. And it just helped me kind of be a bit resolute about it all and think, whatever happens, whatever I have to go through, whatever hell, I'm still going to keep going because just having this moment in my head of ringing this bell that I have to walk past in hospital every day, I'm just going to hang on to that. Unfortunately, since... Good timing with the food bell going off.
Doon Nam. Unfortunately, since I wrote that song, I won't be ringing any bells now. The cancer is officially classed as spread so far that any treatment is now palliative, essentially. So they're just looking to contain whatever's there. But I still kind of sing that to myself, just to provide a bit of comfort. And then a few other songs have started to just come into my head, and various songs are in various stages of half-finishedness. You know how it is with... I guess this is a concept album, like a cancer concept album now, that might eventually see the light of day, who knows? But yeah, creativity is really strange. I've had various bits of trauma in my life, and at one point I thought, right, okay, this tragedy has happened to me. I'm going to be really creative now. I'll have all sorts of things to write about, to sing about, and this is going to just produce this amazing place of spark, and the opposite happens. Because it happens, I just had nothing in me. It was just, it was too much for me to do any creating. But I don't know, I mean, recently it's just produced some really good music, so maybe both things are true. Maybe tragedy produces great music, and it's okay for it not to. Yeah, absolutely. Well, but you do, I mean, I think it's, people deal with things in different ways, and music and creativity is, I guess, one way of dealing with things that can be really effective, but it's not always a cure, or sometimes you need to space and time to process things before you're able to be creative, I imagine. Yeah, I don't know. It's a case of, I'm off the chemo now. I could potentially spend, even if it's 10 minutes a day at the piano, just working out the songs that are kind of in my head and putting them into fruition, but somehow that's not happening. Yeah. I mean, who knows how to become productive? I mean, we have all sorts of ways. Maybe I need a deadline or something. Sorry, that sounds really morbid. I'm not sure, can I say the word deadline anymore without having connotations? Man, I think you have earned the right, more than earned the right to say whatever you like in that context, I think. But yeah, the humour's become really dark now. In all sorts of ways. I say stuff like that and I think, yeah, actually, that's really funny. But yeah, all sorts of things just happen now. I've got a song about just raising awareness and just making it a little bit frivolous. I've attempted to make a kind of joke song, which is like a blues about my stoma, which is a colostomy bag, which I've named Homer, essentially, because it's going to rhyme in a song. I thought that was too good an opportunity not to. So Homer's song has a solo from Homer, because maybe this is slightly puerile, I must admit, but Homer has a kind of fart solo in the middle. Because this just happens to me. I'm surprised it hasn't happened on this recording, just making lots of noises, because I can't control this now. Of course, of course. I haven't really got a way to make it happen in the middle either, so I just buzz my lips or might get a brass mouthpiece or something. Speaking of which, you're a fantastic trombone player. You were playing in the gig last week, and we're about to play again. We
talked about the creativity of writing songs and things, but also from the point of view of practicing your instrument. I've talked about on the podcast in the past, the difficulty of maintaining your chops as a brass player, your abilities and your musculature to play the instrument at a high level. It's not easy at the best of times. And yeah, you were sounding absolutely fantastic last week. Well, it's really interesting that you call me a fantastic trombone player there, because I've got the biggest sense of imposter syndrome. Well, I have to say, that's something we all share, I think, right? Most musicians feel like, oh, I'm not really a proper musician, like so and so is. But yeah, from my point of view, you sounded absolutely really great. I think it happens especially to teachers who are also musicians. Yeah, I suppose that's true. Because you think, ah, you know, I'm just not there, you know. With the best way in the world, when you're a teacher, you generally can't practice as much. Playing gigs in the evening, and then having to get up at 5 o'clock to get lessons ready, etc. They don't go well together. In fact, it's really weird, since I've been on sick leave for chemo, I've been doing way more playing right now than I've done otherwise. Right, right, right. But I do as much as I can to maintain. There are various things that just get in the way. Well, of course, I mean, with chemo treatment, hey, let's start again. With chemo, I get this side effect called peripheral neuropathy. Which is like intense pins and needles in hands, feet and throat. And it means I can't really touch brass instruments for a little bit. You know, it wears off through the cycle. Steve back in the studio now. And before we go any further with this interview, I just want to drop in a little sample of Nat's fantastic playing from the very gig we were about to play when we spoke here. So here's a little solo that Nat did on a great tune called Medicine. One thing I've really noticed from the last year or so is that, I mean, having cancer doesn't necessarily get you a yes to asking for stuff, but it definitely gets people listening. So I've found my way into all sorts of absolutely fantastic opportunities as a musician. I've just worked my way into all sorts of groups, played with a bit, with a ska punk band called Filthy Militia. That's just because I kind of heard there might be an opening and just was brave enough to say, yeah, can I do that? And would you have done that before your diagnosis, do you think? Probably not, because I wouldn't have been confident enough that I'd be good for it. But now, in all sorts of aspects of not just music, but life, I think, God, at this point, I might as well have a go. I mean, I hate to be simplistic and try and reduce things down to kind of easy soundbites, but is that not something that we should all take a lesson from, right? In terms of, I mean, obviously, you're in this very awful situation. By the way, I haven't yet said I'm really terribly sorry for your situation. It's really awful. I've been trying to keep it light, but it's
really appalling and I'm very sorry that you're having to go through that. But equally, we're all closer to that than we might think. I mean, you know, for you, it's much more known than it is for most people day to day. But it's a cliché, but I could get knocked down by a bus on my way home today. So in terms of in terms of taking those opportunities when they're there and kind of going for things, if you're feeling a bit nervous or feeling a bit of the imposter syndrome that everyone's got and stuff, I don't know what was in your mouth, but would you say that that's something that we can kind of... Well, I don't know, maybe I'm making this overly simplistic as well. But there were times when I think, God, knowing that I'm dying soon, that's a bit of a gift. It means I can just go for stuff and I don't have to worry about feeling validly worth it. Because at least I'm doing something. I may not deserve to be here, but well, I'm here. So I might as well take the opportunities that are there. It's dead to all sorts of things. Like I've written about, I'm getting on for 10,000 words now in national newspapers and magazines. All sorts of things, just because I started telling my story and started getting into it and asked people if they wanted my piece in their paper, and it's just, it's enabled. So it's just, just take these chances, you may as well. And in some ways as well, the pressure's off. Like I don't have to worry about career development. And then, yes, I wrote a big long thing actually about how toxic Ofsted is, and actually, you know, part of that was spurred on, but I found that I'm probably not going to be here for the next one that my school has. Right, right, right. You know, I can just, the teaching bit can just be the joyous part. I take all the joy and I don't have to worry about all the rubbish that surrounds it. Of course. Personally anyway, obviously I do what's required for the kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All sorts of aspects. I can just live with a kind of freedom that just wouldn't have been there. I have nothing to prove now to anyone. And yeah, when you've run a hundred miles with cancer, you think of what else do I have to prove? Look, I've made a statement now. I've come back to work. I've made statements about living as well as I possibly can. Obviously I'll continue to do that. But in some ways, I mean, obviously, this is absolutely rubbish. I'd rather not have cancer, don't get me wrong. I once heard, I think it was you and me in the Big C podcast on the BBC, and they were saying, well, I'm not certain I'd necessarily go back. It's part of me now. Interesting. I think finally, I get that. At the time, I really wasn't happy with that statement, but God, in some ways, it's brought opportunities. It's brought joy that wouldn't have otherwise been there. That's so interesting. And so some people keep telling me, I've lived more life in the last year than I might have lived in the next 40 anyway. I think it's, I mean, it's obviously, and this is again, a very
overused statement, but it is obviously very, very inspiring, and I also just go back to what I was saying just now, which is that all of us are, life is unpredictable, and again, you know, whether it's being in a car accident or getting knocked down by a bus or being, you know, having a diagnosis or whatever it might be, we all, no one knows what's around the corner. And so for me, one of the wonderful things about music, and when I was talking to you about it last week, if there's something that you're passionate about, either as a listener or as a player or as, you know, as someone musically curious, there's, it's an amazing adventure. And I think that's what was really inspiring talking to you now and the bit last week. It was just embracing that adventure for its own sake. And, and, and of course, all the amazing running you're doing, everything else as well. So I think there's really, yeah, it's really, I'm going to say it again, it's really inspiring, you know, and so thanks very much for for that. Oh, yeah, thanks for having me. And yeah, if anyone's interested in my story, you can go to barrelcancerbucketlist.com and that's got all sorts of stuff, a few press links and whatever, and most importantly links to the Redmond & Fundraiser, which is about seven and a half grand at the moment. That's great. And can I just have a quick plug for one thing that's on my bucket list? Please, please, please. I haven't been able to fix yet, right? So one thing I really like to do is play at Glaston in some way. Nice. So if anyone's listening and you know a way to get a Glaston accreditation, or even better, like a space on the stage at some point, you know, then just let me know. I think this might be something we can make happen. Let's see if we can make that happen with a podcast community, I reckon that might be something we can do. So let's get now to Glaston. Hash, shall I get now to Glaston? Exactly. Yeah, yeah. That was really, really great. We're going to go and play some music together. Appreciate it. Now, look, I'm not going to use the I word again, but I hope you agree that that was a really fascinating insight into Nat's amazing approach to living his life and living it through music. So yeah, I'd love to hear what you thought of that. And of course, go to bowelcancerbucketlist.com to suggest some songs for Nat to play as he runs the London Marathon. But also, if you've got any way of getting Nat to Glastonbury particularly to play, then please do. I'm going to be looking into a few different ideas I've got, but otherwise, if you're in a band and you think, oh, you know what, it'd be great to have trombone. And Nat, as I've demonstrated, I hope and really believe is a really great player. So you'd be getting a really great trombonist, first and foremost, but also fulfilling Nat's wonderful dream of playing at Glastonbury. Right, on with the show. And as that long artificial spacey reverb dies out, now feels like
the perfect opportunity to talk about exactly that reverb, because it is the 70th anniversary of a very important song in the history of music called Space Guitar, which is probably the most, maybe not the first use of artificial reverb in a song, but certainly the most prominent. It's by Johnny Guitar Watson. Do go and check it out if you haven't heard it. It's quite bonkers. They really put loads of reverb on and then take it off alternately. If you're not necessarily aware of what reverb is, some people call it kind of echo, slightly different from that. That's what you get if you are in a big cathedral, for example, or in a cave, as I'll discuss shortly. We add it now artificially, as Johnny Guitar Watson did in that song. So 70th anniversary of that song. I'm going to take us back to Wilton's Music Hall, though, where I did talk about reverb with my friend and the great scientist, Chris Lintott. So here we are back in Wilton's Music Hall, talking about how important sound design and a sense of place and space is to most music in the world. Yeah, again, we had the astronaut, Chris Hadfield, on a couple of episodes ago. And I talked to him about the acoustics in the space station, because of course I did. And he, because of course, if you don't know Chris Hadfield, he was the person, the astronaut who recorded David Bowie's Space Oddity on the space station, which is quite cool. And yeah, we were talking about what it's like. And he basically said, ironically, given that it's the line in Bowie's song, that it does sound like just playing in a tin can, you know, it's very, it's very sort of dead, nothing much to it. And so yeah, it's like quite a, it doesn't really give much atmosphere. It feels like, you know, playing, playing in a very kind of deadened, deadened room because there's so much equipment everywhere. It's something that I'm quite obsessed by when it comes to music, because I think a lot of time when people think about music, they think about the different elements of music, rhythm, harmony, maybe pitch, melody, that kind of stuff. What you don't necessarily think about is, I guess, like the acoustics or the sound design, if you like. And that might sound like a kind of nerdy thing, technical side of music, but actually it's really intrinsically linked to how music works and how we hear and understand music, you know, whether we, what we're kind of perceiving it as, where we're perceiving it as being. So this room, it's quite hard to play to get a kind of very dead flat sound in this room because it's quite a big reverberant room. But you can, you can artificially add reverb if you're recording stuff, as people do in recording studios, of course, these days. They will be often be in quite small booths, so vocalists might record in a little box, very, very muffled box. And then you add artificial reverb afterwards. And it's kind of a weird thing to do because, you know, you think, why does it sound better when it sounds, when it sounds like it's being sung in a church or something? And it's because it gives it a kind of sense of grandeur that I think ties back to our early past. And one of the reasons we like music in the first place is this idea of ritual and ceremony. And again, it comes back like almost everything does people to the shell, right? Because if you imagine
the shell being played in the living room, doesn't just sound, just sounds like a noise. The shell being played, so I got a great privilege to record a load of shells in the Natural History Museum, in the main hall of the Natural History Museum, overnight a year or so ago, which was an incredible thing to do. And if you play, like, let me just get this big shell out, right? If you play this in here, it will sound nice, because it's quite a reverberant room. So you can hear it ringing out. In the Natural History Museum, that reverb lasted about 20, 30 seconds. It was absolutely amazing. But what was even more extraordinary was that this shell, this tiny little baby one, one of the smallest ones that I've got, this one somehow, the natural resonant frequency of the Natural History Museum, that Hintze Hall, the main hall there, with the whale skeleton in, just somehow matched this, right? So the note that this plays just somehow matched that room. And the whole room just sort of lit up. And it was about 1 a.m. in December, freezing cold in there. It was just incredibly magical. And it really, really transported everyone there, 吃it to eight thousand times. So quite a short reverb time in here, but again, just the natural resonance of that room, like a big cave would have been back in the day. I mean, genuinely, there are only a few of us in there doing this recording session, and one of the people who was helping out started crying. And as you played one note on this, so I think there's something incredibly powerful and it's really important to think about things like sound design when we think about music, as almost as important, I would say, as melody or harmony. So, a little insight into my love of all things sound design and reverb, and no doubt we're gonna be coming back to this in various iterations over the forthcoming episodes because it does, as I mentioned there, tie into all sorts of different aspects of music and how we understand it. But now it is time for the genre tombola. Now, once again, to reiterate, this genre was chosen for me by the gods of the internet, the random list picker, and it is cow punk. That's right, cow punk. In this section, I often invite a guest to help me kind of parse and unpick the different genre that I'm looking at each episode. But for cow punk, it was remarkably difficult to find anyone, to be honest. I think it's a genre, I think it's probably fair to say that as a genre, it was more popular in the sort of 70s, 80s, maybe early 90s. So there's maybe not as many cow punk bands around as there once were. And I spoke to a very good friend of mine who will be on a future episode, who is a big hardcore punk fan and also a big country music fan. And he did not know any cow punk, didn't know any, had never heard of cow punk. He also spoke to his other friends who were into those genres, didn't know anything about cow punk either, which I found quite interesting. So it's clearly, it's not a massively kind of a live genre, at least in the UK amongst punk fans or country music fans for that matter. Because that's what cow punk is, it's cowboy punk, right? It's a hybrid of kind of cowboy, country and western style music, and punk
music, hardcore punk music. So rather than digging deep into the bands, the different bands that make up that scene, as I sometimes do here with guests, what I'm actually gonna do is just unpick the track I've made. Because that's right people, I have made a cow punk track in the last few days. Cow punk comes particularly in America from rural communities. It's a lot of the origins of cow punk came from people who were taking traditionally country and western songs and speeding them up to a very fast punk style tempo and putting a much heavier drum beat, maybe more distortion under it and that kind of thing. Then I'm gonna give you a little breakdown of the track and then I'm gonna play the track in its entirety. The first thing I do when I'm writing music in a genre like this that I don't know much about is to try and really listen to the instrumentation. I'm a composer and instrumentalist myself, so I really try and listen to the sound of the drums, not just what beat they're playing, but what the drum sound is. So here's the sound of the drums. I put together some drum recordings and this is what they sound like. So you can hear, it's quite a kind of rocky, punky sounding drum kit, but also quite a kind of country and western style beat. You can hear that country and western style beat. If that slowed down significantly, then it would sound probably more like a traditional country and western song. So the next thing I did was to get some bass on it. Now often, as a modern music producer, you have a lot of basically what are called virtual instruments, so in other words, the recordings of instruments called samples where you can basically play that instrument on a keyboard and you can program it in on the computer and play it in on the keyboard. And that's how I would often prepare a track like this with instruments that I don't personally play. But I have a bass in my studio. I cannot really play it. I know that is not me being humble. I really can't play it. I know what the strings are. I've worked with a lot of bass players. I know what it looks like to play bass and I've maybe played it for a total of an hour or two over the last 10 years. But I have this bass in my studio from a previous project and I thought, this is a punk record. This is a country and western record. These people wouldn't necessarily be the most advanced technical musicians on their instrument. And so in the spirit of punk, I thought I'm gonna play bass on this track. So here is my bass line, which in isolation sounds slightly shameful. And you can hear with this bass sound that I'm playing in quite a distorted way. Often you play through amplifiers with valves in that can really give this really nice kind of warmth, but slightly gritty sound to it. So that's the bass line with a bit of distortion on it. And next, a bit of acoustic guitar, just a rhythm guitar to kind of hold and lock everything in together. And that sounds like this. It's going to be quite low in the mix, that. And then, and again, this is, I'm afraid, from the computer. This is not me playing this acoustic instrument because it is notoriously tricky. And that is the banjo. I've played some virtual banjo on this, which again gives it that
more country flavor, I think. More country and western flavor. So that sounds a bit like this. And to finish it all off, I was thinking this, you know, it needs something else, this track, apart from the vocals which I'm going to come to. It needs something else instrumentally. And of course, something that's very much associated with country and western music or with music from that sort of regions of southern America, particularly is the slide guitar. Now the slide guitar is something that you often play with a bottle top around your finger on the left hand and you slide up and down between the notes and then you pluck the strings with your right hand and you can play melodies, but you have this really nice ability to slide up and down more than you do with a regular guitar. I don't have a slide guitar in my studio because I don't play it and they're quite bulky and big, but what I do have is a shovel guitar and that is a three-string guitar, which I bought basically for a gimmick when we built the studio in the garden a few years ago. I thought it would be appropriate since I am at the bottom of the garden next to the compost heap. I thought it would be appropriate to have something gardening related in the studio. And so I saw this fantastic guy on eBay who makes guitars out of all sorts of things, including shovels. So I've had this guitar shovel, this shovel guitar in my studio since we built it. And I've maybe used it on one project just to make some kind of, I guess, sound design-y noises for, I think, for a TV thing that I was doing. But I've not really used it in anger in the style that it should be played in. And that is basically a slide guitar. The strings are very high up off the neck of the shovel and it doesn't have any what are called frets, which are the little metal bars that go across guitars and basses to tell you where to put your fingers basically to keep the notes in tune. So yeah, I realized that I actually did have a slide guitar in the form of this shovel guitar. So again, not an instrument I really play, but I tuned up these three strings and this is what it sounds like. Now we come to the lyrics, which are of course a very important part of this style of music. Cow punk's an interesting one because of this fusion of country and western music and punk music, both of which have mixed political histories, you could say. So country and western music now, perhaps you might think it's more associated with kind of right-wing politics in America with a gun lobby and all that kind of thing. But of course country and western music also has a very rich history of more left-wing politics. Woody Guthrie, arguably one of the fathers of folk music in America and therefore kind of country and western, he was very much a left-wing campaigner really. He was a protest singer. And so it has this history of those two elements. And of course, punk is very much the same. For me, punk, I often think of as associated with the kind of progressive politics, if you like, with things like, I guess culturally, with things like veganism and alternative lifestyles and progressive views on gender, all that kind of stuff. But of course, punk does also have this darker side where on the
fringes of it, there are fascists, basically. There are skinheads and there is that crossover there. Incidentally, I've got an interview coming up with an absolutely incredible guest quite soon where we talk about this sort of stuff in much more detail about this kind of social history of punk and how it crosses these divides of politics. But that's for another time. For now though, when it comes to writing the lyrics of this song, I wanted it to kind of represent the more progressive side of things. I like to think of myself as being more on the progressive side of things. But also I wanted to situate it because I think for music like cow punk, it's very much associated with particular communities. It comes out of, in this case, normally rural communities as far as I understand it in America and to an extent in the UK as well. Now I'm writing a UK version of it, so I thought I want to set it in a kind of rural community, perhaps a community with quite a lot of deprivation in it because again, cow punk, both country and western, and punk music both come traditionally, I guess, from this place of, I guess, deprivation. Both of those styles of music often are born through disaffection, often caused by deep-rooted poverty. And then I realised I spend quite a lot of time over in Suffolk. I'm involved with a brilliant festival called First Light Festival over in Lowestoft, which I'll be talking more about as the year rolls on. But I was over in Suffolk over the weekend, and again, spend quite a lot of time there, so know it fairly well. And I thought, you know what, that's really, that's kind of interesting. It's an interesting area because parts of Suffolk are very well-off, but very large parts of Suffolk are really quite deprived. And somewhere like Lowestoft is a good example of that. It's a very beautiful area, but it's also got a lot of deprivation since the decline of the fishing industry in particular. You know, there's not so many jobs around there, and it's, yeah, it's gonna be a tough place to live, I think. So I've set it in Suffolk, particularly that part of Suffolk, Lowestoft, a small town called Kessingland. And then the other side, which is, to be fair, a much fancier part of Suffolk called Southwold. Some of you might know it. It's a kind of fancy beach resort. Warbleswick is very posh. Lots of celebrities live there and that kind of thing. But they're all within a few miles of each other, these places. And of course, they're on the coast, but as you go inland, we're straight into rural farming territory, which again spoke to me when we're talking about cow punk. I'm not much of a lyricist. I do sometimes write lyrics for songs I'm working on. But in a genre like this and with a tight turnaround, I've enlisted the help of AI. In this case, Google's AI called BARD, which I happened to be signed up for. And so I thought I would read the prompts that I gave it, because we haven't got time to go into the pros and cons of using AI as a creative tool and the threats there in. But we will look at that, of course, down the line, I'm sure in a future episode, because there's all sorts of fascinating stuff we can dig into there. But in the meantime, let me just read you the prompts that I gave BARD to write
the lyrics that you're about to hear. So firstly, I said, can you write me a cow punk song lyric set in East Anglia? All right, and then it came up with some very nice stuff. It came up with stuff that was mainly based in Norfolk. So I came back and said, that's good, because the first draft was good, but can you make it more specific to Lowestoft, Kessingland and Southwold? And so sure enough, it came back with a more Suffolk focused lyric, which was nice. And then after that, I saw, hmm, needs a bit of tweaking. So I said, that's good, but can we make it more socially progressive and countercultural? Going back to what I was saying just now about punk and country music having those elements. And then it came back, improvement again. And then I realized there was a lot of stuff, because of it being cow punk, there was a lot of stuff about cattle and cows. Now, if you know anything about East Anglia in the UK and the rural produce that comes from there, probably the best known thing that comes from Suffolk is pigs, not cows. So I said, with this final prompt, that's almost perfect, but can we reference pigs instead of cattle? So listen out for the poor sign reference in this song. So enough chat. Here is my cow punk song set in East Anglia. Till now that is... That's right, I see you Wangford. Right, I hope you enjoyed that. That was, of course, my East Anglian cow punk song. Bit of fun, bit of fun. But hopefully people will take that. In the spirit, it was intended, which was a genuine sort of investigation into that genre, just as I try and do with every genre. But you can have fun along the way, right? Yeah, let me know what you think of my cow punk song. Maybe I've totally hit Mr. Mark, but I really enjoyed making that. So it is time to pick the genre for next episode in this genre tombola. So I've got my spreadsheet up, which is just copied over from Wikipedia, the list of all music genres is 1,334 items long, the last of which is yodeling, by the way. And I feed it into this random list generator. Okay, and I press run. And okay, we've gone from cow punk to deep funk, deep, deep funk. So I'm gonna be going away and listening to deep funk and making some music in that genre next episode. Now that is probably close, that's probably the closest we've got so far in this genre of Tombola to something that I actually do sometimes play and make music in. So deep funk it is, I feel slightly more on home turf, but I'm looking forward to exploring that, maybe with a guest for next time. Thanks once again for listening. You can get that full Wilton's Music Hall show, the video of it at originofthepieces.com, and you can find my Patreon on there, or just go straight to Patreon and Steve Pretty on the Origin of the Pieces. Yeah, I'm really proud of that show, and I think if you weren't there, do check it out and give me $5 a month to help support the show if you can. Of course, money is tight for everyone at the moment, so more importantly than even that is to spread the word if you enjoy the show and to review it and all that stuff. I'm really gratified to see people starting to do that and it's starting to spread a bit
further and wider. And I've just, you know, we got very close the other day to knocking pesky Joanna Lumley off her perch. I was number three in the UK music commentary podcast charts last week and just Joanna Lumley just ahead of me wouldn't budge. So yeah, maybe with a bit of word spreading we can temporarily dislodge Lumley from her perch. Anyway, Lumley aside, thanks once again for listening. Thank you to my guest, Nathanial Dye. Don't forget to go to baukunstherbucketlist.com and donate to his amazing cause. Maybe give him a tune to play as he's running the marathon. And also of course, let's get him to Glastonbury. If you've got any way of getting that to Glastonbury, I'm sure he'd be incredibly appreciative of that. Thanks to Hackney Colliery Band and Angelique Kidjo for the theme as always. Meanwhile, stay musically curious and we'll see you in two weeks time.