Director and Cosmic Shambles co-founder Trent Burton joins Steve to tackle a modest question: how do you tell the history of music, from the first sound to AI, without pretending it travels in a straight line?

Hello, musically curious people

How do you tell the whole history of music? The short answer is that you can’t. The longer answer is For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music, a nine-part, ten-and-a-half-hour documentary presented by Charlotte Ritchie and directed by my guest, Trent Burton.

I’ve been living rather closely with this enormous thing. I worked on it as music consultant and mix engineer, contributed music and appear in it too. That makes me biased, obviously, but it also means I’ve watched the question at its heart become steadily more interesting: how do you build a history of something that refuses to behave like a timeline?

Music branches, collides and doubles back. A discussion of Babylon and musical mathematics leads to Pythagoras and Bach. The djembe leads through the transatlantic slave trade towards jazz and hip hop. Written notation preserves ideas, but also leaves things out; oral traditions change through memory, performance and accident. Then recording arrives and changes what we think the “work” itself might be.

Trent and I talk about those shifts, along with the extraordinary fact that some early recording artists had to perform a song again for every copy sold. We get into active listening, cultural exchange, genre, grief, live performance and the value of musical jeopardy: the sense that what you are hearing is being made by people, in a room, and might never happen in quite the same way again.

That leads us, inevitably, to AI. The interesting question is not simply whether a machine can make convincing music. It is what music is for. Background music can be generated efficiently enough, but can it replace the human connection of a tiny gig, a packed dance floor, an improvised electronic set or a single unexpected voice in a shopping centre?

There is also a wider question about the economics of culture: stadium ticket prices, struggling grassroots venues, why For the Record belongs on YouTube, and whether making art for an imagined market before you have made the thing can swallow the more unruly reasons for creating it.

Along the way there are conch shells, “faceless techno bollocks”, a music video origin story and a musical interlude from Slack Tide, my collaboration with violinist Harriet Mackenzie at First Light Festival. So, a perfectly manageable little chat about all of music.

In this episode

How a 90-minute film about sound became a nine-part history of music
Why every history of music must be incomplete
Following themes rather than forcing music into a straight timeline
Notation, oral tradition and what gets lost or transformed in transmission
How recording changed the idea of an “original” musical work
The early recording artists who performed once for every copy sold
AI music, commodification and the continuing value of human connection
Live performance, improvisation and musical jeopardy
Rave culture, genre labels and the different things music is for
Active listening and learning how to hear unfamiliar music
Cultural exchange, appropriation and responsibility
The economics of stadium shows and grassroots music
Why long-form documentaries can thrive on YouTube
Trent’s answers to “What is the point of music?” and “How is music evolving?”

Music in this episode

You’ll hear an excerpt from Slack Tide, written by Steve and performed with violinist Harriet Mackenzie at First Light Festival 2026. The complete performance is below, alongside Steve and Harriet’s reworking of Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending and Steve’s dawn collaboration Shells & Bells with Jason Singh.

Watch Slack Tide – Steve Pretty & Harriet Mackenzie

Watch The Lark Ascending – Steve Pretty & Harriet Mackenzie

Watch Shells & Bells – Steve Pretty & Jason Singh

Links & references

Watch and explore

Watch Episode 41 on Steve Pretty’s YouTube channel

Watch For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music

Explore Cosmic Shambles

Music from this episode

Slack Tide – Steve Pretty & Harriet Mackenzie
The Lark Ascending – Steve Pretty & Harriet Mackenzie
Shells & Bells – Steve Pretty & Jason Singh

About For the Record

For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music is a nine-part Cosmic Shambles documentary series presented by Charlotte Ritchie and directed by Trent Burton. Across 614 minutes, it explores music through history, science, culture and performance, with contributions from musicians, academics and researchers around the world. Steve worked on the series as music consultant and mix engineer.

Support the show

If you’d like to help keep Steve Pretty On the Origin of the Pieces independent, you can support the podcast on Patreon.

For new episodes, live dates, videos and other musically curious material, visit originofthepieces.com and join The Open Ear Dispatch.

Full transcript

Hello, my name is Steve Pretty. I'm a musician, composer and performer from London. And welcome to my podcast, Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces.

This is a show that helps you to hear, understand and enjoy music in new ways.

Hello, musically curious people. Welcome back to the new term of Origin of the Pieces. I hope you've got your fresh new pencil cases ready and you're ready for a whole new season of listening.

Sorry for the absence over the last few months, but as I explained in the last couple of episodes, it's been a bit of a rollercoaster year personally, but also professionally, I've had a lot going on. And in fact, today is one of the reasons that I've been so busy that I've not been able to do as many podcast episodes. And that is because in between everything else, I have managed to mix and be music consultant on and otherwise contribute a lot of music to and be very involved with the 10 and a half hour documentary that is the feature of today's episode.

This is a documentary made by the great Trent Burton, who runs an organization called Cosmic Shambles with Robin Ince. And it's an absolutely wonderful organization. I've done a lot of work for them over the years and of course have been a regular collaborator of Robin's for the best part of 20 years now.

So yeah, I know those guys extremely well and I'm gonna let Trent explain how the whole thing kind of came about. And so without further ado, here is a little insight into our nine episode, 10 and a half hour long documentary all about music, which is very similar sort of scope to this podcast. So I'm sure you're gonna be in for a treat.

If you haven't seen the series yet, we talk about it a lot in this episode, do go and check it out. It's called For the Record. It's presented by the wonderful Charlotte Ritchie, who British viewers may know from things like Ghosts and another fantastic comedy shows.

And she's a really great presenter as well. And we dig into music from all over the world. We talk to hundreds and hundreds of people, musicians, academics, scientists, all sorts of fascinating people.

Anyway, here is another fascinating person. This is my conversation with Trent Burton about For The Record. Enjoy.

I am Trent Burton. I co-founded the Cosmic Shambles Network with Robin Ince, who I'm guessing viewers of this podcast I've had Robin on, yeah. Will know.

Yeah, we founded the network maybe, I don't know, 12 or so years ago. We've worked together for about 20 years. And we make sciency, entertainmenty things.

So like Nine Lessons, live shows, which Steve has obviously played at and been MD for, for many of them, the ones at Albert Hall and whatnot. And we make documentaries and podcasts and all sorts of stuff, including For the Record, An Incomplete History of Music, available now.

Available now, yeah. This is a big thing, right? This is-

It's quite large.

This is nine episodes. And nine episodes long is about ten and a half hours.

Six hundred and fourteen minutes.

Six hundred and fourteen minutes. So it's long, it's big.

Yeah.

It's big. And this is- So we've worked on this together.

I mean, this is mainly like you've made this documentary. But you came to me a few years ago and said, I want to do something about music. Because we've made documentaries previously, right?

You did one about Nine Lessons, which is this amazing series of Christmas shows that Robin has been doing for years. And so you did a documentary about that. And then you did one about Speed.

Yeah. So the loose beginning of this is during the pandemic, we did a thing called the Stay At Home Festival, which was Robin, me and Josie did a daily show every day for-

It's amazing.

10 weeks, I think during the- like we started the day of lockdown basically. And we're doing lots of stuff throughout that.

We did the daily show, we did science Q&A, live streams, all sorts of random things. And I decided we should do a couple of things that were a bit more structured rather than just the live things. So we started an Uncanny Hour, which is a two-part online radio series about weird films.

And then I said, let's do a three-part radio series on half-hour on sound, speed and light.

Is that where it starts? See, I didn't realize that was the beginning of it, okay.

So that's where it started. We were gonna do three half-hour little podcasts, one on sound, one on speed, one on light. And the first one we started on was speed.

And then, pandemic didn't end, but things kind of started opening up. So I thought, oh, let's go and film some of the interviews instead. And then that half-hour speed documentary turned into a two-hour feature film.

And we put Matt Parker on the back of a Moto GP bike. You mixed that as well, rapid motion through space and incomplete history of speed, which is on YouTube as well. And then, as we were doing that, I thought, oh, well, let's do the sound one next.

We'll do, maybe we'll just do like 90 minutes on sound, and we'll just, the physics of sound and stuff. And then, so that's what I decided to do. I spoke to Alice Degrassi, who's like our production assistant camera person, said, let's do this next.

Then I thought, oh, maybe if we just focused on music, sounds too big a topic, that'll take too long to cover. Let's narrow the focus to just music. So that's when, this was four and a half years ago, that's when I either dropped you an email or a WhatsApp or whatever.

I think we'll do this. Let's just have a chat about some of the scope. And I think that's probably roughly about the time you'd started messing around with conch shells.

Yes, I think it was.

Give or take.

Well, yeah, so I'd been dabbling for a while, but it was, that's when I started getting into it a bit more.

It might have been the first time, actually, because we did a 24-hour show as well during the pandemic. And you were a one-man band for 24 hours, and you'd done some conch shell stuff and some robot music and that. And I think it was near, not long after that.

So we had a chat about, okay, what's some rough parameters of kind of music? And I think that's when I thought, okay, well, I still want to include sound. I do want to do a music documentary like no one's done before, as in literally start at the very first sound, go to AI.

That'll be a challenge to fit in 90 minutes, but I'm up for a challenge. So we started making it. And then I think I thought, this is a bit optimistic.

Let's do two 90-minute episodes. So I did that, and then it's 10 and a half hours now.

And now it's nine episodes.

Yeah, now it's nine episodes, 10 and a half hours, and all I can think about is all the stuff that's not in it.

Yeah, well of course. And that's the thing, because it's so sprawling, and it's such a sprawling topic, I mean. So you have to, obviously, you have to leave stuff out.

You can't do a complete history of music. So it's called An Incomplete History of Music. And that's, yeah, I mean, any history of music is incomplete.

I think that's what's interesting about it. And so I think it's really good to front up about that.

So the incomplete comes from a thing Robin and I did 15 years ago, was an app in an online magazine called Cosmic Genome, An Incomplete, The Incomplete Map of the Cosmic Genome, which is roughly where Cosmic Shambles from other variations come from. So I kind of, when we did Speed, I was like, it's an incomplete history of speed, mainly to cover myself because there was so much motorbike focus, because I have history in motorbikes, I didn't know that world and I knew I could get access to new stuff. And I knew lots of people would go, why are you doing motorbikes and not Formula One?

And part of the reason was I didn't have as much Formula One access. I knew the MotoGP world. So I kind of put it in as like a covering, like look, this is, and then we did the Incomplete History of Nine Lessons and Compendium and then Incomplete History of Women in Engineering.

And then now this, so it's kind of become like a little...

A kind of ongoing thing, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then when it was announced, it was eight episodes. And then during the edit process, I think I just put a post on Blue Sky at some point and went, I mean, nine makes sense, doesn't it? Nine lessons.

And everyone just laughed and went, we might as well make it 10 and a half hours.

Because so, it's so sprawling and vast, right? There's so much, there's so much stuff in it. And I mean, I was involved in a small amount of it, but it's taken you all across the world, isn't it?

Yeah, well, it's, the hardest part really was not necessarily knowing what to include, not what not to include, but how to maintain some semblance of structure.

Well, so just sorry, just to interrupt, that's the thing that I, well, we talked about that when you first approached me about the idea. And it's the thing that I've always struggled with, with both the podcast and when I've done live shows and stuff, is because, like you, a lot of the stuff that I do is about the totality of what music is. And it depends how you define that, right?

Because you can go, as we have in this show, and as I do with this podcast as well. But you can talk about the physics of what sound is, how sound is produced, and the kind of mechanism that sound gets into our ears. Then there's the sort of science of the biology of it, and the evolutionary biology of it, and the neuroscience and all that side.

But then of course, at least as interesting, is all the kind of cultural history of it, and the kind of cultural theory of it, and the way that music evolves in different places. So it's, and this, I think what I love about this is because it's exactly the stuff that I do, is that it is both of those things. You're not trying to do both, but trying to categorize that and shape that into something coherent.

It's quite difficult because there's so much to it, right?

It's the order. So we've had a couple of people have said, oh, it jumps around a lot in time, which we mentioned in the first episode that we're going to jump around. Because there's some episodes that are a little bit chronological, but I don't think you can.

So as an example, in episode two, which a big focus on the first half of episode two is the maths of how music works. And you can, so we start in Babylon, which is the first bit of musical understanding, and then we have Pythagoras. Now there are bits in between that, that we kind of don't cover.

And then we talk about Bach, and Bach's understanding of maths. And there's obviously a lot between Ancient Greece and Bach. And people have said, oh, so you're going to forget, like, the rest of classical music.

Well, I know we're going to, there's a whole episode on classical music and opera. But you can't talk about maths without talking about Bach. So you've got to bring a couple of centuries in.

So it kind of, it's chronological a bit in time, but it's more chronological in theme. And, you know, when you get towards later period, you know, when we talk about, like, the birth of the Djembe drum, you can't talk about that and then not go to the transatlantic slave trade, which gets you to jazz, which gets you to hip hop. And yes, you've missed out Chinese music, which is happening at the same time.

But we get to that later. But you've got to kind of make the...

Well, if you're trying to do any sort of global history, and obviously, it's always going to be flawed that, but if you're going to do any sort of global history, you can't... It's really reductive just to do it chronologically, because stuff is happening in parallel all over the world in different ways, and often quite different approaches to music. So if you were literally to try and do it chronologically, you'd have to jump around geographically loads and with the...

A lot of things I talk about in the show are like the different uses of music and the different things that music is used for, and that varies enormously over across time and space and things. So you'd have to... There's no way of not jumping around.

So you either do it chronologically or you do it geographically, right?

It's literally impossible, because if you look at it in parallel with human evolution, yes, we all start out of Africa, and you really can basically trace human evolution back to that rift valley. But with music, okay, you've got first humans and you come out, and then by the time you're here, it's bang, bang, bang, bang, and then that bit over there starts influencing this bit, which influences that bit. And then there's a slave trade, which means that music is suddenly over here that's influencing that.

And then the Chinese are doing one thing, which is influencing Japan, but South America started their own thing, but that's still linked to the slave. And it's impossible to go. And then this happened, and then that happened.

Exactly.

It's not chronology. Just like, you know, like evolution, I think, often people misconceive evolution as a straight line, right? It's not a straight line.

It's branching trees. And now the music is exactly the same. It's why my, you know, name of the podcast, Origin of the Pieces, is directly relevant.

Because although I know that sometimes evolution is used wrongly to, you know, evolutionary biology sort of applied to things that shouldn't be applied to. But I do think with music it is unusually relevant in some ways because it does branch out just as, you know, so, oh, what? So how come there are still monkeys when there are people?

So because there are different branches and that's how. And music is the same. How come there is still, there is still like Plainsong or while there is also hip hop?

Because these things can exist in parallel and branch off in different ways. But also those branches then come back together and converge.

The one bit, so this is an area of music I knew nothing about, that where that doesn't seem to be true funnily enough, is largely in notation, is that notation really does, we have different versions of like there's what they're doing in Mesopotamia, then there's newms in the church, but then the Greeks have a bit of an idea and then that does all seem to go, we're just going to universally agree on this. And then there are still scattered things. But notation seems to have a point where everyone just went, we need a system guys.

Yeah.

Excluding most of music history as you and your listeners will know is oral obviously. But in a written we did agree at some point that we're basically going to use this, because it's especially with like classical music, it's just too complicated to not have a standardized system.

So that kind of system got relatively speaking, obviously there's different takes on it in different countries and different approaches. But like relatively speaking, it did get kind of codified, didn't it? And then and that still give or take the system that we use today.

But also, I think as you rightly cover the documentary, and I've talked about a lot here, even now the majority of music isn't notated really. So, you know, I think often when we're learning music in the Western tradition, people often conflate written music with music, if you like. And rather than it being a guide to how to play it, like a handy aid memoir for how to pass on music.

That's how I think we should think about it. It's incredibly valuable. And so I always think, I always encourage people if they say, oh, don't read music.

That's fine. You don't need to read music. Music isn't notation.

Notation is a handy aid memoir for it. But it's a great thing to learn because it's very handy to be able to communicate musical ideas to people. And but a much, a much deeper way of learning a lot of music, not all music, but is by it, or is passing down orally and hourly and across the generations.

Like that's how most music has and still is made in some ways.

Well, there's about a million things I want to say now. I think the not reading music is a big thing. Like I've, you know, famously the Beatles couldn't read or write music.

David Gilmour can't read or write music. And to the best of my knowledge, they've had successful careers.

They seem to have done it right. Yeah.

Um, David Gilmour sold a mansion and gave it to charity because he couldn't be able to do the paperwork. Like, lovely. But then, I'm going to get bits of this wrong, but when we were talking to Shu Zhang, who's a Chinese music historian, she was saying that the way a lot of Chinese music is notated is, and this is the bit I'll get wrong, they basically...

You notate just the melody and then the rest, you can do what you want with it. Like, here you go, this is basically it, but muck around with the harmony of the pitch. Do all of that yourself.

Here's kind of some brief notes for it and bend the notes however you want. And then when we were talking to Dr. Richard Wally, who's a Noongar elder in Australia, I asked him, because we'd looked up, how do you spell Noongar? There's like five different ways to spell your people's name.

And he said, we don't really care, because we've never written it down. It's white people started documenting it and decided you needed to write down it. We just told you it was Noongar.

So spell it however you want.

I don't give a shit.

It's Noongar. It's like, all right then. And obviously that's how all of their music history and their storytelling is as well.

They've never written any of it down. And of course, the worry is now as their populations are dwindling and this, that and the other, that those stories and that music will be lost. So people are starting to write it down.

So it's not lost.

Well, that is the problem, isn't it? It's the transmission of ideas. That's what you do if you're not careful and you don't carefully preserve the oral and oral tradition, that is, you do get stuff lost.

But it's also worth saying about the limitations of how much you can write down. You know, this is, there's different ways of codifying those things, of passing on music and learning it sort of through the oral tradition is imperfect, but then that's how music evolves as well. So actually, like you slightly misremember something or you make a mistake in remembering a tune, but actually that's how a new tune happens.

But then you've got the two other ways of trying to codify musical information and one of them is the written form, but that's very imperfect as well because even the most detailed orchestral score is not a perfect representation of what that music is going to sound like because it would depend on the players, it would depend on the space they're in, it would depend on, so you can write, as a composer myself, you can write the most detailed stuff, but there's only so much you can control. And for me, the thing I like about that as a composer is that that makes it tremendously exciting. I'm trying not to control everything, I like it being, so I often, when I'm writing stuff, I often will try and write for specific people or for specific, like with a specific idea in mind.

And the fact that it's slightly different every time is a good thing because music is a living, breathing thing. And it's one of the things that I value most highly is the fact that, I mean obviously, jazz is the ultimate expression of that, but even aside from jazz, just it being sort of slightly different every time, I don't like this idea that there is a perfect version. And it's one of the problems I sometimes have with some of the approach that the classical education tradition can inculcate in people is like the idea that there is a perfect version.

Exactly. There isn't. But I remember, I won't name the band, but years ago, my wife, Melinda, who is an associate producer on this, we went to see a very well-known band and they were lovely, they played very well and a couple of people went to me and went, oh my God, I love it.

It sounded just like I was listening to the CD at home. That CD will date it and both of us were like, yeah, it was awful.

Yeah.

If I wanted to listen to the CD, I'd go home and put it on. It was quote unquote, note perfect to that. And it was like a big band with complicated songs.

And it wasn't a classical anything. It was like a pop band. And there was no, they didn't throw in a cover.

They didn't have an extra solo. They didn't, even the tone of every word of lyrics was identical. And it was so boring.

Yeah.

It was like watching someone like read out their accounting.

Yeah.

So that's not, that's not why I go to live music. I want it to be a mess.

But that comes to what the other way of Codify Music I was about to talk about, which is recorded music, right? And that is, we obviously cover that in the series. We talk about the invention of recorded music.

And that as well as Codify Music in the written form, like that is the other absolute sea change in how we conceive of music. Like as soon as we can record music, suddenly, then the kind of original document, if you like, becomes the recording, certainly in the pop music world. And yeah, it becomes, forget the written stuff, you can get a Beatles transcription book, but no one thinks that that is what the Beatles, the Beatles are the recordings, right?

Even then you get like 25 remixes of everything.

Well, it's true, it's true. But yeah, but the recordings that are particularly in later albums, you know, that you can write out a Sgt. Pepper by a notation as much as you like, it's not going to be, no one would I think argue that that is what Sgt.

Pepper is in some way, you know? So that changes things fundamentally again. Well, I completely agree, like, and now we get into a stage where, yeah, I think the live experience is even more important because music is so commodified now that recorded music is absolutely everywhere.

There's more music in our lives than there has ever been in history. But our relationship to that music is probably different, very different to how it would have been hundreds or certainly thousands of years ago.

Yeah. I like one, I mean, I learned a million things making this that I didn't know. But one thing, I can't remember if you've mixed this episode or not yet, so you may or may not know this, is that the first ever recordings of music before we'd invented stamping, is if a song was really popular, the band had to play it for every single record.

So if you had a song that was popular and it sold a thousand copies, the band had to go in the studio and play that song 1,000 times. So even the recording, there isn't a standard recording until we get to stamping and they go, I like take 912, that will be the one that we use.

It's astonishing now, I love that fact. The idea of a band going, oh we need to sell a thousand copies so we're going to do that.

Imagine like in today's day and age, Taylor Swift in a room going, right, it's time to play, you know, shake it off 1 billion times today and send that out.

It's just, it's wild isn't it?

It's absolutely, and then, I don't know if we put this in the documentary, it might be in a caption, that the music video is essentially invented because the Beatles were sick of going on TV show after TV show, they went, let's just film us playing it and then we'll post it to everyone because I can't be bothered going on Ed Sullivan and whatever, Top Of The Pops and stuff like 50 million times. And then other bands went, oh that's a great idea, let's do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the way that our experience as a species of music has changed is really, really interesting. And I think, but I think what's again, as we were talking about with Evolution, all of the original functions of music and the way that music was originally, are still existent.

Yeah.

And I would argue, I mean this is going to go down a rabbit hole if we go here, but I think the more music gets commodified and now in the age of AI music, the ultimate expression of commodification, right? Where you can, any of us listening to this now could go on, Sue, no, please don't, but you could do that. Yeah, don't do that.

And basically describe any sort of music that you want to listen to and it will make that track for you within seconds. And it may not be any good, that's a different debate, but it is possible to do that, right? And that point, which is the point we're at now, music is so commodified that I think there's a really strong case for it coming back to some of the things that we talked about and the origins of music or the original uses of music to bring people together and that's why I think the live experience is incredibly important and how we as musicians, I think there's a responsibility to do something really special live and specifically to do something that isn't the same every time, something that is, has got a small element of jeopardy or, you know, you don't want stuff that sounds wrong or whatever obviously, but you want to get back, I hope, to people making music in the way that they have done for millennia because you can now just ask a robot to do whatever you want and it will do it.

But it's, I think, if you ask people, you know, what are your favorite memories of music or what's a, why does this bit of music stick with you? As far as AI goes down the line, I don't imagine you're going to find someone who's not even been born yet going, oh, my first love of music was when I typed into a generator, please make me some background jazz that sounds a little bit like Sidney Bechet. And it come out with this thing.

I was like, oh, it's never ever going to be that. I think in the final episode, Charlotte Ritchie, we should probably mention that wonderful Charlotte Ritchie, who presented the show, Ghosts and You and Taskmaster and Call the Midwife and other things, is that I think the reason we make music, the reason we make any art, is to connect with other humans and to express something, good or bad, about our connection or what the artist's connection to humanity is. And if I want to talk about humanity and I want to connect with other humans, I'd rather do that with another human, than something that a robot has generated, which is only derivative anyway.

I think also, again, to come back to this idea of the different uses of music, I think AI will do a perfectly adequate job for, again, random background music that no one's really listening to, like, you know, lit music, lift music, or even like background music in a shop or whatever. Fine, but the function of that music is to be in the background and to not have an emotional relationship with it. But it's still, like, music is about manipulating people's emotions, which makes it sound psychopathic, but that's what we do as musicians, right?

That's our whole job. And so it will still manipulate your emotions, it will still get you to, you know, in the way that they pipe in music into shops to get you to vibe.

It manipulates my emotions, it makes me angry because it sounds sh**.

But like it will still do that basic job, but when it comes to a more human connection with music, I do think that that probably is a largely human-based thing, even if... So again, I think the debate about how good it can get, or whether it sounds like AI or not, is not really the point, if you're talking about that, because it's getting better every day. So whether it can sound exactly like a great jazz record or whatever, if it can't do it today, it will be able to do it next month.

So that's not...

The speed is astonishing.

It is crazy and terrifying, obviously, in all sorts of ways. But again, I don't find that a very interesting way of discussing it. It's like, oh, it sounds like AI.

Yeah, sure, but it won't. We'll get more used to that. But yeah, it's more like, what is the function of that music?

Why do we have music? Why do we listen to music? And that's why I think we cover that a lot in this documentary, and I talk about it a lot, why people make music or why people listen to music, why people go to gigs, why people...

Yeah.

And I think that's why it is a really important case, and I think you make it brilliantly in this documentary, for the value of understanding all the things that music is. Because if you just think of music as a commoditized thing, then your AI can totally do that, and already is, and will be doing it much more. So that's done, essentially.

But obviously on one level that's terrifying, because there needs to be musicians we need to earn a living. And so that is terrifying. But on another level, I think, yeah, but that's not the bit I'm interested in.

The interesting bit about music is the human connection, and is the playing with other musicians, and this idea that I'd like to have talked about a bit on the show before, using music as a verb, you know, to music, yeah, music, and you do that as an audience as much as you do it as a former or a composer. So that's the interesting bit of what music is, and AI, I don't think, can fully come for that.

We talk in, in the last episode, one of the people we speak to is Melvin Ben, who's founder of Latitude, director of Glastonbury and various other festivals and stuff, for better or worse. And he's basically saying, you know, in the future, so Melvin's getting on in years, and he's, you know, in the future, there will be gigs, there will be festivals of just AI music. And he said, you know, I don't think I'm going to be at them, but they will exist, but they're not going to replace the feeling of being at somewhere like Latitude where you're, you know, in a tiny tent with a musician or on one of the, you know, on the obelisk stage where there's, you know, 40,000 people watching David Byrne or whoever.

No matter how good, as you say, no matter how good that AI gets, the uncanny valley style, no matter how you can't tell it's AI or not, you're not going to go and see it live.

Yeah.

You're not going to sit there and then, you know, then there's the argument of, is electronic music, we kind of go into that with in the documentary as well. But even something that's very electronic, I still want to see Orbital and their little funny lights.

Yeah. Yeah.

They're creating it. There's still, you could essentially just go and, you know, Paul could walk on stage and hit a space bar and walk off, but no one would want that. That's just a nightclub.

As someone who has got really into electronic music in the last few years, but from a point of view of an acoustic musician originally, that's when I'm using electronics and thinking about how to do, to play electronic music or adjacent to that stuff live. I think it's why the stuff that I like seeing, and certainly the stuff that I try and do myself, has still got an element of, even if it hasn't got an element of acoustic instruments in it. I mean, for me it does, but even for electronic artists who don't have any acoustic instruments in it, there's still the idea that there is some sort of, again I use this word jeopardy, not because I want it to go wrong, but the idea that there is a craft going into it.

So, you know, techno for example, I'm no expert, but I've got quite into it in the last few years, and going to see like live techno, I was in Berlin a couple of years ago, and went to see like a live techno jam. So everyone's got all their, you know, bleepy, bleepy boxes on the stage, all like spaghetti wire everywhere. It's a good jam, an improvised jam, just like it would be for a jazz jam or whatever, and there are parameters just like there are with jazz jams, and people take the turns and whatever.

But there, you know, it's people, it is people improvising together. Okay, it's not as visceral as like, here's a double bass and here's a drummer, you know. Okay, I still obviously, I think that's really valuable, and I hope that lasts forever.

But the fact that, okay, they're doing this and it's clearly happening, someone else has done that, and then maybe something's gone slightly wrong, but that means a happy accident, because that's how a lot of music is created with happy accidents. So you're like, oh, that kick drum slightly off, but everyone's like locked in. And I think you can still, you can do something live with electronic music in a way that.

Well, I think what since, so in, I don't know, I think might be episode nine, we talked to Martin James, who some of your listeners will know, who's the official biographer of The Prodigy and like a rave historian and stuff. And he calls that period, faceless technobolics is the phrase he comes up with. And he said, but what's interesting about that is even if there wasn't, you couldn't see the person in these, you know, the 90s illegal raves, you weren't necessarily then going for whatever CD you was going to be playing.

You were still going for the human connection of the other people that were on the dance floor. And the music, obviously not secondary, but the music was what was enhancing the human social connection. That's what enabled that to exist.

So even if there is no human there, even though there is, it's the connection part of it that still matters. So that's where I wonder if we do have an AI music. Will people go, I don't really care, because I'm just coming to dance with my friends and that's the connection.

But that's the bit I don't know where that's going.

I think that might exist. So for example, the other night, again, I'm no long-time raver, but my partner was an old raver in the late 90s, early 90s, and has got back into it a bit. So I've gone to a couple of raves and things recently.

I was at Annie Mack the other day. All right, yeah. I went to see her with the partner.

It was really fun. It's really fun. I don't know loads about that sort of music, but that communal experience of everyone coming together and dancing.

I mean, there are some tunes that are kind of iconic tunes, and you drop those and everyone goes mad. But it's not so much about that. It's about the general coming together.

What's interesting about that is, I think I was quite snooty when I was a teenager and getting into jazz and classical music and proper music, if you like, in verticals. That about like, oh, it's just like, you know, it's like, well, it is, but you know, but also, I think that's why reframing those things as understanding the function of it. Again, coming back to that thing, like it just has a different function.

Classical music has a different function than rave, right? So they're doing a different thing.

There's a reason that they play techno in gyms and not Beethoven, because neurologically, that repetitive beats make you want to run faster or punch the bag harder or whatever.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So again, music can kind of shape our experience of that. But also, the more I learn about music, like techno, or any sort of music, with the genre tombola thing that I do, examining different genres, randomly chosen genres, you just unlock so much.

There's always so much deeper you can go with music, I think.

I hate the idea of genre, and we kind of cover that in the series. That genre is essentially bollocks. Because like we've said at the start, music is this cultural thing that kind of, there is a genesis point of stuff.

Jazz has an origin point in Congo Square or opera in Florence or whatever. But it does start to, everything starts to blur and like the Prodigy, whichever one we got, they have a techno rave. As far as I'm concerned, Prodigy are a punk band.

Yeah, I agree. I completely agree.

Like then, yes, they are an electronic band. Yeah, they kind of dance and techno and rock, but I feel like they're a punk band.

Definitely a punk band, yeah, yeah.

But that doesn't mean that that's all.

No.

They are most, like you're doing the... That essentially is an African rhythm in some way, just because you're making it with an electronic thing.

The floor to the floor thing is like a harby thing. It's like a universal thing pretty much. What I was going to say as well is we were talking about the human connection and for me as a musician, I feel very strongly that I am really as passionate about music as I am because of what it teaches me about people.

I love music and I love learning more about music, but the reason I love music so much, and I think this comes through in your documentary as well, is that it teaches me about humanity and about connection and it teaches me about myself in terms of manipulating my own emotions when playing or listening to music. So my mum died earlier this year and I've been thinking a lot about music and its relationship to sadness and grief and all those things. And that reason that we want music to make us cry, but we don't quite know how it does that and it can manipulate.

I've said many times in this show the fact that one note from a shell in an Natural History Museum can make someone cry, this happened to me a couple of years ago, is kind of this mad mystery and this shared point of what feels like a very ancient connection with other people. And I think some musicians, not many, but some I think are into music purely for the music and that's fine. But that's not for me, I'm as much of a nerd as anyone.

But I want to know what it tells me about, like I'm not so fussed about, oh this record and who's on this and who does this. How does it make me feel? Why is it there?

What's the back story to this? And what's the social history of that time and the cultural landscape it existed in? And all of those things are things that I am obsessed with and why this podcast exists.

Billy Bragg says some version of music can't change the world, that people can change the world, and music can change people. And I think that's the link through it, that you say that it has this effect, whether it can strive someone to create social change or get out in activism or just dance when they're sad or cry when they're sad or whatever. And to link this to a multiverse thing is we don't necessarily understand how that works.

We know what your brain's doing and the different chemicals and how it makes us feel. But there is still that magical, how can a conch shell make someone cry? How can this?

If you play this disassociated fifth, I don't know the music thing, something like that. And that is the exact note that makes you sad. That's fascinating.

That's amazing. I'd love to know that. I'm still going to feel sad.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm still going to cry. I'm still going to be happy. I'm still going to be elated.

Yeah.

Does it. And that links to what you do with the podcast as well. I think the more we understand about anything, just lets you appreciate it on a new and different level.

But it doesn't have to, you know, the old fireman thing, it doesn't have to take away that visceral reaction. And I still think, you know, I know a lot about science and stuff. And it doesn't mean when I've been at gigs and I've felt overcome, I haven't gone, that's because I've got a dopamine thing.

No, no, that's my amygdala firing. I've just gone, oh my god, this song, this music, this whatever, it does it, but then later I can think about it and go, oh, that's fun.

Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, yeah, again, the more you learn, the more you can get out of things, I think. And I think often that's true. So again, come back to jazz and some classical music often gets criticised understandably and sometimes quite rightly for being elitist or, you know, needing a level of knowledge.

And let's be honest, some of it is.

Some of it definitely is. But also, I think, I think, well, there's two things. Firstly, I think it can work harder and should work harder to not do that, to not exclude people.

And I feel very strongly about that as a, you know, as somebody who plays a lot of jazz myself, I really try and bring people with me. But also it's fine if stuff does require a bit of knowledge. Not all music needs to be immediately accessible to everyone.

Learning a bit more about something means you can get more out of it sometimes. And so understanding the context in which the music was written, or particularly I would say as a listener to jazz, understanding the fact that people are coming up with stuff spontaneously, but within rules and sometimes they're breaking those rules. And understanding a bit about how the music is made will mean you get way more out of it.

And of course the social history of where it came from and all of those things will mean that you can get a bit more out of it. It doesn't just need to be on the surface level. The surface level is really important.

That's one way of conceiving of music and approaching understanding of music. And a very important one that sometimes musicians, including especially jazz musicians, can forget, definitely. But that's not to say that as an audience, again, as someone who is music-ing, as an audience, like you can, understanding a bit more means you get more out of it.

Yeah.

I mean, there are some jazz musicians who go off on these long, you know, like pretentious things with conch shells. And the audience are just like, what are they there for?

But the conch thing is interesting. I know that's the thing I'm doing more and more. In fact, we were talking in the summer and I'm about like, my summer is quite packed.

Well, not, you know, I've got- Steve It's very conch heavy. Quite conch heavy.

And I've booked you for a conch gig in a few weeks.

Well, then I just did. I just did a conch. I spent most of the day, I've just done First Light Festival, which is what I do every year in Suffolk.

And yeah, and I did a conch shed at dawn, as I always do. And then spoke and played conch for quite a lot of the next day. I barely played trumpet all weekend.

I played trumpet for about 20 minutes an entire weekend. But again, what's been interesting about the stuff I do there is again, thinking about the function of that music. And so a lot of the time when I'm doing that music, it's much more, it's sort of, I sort of hesitate to use the word ambient music, but you know, it's like, it's a different function.

So for example, when I do an early morning slot at Also Festival, and it's sort of in, you know, around people doing yoga or people are doing, and people lie on the floor with their eyes closed. And if people lay on the floor with their eyes closed during an HDB gig, something's gone quite badly wrong. Yeah.

But that's what I want people to do. Yeah. So it has a different, again, but it got a different function.

It makes people, you know, it sort of allows people to go inwards. Whereas HDB, when we're playing like more party stuff, people going outwards, you know, and so it can do those different things. So I'm just interrupting because I think it's time for a little musical interlude.

And since we were just talking about First Light, I thought I would play some music from First Light Festival that I was making there. Once again, I did my kind of artist in residence thing there, did all sorts of stuff over the weekend, and we've got lots more interviews from that weekend and live music coming up over the coming episodes. But for now, what I thought I would do is play a lovely collaboration that I made with Harriet Mackenzie, who is a very well known concert violinist, a wonderful musician and a really great person to work with.

I was very lucky to work with her and I hope it's going to be the start of an ongoing working relationship. We were commissioned to do a half hour set in the church at First Light Festival in Lowestoft back in June, and I wrote some music for it. We did some re-workings of some classics including Lark Ascending, which is also going to be up on my YouTube channel alongside, by the way, my full performance at Dawn called Shells and Bells.

That's with the great Jason Singh, who's a wonderful nature sound artist, beatboxer, all-round good egg and DJ and all sorts of other things. We played at Dawn together, which is great fun. So you can go and check out Shells and Bells on my YouTube, but also that version of Lark Ascending I mentioned.

But what I'm going to do now is play a little excerpt of the piece that I wrote for this performance, which is called Slack Tide. It's based on the tidal cycles of the Suffolk Coast. So I'm just going to cut into it.

It's a 12 hour, 25 minute tidal cycle compressed into 12 minutes, 25 seconds, and I'm just going to play the last couple of minutes of it. This is my performance of Slack Tide featuring Harriet Mackenzie at First Light Festival 2026.

I talked to Phil Ball, the science writer Phil Ball, and he was talking about what people, not general people, but music critics, I think, and elitist people need to understand better, is how to listen to different music differently.

Yeah. Yeah.

And that there will be, he said, he once, I can't remember the exact band, but there was a classical reviewer that had stepped out of his genre and had reviewed, I can't remember, let's say it was the Rolling Stones, I can't remember what it was. And they were saying, well, this clearly doesn't work musically because they haven't respected this, this, and this. And Phil's like, well, they're the Rolling Stones.

They're not, you can't listen to the Rolling Stones and expect Bach. You can't listen to Jay-Z and expect, you know, gamelan, Indonesian gamelan music. Yes, it's music, but you have to listen.

Yeah, you have to calibrate.

It would be like, you know, if I went and saw Todd Salan's Happiness film and expected a Rolling in the Isles, you're going to be very disappointed. It's not that sort of film.

Exactly. I mean, I really like calibrating your expectations. It's really, really important because music is about expectation management and again, manipulating emotions and things.

So if you're going in wanting something really uplifting, but you're listening to like Ornette Coleman, you probably might get some people might get uplifted by that. But it's, you know, it's a different thing. It has a different function.

So again, I think it's super important. And I think Phil makes a really good point there. One that I've talked about a lot as well, which is opening your ears to things is an active process.

You got to act active listening is really important.

Yeah.

I think it's one of the reasons the documentaries so great is that you dig into all these things and context can really help you understand and get more out of these things. Yeah, so like with the genre tombola thing I do on the show, where it's just a randomly chosen genre. And then I dig into it.

And one of the interesting things about that process is that I go in not knowing anything really. It always depends on the genre. But often, I was listening to Nigerian hip hop a few months ago.

I was like, what do I know about Nigerian hip hop? But going in and then learning about it and understanding the context that it comes from and understanding the role that it plays for the people who are really into that and the people who make it. And there's another genre called Mexican music that sounds very happy and jolly and is very trumpet and brass heavy.

Sounds great. Corredos is what it was called. And it turns out it's basically Mexican drug lord music.

So they're all beef songs. Yeah. They're a lot.

And a lot of people have died over like-

It's all this Kendrick and Drake, but Mexican drug lord style.

And so knowing that context, it's really happy and fun music, but then knowing that really-

You go, oh, maybe, maybe not now.

You should think about it differently. So I think, I think, yeah, opening your ears to stuff.

I think that's a good point as well, and we talk about this in, I think it might be episode seven that you've just done around the ideas of cultural appropriation and stuff. And there, yes, it's tricky because music is culturally universal in that sense. But I think so, I think that Polk Sook, who are some of the newer throat singers who are in the film, they compare it to going to an art gallery, which I really love.

They go, you can go to an art gallery and you can look at a piece on the wall and go, that's beautiful, I love it, I want to learn more about the painting, I want to learn more about the artist. But that doesn't mean you have a right to take it off the wall and take it home.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I think that, I think that's really, I love that way of looking at it, of like going, yes, just because it exists, you don't have to make your own version of it, you don't have to have, and that doesn't mean the music vanishes, they're still making it.

Yeah, exactly.

If you like Inuit throat singing, you don't have to make your own, because there's like five incredible people out there doing it. And then Sanju Sahi, who's a tabla player, says when he's playing with other people, you know, who aren't Indian classical musicians, he's like, well, I also don't expect that person. They can't have grown up, like, I think he goes back like 12 generations or something ridiculous.

He's like, well, I can't, not everyone can have that, but you love my music, so come in.

And this is the thing, the discussion with cultural appropriation is very interesting and tricky, and it's something I think about a lot, partly because, so I learned tabla in India for a couple of months, for example, many years ago. And what's interesting about doing that is that I was learning with another guru who goes back 15 generations or whatever, and it was really welcoming, like, oh, you're interested in this music, come and learn about it. So it's not like me as a white man can't learn that, but it's also not like I can then claim a huge authority about it, or it's not my culture.

So it's not like, and monetizing is also a very important thing, I think. If I was sort of like basically nicking that for my own gain. I mean, on some level, of course, it's like I learned more about things.

Yes.

You know, added to my musical understanding and so which I suppose on some level has been living or whatever. But yeah, like I would never claim full authority. I've just learned a bit.

It's a good example. And I was talking about this with Tiffany from Ploxoc. I'm pronouncing that terribly because I don't have that background.

Is that I wanted to include throat singing in the documentary in some ways. I think it's so fascinating. And every throat singer I could find in the UK was a white person with dreads.

Yeah.

And I was like, I don't, I'm sure they're technically very, very good at it. But I don't want to talk to them about it. Because they will be able to tell me all the very technical, this is how you sing and this is how you do it.

But the bit of it that really interests me is why does this exist? And then luckily, weird name drop, Chris Hadfield, the astronaut's son Evan, introduced me to the girls from Ploxoc for a gig I was doing in Toronto. And they could tell me all the technical stuff as well.

But what was so fascinating was them going, oh, it's because we were with our mums in the tent when we were out hunting. And that like, oh, now I understand the music. Yes, I can still listen to it.

But now I get why it sounds like this and why you do this and that. And that's the bit. And I hope that comes across in the documentary.

That's the stuff that interests me. This is technically what opera is. But why did opera exist?

Oh, it's because the enslaved people needed to have a rhythm so they didn't cut each other's hands off when they were harvesting sugar. That's what fascinates me.

Yeah, absolutely. And jazz and world music. So I run a band called the World Music Workshop Band.

And world music is obviously a very contentious term. And it's not, I didn't name the band. But it's been going for 20 years.

But I feel a big responsibility in that band, for example. And it's like bands, I'm a professional in the professional rhythm section, but everyone pays to do it. It's a kind of workshop band, you know, a lifelong learning thing.

It's really good. But one of the things I think I feel a big responsibility to there is to play music from all over the world and to very much acknowledge where the music is from and celebrate that. So we are playing, for example, Afrobeat or music from Cuba.

But we also play music from Belgium and music from the Balkans. And I specifically make a point of talking about it, talking about, this is from here, this is fascinating music, we learned about this amazing thing. Because otherwise, it's not like just because you're a white person, you're not allowed to play certain music.

But I do think there is a big responsibility in acknowledging that this isn't our music, no one owns music in that way, but this isn't our music. And go and check out this person who's tuned this is, because they're amazing and this is our little tribute to them. So I think that's the only way I could, when I was asked to take over that band, that's the only way I could square doing that, is to, as a bunch of white people basically, is playing other people's music from around the world.

There's a million problems with streaming, obviously. But I think one of the good things about that is now, you know, years past, if you heard, you know, say, you playing that, then that might be the only way someone could ever hear that type of music. But now, if you hear you playing it or you hear it in the street or somewhere, you can go and find 500 Afrobeat bands or 500 throat singers or whatever within 10 seconds.

You don't, you don't, I find that...

It's very democratizing.

Yeah, I find that part of it very strange, which is probably, I don't know if it's controversial or not. When people go, oh yeah, but where else? I can't, you know, I know it's a bit, but I really want to make it.

It's like, no, but you don't have to though. You can go listen to someone or go and band camp exists, but if I go and buy that person's band rather than have to go and see Doug's version.

But as a musician yourself, I think you can learn. I think what's interesting about that is when I talk to other musicians about it, from other cultures and you know, like it's mainly musicians are super up for it, right? As long as you're not trying to like steal their music and make a big profit out of it at their expense.

Like that's the big thing and you quite rightly call Elvis and others out for that. But-

Yeah, Elvis fans are not going to like this documentary.

Oh no, it's true. But it's very important to call that out because that is obviously a huge problem with cultural appropriation. But actually my experience and the experience of I think most musicians, when again, when I learned tabla in India, they're like fantastic.

You can do it, but you got to do it respectfully. Again, when I've been to other cultures and played, like when I was in South Africa and I went and I loved like South African township jazz, and I went to a jam and I know some of those tunes. So like the musicians there, they're like thrilled that this guy from London knows their tune and wants to come play and really hang out and love it.

As ever, like you said, it's usually when someone in a suit turns up and goes, how can I monetize this? There's probably a way to make money out of this.

I know you've got to go in, but just to bring it full circle, this is where like the AI thing, like it's the commercial side of music, it's the monetizable, easily monetizable bit of music that is under threat. And so, and that to be honest, as someone who does what I do, I mean, I need to make a living out of music to make that caveat. And so we need musicians to be able to make a living if we want music and venues and all of that.

So it's very important that there is a way for musicians to make a living. What isn't important, in my opinion, is for some musicians and adjacent A&R people or whatever to be fabulously wealthy. Like that isn't important.

Music has always existed and musicians have always needed to make a living. And Mozart famously, all of the famous classical composers, all had patrons and had to write stuff for the king and write stuff to spare. So it's not like it's pure and we should just have this undiluted, we should be able to go in our ivory towers and not connect with the world.

Absolutely not. We need to make a living. We always have and we always will.

But we don't need to make bajillion pounds from selling. And so I think if AI is coming for that stuff, fine. As long as there's still people coming to see stuff, and the stung is still.

I have no, I mean, I have a lot of problem with billionaires. They shouldn't exist. But I have no problem with people like Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, whatever, selling out massive.

And some stuff is just going to be more popular for social, cultural, marketing, whatever reasons. But I, which you kind of touched on there, I really do worry that we could push towards a thing where that's all we've got. And then we get back to a point like, you know, we're basically the same age, like growing up in, particularly in Australia in the early 80s, you really had four radio stations.

And if you couldn't get on there, then you were playing covers of those songs in the pub. And if you, if the, I've seen bands go, we're gonna do an original, and people just turn on them. They go, you doing original, do a nub, do my Sharona again.

Yeah, yeah. But I think that's right. And just, having just come off a tour in the spring with Hackney Colliery Band and talking to a lot of promoters and agents and stuff, it is a kind of universal agreement in the non-mega stratospheric, you know, stadium filling side of the industry, that it's never been worse.

It's been because, and one of the reasons, I think very important and under-priced reason for that is because, under-priced ironically, because people were paying 700 quid to go and see Taylor Swift or, you know, several hundreds of pounds. And what's interesting about that is the economics of it. You look at what was happening even at the beginning of my career with HEB or whatever, where the top-priced ticket for the O2 versus a ticket for the Jazz Café would be, I don't know, I'm making this up obviously, but the top-priced ticket for the O2 might be 100 quid, something like that, or maybe a bit more if you're in a box or whatever.

But, you know, but rather, a ticket for the Jazz Café would be, you know, 20 quid or something. So that's the difference. What's changed now is that no one wants to pay 20 quid to go to the Jazz Café, you know, three or four hundred capacity venue.

But people were paying 700 quid to go, you know, or sometimes more, like hundreds and hundreds of pounds to go and see these big stadiums. So on paper, the music industry, from the government's point of view, looks like it's doing really well because tens and tens of thousands of people are going to see Oasis, hundreds of thousands of people.

50% of the money is going to like five people.

It's all going to the top and no one's coming out to see the small gigs. And that's what is really scary and worrying.

It's also a sign, and I mean, we see this in the events we do and stand up tours and stuff as well, that people use Oasis or Taylor Swift as an example. People want to see them. They love those artists.

So they're going to go, well, if it costs 500 quid, I'm going to spend it because I really, really want to see them and cost of living or whatever. If you go, I love Oasis so much, I have to spend 500 quid, the sacrifice you're going to make is that means I can't go to the cinema or I can't go and see a stand up or a smaller band or go to a restaurant.

You can't take risks.

I'm going to have to spend 10 quid on Burger King because I know it's quick and reliable. I can't risk 30 quid on an independent restaurant that I don't know if it's going to be good or not, because I need to save money to see Oasis.

Exactly. I think that's the really scary thing that is happening.

We speak to the great Robert Smith in Episode 9, and he talks about his trying to keep ticket prices down. He says in Episode 9, the best line in the entire documentary, so I was on the phone to the bloke that runs Ticketmaster. I love that in Robert's head, there's a guy at a desk that runs Ticketmaster, and he says, rang him and gone, the Cure are not having this.

He talks about in a really sensible way, which is like, I want people to come back and see us again. And he said, I run everything now. I know how much it cost to print a T-shirt.

Why would I sell a T-shirt for 60 quid, when I can just sell it for 10, and then everyone can have one, and at the end of the day, I make the same amount of money, but we can keep touring. And the other point he makes, which I really like, is if you overcharge people, it's because you don't believe in the product you're selling. If I'm selling a ticket for 600 quid, there's a part of you that thinks I've got to make my money now, because what if it goes away?

If I sell 20, it's because I think I'm good enough that you're going to come back and see me again.

It's a really interesting point, and certainly I-

And obviously he's the cure, so that-

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're going to come back.

But-

Yeah, it's such an interesting- I mean, I've always said, yeah, I've wanted a long and interesting career in music, and that is about being a sustainable audience, and sustaining a relationship with them, and yeah, and obviously Robert's done pretty well.

It's similar to why this documentary is out on YouTube, and there's lots of reasons it's on YouTube.

Sorry, we've just kind of got very deep into it. That was always what was going to happen. But yeah, tell us about why it's on YouTube.

Yeah, so it's on YouTube and not broadcast TV, partly because broadcast TV is completely broken, and they would not fund- I know, because we asked. They would not fund this sort of stuff, because why would you when you can spend 20 quid and get 10 episodes of someone cheating on someone on an island?

And it's the same problem, and it goes to like the Stuart Lee model, which is he's always said, I would rather do 500 shows in a four- well, a bit bigger now for him, like 500 seater, and know that 90 percent of those people that are sat there are there, because they want to see me, whereas I could make the same amount of money doing three nights at the O2, but half of the people are there because, well, it's a big comedian in the O2, and he must be good, and then they don't get it, they're not his fans, they don't.

The room is very different, the experience is worth it.

And part of, I think, the appeal on YouTube and stuff for me with a documentary like this, is so at the time of speaking, like the first couple of episodes have had, I don't know, like 25,000 or something views, but if I look at the analytics of the retention, it's like 85 percent have watched the four hours. So I know I've got those 25,000 people because they want to learn, they want to watch, they're interested in it. Some of them, I think, have hate watched it all the way through.

That's fine.

That's up to them. I'm just going to get that.

Whereas if that probably equates to a million people on BBC One, but half of them have got it on while they're feeding the dog or making dinner or dealing with the kids or they forgot to turn it off after the news or whatever. And I think that's the appeal of the music. I know people who went...

So I went to the era's Taylor Swift gig. It was incredible. I like Taylor Swift.

I'm not ashamed of this. It was expensive. But I know there were people there who were like, this is a big gig.

You got to go. It's a cultural landmark.

You got to be part of it.

And they didn't know any of the songs.

They didn't know.

They were like, you've kind of got to be part of it. Whereas if you're going to see HCB, most of the people who are going to see HCB is because I love this band. And I want to be part of this.

And that's why I like the small gigs. That's why I like small gigs and YouTube to me, even though YouTube is massive, are very, in a long form thing, I think they're very similar. You still get the scrolling and YouTube obviously.

But I think if you're going to commit to something on YouTube or Netflix, you're picking it. And that's the same problem now with music. We are not, years gone past, you were competing with three other things that were on TV.

Now we're competing with the entire Star Wars franchise that is available at the click of a button. Every Marvel movie. And we're asking people to spend 10 and a half hours on an in-depth history of music when you could just re-watch 30 Rock for the 15th time.

No disrespect, love 30 Rock. And it's the same with some of the gigs that you're doing and other bands are doing. We're asking you to spend 30 quid to come and see us when you're now competing against Beyoncé.

Just to bring it back to the documentary, I think it's such a good point about YouTube. I mean, obviously, if it had been on a broadcast, there's advantages to that in terms of budgets and production support and the rest of it. But I think you're absolutely right about the fact that the people who are watching it on YouTube have chosen to watch it and are there watching it and really digging into it in a way that they're not necessarily on telly if it was on BBC 4.

And actually, probably, certainly over time, the viewing figures for something like this, maybe not like the minute it's broadcast on BBC versus the minute it goes out on YouTube. But over time, this is just going to sit there forever.

Yeah, and people are, we're already seeing, you know, different groups. So someone sent me a thing the other day, that the subreddit on of the BBC Ghost series, someone had just posted on there going, hey, Charlotte Ritchie's doing this new series. So I just looked at it for her and it's really good.

And now there's lots of people on the BBC Ghost going, oh, yeah, we're kind of getting into it. Obviously, you know, we had an incredible review from The Guardian, which we weren't expecting. We weren't expecting any reviews from The Guardian.

But that's obviously brought a lot of people to it. And it's nice that people are organically kind of slowly discovering it. And I think, you know, there will also be a lot of people that go, I haven't got time for 10 hours an hour.

That's fine.

And they'll pick it up slowly as it goes along. And it's not going to, I mean, the AI stuff is going to be out of date by the time it goes out. But the history of Ancient Egypt is not going to change a lot in the next 100 years unless we magically find something.

No, no, exactly. Exactly. I think there is a lot about it.

It's very timeless. Yeah. I mean, it's really great.

I mean, you know, we haven't, we've got so sidelined as we always, this is how this, this is how this sort of thing escalates. How did, how did this end up 10 and a half hours? This is why.

Exhibit A. Exactly. Yeah.

But it's really, it's a really incredible piece of work. And it's been a delight to work on it. And I should also plug on it.

That each episode, the nine episodes ends with, except for one, ends with original new live performance of A. So every person I interviewed for this, which was 107 or something, the last question I asked them was, top of your head, don't think about it. What song makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up?

Why do you love music? And they would give us 106 songs. And then I got in touch with eight of my favorite artists who perform as shambles a lot, and said, here's the 106 songs, pick one, come up with like a you, just a you arrangement, then they spoke with you, and we had like a shambles band of three people that play about 900 instruments.

And then we have each credit sequence is a filmed version in King's Place, which I should plug King's Place Music Foundation, brilliant charity we've partnered with, RI., brilliant charity we partnered with, and they perform the song over the credits. Charlotte Carpenter does a version of Friday I'm In Love that is completely Charlotte Carpenter that I adore. Just seeing Jim Bob get to do the Stranglers is just fantastic.

And so we're not just telling the story of music, we're also making some new music throughout it.

I've really enjoyed mixing those. I mean, it's been a big mixing challenge because it's mixing a 10 and a half hour documentary and a whole album, basically. A whole live album as well.

A whole live album of completely different genres. Like you're mixing Jim Bob doing Golden Brown the next day, is Toneata Tikaram doing a piano Randy Newman song.

There's a lot of it.

It's pretty varied.

I think I'm going to ask you, just before you go, the thing that I always ask you. I ask two questions now. I should have prepared for this, because I know you ask this.

I always ask two questions now. One of which is the question you've heard me ask people, because we were in New Orleans together for the show, interviewing people, and that is what is the point of music? So I'll ask you that first.

Here's a controversial one. Someone might have already said this. I don't think there is a point to music.

I think it's just inevitable. I think it's like when someone says, what's the point of consciousness? It's irrelevant.

It's inevitable. I think sounds exist. The human brain has evolved in such a way that we like certain intervals.

We like what it sounds like. So I don't think there is a point to music. I think it's just an inevitability of existing on Earth.

As humans?

As humans, yeah.

Yeah. No, I mean, there's a lot about that. I totally agree.

The other thing to ask is how... So obviously the show is called...

When will I pay your invoice?

I don't know. It's called... The show is called Origin of the Pieces.

So, how is music evolving?

In a very, very non-linear fashion.

But...

The really, really awful answer is I think it's evolving far too commercially.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of what we've talked about today is basically answering this question. Yeah, I think...

The last thing I'll say then, I remember years and years and years ago, I wrote a play and I was on a panel talking about it. And someone on the panel had said, who do you think the audience is for this play? And I said, you know, I don't know really.

It's what I felt like writing about. I think it's quite good. Come and see it.

And she said, I would never start writing anything without knowing who the audience is first. And I recoiled because that's probably a very good business decision. And I do worry that music now, a lot of people are evolving it in a sense of like, who's going to buy this?

How many hits will this go viral? Can that go into a 20 second clip rather than just make a thing?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And that the whole shambles philosophy, I was speaking to a young girl came up to me last night and said she wanted to be a documentary maker. What can I do to start? I was about maybe 15 or 16 there with her mom.

And I said, it's so easy now. Like when I was a kid, I had to go to cash converters and buy a massive video camera and put VHS tapes in it. You have a studio in your hand.

Just go make something and put it out. And if it's the next thing will be slightly less. Just that's how I want it to evolve.

But I worry that up here, I'm putting my hand above my head for the audio listeners. It's how much money can I make off this before I make it?

Well, I think for me it's whether that top bit, as we were just talking about with the audiences for live music, it's whether that top bit swallows up everything under it, or whether those of us who aren't actually interested in that top bit. I mean, I've played big shows with big artists, and obviously did the Olympics and stuff. It's fun in a way.

But you had great fun at the Olympics, I know you did.

Let's not go into that. But it's fun playing big shows in stadiums or massive arena shows. It's fun, but I don't get my shout out of it, which is lucky because I don't want to do it, because I'm not going to do that with what I'm doing.

But I think it's just whether those big things suck up everything in their path. Those of us who aren't interested in those big things, I've got to make a really strong case for why what we're doing is interesting. I think that's what you do brilliantly in this documentary, and what I'm constantly striving to do with podcast and my own...

I think that we used to do, we haven't done it for a few years, a show called Compendium of Reason, which was at Hammersmith Apollo and Royal Albert Hall, which are like a big version of our Nine Lessons shows. We did two or three nights, sold out, 15,000 people, whatever it is. There's a different pressure on those shows, people love them, you've played loads of them and stuff.

I, as the producer and director of lots of those shows, not all of them, but a lot of them, I never enjoyed them as much as I do Nine Lessons, which is our smaller version, which has a lot less famous names, we have a few famous people each night, and then regulars and mix. Because those shows felt like they're on the rails, like it has to run like this, the audience is expecting this, we've got to give them that. Nine Lessons, anything can and usually does happen.

It's much smaller, it makes a lot less, this is why I'm not rich, because I enjoy those manic, anarchy type shows so much more, and I know that less people enjoy those than do the big shows, and that's fine, because that's what the mainstream is, whatever. But I will always enjoy doing those, I will much prefer, like stuff that you've done at Nine Lessons. I could not, as a producer, say, yes Steve, go on stage at Albert Hall, and hacksaw up a conch, and it might work, it might not, who knows?

We could, but I know that that audience would go, hang on, what's happening now? But at Nine Lessons, if your hacksaw doesn't work, or it doesn't go, just stand up the back and deal with it, and then I'll get someone to come on and talk about physics for 10 minutes, and then you might be ready, and if you're not, who cares, keep sawing. That excites me so much more.

I totally agree.

And that's the same as what we do at Latitude, and with the documentary, and that sorted me. I love big stadium shows, I'm not going to lie, but my number one musical experiences. One of my favorite gig, one of my favorite gigs I ever saw was Jimmy Barnes, who's an incredible Scottish Australian singer I love.

I saw him do a cover of Joan Osborne in a shopping center. Impromptu, he was there to promote like a new record, and he was just meant to be doing a signing. And he's grabbed the interview mic, and just did an acapella version of What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted.

And it was phenomenal. It was like, I don't know, there was 50 people there?

Yeah.

It was like, that wasn't meant to happen. One of the speakers blew, because they put it in a PA for a man to go, yes, well, when I was making this album, and he's bursting it, and that was my favorite gig, I think I've ever been to, and it wasn't even a gig. That's the stuff I love.

But that's what music can do, right? It's the spontaneity of it, and the fact that it, yeah, it can just sort of erupt and emerge. That's what's so exciting about it.

And, you know, the big stage stuff is fun, but like, yeah, that's those little moments. Music in a pub, you know, I think those are such important moments. It's everywhere.

Music, you can't escape it, whether you want to or not.

I can't escape mixing this music.

I have to go to the physio, you have to mix the rest of Episode 7.

Yeah, so you know what to find out, YouTube and everything. YouTube and Cosmic Shambles, links, things.

Thank you.

And yeah, onwards, on with the mix. So my thanks once again to the brilliant Trent Burton for that interview. I really urge you to check out For The Record An Incomplete History of Music.

It's really fascinating show. Of course, I'm biased because I worked on it a great deal as music consultant on it and mixed the whole thing. So I've been living with it a lot this year, but it's really something.

Trent's been all over the world to interview amazing musicians and academics and historians, and it's really, really fascinating and very entertaining as well. Charlotte Ritchie does a great job of presenting it. So yeah, I really urge you to check it out.

I appreciate it's a big time commitment, but I promise you it will be worth it. You can dip in and out of it. Again, the great thing about it being on YouTube is it sits there forever.

It's not going anywhere and you can dive in for the odd hour here and there, half hour here and there and just learn lots about music. There's a lot in common with this podcast. Obviously, I'm in the documentary a fair bit, particularly episodes one and nine, but there's also just so much in between those episodes as well.

So do check it out. Just remains for me to say that all the links are in the show notes. So there's links to For The Record, but of course also Shells and Bells and my performances with Harriet Mackenzie.

So do check those out. My Patreon, I've sadly neglected in the last few months along with the rest of the podcast. My apologies for that, but thank you to those of you who have stuck with me on the Patreon.

I will be updating that much more regularly going forward. I have big plans for the podcast and the Patreon and everything else. So do sign up to the Patreon or you can sign up to my newsletter, the Open Ear Dispatch, which you can sign up to on originofthepieces.com.

There's going to be again lots of stuff coming out there. There's a new live show that I'm going to be doing in the new year, which I'm going to announce soon. But meanwhile, thanks again for listening.

Stay musically curious and I'll see you next time. Bye.

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The focused UI element is 31 text entry area Secondary Actions: Cancel, Value: Hello, my name is Steve Pretty. I'm a musician, composer and performer from London. And welcome to my podcast, Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces.