As I said yesterday, I was expecting Edson Burton in the studio to talk about Wole Soyinka. I had no idea he was bring along Dr. James Gibbs, a former lecturer at the University of the West of England who is an expert on Soyinka’s work, and has been invited to Nigeria to give a speech at Soyinka’s official 80th birthday celebrations. He’s extremely knowledgeable, and also a great performed of poetry. I recommend that you listen in for his rendition of Soyinka’s famous poem, “Telephone Conversation”. I very much want to get Dr. Gibbs back in the studio once he is home from Nigeria.
The segment on Soyinka had a contribution from Tade Thompson, and a brief mention of Nnedi Okorafor’s Wole Soyinka Prize win.
In the second half hour I was delighted to welcome Norma Daykin who is the Musical Director of the Bristol Reggae Orchestra. Norma is also involved in a couple of other local bands: Meet Your Feet and JAMA. The Orchestra doesn’t have any recorded music as yet, but I played songs by the other two bands, and from the wonderful Bristol musician, Lorraine Anyesu, who was sadly taken from us much too young. One other local band that Norma mentioned was AMJ Collective. Their music is a bit long and laid back for the show, but they are really good. We talked a lot about bringing together musical styles from all around the world, and about various charity gigs the bands will be playing at (including Refugee Week next week, and Bristol Pride in July).
You can listen to the first hour of the show here.
I began the second hour by interviewing Jenny Foster, the Coordinator for Bristol Fair Trade. Jenny was one of the people featured in the You Make Bristol exhibition at the M-Shed that I wrote about a few weeks ago. I was very pleased to hear how involved Bristol is in the Fair Trade movement, and Jenny is an excellent advocate for their work. I may have been a little disparaging about Lord Lawson and commodity traders.
In the final half hour Paulette took over and interviewed a film director who is crowdfunding a project about trade unions. You can find the appeal page here.
You can listen to the second hour here.
The playlist for the show is as follows:
- Paradise – Sade
- Dancing Mood – Delroy Wilson
- No Borders – JAMA
- Untold Lies – Lorraine Anyesu
- Pushin’ – Meet Your Feet
- The Banana Boat Song – Harry Belafonte
- Silly Games – Janet Kay
- Big Ship – Freddie McGregor
The Sade was, obviously, for Nigeria. JAJA, Meet You Feet and Lorraine Anyesu were all for Norma. I’m afraid I couldn’t resist playing the Banana Boat Song for Jenny, given that she’s done a lot of campaigns around the banana trade. The other three songs are all tunes that the Reggae Orchestra covers. Paulette may have forgotten to play the last one — she tends to get deeply into the discussions.
After the show I headed off to a nearby photography studio. The station has arranged a group deal to get promo pictures of all the presenters done. I was very relieved that the lens on the camera did not break, nor the did the photographer throw me out on the grounds that be couldn’t be expected to make anything of such a hopeless case. I’ll let you know when the results come back so that you can all have a good laugh.