Oh What A Time... - #123 Music in Unexpected Places (Part 2)

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!This week we’re discussing various tunes and music genres which popped up in surprising circumstances. We’ve got North Africa’s blues inspired Tuareg Rock, western music behind the iron curtain and modern attempts to recreate that original Tudor sound!Tom’s joined the rechargeable nasal hair remover revolution and we’re talking hair removal through history this week; we’re talking Norman Lamont, we’re talking Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary. To contribute on this subject or anything else, please email: [e-mail] you fancy a bunch of OWAT content you’ve never heard before, why not treat yourself and become an Oh What A Time: FULL TIMER?Up for grabs is:- two bonus episodes every month!- ad-free listening- episodes a week ahead of everyone else- And much moreSubscriptions are available via AnotherSlice and Wondery +. For all the links head to: ohwhatatime.comYou can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom xSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to episodes of Oh What A Time early and ad free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Keep people and pets safer. Always keep your dog on a leash in public. Learn more at toronto.ca slash leash your dog. A message from the city of Toronto. Agent Nate Russo returns in Oracle Three. Murder at the Grandview, the latest installment of the gripping Audible original series.

When a reunion at an abandoned island hotel turns deadly, Russo must untangle accident from murder. But beware, something sinister lurks in the Grandview shadows. Joshua Jackson delivers a bone-chilling performance in the supernatural thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. This is part two of Music in Unexpected Places. Let's get on with the show.

Okay let's talk about rocking in the free desert. It's 1973, a severe drought swept across North Africa forcing many of the traditionally nomadic peoples of the Sahara into nearby towns and cities. But life in these urban spaces offered little security, jobs were scarce and migrants as so often elsewhere found themselves pushed to the margins socially, culturally, economically. And out of this kind of precarious existence came something extraordinary. Frustration and exile gave birth to a new musical form. And I hadn't heard this until our fantastic historian Dr. Darrell Eworthy

helped us with this particular section. And I've gone off and listened to this particular genre that I've never heard before and it's amazing. It's a hypnotic fusion of traditional Saharan rhythms and the raw emotional power of American blues. It became known, depending on who you asked, as desert blues, Marley blues, Turek rock, or simply Asuf, a word that means both nostalgia and loneliness in the Tamasheq language. So at its heart, when you listen to this, the heart of it is guitar, and it's woven together North and West African folk melodies, Arabic modes, and the spirit of American rock

and blues. So, it's accompanied by hand-played percussion, like the Tende drum, and stringed instruments like the Marley and Ngoni, or lute. This was music born of movement, memory and resistance. And one of its most famous exponents was Ali Farka Toure, 1939 to 2006. He's a Marlian guitarist whose playing was often compared to that of John Lee Hooker. It's mesmerizing, percussive, elemental. Toure bought his first guitar in Bulgaria during the 1960s and fell hard for the blues

But it wasn't until the 1980s that he recorded a breakthrough album in London And it was the 1994 Grammy winning collaboration Talking Timbuktu with Ry Cuda that bought him wow brought him global attention And you know what as a little treat why don't we have 20 seconds or so from the opening track of Ali Farka tours? 1994 Grammy winning album talking Timbuktu. Check this out Have you boys listened to it? Yeah, it's great. Yeah, what do you think? It's great, isn't it?

It is good. I love it. It's not really like any other genre I've heard before. Like, you can really see that melting pot of the different influences. It really just works. Will Barron Absolutely, yeah. Will Barron Damon Alban has got us recorded a lot of musicians from Mali. He must be familiar with this kind of music. I wonder if that's why he went over there in the first place.

Damon Alban The Mali music I've heard, there's a sort of lightness and fun to it. It's quite bouncy and joyous and what I've heard, not that I'm an expert, but the things I have heard on Spotify in the past from that part of the world. There's a sort of, I don't know, it feels light and fun. I've really kind of really bright music. I've always really enjoyed it. Do you know what as well? Getting older. So in my life, I've got older, more nose hair, more eyebrow hair

and when I was younger like if I walked into HMV I would stroll right past the world music section and wouldn't give it a second look but as I've got older I'm banging into world music now and red wine and Guinness and dark chocolate. Meanwhile in the lake. You're developing, you're developing. You're growing up, Chris, and it's really nice to see. I'm growing up live on the podcast. Yeah, I like real ale that tastes like dust. I love it.

I love real ale. I do love real ale. Do you know what I also love? Being really meticulous with my lawn. Like, filling, putting grass seeds on the dry patches. I'm such a cliché of an old man in progress. Yeah, yeah. Bad, isn't it?

Luckily, I'm still into skateboarding and all that kind of stuff. Luckily, this guy. Yeah, I'll be down at the skate park with my ghetto blaster if you need me. Yeah, yeah, and a load of 40-year-old kids. And they all think that I'm weird. Let me correct that. Sorry, if you want me, I'll be down at the skateparks being asked to leave with my... Please say would you mind leaving and take your get-a-blaster with you. That'd be good. Thank you. Do you mind skateboarding here when the kids have gone to bed?

Yeah, thank you. I bet if you went skateboarding, Craig, you'd have the knee pads, the elbow pads, all the protection. Well, when you're doing the sort of the jumps and tricks that I am you have to be safe. When you're dropping in as high as I do, with the angles that I risk you have to be padded up to the hills. Be mad not to. Meanwhile, in the late 1970s another chapter was being written on the edge of the Sahara. In 1979, a loose group of musicians, exiled Turek youth, came together in a rebel camp in Algeria. They called themselves Tina Rouen. But to their early fans, they were simply

the Desert Boys. After relocating to Libya, they received military training from the Gaddafi regime, but found their true weapon was music. They began recording their tracks on cassette tapes, offering to copy their songs onto any blank cassette supporters mailed in. What a great model! And word spread fast. The band's founder, Ibrahim Aghaib, had been inspired as a boy by a cowboy film screened in the desert. Struck by the sight of a guitar playing hero, this is amazing.

He built his own instrument from an oil can, a stick and bicycle brake wires, an act of improvisation that recalls the British kind of skiffle movement of the 1950s. Wow! That's so cool. One of the strings on my guitar broke three months ago and it will not get fixed until I take it to a man to sort it out. I can see it from here and that is one string. The idea that I would be able to construct guitar out of an oil barrel and a walkie stick, whatever it is. Yeah. Fair play to them.

I listened to Johnny Ma being interviewed on Stick to Football, and he was like, it never felt like a sacrifice to me, even though it was, because I loved music so much. Like one year when I was 17, I didn't go out on New Year's Eve with all my friends, because I knew I could get a recording studio for nothing. Right. But it didn't feel like a sacrifice, because I was so into music. It was more fun than I would have been having if I'd been up with my friends. But yeah, if you can't change one guitar string, I wouldn't say that music is the thing for you, Tom, because...

Hurtful. I'd love to see what would happen, Tom, if you were left on a desert island and forced to make your own guitar. Like, what would that look like? Well, I chopped down the palm tree. We're assuming it's like the cartoon one, yeah, which is a palm tree and nothing else on it. Chopped down the palm tree, you use the stem, what do you call that? What's the main part of the palm tree called? What's that called? The trunk.

The trunk? That's it? The trunk of the palm tree. So you've got no shade anymore, but you have potentially got an instrument. The question wasn't how do you build a guitar and still maintain shade. The question was how do you build a guitar? So I'm using the trunk as the main body of the guitar. I'm then taking the, oh yes, the rather tough leaves from the pantry. I'm then taking individually and rolling up tightly to basically make strings. They'll be playing the same note, wouldn't they? I'm getting a crab out of the sea using its claw as a capo.

Yes. It's really coming together. It really is coming together. And if you're wondering what about the drums, coconuts. There's your rhythm section. Tom Crane's castaway band. Do what you do. You could tie halves of coconuts to your feet and then you would play lying down, like I sometimes play on the bed, and then you would keep a rhythm with the coconuts by tapping your feet together. And then because obviously all the strings

would be the same thickness, because the leaves would be the same, so you would end up playing a lot of drone music. It would just sound like John Cale. Or Sonic Youth. It would sound quite cool actually. You've done it, you've done it Tom. He's basically a desert island Dick Van Dyke at this point. I'm now imagining though the rescue ship arriving and I'm long dead lying on the beach with two coconuts tied to my feet. Any

dignity I might have had in the burial now gone. And they would say, he lost his mind. We couldn't have rescued him anyway. He probably had sex with the coconuts as well. How can you assume that? We can't assume, it's probably fair to say that. Should we mention that at the funeral? We should probably mention that at the funeral, that he had sex with a coconut. Is that the headline for this whole affair? Yes. Yeah, let's make sure the top line in the UK is he had sex with a coconut.

OK. Let's go back to the lead singer of the Desert Boys, the band's founder Ibrahim Aghaalib. So he's built his own guitar. He's learned to play using folk songs, Arabic, pop andcially, the blues riffs of Toure. The lyrics Tinerouen wrote were political, yes, often fierce in their anti-colonialism and critique of state repression, but they were also personal, songs of longing,

freedom, solidarity, and exile. They mourned the erosion of the Toureic identity and the suppression of native languages in favor of colonial tongues like French and more recently English. the erosion of the Tuareg identity and the suppression of native languages in favour of colonial tongues like French and more recently English. Here's one lyric which asks, What's the use of hating one another? You're not the same as the Westerners.

You're from the time of the tribes. Love this. As desert blues evolved, so too did its influences. And one name echoed louder than most, Jimi Hendrix. Among his heirs is Mdou Moctar, a Nigerian guitarist born in 1984, whose psychedelic riffs and blistering solos are as rooted in Saharan tradition as they are in the sonic legacy of Hendrix. And like Ibrahim Agh al-Habib before him, Mokhtar built his first guitar himself. Another one from wood, old bicycle brake wires and corned beef tin keys for tuner legs. Love this. Ingenuity far beyond that of Tom Crane and his droning palm tree guitar.

The now dead Tom Crane. Put coconuts on his feet. May he rest in peace. Mokhtar said in The Guardian in an interview, my parents didn't have the means to buy me an instrument and wouldn't have done so. To them, becoming a musician would mean I was a delinquent. I never told them I wanted to play the guitar. I didn't dare, so I made one.

Oh, what ingenuity. Fantastic. Love that. Yeah. If the older generation spread their music on cassette tapes, Mokhtar's early tracks travelled via mobile phones, flash drives and memory cards, an underground file sharing network that crisscrossed the Sahara long before Spotify or WhatsApp got there. Today, streaming and messaging apps have taken over, but the do-it-yourself ethos remains. The psychedelic threads in modern Asuf also recall a wider African movement from the 1970s.

Zamrock, a genre born in post-independent Zambia, drawing from Hendrix, Black Sabbath and the Rolling Stones. I love Zamrock. Do you? Yeah, yeah. I was introduced to it quite recently by John Robbins. It's amazing stuff. And you know how James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem was always very good at this? When he was DJing, he would find records in the genre that you loved, but from corners of the music shop, you would never usually look in. And so then it's really, really exciting stuff because you'd like, it would be like, I don't know, some, some, uh, like German music, for instance, but it sounded great.

It's, it's like a lot of undiscovered Jimi Hendrix or Frank Zappa. It's really, really good stuff. I mean, there's a possibly a whole episode, uh, on Zamrock because it flourished for a decade, but it was the, the Zamrock genre was devastated by the AIDS epidemic, which just devastated its community. By the early 2000s, only one member of the iconic band, which we intend to cause havoc, was still alive. Yeah, so that's a Souf.

Simultaneously local and global, communal and personal, it told stories. Others ignored. It carried identity across borders and generations. And in the burning heart of the desert, guitar in hand, it rocked. And that guitar, in your mind's eye, is a lot better than the one Crane's made. That was brilliant. Do you know my favourite part of that whole section? Me trying to describe Marlian music, very quickly realising I was out of my debt, hoping one of you two would join in and help me out. But you didn't. And now I'm still trying trying to describe Marlian music, very quickly realising I was out of my debt, hoping one

of you two would join in and help me out, but you didn't. And now I'm still trying to describe Marlian music and I'm now using the word bouncy, hoping that's correct. Ah, that beat. Blimmin' up beat. And then Edith is just leaning on his hands staring at me going, let's see how he gets out of this one. I don't think he knows much about Marlian music. Have you been following Marlian music every time? I have. I do have a Marlian album that Big fun of Marlian music, don't you, Tom? I do have a Marlian album that I listen to when I'm working, which is fantastic.

I forget the name of the artist, but I saw them in Glastonbury a few years ago. So stick that in your pipe. That'll do. I do love this album though, Talking Timbuktu by Ali Fakatorie with Raik Uda. Oh man, it's this quality stuff. So do listen to that. And so for the final section of this episode on music in unexpected places. Now a thing that we get on this show consistently since we've started are emails about our theme

tune. We get so many of them. We got one last week about someone telling me that she dances around the kitchen whenever it starts and is gutted when it ends. Yeah. Lots of people asking us who made it, where can we get it, all that sort of stuff. Can I speak to that? Yes.

Because a lot of people ask me as well, where does that, like people say to me is what they hear it in like museums or walking around places. And the two words I would use to describe why you're hearing that is royalty free. And how did I write it? Well I was trapped on a desert island, with only a plant tree of coconuts, and I had to pass the time somehow. Now, the people who sent me those emails will be very happy about this section because I'm going to be talking about a group of modern musicians whose work directly impacted how

we imagine early music sounded. The early music of our theme tune, for example, our perception of how that old music sounds and how this particular group of people, and one person in particular, had a huge impact on that. Now the story begins in the 1950s as a group of musicians in Western Europe, Northern America, and they begin to turn away from established habits of performance and repertoire, and they instead seek out what they call ancient music. So that's music of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, early Baroque, that sort of stuff. And what is particularly interesting about these people

is that they weren't just taking inspiration from this music and going, okay, how can that inform what I write myself? They were facing the challenge of figuring out how those pieces might be played and then from that theorising how they were actually played when they were first performed centuries ago. Now, does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like reverse engineering. Exactly. So let's say you look at annotated music.

That isn't enough to tell you exactly how that would have sounded. So it actually takes a lot of analysis to work out how do we create this? How do we replicate this today where we're actually playing the music, hearing the music as it was played in the court of Henry VIII or whatever it happened to be? OK. This approach led to something called early music revival, a phenomenon known as historically informed performance or HIP. Will Barron It's a bit like academics will try to work out how a Londoner sounded 400 years ago. Chris Will Yes.

Will Barron And obviously it's very difficult. But the way they've done it, they don't sound like Chris. Let's put it that way Yeah, I would drive into personal green and then I'll be working today Okay, have you ever seen that clip they recreate was it a Neanderthal? Oh, yeah, the Neanderthal throat and voice box. So they're able to meticulously create the Neanderthal throat and voice box. And then they blow it after all this work.

And it just sounds like, it's just absurd. They get an actor to scream into the mic. And it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life. If we're able to put that clip on our Instagram, we really should. Because it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life. If we're able to put that clip on our Instagram we really should because it's one of the greatest things ever. It's so funny. Now, working out how this early music sounded is actually quite complicated. There's lots of things the group considered when they were trying to figure this out. Would you like to try and guess some of the things they had to consider when trying to work out how does this early music supposed to sound? Give me some suggestions.

What do you think they had to consider? Well, did musical notation, had it been codified and formalised? So yes, it had been noted down. Yes, that's right. How many people are in the band or orchestra? Yes. What instruments are in the orchestra? Orchestra is one of them. Now, not numbers, it's where are you seating these people? So how far away is each instrument away from one another? The way they did that, this is really interesting, is they looked at old artworks and writings, but often artworks which showed how these people laid out when they were playing their chamber music or whatever it happens to be, or earlier than that, early music. And there they would work out how close

the lute should be to the harpsichord. Because of course how the instruments are placed in an orchestra has a huge impact on the way you hear it. Other things are what period instruments were used in the piece, because that isn't always shown when it's written down, but exactly what instrument is used. How are these instruments tuned as well? Will Barron Yes, I was going to say that because obviously nowadays you've got electronic tuners, but there are also things like pitching forks and so everyone is working to concert pitch. But that would have been much harder then,

I take it. Will Barron That's exactly it. Also, you talk about musical notation, how should those notes be interpreted? So the way that music was written down and recorded and what you can draw from the pieces that you're reading changes in terms of time and place and all that sort of stuff. So it's also that deep analysis of the text, the musical text that they're reading in accordance to the time it's from. So there's all these complicated that they're reading in accordance to the time it's from. So there's all these complicated things they're having to weigh up before they have any sense of what this music would have sounded like. Now, to some extent, this

work was an academic process. It was encouraged by the creation of new areas of research, university departments, and areas of performance specialism, such as the early music within the School of Music at the McGill University in Montreal. In Britain, the movement was propelled by groups such as the Early Music Consort of London and its tragic but brilliant multi-instrumentalist, David Munro. Now it's David Munro's work that is most interesting and it's his work that directly impacts most people's idea of what early music sounds like. And this is fascinating. I had no idea about this. I hadn't even thought about it.

Now, David Munro had quite a tragic end to his life, but he was born in Birmingham in 1942. He's a very gifted musician from early childhood. He can play instruments such as bassoon, oboe, all these sort of things from a young age with great ease. He goes to Cambridge University, he studies there, and at Cambridge University he starts exploring older instruments, so recorders, bagpipes, and also something called the crumbhorn, which was a renaissance instrument, and I think, I can confidently say, is the least sexy sounding instrument I've ever heard of. What is it? I've never even heard of a crumbhorn. It's a woodwind instrument, it's almost a long bend, it almost looks like a little bit like a walking stick in a way, a long

wooden woodwind instrument from the Renaissance. He's playing this at uni, so other guys have got the electric guitar, they're big, really sexy. He's got the crumb horn, that's what he's gone for, okay. But he's obsessed with this stuff, he loves these old instruments and he's obsessed with old ancient music and how it would have sounded. And then after that his academic studies culminate in him writing a book on the instruments of medieval and Renaissance Europe. He then starts performing with these early instruments. He makes over 50 recordings with them and then in 1968 he's asked to score a Radio 4 adaptation of The Hobbit. So they decided to score The Hobbit with these sort of quite weird and old sounds using old instruments. Something that BBC decided

to do, sort of to give this sort of, I suppose it is that, you know, it plays into your idea of what Tolkien's writings like. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So he scores The Hobbit. Then in 1970 he gets his big break and this is the thing that changes it. He is asked to provide the score for BBC's major costume drama called The Six Wives of Henry VIII and this kind of job and the work he does on it has a huge impact on… It allows him to buy a golden crumbhorn. Exactly, a golden crumbhorn. It has a huge impact on people's impression of early music throughout the world, okay? And this is because because Monroe aims to make it as genuine as possible.

He wants to give the audience an authentic experience of Renaissance music. So he said that everything had to be played on authentic instruments or modern copies made exactly to authentic specifications. Now as someone who writes scripted stuff and pitches stuff to the BBC, I can tell you, money-wise that's not the sort of thing they're going to be happy about at the moment if you're saying, I insist that everything is played on. They're going to go, no, find something free. You're a writer, come up with a different idea.

It's, I said it all in one room. So he makes his old instrument, he finds his old instrument, all the music is played on that. The tone and style was deeply considered as well, and as historically informed as possible. All of this so that television audiences were able to listen to the sounds as he thought they were intended from the 1520s.

I love that. And the show was a hit, a smash hit. And Monroe's interpretation, this is, I love this – of the music on that transformed on-screen depictions of Tudor and Stuart's music from that point on. So the Renaissance music we hear now in films all comes from Munro's take on how it would have sounded. That's fantastic. For example, Wolf Hall, which was a smash hit not long ago, was scored with an early music expert as a consultant, all because of the legacy of Munro's work half a century before. This is all the work he did.

His impression of how this Renaissance music would sound is how it sounds on screen now. If it wasn't for him, we wouldn't be hearing it that in that way. I love that. Isn't that fascinating? And do you know what? Actually, when I watch Wolfhorn and things like that, I do think like sometimes they're all sitting around listening to music. I do think that's decent tunes. Yeah. I think Tudor Times, decent entertainment. It's all right. It's not bad. Music really, it doesn't get as good as that

for a couple of centuries. A lot of wine, big feasts as well. Yeah, a long time to wait as well for music to get good. I don't really like music, or you will, in about 200 years' time. As I say though, tragically, Munro's life does end in a sad way. He suffered from depression, he committed suicide in 1976, but his legacy lived on. And there's an argument that he did more than anyone else in the 20th century to popularize this early type of music and to shape how we hear it today. And this is something that was reflected. And I love this is such a lovely sort of thing to happen so soon after his sad end to his life. This was reflected when one of his early music consort recordings was selected by the NASA

Voyager space probe for the Voyager Golden Record. Oh wow. Now the Voyager Golden Record was a gold-plated copper record that contained its sounds, images of life on Earth and culture and all this sort of stuff that was launched into space in 1977, one year after Monroe's death. So his work was sent up there. Amazing. Other life forms to find and reflect

everything that we want to show that is good and wonderful about this place. It's got some Welsh on it, the golden record. Has it really? Yeah, there's a greeting in 55 different languages. Wow. And Welsh is one of the 55, yeah. And I've got a tattoo inspired by the Golden Record too.

Have you? Have you? This one on my arm. Wow! That's from the Golden Record. So explain how that's inspired. I remember reading that in the Golden Record, there's two circles and it's like hydrogen atoms and I think it's showing... it's a period of time that basically,

they thought this was the most universal symbol of communication. Whoever intercepted the Golden Record would be able to figure out how to play it, basically, they thought this was the most universal symbol of communication. Whoever it's intercepted the golden record would be able to figure out how to play it, beginning with the depiction of a hydrogen atom. No, the most universal depiction of communication is two yogapots and a piece of string. They should have sent up two Activia's. What you want to keep though, Al, is one down here on earth and a really long string so they can say something back to us. That's the answer.

And you could pay some NASA employees to just sit there with a yoga pot next to the area, waiting for aliens to make contact. Don't let go because it will float up. So there you are. That is the incredible work of David Monroe, who has completely changed the way you hear that sort of music, whether you knew it or not. Yeah. What a guy. What a legacy.

Amazing. Well that was it, that was music in unlikely places. What a great topic. I really enjoyed doing that. Love that. Yeah. Thank you to our historian, our brilliant historian, Dr Darrell Leeworthy, who pointed us towards those subjects. Fantastic work as always. I can also really, really recommend some Zamrock, especially Witch. It is good stuff. We intend to cause havoc, yeah. But anyway, thank you very much for downloading this week's episode of Oh What A Time. We'll be back with you next week, of course.

If you've got any topic suggestions, if there's anything you'd like to hear us discuss, send it to hello at owhatatime.com. If you'd like to become an Oh What A Time subscriber, you can do that at owhatatime.com as well, or another slice and you can find out all of the various ways you can support the not what do we do we don't do passports oh my podcast podcasts that's pathetic

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It'll just be like, here lies the greatest podcast of our age. It won't even need my name. I'm going to come down every morning and leave a fresh microphone at your grave as well. Yeah, so if you'd like to support the podcast, go to owatertimes.com if you'd like to buy me a new passport. It's fine, I did it in February actually, it's valid for another 10 years or so, so you needn't worry about that. Thank you very much for downloading. Goodbye. Bye Follow Oh What A Time on the Wondry app, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or

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