Reverberate

About this podcast

The Guardian’s Chris Michael explores incredible stories from around the world about when music shook history. Each episode focuses on a turning point in a city’s story, as told through a song that sparked a moment – and reveals the deeper social and political issues that shaped these pivotal events

Reverberate

Episodes

2021
Reverberate, episode 5: Birmingham's bhangra revolution
Racism, riots and political upheaval seemed to be spreading like wildfire in Britain in the 1980s. In that increasingly hostile environment, the ‘daytimers’ – mostly south Asian teenagers who skipped school to attend daytime raves – began to mix their Punjabi roots with western influences, creating a new type of music: bhangra. And one song about a Birmingham street crystallised it all. This musical revolution is told to us by the people who lived it, who bought the cassettes and bunked off classes to attend the parties: academic Rajinder Dudrah, DJ Boy Chana and others whose story is of a collective musical voice that spoke back against hatred
February 24, 2021
21 min
Reverberate, episode 4: the bloody symphony of Leningrad
In 1942, the city we now call St Petersburg had been under siege by Nazi troops for months. With hundreds of thousands starving to death and the prospect of victory looking bleak, Soviet leaders tried what might now seem an unlikely attempt to salvage morale: they commissioned Dmitri Shostakovich to compose a grand symphony. The jaw-dropping true story of how Shostakovich’s seventh symphony was eventually performed is brought to life by Marina Frolova-Walker, a professor of music history at the University of Cambridge. The Russian music journalist and academic Artemy Troitsky goes on to recount how the triumph of the so-called Leningrad Symphony against all odds has today become a key part of Vladimir Putin’s mythology for Russia
February 17, 2021
30 min
Reverberate, episode 3: the call and response that changed Cairo
Ten years ago the Arab spring spread into north Africa’s biggest country as more than a million Egyptians, enraged by police brutality and a collapsing economy, took over Tahrir Square – the heart of Cairo’s police state. It was Ramy Essam’s moment. In a remarkable communion with the crowd, his spine-tingling song, Irhal, became the rallying cry for an entire generation. And when the dictator Hosni Mubarak resigned, they couldn’t believe their success – but nor could they predict what would happen next. Ramy and the writer Mona Seif, who covered the events firsthand, take us back to those fateful days when Egypt, and the entire Arab world, chose its future
February 10, 2021
30 min
Reverberate, episode 2: Rick Astley versus the dictator of Panama
Christmas, 1989: the White House has sent troops to depose Manuel Noriega, but the dictator of Panama has holed up in the Vatican embassy. So the US military tries a new ‘psy-ops’ tool: it points huge loudspeakers at the embassy and begins blaring rock and pop music, with pointed titles such as Van Halen’s Panama and Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. A young translator named Enrique Jelenszky, who was with Noriega when the music began, takes us inside the dictator’s final moments in the embassy. Combined with rare insight about psychological operations from US army historian Jared M Tracy, a new picture emerges about what really happened when the US used music as a weapon
February 3, 2021
29 min
Reverberate, episode 1: Hong Kong's accidental pop star
Reverberate: Music That Shook History. Episode 1 It was the stuff of dreams: in 2013, Kashy Keegan was an unknown singer-songwriter in a sleepy English town when, out of nowhere, he became the voice of Hong Kong’s nascent pro-democracy movement. Alongside Vivienne Chow, a journalist from Hong Kong, and Edith Chong, a scriptwriter for the HKTV television station at the heart of the protests, Kashy takes us into those incredible early days of Hong Kong’s fight to stay free
January 27, 2021
25 min
Reverberate: a new podcast from the Guardian – coming soon...
The Guardian’s Chris Michael explores incredible stories from around the world about when music shook history. Our first episode – which tells the story of an unlikely pop star who accidentally became the face of a huge new protest movement in Hong Kong – comes out next week. Make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts
January 19, 2021
2 min

Reverberate

About this podcast

Categories

About this podcast

Categories

Reverberate

Episodes

Reverberate, episode 5: Birmingham's bhangra revolution

Reverberate, episode 4: the bloody symphony of Leningrad

Reverberate, episode 3: the call and response that changed Cairo

Reverberate, episode 2: Rick Astley versus the dictator of Panama

Reverberate, episode 1: Hong Kong's accidental pop star

Reverberate: a new podcast from the Guardian – coming soon...