PODCASTS' PAST. PRESS PLAY.
Podcasts as knowledge farms.

Sudio 1B became a revolving door for some of the biggest celebrities and emerging talent of its time. The godfather of indie filmmaking Melvin Van Peebles, actress Eartha kitt, Oscar winner Lou Gossett Jnr, Afro beat pioneer Fela Kuti, Quincy Jones and James Brown's Saxaaphone player Maceo Parker.

An emerging fashion designer Ozwald Boateng was coming back from a photoshoot in Lithuania, and a young woman was remortgaging her house to set up a new event, The MOBOs.

It was a time before podcasts made their mark. This was GLR 95.8 where national figures Chris Evans and Vanessa Feltz cut their teeth with their show, and on Wednesday 8-9 pm it was us. My co-host Sheryl Simms and I mixed the latest music, news, culture and politics with interviews for London's metro population.

All the ROTs (Recordings of Transmission) were dumped in the skip when I left the station destined for South Africa.  The few I could find were posted some years later as podcasts were coming into their own in 2010 on Apple's podcast service. They received some attention.

Then years later during lockdown, we started to locate one tape after another. Not quite the two year's worth, but enough to bring nostalgia and news of the time to the present.

The haul was submitted to the global archive body FIAT/IFTA who deemed it historically important and digitised them. Here you can hear Kwame Kwaten, producer of Jay-Z and others and one time lead of D-influence who'd just been asked to support Michael Jackson.  Then there was P-Funk master George Clinton. 

Now in an ambitious project, we're trying to bring the whole together and more as an audio exhibition, a sound scape of the past and present.  Three years ago I was asked ro serve on the British Library's advisory panel for its 500 years of news exhibition. That further inspired the idea. 

The present includes the views of leading foreign correspondents, young and well travelled, pressed into an AI model referred to as a Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG). They include, Jeremy Bowen, Clive Myrie, Shaimaa Khalil, Alex Walker and more.

Thirty plus years ago I was a freelance correspondent in South Africa covering its transition from an apartheid to democraticn state. The bug from reporting never left me.

In time, universities, conferences, museums and podcaster we believe will adopt this format with the ability to fit a wealth of interviews into RAGs and £50 computers, we're calling “Tracey”, from collaborating with the architect Sean M. Tracey.

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