Reverberate

By: The Guardian
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  • Summary

  • 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
    © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
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Episodes
  • Reverberate, episode 6: The plastic people of Prague

    Reverberate, episode 6: The plastic people of Prague
    Mar 3 2021
    The Plastic People of the Universe were a group of underground Czech psych-rockers known more for their outlandish stage presence than for their songs. After the Communist invasion in 1968, however, they became a thorn in the side of the repressive regime for their subversive messages, not to mention some truly ingenious ways of defying the ban on live gigs. So the authorities decided to put the band on trial – an event that backfired spectacularly. Paul Wilson, a young Canadian swept up in the history of the Velvet Revolution when he became the group’s singer, and Martin Machovec, a historian of the Prague underground, take us inside the courtroom at that crucial moment when a rock band inspired a nation to rise up and defeat totalitarianism
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    32 mins
  • Reverberate, episode 5: Birmingham's bhangra revolution

    Reverberate, episode 5: Birmingham's bhangra revolution
    Feb 24 2021
    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
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    20 mins
  • Reverberate, episode 4: the bloody symphony of Leningrad

    Reverberate, episode 4: the bloody symphony of Leningrad
    Feb 17 2021
    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
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    29 mins

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