BONUS: The Music from 'The Blackout Ripper'

about their work. We thought you might want to hear that conversation and some of the tracks played in full. It's a great listen enjoy. Hello, Hello, Justin Pascal here, who's the composer, sound designer and imed So I kind of got the band together for the Bad Women session. So yeah, Pascal is playing trombone, edsplaying guitar. I'm now talking about myself in the third person. James Brown, thanks so much for doing this, guys, appreciate it. Not at

all patica. Maybe you want to talk a little bit about Bad Women for sure. Yeah. Well. Bad Women is the second season of a podcast which began explaining and understanding the lives of Jack the Ripper's victims, and it was very much a refocusing of that story. I mean, that's a story that's now what over a century old, but even in my youth terrified me, and I was a continent away and you know whatever, eighty two hundred

years removed at that point. But infamous serial killer, yeah, who stalked London streets and took women of the night as victims, right, Well, that original series was really alongside an incredible book called The Five written by the presenter of the show Bad Women, Halle Ribbinhold. And this book

completely refocuses the story of Jack the Ripper. It rests that obsessive attention on the killer himself, which of course has created this this incredible how kind of put it, Here's a boogie man story that people endlessly pick over and get very obsessed with the idea of who he might have been and all the rest of it. And what happens is that the victims who had interesting lives

are just completely overlooked. And it's become a sort of comfortable way to kind of write off some of the victims of saying, you know, well, you know, they were sex workers. And there's almost a hidden kind of wink. They're saying, you know, there were there were somehow morally, you know, we could abandon them, but actually they had really interesting lives. And what Halle really wanted to do with the book and then with the podcast that came

after it is just rebalance that whole tale. Let's look at the women, Let's look at the amazing and interesting lives, what they had to deal with, and let's stop obsessing with the idea of, you know, Jack the Ripper and who we may or may not have been. And of course, one of the most in some ways shocking revelations that you get when you dig into the story in those terms is that that central piece of information that almost everyone carries around about Jack the rippert Ie, that his

victims of prostitutes turns out to be completely untrue. They weren't. That's the sort of set up in Bad Women season one, and in season two there's some DNA from that that gets carried forward. We are talking about a killer, and we're talking about a killer of women, but we moved now to Blitz era London, and the killer is an RAF officer, and again the focus is very firmly on who were the women, what were their lives like and what was it like, you know, existing as a woman

in those times. You know, you're helping with the war effort and you know, very difficult for people to imagine or conceive of our heroes, you know, doing anything so grotesque. So again we've ported from Victorian London through to Blitzerera London and we're dodging in and out of clubs in soho and hence the more jazz themes that come up

in the show. Right, So season two were in World War two era London and a Royal Air Force officers the Killer, and of course the theme that continues on from season one is refocusing the framing of the story from the killer to the women who had their lives taken from them, exactly giving them something back, yeah, yeah, and understanding you know, the times they lived in and the particular pressures, because you know, all of that gets lost when you spend your time obsessing over forensic or

otherwise details of you know, who, say, Jack the ripple was whatever. You know, this stuff just gets lost, it gets swept away, and so in many ways it's it's much more interesting because it gives you a really interesting snapshot of how lives were at the time and the journeys people made, particularly women in this case. You know,

it's a very useful refocusing, I think. So that's sort of what you guys are tasked with soundtrack, which is an interesting I don't know, that's an interesting opportunity, interesting proposition. What was the first thing you did when you realized you were going to be making music for this new season.

Whenever I start a project like this, I have this romantic idea of taking long walks and planning and really kind of devising my strategy and sort of coming up with a grand concept, and then inevitably what actually happens is life catches up with you and you just crash in there and you get on with it. I'm a great believer in dumping myself into the middle of it

and fighting my way out. You know. Yeah, with Bad Women in this season too, in particular, there's there's quite a strong sense of place, I mean, in the lucky position of also looking after the sound design on the show, and that's really interesting and it's one of the things that's afforded to a degree by podcasting. There's a certain flexibility, you know, the the work patterns are not so ironed out perhaps as they are in other industries, So there

isn't a sort of separate sound design department. I am that as well, So it really means that I can think about the sound design and the music as a as a whole. I can get things to sort of talk to each other. Actually, what I really started to think about first was what's London going to sound like at this time? And didn't want to throw away the DNA of the music from the first season, you know, we wanted that sense of kind of linearity of keeping some of the tonal work, you know, from the first

show and bringing that forward. So it's really about trying to understand the kind of fabric of sound that sort of Soho and some of the places that we're diving in and out of in the show would have created. So actually, I think my first port of call was to start with some sound design elements. You know, let's get the place alive. What do these clubs sound like?

And it throws up a really interesting conundrum really, because you know, a restaurant in nineteen forty two wouldn't necessarily sound a whole lot different to how a restaurant would sound now. But how do you somehow trigger in people that the concept that they're being taken back in time.

And in that sense, I think it's really interesting that one of the best ways to kind of fool people in that environment is to try and make the sounds almost appear to have been recorded back then, so slightly degrading them, giving that sense of that vintage sense, and I think it's really it helps people be tricked back

into that time. But going to the sort of music side of it, it became quite clear quite early on when you know, looking at the scenes where in these bars and clubs of Soho of the time, that jazz was going to form a part of this the music they would be listening to down in these clubs, the jazz scene of the time, which you know ed will

will speak more about. But in an environment where you're working, as we say, sort of in the business yet in the box, looking standing out a computer or sitting at a computer and devising this sound using a lot of virtual instruments and electronic instruments, it quickly became apparent to me that you know, we really needed something real and human and alive, and with all the cracks and the fractures and the mistakes and the looseness and the vibe

that that would have. And that's when we cooked up the idea that if we could manage this, can we record some tracks that would have been relevant to the era and try and thread that through the show. And I'm so glad we did it. Yeah, the music turned out great. Ed. Can you tell me a little bit about the jazz clubs of World War two era London? Yeah, so it was, you know, an interest in time nineteen

forty two. One of the big bangs, if you like, in European jazz was the Django Reinar Hot Club of France thing, you know him and Stephan Grappelli and all those amazing kind of gypsy players that were part of that scene. Can you play a bit of what the Jangle Ranhart sound is. He's got a huge guitar. Is that Natward Jingle would have used. Django played an acoustic guitar and mccafery acoustic guitar, which we did play on the sessions as well, myself and Christian the other guitar player.

We're playing them on the sessions. But I can sort of have a go on this big archtop. So basically in the Hot Club of France traditional setup you have in Django's original model, you'd have two rhythm guitar players who'd be doing this sort of thing, and then you'd have you know, melovy stuff going on on top, and that was a huge thing in Django was arguably the first kind of European jazz star, do you know what

I mean? Obviously the music is American and mostly African American and always led by America, and Django Rynot was the first European really to make a kind of any kind of impact on the world of jazz, and he

was huge in the UK. The Hot Club of France toured a lot in the UK and actually in at the outbreak of the war, I believe they were over here and Django and the rest of the band, his brother and his cousins, the ry them guitar players, they all fled back to France and Stefan Gropelli got stuck in London, so he was in London for the duration of the war. And then of course in America in the early nineteen forties you had the beginnings of the

bebop revolution. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and all those people, which was the next sort of big seismic shift in that music. It didn't come as quickly to the UK because there wasn't like now obviously we have so many

channels to access music and internet and whatever. And in the early days of that music, it was American serviceman who would bring in bibot records over to the UK, and so you would have heard records in London clubs and I'm sure there would have been people that were kind of playing bebop, but late thirties early forties in the UK would have still been much more rooted in the swing swing era, which is you know, again that kind of four to the bar jangle kind of style

and then you know, do I've got rhythm? You know, whereas in America and the bebop thing, that was starting to become more harmonically complicated and so you'd get more so, you know, the music was changing very fast in America and in Britain, I think, you know, there was a slower adopting of the more advanced harmonic and rhythmic and melodic concepts that were coming out of the bebop thing.

Right with bebab they were trying to really deconstruct the chords in an interesting way, and swing would have just been let us take the Scrocman song I've Got nam and make it rhythmically interesting. I guess I would say, yeah, totally. And also you know, adding extra chords to it, extending the harmony, which was a big part of the bebop thing. And yeah, but you know there were people. There was a bass player called Coleridge Good who was from the

West Indies who came to Scotland. Actually first came to Glasgow in the thirties, So this is before the wind Rush, which was the big emigration into the UK of Caribbean people in the fifties. So Coleridge came to Scotland in the early thirties to study engineering and he was a bass player on the scene in Soho at that time, early forties, and he wrote a brilliant book called Basslines

about his life as a jazz musician in the UK. Yeah, he was certainly playing kind of swing am bop and what then would have been popular music, you know, because the swing that was the thing with the swing era stuff, it was the pop music of its day. It was the hip parade music of its day. People at Benny Goodman and those guys were Glenn Miller. You know, they

were the kind of pop stars of their time. So yeah, I think London at that time thereuld have been a lot of different influences going on, the start of the Caribbean influence, the start of bebop, the swing big bands. People at Ellington had toured in Britain from kind of the twenties on woods. So yeah, I think London was a you know, probably quite an exciting, exciting place to be as a musician in the early forties. What about

the electric guitar when was that? I mean Charlie Christian was the first big kind of electric guitar star who was one of the thirties. Yeah, Christian died and I think forty two was really young. He was like twenty

five or something. He played in Benny Goodman's small band and he was arguably the first kind of proper bebop guitarist, and there's a bunch of bootlegs of him playing at Minton's, which was the kind of hot house laboratory of the bebop era, or all the musicians when they finished the gigs at the Savoy and places would head to Minton's to Minton's Playhouse and play after hours and throllowing its.

Monk was the house piano player there, and Joe Guy would turn up on trumpet and there's these amazing bootleg recordings. It was some guy who was like an audio enthusiast, brought in i think some sort of eight track, a real to real thing, and just stuck it on the

table and there's an incredible record. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're so brilliant, and it's Charlie Christian really sort of ripping it up on standards, things like Topsy and honeysucker Rows and stuff like that, and him just really going to town on it and kind of extending the jazz vocabulary. And there's a chuin called swing to Bot which is based on Topsy, which is an old standard. And yeah, and you can just you can hear him kind of

rewriting the rule book as he's playing. It's absolutely amazing. That's great. So how did you guys got about picking the songs for what you guys were going to do

for the podcast. There's a kind of standard repertoire for those hot club bands, which is a lot of jango ranuc tunes and a lot of swing tunes from the era, but because we were in sort of nineteen forty two, we wanted to try and reflect a bit of the what we've just been talking about, the slight bebop influence and the swing influence, sort of Benny Goodman small band thing. So I've got a band called Prophets the Swing, who

were myself and three other brilliant musicians. We've got Marcus Penrose on bass, Ross Hughes on clarinet, tenor and baritone who's playing on the recording, and Christian Miller, who's an absolutely incredible guitarists. You've sort of drawn the short stroll with me justin unfortunately, so I feel a bit like Angers Young in ac DC. Someone once asked Angers Young, you know his brother Malcolm Young, who was in ac DC as well and wrote a lot of the tune.

Somebody once asked Angers Younger, you're the best guitarist in the world, and he said, made I'm not even the best guitarist in a CDC, And I'm sort of a bit like that. So you've got the short stro of me. Christians absolutely brilliant, but they're fantastic musicians, and so we kind of went through a lot of swing era tunes.

I've worked with Pascal a lot is very old Powell, and so myself and past talked about basically things with different atmospheres, because when you're doing soundtrack for something, it's not just about how pretty the tunes are or how wrong the melody is whatever. Obviously you're trying this sounds obviously you're you're trying to do something that evokes a certain feeling as well and might and that will advance the narrative and support the emotional beats of the story.

What's the first song you landed on that sort of fits the emotional tone of the episode but is also reminiscent of the time. I think it had to Be You was the first one that we kind of felt. It's really well known it had to Be You. People who don't even know jazz stuff now it because it's been used in so many movies and adverts and stuff. But it's such a beautiful It's a lovely melody, and it's kind of wistful and a little bit kind of melancholy at the same time, you know what I mean.

It's got that lovely, kind of ambiguous feel to it, and that was a I think the man I love as well for similar reasons, you know, I mean it's really interesting. You know, Ed has a lot more knowledge than me about this sort of particular era of music, but it was quite interesting when he was sending me tracks. Quite often, you know, a track will have a very particular kind of introduction that may or may not really

relate to how the rest of the champans out. And I remember you sent me a Django Dark Eyes thing and it, and of course, you know, with the subject matter of the podcast, yeah, it's important that we get this sense of you know, clubs and people having a great time and swinging about in nineteen forties London. But you know, the central current of this podcast is about a very awful series of murders and about some pretty

bleak lives and situations. So we had to kind of keep half an hour that even though you know, my underscoring is more takes care of that side of the podcast. But I remember when you played me the intro to Dark Eyes it we had this sort of incredible, kind of dark, exotic kind of feel, and it's really it's really interesting how an introduction to a tune can then just sort of be bounced out the way and then

the band kind of kicks out. Yeah. Now it's an interesting tune that because it's it's basically the gypsy it's kind of the unofficial gypsy anthem. And you'll know it's really familiar. It's the one that goes it's really famous, and it's again, it's one of those when you play it in gypsy hands. I've got the right guitar for it at all, But when you play in gypsy bands you play it a kind of quite up like that.

But as Path said, because it has inherently got this kind of major minor, slightly ambiguous, melancholic, slightly almost sinister quality to it, we did a thing where we did lots of bringing out the kind of and then it just it floats down in a much more ambiguous player. Yeah, that's beautiful. You're listening to a special crossover episode of Bad Women and Broken Record. There'll be more chat and more music after this short break. Well, it had to

be you was the first track that you guys landed. Answer, we should listen to that. This is your guy's condition of it. Who initially wrote the song and who would you say had the most famous version of it. She sure who wrote it early on? Most famous version. That's hard, isn't it? I mean, I guess, I mean everyone, this is one of those standards that everyone's done. I suppose for people. Probably people now it's probably Harry Connick actually, because he did that version of it for the movie

when Harry Harry Sally, which is huge, you know. Yeah, so it's probably Harry will have what he's having exactly, it might be, I think, I mean, what's incredible about these chains is you know, and this is again I'm stating the obvious here. Why are they called jazz standards?

You know? But the malleability is extraordinary. The way you can you can take a tune, imbue it with you know, upbeat, carefree romance, and then you can choose to play it in a way that completely undercuts that and the quick and dirty twigs that have sometimes used in soundtracking. Is is really time stretching music or recordings of music, particularly on the piano. I did this quite a lot in

Season one of Bad Women. You know, you time stretch the whole thing out and then and sync it in reverb and essentially, you know, even very optimistic sounding harmonies suddenly start to kind of swim around and develop a much more mysterious dark undertow and it's just yeah, it's a testament to how these tunes can be pulled around and they survive, you know, the sophistication in the writing.

You know, we were myself from Pascal, but we've got a little thing that the little arrangement of Lady be good to play for you today, just to as a due out. And we were looking at some Ellington things and other stuff, and especially with Ellington, like the harmonic stuff. You know, the chords and the relationship between chords and melody and rhythm is so complex and so sophisticated, but not in a flash showing off, do you know what I mean. It's like the tunes sounds so beautiful and

so simple. It's only when you try and play them, you're like, god, this is really hard, you know, because they sound so gorgeous. That's why Ellington was a genius arrangement. You know, him and Billy straight and you know they were just both straight incredible. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean we you know things like take the atrean when you've got you know, big sort of major chord and then the second chord has got this slightly crunchy yeah. I mean he's just you know, and and a lot of

the composers of that era. I mean Ellington obviously being in my opinion, the pre eminent jazz composer of all time. We'll pre eminent composer of all time. But you know, lots of those guys who were writing music then Colporter and the Gershwins and stuff. It's like, yeah, there's there is a real sort of sophistication to the harmonic material

that just makes it endlessly open to reinvention. You know, absolutely, well, let's listen to your rendition of It had to be You for Bad Women season two and I m mute, m h that was great, thank you. We played sax On that. That's Ross Hughes, who's absolutely brilliant. Ross is another old friend of him myself and Pascals that we've both thought with a lot. He's a brilliant composer and

arranger and absolute I mean, a proper multi instrumentalist. Most of us we always refer to him as the real musician. He's the real musician, isn't it. Yeah, And it's funny, like most musicians, we will play a couple of things, but we get kind of weaker as the circle goes out, you know what I mean. Whereas Ross is absolutely you know, he's a fantastic clarinet player, beautiful saxophone, all the woodwinds. He's a great piano player, he's a lovely bass player.

He's a you know, absolute multi instrumentalist. Well that's great. I mean, such a sultry tune. And I think for people listening who haven't heard Bad Women yet, it'll be interesting for them to hear how that was yes in the show. I mean it's I think with all of these, while we knew there was a certain function, you know, sometimes we just we needed tunes to step up and be danceable and and and give off some of the

you know, the difficult optimism of the time. Though. I was always when we were discussing, said of how to play them, I was always trying to push them towards the ambiguity and the melancholy if it was in there in the Yeah, yeah, it resonates with the stories that we're hearing. You know, these are the episodes a litted with romances that go astray, and you know, and even

the concept of something like, oh, lady, be good. You know, it strikes a big resonance with the way women were being treated and talked about and dealt with in those times. So it's yeah, if we that level of ambiguity, which I think does come through in that take, and I should say, you know that we were not after utterly perfect camera ready takes. If you see what I mean, that's I'm happy when you've got me in the band life. Yeah, I'm mashing up, yeah, Yeah, it's not going to be yeah,

you know, necessarily perfect record. Yeah. And that fitted the pop music of the day, you know. I think that's the thing like we you know, I'm you know, so reverent about that music and about those tunes and that time. And when you talk to older musicians, they had no idea that this stuff people would still be playing this stuff fifty sixty one hundred years later, do you know what I mean. It's like, yeah, I think that strikes a really interesting, you know, the very broader theme in audio.

You know, this idea that we've we have perfected things and then had to find ways of reintroducing error and imperfection. Yeah, you know, which is a bit of a broader, bigger

philosophical point, but it is it's really important. This stuff does sound like some ultropolished studio session that's dumped into and I'm a nightclub and and really, I mean a ridiculous and extreme example of that is um oh Johnny O, which we didn't We didn't record fully at all because what happens is about eight pars into it, a bomb drops on a club. So I literally had It's like, the guys just started playing and I just walked into Okay,

a bomber's dropped on. You can stop. You know. There's an extraordinary scene where it's saying, you know, I knew, I knew the sound design had already done it, and it's like, yeah, I just need to hear you start this tune because a bomber is going to drop. So you're saying this group is not like the Titanic ship goes could have done that. Yeah, there's not that level legging it for the exit, mate, absolutely straight. What was the next towing you guys settled on? Think after that?

It might have been Diner actually, which is a really old standard Diners one that you're here on. Early Hot Club of France records, Django and Stefan Grappelli recorded that tune a lot of times. Yeah, Lewis did it, Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah, No, I mean it was a real It was again, you know, sort of massive pop hit of the day, um that

got reinvented by jazz musicians. You know, trying to get yourself into that mindset of this being pop it requires a real I wish it stretch of the imagination and that, and you know it certainly the bebop movement, you know, was occupied a very you know, now it's become this really rarefied thing that's taught in you know, I went to university. I did a jazz degree course. It was just like that movie Whiplash, but less overrated, and so

I did. I did that and it was brilliant. I mean we had we had we had amazing teachers and you know, they was brilliant and incredible musicians and it was a really interesting experience. But they talk about this themselves, the idea that that stuff is now taught in sort of conservatoires and whatever, and you know, it was total It was complete outlaw music. It was rebel music of

the time, do you know. I mean, it wasn't in any way socially acceptable, and the people that played it were viewed by you know, sort of the media and the establishment of the forties, as in the way that gangster rappers were were viewed in the nineties, you know what I mean, they were viewed as these kind of scary, you know, ghetto people that were heroin addicts and would you know, corrupt your children, you know, yeah, yeah, I mean very unfairly obviously because they were you know, studious,

incredible musicians. But you know that, and that's that's so hard to reach back and try and try and kind of imagine that sentiment now because you know, now sounds so sort of in some ways refined and yeah, totally. And the way that hip hop has become very much pop music now, you know, when we were kids in the eighties and nineties, it wasn't and now it's you know, it's completely kind of mainstream pop. So it's, you know,

the same thing happens again, doesn't it. If we're being honest, I'm sure jazz musicians, especially in the B bar, were probably more ill beherent. Some of them were completely some of them were not. Some of them I think we're very naughty boys and girls weren't they check out, you guys version of the old standard dinah and nothended nothing, and then got it down and then I go and I don't anyone and I three endings with the prize.

When I was listening to that really reminded me of something that I remember talking to the band about on the day. And again it goes back to this idea of creating music that sounds like it's belonging in a particular space and a place. I remember saying, I don't know whether it was on this tune, but it kind of it's relevant anyway. I remember saying, you know, you've got to imagine that you're playing and there's people around

you making a hell of a racket. I remember saying at one point, you've got to play as if people are basically ignoring you, and then everyone's about the musician. But it's, you know, it's like it's trying to get that that spirit in it, because you know, I know, having played you know a bit of weddings and you name it, you know, when the way you play it adjusts to the crowd to a degree, and so I really wanted to try and occasionally, you know, get that

feeling of the band about to maybe fall apart. It doesn't, it doesn't feel so in that apart from that little end bit, which is really nice, it's like it's more or less like they've they've kind of given up thor right, come on, let's get a drink. No one's listening, you know,

And I really I love that. I love that about it because that felt very important to me to you know, from the point of view of getting it to sit right under you know, because I'm thinking, I'm what I'm going to put over the top of this, which is a shame on one level because I'm covering it with people drinking and talking and you know, the sound of this,

that and the other. But on another level, yeah, it's about how can we how can we make this really sit right in the dramatic situation, and yet another level that that feels like the appropriate place to be. Yeah, that's yeah, I say, listening back to that, I won't listen to that tune for a little bit. And Marcus the bass player marks Penrose absolutely stilling job of holding everything together, Mummy. Basically he's amazing. Yeah, he totally is. You sort of clinging to marcuse he's got it's a

strong rhythmic drive, and he's so brilliant reforms. He's always absolutely right on it. You know, that idea of fighting too for the audience. I feel like it's something that's last, you know. I think that's sort of why jazz is sort of regarded in the sort of rarefied are now, this idea that it's to be played and you know, with with with with with, you know, an audience who's deadly quietly after the solo. You have to clap after

the solo. It's like, well, maybe maybe you should earn yeah, you know, and maybe and maybe you should earn that. I was always fascinated by the Jazz Cafe in London. I'm going I'm talking about it twenty three years ago now, but I remember when it you know, when it was done up. They had this on the wall above the stage. They had STFU during performances. Thanks yeah, and that meant shut the fuck up during performances. And it's like, that's an interesting vibe in the jazz club. You know what

the FF in Brixton. If you're ever in London, justin you have to go to the F for a tavern in Brixton because there's an incredible set musicians who play. They're led by a guy called Alan Weeks, who's a British Caribbean guitar player who played in loads of reggae bands in the seventies and eighties and incredible jazz guitar player. And they just set up in the corner of the pub and they just play, and it's this kind of

it's brilliant. It's a proper sort of raucous gig where people come to drink and dance and have a good time, and you know, and they play all these tunes. They play all the old standards and all that stuff, but they also mix it up. We're playing scar tunes and reggae things and James Brown and kind of funk stuff, and it's just it's really interesting how they Yeah, they absolutely they've got great integrity as musicians, but they absolutely make it accessible as well. And I think that's a yeah.

And that's strangely tangentially related to that is the business of doing music within podcasts. You know, it's like there's almost always a voice happening in a podcast for obvious reasons, and that voices bang center center stage. You know, so it's like if you were writing music for a film or even for like a radio drama or something, it's can see evable that you would have the stage to yourself for a little but that really very rarely happens

in a podcast. You might get you might get a little sniff of it when you when the narration at the top of the podcast makes way for the theme, and it's really interesting. It's a really interesting challenge that about how to make music that will that can coexist with a speaking voice that is pretty much always there.

And so I do remember, you know, there's a times when people were doing these sort of amazing solos and I just thought, that's great to having the cane, but I'm going to need a sort of slightly paired Yeah, something less interesting you need, and it sounds awful to put it in those that's the game, that's the job. And it's like, yeah, and I think that's the same you're dead right podcast even more so than other things.

But even when you're scoring music for theater or film or whatever, sometimes a really interesting bit of music is the last thing you need. So that's why you know, the Jaws music or whatever, those iconic things that are just like two or three notes, you know, are so brilliant because they underpin the emotional and narrative beats of the story in such a great way. You know. Yeah, they exist in the in the spaces around and yeah, I'm kind of really fascinated by how music is absorbed

in these sort of situations. I mean, honestly, it would you would be horrified if if you took some of the keys out of you know, the shows and just listen to them in absolute isolation, because they're you know, they're designed to work alongside a voice and and and the listener kind of goes in and out of it. Then they're not they're not locking onto it. So I don't know why I thought of that, Just because we were talking. We ended up in that area of you know,

people talking over music. But it's an interesting kind of correlation. You're listening to a special crossover episode of Bad Women Unbroken Record. There'll be more jazz and more conversation after this short break. I wonder if we should play the Gershwin tune next. You guys did a version of Man I Lived? Anything you want to say about it before I play? No, I think if you play it and then we can play it. Yeah, and then because it particularly is it will stick it back in my head. Okay,

let's give a listen. Two three. Oh yeah, we're both playing acoustic guitar. No, actually, you hear that. That's sort

of tasting shut h. Nice performance, very nice. Yeah, that's very That's rolled back some really interesting memories for me, actually, because you know, we spoke a little bit about the idea of reintroducing fragility and error, and that was a really good case of that, actually, because i'd heard the Billie Holiday version of that tune and I really wanted to capture that sense of kind of just this idea almost that you would start, you would go to sing

or speak and it might it just might not come out. It might not work, you know. And I remember when on the first take, you know, Ross, who's playing the clarinet on that, you know, just gave this beautiful but very sort of confident performance, and I was like, can you know, can you possibly sort of play that as a little bit more as if you know this just might not work, you know, can you can you make it much much much more fragile? And I think he

really nailed that. And yeah, and again, you know that ending that was completely spurred the moment I was sort of on my feet and thinking, actually, could be quite interesting to have the band just kind of dissipate and end up just on the bass. And so that's you know, it's a real case there of kind of thinking from an underscoring point of view in terms of where this is going to end up. That's just a quick idea

that I had and thought might be useful. But it's interesting because it makes it makes that ending a very particular and thing, you know, definitely challeed with this sort of loneliness and the yeah, you know, yeah that's solitary voice. It's like, yeah, but it was, Yeah, it was an interest. It just really reminded me of that of trying to get to that level of almost breaking down basically good instincts, because it really felt that way, and I think it

really was a nice performance of that songs. Yeah, and you know, a testament again to how all these tunes can be clothed in so many different ways. There's a way of playing that that makes it sound bulletproof, absolutely, yeah, And you can play that there's a Frank Vaniola, amazing American guitar player really kind of up tempo version of that that makes it sound really sort of joy us

and you know, a real sort of celebration. But yeah, when you play it like that, and again, you know, props to Marcus Penrose, you know, the bass playing, and that's so beautiful because you know, it's a hard role being a bass player in a band like this where there's no drummer basically because obviously, you know, normally in a if it's a piano trio or a bigger band, the bass player and the drummerre locking together and you know,

the bass players underpinning the harmonic movement and the melodic things, but they're also you know, reinforcing with the drummer the rhythmic drive the tune. And without drums or percussion, you know, that role is basically like Marcus on his own a lot of the time. You know, sometimes if I'm if myself or Christian are doing the you know this the very strict for in the bathing, you know, that's slightly different. But obviously we were sort of dropping in and out

of doing that on that tune. And yeah, Marcus really kind of keeps that keeps the game alive, you know. But that's really it's really valuable because drums against speaking voice, you have to work quite hard just to find the right spaces you have to, whereas this band in that format,

can you kind of just sit underneath the voices. Yeah, And because we were trying to keep it kind of you know, we weren't slavishly trying to recreate you know, Django bit a gun to me, yea, but you know we were we were trying to do something with that sort of setup. So, you know, two guitars, bass, and then various lead read instruments that would have been what

a pretty standard setup in a yeah. I mean the Django the hot club thing is said early as two rhythm guitars, one lead guitar, doll bass and then usually violin or later clarinet and saxophone, you know what. So the lack of drums was that what fed that? I mean, I think it's a very European thing. Again. I think it because you know, Django and those guys were coming out of Yeah, and they were coming out of playing what we now think of as kind of gypsy folk music,

do you know what I mean? Where it was a lot of a lot of guitars, a lot of symbol on violin, so it was mostly stringed instruments really, you know, so I think that's where that came from. And then of course he was hugely influenced as everyone who's ever tried to play jazz, It was and still is by Lewis Armstrong, you know. So he was taking some of those rhythmic and melodic ideas that Lewis Armstrong was playing

on trumpet and literally transposing them to the guitar. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, the last number, you guys did, I found a New Baby, I know from the rendition that has a great I mean probably outside a flying solo flight, one of my favorite Charlie Christian guitar solos. Yeah, how did you guys

land on this one? Well, again, we were just trying to think of other things that were popular at the time that a lot of bands would have been playing, and again, things with this sort of interesting harmonic sequence, because again I found a New Baby's got that as a lot of those tunes have got that slight thing where it's kind of you know, minor dominant and resolves

to this kind of pretty major thing. You know, so it's got again it's got both both elements, and I think, I mean, that's one of the things Ed was brilliant at in terms of you know, because I bow to his much greater knowledge of this area of music, but he completely locked onto the fact that even when we're in doing an up temper number like this, it had

to contain that little seed of ambiguity. There's a little little element of pain, you know, and he was very good at sparting tunes that would carry that or I just have a little bit of grit in the oyster. I suppose you can say harmonically, at least, let's listen to your guys version. I found a new baby before we get out of hell to come to remember it have happened? Didn't let better than being the one key ending? Nice? Nice? Yeah? I mean yeah, I do like a love a one

key ending. I should say, there's like there's there's there's this massive sea of music that you know, we could have picked from. And I know that Ryan, our glorious executive producer, had this huge playlist. He'd so imbibed the music of the era. I mean, he actually sent me the playlist on Spotify and it was it was horrific. It was like, literally, I think if I'd started listening to it when he sent it to me, I would be way past retirement by the time I got to

the end of it. But it was a testament to just how much he'd kind of soaked up this music, and he basically, I think, brought the goalposts in and said like, this is this is the kind of tune, and this is the area we need to be in, which is so you know that and that for us is brilliant, and you know, yeah, it was a lovely thing to do to be able to play that music, not in a kind of trying to slavishly recreate what's gone before, but trying to keep yeah, like you say,

this sort of emotional and narrative beats of the show going while still trying to actually orner that music was I mean, at that point, Ryan was across the who's the exact producer from the show and the rider and everything else. He's across the whole kind of narrative arc of it. So there are things I just didn't know about the show that he would be able to kind of lead into. So he definitely he basically dumped us in the right ballpark and then let us play around

in it. Well, you guys mentioned you have a live rendition of a song you can do for us. Yeah, together for you this afternoon, just Sei undead. We thought, you know, would be deaf not to Yeah we should. I didn't play on the sessions, so now you get exposed to my trombone a little bit. What are you guys going to going to do the old Gershman standard Old Lady Bigot, which I believe is from a musical. I'm not sure, some long forgotten Broadway show. Yeah, let's

see what happens. Can you count as in? Please Edward A one two, one two three four maybe by SKYL and D Thank you so much, and music music, thank you, Justin