Wonderful Roger Linn documentary on Radio 4

~~Click here to listen~~ (see below) to a wonderful Radio 4 documentary on Roger Linn, presented by (of all people) Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet. It opens with him playing his mandolin at Caffe Trieste in Berkley, and goes on to a string of great interviews: Brian Eno, Jerry Harrison, Martyn Ware, Pete Rock, Mark Ronson, Dave 'Sequential Circuits' Smith, talking about the connection between drugs, hippies and techonolgy in '70s California + his development of the MPC60 for Akai. If the BBC link has died, you can download the show here. If you work for the BBC and want to complain about the download, email me at the usual address. (Thanks to Jon and Alexis for sending this in)

Posted by Tom Whitwell.

Comments:

At 4:10 into the broadcast, the intro of Herbie Hancock's "Rock It" is played, which was recorded with an Oberheim DMX (according to the album credits), not with a Linn machine. ;)

# posted by

Anonymous : 2:15 am

Huge thanks for the heads-up on this piece - Linn deserves all the props he can get. Now hopefully he & his crew will finally release the long fabled Black Box update for us Adrenalinn users. ;-)

# posted by

walkathon : 2:18 am

Excellent find Tom. Totally missed this one :o) Thanks :o)

# posted by

Failed Muso : 9:56 am

yeah it was a cool doc. I was actually driving and as usual flicked on radio 4 on the off chance (so rare) there would be something interesting to listen to. Its not often you hear something like this on day time radio 4.

# posted by

Anonymous : 12:04 pm

Might I recommnend SoundCapture, then.
It records everything that goes through your sound card and delivers an mp3.

A jolly little device but be careful of the record level. Mine's set at around 3 or 4 marker points up from the left (i.e. quit low).

And... it's fre.ee

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# posted by

upasna : 6:23 am

Sorry dude, but I thought the documentary was lame. Spandau have f all to do with electronic music and none of the interviews say much more than "he turned up with this box and it sounded like a drummer." It was fun to hear Roger Linn programming a Linn drum though, talk about a feeble pattern!

# posted by

Anonymous : 9:55 am

It was a highly enjoyable documentary provided you could ignore the howling factual errors: Roger Linn didn't actually invent the programmable drum machine, IBM didn't start in Silicon Valley, etc...

And as for Gary Kemp's pathetic attempt to make the Spands into elektronische pioneers!

# posted by

Unknown : 10:33 pm

things like the this are why musicthing is the only blog i visit. trace the actual significance of less respected aspects of creating music.

# posted by

oeddy : 5:01 am

i think it might have changed to some kind of documentry about bod dylan....

# posted by

Anonymous : 2:33 pm

anyone have a recording of this?
Thanks.

# posted by

Anonymous : 9:40 pm

ditto... BBC have taken this down, does anyone have a recording they could put online? I would really really like to listen to it!! thanks xxx

# posted by

Anonymous : 9:35 am

Thank you musicthing! i am listening now... xxx

# posted by

Anonymous : 2:09 pm