Wind of change

Thursday

Michael Hann

The power of cheap music: pop podcast round-up

Noël Coward was so right that his words have become a cliché: it is indeed extraordinary how potent cheap music can be. Its potency, however, is not innate. Amanda Prynne, from Coward’s Private Lives, would not have been especially struck by ‘Some day I’ll Find You’ had it been playing on a wireless in a shop; its impact came from hearing it as she again encountered her ex-husband. For cheap music to be potent, context is everything. Without a wider meaning, a cheap little pop song is just notes and chords. With meaning, the most throwaway frippery can become an object of fascination. That’s often true of the best known

Thursday

Robert Jackman

The problem with mystery podcasts like Wind of Change

Did the US secretly write a power ballad in order to bring down the Soviet Union? That’s the question behind Wind of Change, a serial documentary that has topped the podcast charts. It’s the work of an investigative journalist called Patrick Radden Keefe who claims to have once received a tip-off, from an intelligence contact, that the song ‘Wind of Change’ — recorded by the hair metallers Scorpions — was actually a CIA campaign to encourage anti-Soviet uprisings. Now he wants to prove it. This week’s episode, the fourth of eight, takes Keefe to a collectors’ convention in Ohio in pursuit of an internet user called ‘Lance Sputnik’ who creates