Did you know that only one person makes each episode of BBC Radio 4’s Soul Music? And that it can take up to five years to compile one edition? (As it did for the episode on Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll.) Now in its 26th series, the show is the quintessence of what commissioners mistily call a “recurring strand”. Desert Island Discs, In Our Time, Great Lives… elevator-pitch-swooning formats. Soul Music takes a song or a piece of music and looks at its impact. No presenter, just voices weaving in and out, sometimes speaking for hypnotically pause-studded minutes, like scenes in an Antonioni movie.
What started in November 2000 with Elgar’s Cello Concerto reached its 136th episode on 2 May with Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colours”, in which the writer of the song, Billy Steinberg (who also wrote “Like a Virgin”), played the original demo, and described (having clearly just thought of it) Lauper’s brittle and brilliant voice as “almost Japanese”. He was great, but the greater pleasure of Soul Music is anticipating the next speaker. Because it might be anybody.
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