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Episode details

Radio 4,17 Feb 2019,14 mins

Glam Rock and Gooseberries

The Listening Project Omnibus

Available for over a year

Three conversations driven by memories and music. Alastair and Frank discuss the power of Led Zeppelin, the allure of glam rock and the way music becomes lodged in our hearts and minds. Bob and Helen discuss growing up in Kiveton in South Yorkshire, a lost world featuring a multitude of aunts, some adored and some with lips so pursed they looked as if they'd been sucking gooseberries. For Jim and Liam, their childhood memories are of Larne. They share stories of bath times, barbers shops and the vanished world of County Antrim in the 1950s and 1960s. Fi Glover presents another omnibus edition of the series that proves it’s surprising what you hear when you listen. The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers a snapshot of contemporary Britain in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they've never discussed intimately before. The conversations are being gathered across the UK by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation - they're not BBC interviews, and that's an important difference - lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moment of connection between the participants. Most of the unedited conversations are being archived by the British Library and used to build up a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in the second decade of the millennium. You can learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject. Producer: Julia Johnson

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