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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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The Essay Podcast

The Essay

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: Under the Influence: Under the Influence

The Essay: Under the Influence: Under the Influence: Part 1: Jon Boden

Under the Influence

Part 1 Part 1: Jon Boden

Jon Boden

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Jon Boden on the influence of apocalyptic science-fiction on him as a folk singer.

Jon Boden, singer with folk big-band Bellowhead, reveals how post-apocalyptic literature by writers from John Christopher to Cormac McCarthy influences his work.

Jon Boden is a folk musician who loves post-apocalyptic literature, works such as 'The Changes Trilogy' by Peter Dickinson, in which the people of England develop a dread of technology, Russell Hoban's 'Riddley Walker', set in the aftermath of such destruction that even the language has fragmented and Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road', in which a father and his son desperately push a cart with their few possessions, some tins of food and a pistol through a devastated land. 

He thought this was at odds with his work as a performer of traditional English song, music that sometimes celebrates a bucolic idyll. But, after becoming a father, he began to consider the implications of contemporary geo-politics. With the end of an oil dependent economy, would reality and the world depicted in the literature he enjoys coincide? Or might this lead to a world closer to that described in traditional song, and the kind of society that produced that music? 

Producer: Julian May.

The Essay: Under the Influence

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