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Front Row: The rise, fall and rise again of audio cassettes, poet Luke Wright, film director Shaka King

11/03/2021

The rise, fall and rise again of audio cassettes, poet Luke Wright, film director Shaka King

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, The rise, fall and rise again of audio cassettes, poet Luke Wright, film director Shaka King

The joy of cassettes: their rise, decline, near-extinction - and recent resurgence.

The wonderful world of audio cassettes - once a world-conquering technology; poet Luke Wright on his latest collection; film director Shaka King on Judas And The Black Messiah

The recent death of Lou Ottens - the inventor of audio cassettes who later went on to work on the development of CD technology - gives us the opportunity to look back at the glory days of cassettes, their subsequent decline and the latest unexpected return to fashion, with music journalists Laura Barton and Jude Rogers.

Young British poet Luke Wright describes himself as 'a louche poet (who) loves a bit of bathos'. He has a new collection of work, The Feelgood Movie Of The Year, with poems written over the past few years and right up to Covid lockdown, which brought his full touring diary to an abrupt standstill. How has life changed, and where does a poet find inspiration when their everyday world shrinks overnight?

Shaka King is the director of Judas and the Black Messiah, a new film starring Daniel Kaluuya which tells the story of the political life and assassination of Black Panther Fred Hampton at the age of 21 in 1969. King discusses the FBI's determined campaign to disrupt the powerful unifying movement and their infiltration of the Illinois chapter by a counter-intelligence operative.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe
Producer: Jerome Weatherald

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The rise, fall and rise again of audio cassettes, poet Luke Wright, film director Shaka King

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