Sound Towns 

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BBC Radio 4 LW

Sound Towns

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

This series explores the origin stories of some of the UK's most vital musical movements.

Great music is born from a collision of societal and political change. This series explores the origin stories of some of the UK's most vital musical movements.

Great music is born from a collision of societal and political change. This series explores the origin stories of some of the UK's most vital musical movements.

The UK's turbulent societal and political changes sparked the most electrifying moments in modern music history. These aren't the stories you know. They're the moments that came before. Each episode is a world in and of itself, and it'll get as close to the music as possible.

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Sound Towns: Bristol: Wild Bunch

Bristol: Wild Bunch

BBC Radio 4 - Sound Towns, Bristol: Wild Bunch

Origin stories of the UK's most vital music scenes.

Great music can come from great change. These are the origin stories of some of the UK's most vital musical movements. In this episode, Bristol's Wild Bunch...

Great music is born from a collision of societal and political change. This series explores the origin stories of some of the UK's most vital musical movements.

In this episode, we visit Bristol. The 'Bristol Sound' has been described as "possessing a darkness that is uplifting, a joyful melancholy", but it couldn't have existed without the 'Wild Bunch' parties of the 80s, These were the spark that grew to create Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky. The sound of Bristol can't be separated from the story of immigration. Illegal sound system parties, directly inspired by their Jamaican counterparts, were commonplace. 

Bristol's goldilocks size, coupled with its collision of cultures, incubated the 'Wild Bunch', the name for a loose gathering of musicians, DJs and graffiti artists. The Wild Bunch parties were a direct descendent of the earlier sound system events, and threw together hip hop, reggae, funk and R&B with ambient electronic sounds. The Wild Bunch eventually became the musical collective that defined trip-hop. Three Wild Bunch members - Robert Del Naja, Grant Marshall and Andrew Vowles - formed Massive Attack, alongside Tricky.

Producer: Victoria McArthur
Narrator: Vanessa Kisuule
Researcher: Juliet Conway
Sound mix: Lee McPhail

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Sound Towns

Bristol: Wild Bunch

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