RADIO GARDEN

As an expat, keeping in touch with your culture of origin is quite important, and a great way to do this is via radio. Maybe the youthful among you don’t know what ‘radio’ is.

Let me explain - it’s a large bakelite box in the living room that the family clusters around of an evening in the 1930s to hear declarations of war delivered through crackles and static. Everyone is wearing a cardigan; some will have pipes in their mouths.

Or, it’s a small plastic box that you keep under the bedclothes in the late 1970s and use to clandestinely listen to edgy punk music played by subversive DJs.

So radio is a relic of the past? Apparently not so. Despite the allure of everything else available on the internet, radio still seems to be thriving. It is indeed somehow pleasant and comforting to have someone burbling away in the background while you get ready for work, do the dishes or cook.

The method of delivery is now your smartphone, where there is an amazing app available for free called ‘Radio Garden.’ It features a map of the world covered in small dots representing towns and cities. As you move your finger over the screen, every time you hit one of the dots a leading local radio station will play. There will also be a list of all the other stations in the vicinity, any one of which you can listen to. You can take a sonic tour of the world.

There are also curated lists of the weird and wonderful stations out there : non-stop Gregorian chants, a station that plays nothing but birdsong, ethnic music from Laos, and my favourite : a pair of stations that play vintage British comedy shows from the 1950s to the 90s, 24 hours a day, complete with vintage ads.

Of course most stations around the globe are purveying some stripe of music, often the generic hits of the west, or local bland pop equivalents, but digging a little deeper will reveal plenty of more experimental or eclectic fare.

I mostly like spoken word, though, rather than music. NPR from the US, a bit of the old ‘deutsch’ from DLF or Bayern 2, but my favourite is London’s LBC, the preserve of the radio phone-in format.

And there resides my favourite presenter, Nick Abbot, who I have been listening to since the 90s when I was studying for a masters degree at Leeds University.

Nick presents a late-night / early morning show Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, which means it’s a morning show here in Japan. How can I best describe him? Witty, sarcastic and stridently left-wing. Like a throw back to the shock-jocks of yesteryear, he has a soundboard full of comedic clips that he peppers the proceedings with. There are regulars who call in, a whole cast of personalities from across the British isles and beyond. The focus is on humour, but this just masks the seriousness of the topics covered. There’s nothing else like him, really.

Weekday evenings my culinary endeavours are accompanied by another presenter, James O’Brien. More serious and less sarcastic than Abbot, but still a welcome voice of reason against the madness of the epoch we are living through. I particularly enjoy Thursday’s "Mystery Hour," a humourous segment in which listeners phone in seeking answers to things that puzzle them while other callers, hopefully qualified, attempt to supply an answer.

So there you have it : radio is still alive, still a great companion, and now you get to listen to practically any station in the world for free!