SOUNDS PECULIAR
As a medium, podcasts have been enjoying something of a boom over the past few years. The democratisation of quality media production through high-specification computer equipment has allowed a plethora of previously marginalised voices their own access to what were once quaintly called ‘the airwaves’.
In the past, broadcasting (reaching a wide audience from a single source) was heavily regulated and controlled, mainly through frequency scarcity: only those authorised or licensed to have access to the airwaves were allowed to broadcast. In UK terms that, initially, meant the BBC, with commercial stations coming along in the 1960s.
In terms of radio, there have been amateurs since the invention of the medium, reaching a crescendo with the offshore ‘pirate’ pop stations of the 1960s that ultimately led to the BBC launching Radio 1. For the longest time, Radio 4 (or NPR in the US) has been the default home of quality ‘spoken word’ content, whether that was drama, current affairs, or documentary radio.
Now, anyone with a microphone and an iPad, laptop, or computer and the right software can produce a decent podcast and launch their work onto a waiting world. Not all of them are good, while many are far better than you might expect, sometimes surpassing the productions of ‘legitimate’ broadcasters like the BBC or NPR. When it comes to fortean topics, there are a host of podcasts out there, ranging from the polished and compelling to the amateurish and downright weird. SOUNDS PECULIAR is your insider guide to the best of the current podcasts dealing with fortean topics: all you have to do is sit back and listen... Podcast: Coffee With Jeff http://csicon.fm/cwj/ Host: Jeff Kelley Episodes Count: 130+ Format: Single Voice Chat Established: August 2014 Frequency: Fortnightly Topics: History, mysteries, cult movies, weird happenings
After several false starts and different formats,
Coffee with Jeff has settled into a regular home as part of the Csicon Network. Presented in a down-home, chatty style by Jeff Kelley,
Coffee with Jeff is a ‘true’ storytelling podcast presented as a less-than-30-minute amusement to be taken with a Sunday morning java. Kelley himself admits to getting most of his ‘facts’ from the Internet – so, as he notes resignedly, “I may have got some things wrong”. To the best of his abilities, Jeff sifts through the available sources and presents his take on stories weird and wonderful, but mostly true-ish.
He has been working at the podcast thing for a few years and seems to have finally settled into a laid-back, folksy style as the most natural way to tell the often ‘tall tales’ that he’s interested in.
Kelley lives in a northern suburb of Chicago, where he works as a production designer, but he also has an active sideline in amateur filmmaking for which he writes his own stories and scripts. Home-brewed beer is another passion, as is playing the guitar and enjoying old movies. An interest in history and a love of storytelling came together and found their natural outlet in the form of a podcast – and so Coffee with
Jeff was born. Not every instalment is strictly fortean – some are straight crime or humaninterest stories – but the vast majority are of interest to FT readers. Recent topics include the ‘ghost blimp’ of 1942, the Jersey Devil, a three-part series on everyone’s favourite reprobate Aleister Crowley, a two-part study of the infamous Patterson-Gimlin ‘Bigfoot’ film, the Bermuda triangle, the Cock Lane ghost, alien reptilians and the Dulce Base, and Spiritualism and the Fox Sisters. That’s only skimming the surface of over 130 instalments.
Every now and then, Jeff also focuses on pop culture topics of fortean interest, such as oddball childhood toys like ‘Silly Putty’, the Magic-8 Ball, or the Slinky, or he offers an examination of the controversy over the origins of the game Monopoly, or the drawn-out fight over the inheritance of the notorious Sea Monkey fortune.
Movies often crop up, from a chat about the original 1954
Godzilla or discussion of such early Hollywood scandals as the trials of Roscoe Arbuckle and the death of Thelma Todd, to a two-part deep dive into ‘The Celluloid of the Strange and Unusual’. Other unusual true-life stories are recounted, such as the crop circle making exploits of Doug and Dave, or the ill-fated Heaven’s Gate cult and its members eventual mass suicide.
The three-part Aleister Crowley series from September 2016 (episodes 104 to 106) is a prime example of Jeff engaging with forteana. He comes at Crowley as an all-round figure, taking in other aspects of his life (mountaineering, poetry) rather than just the occult, and he comes clean as being someone who initially knew little about the man apart from the popular caricature of Crowley as ‘the Great Beast’ and ‘wickedest man in the world’.
He begins by getting the pronunciation of Crowley’s name right (always a good start), then expresses his own surprise that there is so much to say about the man that it’ll likely take a podcast trilogy to do him justice. “Even if I do three parts, I’ll only be scratching the surface,” admits Jeff. He also engages with how finding the definitive ‘truth’ about the real man at this far a remove is virtually impossible, and in his own idiosyncratic manner tells Crowley’s story. Intercut with Jeff’s own narration are some archive audio snippets of Crowley, making good use of the podcast medium; you might think of It as a fun aural equivalent of Hunt Emerson’s comic-strip biography in this issue of FT. Each story on Coffee with
Jeff is usually done and dusted within 20 minutes, with some establishing chat, vintage old-time adverts and closing words bringing the whole thing in at just under half an hour – perfect for the coffee break evoked by the title (whether it’s a Sunday morning or not).
Strengths: Jeff’s welcoming, personal style makes his podcast a regular treat.
Weaknesses: Sometimes the chat away from the main story can be inconsequential, and then there’s that terrible theme song; sorry, Jeff… Recommended Episodes: Ep14: Joseph Merrick (the story of the ‘elephant man’); Ep19 The Fiji Mermaid; Ep21 The Cottingley Fairies; Ep23 William Mumler and Spirit Photography; Ep31 Claude Vorilhon and the Elohim; Ep53 The Philadelphia Experiment; Ep66 The Rendlesham Forest Incident; Ep103 The Dungeons and Dragons Controversy
Verdict: Something of an acquired taste, but once you’re on Jeff’s laid-back wavelength, there is much here to enjoy.