This is the first of a new monthly feature that will run alongside the main podcast -- once a month I'll be doing a ten-minute bonus episode looking at non-music news from the time we're covering in the podcast. These can be skipped if you're only interested in the music, but add valuable context about the culture in which those records were made. This month's is on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Year three of the podcast starts in a few days' time, with "Telstar".

Click through for the episode transcript:



Welcome to "I read the news today, Oh boy", a new feature for this podcast. One of the things I've been doing during the series is trying to put the music I'm talking about into a wider context, and part of that has involved explaining things about the Civil Rights movement or strikes that affected the industry and so on.

As we enter the sixties, the music we're talking about gets a lot more socially conscious, and music will start to interact far more with other events. For example, in a few weeks time we're going to be looking at the March on Washington, and at a song that was sung there, and some of the performers who were there. While there is no such thing as music that is completely apolitical -- every piece of music is affected by the circumstances in which it was written and performed, in a myriad ways -- there is a difference between Little Richard singing "Tutti Frutti" and the Beatles singing "Revolution" or the Rolling Stones singing "Street Fighting Man".

The sixties were also a time of radical social change, which shaped the music that was being made. In many ways, society in at least the US and the UK, the two countries we're mostly going to be looking at in this history, was unrecognisable in 1974 from the way it was in 1964, and we're still living in a world shaped by the arguments then -- largely because we're currently ruled by the generation that grew up in that time period.

Now, anything that directly affects the music gets explained as part of the episode -- so the March on Washington will be explained in that episode. But I was reading a book on the Beatles recently, and it mentioned the Profumo affair in passing. And I was pretty sure that about 95% of my listeners will have no idea what that was. It probably indirectly affected every event that's happened in Britain in the ensuing fifty-seven years, and shaped every British thing we're going to talk about, but there aren't any songs about it, at least not that we're going to cover.

So, once a month, I'm going to do a ten-minute podcast where I do a quick overview of what was happening in the non-music news at the time we're looking at, to provide cultural context. That will go up to twenty minutes if the Patreon hits its next target. You can skip these, which will all be clearly labelled, if you're not interested. Other than this episode, done in a skip week, they'll go up the same day as the first proper podcast of the month.

To start with, we're going to look at the Cuban Missile Crisis. The roots of the Cuban Missile Crisis go back to 1952, when a US-backed right-wing dictator, Batista, led a military coup that got rid of the elected President of Cuba, and handed most of the country over to American organised crime bosses to run. As you can imagine, this was not very popular among the people of Cuba, and for several years there was an armed resistance, which eventually turned into a revolution which overthrew Batista in 1959. Unfortunately, instead of returning to the democracy that had been in place before the Batista coup, the revolutionaries replaced it with another dictatorship, albeit a left-wing one, under the leadership of Fidel Castro.
Now, the Castro regime decided to take away all the vast wealth that had been put in the hands of American citizens by the Batista regime. They then tried to become friends with the USA, as all previous Cuban administrations had. However, the USA has never been keen on governments that take money from ri