This short Special Edition says THANK YOU for listening - and also talks with Canadian recording artist Rose Reiter who has produced a song dedicated to The Unexplained - you'll hear the song... "All Directions"
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hello again, it's Howard in London at the Home of the Unexplained. | |
| Now, by now, as I record these words with the sunlight pouring in and the snow clouds hovering by the sun, interesting weather we've got here. | |
| I know some people don't like me talking about the weather, but it's become a kind of tradition here. | |
| By now, you will either have just heard or be about to hear edition 500 of The Unexplained, featuring the great Jacques Valais. | |
| I sure hoped you enjoyed that show. | |
| It broke the record for the longest show I've ever done. | |
| I thought what I'd do just now, since I haven't put out like a little special or directly talked with you for a long time, it's just been one of those crazy silly years, hasn't it? | |
| Boy, and how. | |
| So what I want to do on this edition is thank a few people and recall a little bit of history, maybe for people, and I know there are many of them who are joining the Unexplained all the time. | |
| Now, The Unexplained has a 16-year history on it. | |
| It began when, for the first time in my life, and I'm not ashamed to admit this now because other people were affected too, I was let go from a radio station that I believe had to save money. | |
| So what they do is they look at the budgets and they get rid of some people. | |
| I was working with a guy called Nick Ferrari, who if you're listening in the UK, you will know that he is possibly the most famous commercial speech broadcaster in the UK at the moment. | |
| A wonderful man and my friend. | |
| I was the news person on his show and did other things on LBC. | |
| This is back 2004 now. | |
| After two years of doing that, I was let go by the radio station along with a bunch of other people. | |
| And Nick Ferrari, this story can now be told and it's been told on that podcast, Radio Moments, that looked at my life story recently. | |
| So I can tell it now. | |
| Nick phoned me and he said, can I help you? | |
| And I said, Nick, I don't know what you can do. | |
| He said, well, I think it's a travesty, so I want to do something for you. | |
| So he phoned the man who ran Talk Sport Radio, a radio station national, which you will know in the UK that is AM, on-air everywhere, heard all over Europe, very famous radio station. | |
| And he phoned the boss of that station who phoned me and said, okay, I've got a show here on a Saturday night. | |
| Give me some ideas of what you would like to do with it, and I'll put you on. | |
| So I came up with The Unexplained, which ran on talk sport until it was replaced by a political show, George Galloway, for two years. | |
| And at the end of those two years, when that show had come to an end, and I believed it was just beginning to take off on a Saturday night, the show ended in the way of things. | |
| Now, I was working six and a half, nearly seven days a week at that time. | |
| And I have to tell you that I was mentally and emotionally exhausted. | |
| You know, working seven days a week ruins your health, I think, to an extent. | |
| I'm very resilient, good constitution, so it didn't really affect me too much that way. | |
| And so I was quite glad to close the book on the unexplained and maybe pick it up somewhere sometime again. | |
| Then I started getting emails, and I've just been back to my email file from 2006 and found this from Harold. | |
| And Harold, if you're listening, thank you for being with me all these years. | |
| Harold says, I'm deeply disappointed that your show's been dropped from TalkSport. | |
| I think I've only missed three or four during all the time that it's been running. | |
| Saturday evenings are not the same now. | |
| I wish you well with your new website, which is what people started advising me to do. | |
| Take it online. | |
| This is 2006, so I was probably one of the pioneers of podcasting, I guess, maybe. | |
| So Harold, thank you for that. | |
| Paul said, thought your program on Talksport was great with great guests. | |
| I'm sure the program will work on another station or outlet. | |
| Email me when you reappear. | |
| And that's Paul Walton, who got in touch back then. | |
| So history being history, that's exactly what I did. | |
| I had a lot of learning to do. | |
| I didn't know anything very much about home recording. | |
| I didn't know very much about anything, really, to be perfectly frank with you. | |
| That's what I did. | |
| And over these years, I've got to know the great art Bell, who was my inspiration and my hero, the late and great art Bell, nearly got to work with him and made a lot of friends around the world. | |
| And I have regular listeners, people like Robin in the US, Philip in Tokyo, Shane in Sydney, Joanne in the UK, Colin, Bill, Smith in the US, and people who help me with news stories like Steve, Jonathan, Aid and Connor, and so, so very many more. | |
| And I'm grateful to all of them. | |
| Highlights of all of those years of podcasting? | |
| Well, probably the interview with the Apollo astronaut, the late Edgar Mitchell, which was definitely food for thought. | |
| But there have now been 500 shows. | |
| And if I look back through them, I'm sure I'll find shows that I've forgotten and I think, wow, that was a good show. | |
| Or wow, that was a turkey. | |
| That's how it is. | |
| You can't, that's one thing that I've learned over these years. | |
| You can't always get it right. | |
| You'll get people saying, I hate the fact that you do weather forecasts or weather outlooks for London when you do these podcasts. | |
| Or I love it when you talk about the weather. | |
| And I love it when you talk about what's going on with you. | |
| And I'll get some people who say your interviews ramble on. | |
| And other people saying it's lovely to hear some color and detail about the lives of the people that you interview. | |
| So you have to walk a really fine line. | |
| And I guess that is half of the fun of it. | |
| So most importantly, I want to thank you for being part of The Unexplained over all of these years, for giving me your feedback and giving me your support in so many ways. | |
| Some thank yous. | |
| Thanks to Graham, who all of those years ago in 2006 helped me set up my very first website. | |
| I had no idea about any of this. | |
| Graham steered me through it. | |
| Adam Cornwell, my ultimate hero who's been with me on this for more than 10 years now, and we've both learned through all of this. | |
| Adam, thank you. | |
| AC as I call him. | |
| Haley, who books the guests these days. | |
| I'm very good at finding people, I think. | |
| I'm lousy at booking them. | |
| Haley is an absolute genius when it comes to getting people to agree to come on the show. | |
| Thanks, Haley. | |
| And the advice that I've had from people like Mike Godfrey and Fevzi Turkup, the gadget detective, over the years, which I couldn't have done without. | |
| And thank you guys and so many other people who've helped me over the years. | |
| Now, there is one very special person in the pantheon of people who've assisted me in the Years of doing The Unexplained. | |
| And we've kind of stayed in contact in the way that friends do, and that is, I might go a whole year and not hear from her. | |
| Her name, Rose Writer. | |
| She's a Canadian recording artist. | |
| She makes music these days for film and television and is a recording star in her own right, recording artist well known in Canada and around the world. | |
| Rose did something really special for me. | |
| And I don't think until recently, because life has been so crazy, there's always so much you have to do, I didn't really fully appreciate how great this was. | |
| Rose created a song for me. | |
| It's called All Directions, Calling Out in All Directions. | |
| It's a beautiful song and showcases Rose's lovely voice so well. | |
| And Rose is on the line. | |
| She's got up early from Canada. | |
| So hopefully we can connect by digital technology. | |
| And Rose, I just want to say thank you really more than anything else. | |
| How are you? | |
| I am well today, Howard. | |
| Lovely. | |
| Thank you so much for having me here today. | |
| Can I say congratulations on your 500th show? | |
| This is so amazing. | |
| Well, you know, who would have believed, as the great man once said in War of the Worlds, no one would have believed, but nobody would have believed that I would continue this for 14 years. | |
| It's just like one of those things, you know what life is like, Rose. | |
| You turn around and suddenly a bunch of time has gone by and, you know, you're older and hopefully wiser. | |
| But that's in the nature of the game, Rose, don't you think? | |
| Well, Howard, you may not have believed it, but I believe every person who's ever heard one of your shows has every, not just belief, but hope that you would continue to do this work. | |
| You're such an inspiration to so many of us, Howard. | |
| Well, that's very sweet. | |
| You know, none of us in the broadcasting world, and I'm sure nobody in the recording industry is perfect. | |
| You're always going to get it wrong. | |
| You're always going to shoot wide of the goal, using a soccer term here. | |
| You know, you're not always going to get it. | |
| All you can ever do is be true to yourself. | |
| And sometimes you're going to get it wrong, Rose, and sometimes you're going to get it right. | |
| And I guess you know that in music too. | |
| Now, tell my listener, since we're both on together, about you and what you do and how you discovered the podcast and came to make a song for it. | |
| Well, it's such a fascinating story because I'm not sure if I believe in accidents. | |
| You know, even with our lovely search engines today where we discover new podcasts, it was a few years ago. | |
| So like yourself, I was an avid fan and listener of Art Bell. | |
| And I seem to recall a few years ago, I think I was in studio updating and I was wanting to listen to some new podcasts. | |
| And I'm pretty sure the algorithms led me to your show. | |
| And I have been hooked ever since. | |
| Honestly, Howard, I think it was your voice that captured me at first because I am a producer and a composer and I'm always listening and I just love the resonance of your voice. | |
| But really it was your discovery of your topics and how you interview people and how you came at it with that balanced approach and allowed me as a listener to be invited into your world. | |
| So frankly, I became an absolute fan rather quickly. | |
| And to this day, actually, I have to save the podcast so that I can binge lists and on location. | |
| I'm not allowed to listen. | |
| So yeah, so that's kind of fun. | |
| Howard, your work really inspired me to write this song. | |
| And this song was a gift for you and for your show in the hope that you would continue working this because I think it asks a lot of questions that a lot of us ask, but maybe are too scared or don't have the way of asking. | |
| So I began to wonder, you know, perhaps if other people on other planets, if this universe was grand enough to have that, then what would they ask? | |
| And I think they would ask some similar questions that you do. | |
| Well, I've got to say that the great heartbell, of course, had his Crystal Gale song, Midnight in the Desert. | |
| And now I have this. | |
| And I have to apologize to you because life has been crazy over the years. | |
| And I did thank you, but I never really thanked you as much as I should have because when we hear the song in just a moment, we'll hear the amount of work that's gone into this. | |
| So thank you from the bottom of my heart, Rose in Canada. | |
| We've never met, but we know each other digitally, and that's the way the world is these days. | |
| It's only fair for me to just say, you know, ask you, you know, what else are you doing? | |
| Because your life is fascinating right now, you know? | |
| Well, as a producer and a composer, I am working on some other shows as well and helping out other shows that are working towards human-centered awareness and so forth. | |
| I'm also working on an album, Leonti Music. | |
| For anybody that is on Instagram, I'm known as at LeontiMusic. | |
| And I'm getting ready to release a new album. | |
| So that's kind of exciting. | |
| And of course, with the situation of the pandemic, it's actually been a little bit of a blessing in that I finally had some time to come back to studio and think of the work as an artist and as a vocalist and as a producer. | |
| So I'm working at that right now. | |
| And I guess there's never a dull day, Howard. | |
| There's every day. | |
| There's always something to write or something to work on. | |
| As a creative professional, there's always something to be focused on. | |
| I admire people who do music so much because I've got into recording big time, microphones and stuff like that. | |
| That is my point of connection with people like you. | |
| But, you know, it's one thing to speak words, but to actually make something that entertains people in a musical way is just something that I can now. | |
| I mean, I can't sing. | |
| I can't play an instrument. | |
| It's magic to me. | |
| Well, all directions, Howard, had this, when I heard your podcast, it felt like it needed, like, I felt like you were speaking to all of us, to all directions, literally. | |
| And I imagined, like, whenever I look at the stars, Howard, I always feel a deep sense of home. | |
| And I can't recall exactly which show it was, but I remember there was a show that I remember listening to it and coming back to studio and these words just came out. | |
| And I just said, oh, this has to be for Howard. | |
| I really wanted you to have something that you could call your own for the show. | |
| So this was for you. | |
| And you never knew me. | |
| You didn't know me at the time, but it resonates with me in so many ways. | |
| So Rose, thank you so much. | |
| We're going to hear the song now. | |
| And it is such a special thing. | |
| I'd love to get my listeners' thoughts on this, but I think your voice is a kind of mix of Joni Mitchell, maybe a bit of Alanis Morrisette, and a lot of Rose Ryder in there, a.k.a. | |
| Leonti. | |
| Rose, thank you. | |
| Thank you, Howard. | |
| And this is the song that Rose Writer created for me from Canada. | |
| It's called All Directions here on the Unexplained. | |
| This is coming to you with my thanks. | |
| all there is to be is all that I see, then why do I dream the dreams I do? | |
| The space between the touch when time starts for us. | |
| Why do I remember you? | |
| Calling up in all directions. | |
| No shot, let me come in between your radios. | |
| My name is Howard Hughes in London, and this is the unexplained. |