James:
I'm in England right now in Cambridge. I'm not from Cambridge. I've spent my entire adult life abroad, save for a few years. I first lived in the Czech Republic for, what was it, 3 years. It was a few trips. And China mostly. I was in China for a decade. Zhuhai my first year, and then I was in Beijing for a long time and Guangzhou for the last few years. Now I've moved back to my home country.
Steph:
Tell the listeners about your podcast.
James:
There's a mixtape for every year of recorded sound, starting with the first year, which is kind of 1853 and going through to now. So I'm using music. It's going to be most years, it's, let's say, 80% music, but also bits of speech. So I use bits of speech from news, from films, from TV, from anywhere, really. Any sound recorded in that year can go into the mix, working my way forward. I got to 1920 so far, and I'm also making contemporary ones at the end of every year. Currently working on 2018, which should be out in January.
Steph:
What inspired you to start this?
James:
I don't know. I've just always been kind of immersed in music. I don't make music as a musician or anything, but I've always been playing records and things, and I found mixtapes from when I was like 7 or 8 years old I was making. So I think it's kind of been something I've done all the time. And I had, I bought a computer when I was in Prague from a friend who was leaving, and it had a program called Cool Edit on there. And I started kind of making mixes in this program, Cool Edit, which turned into Adobe Audition later. I got to Beijing, so this is like 2007. I started hearing some podcasts, and the podcast I was hearing is a music podcast where they played music. So I thought, okay, I can do that as well. And I started making— it was a previous podcast, it was called Last Night a DJ Killed My Dog. So they'd be on themes. So instead of by years, they'd be theme-based. And those are still all up on the internet. Say the same thing, but based around a theme. So the first one was like numbers and counting, like songs with numbers and counting in them. Second one was breakfast. It was like going through waking up and breakfast time. The thing in China is I was isolated from music. Like when I was in England and when I was in the Czech Republic, like music was what I weird going to see bands and knowing bands and there being like a music scene, especially when after I got married in China, there's nothing I could do or go to. So I had to kind of make something by myself. You know, there's always the internet, there's always people out there who want to hear stuff, even if you don't know anyone in your city. That's a way of connecting to people over music.
Steph:
You've got your internetness, your onlineness in the UK before you left.
James:
You know, my mother, well, she's retired now, but she's a computer science lecturer in university. So in the '90s, I would go into the university and use the internet, and it was painfully slow. Like '95 or something, I was making a fanzine for my favorite band at that time, and I was kind of trying to look at web pages to get the equivalent of that. So I just, yeah, searched my favorite bands and stuff would come up. You'd sit there for 10 minutes watching the one page load.
Steph:
I remember those days. Just for a reference point, when did you leave the UK to go live overseas? What year Was that—
James:
it was kind of 2001, let's say, although I came back and then I left for good in 2002.
Steph:
When did you return to the UK? How recent was that?
James:
2016 is when we moved back to the UK.
Steph:
So we're basically talking about 2002 to 2016, it sounds like.
James:
Yeah. So like 14 years. When I was in Prague, I was just writing this blog all the time and all my friends were kind of as well, but I was taking it more seriously. I was writing something every day. And there was a magazine called the Prague Compass and they were just setting up, they just put out their first issue and they said, we want an expat blogger to be our diary writer for the magazine. I was like, okay, I can do that. I didn't really have much work then and I didn't really have, I was technically homeless for about a month when I joined that. I say technically, I wasn't like sleeping in the streets or anything, but I didn't really have like a place to stay at that point. And I met the editor and he, well, the owner really, he I think he felt sorry for me and just gave me a job doing that for his magazine. Yeah, so I was running half of their website after a month or so because he didn't really know what to do with it. And so it was called PragueNet and— Wow.
Steph:
Was it mostly travel stuff?
James:
He was a businessy guy and he wanted— it's awful to think about, but our main advertiser was basically a brothel in the magazine. And I would be writing these like funny reviews of things and he's like, no, that's not suitable. That's not going to go in there. That's not good. Write about my friends' bars and strange music. He's like, no, we're a lifestyle magazine. I don't want that. So it didn't really work out in the end.
Steph:
When you were doing your live journaling, when you first got to Prague, what were you writing about on the blogs?
James:
Just everything happens to me day to day. It was such a big kind of adventure. It's kind of amazing time in my life. I just wanted to get it down because I'd always written diaries. It was a bit self-indulgent, to be fair. It wasn't really, I wouldn't talk about anything apart from just what I was doing myself, basically. I never had any like journalism training, but I had to write articles about stuff. So I was kind of interviewing people like in the bar that I knew about a topic for the next month, things like that. So I had to kind of shift my ideas a bit.
Steph:
Yeah. 2002 is pretty early. Were you on a lot of websites or any forums or anything like that when you were first in the Czech Republic? Or actually, anytime during those 3 years in the Czech Republic?
James:
I don't know if it's still going. Expats.cz, that was the big site. And I met the guy who was running it. And there was a newspaper called the Prague Pill, which was for expats at that time. There was artist people. It was a really kind of artistic community there, but that didn't work in business terms. So it was kind of, that newspaper folded kind of straight away. All the new stuff coming in was, it was for the upmarket expat crowd. So especially that expats.cz website, he was trying to take the other side of it. And I've kind of found that throughout everywhere I've been, basically, that there's, there's the arty community making stuff. And they are kind of, I don't want to say doomed to failure, but it's, it's kind of sad. Those things always seem to fold. And it's the, the newspaper that's catering to the, the business people who've come over, who've got like huge amounts of money to spend. That's, that's who the advertisers want to get to. All the expat portals I've seen kind of seem to go in that direction sooner or later. Yeah.
Steph:
Well, cause you have to, they have to keep it going somehow. That must be why some folks are starting to do like Patreons and memberships and things like that in lieu of the, that advertising. I don't know if that's working any better, but you have a Patreon, don't you?
James:
I do. And I can actually get some money for stuff I've created, which is the first time since Prague, actually. That's a long time I haven't been paid for writing or making anything.
Steph:
So when you went back to the UK in 2016, what was the most surprising difference that you found when you were doing stuff online?
James:
You know, the whole reverse culture shock thing, and it does exist, and it is a big thing, and I'm trying to separate the online part of that. I stayed in touch on on like WeChat for quite a while and I didn't really get up to date with like apps and things here. I sent out messages saying, how does it work in England? What should I be on? And people were like, oh, Instagram these days. So I tried to do it from time to time, but I just, yeah, it's a hassle. You can't make links on there. I just want to link everything to my website. I don't want to be creating stuff for somebody else's website. That fuck feels kind of annoying. I guess I've got into Twitter, although I hate it as well. I've created an account for my Centuries of Sound thing, and I like to go on there. I just follow sound engineers and podcasters, and it's lovely. And my normal Twitter is just— there's a few arguments that have torn apart everyone I knew on there, and it's just—
Steph:
No, like political arguments or something? Yeah. Oh my gosh.
James:
Yeah. I mean, I have some friends who are transgender and some other friends who are, uh, kind of old-school feminists who, uh, I guess you call them TERFs now. I was like, I'm not going to take a side, I'm just going to mute it. And I, of course, I had to take a side.
Steph:
Okay, I'm very out of touch. What in the world is a TERF?
James:
Uh, trans-exclusionary radical feminist.
Steph:
What the heck is that?
James:
Radical feminists who who are against transgender people. What? Yeah, this is, this is the scandal of, uh, Twitter in the last couple of years in the UK. Yeah, I know that was the thing to adapt to, was this— there's a lot of politics on every social media in the UK, and like even people you think are going to be friends are not friends with each other.
Steph:
Yeah, I've heard about this a lot on Facebook where like family, friends, like people at a moment's notice, if something like this comes up, they're just like gone.
James:
There's been like a lot of political things like this. I fortunately, my family who are online all agree with me about most things politically. So it hasn't had to be any kind of, you know, the online equivalent of the awkward Christmas or Thanksgiving kind of thing. Though I did have some from when I was traveling. In various places. I went around Southeast Asia one time. You know, I do the thing, I go to one city and I meet people in a hostel and then I travel with them to the next city. So I have lots of friends from all over the world on Facebook and stuff from that. And especially, it was 2016, you know, so there was Brexit and then there was the US election in 2016. And some of the Americans I'd made friends with traveling around Southeast Asia, I kind of had to unfriend on Facebook because I couldn't read that stuff. That was the big difference. The internet was kind of innocent and apolitical in China.
And it's been like this huge, just everything is politics since I got there. There's a forum that I should have been using for ages because it's people who are very interested in music and music journalists and writers, not in the kind of in-depth music writers, things like that. And I've been spending a lot of time on there and they talk about politics all the time as well. So I'm lucky. That I'm on there, people kind of, I can discuss it with. I don't need to watch what I'm saying on there because people basically agree with me about things. My other Twitter account, I go between giving up on it because it's all arguments there and then just going in and joining in with the arguments, especially just before an election right now. It's so dominating. Everything is about that. Everything on Facebook, everything on Twitter.
Steph:
Are you watching all of this happen or are you doing a social media blackout until Thursday?
James:
I'm watching it happen. I don't know. We're in a very weird state right now of, I guess, social media is better than TV and better than, like, I hate to say that, better than the BBC right now. Yeah, I think if I didn't have that, I'd have a very blinkered view of what was going on, really. I think it's only because of that that you can kind of get a good view of what's going on in the country. You could try to not be involved in politics, but I had to get a visa for my wife to come to the UK, and that's, first of all, that puts you right in there with politics because immigration is this It's like a big topic in the UK right now. And we have, I mean, people kind of, you know, the US immigration policy is kind of famous and about how it works, but we don't have birthright citizenship in the UK. We don't have, if you're married to a British person, you can't get a visa even. You have to be married for 5 years before you can get a visa even. It's much more restrictive than most places in the world, people don't realize quite how bad it is. Yeah, people get deported all the time. Just, there's a woman who was Cambridge University and she went to do a project in studying something in India and they said, you've been out of the UK too long. And they refused to let her come back. Yeah, there's plenty of things like that.
Steph:
I wasn't in China till 2010, so I'm not sure what the internet was like here then. What was, what was internet access like?
James:
Much better. Stuff wasn't blocked. Firewall was non-existent, but it was— there was one time in 2000, end of 2006, when I was first there, where there was an earthquake, an undersea earthquake, and it cut off the cable between Taiwan and the USA. And literally you couldn't access non-Chinese sites for a while, for a few weeks, if you can imagine that. But yeah, that was the one time. But like Facebook, you could go on Facebook, you could go on Google, you could go on— I had a student in Beijing who was working at MySpace headquarters in Beijing, and he was one of the guys organizing MySpace in China, which was going fine. I don't know if they even bothered blocking MySpace. They've tried reboots a few times. But when there was the MySpace era and that, that was all fully available. That was all free. When they started to block things, I think, I forget what it was. There was a website called Anonymouse. It is kind of like you could just redirect, so it just changes the URL and you could just use any website. It was very easy. So it was fine using these things. It was just slow. You couldn't stream video from the UK or America, no way. But it was fine. As far as things you were actually using. When did it start becoming difficult?
Steph:
2009-ish, because we got here and it wasn't blocked, and during the year we were here, then it got blocked. So it must have been between 2009, 2010.
James:
I think you could use Google until like 2014 or something like that.
Steph:
It was a very slow block, and we were still using a free VPN at that point, and it gave us access to everything. So, I mean, it wasn't very It wasn't very efficient block yet.
James:
I remember it, that the VPNs had lots more trouble, like it's 2014, I think was a time when suddenly you couldn't use free VPNs. They didn't work at all. And the paid ones, you had to keep getting like updates. You'd be offline for a week or something. I remember those, that, that was when I left. It was in that kind of state. I think for big companies it's still okay though, isn't it? They've got their private connections that just kind of—
Steph:
they do. Yeah.
James:
Tunnels.
Steph:
Yeah. But yeah, for now.
James:
Uh, cause I worked for work for EF and everything's coming from Boston. You log onto this Boston server and it's just bizarre. It's, yeah, everything's kind of running from there.
Steph:
Okay. So when you moved to China, there was free access. What were you doing online? Was it still a lot of reading the news or?
James:
I had a weird food blog. It was called FoodTube and it sounds like it's YouTube, but it's pre-YouTube actually, because it's 2006. I did, it wasn't videos. It was just, I I'd go around Zhuhai finding weirdest food, take photos of it and eat it and review it. I could find lots of really weird food. This was all still on LiveJournal, so it got some attention at that point. I don't know if I want to publicize that too much because I feel a bit weird about some things I ate now.
Steph:
Is it still online?
James:
It's still online. Oh no. You can find that, I'm sure. I don't know if LiveJournal is— what's happened to it recently. It's, it's, it's been bought by a Russian company and, um, yeah, that was ages ago as well, but it's probably still there. FoodTube, LiveJournal. I, I dog on there one time and that was very controversial and I, I found out some things about it afterwards and I feel like I shouldn't have done that now. So, um, that was kind of the end of doing that. There's a photo I think I've removed of the rat's foot. Um, I didn't want to be existing anymore.
Steph:
Oh. Oh, that doesn't seem safe.
James:
Yeah.
Steph:
Did you eat the rats?
James:
I didn't eat the foot. It was in Guilin. They had bamboo rat, which I think is technically not a rat, but it's a rodent, that's for sure. And it's disgusting.
Steph:
Okay. Yeah. Well, it's mostly the disease part of the rats and stuff that's dangerous. I don't know.
James:
Well, I definitely don't do that now.
Steph:
But it's easy to— when you come from the West and how sanitized we look at food, and then you come to the East where they eat a lot of different kinds of things and different parts of the animals that we don't. It's easy to go, that's really weird to everything.
James:
I found some food that would freak out Chinese people that I'd eat at home. If you tell people about live oysters, then they can't believe you foreigners eat live oysters. But yeah, it's like I would never eat anything that's alive. It's like, yeah, that's actually— I did, and it's not that weird for me. I don't know. I think actually most English people don't like live oysters.