Monsters Myths and Manias

Music to Go Mad By: Satie's Vexations

In 1893 composer Erik Satie wrote Vexations, a dissonant, repetitive and unnerving piano piece that takes up to 24 hours to play. Demonic music that warps the minds of those who played it, a topless cellist, a bra made of televisions and a phial of amphetamine... This is the weird musical history of this piece and the disturbing and uncanny effect it had on its performers... More weird stuff on my website: https://paulweatherhead.com/weird-calderdale-strange-and-horrible-local-history/ [https://paulweatherhead.com/weird-calderdale-strange-and-horrible-local-history/] Sources Gavin Bryars (1983) ‘Vexations and its performers’, Contact: Journal for Contemporary Music, 26, pp.12-20 (p.13) Robert Orledge (1988) ‘Understanding Satie’s ‘Vexations’’, Music & Letters, 79(3) pp. 386-395. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/855366 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/855366] [ [https://paulweatherhead.com/2024/08/16/saties-vexations-weird-musical-history-14/#_ednref3]Steven M Whiting (2010) ‘Serious Immobilities: Musings on Satie’s “Vexations”’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft,  67(4) pp. 310-317

Yorkshire Zombies - The Medieval Dead

Yorkshire in the 1300s was a strange and frightening place. The living dead crawled from their graves, wandered round the lanes and accosted the villagers, at least according to accounts written by an anonymous monk. But these zombies were very different from the gut munchers of modern popular culture, and it wasn’t your brain they were after. So why were the dead shuffling round Yorkshire six centuries ago? What did they want? And how could they be stopped? In this episode of Monsters, Myths and Manias Paul Weatherhead (aka Professor Weird) looks at some of the strange tales from Byland Abbey and teaches you how to survive a medieval zombie attack! Sources: S.R. Young, The Ghosts of Medieval Yorkshire (2023, Pwca Books and Pamphlets) The full text of the ghost stories can be read here: https://www.anselm-classics.com/byland/about.html [https://www.anselm-classics.com/byland/about.html]

Top 5 Cannibal Zombie Movies from the Golden Age of Gut Munching!

In recent decades there have been some fine zombie films, but these mainstream offerings tend to suffer from one fatal flaw: respectability. The zombie films from the golden age (which I’ve taken as being from the late 60s to the early 90s) are different. They are gloriously disreputable, so much so that many were banned in Britain or were only available in editions butchered by the censors.  In this Halloween special, Professor Weird aka Paul Weatherhead guides you through his Top 5 cannibal zombie gut munchers from the golden age of the video nasty!  Further reading: Jamie Russell, Book of the Dead, (Godalming: FAB, 2005)  Jay Slater (ed), Eaten Alive: Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies, (London: Plexus, 2002)

Scared to Death!

In this episode, bizarre and spooky urban legends about ghost hoaxes going wrong and scarring the hapless victim to death!

What did the atheist philosopher see when he died and was brought back to life?

Atheist philosopher A.J. Ayer choked to death on a piece of smoked salmon and had a bizarre vision of the afterlife before being revived... What did he see and did it change his mind?