To A Little Radio / (Words Flew) Right Around The World

Album: The Boy Bands Have Won (2008)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song features the Charlie Cake marching band from Leeds, where Chumbawamba also hail from.
  • "To A Little Radio" was written by Bertold Brecht as he reached exile from the Nazi regime in 1933 and listened daily for news of the war. The line, "Bert told Brecht. Brecht told Bert" was taken from a poem by Leeds poet Ronald Arthur Dewhirst. They wrote "Right Around The World" especially for a performance at the annual Brecht Festival in his birthplace, Augsburg.

    Prophetically, in 1926 Brecht said, "Radio is one-sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him." >>
    Suggestion credit:
    Martin - Rostock, Germany, for above 2

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