We asked Niall Grimes to give us a run down of his favourite podcasts that he has recorded, since he started the popular 'Jam Crack' series last year.
Do you ever meet somebody – well, not even meet them necessarily, even just be in the same room as them or see them hanging out with other people at Fontainebleau or something like that – and take an instant unredeemable dislike to them? A deep, instinctual turn-off from their demeanour and look, so that right there and then you decide you will never like them nor most likely even bring yourself to look them in the eye?
I get that. And over the years it has been my depressing realisation that the people who spark this reaction in me the most will, upon closer examination, come to reveal themselves as the people who remind me of me?
So rest assured: I have many annoying habits, and these annoy nobody as much as they annoy me. Foremost amongst these is the habit for a stupid idea to get lodged in my brain – so lodged, in fact, that I eventually have to act on it. These are generally elaborate wastes of money and huge amounts of time and effort. Examples of this include my old Ape Index slide shows in Sheffield in the winters of 2000/2001, my national bouldering guidebook, Boulder Britain, and my career as a writer for climbing magazines.
"That seems like fun," I thought to myself, then immediately laughed as my experience of such ventures reminded me that, No, they are tons of hard work for which you somehow scrape together the motivation to carry on with in the face of dispiriting actions. So I thought, No way, wise up.
And did I? Of course not. The notion of doing a UK-based version niggled away at me. Last October, at a memorial event to a recently-deceased friend, Ben Winston, I was talking to Sophie Heason. I talked about the notion.
"You should do it then," she said. There and then, my heart sank: I knew I was going to.
There followed huge amounts of internet research into things I knew nothing about: microphones, post-production, website creation, hosting, recording techniques. Utter nightmare. But it all came together last November and it launched.
Jam Crack Podcast aims to put out interviews with interesting climber cats as well as put classic climbing literature out into the spoken world. Check it all out on my website. Subscribe on iTunes. Spread the word on Facebook and Twitter. Alternatively, don't do any of that shit: I don't own you.
To get you started, here's a few my personal favourites.
Tommy Caldwell
I caught TC at the Kendal Mountain Festival in 2015. This was my second podcast, the first I did with a big time climbing celeb (he had not long since did the Dawn Wall) and the first time to interview someone I had never me. It was the second of these which gave the interview he edge.
With a podcast you don't have that much warm-up time as it needs to be listenable from the word Go, or else people might tune out. I had arranged with Tommy's 'handler' to get half an hour. This really isn't long enough, so I got Tommy into a small art room and locked the door.
My plan n these interviews is not to have a plan, to try to let the conversation take care of itself, so it always feels that the first few minutes are crucial as this is what will set the tone for the remaining hour or whatever.
With TC this worked really well, and it turned into a great chat. This was mainly fuelled by the fact that Tommy was really cool and chatty. For instance, I later interviewed Alex Honnold, the other big-time celeb, and compared the two. In Alex's there was very little of him asking me about me – no doubt because he has the life interviewed out of him – but with Tommy it felt a lot more to-and-fro. Fun chat, fun guy.
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