Pick of the podcasts: Hear Her Voice, Heidiworld, Untold Killing

Hear Her Voice

Apple, Google, Spotify etc

It’s not easy being a woman in the music industry.

While Bob Dylan and Neil Young field questions about politics and their poetic influences, women, have to field queries about what clothes they’re wearing and when they’re going to have a baby.

Hear Her Voice aims to correct that imbalance in the genders. This is a podcast which speaks to women in music and celebrates their artistry and talent.

Laura Whitmore and her guests explore the female experience via the songs, albums, lyrics, and creative output of trailblazing female recording artists.

Recently Scotland’s own Lauren Mayberry, of the sublime Chvrches, spoke to Whitmore about being dropped into a world where she was viewed differently to her male bandmates. “I was not prepared for what was going to happen,” she explained.

“And then I got really panicked and paranoid that this kind of separation was going to happen to me. In early interviews, they would ask Ian and Martin how they write everything and they would ask me about hair products.

“I’d think why do I spend all my time doing this if this is what it’s going to be?”

Mayberry has always been a sharp presence. Battling with the expectation of being a woman with the pressures it brings with regards to how she looks is something with which she struggled, and still does.

“At the first Chvrches gigs, I’d put on face paint, and I love Annie Lennox and Grace Jones and Karen O, and all those women who use those things as part of their art, like your physicality is part of your art,” she added.

“But then I became conscious other people were saying, ‘Oh, well, your physical appearance…they’re not taking it as part of your performance. It’s because you’re a woman. Then your body is a think. That’s something that I’ve had to work on a lot because I don’t know how to sit with certain parts of it.”

Heidiworld

Apple

Ambitious LA girl Heidi Fleiss rose to become a “Hollywood Madam” in the early ’90s.
Ultimately she became a victim at the hands of American sexual hypocrisy. A kaleidoscopic look at sex, drugs, glamour and corruption in Los Angeles.

Untold Killing

Apple, Google, Spotify

Over the course of a mid-Summer week in 1995, more than 8,000 men and boys were systematically killed in a small Bosnian town, Srebrenica. Untold Killing tells the little-known story of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the heart of Europe through the voices of survivors.