Going underground with London's most unsettling podcast
Going underground with London's most unsettling podcast
A chat with James Thompson, creator of 'Subterraneans'
It’s a slightly different Monday issue this week. Instead of the usual news-focused issue, we have an interview with the man behind one of our favourite new podcasts, Subterraneans. This is normally the kind of content you’d find in our Wednesday issue, but we think Subterraneans deserves as big an audience as possible, so we’ve bumped this one up.
Before we get on with it, just a quick note to say that we are taking our summer break next week so there will be no LiB after this Saturday until Monday 19th.
We approached the Subterraneans podcast with more than a little cynicism. The blurb describes the show as “a podcast about the underground history of London,” so we were expecting yet another mini Ian Sinclair excitedly reciting the Wikipedia entry for the ‘lost’ River Effra as if he (and it’s always a he) had just discovered the bloody thing himself.
Instead, what we got was something altogether more strange, entertaining and enthralling. We don’t want to say too much here, because half the fun of Subterraneans is the experience of ‘getting it’ for yourself.
In fact, If you’re yet to hear it, then you should go and listen to an episode or two and then come back to this interview. The episodes are all around twenty minutes long and all great, but the two we’d recommend are episode 4 of season 1, which is (ostensibly) about the ‘super basements’ of Kensington and Hampstead:
And this more recent episode from season five about the mutant deer of Richmond Park:
A few weeks ago we tracked down the creator of Subterraneans, ‘James Thompson’ to ask him what the hell he thought he was playing at and what terrible things had happened to him to warp his mind to such a degree.
You’re not London born and bred are you James? You mention in one of the episodes that you have a slight ‘outsider’ approach to the city.
I grew up in Essex, in one of the commuter towns. I moved here probably ten years ago now, but I’ve been visiting pretty much my entire life and most of my relatives are from London. It sounds really corny when I put it like this, but because I grew up on the main line up to London, the city has always been like the end of the rainbow for me. It’s where stuff actually happens!
Even though moving to London was the result of me always wanting to be here, you can hear in the show that I also have a distance from it. The London I’m writing about is not a flat text to me. It’s not a straightforward place that is easy to understand. It’s always a little distant and I want to keep that sense of magic and changeability to how I experience the city. I want to play with the history of London, but make it feel a bit alien again, to play with things like folklore and urban legends.
Well, my next question was going to be about why you chose this route. A podcast about London isn’t exactly untrodden territory so you must have been confident you had something new to offer.
I’m interested in finding what’s real about the stories we tell each other and the stories we tell ourselves, rather than necessarily finding new ‘real’ things. I don't think I’m going to find anything's particularly new about London. It’s all been so well written about, and there’s always someone who’ll have found something before me. But what I want to do is find a new way into the subject, to find a new way to talk about it.
It sounds like you were almost setting yourself a challenge to see if you could make these stories strange or exciting to yourself all over again?
I think that’s definitely part of it. I have all my writing for the show in one, huge Google document and the first line I wrote in that was “Concept: Overproduced NPR-style podcast about cryptids, told with complete sincerity.” That’s not necessarily what the show is now, but that’s what I wanted to do. I enjoy tricks and pranks, and what I want to create is something where it’s hard to tell at what point I’m being completely sincere and at what point I’m delving into something which is more ‘emotionally real’.
The thing I want to stress though is that I do a lot of research for this show. There is a lot of genuine, factual stuff in there. In fact I often delve really deep into the subjects I’m talking about and find stuff that I don’t necessarily end up putting into the show because I think that makes it more interesting.
I think it’s much more fun if I start talking about Roman settlements and how the walls of London were originally built… And then I talk about the ancient giant’s bones that they buried underneath them!
You obviously have a fascination with the more folkloric, mythical side of the city. Were you confident that territory could provide you with enough material to create something new?
I’m going to be a bit evasive about this, but I have a day job that I sometimes feel guilty about. It’s not the worst in the world. I’m not like an evil banker or anything like that, but I have a day job that I sometimes feel a little morally conflicted about.
I think that’s quite common if you work in the Square Mile or in London in general even. I think there's a lot of jobs here that, even if you don't feel morally conflicted, you're thinking “At a certain point, people are going to realise I'm a fraud and this is a fake job that I'm doing.”
Which is my way of saying that I think it’s really important to explore the horror and the darkness at the heart of the city and yet also find moments of hope in it.
I should also say, my show is also a political project…
That’s what excited me most about it! Of course there’s the core stories you’re telling in the show but the thing that really sets Subterraneans apart is the political, socio-economic themes that you thread through it. At the risk of sounding patronising, it feels like a very fresh, millennial take on a subject matter which has been been previously done to death. Was that something you set out to do from the beginning or did it just creep in there?
It's definitely something I set out to do.
I saw Nope the other day and I was thinking that thing I really admire about Jordan Peele is he understands what he’s trying to communicate, and it’s so upfront in everything that he writes. Now I don't want to compare myself to Jordan Peele, but when I think about writing horror I think about that classic trope that says ‘Once you’ve removed the horror, what’s left?'. If you remove the slasher then what’s scary about this situation? That’s what I'm thinking about when I’m writing.
The horror in Subterraneans is the horror of isolation and late capitalism and feeling like, as I often do, that I am trapped in this giant machine that is bleeding to death.
I wrote the first episode in a fugue state in 2019. I just had to get it out of me. I had the full thing in my head so I just sat down and wrote it in an afternoon and it was good to go. If you go back and listen to the first episode you’ll hear that I’m speaking at this incredible speed and that’s because I was losing my mind.
You’re right, that feeling of despair and immediacy comes very much from that fact that I am a millennial. I went through university during a financial crisis, I graduated to a Tory government, the student loans tripled and every time we’ve tried to get anyone who I felt even slightly hopeful about into political power it's been crushed in the most merciless way I could imagine. It’s impossible for me not to weave that into my work.
Season two of the show is hard for me to listen to because I wrote it after the 2019 election and I was just in complete despair. It's a really bleak season of me trying to find moments of hope in a city that I love, even as I felt it kicking me in the teeth over and over again.
Sometimes I do find hope. I think there are moments of hope in horror and I think you have to go to some pretty dark places sometimes to find them. That’s what I’m writing.
Do you have to go out and really dig for the subjects of your stories or, at this point, do you find them just presenting themselves to you?
I do have a strong group of friends who, when they see something silly online, send it to me. But a lot of what I write about comes from things I stumble across in my day job and in the course of my life. I am shamelessly, in the psychogeographic tradition, just walking around the city, spotting things that might be interesting; and then sometimes doing a bunch of research and sometimes just writing whatever I want about it!
A lot of things have just fallen into my lap. The underground shopping episode (below) came about because I was reading a lot about 90s rave culture and just listening to a lot of old jungle music as well as reading Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie and thinking about hauntology and that feeling you get in rave music and the work of someone like Burial. All of that led to me wanting to write something that had some of that feeling in it.
Speaking of music, you produce all the music in the show yourself, right? Was that something you were doing anyway or something you had to do when you started the podcast?
It’s something I do for fun anyway. A lot of the music you hear in the show I wrote when I was 15 or 16. It’s me being deeply anhedonic on the family computer and writing these long, structureless noise tracks with whatever I had nearby. then distorting them in Audacity and making them sound horrible.
All my friends wanted to be in indie bands and I wanted to be Merzbow I think, which was not really achievable for a kid in the suburbs! I revisited a lot of that horrible, 15-year-old noise music when I was making the show and realised I’d been making horror movie soundtracks.
What’s the plan for Subterraneans? Have you got one or it a case of just seeing where it goes next?
I'm really just seeing where this goes. I have a handful of very kind people who support me on Patreon but it’s not a full-time job. I’ve had several people ask me why I’m not promoting the show more, but my question to them is ‘how do I promote this weird thing?’. I don't know how to promote this thing at all but I do find the fact that it's small and niche gives me a lot of freedom to write whatever I want and just follow my instincts without worrying.
Obviously, I think I would love it if it blew up and it became a day job, but right now I am enjoying it just as it is.
Subterraneans is available to listen to on Stitcher, Apple podcasts, Soundcloud and YouTube.
You can support the podcast through Patreon.
Follow Subterraneans on Twitter.
Coming up on Wednesday 🎥
In our paid issue this week it’s the next instalment of our Electric Theatre column, in which we invite some of our favourite people to write about London on film. This month the artist, writer and filmmaker, Nick Stewart gets to grips with Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film, Blow-Up.
5 little bits
Six members of Extinction Rebellion have been arrested after a protest at the Houses of Parliament on Friday. Four protesters who glued themselves around the speaker’s chair were ‘de-bonded’ with “no damage to the speaker’s chair,” and arrested along with another who had climbed onto scaffolding outside parliament and one who had “glued himself to the pavement inside parliamentary premises”.
In the early hours of Sunday morning, freeclimber Adam Lockwood scaled the outside of The Shard before posting a palm sweat-inducing selfie at the top… and then he was arrested too.
Time Out have put Deptford High Street at number 17 in their ‘33 coolest streets in the world’ list, so the BBC took a trip to try and find out what makes it so ‘cool’. P.S. In case you missed it, in July we published an essay about the changing face of Deptford by the photographer, Jonathan Hall.
Those Camberwell Green rats we told you about in Saturday’s roundup have gone and got themselves their own Instagram account.
A new statue “finally celebrating” the London life of WB Yeats will be erected in Bedford Park tomorrow. The Guardian takes a look at what took them so long.