Cursed Objects hits 100,000 downloads

Here's a chord, here's another, here's a third: now start a podcast

Yup, that’s me — wearing a Van Gogh ‘sunflowers’ bucket hat to the general derision of those around me — you’re probably wondering how I got myself into this situation. Well. Three and a half years ago, my friend Kasia Tee became Dr Kasia Tee, and upon completion of her PhD, facing down the barrel of the university jobs market, asked me what she should do. You should start a history podcast! I said, thinking of a great BBC radio programme she had presented. She said, uhh maybe: but I’m not doing it on my own.

Six months later, in April 2021, we anxiously launched Cursed Objects into the world, with an episode about house plants — which was both a) about house plants, but b) also about the colonial origins of Kew Gardens, the precariousness of domestic space in an age of rentier capitalism, why millennials always get such a bad rap, and much else besides.

The idea was to turn our pub conversations about material culture (ie THINGS, tat, stuff), and how they relate to historical memory, pop culture, social history and consumer capitalism into something sharper and more focused. ‘Cultural Studies, but with jokes’. How do everyday objects, found in charity shops, on eBay, or anywhere else really, help us tell the story of the social, cultural and political worlds around them?

Suffice it to say, we did not plan to make it to 63 episodes, 100+ Patrons, and, as of last week, to our delight, to 100,000 downloads. The photo at the top is from our first ever Cursed Objects live event, a few weeks ago at Birkbeck Uni — which was based on four objects bought from museum and gallery gift shops; it was a joyous evening, and completely sold out. The recording will be uploaded for our beloved Patreon subscribers very soon. Here is our designer Archie Bashford’s magnificent poster for the event, containing both Kasia and I, and a number of our cursed objects, hidden around the room.

I was initially a bit sheepish about being the 748th middle-class white male journalist to start their own podcast — it is deeply Your Boyfriend territory, to start a DIY lefty cultural studies podcast with Walter Benjamin as an unofficial mascot — but I will now defend it to the hilt; to the point that I’m now rather evangelical about it. Yes, there’s a lot of under-researched, under-produced, unoriginal crap out there: lukewarm takes that sound like they’ve been recorded in a washing machine that is for some reason also situated in a swimming pool. But it’s also a fantastically accessible DIY medium with wide-ranging creative potential, and offers some of the same democratising “citizen journalist” possibilities as the blogosphere did in the 2000s.

The tools to make a high-quality sounding podcast are surprisingly accessible, and while they’re not completely free, our mic cost about £100, Audacity editing software is free, and our annual Podbean subscription is about £80 — via which, Cursed Objects is instantaneously distributed to Spotify, iTunes, and the rest.

In spite of this, the seemingly unstoppable growth of the big-money podcast media — hosted by celebs, and/or distributed via legacy media orgs like newspapers, magazines and broadcasters — threaten to drown out a lot of the DIY efforts. What’s that you say, a C-list comedian has started a podcast where they interview other C-list comedians about their favourite spoon? Brilliant. Meanwhile Skeletor and Lex Luthor are launching ‘The Rest is Supervillainy’, where they reach across the political aisle to offer listeners their unique insights and anecdotes — and maybe even a few laughs! — drawn from their time shouting “Guards! Seize him!” from the battlements of a haunted castle? Cool.

So as we unexpectedly reach 100,000 downloads, I would like to use this milestone to call upon more people to start their own DIY podcasts — if you’ve got a strong idea, and good rapport, honestly the rest is easy; learning to use Audacity took us very little time at all. (Although thanks all the same to our sound guru Mr Beatnick and friends of the pod Samira Shackle and Bad Gays’ Huw Lemmey for offering us advice at the start.)

I did a very trad undergraduate degree in history, in which we read books, books, occasionally some journals, and then some more books — which is all very well, but the idea that you can read the past through everyday objects, not to mention films, TV, interior design, fashion, pop songs or what people were buying in the shops, still feels refreshing and novel to me. Something I find myself quoting with great frequency, and which is pertinent to both Cursed Objects and the election now underway, is this paragraph from a Jeremy Gilbert blog, written at 3am on election night 2015, after realising that once again, in spite of what the polls had hinted, the Tories were going to win:

Forget opinion polls. You get a better sense of what’s going on in the electorate by sniffing the wind, sensing the affective shifts, the molecular currents, the alterations in the structures of feeling. Listen to the music, watch the TV, go to the the pubs and ride the tube. Cultural Studies trumps psephology every time.

Obviously no-one has to make a definitive choice between the ‘hard science’ of polling data and the rather more vibes-based approach of Cultural Studies — why not both? — but there is certainly a great deal of fun to be had in trying to tease out the ‘molecular currents’ of the world we live in, using the things that are nearest to hand. Making Cursed Objects is without doubt the most consistently enjoyable thing I do for work. So thank you to Kasia for dragging me into this, and here’s to the next 63 episodes and the next 100,000 downloads. Thanks for listening — and thanks especially to the Patrons who are helping make it sustainable for me and Kasia by chipping in £4 a month, it really makes all the difference. And if you haven’t heard Cursed Objects, here are a few episodes from the archive. Now start your own!