Sam Walsh

April 2024
My second episode with Stories From Round Our Way is out now! I speak with firefighter Craig Hope about how climate change is affecting the wildfire seasons in the South Wales valleys.

March 2024
I've been working with Round Our Way on some stories for a while, and I'm proud to be able to finally share them! It's community storytelling - personal stories about climate change in the UK. The first episode of an ongoing audio series is out today, in which Gloucester farmer Debbie Wilkins shares her story dealing with the changes in weather in the last few years.

January 2024
I had the privilege of working with Second Step's community rehabilitation service in Bristol to make a podcast with their creative writing group. Check it out here.

September 2023
I'm currently working on a new audio series called Auto-Tape: the aim is to release the first episodes before the end of the year.

In the meantime, if you've not been keeping up with The Space Between the Notes, recent episodes include conversations with Buck Meek (of Big Thief fame), Neil Halstead (Slowdive), Romy, Karly Hartzman (Wednesday), Meg Remy (US Girls), and Kelcey and Taylor from Local Natives. We've covered a ton of ground: topics include the relationship between emotions and the environment, surfing with luminescent dolphins, and tour bus fires!

I'm also starting a monthly playlist called 'sammy goodsongs' for fans of The Space Between the Notes: 10-15 songs I've loved in the past month or so.

More soon, playlist below...

April 2023
The first episode of Bedroomdisco's official podcast 'The Space Between the Notes' is now live if you want to hear me powwow with Indigo De Souza and/or Jessie Ware.

April 2023
Had the privilege of interviewing Karly Hartzman from Wednesday about their outstanding new record Rat Saw God. Read the transcript at Bedroomdisco.de and watch this space for news about a podcast release featuring Karly, Indigo de Souza, Jessie Ware and others!

March 2023
The first episode of The Folk House Podcast is live! It's a series dedicated to stories written by students of writing courses at the Bristol Folk House. The first episode is themed around the sea, with stories written and performed by students of Grace Palmer's winter 2022 short story course.

February 2023
I was lucky enough to talk to Meg Remy of US Girls for Bedroomdisco. An all time favourite interview - we talked about her new album Bless This Mess, recording while pregnant with twins, embodiment, and the importance of humour. This one may be part of a podcast launch so keep your eyes out for that!

January 2023
I've launched a Substack! It's called Halcyon Digest and you can find it here. The first piece is about music and healing, with a focus on Duval Timothy's album Meeting with a Judas Tree. Like, subscribe, and all that, por favor!

January 2023
Spoke to one of my favourite guys, Noah Weinman from Runnner, about his upcoming album Like dying stars, we're reaching out. Check out the interview on Bedroomdisco.de: we talk about production style, favourite books, and the food-lyric.

December 2022
Had the privilege of interviewing Mish Barber-Way about her band White Lung's fifth and final album, Premonition.

December 2022
I produced two pieces, curated and managed 6 hours of content for Subtext's End of Year special broadcast on Threads Radio

November 2022
Proud to have my Vehicular Solutions episode of You Are Invited included as part of The Empathy Museum's Bristol: City of Activism series.

October 2022
Was fortunate enough to interview Frankie Cosmos for Bedroomdisco! We discussed, among other things, the current trend of food and cooking based lyrics in DIY rock. Read here.

September 2022
Episodes 3 & 4 of You Are Invited are finally done! They are the first two parts of a miniseries called Listening Posts, which focuses on shame in contemporary culture. Voices featured include international writer and speaker Mac Macartney, one of the founders of the survivor-run organisation SLEEC, Roman Catholic priest Rev. Richard McKay, and a doctor undertaking humanitarian work in Seirra Leone. Listen here!

July 2022
I've been doing a ton of artist interviews for Bedroomdisco over the past few months. Some of my favourites include the wonderfully thoughtful Tomberlin and my beloved Alex G! You can find them all here.

May 2022
I've released the second episode of my podcast You Are Invited. This one is in collaboration with The Empathy Museum as part of their series on activism. It features lots of vehicle-dwellers and travellers, and I got to visit the wonderful Rockaway Park!

March 2022
Had the pleasure of speaking with the inspiring Jenny Hval about the boundaries between fiction and memoir, her relationship with performance, and her new album Classic Objects for Bedroomdisco.

March 2022
I interviewed Tamara Lindeman from The Weather Station about her new album How Is It I Should Look At The Stars for Bedroomdisco.

February 2022
I produced the pilot episode of my new podcast You Are Invited: snippets of the interior worlds of neurodivergent subjects, from the disturbing to the sublime.

I'm really proud of this first piece - a personal account of psychosis, featuring a first hand account of the 2016 Bastille Day attack.

February 2022
A version of the following was published in Hub Magazine:

During the Q&A portion of Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir: Part II screening at The Watershed in Bristol last week, an excited young filmmaker took to the mic to show her appreciation of the director’s work. She struggled to express herself or find the right words to say and, in the end, clammed up and couldn’t from a question for her idol at all. I imagine she was mortified – she was clearly inspired and overcome with nervous energy – and I’m not writing to shame her. I don’t believe I’ve ever contributed anything worthwhile or thoughtful to Q&A discussions, usually because I’m afraid of exactly that scenario: not being able to communicate the thing that a work of art has made me feel; failing to say anything original or interesting; and especially being seen to fail to communicate or be unoriginal. Basically, I don’t want to feel shame. We all have moments like the one I’m imagining this person experienced, where we make ourselves vulnerable and it doesn’t pay off. These moments are often seared onto our memory, and we will be lucky if we can let ourselves forget them.

The Souvenir: Part II is a film comprised almost entirely of moments like these. The protagonist Julie (played by the skilfully subdued Honor Swinton Byrne) is struggling to make a film about an abusive relationship that ended in the death of her partner Anthony (Tom Burke). It is film school in 1980s London, and the language of her world is lofty, elliptical, and vague – often functioning to obscure insecurity rather than connect sincerely. Richard Ayoade puts in a fantastically loud performance as an obnoxious and uncompromising student director who alienates his entire cohort - screaming “what does it make you feel!?” at his editor during one particularly hilarious scene - with his ultra-demanding style. Julie is on the other end of the directorial spectrum and demoralises her crew with her hesitant and confused instructions.

She seems desperate to render a grief that she doesn’t yet understand. Jim (Charlie Heaton), a young actor with his own buried demons, turns up at her flat one evening and they have wordless dispassionate sex. She propositions her gay editor, Max (Joe Alwyn), and is mortifyingly turned down when he reveals his sexuality. Scenes accumulate in which almost every character is desperately trying - and failing - to communicate something they don’t have the language for, whether it be verbal, physical, or visual.

For Julie, it appears that some of this failure is inherited, and you could make a solid argument for this being a film about British stoicism. While that isn’t my interpretation, many of the funniest moments occur in scenes in which Julie visits her parents William and Rosalind. James Spencer Ashworth and Tilda Swinton give quietly masterful performances as the patrician and sweet-natured root of Julie’s repression. The language of this mini world, much like that of the film school, is bankrupted by pretence and inhibition. In a brutally hilarious section, Rosalind takes a pottery class to try to get closer to her daughter and understand her creative impulse. In a moment of solipsistic depression, Julie accidentally drops and smashes her first piece (an “Estruscan” pot). “Worse things happen at sea,” William consoles.

In the metatextual ending of the film we see the way that cinematic moments are constructed for us. I was reminded of Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, as the apparatus of the production is presented on screen (we zoom out of the scene’s action and watch the crew filming). The effect of this put me in my mind of all the social apparatus that comprises the structure of our everyday interactions. Expression is only possible in collaboration – at the very least with a viewer/reader/listener – and there are so many external forces that colour exchanges. It is an affected but profound way for the film to end, and although the lasting effect left me feeling philosophical, I cannot understate how much The Souvenir: Part II made me laugh and filled me with a euphoric joy (I haven’t even mentioned the sparse but brilliant soundtrack, which deserves its own essay). It is as much a film about shame, repression, and artmaking as it is youth, innocence, and beauty.

Like William, Hogg was generous and made the best of the audience member’s question, but truthfully all I could think about was: “this is very The Souvenir: Part II”. The completely arresting atmosphere of the film had permeated the air in the room. There was a specific sort of tension: I felt as though everybody wanted to collaborate in this discussion, to say something valuable and redemptive, but didn’t know how. I wrote in my notebook after the showing: “try to make stuff out of all your most embarrassing moments”.

February 2022
I interviewed the amazing post-rock band caroline for Bedroomdisco.

November 2021
A few months ago, in the early summer of 2021, Amber and I walked in the late afternoon and found ourselves in St Werberghs which, at the time of writing, is a charmingly cultish area of Bristol containing a city farm and an eco-village called The Yard where each house has been individually designed: a collection of Gaudi imitations made of copper, wood and glass in strange shapes, glinting with solar panels. A cynic couldn't help but feel the abject pleasantness of all those allotments and communal gardens and mini nature reserves must be a facade for some sort of repressed depravity.

This was at the point of my relationship with Amber where it was disfigured and over, but then she would do something like a cute laugh or a tender look, something little, and I’d fall in love again all at once. I was in denial: pathetic, desperate, anxious and insomnolent. Within a few weeks it would end violently, and I’d leave my support work job and house in Easton and spend the summer grieving and rebuilding.

We walked until we reached Mina Road Park, opposite Sonni’s – a corner shop which sells coffee and great wraps out of a window in the front. They had set up a seating area outside on the pavement and a crowd had amassed for the France vs. Germany Euro 2020 game. I guess COVID must have been in a dip at this point because it was crowded shoulder to shoulder all the way onto the road – the crowd would split to let cars through - and everyone was drinking and smoking. The way I remember it, I was as present as I feel I can get in this moment, could see and feel all the textures: it was a lantern-light early summer’s dusk and it was loud and warm and the air was crisp. We drank and kissed and angled our bodies toward each other. We had that third beer glow about us.

Amber cheered along with everyone even though she was from America and had never really watched football before we met three years prior. That’s one of the things I really loved about her: I don’t know if she enjoyed football for its performance or competition or aesthetic qualities, but she would watch it with me and get into it because I was passionate about it. She loved it when I got animated. I felt most attractive to her when I was childishly excited about something. I was always more judgemental in that respect – if someone unconditionally loves something that is contradictory to the rest of the way they are, I can often make them feel insecure about it. I don’t know why, because that’s what gives the world with most of its texture.

We used to watch Arsenal games in the projector in our room in Glasgow and I would scream at the TV like a totally vulgar man-child, and she would just egg me on and join in, as if stuff like that adds a compelling inflection to my character. She loved Matteo Guendouzi, who is this really goofy midfielder with an awkward running style who wins a lot of fouls and spends a lot of time irritating the opposing team. And Willian, who to this day must be the single worst Arsenal signing ever. I hate that guy.

When she identified a space for shared wonder, it would propose this sort of parenthesis in our experience of the world. The wider view of our relationship was often laden with small simmering conflicts we couldn’t sort out, larger fears, miscommunications. All of it thrumming. But then we would read short stories or poems to one another, or watch great movies, or do a sudoku, or paint each other’s nails, or draw each other without looking at the paper, or have astonishing sex. In this way, we could put structural parameters around our time together – outsource the rules of exchange to something with a prearranged form. It made things more manageable for us, gave us a palette with which to work, when we couldn’t manage so well without. One of the most difficult parts of that breakup was trying to reform all those conduits for our love; unload all that heightened meaning.

There were plenty of great days, right up to the end but with this one I can be there in St Werberghs, and in our Glasgow flat, and in the coop where we lived in Austin all at once. I can draw a line between those vessels we would create together, just as we would draw lines around the experiences to form them. I can acknowledge the permeability and impermanence of things: a reality Amber always seemed to be able to inhabit more intimately in her sad, inscrutable, intoxicating way, while I tried desperately to cling onto something that had become broken.

Around the time things finally blew up between us, Matteo Guendouzi had a fight with the Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta and refused to apologise. He’s on loan at Marseille now and isn’t expected to return.