A UFO-Friendly, Spotify-Protesting Christmas with The Pocket Gods

I don’t usually get to end a conversation on Christmas music with
memories of radio legend Art Bell and his late night deep dive
into the paranormal, After Dark with Art Bell. But that’s what
happened when I talked to Mark Christopher Lee of the British
lo-fi indie rock band The Pocket Gods. It took a lot of
discipline not to end the show with After Dark’s theme, “Chase”
by Giorgio Moroder. Instead, the episode ends with “Merry
Christmas to the Drunks, Merry Christmas to the Lovers,” a
new-to-me track by the Edinburgh indie band ballboy. 


My conversation with Lee on The Pocket Gods covers a lot of
ground as we talk about influential British DJ John Peel, Phil
Spector, John Cage, and the way Lee morphed the band into a
conceptual art project that explored how musicians do and don’t
get paid in a streaming ecosystem dominated by Spotify. 


Late in the conversation, we talk about Lee’s forays into
documentary films. You can find Weird: The Life and Times of a
Pocket God, Inspired: The 30-Second Song Movie, God Versus
Aliens, and The King of UFOs: Royal UFO Secrets Revealed at
Tubitv.com or the Tubi Roku app. 


All of the music on today’s show is available at the iTunes
Store, but 2021’s A Quantum Christmas Song, which is more than
115 hours long, can only be purchased as a full album and
requires more than 8 GB of disc space to download. I think Mark
will understand if you choose to stream rather than buy that
one.