5/4 - Anatomy of a Music Festival

‘You’re creating a City in the middle of the country’

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From Glastonbury to The End Of The Road, Summer festivals continue to colonise the countryside. But how do people pull together such enormous events year after year?

In our 2017 Summer Festivals Special, Olly meets Pete Lawrence, co-founder of The Big Chill, which went from being a low-key ‘festival in a club’ for 150 people in Islington to an massive outdoor happening, taking over huge venues across Britain, with acts including Lily Allen, The Proclaimers, Basement Jaxx, and Leonard Cohen.

How do you choose the perfect location for your booming event? How can you maintain a counter-culture ethos whilst wooing corporate sponsors? And how can you keep the Police on-side when so many attendees are doing drugs? Pete - now founder of campfireconvention.uk - reveals all...

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Meanwhile, in this week’s Zeitgeist, Ollie Peart - fresh from sitting near Kate Adie at a train station - previews some Summer festivals you’ve never heard of, but should get tickets for NOW. In his top three are G!, in the Faroe Islands; the Archstoyanie Land Art Festival, 200 km southwest of Moscow; and, closer to home, the Brainchild festival, a ‘DIY and volunteer-led festival’ in East Sussex. Also, he explains why every festivalgoer needs a BioLite camping stove and Minipresso portable espresso machine, and receives an exciting invitation to Camp Bestival as part of his quest to become a true trends insider.

Elsewhere, Alix Fox brings news of sex festival Swingfields in this week’s Foxhole, and has a surprising suggested use for Original Source Mint and Tea Tree shower gel. She also tackles another prickly listener question - this week, how to speed up ejaculation when trying to conceive a child within your partner’s most fertile window of conception.

The Foxhole is sponsored by the sex legends who created mycondom.com. They stock all you need for festive fumble in a tent - including the cooling condoms Alix highlights this week. Remember to use our discount code ‘FOXHOLE’ to receive a bewildering 15% off.

If you have a question of sex for a future edition, do get in touch via our Feedback form - you can remain completely anonymous if you wish.

Finally, our song of the week is by brand new outfit Videocean. They sent us their debut track, ‘Fruitless Fever’, and we loved it. It’s out now on uber-cool underground imprint Bon Nudity:

If you enjoy this week's show, please do support us and buy us a beer, write us a review on iTunes, or simply tell your friends about us.

See You Next Tuesday!

4/8 - Having The Last Word

"You’re not dealing with death, but celebrating life"

From David Bowie to George Michael, celebrity deaths are becoming increasingly common, as the rock generation reaches retirement age. How does a paper of record go about documenting their lives?

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Simon Pearson is Obituaries Editor of The Times, and in this interview he explains how profiles of the great and the good are created - ready to be published the moment a notable name pops their clogs - and how lesser-known figures also find their way on to the paper’s illustrious pages...

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Elsewhere, Ollie Peart brings us news of meme warfare, holographic phones and animated April Fools pranks in this week’s Zeitgeist.

Meanwhile, down The Foxhole, Alix Fox is angry about ‘the world’s first smart condom’, and tackles one of the most popular questions to grace our mailbag: what do you do when your sex drive vastly exceeds that of your partner?

The Foxhole is brought to you by our friends at mycondom.com. Use the code ‘FOXHOLE’ at Checkout to get an astonishing 15% OFF!

And, in our new feature The Lifehack, Great British Bake Off winner Edd Kimber reveals his baking tips, courtesy of Squarespace. If you want to build yourself a beautiful website, simply visit Squarespace.com and use the code to 'MANN' to get 10% OFF a year's subscription.

Finally, our record of the week is ‘Lava’ by Tender Central, available to stream now thanks to Boom Ting Recordings:

We'll be back with something very similar next week - but in the meantime, if you'd like to buy us a beer, write us a review on iTunes, or send Alix your sex question, that would all be very much appreciated.

See You Next Tuesday!

1/6 - Confessions of a Film Extra

Getting paid for killing time with Britney Spears

Olly has Mann-flu, but the show must go on, thanks to the healing powers of Lemsip.

This week he meets Dr Chay Allen - an art historian who paid his way through his phD by working as an extra on shows including 24 and Downton Abbey, and films including The Dark Shadows and Skyfall.

He also, for a brief period, had 10m people convinced he was Britney Spears' beau...

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Chay Allen as companion to Britney Spears in the 'Criminal' video - an image she tweeted out to over 10m of her Followers

Meanwhile, thanks to Producer Matt's ingenuity, the rest of the podcast is recorded in a Ford Mondeo on St Martin's Lane.

In The Zeitgeist, Ollie Peart - himself struck down with S.A.D - applauds a novel approach to Black Friday, loses yet more of his hard-earned cash in Bux, and gets COMPLETELY SUCKED IN by Amazon's drone PR campaign.

Meanwhile, down The Foxhole, our resident love guru Alix Fox has some advice for a horny young dude who is boning so frequently he's resorted to faking his own orgasms. Poor love...

If you'd like to send in a question of sex for Alix, just click on the Feedback form - you can choose to remain completely anonymous if you wish.

Olly's song of the week is 'Let Me Hold You' by Plaitum, out 4th Dec on Wolf Tone.

See you next Tuesday!

1/1: The biggest screens in the world

Blow Your Socks Off Cinema

In this episode - is bigger always better? Olly meets Andrew Cripps and Brian Bonnick from IMAX, creators of the world's largest movie screens, to find out.

They also tell him how to film a panda, and explain the difference between 'black-black' and 'black-black-black'.

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In The Zeitgeist, Ollie Peart chews over the 'hoverboard' ban, autonomous Tesla cars on YouTube, and what crocodiles have in common with the mafia. If you've got a trend you'd like Ollie to talk about in a future episode, tweet him @ollieep.

And in the slot we are currently calling The Fox Hole (alternative ideas on a postcard to @themodernmann...), our resident love guru Alix Fox teaches Olly about sex with mermaids. If you have a question of sex for Alix, send us an email here (you can remain anonymous if you want).

If you enjoy the show, please tell your friends - either by using the hashtag #ModernMann on Twitter, or by leaving us a nice review on iTunes. And remember to subscribe, so you can get our next episode delivered to your smartphone automatically next Tuesday. The show is completely free to listen to, but not free to produce - so if you'd like to buy us a beer, we'd be ever so grateful.

Our song of the week, appropriately enough, is 'Trials of a Modern Man' by Vangoffey, out November 9th on Distiller Records, and from the album 'Take Your Jacket Off And Get Into It':

Next week: Olly heads to San Francisco to taste America's Best Burgers.

See you next Tuesday!

Presenter: Olly Mann. Contributors: Ollie Peart, Alix Fox. Producer: Matt Hill. Theme Music: 'Skies Over Cairo' by Django Django. Graphic Design: Jenny Robertshaw. Copyright: Olly Mann 2015.