Monstrosities Mon Amour
Monstrosities Mon Amour
Podcast Description
In Monstrosities Mon Amour we celebrate places and things that have been unfairly monstered in popular opinion. Host John Grindrod will be your excitable guide to a world beyond the lazy stereotypes of crap towns and guilty pleasures. He'll be meeting people who’ll share their enthusiasm for monsters major and minor, places that get a bad press and cultural artefacts that need to be rescued from the bin.
‘Warmly, welcomingly geeky.’ Jude Rogers, Observer
‘What a breath of fresh air … a genuine celebration of places and culture it’s all too easy to dismiss.’ Radio Times
Theme tune by Lorna Rees and Rufus Rees Coshan. Logo by Richard de Pesando.
You can support the podcast by subscribing through Substack or https://ko-fi.com/grindrod.
Thank you for listening. johngrindrod.substack.com
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast delves into themes of cultural appreciation, urban spaces, and pop culture phenomena, with episodes focusing on towns that face stigma, quirky architectural features, and nostalgia for forgotten trends. For example, episodes celebrate the gothic architecture of Minster Court and the American-style relics of Swindon while discussing topics like class and excess in society.
Monstrosities Mon Amour celebrates places and things that have been unfairly dismissed. Host John Grindrod (author of Tales of the Suburbs and Concretopia) is your excitable guide to a world beyond the lazy stereotypes of crap towns and guilty pleasures. He meets people who share their enthusiasm for monsters major and minor, places that get a bad press and cultural artefacts that need to be rescued from the bin.
‘Warmly, welcomingly geeky.’ Observer
‘A genuine celebration of places and culture it’s all too easy to dismiss.’ Radio Times
Theme tune by Lorna Rees and Rufus Rees Coshan. Logo by Richard de Pesando.
You can support the podcast by subscribing through Substack or https://ko-fi.com/grindrod.
Thank you for listening.
Back to the future in the Austin Maxi – but which future? Is it the East End of London in the Georgian era, or are we in the mid-eighties? That’s right, it’s both! Novelist Will Wiles loves his local landmark, Onyx House, which he says is like a toy designer’s idea of a building, a pomo office block that pretends to be an eighties glass structure bursting from the stomach of a neo-Georgian mansion like Ridley Scott’s Alien.
Designed by postmodern maestros CZWG, Onyx House has since been disowned by the architects, but it remains an appealingly bizarre landmark opposite Mile End Station. We discuss humour in architecture, changing tastes and how on earth did anyone get this bonkers piece of architecture past a developer?
Will also chooses another cultural artefact stranded in time: the fantasy art of Boris Vallejo. If you’ve ever seen a barbarian princess on top of a mountain in a chain mail bikini a) where do you live and b) you have probably seen the work of Vallejo, a cultural phenomenon of the 70s and 80s. Will, a fantasy author, shares his enthusiasm for these kitsch cheesecake epics, and debunks any idea that these oil paintings were airbrushed.
Will Wiles is a freelance journalist and has written about everything from Pot Noodles to jumbo jets for the art magazine Apollo. He is also the author of fantasy novelsThe Last Blade Priest, and The Dead Man’s Empire under the name W. P. Wiles, which are published by Angry Robot. He is the author of three literary novels, Care of Wooden Floors (a Betty Trask Prize winner), The Way Inn, and Plume. He’s on BlueSky at @willwiles.bsky.social and Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/wiles_books
Theme tune by Lorna Rees and Rufus Rees Coshan. You can support Monstrosities Mon Amour by subscribing through Substack or through Ko-fi at https://ko-fi.com/grindrod
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