Back in 2011, I tried to get a podcast going for sloucher. It was called Radio Chaneque, where we promoted independent music and did a few interviews.

My idea for interviews was to mix things up. Invite an artist, have them choose 8 songs that formed them and then I would choose one song of theirs and tell them why I liked it.

It was a good format while it lasted and it was cool finding out where people got their music formation from.

One of such musicians was Denzil Watson from Repo Men, a rock band from Sheffield that accrued a respectable catalogue but never quite brokethrough. Denzil is also a great photographer and published a book of photos of abandoned places in Sheffield.

Denzil’s eight songs were varied but the one song that stayed with me was Dead Kennedy’s holiday in Cambodia. He had the album version, with the long guitar intro and frantic “pol pot pol pot polt pot” refrain. We had a good conversation and it’s a bit of a trip down memory lane listening to it again.

Podcasting can get hard when it’s a one man operation. Recording, editing, re-editing, applying all sorts of effects and filters, and sometimes the results are discouraging. I still podcast occasionally, but it’s now a rarity. I think I’m more adept at writing.

Holiday in Cambodia is a brutal takedown of pseudointelectual “do gooders”. It’s a song before it’s time, and I guess it’s applicable to a lot of people nowadays that think that sharing or retweeting is enough. I prefer the first version of Holiday in Cambodia due to the foreboding bass intro, solemn and angry, menacing and brooding. It misses the intensity of the freak out at the end from the album version, but it was the version I went back to a lot during lockdown. Still, posting the album version because it was Denzil was partial to.

-Sam J. Valdes Lopez