Paris On Air

by Oliver Gee

  I was meeting interesting people and I was loving it. It was fun too, despite the fact that the “studio” was just a desk in an open-plan office. The radio station had permission to use it after 7 pm, provided all the office workers had gone home for the day. It wasn’t a professional setup, but they had great microphones and that’s all we really needed. The dream, of course, was to have a private studio where we could record at any time of the day, and that was apparently in the pipeline, they said.

  After a few months of the amateur hour on the radio, James told me that things were sailing smoothly.

  “You know, there’s a spike in traffic every time we air one of your shows,” he said. “There could be something in this.”

  The head of the radio station contacted me to tell me the same thing.

  “What do you know about podcasting?” he asked me.

  “Absolutely nothing,” I responded.

  He explained that a podcast was just like a radio show, except subscribers could download it to their phone and enjoy it at their own leisure, rather than, say, every Friday at 8 pm like a radio programme.

  It was all new to me. And little did I know that before long I’d be teaching podcasting at a Parisian university, meeting with mayors, and wrestling with crocodiles. But there I go again, getting way ahead of the story.

  5.3 The eleventh

  The hunt for a new apartment ended when a friend left Paris and leased us her apartment in the trendy 11th arrondissement. We ended up staying there for the next 18 months. The apartment was twice as big as the maid’s quarters on the seventh floor, and half as charming. But our friend didn’t need a dossier, just a promise that we’d pay rent. I handed in my notice for our tiny flat and we moved soon after. Two years in that minuscule place seemed ridiculous in retrospect, but I still don’t regret it at all. In fact, I still miss it sometimes.

  But life in the 11th was a whole new Paris. Gone were the tourists, for one thing. And it wasn’t as picture perfect as the 2nd arrondissement, no sir. But it was interesting in another way. We lived on rue de la Fontaine au Roi - King’s Fountain Road - which ran from the Canal Saint-Martin all the way up a gently sloping hill into Belleville. The street was named after the fountain that once provided Parisians with water, which ran through aqueducts to the town below. The fountain is long gone now and the street is perhaps better known nowadays for housing one of the bars that was targeted in the terror attacks. It was no coincidence that those terrorists had chosen the 11th district to attack, because the terraces of the local bars were always full.

  But it was a pretty fascinating place to live, especially in those days. Gentrification was sweeping up our street like an Australian bushfire, and taking everything in its path. We watched it happen right outside our front door. When we moved in, there was an ageing internet cafe across the road. Within months, it was replaced by an organic fruit and vegetable shop, then a hipster Asian restaurant. The shops on both sides of it had similar fates. Senegalese restaurants turned into specialty coffee shops. A nearby bar that was once popular with elderly locals turned into the hippest dive bar in the neighbourhood. But not everyone was thrilled with the new face of the 11th arrondissement. On the local bistro-turned-dive-bar, someone took a black marker pen and scrawled in big, English letters on an outside wall: Hipsters Die!

  Our 18 months in the area included a lot of socializing, particularly around the Canal Saint-Martin, the city’s picnicking capital. Our timing was perfect, our neighbours said. The canal area had only recently undergone a facelift that saw hipsters replace drug dealers, and cafes in the place of tired shops. As for us, we’d sit on the canalside with a bottle of wine from a nearby supermarket and stay long into the night. If it got cold we’d wander into one of the nearby bars or restaurants, or we’d migrate gradually uphill to the happy hours of rue Saint Maur and beyond. Over the two years we’d been in Paris we’d surrounded ourselves with a good group of friends, and we rarely stayed home when the weather was good.

  And it wasn’t only that we had more friends. We noticed that living on the ground floor made it a whole lot easier to duck out onto the street - for whatever reason. I found myself popping out for ingredients as Lina had developed a keen interest in baking, thanks to the fact that we finally had a real oven after two years without one. Lina was baking like a woman possessed and her cakes and muffins were delicious. And I could run out and get eggs within three minutes. It was wonderful. But the best part of it all, we agreed, was finally escaping the seven flights of stairs (with no elevator) which had eventually made it a chore to leave the flat.

  Back in those early days in the 11th, I remember we once sat down over a fresh banana cake - Lina’s new speciality - to toast to the new lives ahead of us and the new opportunities. We tried to figure out just how many times we had climbed up the dreaded 118 stairs in the 2nd arrondissement. And we vowed never to live on the top floor of a walk-up again. At that precise moment, I got a text from James at the radio station.

  “Good news, mec, they’ve signed the lease on a new studio, we’ve got it all to ourselves. We can record at any time of the day or night. It’s a bright new future and a bright new studio,” he wrote. “PS: It’s on the sixth floor (with no elevator).”

  Ah, some things never change.

  5.4 The resignation

  It’s a strange thing to be recognized by your voice. I’d been running The Earful Tower for six months and I felt I was on to something. People were writing in from around the world to say they were listening. Friends, who had gone beyond the stages of listening to support me, surprised me by discussing recent episodes. The momentum was thrilling. One day I was at Le Peloton cafe in the Marais and I was ordering drinks at the counter. As I headed out to a table on the terrace, a man stopped me in my tracks.

  “Oliver?” he said with a start. “Oliver Gee?!”

  He wasn’t asking it, he was exclaiming it. He was almost jittery with excitement.

  “Yep, that’s me….” I said.

  “No way!” he continued. “I thought it was you! I recognized your voice when you ordered the coffees.”

  Then he sang the jingle that I had been using in the early episodes, composed on the spot by Slim and the Beast.

  “The Earful Tower, with Oliver Geeeee,” he sang, turning back to his friends with his eyes wide. “This guy does that podcast I was telling you about. Remember?”

  The jingle bit was slightly embarrassing. More embarrassing was the fact that his friends apparently had no idea what he was talking about. They gave polite nods. I blushed and thanked him for listening, then headed to the outside terrace with our coffees. I was with Lina and a friend and they thought it was a hoot. As we sat down, they were laughing and punching me in the arm. Fancy getting recognized by your voice, they said. But then it got even weirder. Only two minutes had passed when an American woman came running down the street.

  “Oh my gawd, you’re Oliver Gee. I can’t believe it!”

  She’d recognized my face from a video I’d done and said she’d come to the cafe because I’d mentioned it on the show. In fact, she’d taken a lot my recommendations, it turned out.

  “Oh my lawd, I love it. I love it! What a scream! And I’ve gotta tell ya, I’ve taken all your tips and I’ve done them all,” she said, reeling off the tours she had taken, the restaurants she’d visited, and the books she had bought - all based on the guests from my show.

  “D’ya mind if I have a picture with you?” she asked.

  It was flattering to know that my work had such an effect on someone’s holiday. But I also got a little niggling feeling of something else. What was it? Ah, that’s it. Missed opportunity. That was the day that I realized that there was a real potential in the show. That was the day that it dawned on me that people were not just passively listening, they were actively listening. They were using the show for insights into Paris. And perhaps most
importantly, they were spending money. Not on me, mind you. But surely there was a way I could twist this thing so I was getting a slice of the pie too. The almost tangible scent of opportunity was so strong that before I had figured out how to monetize my show, I handed in my resignation at the news site.

  Let’s be totally honest here, it wasn’t just that sense of opportunity that made me quit the job. It was also time to go. You know when you’re reading a book and your mind wanders elsewhere, then suddenly you snap back and wonder how much you’ve missed? Well that’s a little how I felt with my job. And I couldn’t figure out how long I’d been looking at the words without taking them in. It was time to snap out of it.

  I’d love to say that quitting my job was a brilliant move and that from that moment on I became rich, but that’s not true at all. It was a move that, practically at least, was quite stupid. Many French people told me afterwards that the trick is to negotiate when you quit; leave on good terms, and then you’ll continue to earn a large portion of your salary from the state. It’s called a rupture conventionelle, in case you’re ever planning to do the same. But I didn’t do it. No, not me. Not foolish old Oliver. I could sense the new energy in the Paris air and I wanted to drink it, to breathe it in, to live it. Exactly how I’d make money from a podcast didn’t enter my mind at all; I just knew I could do it.

  I was 30 years old and I figured I was still young enough to struggle on a new project. I gave a month’s notice to my editor, meaning my last day would be right after the French presidential election of 2017. After more than two years working as a full-time reporter in Paris, my stint with the news site was going to end with a big story.

  5.5 Le Président de la République

  After five years working at the news site (including three in Stockholm, but that’s for another book) my time as a journalist was coming to an end. The French were deciding whether to vote in their youngest leader since Napoleon, Emmanuel Macron, or Marine Le Pen and the far right. The election was to be my last story for the news site which seemed to be a fitting book end.

  In the lead-up we reported the hell out of that election, and I’m glad to say that by now my French was much improved. I travelled around Paris and France and listened to anyone who’d talk. I spoke to young Parisians who were excited by the prospect of a president in his thirties. I went to a National Front rally in a former coal mining town, Hénin-Beaumont, where Marine Le Pen was a hero and people were hoping her anti-EU, anti-immigrant policies would turn their lives around. I even went to ghost towns in rural France where no one cared who would win and no one cared to even vote. In Roubaix, which was once the beating heart of the textile industry, people were so disenchanted with it all that they didn’t even want to talk to me about the election. The French papers called it the “capital of abstention” after 45 percent of people didn’t bother voting the last time around. It was fascinating to see how France could be so divided. Walking the streets of the towns in northern France made it evident, once again, that Paris wasn’t France and France wasn’t Paris. But no matter which way the vote went, France was going to get a change, which was clearly what everyone was after.

  On the night of the election I was sent to the courtyard of the Louvre museum, where Macron accepted his victory. He strode out to greet the crowds as the European anthem, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, blared from nearby speakers. He’d won in a landslide: 66 percent of the vote, and as I stood among the crowd of thousands, the result seemed to me like the exact kind of news that France needed. A fresh start. New ideas. And a pretty clear “non, merci” to Marine Le Pen.

  I stumbled home that night exhausted, but relieved to have finished my work with the news site on a high after two years that included a lot of heavy reporting. But it felt like good news that night: the energy in the young crowd at the Louvre was exhilarating and contagious. They were excited for something new and so was I. But my new chapter had nothing to do with Macron. I was going to tell my own story.

  I took a break after the election and spent some time setting up The Earful Tower to be its own entity as a podcast. I taught myself how to edit audio files so that I didn’t need to rely on any outside help to produce the episodes. I built a website so I could see where the readers (and therefore the listeners) were. I joined a hosting platform to store all the episodes and launched social media pages. All these things I did organically, setting them up as I figured out that they were necessary. A long way down the road I learned that many new podcasters get weighed down by being prepared for “launch day”, but it was never like that for me. When I realized I had an audience, I turned the radio show into a podcast. When I saw people wanted to follow me, I set up a Facebook page. When people starting asking for details of the next episodes, I decided to release them every Monday. It was all quite natural, I didn’t plan it. But now that I was going to try and “make it” as a podcaster, I realized I needed to take it pretty seriously. This was going to be a bumpy ride, and I needed to be ready for it.

  5.6 The U.S.

  Quitting a full time job is a life-changing moment and should be celebrated accordingly. At least that’s what I think. A sensible person would knuckle down and find a new job. An even more sensible person would have a new job to seamlessly switch to, preferably with a higher salary. But someone like me thinks that quitting a job to pursue a podcast with no hint of an income should be celebrated.

  So with this in mind, I bought a pair of one-way tickets to New York as a surprise for Lina. We spent the next six weeks in a rental car, driving from New York to Los Angeles, from where we’d eventually fly back to Paris. We took the back roads, saw some of the most famous places in the entire world, and it was fantastic.

  Now I’d love to get into all the details of this road trip, but I don’t think I should because 1) this is meant to be a book about France; and 2) there’s a full chapter about a French road trip coming up soon. But believe me, that American journey was beyond a highlight. I think a lot of people who take similar holidays probably take Route 66 or something similar, and drive fairly directly between the two coasts - but not us. We first drove from New York to New Orleans - which, whenever I tell Americans, always prompts them to react the same way. You went that far down? We sure did. And it was crazier still. In case you know the United States well, here are the outliers on the map so you can connect the dots. New York, Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, Albuquerque, Kansas (yes, back through Texas), Las Vegas, San Francisco, then L.A. If you mapped out our journey it looks a lot less like a Route 66 cross section and more like a monitor for an arrhythmic heart.

  But oh how wonderful it was! Especially the bits that were off the tourist trail. Sure, Nashville, the Grand Canyon, Hollywood, and Monument Valley are sublime. But I think my memories will always go back to the people. I’ll remember the little basketball museum in rural Texas where I signed a ball for the owner, who thought I was a big-shot hooper from Australia. I’ll remember being warned about returning to the town of Alligator, Mississippi because “folks go missin’ in Alligator”, at least according to the woman at the catfish restaurant in the next town. I’ll remember one of our hosts telling us he was “an illegal drug dealer” before taking us two-step dancing in a small town in the South. And I’ll remember the high school principal in Ness City, Kansas who wrote us into his weekly newsletter after we stopped into his school.

  We covered 7,000 miles in six weeks and I had a newfound taste for big road trips. Luckily Lina did too. That adventure was over far too quickly for my liking, and I returned to Paris broke (again), but refreshed and ready to make a serious effort at podcasting. It was the first time in two and a half years that I was free in Paris. Remember, I didn’t really know how Paris worked. Sure, I’d been free at the weekends and at the end of the work days. But what happens in the centre of the city at 10 am on a Tuesday? Are the bakeries busy on Thursday afternoons? Are waiters friendlier during off-peak hours? And how hard is it to get a
seat on the terrace in the middle of the day?

  These were the questions I wanted to answer. Weekends in Paris are chaotic and I now know they’re not representative of the city in general. But weekends was all I’d had at this point. And I had been dreading the thought of one day leaving Paris and realizing that I only knew daily life from the weekends. So when we got back from the US and settled once more into Paris, I was giddy with excitement about exploring this second coming in the French capital.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Chasing crocodiles, understanding cheese, and making a viral video.

  6.1 Live shows

  I was very hungry as I approached 18 rue de l’Odeon, but as Ernest Hemingway said in A Moveable Feast, you can enjoy Paris more when you’re hungry. He said the hunger made you appreciate the art, as if you could feel the same hunger the artists were feeling when they were working. But in my own hunger, Paris looked the same to me. All I could think about was how I needed some food, and how I needed some money to buy food, and how I needed a way to make money.

  My first money-making scheme was to experiment with live shows in Paris, with a paying crowd and an entertaining guest. And my first target was John Baxter, an Australian author who’d been living in Paris for decades and could tell a story better than just about anyone I knew. He’d invited me to discuss my plan at his apartment on the Left Bank, which had sweeping views over the city from the Notre Dame cathedral to Sacre-Coeur.