19 December 2019
19 December 2019
The daytime interview had left a lot out
After Lewis Capaldi appeared on the final regular show of 2019, Scott and Chris released a second podcast.
The introduction gave listeners a clear warning.
Lewis swore.
A lot.
There had been plenty in the interview which could not comfortably go out in the normal daytime programme.
This file existed to preserve the uncut version.
The automatic transcript makes the identity problem particularly severe here, repeatedly calling Lewis Dale Winton and Joel Corry.
Those names are ASR errors.
The source title and conversation are explicitly Lewis Capaldi.
Christmas meant four days off
Scott began by asking whether Lewis was actually being allowed a Christmas break.
The answer demonstrated how quickly his career had expanded.
A European tour had finished on 9 December.
He was then returning to America, with that run ending on 22 December.
On 26 December, he was due to fly to Australia.
That gave Lewis roughly four days off.
Scott was impressed that Lewis could remember the dates at all.
Lewis described the year as brilliant and strange rather than complaining about the schedule.
He was learning how to export Lewis Capaldi
Scott enjoyed watching Lewis enter new markets.
The Scottish personality which worked naturally in Britain did not always translate word for word in American interviews.
Lewis said he sometimes slowed down or subconsciously changed how he spoke.
Certain Scottish or British phrases meant nothing to American presenters.
People in the US also regularly told him they were partly “Scotch”, a word Lewis found particularly revealing because nobody actually Scottish would normally describe themselves that way.
Australia appeared likely to be easier territory for the swearing.
Lewis joked that Australians were much more relaxed about it.
The programme remembered where the year began
Scott and Chris returned to a moment roughly a year earlier.
Lewis had sent them a video from Scotland while they were putting the finishing touches to their book.
At the time he was still waiting to discover what “Someone You Loved” would become.
Lewis remembered making the album under a tight deadline and not knowing whether the record would work.
Looking back from December 2019 made the uncertainty almost difficult to believe.
The song had become the centre of an international breakthrough.
Lewis himself still seemed slightly baffled by how quickly everything had changed.
Radio 1 had been part of the strange year
The pair remembered several moments where their own programme had crossed into Lewis’s story.
His early appearances.
Karaoke.
“The Climb.”
Festival encounters.
The strange progression from being an emerging Scottish singer the show liked to somebody Scott and Chris could describe, only half jokingly, as one of the biggest people of the year.
Lewis did not suddenly start behaving like a polished global star.
That was exactly why the relationship with the show still worked.
His card had failed at the worst possible moment
The uncut version expanded on one of the headlines from the daytime interview.
Lewis had tried to buy a round of tequila shots for Sam Smith during a celebrity night in Los Angeles.
His card was declined.
Lewis described it as a humbling experience.
He had subsequently experienced similar card problems around other famous people, including a night involving Nile Rodgers and Jack Whitehall.
The running joke was not that Lewis had no money.
It was that he was terrible at organising money between different cards and accounts.
Lewis even pre-emptively reassured the tax authorities that everything was properly declared.
Scott and Chris had not accused him otherwise.
The panic made the answer funnier.
Celebrity rooms still made him nervous
Lewis admitted there was something about being around people he recognised from television which made these mishaps feel much worse.
He could be one of the successful artists in the room and still mentally revert to somebody thinking:
“These people are on TV.”
The uncut conversation gave more space to that contradiction.
The career had become enormous.
Lewis’s internal reaction to fame had not necessarily caught up.
The extra language explained the extra podcast
The daytime programme had already captured the main events.
The uncut file captured how Lewis actually spoke through them.
More swearing.
Longer tangents.
Stories allowed to wander.
Scott and Chris no longer needing to steer every sentence towards language suitable for afternoon Radio 1.
That made the bonus edition less a separate interview than the full-length version of the same conversation.
2019 ended with exactly the right guest
The Scott Mills Daily archive had followed Lewis throughout the year.
January began with “Someone You Loved” as Tune of the Week and Lewis singing Miley Cyrus.
The months which followed included karaoke, festival appearances and repeated returns to the show.
By December, the programme could genuinely describe 2019 as the year of Capaldi.
The final source file therefore closed the archive in a fitting way.
Not with a formal year-end speech.
With Lewis Capaldi swearing through a review of the year, still sounding surprised that any of it had happened.
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