Nobody's Watching

Hi and welcome to Nobody’s Watching, a show about the benefits of music, singing and dancing. I’m Claudia, your host, and I’ll be interviewing be interviewing experts, amateur dancers and music lovers, to collect stories and scientific research on the positive impact of music and dance. This first series is be a collection of interviews with people who had some sort of musical lockdown project. 

Nobody’s Watching is also the name of my dance business: I organise and host uplifting dance events for amateur dancers. Since November, that’s also involved organising Wake Up & Dance: every Monday, Wednesday and Friday I send 3 uplifting songs to dance to so you can start your day with a sweat and smile. Many of us connect and dance together on zoom but you can also dance offline in your own time. To learn more and sign up, check out my website https://www.nobodyswatching.co/

This is part 2 of the conversation with Rick Barter. If you haven’t heard part 1, I recommend you start from there. In part 2, Rick shares some fun, non-dance related stories from his past, which include how we almost got deported from France, how he landed a translation gig at the Atlanta Olympics, and how he ended up in Yoko Ono’s kitchen. At the start of episode 1 you might remember Rick’s reaction when I told him I had researched him online. I told him everything I found was very innocent, but in this episode you’ll hear me to try and source the juicy stories live. Listen till the end to find out if I was successful.

Today I’m joined by Rick Barter, whose musical lockdown project was called Dance with Uncle Ricky. Starting at the end of March, every day, for 100 days, he shared a song to dance to and a fun personal anecdote or little know fact about the song on Facebook. He numbered them and it became a ritual that his friends keenly awaited every day. I wish everyone could have an uncle Ricky in their life. He’s an endless source of fun and good stories because he’s had an adventurous life, guided by the principle of doing one thing that scares him every day. I met Rick because one day, that thing that scared him was attending one of the silent disco events I had organised on a London rooftop. He came, he danced and he loved it so much that he just kept coming back, and we became friends after dancing together almost every week for a year. Rick is now 61; he was born and raised in New York City but he’s lived in Paris, Vienna, Beirut, Gran Canaria and London. Our conversation was beautiful and it was long, so I’ve split it into two episodes. In this first one, we talk about his lockdown project, about what it was like growing up queer in New York in the 70s and 80. He gives us a visual description of a New York dance club back then then, tips on how to skip in public and much more. 

Here is the playlist collecting all the songs he shared, in the order in which he shared them.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3k99MGqONSBhC06WhhiZGc?si=12c54f01c8cf4082