Welcome to the Undertone podcast where we talk about all things creepy. It wants to be heard. We're listening to 10 mysterious audio recordings from an anonymous email. Oh my god. Are you implying there's hidden messages in it? Let me play it back in reverse. I'm sorry. And it refuses to let go. Undertone, the number one horror from A24 in cinemas from the 10th of April. Book tickets now. Hello, it's Ed Gamble here from the Off Menu podcast. And James A. Caster here from the Off Menu podcast. And the Off Menu podcast is currently being brought to you by Magnum Bonbons. Bite-sized ice cream indulgence, James. I'll Ed. I've been loving Magnum Bonbons lately. I bet you have. They're everything you expect from a Magnum, just in bite-sized form. Cracking chocolate, creamy ice cream, ribbons of sauce, and crunchy inclusions. You're not the only one who loves Magnum Bonbons. I absolutely love it for a night in. Pop a film on, crack out the bonbons, toss one in the air, catch it in my mouth, high five my wife. And listeners, have you tried Magnum Bonbons yet? These bite-sized treats are perfect to share and available in four indulgent flavors. I think my favorite is Magnum Bonbon white chocolate and cookies. Back to the show. Good morning, good afternoon, everybody. Depending on where you are on the planet, this is Ill Advised by Bill Nye. I am Bill Nye and I vow, I promise, that we will continue our quest to make this podcast as inconsequential as it is humanly possible to be. This is a profundity-free zone. If you catch me commenting on your relationship, either sexual or romantic, or any kind of relationship, call a cab. I'll be answering more questions and I'll try not to make things actually worse. As regular listeners will know, I'll also be suggesting some songs and books. We also have a new feature which is, I don't think you understand, but I'm like with the band. Which is interesting, where people send in the embarrassing name of their early embarrassing band and the embarrassing lyrics preferably to their signature embarrassing song. And I will read those embarrassing lyrics out over the air. Let's start now. Hi Bill, it's Gary, living in Uji, originally from England. I just wanted to say I really enjoyed your solo air guitar the other day. It was pretty good. Bought a smile to my face. On the subject, I was thinking of holding a air solo saxophone competition. Do you have any idea which city I should hold it in and would you like to participate? Thank you very much. Gary, I think it's a sensational idea and I think there's only one city in the world that should host it and that's Reykjavik. It's so obviously as an Icelandic phenomenon. I've never actually air saxophoneed personally, but I'm not against it. I'm all for it in fact. I think the more airing that goes on the better. I think it makes the world go round. I think it makes the world a better place. And it must be quite tricky air saxophone, I would imagine. But I think that Iceland would embrace you should you go there. Will I take part? Gary, are you out of your mind? No, I won't because I've got my hands full, if you're pardoning me, with the guitar. Because you never get to the end of air guitar. It's an endless quest and I'm afraid I just don't have the time for no saxophone. But I wish you luck. Take it easy. Hi Bill. This is Julie from the US, but living in London. Over the years, I've come to love drinking tea and eating biscuits, especially sweet biscuits. But I think I have a sugar addiction. You mentioned you don't eat sugar anymore. I wonder if you could advise me how to continue enjoying my afternoon tea without the sweet biscuits. Thank you. Julie, I think you came to the right person. I could never imagine a cup of tea without a cigarette. It was just unthinkable. The tea became meaningless until I gave up cigarettes successfully, which is one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. And then never a day goes by when I don't rejoice. And then tea became like a sacrament. Tea became the most fabulous event. And I drink a cup of strong. I make it as strong as it can possibly be. I squeeze the tea bag with an inch of its life and I have that first thing in the morning. And I have zero nostalgia for a cigarette. And the same thing happens with sugar. You just have to give it a while and then the biscuit becomes not even a memory. It would just ruin your cup of tea and the cup of tea becomes the thing. In terms of sugar, I'm like a child with a credit card. I used to go on wagons. They would always turn out to be a wagon and wagons are there for one thing only, which is falling off. And I would fall off and I'd get quite a long time. I'd get like six months and then I'd fall off a wagon. It would turn out to be a wagon. But the last time I went to a shop near my apartment in my district and I bought a sack full of high street chocolate. And I bought two of everything because I get institutionalized in the numbers. So I would have two topics, two lion bars, two picnics, two usually things with nuts. And I'd get four to eight tubes of round trees fruit comes. I also used to get in the old days, I used to get a four pack of magnums and a four pack of celeros. And magnums would be like main course and celeros would be like dessert. And I would eat the eight ice creams and the two of everything chocolate and the six to eight round trees fruit comes at one sitting in front of the TV. I became like a machine and it's hard to rationalize because like the first magnum and celeros is easy because, you know, I don't smoke. I don't take drugs. I don't, you know, do bad things to people. So why shouldn't I have a couple of ice creams? The second two. Yeah, you can you can get by on the same, you know, in the same rationale. The third two are tough. Why are you having a third magnum and a third celeros? That's a hard one to sell even to a maniac, but you manage it obviously. But the last two, the fourth magnum and the fourth celeros, that's a walk in the park because they're, they're messing up the freezer. You know, they're in there loose in a box in the freezer and you can't go to sleep leaving them in that situation. So you've got to clean up. So you have the fourth magnum and you have the fourth celeros. So just so you know, my credentials when it comes to sugar, but the last time I actually went to a shop and bought a load, I was walking back through my district and I thought that if I were to see anybody I knew, it was just possible. They might say, what's in the bag? And I would have to explain that I was going to an orphanage the next day because there was no other way to account for the amount of high street chocolate I had in the bag. And then when I got home, I crossed a line. The line was I took the bag to bed and I put all of the high street chocolate all over my bedspread. And then I went to Mars and looked back down and I saw this man of what I was then probably 60 something lying in a bed that was covered with high street chocolate. And I picked it all up and put it back in the bag and I took it downstairs and I put it in the rubbish and I didn't go back and get it out. Julie, I left it in the rubbish and I can't remember if that was the last time I did. I think that was the last time I ever had any of that sort of high street chocolate. And again, I never gave up anything that wasn't a terrific idea to give up and that didn't make life quite seriously better. And I haven't had sugar for a long, long time. I don't read the back of things. I eat bread and stuff. If anybody ever says to you, you know, fruit, that's got a lot of sugar in it. Then you know you're talking to somebody who has a sugar problem. Only people with a sugar, as you say. There's a lot of sugar and fruit, you know, and I do eat fruit and I don't suffer anymore and I don't yearn. I have zero nostalgia for a picnic or a topic or a lion bar and I don't have to think about it anymore. It's a great relief and it's just great to be free of it all. So what happens is your afternoon cup of tea becomes dreamy without the biscuit. Trust me. Hi Bill, it's Orlando here from Sydney, Australia. I just have a question about up shopping and crovats. I'm a 21 year old university student and I often find that classic menswear can be quite expensive. So I go up shopping and I just wondered whether you ever go up shopping and if you have any advice for your younger listeners on how to acquire classic menswear at a more reasonable cost. The second part of my question is crovats and wearing crovats. I was very lucky to inherit my grandfathers from the 1940s and 50s and I love wearing them but they can be very flamboyant. And I just wondered whether you think you can wear a crovat in this day and age and whether they might make a comeback and if you ever wear a crovat. Thank you so much Bill. Ciao. Orlando, I spent half my life in what they now call vintage shops. They used to be called second hand shops and I've just been told that they are now also called pre-loved shops and I'm instantly putting pre-loved on the band word list because it's just too bad. Anyway, yeah, no, so I dressed almost exclusively out of vintage stores when I was a kid or rather when I was a young man and it's a great idea. I live near quite a famous vintage store but it's mostly caters to women. But yeah, and you would go to posh areas where the second hand stuff would be, you know, posh. When I say vintage stores, I don't mean what you call apparently in Australia, op shopping because that means charity shops. I did go to charity shops but there were also vintage stores which were not for charity. They were for the person who ran the shop to make some money but either way they would be second hand clothes. I love the kind of randomness of it and that you would get things that you wouldn't normally, you wouldn't go in a shop and buy them for, you know, new. But they were somehow acceptable because they were second hand. As for cravats, Orlando, are you out of your mind? It's 2026, you can't wear a cravat and you're at university, you'll never get laid, you'll never get a girlfriend or a boyfriend or whatever it is you're looking for because you will look like someone who is pretending to be 63. I just don't think they will ever be, it's, you know, who knows, everything goes in circles but I don't think they'll ever be rehabilitated. I wear a scarf under a coat and I tie the scarf around my neck and somebody the other day, a young person said to me at work, oh that's a nice cravat and I was, I'd tell you, I had to watch my mouth, I had to restrain myself and I said tight lipped, I said it's a scarf. And she went, oh, I thought it was a cravat, she said the word twice. Anyway, they may be cute and they came down the family line and everything and they have sentimental value but for God's sake, wear them around the house but don't go out on the street. That would be my advice, Orlando. But then again, you know, like everything, that's just me. You may be able to pull it off. Hi Bill, it's Christina and Chester in here from Deeper's Burgundy in France. I'd like to know your thoughts about etiquette when taking one's Daxand or as they're known here, Teckel, with one for dinner or social occasions at friends or acquaintances. Thank you. Christina, hello. I used to have a friend called Ken Campbell and Ken Campbell was a genius. He was routinely described in the newspaper as a lunatic genius which used to really get to him and he'd say, why can't I be a genius like all the other geniuses? And he had a dog called Werner who was ironically called Werner after Werner Ehrhardt of Ehrhardt Seminar Training fame which was a sort of semi-cult that happened in the 19-somethings. And he ironically called his dog, who was a girl, Werner. But he used to say that if they won't take the dog, don't go. He conducted his life according to, you know, where Werner was allowed. And therefore, if Werner wasn't allowed, he wouldn't turn up. And he wouldn't go into any establishment where they wouldn't tolerate Werner, which is one way of navigating through life by dog, navigating by dog. I used to have a dog. The trouble with my dog, Smokey, was that he would eat the dinner. If you turned your back for two minutes, he once lifted a whole roast chicken off the Sunday lunchtime table and took it into the garden. And then it came back and we couldn't find the chicken. And he came back and he did that thing that dogs do, which is he would sit with a very, very straight face as if nothing had happened, which always used to make me laugh. The joke in the house was that I was like Smokey. In other words, I was long. He was a sort of lurcher-ish kind of thing. He was actually a rescue dog. My friend from Chile, when she first saw him, said, oh, he's a street dog, which I was quite, I was more than quite offended by it. But it's true. He was a mongrel. And we had a Tibetan terrier called Nell, who was also black and white. And they were like Lady and the Tramp, only black and white. And the only funny thing that Smokey ever did was that if you played the chord of C on the piano, he would howl in the chord of C, which I know you had to be there, but it was really, really funny. The other funny thing he did, and I'm going to get into trouble for this, but I'm going to go ahead, is that if you gave him a wine gum, he loved, guess what, he loved a wine gum. But it meant that he had to snap his jaws in order to get, because, you know, they're bouncy. And dogs aren't used to bouncy food. And my daughter used to howl with laughter. Now we're both in trouble. But she would beg me to stop because she thought it was wrong. I don't know whether it's wrong to give a dog a wine gum. It's almost certainly officially, technically, you know, dieterrally wrong. But is it really wrong? I don't know. Where do you stand? The other impressive thing about Smokey was that he could catch a Frisbee in midair and hang there like Cristiano Ronaldo. And also, he was a festival of bad character. He was terrified of his own kind and would take a two-mile detour to get away from any dog that resembled him in terms of size. But if there was a small dog, he would howl and bully and become unbearably aggressive. So he'd go missing if there was anything that equalled him. But he was a good dog. And I miss him. It's now time for our I'm With The Band feature, which is where we invite people to send in the name, preferably embarrassing name, of their early band as teenagers. And some embarrassing, preferably, lyrics from one of their signature tunes. And we've had lots of responses. And one here from Kings Mountain, North Carolina. And it's from Kim. And in the 90s, says Kim, I played drums in an arty punk band called Tex Svengali. And while most probably wouldn't call this one of our signature songs, I always love these lyrics to the song Rhino Stand. And the lyrics are, I don't think I like humans no more. They either make me mad or bored, only happy when they're causing problems. I'm embarrassed to be one of them. Which I think he did well to sell it to us, Kim. I think they're great lyrics, and everyone can identify. And they rhyme, kind of. No, they rhyme, they really rhyme. To rhyme problems with one of them is exemplary. Thank you for that. If you have any preferably embarrassing lyrics from your early band before you were 27, then we'd love to hear them. And I will read them out live on air on your behalf. And that's the end of this week's I'm With The Band. This week's playlist is called Instead of School. And the reason it's called Instead of School is because I have a friend called Carl Johnson who plays blues guitar. And he always used to say that playing blues guitar was what he did instead of his O-levels, which always used to make me laugh. And for those of you who don't know what O-levels are, they're what GCSEs used to be before they became GCSEs. Anyway, so this is called Instead of School in honor of Carl. It starts with something that I know Carl would approve of. And it's called I'm Taw Down, T-O-R-E, which is an expression I really like. I've only ever heard it once before. And that's a Van Morrison song that many people will be familiar with called Taw Down, Alarambo, meaning the French poet. It's just a little bit of ancient jive talk that I like. I like ancient jive talk, particularly when it's been laundered through irony and made it into the modern world, as you probably are familiar with. So that's the first track. And the second track is by another favorite artist called Dr. John, The Night Tripper. And it's called Right Place Wrong Time. And I like it a lot. And then there's I Can Teen a Turner with a great song called Knuck Bush City Limits, which a lot of you, everyone over, I don't know, 30 will have heard, but it really swings. And then another band that I thought I'd discovered and then realized that they were internationally famous was Elastica. I got to them, you know, this century, which is a little late. And this is a track called Stutter. I love the lyrics. I like Elastica lyrics. They're very cool. No need to wine boy, like a wind up toy. You stutter at my feet. And it's never the time, boy. You've had too much wine to stumble up my street. Is there something you lack when I'm flat on my back? Is there something that I can do for you? It's always something you hate or it's something you ate. Tell me, is it the way that I touch you? Have you found a new mate? Is she really great? Is it just that I'm much too much for you? These are refreshing lyrics. The next track is from Kelly Rowland. And it's a song called Daylight, which I thought was unique to her. But then I discovered that Bobby Womack does a version and it features Travis McCoy. And it's about going out late, staying out all night and coming home when everyone else is going to work. We all know about that. And then David Bowie with Suffragette City with very mysterious lyrics. But just a great driving tune. I know that Carl will disapprove of half of that list, but what can I do? He's just going to get out more. This episode's book is called The Idiot by Elif Bachuman. Again, you don't have to remember the title. It will be in the show notes. And I enjoyed it very much. Elif Bachuman has a habit of calling her books the same name as novels by Dostoevsky, one of which is The Idiot, and the other is The Possessed, which amuses me. And which will amuse you if you read the book. I really like the book. It's funny and romantic in an odd way. And I'm going to read a little bit. Ivan called at 10 that night. Where are you? I asked. I'm outside your house. Said Ivan. I looked out the window. He was standing under a streetlight at one of the emergency telephones. Those phones were a direct line to campus police. They didn't even have number pads. I had no idea how he had used one to reach my room. I went downstairs. He seemed different from usual, more restless. I think we need to get a drink, he said. He had said before that he thought drinking would help me. He said it would help with talking. This obsession with drinking was one of the things that had most surprised me about college. I had always looked down on alcohol because my parents liked to drink at dinner and it always made them more annoying. I had known that alcohol was supposed to be a big part of college life and that some people would really care about it, but I hadn't realized it would be basically everyone except the most humilous or childish people and also some people who were religious. There didn't seem to be any way of not drinking without it being a statement. Fine, I said, let's get a drink. Ivan took me to an upscale beer garden twinkling with white Christmas lights. The bouncer asked for our IDs. Ivan didn't seem to understand at first why we weren't being allowed in. He seemed to think we were somehow being discriminated against. I'm not 21, I told him. That's the reason. He asked. That's it, pal, said the bouncer. We walked 20 minutes farther from campus to a crowded bar in a basement where we came up against a warm wall of cigarette smoke, beery exhalations and some kind of vaporous sawdust. Ivan found a table where people seemed to be thinking about leaving a high table with stools and loomed over them until they got up. You can wait here, he said. What do you want? I don't know, I said. Ivan looked at me for a moment and then went to the bar. All around people were shouting, wearing t-shirts. Their backs seemed more numerous than their faces. I saw Ivan leaning over the bar and talking to the bartender who had a pixie cut, laughing eyes and dimples, though her mouth wasn't smiling. Ivan came back with two pint glasses of beer and handed me the paler one. The glass was heavy in my hand. It felt expensive and adult. I didn't understand why we had to be there in that place. At the same time, there was nowhere in the world that I would rather have been. I thought about what a special, unusual person Ivan was, how much more present and alive than other people, how he said and thought things that nobody else said or thought, and how ready he was to walk round with me for hours. All I had to do was write him an email and then he walked around with me all day long. Who else in the world would do that? Health, Ivan said in Russian, and we clinked glasses. The beer was cold and not especially unpleasant, but I couldn't tell what the point of it was. Like the iced coffee, it was at once watery and bitter. Apparently that was desirable. Is it okay? Ivan asked. I'm not sure, I said. He picked up my glass and took a sip. I looked at him closely. It's beer, he said shrugging. Try this one. He pushed his glass towards me. I tried it. It tasted extremely similar to mine. Do you like mine better? He asked. I shook my head. We traded back our glasses. I wasn't sure I would be able to finish the beer. Swallowing became increasingly difficult. I thought I could feel my body swaying ever so slightly on the high bar stool. I didn't find that talking was any easier. All around us people were laughing and roaring so loudly that we had to lean in close and shout past each other's ears. Linger by the cranberries was playing in the background. You've got me wrapped around your finger, the singer warbled over and over in a girly, excessively beautiful voice. It felt ominous to me. The aestheticized girliness, infatuation and weakness. Do you like the cranberries? Ivan asked. I don't really like this song. I said, do you? I like it. He was pulling apart and counting a wad of fives and singles. I have enough money for two more each. I realized he meant two more beers. My heart sank. I had thought getting a drink meant you only had to have one. You have just been listening to Bill Nyegele in Ill Advise by Bill Nyegele. We hope you've enjoyed it. Please keep your questions coming. Not that we're short of questions, I assure you, but it's always nice to have fresh data. You can send them in via our Instagram, which is at illadvisebybillnyegele.com. We look forward to hearing from you. Take it easy wherever you go. Oh, and whatever else you forget, don't forget to disco. Ill Advise by Bill Nyegele is produced by Chiara Grigori, actually Chiara Gregory, and Alice Williams. The assistant producer is Angelique Somers, which is pronounced Somers. It's an iPod studio production. Cracking chocolate, creamy ice cream, ribbons of sauce, and crunchy inclusions. You're not the only one who loves Magnum Bonbons. I absolutely love it for a night in. Pop a film on, crack out the bonbons, toss one in the air, catch it in my mouth, high five my wife. And listeners, have you tried Magnum Bonbons yet? These bite-sized treats are perfect to share and available in four indulgent flavors. I think my favorite is Magnum Bonbon White Chocolate and Cookies. Back to the show. Welcome to the Undertone Podcast, where we talk about all things creepy. It wants to be heard. We're listening to 10 mysterious audio recordings from an anonymous email. Oh my God. Are you implying there's hidden messages in it? Let me play it back in reverse. And it refuses to let go. Undertone, the number one horror from A24 in cinemas from the 10th of April. Book tickets now.
