An Incomplete History of An Incomplete History of Music

The rough story of how Shambles' biggest ever project came to be, told by its director and producer, Trent Burton.

LONG READ: Over the years, The Cosmic Shambles Network has put together some pretty big projects for what is essentially a pretty little operation. A 24 hour live show, an entire forest of science and culture at the Latitude Festival (returning in 2026) and multiple sold out shows at the Royal Albert Hall to name just a few. So how did For The Record: An Incomplete History of Music wind up being the Network’s biggest project to date? Director and Producer Trent Burton takes a swing at an explanation.

Producer & Director Trent Burton on set

Why music? Why a 9.5 hour broadcast level documentary series? FOUR YEARS IN THE MAKING? Are you OK? All fair questions.

Let’s go back a bit. Sometime in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic being deathly mishandled by Boris Johnson, alongside our award winning The Stay at Home Festival (our publicist says we have to say things like this now even though it makes me feel icky. The ‘award winning’ bit, not the political stuff, they’d probably like us to say less of that), we were making a bunch of audio documentaries and podcasts like An Uncanny Hour and Science Shambles Q&A. We were also going to make a short series on some scientific concepts, told from a couple of different perspectives. The first one we were going to do was to be about ‘speed’.

We did some Zoom interviews with astrophysicist Dr Katie Mack and motorsport journalist, and author of the book Speed: The One Genuinely Modern Pleasure, Mat Oxley. But as things started to open up, lockdown wise, I thought perhaps we should film some of the interviews, and expand on the topic. That’s when things got out of control fairly quickly, as Shambles projects tend to do. It was fast turning into our first full feature documentary film. Mat would appear in the final film alongside a huge array of people including everyone from astronaut Helen Sharman to test cricket legend David Gower. We also terrified mathematician Matt Parker by putting him on the back of an actual MotoGP grand prix motorcycle for a lap of Silverstone all in the name of derivatives. Physics World said it was a, ‘mix of ultra-nerdy science discourse and unabashed silliness’ which is basically what I’m always aiming for.

Sadly we weren’t able to get to the US to film with original audio series interviewee Katie Mack for it, but in making sure we’ve come full circle, we did head out to the US to film with her for this new docuseries.

That speed film, Rapid Motion Through Space: An Incomplete History of Speed took its title from two places, the James Joyce quote from The Dubliners up front, and then The Incomplete Map of the Cosmic Genome. This was an app created by myself and Robin Ince over a decade ago that was a sort of video magazine based around the joy found in scientific discovery.

As soon as I came up with the subtitle for Rapid Motion I knew that ‘An Incomplete History…’ was going to be something we’d come back to. It had a very Shambles feel to it.

It was like our Nine Lessons shows in many ways. A tasting menu of ideas, introducing the audience to multiple ideas and inviting them to dig deeper themselves into the particular parts that fascinated them the most. In the live shows, it could well be anything, but in the film it was tied to a single theme that still enabled us to explore multiple areas of science and culture. Neuroscience and aerodynamics and space flight and climate change and all manner of other topics, in documentary form.

We also wanted to make it look different to our other web series and the like. We wanted it to look like a ‘proper’ documentary, so I brought in my old pal Andrew Mickelburgh, a cinematographer with some BAFTA nominated projects on his CV.

Always with an eye on the next project, during the production of Rapid Motion I went back to the original audio series plan. The three initial topics we had in mind were speed, sound and light. Sound felt like an obvious choice for our second feature documentary I thought, but I wanted to narrow the focus a little so it didn’t get too unwieldy. So I decided to just focus on music. A feature documentary on the incomplete history of music. No way that could get out of control surely…

So I sat down with long time Shambles live show musical director Steve Pretty, of Hackney Colliery Band fame, one day for a long discussion about music in general. He had done a live show many moons ago at the Edinburgh Fringe called On the Origin of Pieces which is now a podcast of the same name. He was exploring what music meant to people and as part of his own self proclaimed mid-life crisis, sawing up a lot of conch shells.

But I wanted to go bigger and wider for this film; right back to the very birth of sound itself.

That chat with Steve was close to four years ago.

Since then, at Shambles, we’ve made two other feature documentaries instead, on the incomplete history of science variety, and of women in engineering. We’ve done countless live shows and events around the world, a Bibliomaniac web series, a web series about ocean science with Helen Czerski, continued running Nine Lessons every year, created and curated The Cosmic Shambles Forest of Science and Culture at Latitude and even as a I type this I am sat backstage at Massey Hall in Toronto where we are doing Chris Hadfield’s Generator show tonight (Note - It went well, I wrote this bit a couple of weeks ago).

You see, it would seem that my narrowed focus of music turned out to be quite wide. Really damn wide actually. And I didn’t want to do an incomplete incomplete history.

As we started doing some initial interviews, so I could try to start to build the framework of the story, it lead to more interviews. Which lead to more interviews. Each interview got me interested in another facet of the story of music. And interviewees would say, ‘Oh you really should talk to Person X’. And I usually agreed. And so we did.

The very first interview we shot for the series was with Dr Helen Czerski exploring the physics of sound.

I realised pretty early on, that this wasn’t going to be a feature film. Two 90 minute episodes I then said. Like a limited series. Or maybe three episodes. At most.

At some point in early 2025 I settled on the final structure and that was eight one hour episodes with a bonus 90 minute special for Patreon supporters. And a live show. Could it very easily be 12 episodes? Yes. Or 24? Or a tour? Sure.

But like I always say to performers at Nine Lessons, don’t overrun…

The thing is, at some point, one has to embrace his own incomplete moniker, settle on a limit, and start to tell the story you want to tell. The sheer scope of it is why it took four years as well as all the other Shambles projects happening alongside it.

Right now we are deep in post production and eight episodes doesn’t feel rushed, and I don’t believe it feels bloated either. I think it is what I wanted it to be, a tasting menu of a huge slice of culture and science that invites you to dig deeper at your leisure.

We chatted with Charlotte Church at The Dreaming in Wales

So why music?

Well, I love music. I really love it. I always have. A vast many people do. And part of the reason I wanted to tell its story is because, unlike speed, for as much as I love music, I confess to not really understanding it. Whereas I could wax lyrical (pun intended) about tyre pressure physics for days on end, I couldn’t really tell you a G Major from a B Flat. Music notation might as well be hieroglyphics. And I have all the rhythm of roadkill.

Making this documentary was as much a voyage of discovery for me as I hope it is for audiences too whether you’re a music lover or music maker. And to paraphrase Richard Feynman, the more I came to understand how it worked, and where it came from, my love and appreciation for this thing we call music only increased.

I am incredibly proud of this series. Possibly even more so than anything we’ve ever done at Shambles. We are a small team, almost entirely independently funded from Patreon and ticket sales to our events, and to have put together something of this magnitude from that, with our small team is quite honestly mind boggling.

Much of what you will see on screen in this series comes from just myself and our lead camera operator Alice Degrassi traversing the globe interviewing all sorts of wonderful people.

Lead Camera op Alice Degrassi filming in Hohle Fels cave in Germany

Back in the UK fine folks like our associate producer Melinda Burton, our returning cinematographer Andrew Mickelburgh, our music advisor Steve Pretty and others were involved in sculpting what you’ll see on screen next June.

Some period of time into filming I started to think about who would be the perfect presenter. I wanted someone with a bit of a background in music, but also the comedy chops to carry the Shambles silliness and levity required of a longer series, and the genuine first name that jumped into my head was Charlotte Ritchie.

We’d worked with Charlotte on a couple of things previously and so I sent her and her team an email, a couple of years ago now. She was off starring in Netflix’s massive global hit You at the time, or maybe it was when she was filming The Assessment with Elizabeth Olsen, or possibly filming her part in Wonka, and so I had expected her to be too busy.

I’d said it might be a film or it might be two episodes or it might be a million, and I don’t know when we’re going to shoot your bits yet because I don’t know when I’ll ever be done and quite frankly sorry for bothering you and congrats on the most recent series of Ghosts.

’I’d love to do this’, was her swift response.

Charlotte Ritchie on set with our Hair and Make Up Artist, Emily Mickelburgh

So that bit in the trailer above where Charlotte is saying it’s all got wildly out of control and we told her it’d take a year tops… Yeah, that’s pretty accurate.

So on the final weekend of June 2026, over what would be Glastonbury weekend if it weren’t a fallow year, we invite you to sit down and enjoy a series that tells the story of how we go from the Big Bang to something like Glastonbury far beyond. We dive into topics are far reaching as singing Neanderthals, medieval church PRS claims, the invention of the synth and the selection process for the songs on The Golden Record. We explore The Beatles and Pitch Perfect. Bone flutes and AI. Hip Hop and Musicals.

Look, the thing is, you’d most likely be watching eight plus hours of music that weekend on TV anyway, so why not take a ride through its history in 2026 instead? And don’t worry, there’s plenty of music in the series too including eight brand new musical performances from the likes of David McAlmont, Tanita Tikaram and Sonny Tennet.

Filming street musicians in New Orleans

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, yes, I’ve already decided what the next An Incomplete History of… documentary is going to tackle. And it’s not light, in any sense of the word...

I want to end this rambling by reiterating that this series, and all projects like this, could not exist without the support of our fans and backers on Patreon and Substack. The big broadcasters, particularly in the UK, have largely moved away from documentary and interesting stories in lieu of cheap to produce reality TV and panel shows based on Reddit threads.

And of those that are still making things, they insist (and this is genuinely something I’ve been told) that documentaries need a moment that can go viral on social media AT LEAST EVERY 90 SECONDS.

I don’t accept that’s the way to make a documentary.

Filming in NYC with Hip Hop pioneer Grandmaster Caz

We firmly believe, and we know a lot of people do as well, that there is still a desire for long form documentaries and docuseries that take time to tell a story instead of bolting together 30 minutes of soundbites and calling it a day.

YouTube is becoming a place not just for shorts and YouTuber videos that are done so well by our friends like Matt Parker and Steve Mould, but also for traditional broadcast style and broadcast quality documentary.

And so, increasingly, the only way for these sorts of things to get made is to produce them independently, with support through places like Patreon and Substack. If we’d worked with a major studio or broadcaster odds are we wouldn’t have even started filming yet, if we ever even would. Or they would’ve just taken the idea, condensed it into a 50 minute special and gotten someone off of Dave to present it. It’s happened before…

There is an immense pride we take in being in an independent network. It’s a conscious and deliberate choice. But it definitely comes with challenges.

Interviewing deaf musician Ruth Montgomery in London with the help of her BSL interpreter

So if you like what we do, enjoy the series when it comes out, or even just think that stories deserve more than 30 second chunks in a vertical format, please consider signing up here or over on Patreon for a couple of quid a month. You’ll get a whole bunch of bonus stuff too.

All eight episodes will be available on YouTube, worldwide, entirely free. There will be a bonus ‘behind the music’ episode for Patreon and Substack subscribers as a special thank you.

You support not only means this sort of content can exist, but also that we can make it available freely to those that can’t afford to pledge or have fifteen different streaming subscriptions. And if you can’t support us financially, that’s ok, sharing our stuff also makes a huge difference.

And if you don’t like what we do I’m not quite sure why you’ve read this far, but fair play I guess.

Anyway, for now, it’s back into the post production suite. (Currently I am deep into a section around the music of Ancient Egypt).

The countdown to June begins now.

by Trent Burton - Producer and Director of For the Record and co-founder of The Cosmic Shambles Network