Talking Perseverance with Carol Jarvis at The Podcast Show in London

This audio report was recorded using the SM7B dynamic microphone, which help shut out the rather noisy crowds at The Podcast Show, Europe’s premier event for the podcasting industry.

Marc Young: Carol, thanks so much for joining me here today at the London Podcast Show.

Carol Jarvis: Lovely to be here.

When we were thinking people to interview here, your name came up as the perfect podcast guest. Not only are you an accomplished session musician who's played with the likes of Sting and Amy Winehouse, but you're also a successful voiceover artist and a soon to be podcaster.

Yeah, exactly. My podcast has literally just launched.

Okay, great. Let's plug it right straight out of the gate here. What's it called?

It's called In My Veins.

What's it about and where can we find it?

Well, it's exclusively on Spotify because I'm using their music and talk type of podcast. So you can actually insert lots of music without worrying about the copyrights and licensing and stuff. And it's all about interviewing lots of guests. I've got some great guests lined up all about the challenges that people have got through in their lives. So, for instance, I went through cancer for a long time. I fought Hodgkin's lymphoma for nine and a half years. And during that journey, I was actually told that we exhausted all avenues of treatment and I was told I wasn't going to survive. And as I work as a musician and voiceover artist, I've got all the gear and I've got a bit of a story to tell. And I wanted to sort of see what other people, what their challenges have been, their motivation behind it, and how they got over those challenges and how life looks the other side of it. So I'm kind of tying all of my avenues of life together in this podcast, which is amazing.

Reading about your battle with cancer was harrowing, what you went through, but it's also incredibly inspiring how you've taken that experience and used it. For example, what you're doing, you've done motivational talks on it as well, and you're taking that into the podcast. Is it going to be mostly people with ties to the music industry or is it a broad cross section of society?

I'm kind of starting in the music industry because that's where I am. They're the people I know. They're the context I've got. But also I've got guests like Guy Disney MBE, who is the first amputee – he lost a leg in Afghanistan – first amputee to win a major horse race, and also the first amputee to hike to both the North Pole and the South Pole.

Wow.

And he's not a musician, but I'm obviously going to tie in music in every single episode and find out the power of music and how music kind of their soundtrack to their lives. So the music that has helped heal them, music they've used to keep them going in certain points, music they couldn't listen to during certain times in their lives. I mean, for instance, when I was going through my final transplant, my bone marrow transplant, I listened to one album, 24/7 for six weeks in this isolation room.

Can you tell us which album that was?

It was a Take That album.

Oh, wow.

And actually, I interviewed a music psychologist that's going to be on this first season of the podcast all about the Power of Music. And we got onto this subject and she translated that as though, well, actually, I'm going back to a time in my life when I was a teenager listening to take that and a time in my life where I had no worries, I had no issues, no problems in life. And so I obviously subconsciously took myself back to that point in my life to help myself through the hardest part of my life. And it worked!I mean, I'm still here.

Okay, speaking of music, I want to stay in that vein, basically, and talk about your earliest musical experiences because I wanted to know what led you to pick up the trombone rather than another instrument.

I don't actually know where I saw the first trombone, but I must have seen something on TV or maybe live, I don't know. And it wasn't until I passed a music test at school and they said, well, you can choose any instrument you like, but we need an oboe in the school orchestra. So I went home and asked my parents, what's an oboe? They played me some recordings and apparently I said, no way. And I said to my dad, what's the one with that slide-y arm?

Of course.

And so he said, that's a trombone. So we managed to get hold of a cheap trombone and I just took to it like it was the best thing ever.

Listen to the entire interview with Carol above and check out her website here. Find Shure microphones for brass instruments here.