London art-punk experimentalists Squid released their O Monolith album in June, and we were big fans. Today they’ve released an accompanying short story in audiobook form, written and narrated by the team behind one of their favorite podcasts. It’s called “Lessons,” and I’ll let the band explain how it came to be:

We’re massively pleased to present an audiobook version of ‘Lessons’ – an accompanying story to O Monolith written by Paul Ewen – narrated by poet, comedian and actor Tim Key.

We’re huge fans of Tim and Paul’s podcast London Pub Reviews and during the recording sessions for ‘O Monolith’, we reached out to Paul asking if he’d consider writing a narrative accompaniment to the record in that vein. On receiving the story it felt only right to see if Tim might be up for bringing it to life in his inimitable way.

John Fahey’s story insert to his 1967 album The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death, inspired the project, and after reading and listening to Paul’s amazing work (London Pub Reviews, How To Be A Public Author) and talking to him, we found he had a great understanding of our work and exciting ideas for the project. He said he wanted to write a story about an out of touch geography teacher and it doesn’t get much more exciting than THAT! Similarly, Tim seems to have an amazing grasp of Paul’s humour and his delivery takes it to another level, as is the case on the pub reviews series.

Hear “Lessons” below.