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Surrey’s Captain Maniac music podcaster still rocking at 76, ‘Proudly a Nasty Canadian’
Colin Hartridge has produced more than 600 Captain Maniac episodes since 2014, building an international audience for his themed monthly music shows.
Longtime Surrey resident Colin Hartridge turns 76 this week and continues to build an audience with his Captain Maniac music podcast, now more than 600 episodes in.
Hartridge, a former drummer with Sparkling Apple and other bands, records a monthly show built around varied themes. His latest, Proudly a Nasty Canadian, episode 621, responds to the Canada-U.S. trade war with two hours of songs by Burton Cummings, Guess Who, Sass Jordan, Amanda Marshall, Headstones and others.
Other recent episodes include Let There Be Drums, focused on song titles involving drums, drumming or percussion, and 2120 South Michigan Ave., featuring artists who recorded for Chess Records. Hartridge began posting Captain Maniac programs to Mixcloud from his Guildford-area home more than a decade ago.
He says he retains memories of concerts and bands he has seen, along with information about them. His first concert was The Beatles at Vancouver’s Empire Stadium in 1964, when he was 14. It led to a lifetime of concert-going that included performances by Jimi Hendrix, Cream and Led Zeppelin, among thousands of concerts.
A computer crash months ago forced a break from the podcast and erased past shows as well as a memoir he was writing about his time with Sparkling Apple. Hartridge said rebuilding the book would take too much work, so he has decided to go without it.
Although the shows run close to two hours, he spends still more time producing them each month, after once maintaining a weekly schedule. He receives no payment and says he checks that a theme has not already been used before searching YouTube and his own collection for music. He said Mixcloud appealed to him because it pays song copyrights and handles restrictions.
Hartridge says he exchanges messages with listeners in the United States, Germany, Australia and elsewhere through Mixcloud and Facebook. Older shows dating to 2014 are at archive.org/details/@captain_maniac, newer episodes are at mixcloud.com/CaptManiac, and his graphic-design work is at captainmaniacgraphics.wordpress.com.