The Plastic People of the Universe were a group of underground Czech psych-rockers known more for their outlandish stage presence than for their songs. After the Communist invasion in 1968, however, they became a thorn in the side of the repressive regime for their subversive messages, not to mention some truly ingenious ways of defying the ban on live gigs. So the authorities decided to put the band on trial – an event that backfired spectacularly. Paul Wilson, a young Canadian swept up in...

Racism, riots and political upheaval seemed to be spreading like wildfire in Britain in the 1980s. In that increasingly hostile environment, the ‘daytimers’ – mostly south Asian teenagers who skipped school to attend daytime raves – began to mix their Punjabi roots with western influences, creating a new type of music: bhangra. And one song about a Birmingham street crystallised it all. This musical revolution is told to us by the people who lived it, who bought the cassettes and bunked off...

In 1942, the city we now call St Petersburg had been under siege by Nazi troops for months. With hundreds of thousands starving to death and the prospect of victory looking bleak, Soviet leaders tried what might now seem an unlikely attempt to salvage morale: they commissioned Dmitri Shostakovich to compose a grand symphony. The jaw-dropping true story of how Shostakovich’s seventh symphony was eventually performed is brought to life by Marina Frolova-Walker, a professor of music history at...

Ten years ago the Arab spring spread into north Africa’s biggest country as more than a million Egyptians, enraged by police brutality and a collapsing economy, took over Tahrir Square – the heart of Cairo’s police state. It was Ramy Essam’s moment. In a remarkable communion with the crowd, his spine-tingling song, Irhal, became the rallying cry for an entire generation. And when the dictator Hosni Mubarak resigned, they couldn’t believe their success – but nor could they predict what would...

Christmas, 1989: the White House has sent troops to depose Manuel Noriega. But the Panamanian dictator has holed up in the Vatican embassy. So the US military turns to a new ‘psy-ops’ tool: it points huge loudspeakers at the embassy and begins blaring rock music, with pointed titles such as Van Halen’s Panama and Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. A young translator named Enrique Jelenszky, who was with Noriega when the music began, takes us inside the dictator’s final moments in the...

It was the stuff of dreams: in 2013, Kashy Keegan was an unknown singer-songwriter in a sleepy English town when, out of nowhere, he became the voice of Hong Kong’s nascent pro-democracy movement. Alongside Vivienne Chow, a journalist from Hong Kong, and Edith Chong, a scriptwriter for the HKTV television station at the heart of the protests, Kashy takes us into those incredible early days of Hong Kong’s fight to stay free

The Guardian’s Chris Michael explores incredible stories from around the world about when music shook history. Our first episode – which tells the story of an unlikely pop star who accidentally became the face of a huge new protest movement in Hong Kong – comes out next week. Make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts