What happens when you mash-up the history of bands, films, and politics with the iconography of the London Underground? With Mike Bell of Mike Bell Maps

Data Malarkey - the podcast about using data smarter

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Mike Bell, the first data visualiser to feature in almost 30 episodes of the podcast. Mike is the Founder and Owner of a thriving new business called Mike Bell Maps which describes itself as “Tube maps of bands and other stuff”.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 13 December 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Mike’s had a long career in creating and running tours for bands, a blend of logistical and strategic planning to the power of Excel. “I see tours in Excel!” he told me when we first met. He moved from arena and stadium tours for bands to production of live events for corporates, staging major conferences and exhibitions right around the world.

A combination of the first COVID lockdown – not a good couple of years for anyone in the live entertainment and production business – and a diagnosis of Parkinson’s some years ago convinced Mike he had to “use it or lose it” when it came to his highly creative, data-driven brain. He started out by trying to represent the career of one of his favourite bands, The Fall, using the iconography, lines, and stations on the London Underground.

Once he’d got The Fall right – to the satisfaction of the brand’s vocal and perhaps a little pedantic fanbase online – Mike’s applied his unique and beautiful way of visualising the world of band line-ups and album contributors to many different spheres. These include films and film genres and even – in perhaps my favourite example – disgraced former Prime Minister Johnson’s political career, with a special line for all those lockdown-breaking parties.

Mike’s encouragement to keep mentally active from his neurologist has paid dividends. Though diagnosed several years ago, his “using it” strategy means he’s not yet been medicated for Parkinson’s. A tale almost as extraordinary as the beautiful manifestations of how he thinks that he now sells, both online and from a new shop in my hometown of Lewes, East Sussex.

Towards the end of our discussion, Mike gives one of the most lyrical and elegiac descriptions of his stock-in-trade, the humble spreadsheet. Once asked to describe them to his grandmother, he said: “They’re like boxes floating in the air that you can connect, tied together with data strings, that allow you to magically make things make sense.” Beautiful!

EXTERNAL LINKS

Mike Bell Maps – https://mikebellmaps.com

Mike’s experiential design business – https://www.freelancevisuals.co.uk

10,000 poems – Mike’s project to take him to 85, writing a poem a day – https://mikebellpoems.com

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