Word In Your Ear

John Higgs' brilliant and wide-ranging book 'The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned A Million Pounds' came out ten years ago and just keeps on selling. It sold initially to the fans who bought their records. Then to those absorbed by the fringe figures in their mythology - Ken Campbell, Alan Moore, Robert Anton Wilson, the Discordians. And then to people who just wanted a staggering and bar...

"The Beatles gave us a continuing soundtrack of unparalleled charm and reassurance", Derek Taylor said. "As long as they kept on delivering fresh songs along with the morning milk, everything was right in our optimistic world". It happened again on Thursday. Is the old magic still there? Also on the menu in this week's podcast... ... Fact or fiction? The extravagant adventures of Bill Drummond and...

There are broadly three Ian Broudies in the public imagination. One is the songwriter with a catalogue of softly psychedelic left-field pop tunes. The second is the record producer behind Echo & the Bunnymen, the Fall, the Coral and Terry Hall. The third is the co-composer of our new national anthem. He talks here about early life in Liverpool and the records that enthralled him (See Emily Pla...

Billy Sloan, Glaswegian broadcaster and music columnist, has written his memoir, ‘One Love, One Life’, about a career that’s allowed him to point his microphone at an astonishing array of musicians and started back in the old analogue world of tight-deadline newspaper journalism where you hammered out your Chuck Berry interview as the rolls of film were biked back to the office to be processed. Th...

We spin the reels of the rock and roll fruit machine this week and get the following pay-outs …   … the preposterous present they gave Bobby Charlton when he retired.   ... “the leaning man from Alabam”.   … ‘Skinny Minnie Shimmy’ by Lattie Moore And The Emperors and other apparently fictitious rock and roll hits.   … a Radio One DJ who was also an actor, erotic sculptor, trave...

Toothsome hors d’ouvres, mains and ‘items from the trolley’ on the rock and roll menu this week include …   … Bowie’s Pin-Ups v Ferry’s These Foolish Things: who won? … the worst band name in history and why.   … the fan who hired a plane to fly a message past Morrissey’s record label.   … the Stones’ Hackney Diamonds: best album since Black And Blue or tedious riff-less dirge? &nbs...

The godfather of British independent labels, Immediate, was started in 1965 by the Stones’ manager Andrew Oldham and Tony Calder, its winning slogan: “happy to be part of the industry of human happiness”. As Simon Spence correctly puts it, “it all got very messy”. Oldham tended to fall out with people and then threaten to kill them. Simon’s excellent book, ‘Immediate: the Rise And Fall of the UK’s...

As it emerges from the upheaval of Cross Rail, music historian Peter Watts looks at this densely-packed thoroughfare between Charing Cross Road and Covent Garden, which started off selling sheet music, grew into the place where many writers sold their tunes for a few quid while a wise minority hung on and made fortunes, a street that continues to provide a home for music businesses to this day. In...

Spicy and nutritious items in the rock and roll bouillabaisse this week include …   … Roger Waters at the Palladium: a masterclass in how to insult an audience.   … “without Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones would have been Manfred Mann.”   … the only rock star who can tell a story onstage.   … Nempnett Thrubwell, Hinton Blewett, Glaister Fagan … Leafy Somerset hamlet or venerable...

Nick Banks - nephew of the great Gordon Banks – saw a note pinned by his favourite band to a wall in 1986, his Sliding Doors moment: ‘Pulp Want Drummer. Call Russell or Jarvis’. What happened next he records in his memoir ‘It Started There: From Punk To Pulp’. We talk to him about life in Sheffield in the ‘70s and ‘80 and why it took 15 long years for Pulp to crack it. Among the highlights … &nbsp...

Engaging blips on the rock and roll radar this week include:-   … Iron Maiden album title or novel by Jeffrey Archer?   … selling Ringo’s ashtray.   … the Blood Doner: the Hancock script that keeps on giving.   … “Terrible album title. Terrible album cover, too.” The start of Rolling Stone’s review of which immortal record?   … how come acting runs in families but writing...

Will Sergeant’s just put out the second volume of his memoirs, both of them Sunday Times best-sellers, Echoes and the first edition, Bunnyman. Here he revisits the Liverpool of the ‘60s and ‘70s in extraordinary detail - the clothes, the records, the gangs, the school days, the early shows he saw - and the many reasons he wanted to form a band. On the agenda …   … ‘rockist’ cliches the Bunnym...

Crime novelist Cathi Unsworth turned Goth in her teens in rural Norfolk fired by a cocktail of Dennis Wheatley, the Damned on the Peel show and the dark arts of the York Festival “Gothtopia” bill in 1984. She devoted long hours to trying to construct Robert Smith’s “tarantula hair” and acquiring black lace garmentry. Something about its music and folklore chimed with a life marooned in the middle...

Richard Morton Jack interviewed over 200 people when assembling what’s unquestionably the best, most colourful, comprehensive, revealing and accurate portrait of Nick Drake ever published. We talked to him about ‘Nick Drake: The Life’ at a live podcast recording at 21Soho on September 25 and explored various remote corners of this sad, surprising and eternally gripping story, among them ….  ...

Spice-filled items tossed into the conversational cooking-pot this week include:-   … our charming encounter with Gary Numan, possibly the world’s most contented man.   … the next step in the age of spectacle: the sensory bombardment of U2’s shows at the Las Vegas Sphere and the crippling cost of experiencing it.    … Taylor Swift’s genius for publicity and the subtle art of co...

Gary Numan is about to set out on a UK acoustic tour, some of it in churches and one date in a cathedral. He talks here - from the Scottish estate house he’s just bought – about some of the first shows he saw and what he’s learnt about live performance. This includes ...   … the peculiar effect of seeing Nazareth at the Rainbow in 1973.   … the fate of the £5 note he’d asked Queen to aut...

Neil Storey is an old pal from our magazine days who worked in the press office at Island. He looked after U2, Bob Marley, Steel Pulse, the B-52’s and many others. About 15 years ago he began the mammoth task of compiling a series of books telling the story of virtually every record the label released in its pioneering history, tracking down and talking to all those involved - musicians, producers...

Both of us were involved in the launch of Mojo 30 years ago in the autumn of 1993 and we dug out our copies of the first issue. As editor Paul Du Noyer said on page 3, it was “our confirmed intention to pitch a wang-dang-doodle – all night long, if necessary.” The cover story was about a sequence from Eat The Document, the film by DA Pennebaker of Bob Dylan’s ’66 tour that was never released and c...

This week’s pod was recorded just after we saw ‘Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm’ at London’s National Portrait Gallery, a warm and winning show that starts with him as a wide-eyed fan trying to take pictures of his heroes and soon switches to his shots of the whole world trying to photograph him. We talk about his pictures of French jazzers, Paris boulevards, backstage rooms...

David Remnick got his Pulitzer for his reporting on Russia. These days he edits The New Yorker, in which capacity he has had close encounters with some of music’s legends during their final acts, some of which is gathered in “Holding The Note”, a collection of his writings on music. From his ill-lit Manhattan eyrie he talks to David Hepworth of many matters, including: ….what was in the handbag wh...

Recorded together in Mark Ellen’s attic! Among the conversational footballs booted round the park this week you’ll find:-   … Freddie’s “exquisite clutter”: would YOU buy one of his bonzai plant-holders, his catsuit with ballet shoes and a $0.5m silver bangle?   … when did the story change from “the Stones are old, knackered and ought to give up!” to “the Stones are old, brilliant and sh...

Fired by the rock and roll revival of 1970 and a post-Easy Rider taste for American music, a circuit of some 35 London pubs filled with bands playing fizzing, small-scale shows that never sounded quite the same on record, bands whose moment in the sun was ultimately wrecked by the arrival of punk rock. This pod – and Simon’s book ‘Before It Went Rotten: the Music That Rocked London Pubs 1972-1976’...

Kevin Armstrong was the guitarist in the band David Bowie asked him to assemble for Live Aid and toured and recorded with him many times. Playing the guitar intro to Rebel Rebel in a stadium, he says, is “like lighting a match”. Start the Passenger with Iggy Pop and you’re greeted with “a great mass of love”. His memoir, Absolute Beginner, is “a window onto the high table of rock and roll” and ful...

We dipped the shrimping net of curiosity in the rock and roll rockpool this week and transferred the following items to the podcast bucket …   … who now regrets being the “little tyrant” that broke up their band 30 years ago?   … who was the real Bungalow Bill and how did the song about him change his life?   … Bing Crosby and Paul Whiteman are almost forgotten. Are the Doors and th...

Ray Padgett lives in Vermont, first discovered Dylan when he was 16 in the 21st Century and was fascinated and besotted, later launching the newsletter ‘Flagging Down the Double E’s’ and now publishing the enthralling ‘Pledging My Time’, a collection of his interviews with over 40 people who’ve worked, performed and recorded with the inscrutable old rogue. Both the book and this fast-moving, whip-...