Word In Your Ear

Be glad for the pod has no ending! Now in our 20th year and, this week, ruminating fondly on the following …   … the “underhand” selling of Geese   … Morrissey’s absurd whinge about the Salford Lads Club photo   … Jay Leno’s $50 ruse to get comedy gigs   … when bands “didn’t even know what a hotel was”   … radio sessions in Andy Kershaw’s flat   … what’s the point of...

Take your protein pills and put your helmet on as we voyage to the far side this week to take a picture of …   … the Kanye West & Wireless ding-dong   … Springsteen with Tom Morello, Pet Shop Boys with Johnny Marr: the fine art of the ‘special guest’   … when Time Magazine invented Swinging London   … Gregg Allman and the judge’s wife   … Fake Plastic Trees! Pressure D...

Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley read a review of the Sex Pistols in February 1976, borrowed a car, drove to London, asked the NME where they’d find the band and were told ‘try a sex shop in the King’s Road’. The events that followed changed both the culture of Manchester and the course of rock history, a story mapped out in David Nolan’s excellent ‘I Swear I Was There’, a book as much about the aud...

The life of Keith Moon can be seen as Animal from the Muppets or as a dark, psychological odyssey. And the two co-exist in Tony Fletcher’s magnificent ‘Dear Boy’, first published in 1998, never out of print and now ‘remastered’ with new pictures, updates, epilogues and a foreword by Mandy Moon who “has to keep reminding myself this person was my father”. Tony looks back here at events along the wa...

Dominic Mohan saw Britpop on the inside from the showbiz desk of the Sun in the days when it sold 4.5m copies, a series of heated memories recorded in ‘1996: My Backstage Pass to the Wildest Year of Britain’s Wildest Decade’, a lost age of hedonism, stupidity, drunkenness and creativity. He makes a compelling case in this very funny and colourful podcast which stumbles into …   … the advice D...

A seasonal egg-hunt in the rock and roll backyard finds the following conversational confectionary …   .. Wild Bill Hickok? Valentino? Bob Dylan’s bizarre new media manoeuvre   … Liza Minnelli, Peter Sellers, Harrison Ford, Aaron Paul: people born to play one part   … how to spot writers using AI   … “dried-up old prune”? Trump’s pot-kettle war against Springsteen   … what...

Tony Visconti left Brooklyn for London in 1967, began working with the Move and Marc Bolan and formed a life-long friendship with the teenage David Bowie, playing on his first two albums and producing 10 of ones that followed. And in 2014 he formed Holy Holy with Woody Woodmansey, a live celebration of Bowie’s music from 1970 to Blackstar. They’re touring again in September with Glenn Gregory as l...

Matt Johnson’s life story has been mapped out as one long Q&A conversation from meetings with old friend, fan and BFI director Jason Wood. ‘Cognitive Dissident’ traces his trajectory from the East End to Soho to the beloved albums he made with a series of super-groups and his 2021 comeback. He looks back here at …   … his earliest musical memories – Donovan, the Move, the Crazy World of A...

When he was 19, New Yorker Brian Cullman covered the London music scene for Crawdaddy, landing at the birth of folk-rock and the singer-songwriter boom and watching its leading lights from unimaginably close quarters - Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, John Martyn among them. He even played on the same bill as Drake at Les Cousins club, all this recorded in his book ‘How To Prepare for the Past: Travels in...

Whooping, whistling, punching the air, standing on the arm-rests and generally adding our voice to the sound of the crowd this week involves …   … the creepy way Google eavesdrops our conversations   … the cleverly positioned “secret” on McCartney’s new album   … why a knackered piano made Keith Jarrett’s Cologne Concert a success   … Daryl Hannah, Mick McCarthy, Ray Manzarek:...

Paul Gorman, author and curator, has put together fascinating maps of the London haunts of Bowie and the Stones and just published one about the Clash built around key locations in the network that formed them and helped them to flourish. It’s a beautiful thing: buy one and take the walking tour! He talks to us here about …   … how an Agit-Prop alternative West London emerged with links to Oz...

A milky tea, a jam sponge and this week’s news served on a tin tray with a steam train painted on it points our very English conversation towards the following …   … what connects the Monkees and a British Prime Minister?   … when are you too old for Indie?   … A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi? A Bar on The Piccolo Marina? Noel Coward or Neil Tennant?   … the Move, the Streets, the Ki...

Neil Tennant co-wrote a musical at Primary School and soon decided that “learning other people’s songs was hard work compared with making up your own”. He’s chosen some from the Pet Shop Boys’ 40-year catalogue, hits and obscurities, in ‘One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem’, just out in paperback, and added fascinating notes about their context and composition. This very funny and revealing conversation...

At the age of four, Steve Nieve drew pictures of piano keys and pretended to play them. He joined Elvis Costello & the Attractions when he was 19, the start of a life that involves having to find a flight case for a Steinway Grand. He talks to us here from his Paris apartment about Stiff package tours, recording remotely, his upcoming shows with the French singer Kessada and …   … being a...

Watering the scented hedgerows of news to see if any green shoots appear. And they do, in the form of …   … the most effective protest song ever written   … the commendable box-ticking life of Country Joe McDonald   … the Timothée Chalamet ding-dong: is it still safe to voice an opinion?   … Harry Styles’ 67 dates in just 7 locations: how ‘Destination gigs’ throttle the competi...

Pointing the scanner of inquiry at the baggage carousel of news to see what gets the lights flashing, which this week includes …   … we know what’s making Morrissey miserable   … bands that can get a whole stadium singing   … the rock star who misses the music press most   … “a Likely Lads for the rave generation”, anyone?   … the speed at which news now travels   … L...

A gorgeous and lavish new publication tells the story of the Kinks in the ‘60s via the key events in their unsteady trajectory plus concert bills, letters and ephemera assembled by Andrew Sandoval, the kind of non-digital research that’s filled his archive with yellowing back numbers of Disc & Music Echo. It’s “nirvana for any fan”, the title hinting at the level of detail – ‘The Kinks: All Da...

Author and broadcaster Samira Ahmed used to watch A Hard Day’s Night once a week and she’s just written an enthralling account of the shoot and its impact for the BFI’s Classic Films series. A movie, she points out, that celebrates Britishness and suburbia made largely by immigrants that broke every Hollywood rule, a film made to capture the essence of the Beatles before the bubble burst “which tu...

Bob Dylan and the Beatles watched each other closely. Jim Windolf is fascinated by the parallels in their stories, the obvious moments they influenced each other and the unconcealable tensions at the times they met, all mapped out in his book ‘Where The Music Had To Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other – and Changed the World’. He talks to us here from New York about what he discov...

Mark Lewisohn began his Beatles’ trilogy in 2003, the first volume appearing ten years later. He’s hoping the second, Turn On, which covers 1963 to 1966 and every recording session, might be ready by 2031 and working “nine days a week to achieve it, assembling a framework and then sliding it together”. Further good news – his lecture about their life in 1962, Evolver62, is now available on film! “...

Spinning sides at the conversational disco to see what fills the dancefloor, which this week includes …   … Jerry Garcia had seven fingers! Brian Jones had seven children! Morrissey worked for the Inland Revenue!   … the most terrifying villain in the history of cinema     ... is pop music becoming inbred?   … when Neil Sedaka made records with 10cc (and Abba)  ...

Glenn Tilbrook wrote an album with Chris Difford about a futuristic nightclub when they were teenagers and, 52 years later, they’ve recorded it and are performing it on the upcoming tour. He looks back here at the partnership that once wrote 200 songs in three years, the first gigs he saw, his recent decision to take control of the group and what’s changed the way they sound. Among the highlights...

Stuart Adamson co-founded the Skids and Big Country but was profoundly ill-suited to the spoils of his success. Author Scott Rowley unpacks his passage from Dunfermline to Nashville and Hawaii to get a sense of his demons and what drove and inspired him. He talks to us here about his compelling new memoir ‘Stay Alive: the Life and Death of Stuart Adamson’ and touches on …   … hints of trouble...

Our ‘big air’ manoeuvres on the rock and roll ski jump this week land the following tricks …   … why don’t we re-use old protest songs instead of writing new ones?   … “a temple of music and gothic lust:” would YOU buy Jim Steinman’s unsellable home?   … when Madness played on the Buck House roof   … Ptolomaic Terrascope? Aquarium Drunkard? Real and made-up music magazines &nbs...

Some shared stages. Some made records and films together. Some had love affairs. Matt Thorne is fascinated by stars’ collaborations and what they reveal about them. He talks here about 14 musicians who collided and the discoveries he made in the six years spent writing ‘Famous: Ego, Envy and Ambition in Pop, Rock and Hip-Hip’, with all this high in the mix …   … Frank Sinatra’s ‘Welcome Home...