Word In Your Ear

Amid much parping of vuvuzelas, the week’s news stories sprint onto the pitch. And these make it to the quarter-finals …   … Dua Lipa’s mega-wedding and its echoes of Mick & Bianca   … when did publicity turn into “perpetual planetary attention”?   … Chris Martin “curating” the World Cup Final half-time show   … if you can’t stand the noise, move out of Soho!   … watch...

Dave Balfe was a key player in late ‘70s Liverpool, joined Big In Japan and the Teardrop Explodes, co-founded Zoo Records and, later, Food who signed and launched Blur. It’s fascinating to hear how he’s adapted to promoting music now with his new band Late Transmissions. We talk to him here about the landmarks moments that mapped out his life, among them …   … growing up in the Wirral and its...

Star Ratings are now ubiquitous and inescapable and it’s not just music, films and books. Everything we encounter tends to be rated which colours our judgement before we try it. Choice can be paralyzing but do we read anymore or just count? Benji Wilson’s ‘Rate This Book: How Star Ratings Took Over the World’ traces their origin – back to 350 BC! – paints a picture of modern life and wonders here...

Philip Norman has written books about the Beatles – and John, Paul and George - and now turns the spotlight on the man who launched them and the extreme personal and professional obstacles in the dramatic path of his short life, the man who built a shield around them but couldn't protect himself. We talk to him here about ‘Mr Moonlight: Brian Epstein and the Making of the Beatles’ with particular...

When the pedalo of perusal cruised the lagoon of news this week, it paused to inspect the following ...   … the particular magic of the late-night DJ   … a Get Well card to dear Bob Harris   … is Global Beatles Day a bridge too far?   … the exquisite Britishness of the Manics, the Fall and the Small Faces   … Cyprus Avenue, Soho, Asbury Park … the best places to visit to h...

Old friend of the podcast Lloyd Bradley wrote Bass Culture, the defining account of reggae, and he’s now turned his attention to funk, from its deepest roots and via the jazz, arts, TV, radio and pop culture that flavoured it. The main 10-year focus of ‘Funk Has Its Own Reward’ is from James Brown’s ‘Say It Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud’ to Michael Jackson’s ‘Off The Wall’ but free your mind and...

Leo Sayer burst onto national telly in 1973 dressed as a Pierrot with the Show Must Go On launching a 50-year career in colourful company – songwriters, boxing legends, swindling managers, scurrilous socialites – and learning a great deal in the process. “Don’t underestimate the idiots!” is the hard-won advice. He’s touring in October and joins us here from Australia to look back at …   … how...

Chasing the shade and slapping the Sunscreen on this week’s overheated news, we pour a tinkling drink and reflect upon the following …   … British people in hot weath-ah!   … when rock stars you haven’t seen for 50 years pop up on Zoom   … Lennon’s tooth? Timberlake’s toast? Mooney’s school report? Weird things sold at auction   … Paul Horn playing in the Taj Mahal, Sonny Rolli...

Daniel Lanois built a studio in his basement in Quebec and began producing local acts when a teenager. Through work with Brian Eno, he went on to record U2, Bob Dylan, Arcade Fire, Emmylou Harris and scores of others with a method that’s unique, cinematic and utterly extraordinary, a brand of sonic architecture that creates settings to accommodate the songs, often in exotic and stimulating places....

Cathi Unsworth was a teenage Goth, enthralled as much by Joy Division and the Banshees as by the Brontës, Bram Stoker and Aubrey Beardsley. We loved her book ‘Season of the Witch’ and she’s since put together a soundtrack album, ‘Dressed In Black’, featuring the Goth divas she most admires and adores. And talks to us here about everything from murder ballads, the Industrial Revolution and Victoria...

Clem Burke joined Blondie in 1975. He started writing his memoir 20 years ago and just managed to finish it before he died in 2025, encouraged and assisted by his old friend Kathy Valentine of the Go-Go’s, “a chance to reflect on all he’d achieved”. We’re thrilled she’s joined us here to talk about his dramatic life and ‘The Other Side of the Dream’, a conversation stopping off at …   … falli...

Panning for gold in the murky waters of this week’s news, we found the following …   … is Sabrina Carpenter’s aunt the voice of Bart Simpson?   … is punk now just a small room in the giant apartment block of Goth?   … why band life was different for Ringo, Kathy Valentine and Clem Burke   … Barack Obama’s songs that define America and how you can’t do the same for Britain...

The Damned are – yes! - 50 years old with three of the originals still onboard. And just starting a world tour. In this immensely funny and touching podcast, Rat Scabies (who’s smoking!) points up the repercussions of life in a band. He looks back at their first shows, their devoted audience, “old-fashioned rules”, highlights, regrets, the value of friendship, “putting on the black suit again” and...

A whole new age of psychedelia kicked off in the mid-‘80s, of dream-weavers and glorious underachievers, a complete rejection of the standard rock approach to stagecraft, sound and self-promotion. Simon Reynolds was at the heart of it, writing for Melody Maker and piping aboard the pioneering noise-mongers aiming to entrance and disorientate, as recalled in his new book ‘Still In A Dream: Shoegaze...

This week’s news gets a thorough shake-down to see what falls out of its pockets. Which includes …   … cupcakes, mobiles, rubber ducks, a dead swan: weird things thown at rock stars   … “polka-dotted micro-tonal space-rock from the planet Zog”: Alex gets the Angine de Poitrine live experience!   … is Shoegaze the Adrian Mole of pop?   … “Hands off my Husker Du!” Joint record co...

For nearly 60 years, Brian Eno has been a “proud non-musician” who changed the way people thought and sounded while inventing whole new ways of recording. We loved reading the updated edition of ‘On Some Faraway Beach’ which examines his staggering catalogue of avant garde experiment and wonders if there’s anyone remotely like him. Author David Sheppard looks back with us here at …   … a life...

Cheap tickets, warm beer, draughty halls and refectories, a whole new cobbled-together rock circuit was born in the ‘60s for an audience who watched and listened intently. Which allowed the music to take a different route. Paul Sexton spoke to Mark Knopfler, Nick Mason, Justin Hayward, Phil Manzanera and many others to piece together ‘Rock Goes To College: the Campus Music Scene That Shaped A Gene...

It’s polling day for this week’s news and these are the stories that got our vote …   ... Pussycat Dolls, Meghan Trainor and how ‘Blue Dot Fever’ is wrecking ticket sales   … how can you judge a songwriter with eight collaborators?   … Dylan’s ‘Judas’ moment 60 years later   … is everything becoming binary: thumbs-up or thumbs-down?   … Grandmaster Flash, Augustus Pablo, G...

Mass commercial nightlife began in a Japanese Pleasure Garden in 1657 and it’s blossomed ever since – via Victorian Vauxhall, cabaret Paris, jazz-driven New Orleans, flappers, speakeasies, moonshine, Studio 54 and the rave palaces of the 21st Century. Imogen Willetts tracks its riotous evolution in ‘Up All Night: A History of Going Out’ and wonders if the invention of the iPhone has burst the ball...

Andy Earl helped create the new dawn of colour photography in the ‘80s pop video age and went on to shoot a series of unforgettable portraits, album sleeves and magazine covers, many featuring in his new exhibition in Bankside Yards, London. He looks back here at some of his subjects and the analogue days when you flew halfway round the world for the right light and backdrop and every prop in the...

Talk Talk made just five albums, all written and recorded unconventionally and no-one’s entirely sure how they did it. And in the last two decades of his life Mark Hollis released only 92 seconds of music. Lifelong admirer Graeme Thomson explores the band’s endless mysteries in his memoir ‘In Another World: the Four Seasons of Talk Talk’, and looks back here at the last hurrah of the days of studi...

Penny Kiley moved to Liverpool in 1976, ran into punk rock and “became the person I’d never been allowed to be”, as vividly remembered in her memoir, Atypical Girl. It’s a moment of liberation mapped out by records, nights at Eric’s and the big personalities in the city’s Second Coming, the beat she later covered for Melody Maker. She looks back here at some unconquerable moments, among them … &nb...

In the 70s Paul Charles wrote lyrics for an Irish prog band. Now he writes mystery novels. Inbetween he’s been agent for Tom Waits, Nick Lowe, Van Morrison, Hothouse Flowers and many others and has forgotten more about live shows than most of us will ever know. Here he talks about: •⁠ ⁠hearing the Beatles for the first time through the family radio •⁠ ⁠meeting Tom Waits in a queue a...

This week’s news stories charge out onto the pitch but which are heading for promotion? In the running at the final whistle …   … “a ghoulish, soulless cash-grab”: the multiple disasters in the making of the Michael biopic   … how spectacle is replacing music   … which do we prefer, the truth or the myth?   … did Steve Reich re-invent music?   … when the Dalai Lama appeare...

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...