Bigmouth

Just for old-school Bigmouth listeners, a taster of the brand new podcast that dives deep into all things ’90s. This time: Oasis brought chaos, electricity and working-class swagger to a music scene dominated by po-faced grunge and indie bands in the early 1990s. How did the Gallaghers go from humble beginnings in Manchester to taking over the world? Miranda Sawyer is joined by Ted Kessler, co-aut...

Bigmouth bids farewell in the outside world! From now on you can get us at The Culture Bunker… but we’re keeping the Bigmouth Patreon going with a few special extras for the Patreon faithful. And of course you can hear the music in full from every edition on our rolling playlist. On this week’s tearful end-of-an-era edition we meet John Cooper Clark, the William Blake of Salford, on the occasion o...

Hear the music from every edition on our rolling playlist. Our new weekend pop culture roundtable returns with special guest Lynval Golding of The Specials, and their latest album, Protest Songs. Journalist Ian Harrison joins us to chew on new films The Farewell and Sweetheart, and we all listen to Bright Magic, the latest offering from Public Service Broadcasting. "The history of music can almost...

Hear the music from every edition on our rolling playlist.  Welcome to the debut of our new weekend pop culture roundtable, as the podcast formerly known as Bigmouth joins The Bunker. This week, special guest Dan Gillespie Sells, composer of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie joins us to talk over the musical’s transition to Amazon Prime film. Critic Michael Hann helps us unpack Sex Education Series...

Hear the music from every edition on our rolling playlist.  Welcome to the debut of our new weekend pop culture roundtable, as the podcast formerly known as Bigmouth joins The Bunker. This week, special guest Sarah Cracknell of pop couturiers Saint Etienne joins us to talk over their new album I’ve Been Trying To Tell You. Plus critic John Mullen helps us dissect the new Steve Martin/Selena Gomez/...

We say goodbye to the Upsetter and ponder the extraordinary circumstances that created Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry with guests Justin Quirk and Mark Hooper. Plus, never mind the ballast! Is the BBC’s murder-on-a-submarine drama Vigil seaworthy? We look at beloved late comic Sean Lock’s sitcom 15 Storeys High, now on iPlayer by popular demand, and Sparks’s “idiosyncratic” movie Annette. And stay tuned for...

This week, why you should be watching WHITE LOTUS, Sky’s brutal new satire of America’s beach-bound bourgeois bohemians. LORDE’s Solar Power brings us the horrors of fame but do we want to hear about them? Audacious female-led horror movie CENSOR spits on our grave (in the best possible way). And we round up the good stuff you might have missed with the Telegraph’s Michael Hogan. www.patreon.com/B...

It’s a double-doctorate edition as Dr Jen Otter Bickerdike joins us to explain the truth about Rock’s Ice Maiden® in her new book You Are Beautiful And You Are Alone: The Real Story Of Nico… and Dr Eamonn Forde returns to fill us in his latest, Leaving The Building: The Lucrative Afterlife of Music Estates. Plus new Irish dream-pop from Villagers and The Strokes’ Is This It hits its 20th birthday....

In road trip movie from (and to) hell Zola a young African-American waitress finds herself conned into sex work, but she’s no victim. What will we make of this first movie based on a series of tweets? Plus the ravishing radiophonic of Hannah Peel, pirates of the airwaves Kurupt FM return in a documentary about the mockumentary, and we finally have our say on Questlove’s incredible Summer of Soul....

Out early for Patreon people… Understated ASMR pop paragon Billie Eilish is the voice of a million teenage bedrooms, but how will her second album Happier Than Ever go down with our 45+ panel of oldies? Plus the perils of child stardom in jaw-dropping documentary The Most Beautiful Boy In The World, Prince’s Vault disgorges Welcome 2 America, and ideas for what to listen to and read on that beach...

Will The Sparks Brothers – a fraternal rockumentary from Edgar Spaced Wright – cast new insight on Mael pattern creativity? Plus a remarkable contemporary soul debut from Joel Culpepper with the unimprovable title Sgt. Culpepper, Scritti Politti reissue two none-more-80s pop epics, and does BBC2’s Reclaiming Amy cast new light on the most tragic music story of the past two decades? Daryl Easlea an...

Is the BBC’s new podcast series Pieces Of Britney a worthwhile exploration of a modern showbiz horror story, or just as exploitative in its own way? Plus the soul sounds of “newstalgia” with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, r’n’b goes all Miami Vice in Too Slow To Disco: Yacht Soul, and truly odd movie about F1 boss turned press nemesis Max Mosley. Michael Hann of the FT and Guardian and pop historian L...

You want eclectic? Novelist and Richard Allen du jour John Niven and Clark Collis of Entertainment Weekly join us for this week’s pop smörgåsbord. This week: Sault’s surprise album of boundary-breaking BLM r’n’b, bombastic Gallic prog rave from Gaspard Augé of Justice, a preview of Marvel’s Black Widow, and thriller from Manila On The Job – a real Netflix find. Oh, and we watch Love Island as a fo...

Will all-day drinking restore your creative spark and joie de vivre, asks new Mad Mikkelson movie Another Round? What do YOU think, respond our guests Linda Marric and Jim Butler. Also, new albums from the Dennis the Menace of hip hop Tyler, The Creator and the Terry and June of doom-bound independent rock’n’roll Bobby Gillespie and Jehnny Beth, and a truly different rockdoc: the heroes of Zambia’...

Cult UK director Ben Wheatley returns to his folk-horror roots with the post-pandemic shocker In The Earth. Will we be able to see the horror for the trees? John Grant’s new album Boy From Michigan is searingly powerful on its creator’s chequered life, but is it, you know, fun too? And guests James Medd (ex-The Word) and Kate Hodges of The Hare And Hoofe challenge Andrew and Siân with albums to br...

The BBC’s intense Sean Bean/Stephen Graham prison drama Time… Marvel’s Loki gets a wildly original Disney+ series to confound all expectations… new music from Deap Vally… and if you’re only going to watch one series about a deer-human hybrid boy lost in post-apocalyptic America, make it Sweet Tooth on Netflix. Journalist Catherine Meyer and beer writer Pete Brown join Siân and Andrew to cover this...

Out early for Patreon people… Is cosmic soul Londoner Greentea Peng’s debut album Man Made the spaced-out summer soundtrack we need? BritBox’s first original programming is Isle of Wight crime thriller The Beast Must Die, but can the streaming minnow’s own stuff compete with Netflix? Plus we challenge guests Sophie ‘Mojo/Guardian’ Harris and Simon ‘Wallpaper’ Mills to try an album they’ve never he...

Contemporary stress drives Ben “Q” Whishaw to a strangely ecstatic breakdown in strange London thriller SURGE. Why Michelle Zauner aka JAPANESE BREAKFAST is the Korean-American sophisto-pop turn you should be paying attention to. And what the hell is going on with that Amazon sci-fi star vehicle SOLOS, with its Helen Mirren, its Anne Hathaways and its Morgan Freemans? International guests CHRIS HE...

Billie Piper’s astonishing directorial debut RARE BEASTS: genius reinvention of the romcom, cinematic ordeal, arthouse triumph or all three? GRUFF RHYS of Super Furry Animals writes a concept album about how a Korean volcano explains the essence of humanity. Plus we revisit Riz Ahmed’s bravura deaf jam of a movie THE SOUND OF METAL and worship at the feet of BBC2’s GODS OF SNOOKER. Film critic ANN...

Crossover Episode! Our old bosses MARK ELLEN and DAVID HEPWORTH of A Word In Your Ear, Smash Hits, Q and Mojo fame join Siân and Andrew to mark our quarter century. On the agenda: the glory days of the Hits and why the music biz didn’t know how much it would miss the pop mags. “PAUL WELDER”’s new album. The Incredible String Band, Half Man Half Biscuit, Girl Band, Fargo on C4 and that BBC Mitford...

Art-pop provocateur ST VINCENT returns with an album inspired by her dad’s 12 year jail sentence for multimillion dollar financial fraud. Is this the key to Annie Clark’s oeuvre (and is it any good)? Plus MATT ‘TOAST OF LONDON’ BERRY’S frankly marvellous psych-pop freakbeat album The Blue Elephant, Sky attempts a female take on I, Claudius with DOMINA, and a couple of off-the-beaten track movies y...

Dear God, it’s Bigmouth’s fifth birthday. We know, right? In celebration, we welcome the legend that is Neil Tennant plus “third Pet Shop Boy” David Quantick for a gala appreciation of the lost world of the music press that made us. Worst interviewees, biggest disasters, dinner dates with Freddie Mercury, the twilight of Marilyn’s career, the mags we’d bring back from the dead and more… plus we br...

The astonishing stories of the little-known women who shaped the genesis of electronic music are told in new documentary Sisters With Transistors. How would you like your guitar music: unflinchingly realist with Teenage Fanclub or boldly avant garde with Field Music? And is Sky’s much-touted new cop show Mare Of Easttown, starring a heavily de-glammed Kate Winslet as a disconsolate detective, an A...

The Carey Mulligan revenge thriller Promising Young Woman from Killing Eve writer Emerald Fennell: black comedy, proper serious commentary, or just too intense to enjoy? Up and coming young artist Paul McCartney hands over his music to everyone from St Vincent to John Home to Khruangbin, What will we think of McCartney III Imagined? Why time travelling subversion of the romcom Palm Springs is your...

Is Nomadland, with Frances McDormand as a van-dwelling “houseless not homeless” wanderer in the new America, really as good as all the awards imply? New albums by one-man rave-up Raf Rundell (ex-2 Bears) and cosmic soul man Matthew E White who’s gone all outsider art on us. And deadpan comedy in Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s NZ copumentary Wellington Paranormal. Strictly Kev AKA DJ Food and...