Bigmouth

POD: SELFISH. In our most post-post-post punk edition ever, Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne and Tessa Norton join us to discuss Excavate! The Wonderful And Frightening World Of The Fall, their magisterial co-edited hardback symposium on music’s most cryptic combo. Plus the debut album from post-Fall observationistas Dry Cleaning, a remarkable compilation of RADICAL! FUNK! from the Thatcher-bashing 80...

Will disaster princess Lana Del Rey hold on to her title as the F Scott Fitzgerald of the blasé Instagram generation with Chemtrails Over The Country Club? After the phantasmagoria of WandaVision, will the newly Marvelized Disney+ audience take to the bleakly realist political thriller The Falcon And The Winter Soldier? Plus a round-up of intriguing new streaming movies – The Columnist, The Banish...

Special guest and all-purpose film-directing dread about town Don Letts joins us to talk about his new book There And Black Again plus untold tales from 40 years spanning Bob Marley, The Clash and B.A.D. up to the present day. And film critic Linda Marric helps us disentangle Sky’s latest New Romantic documentary Blitzed: The 80s Blitz Kids Story, Netflix movie The Best Of Enemies – in which a KKK...

The great punk misfit Poly Styrene features in new documentary I Am A Cliché, showing this week on Sky Arts. Will it earn her her proper place at last? Laura Snapes of The Guardian and writer Travis Elborough join us to examine it plus the first album in 16 years by Falkirk seediness connoisseurs Arab Strap and Ridley Scott’s The Terror, AKA I’m A Character Actor, Get Me Off This Ice Floe. Plus ne...

There’s a con woman coining it in the care homes of America: will Rosamund Pike crime caper I Care A Lot on Amazon Prime Video scare us straight? The ecstatic grown-up grief-pop of The Anchoress. Andrew finally succeeds in turning the panel on to a comic book with The Department Of Truth – an X Files for the QAnon era (read Issue 1 for free here). And was Frank Zappa quite as charmlessly difficult...

Fyre Festival/Lord Of The Flies vibes in Class Action Park, a frankly astonishing documentary about America’s most insanely hazardous amusement park now showing on Sky Documentaries. New albums from the Radiophonic Kate Bush of cosmic Cheshire Jane Weaver and young disco turk SG Lewis. And why Lupin is the biggest deal yet in French telly’s bit to take over the world. Acid house veterans Anthony ‘...

Hot from the podcasting mill for the Patreon people… Is Adam Curtis’s latest think-about-it-yeah epic Can’t Get You Out Of My Head worth the eight hours you’ll need to navigate his “emotional history of the modern world”? New music from electro noise-tamperers Django Django and the litfest Springsteens that are The Hold Steady. And the busy life of a drug-addled nurse/organ thief in dark horror co...

Does AMC’s ambitious Hip Hop: Songs That Shook America (all eps now on iPlayer) expand our knowledge of the boom-boom-bap? What happens when Stewart Lee makes a documentary about Robert Lloyd of The Nightingales, a man who makes Radiohead seem hungry for celebrity. King Rocker is on Sky Arts right now. And are we taken by young persons’ rapper slowthai’s “mature second album”? John Doran of the Qu...

Bass player to the gentry Guy Pratt of Pink Floyd, Bryan Ferry and My Bass And Other Animals fame and Harry Hill scriptwriter Dan Maier join us to delve into the pop culture bran tub. This week: Dirty deeds in Delhi in the stunning White Tiger on Netflix. The post-rock post-jazz post-everything sounds of Black Country, New Road plus delinquent Aussie motorboogie from the Psychedelic P0rn Crumpets*...

Everybody should be watching It’s A Sin, Russell T Davies’s riotous, heartbreaking and funny saga of AIDS in young London, and guests John “Kill Your Friends” Niven and Daryl “He’s the Disco Curator” Easlea will tell you why. Plus all the BMX Bandits, Vaselines and Shop Assistants you could wish for in Scottish indie rock-doc Teenage Superstars. Who is Steven Wilson and will his post-prog sounds f...

On the actual day that new album Spare Ribs comes out, Jason from Sleaford Mods joins Siân, Andrew and guest Iestyn “NME/GQ/Golf Punk” George for pop’s most penetrating panel. On the agenda: that weird-looking Bowie movie Stardust (is it as terrible as they say?). Domestic bangers from Belfast’s Bicep. A movie about the KLF becoming undertakers – a grave experience? And the time Jason won a compet...

Is BBC1’s hippy-murderin’ heart of darkness horror show The Serpent what we need in a cold January? Why should you bone up on the new album from Viagra Boys? How did Disney/Pixar’s ‘Wonderful Life for kids’ Soul illuminate our Christmas? And a preview of the movies you might see in 2021. Deputy Editor of Esquire Magazine Johnny Davis and film critic Linda Marric (NME, HeyUGuys, Jewish Chronicle) j...

An appalling year comes to a glittering crescendo as Alexis Petridis of The Guardian and Pete Paphides – rock’n’roll impresario at vinyl Mecca Needle Mythology and author of Broken Greek – join us to select their (and Siân’s!) “fave raves” of the year. And here’s the playlist…  Produced and presented by Siân Pattenden and Andrew Harrison. Audio production by Alex Rees. Bigmouth is a Podmasters pro...

God, is it that time of year again? Repeat offender guests Jude Rogers of The Guardian and Eamonn Forde of The Final Days of EMI: Selling the Pig fame join Siân and Andrew to choose their favourite albums, tracks, TV things and hidden gems of this terrible, terrible year for everything except pop and telly. More next week… And if you want to enjoy our guests’ music selections they’re all here on a...

In Julien Temple’s biopic Crock Of Gold, Shane MacGowan is a wheezing wreck of himself. Is the Pogues frontman a neglected poet, a cautionary tale, an Irish hero or all three and more? Plus The Avalanches take the cut-and-paste sampledelic collage to wildly ambitious new places. And is David Fincher’s Mank – about the self-destructive alcoholic who wrote Citizen Kane – a work of dedication or just...

John Belushi: kamikaze genius, drug disaster, wounded soul or all three? An epic new biography on Sky Documentaries tries to explain. Plus guest Robin Turner on his memoir of Heavenly Records, grown-up jungle from High Contrast, and Riz Ahmed’s portrait of a hip hop star in crisis, Mogul Mowgli. Worldwide FM DJ Kate Hutchinson joins Robin and regulars Siân and Andrew to thrash it all out.  Produce...

What’s in Steve McQueen’s miniseries exploration of Black Britain, Small Axe? Can our panel of senior b-boys plus one b-girl relate to hip hop raunchstress Megan Thee Stallion? World War II animated drama The Liberator on Netflix – is war hell or is it just drawn that way? Plus tales of DIY metal pyro mishaps and the pubs and doubling glazing adventures of our favourite footballers  One-man bible...

It’s a broad appeal edition this week as we look back at Peter Bagge’s HATE!, the infamously gross and hilarious ’90s comic book that stands as Generation X’s Great American Novel. How does it come across now in luxury box set form? Plus Cabaret Voltaire bring the electro paranoia back for the first time in 26 years. And why you should be watching horror nerve-twister Paranormal, Netflix’s first E...

Sky Arts’ epic series Icons: Music Through The Lens tells the history of rock photography on album sleeves, mag covers, publicity shots and beyond. Legendary photographer Gered Mankowitz – yes, he took that Hendrix shot!! – and director Dick Carruthers join us to discuss the stories behind one of the best music documentaries we’ve ever seen. Plus: Dizzee Rascal, piping-new country-folker Katy J Pe...

PAWN COCKTAIL: Is brilliant Netflix chess psychodrama The Queen’s Gambit the true apotheosis of the Bunty comic cruel orphanage story – or is it really a superhero tale? STUDIO 5’4”: Kylie Minogue returns to her (and our) happy place with new album Disco. OVERDUE BILL: Does Sophia Coppola/Bill Murray/Rashida Jones caper flick On The Rocks recreate the magic of Lost In Translation? Lucy O’Brien, au...

Is Aaron Sorkin’s Trial Of The Chicago Seven a timely look at the corrupt roots of cop/state bad vibes or just more burnishing of the hippy myth? Gorillaz: the only valid model for 21st Century pop or a big ol’ ego trip for Damon Albarn? And a startling BBC documentary asks if Pepe the Frog can be saved from the clutches of the alt.right. Select mag veterans Adam Higginbotham and Clark Collis join...

Sleeve designer to Weller, Oasis, George Michael and Madness Simon Halfon tells us about a life in pop art and the untold tales and unseen art in his new book Cover To Cover. Film critic Linda Marric brings us more gems from the London International Film Festival including eye-opening sneaker investigation One Man And His Shoes. MAD MANC: John Cooper Clarke’s brain-bursting autobiography. And Norw...

Under the electron microscope of pop culture this week: Outsider artist Ivor Cutler in a SKY documentary/love letter from KT Tunstall. Have Autechre, creators of bass-driven Barbican Centres of brutalist electronics, made their “accessible album” with SIGN? Can Good Sad Happy Bad bring back the shoegazin’ days of ’91? And we hit the London International Film Festival – now accessible to the whole...

Who will win this week’s pop culture smackdown? The troubled peacocks of our guest Dylan Jones’s new epic work Sweet Dreams: The Story Of The New Romantics? Contemporary agit-punk shoutmongers Idles? Their spiritual forebears The Clash and other Rock Against Racism alumni, immortalised in the documentary White Riot? Or Mr Autumn Man himself Robin Pecknold, currently hermitlike sole operator of Fle...

Soma lovin’, had me a blast… Can NBC do justice to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, with Harry Lloyd and Jessica Brown Findlay free-lovin’ their way across futuristic New London? It starts on SKY next Friday. Can the debut album by Todmorden noiseniks Working Men’s Club superserve both the mature Fall/Cabaret Voltaire fan and today’s young ravers? Are US electro plinkers Sylvan Esso any good? And...