Bigmouth

Have Public Enemy really made a masterpiece with What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down, their first album for Def Jam in 22 years? A Pong From Under The Floorboards: David Tennant as Dennis Nilsen in Des. The discomatic return of Róisín Murphy with Róisín Machine. And is Katherine Ryan’s single mum comedy The Duchess just a bit too North London for its own good? Justin Quirk, author of Nothin'...

On this week’s bloody assizes of pop culture… Does THE FLAMING LIPS’ new album American Head constitute the headstone of psychedelic culture or a state of the nation rallying cry to let your freak flag fly? Can Maisie ‘Game Of Thrones’ Williams cut it in revenge comedy TWO WEEKS TO LIVE, now on Sky? And what the hell is Charlie ‘Adaptation’ Kaufman’s I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS supposed to be ab...

Ultra-prolific gene-splicer of all musics Asian, Anglo and beyond Nitin Sawhney joins Will Hodgkinson of The Times plus Siân and Andrew for this week’s pop culture summit. WELCOME TO THE PALINDROME: Does Christopher Nolan’s mind-pretzeling Tenet make sense, and will it save Hollywood? MIND OVER PLATTER: New albums from leftfield jazz parper Nubya Garcia and house delinquents Disclosure.  STAX AND...

The weekend starts early! Just! Under the pop culture microscope this week… H.P. SOURCE – Sky/HBO’s Lovecraft Country: here’s that “Jim Crow-era American racism meets extra dimensional elder gods” mash-up you were looking for. But is it any good? GLAM RACKET – Is The Lemon Twigs’ magpie mid-70s power pop a wild pastiche, a glorious rock’n’roll adventure… or both? SAVED BY THE BELL (AND THE CLARKE)...

This week on pop culture’s premier inquisition… I’M MANDY, TRY ME: Does Diane Morgan’s new mini-series MANDY hit the highs of Philomena Cunk? CHILL BY SOUTH: Melbourne electro gadabouts Cut Copy go ambient on new sixth album Freeze, Melt. Will it assuage our panel’s heatstroke? DOING THE LORD'S JERK: It’s Catholic guilt vs teenage sexual “self-discovery” time in new comedy Yes God Yes. Will our pa...

This week on the premier pop-probing podcast… MERSEY, MERSEY ME: The Real Thing, the 4-piece Marvin Gaye of Liverpool 8, finally get their props on a new BBC4 documentary. What do we think? DUBLIN UP: Fontaines DC are this year’s Great New Guitar Band. Will they excite our mature panel as much as they do the ragin’ teens?  GET IN THE RING: Leftfield dramady The Peanut Butter Falcon takes a Down’s...

Mojo mag contributing editor SYLVIE SIMMONS dials in from San Francisco to tell us about her new ukulele-powered album Blue On Blue and talk over this week’s pop culture stuff with fellow guest, award-winning podcaster KATE HUTCHINSON:   ISN’T SHE SCHLAFLY? Does Cate Blanchett convince as counter-feminist martinet Phyllis Schlafly in Mrs America? MOTHER FOLKER: Doyenne of traditional English music...

Attention, earthlets! 2000AD comic creator Pat Mills joins us to talk about the romance of violence and anarchy for teenage delinquents plus his new comic Spacewarp. Plus… COCKER THE NORTH: Is Jarvis growing old gracefully with his new band Jarv Is… and its debut album Beyond The Pale? BLOOD WIMPLE: Holy terror in Netflix’s Warrior Nun. THE DIGGER YOU LOVE TO HATE: The Rise Of The Murdoch Dynasty...

It couldn’t happen here… right? Philip Roth’s counterfactual of a fascist USA The Plot Against America gets a TV treatment from the team behind The Wire. The Streets return with None Of Us Are Getting Out Of This Life Alive – will a lachrymose dad-rave “mixtape” bake our collective cake? And Family Romance LLC, Werner Herzog’s multi-layered tale of illusion and familial longing. NME and Loaded vet...

Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson and Jude Rogers of The Guardian and New Statesman join us for this week’s bloody assizes of pop culture. Does the BBC’s Arena documentary Keith Haring: Street Art Boy finally do justice to the wild style graffiti artists of early 80s New York? New albums from Tyneside toughnut Nadine Shah and 9ft tall trans electronica artiste Arca. And we revisit Nicolas Roeg’s still-...

Lockdown has given Paul Weller longer trog-hair than we’ve ever seen… but is 15th album On Sunset his actual prog-mod masterpiece? Wu Tang Clan documentary Of Mics And Men mesmerises our panel of ageing B-Boys and B-Girl. And we probe The Vast Of Night, the lo-fi sci-fi sleeper hit now on Amazon. Rob ‘Spotify’ Fitzpatrick and Michael ‘Guardian/Spectator/FT’ Hann are this week’s special guests  Pro...

Is BBC1’s all-encompassing comedy drama of race, class, cities and, yes, sexual assault I May Destroy You as good as everyone’s saying? A pulsating polysexual solo debut arrives from Jehnny Beth of Savages while another frontperson-without-portfolio, ex-Maccabee Orlando Weeks, delivers a much more subdued one about – ahem – fatherhood. Which one’s the best? And is Spike Lee’s “Black Vietnam” movie...

This week in the Inner Sanctum of pop culture: Will McDonalds heist documentary McMillion$ supersize your evenings in? And which of its cast of oddballs and nutcases deserve their own spin-off? Run The Jewels’ fourth album lands in a none-more-timely fashion, right in the middle of the BLM revolution. What do the panel think? And we revisit Céline Portrait Of A Lady On Fire Sciamma’s Parisian banl...

This week in the Cell Block 9 of pop culture: Madness’s hair-raisingly criminal and violent joint autobiography Before We Was We is out in paperback, which is as good a reason as any to revisit it. Was Steve Carell wise to base an entire big-bucks sitcom on Trump’s whim toof creating a Space Force for the US military? And the cosmic sound of Orkney with post-folk mind-massager Erland Cooper. Men a...

This week on the lockdown get-down of pop culture: Does Tim Burgess’s new LP I Love The New Sky cement his position as Captain Cheer-up of the COVID calamity? Netflix turn Bong Joon-Ho’s dystopian weird-out Snowpiercer into a series. Is this a good idea? And in Old Film Club we settle down with Adam And Paul, a heartwarming tale of two Dublin pals who share a dream, a deep personal bond, and a cri...

Doyen of US pop journalist David Keeps of Star Hits and Details magazines fame dials from faraway Phoenix, Arizona to join Mark “Arena/The Face” Hooper, Siân and Andrew for this week’s bloody assizes of entertainment. In the dock: Netflix’s uncommonly clever clubbin’n’druggin’-in-Ibiza series White Lines, Mark and David’s choices of great albums for the Great Shut-In, and we revisit Martin Scorses...

We loved his new album The Night Chancers and now we welcome Baxter Dury plus guest Hannah Verdier of The Guardian to this week’s conference call of pop. On the agenda: The new Sparks album A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip! Do they still have it in their *checks notes* SIXTH decade in rock and/or pop? Baxter and Hannah suggest great albums of the Lockdown Era, including Jarvis Cocker’s as-yet unreleased...

Will Quickies, an album of VERY short songs by maudlin mandolin merchants The Magnetic Fields, have your knees a-tremble? What about that Fiona Apple album, eh? Is Ryan ‘Glee’ Murphy’s Netflix extravaganza Hollywood quite the turkey that everyone’s saying? And in the absence of interesting new stuff we institute Old Film Club with a look at Sidney Lumet’s media satire Network. Guests Sophie Harris...

Does Beastie Boys Story, MCA and Ad-Rock’s hip hop TED talk, expand our knowledge of their journey from frat pack to woke MCs? The new Pretenders album Hate For Sale – they’ve put the release back but we’re talking about it anyway. And SURREAL ESTATE: will Kafkesque homeowning horror mystery Vivarium put you off househunting forever?  Guests William Shaw and Claire Biddles join Andrew and Siân for...

Who’s Zoomin’ who? Guests Joe ‘Mixmag’ Muggs and Jim ‘Jockey Slut’ Butler join Andrew and Siân for our first-ever LIVE ZOOM recording. On the agenda: Alex Garland’s paranoid tech fantasy Devs, the spectacularly bloody Russian comedy thriller Why Don’t You Just Die?, and foul and funky behaviour in Beavis & Butthead genius Mike Judge’s Tales From The Tour Bus.  Want to actually SEE all this? Sign u...

Is Sky’s new Phoebe Waller-Bridge “screwball tragedy” Run up there with Fleabag and Killing Eve? How Radiohead-y is the first solo album by their guitarist Ed O’Brien? And would you watch US TV shows with titles like Murder House Flip in 8-minute bursts on your smartphone? New mobile media launch Quibi hopes so. Guests Adam Higginbotham – author of Midnight In Chernobyl – and Miranda Sawyer of the...

With all the quality releases cancelled, we celebrate the 25th anniversary of Duran Duran’s covers album ‘Thank You’, acclaimed as perhaps the worst album ever made. Plus slash’n’stab satirist John Niven on why his new book The F*ck It List might get him banned from America, and fellow guest Kate “Worldwide FM/Last Bohemians podcast” Hutchinson helps us to dismantle Jim Carrey’s dark comedy Kiddin...

Combating isolation frustration across the nation… This week, The Strokes are back! Is this a good idea? Bravura and very near-the-knuckle middle school cringe comedy Pen15, in which two 31-year old actors play themselves as 13. And does BBC3’s Mysterious Murder Of Nipsey Hussle do justice to the assassinated hip hop star? Guests Jude “Guardian/New Statesman” Rogers and Ralph “Mixmag/Muzik” Moore...

Remotely-recorded for your safety and comfort… Disney+ is here just in time for the Lockdown. Will spaghetti Star Wars western The Mandalorian justify your hard-earned Imperial credits? Big cat murder mystery cult saga Tiger King on Netflix: has any true story this insane been seen on TV before? And Salford torch singer Ren Harvieu returns after years of hardship. Will she get a good revieu? Clark...

Excuse our sound quality… We’re all indoors for the foreseeable future, so you might as well enjoy the good stuff. In our first hygienic, remotely-recorded podcast guests Eamonn Forde (Guardian) and Martin Aston (MOJO) join Andrew and Siân to recommend what to watch, play and read in the self-isolation era. Plus Baxter Dury takes his urban dirty young man persona to “another level” and we assess n...