The James McMahon Music Podcast

So yesterday, the Winchester born musician Rozi Plain – not singer songwriter, not folk singer FYI – released her new album, her seventh, the really very brilliant, Prize . Now out on the ever-excellent Memphis Industries , it is a thing of wonder. The night before it's release I had a chat with the record’s creator about whether she reads reviews of her music, the impracticalities of pyro, e...

I love catching up with old friends via this podcast, and my guest on this episode is someone I’ve wanted to catch up with for a loooooong time now. I’ve only spoken to Jon McClure , aka The Reverend, the singer in Sheffield’s Reverend and the Makers , a handful of times since leaving the New Musical Express , a decade or so ago. Then a staple of the magazine I worked for, in that time, much has c...

Regular listeners will be aware that I have a lot of time for Sunderland, the city in north east England that I attended university in, and for a time, made my home. I used to be in a band up there. I put on shows. Did a radio show. A fanzine. And I thought I had a good handle on what was going on up there. But then my old friends in the city started telling me about this kid called Tom A. Smith ,...

Hello, and happy new year to all of you. This is an episode of the podcast I recorded a week or so before Christmas, but since Dub Pistols ’ new record is out on March 10th – their ninth, it’s called Frontline – I don’t think it matters too much, though do excuse the bit of Christmas chat towards the end. Actually, maybe you'd might like to save listening to this episode until this coming Dec...

Okay, one last episode before 2022 is done and out the door. This is a conversation I had with Jessica Viscius a few weeks back. She plays in the Chicago based indie rock band Bnny . That band’s 2021 debut, Everything , is one of my favourite records in years. Largely about Jess’ late boyfriend Trey Gruber , it’s collection of fragile, introverted rock has become akin to my grief soundtrack. My da...

Hello hello. I trust you all had an excellent Christmas? I got obsessed with The Traitors , ate my bodyweight in roast potatoes and had a succession of OCD induced mental health episodes. But it was pretty good on the whole! I read a tonne of books. Some good ones too. Though nothing that was better than Fingers Crossed , the debut book from Miki Berenyi , formally of Lush , now of Piroshka , the...

Rad episode this. For two decades now, Damian Abraham has fronted one of my very favourite bands, powerhouse Toronto born punk rock collective Fucked Up . That band have a new record due on January 27th, 2023, on the ever-brilliant Merge label, entitled One Day . The clue is in the title, the majority of the song parts on the album were written and recorded within a window of 24 hours. Urgent, dee...

I was lucky enough to hear an advance copy of Shame’s forthcoming third album, Food For Worms , last week. It’s not on general release until February 24th, 2023, and when it is it’ll be on the Dead Oceans label, but such is it’s brilliance – no hype, it is incredible - I thought I’d give singer Charlie Steen a shout to talk a little more about it. And an illuminating chat it was – about working wi...

Blimey, a hundred episodes, eh? I won’t make too much of a fuss about it, because I’ve got a belter of a guest for you today, and there’s still a bunch of episodes that I’d like to get published before the year end. But while I’ve got you, I would like to say thank you to anyone who has listened to, downloaded, shared, rated, reviewed, or in any way thought favourably about this here podcast. And...

I didn’t really know what to do with this episode, a conversation with one Morgan Murphy , aka guccihighwaters . It’s not the best recording – Morgan is backstage in Hamburg when we speak, seemingly building a shed. Also, Morgan isn’t very well – it takes weeks for us to connect, such are the perils of getting sick on tour. But I’m so fond of the kid’s nervy, quote unquote, Soundcloud Rap , and of...

Black Honey are one of my favourite bands. And that band’s singer, Izzy B. Phillips , is one of my favourite people in the music scene today. The Brighton based group are returning on March 17th, 2023, with a new record – their third and the follow up to 2021’s excellent Written & Directed – entitled A Fistful Of Peaches , which comes via FoxFive Records . This conversation is about all of the...

Whether with his first band Thieves – hugely underrated, I listen to those songs all the time – his Britpop era partnership with Suede exile Bernard Butler – the union of which produced arguably the finest pop song of the mid-1990s - his work with the great Dave Arnold or the English composer Michael Nyman, the voice of David McAlmont has been a fixture of my listening habits for almost three deca...

It’s been 15 years since the release of Type O Negative 's classic final album, Dead Again . It’s been 12 since the passing of that band's singer, bassist, and songwriter Peter Steele . For years a tricky record to track down, Dead Again was recently reissued by Nuclear Blast over three LPs, with a load of live odds and sods included too. Let me tell you, it rages as hard as I remember i...

Have you joined the Substack ? Whether with his 90s outfit Pele , his subsequent band Amsterdam , or in recent years, just under his own name , Ian Prowse has written some of my very favourite songs. This year he released his most recent set of tunes, One Hand on The Starry Plough , and there’s some all-time classics on there. Quite often on this podcast I speak to musicians and figures in music w...

It is a scientifically proven fact that ‘ Crash ’, the 1988 single by indie pop geniuses The Primitives , is the best pop song ever written. It is. No really it is. Science proves it. Formed in 1984, disbanded in 1992, then reunited in 2009, the Coventry born group have some story to tell. And with a brand new single buzzing about, a UK tour plotted for May 2023 , and an instillation celebrating t...

This episode features a conversation with Douglas MacIntyre , historian of Scottish indie and post punk, founder of the influential Creeping Bent label, and a musician of note via his own acts Article 58 and Port Sulphur . For an underground music nerd like myself, it really was quite the thrill. And Douglas is also the author of a new book, Hungry Beat: The Scottish Independent Pop Underground Mo...

There’s an album I’ve really enjoyed this year. It’s called Here's What You could Have Won   and it’s by the Hastings born punk band Kid Kapichi . It’s shouty and funny and its songs do a pretty good job at squewering the grizzled mess that is England right now. I’ve always been a sucker for that kind of thing. Late era Gallows, Slaves, Carter USM , Sex Pistols, Billy Bragg. Englands bleeeeee...

When I was a young teenager, just getting into music, I would be in record shops and find myself drawn to the strangest of record sleeves. A prism refracting a rainbow. Mermaids crawling over rocks . A man shaking another man’s hand, one of them on fire. And my personal favourite, two men on a beach, their heads actually big toes, with a goat behind them . But of course! I didn’t know who any of t...

I used to think that music – pop music, the space I’ve lived my life in for over twenty years – was akin to a theatre of ideas. A place where different perspectives on art, life, politics, and culture could be shared, and debated, kicked about, agreed with and disagreed with, all of which helped shape lives and world-views. And yet in recent times I’ve started to see music as something of a monocu...

Few labels informed my taste in music like Fierce Panda did as a teenager. Without them I’d have never heard Ash, 60ft Dolls, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci , The Bluetones, China Drum , Supergrass, Jimmy Eat World, Hundred Reasons , Coldplay, Art Brut , Embrace, Ultrasound , Kenickie, Bis, Idlewild , Placebo… I could go on… and on… While I can take or leave some of those bands now, as a teenager, all of t...

This episode has been a long time coming. I was a big fan of Holly Ross ’ teenage band Angelica . I’m an even bigger fan of the band she’s been in for the last sixteen years, the Lancaster based duo The Lovely Eggs . Comprising Holly and husband David Blackwell – but not their son, I repeat, not their son – the group are a band whose sometimes funny, sometimes sweet, always loud and exciting songs...

For over 40 years, Girlschool have fused punk, glam and metal and assembled a legacy of melodic wonder to rival any band who emerged from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal boom of the mid to late 70s. Don’t believe me? Well, you’ll be needing the new release from those good folks at Cherry Red records, Girlschool: The School Report 1978-2008 , a 5 CD box set that takes in all the hits – and as w...

2022 has been a stellar year for music books – you’ll know this if you listen to the podcast regularly, I’ve interviewed the authors who’ve penned many of the best. And though I haven’t quite got around to compiling my own favourites of the year list, somewhere towards the top of said list is Exit Stage Left… The Curious Afterlife of Popstars by Nick Duerden . Nick ’s book came out in paperback la...

It’s surprising to me that as this podcast races towards a hundred episodes, I haven’t yet involved anyone from the incredibly fertile, really quite unique north east music scene, that I was involved in twenty or so years ago . I’m happy to break that duck by talking to one Ian Black, main-man in Sunderland’s Slug , one of the most brilliantly eccentric groups around, and one currently preparing t...

Late last year, Greg Gilbert, the singer – and what a singer he was - in Delays , one of the very best bands of the 00’s and a group with one of the most transcendent of catalogues, lost his battle with cancer . He was just 44 years old. The word tragedy gets used a bit too flippantly I think, but I have no problem in using it here.  Too young. Too soon. Too much still to do. Not so much a death,...