The James McMahon Music Podcast

Local Natives released their fifth record, Time Will Wait for No One , last Friday and  so I thought I better get them on the podcast pronto for a chat. The record explores themes of newfound fatherhood, isolation, loss, and identity crisis. And the tunes? The tunes are wonderful. And so I am hugely grateful that vocalist and guitarist Taylor Rice and Ryan Hahn, also on guitar, found the time to t...

I recorded this episode a month or so back and I’ve been struggling to find the time to get it published – but it is unquestionably worth the wait. Alex Kerns was/is the drummer in one of my favourite bands of all time, the Buffalo power pop trio Lemuria , who, since 2018, have sadly, tragically, been on hiatus. In this episode he says that someday Lemuria will return. But not only that, Alex is c...

ĠENN , from Malta via Brighton, are one of my favourite new bands around. I say new, they released their debut record, Titty Monster , in 2018, and a very good EP, Liminal , back in 2021. But their new record, unum , due for release on October 6th, is a different sort of beast to anything that has come before, and reveals the four-piece to be a brave, adventurous, eccentric, deeply emotional, inte...

If you were kicking around the UK alternative music scene in the late noughties, then you might have heard English born, Malaysian raised Josh Weller peddling his music under his own name – number 11 in the indie charts with a slow moving bullet, baby! After that he was in the punk outfit The Kenneths , who were really good actually. But in recent times Josh has become much better known for his co...

On this episode I’m speaking to Randy Randall from American noise rock titans No Age , which is a pretty big thrill for me, because I have been a fan of American noise rock titans No Age since the year dot. Principally we discuss the LA band’s most recent album, People Helping People – out now on Drag City – but the conversation ultimately ends up with us putting the world to rights and deciding t...

Look, there’s no way I’m going to sum up everything that happens in this episode in this small amount of space. It is a trip . The plan was to hook up with Deerhoof drummer and vocalist Greg Saunier and guitarist John Dieterich to talk about the San Francisco born band’s thrilling new album Miracle-Level . That happened, to an extent... but things went off the rails fairly quickly and we went to s...

I was staff at the NME when ‘ Daddys Gone ’, the impossibly brilliant, desperately emotive single by Glasvegas landed on our desks. And I was staff when the group’s self-titled debut album followed. These were times when I - and I was far from alone in thinking this - thought that the Glasgow band were not only the best band on the planet, but would perhaps be the most important band for the follo...

Listeners, I’ve told all my friends about Harriet Gibsone ’s debut book, Is This Okay? One Women’s Search for Connection Online , so it’s only right I tell you about it too. Is this okay? Pah, it is, by some distance, the best book I’ve read so far this year. Harriet’s career as a music journalist took place at a similar time to the years I spent in the thick of it, and by the time she ended up at...

M.A.G.S. is the solo moniker for Los Angeles-based indie rock stud Elliott Douglas, and in recent years the Buffalo born artist has become one of my favourite songwriters, with 2017’s self-titled debut and 2021’s Say Things That Matter , being two records that have lived in permanent rotation on my turntable since their respective releases. Elliott's third album, entitled Destroyer , arrives...

Steve Turner from Mudhoney has just had a book published – I suppose you’d call it a memoir, but in many ways it’s more akin to a treatise on the enduring glory of punk and rock music, and the fusion of the two that would come to be known as grunge. Written with the music journalist Adem Tepedelen , Mud Ride: A Messy Trip Through the Grunge Explosion , does everything it says on the tin - and does...

So I was in the pub the other day, celebrating my wife’s birthday, and I got talking to Rookes , a songwriter/producer that my wife manages.  Actually, we weren’t in the pub but out the back of it, and I was burning to a crisp. We talked for ages, about gender, about God, about what the number 50 on Factor 50 sun lotion actually means, and I got thinking, “this should be a podcast really”, so when...

Okay, depending on how close to the ground and/or speakers you keep your ears, you may not have heard of Lurk yet - but you will. A five-piece from Chicago, their debut album Around The Sun was released back in 2021, while on Friday gone, a new EP, Natural Causes , was let loose into the world. Both are excellent, featuring some of the best, feral fanged indie punk rock that I’ve heard in a while....

What happens when you unite two boys from Doncaster, South Yorkshire, on a podcast? Well, on the evidence of this episode, a conversation about Doncaster Rovers Football Club, Apartheid-era South Africa, talking trees (?), what it means to be working class, noughties indie, Doncaster Dome, dead dads and… sorry mum… dogging. Because on this episode I’m speaking to Skinny Pelembe , aka Doya Beardsmo...

Since their formation way back in 1985, Philip Selway has been the drummer in one of the most significant rock groups of my lifetime. That band is of course Radiohead , and in my teenage years, there were few bands that mattered to me more than Radiohead. And so it’s an absolute pleasure to welcome Philip onto the podcast today, whereupon we talk about his superb new solo album Strange Dance , his...

When Michael ‘Moose’ Thomas left Brit metal superstars Bullet For My Valentine in 2016, he did so frustrated at a perceived lack of creativity within a band he’d been a member of since their formation back in 1998. It was a brave, but terrifying decision. And yet you can’t keep a good drummer down, and a year after Moose’s new band Kill The Lights marked their arrival with debut album The Sinner ,...

For the last ten years, Pop Recs Ltd – initially a publicity stunt, then a record shop, then a venue, now so much more - has been at the heart of the music community in Sunderland, the place that I, for a time, called my home. Founded by Frankie & The Heartstrings duo Michael McKnight and the late Dave Harper, now aided and abetted by my old friend and punk pizza supremo Dan Shannon , Pop Recs...

Graeme Thomson has just had the paperback of his 2022 Simple Minds book, Themes for Great Cities: A New History of Simple Minds , released into the world, and so I thought now was a pretty good time to speak to the author about a band I like, but am only now really learning the cultural significance of. Graeme has written some of my favourite music books in recent times, not least the superb Phil...

Blessed to have Murray Macleod on the podcast today, singer, guitarist and songwriter supreme in British alternative rock champs The Xcerts . The Aberdeen trio are a band I liked from the get go, until 2014 and the release of their third record, There is Only You , whereupon they became a band I absolutely and completely adored. That’s a trajectory I think not unusual for many rock fans, but man o...

Around the dawn of the decade, Simon Goddard , one of the finest music journalists that these isles has to offer, embarked on a truly gargantuan task - kicking off his epic Bowie Odyssey series, chronicling the life of David Bowie against the cultural and social history of the 1970s, year by year. Book four, Bowie Odyssey 73 , was released just last month, and a fascinating tome it is too, explori...

Kathryn Bromwich is one of the best music journalists plying their trade in Britain today. She’s a writer and commissioning editor on the Observer New Review , but I first encountered her when she was working as the acting deputy editor of the forever missed Guardian Guide . Before that her words on pop culture appeared regularly in Dazed , Vice , Time Out and The Independent ,  and astute and ent...

Sad Park , from Los Angeles, California, aren’t fucking around. Since forming in 2018, they’ve released two albums of very fizzy emo punk, both very excellent, with their third, No More Sound coming on Pure Noise Records on Friday, July 7th. Incidentally, Friday, July 7this the deadline for me filing the manuscript of my book, so really, I should stop talking to you and go finish my book. Okay, I’...

In 2020, Dan Franklin wrote one of the best books I’ve ever read about the caustic enigma that is heavy metal. It was called - because why call it anything else - Heavy , and even within a corner of music book publishing that is saturated with said subject matter, it stood alone as definitive and hugely insightful. I finished the book excited about what Dan might do next. The answer is Come My Fan...

Superlove , from Bristol, are one of my favourite bands at the moment. Comprising Jacob Rice on vocals and bass - who I speak to on this episode - Jonathan Worgan on guitar and vocals, and incoming drummer Tom Hennessey on drums, their last record, 2022’s Colours , was a snapshot of fizzy, Gen Z fuelled pop rock inspiration. A genius opening statement. But wait! On Friday, on June 2nd, the band ar...

Shane Parsons and Simon Ridley (and in recent times, Lachlan Ewbank ) – aka DZ Deathrays , from Queensland, Australia – have been responsible for some of the most fun music around since as far back as 2008. Now, on June 2nd, the Brisbane group release their new full-length release, R.I.F.F , a record that is expressly designed to combat misery with melody, while also expanding the group’s sound by...

I’m back from Italy. Bellissimo! And it’s a delight to resume the relentless march of this podcast with a legend of British music media, the Venerable Allan Jones . Whether it’s launching Uncut magazine – for a time my absolute favourite music magazine – or revitalising the forever missed Melody Maker during his epic stint as editor, or simply standing outside IPC towers chain smoking with me when...