The Joe Jackson Interviews

Since I posted this podcast in 2021, many people are using the title 'The Music That Made Me.' Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery! Francis and I had great fun during this interview. I hope it makes you smile. 

This is a phone chat I had with Tori - it's quoted in part in my Ebook Tori Amos: Soul Searching and Uncensored - after I was told that an interview we did, during which Tori revealed for the first time the full details of the rape experience that led to her song Me and A Gun, was not suitable for the newspaper we di dit for - The Irish Times. It's a re-post from three years ago. 

Dave Fanning and I do not like each other. We never have. But during the one interview we did when we both were working for RTE, we had an exchange about dealing with the death of loved ones, such as a mother and father. The fact that Fanning and I dislike each other is irrelevant. I hope this conversation heps listeners. 

Jerry Leww Lewis has died since I posted this podcast a few years back. I became an interviewer to track down and talk with my music heroes. As a kid during the 1960s, I adored the music of Sun Records, including everything recorded by Jerry Lee. During the 1970s, I loved his country music. But he and PJ Proby are the two of the music heroes I wish I had never met. This podcast may explain those w...

There are more lies than truths about Elvis's love life, in Baz Luhrmann's movie. And June Juanico is one of the many women Elvis loved, whom Baz deemed to be unworthy of even a mention, even though Unchained Melody was "their song," and June wondered if, in the end, he sang it to her. She's a wonderful, feisty, forceful woman and maybe if Elvis wasn't such a 'Hound Dog' to women, she might have b...

The 2022 documentary, The Ghost of Richard Harris, now showing on Sky Arts and elsewhere and nominated for an IFTA award, came into being because its director, Adrian Sibley, became aware of the taped interviews I did with Richard from 1987-2001. He decided to use them to voice the 'ghost', and this adds an extra depth to the film, said the Guardian newspaper. I also am an associate producer of th...

This is a re-post of one of my first podcasts in 2020. I am re-posting because I am currently reading through my journals for a proposed documentary that may be made about me, and I came across something wonderful Eartha Kitt, a woman I admired greatly, said to me after this interview in 1987. She said, "I feel you are interested in me, in the spirit of Eartha Kitt, not the image." I was. Also, th...

I think all singers should listen to this podcast. It's a clip from a 1988 interview I did with Leonard that I decided not to include in my Ebook: Hallelujah: A Conversation with Leonard Cohen, which is about our first interview that re-routed my life and made me decide to become an interviewer. Here we talk about the quest to sing truthfully. Eight years later, during an interview with another of...

This is a fun re-post from 2021, with me remembering teenage encounters with Mr Geldof in Dun Laoghaire and showing just how cool I was as a kid - not! It's one of my 'Singles' podcasts because it lasts roughly the same time as, say, a single such as I Don't Like Mondays. I hope it makes you smile. No, Bob, I don't mean you! 

I was reminded of this exchange when I saw the tsunami of nonsense in the media, social and otherwise, about U2's latest ventures. Even David Letterman, a brilliant interviewer, has become a U2 media groupie, hyping their latest album and forthcoming tour.  Frankly, when I read a headline that quotes The Edge as saying U2 choose to do a residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas because the venus is "st...

This is a companion piece to the Paula Yates podcast part one I posted to mark the screening of the Channel Four documentary about Paula this week. Bob Geldof, who I knew socially growing g up in Dun Laoghaire, has not spoken to me since we did this interview in 2000, Though he did grunt a "hi" once, in 2016! 

This week I saw on Channel Four part two of a fascinating documentary about Paula Yates and her final years. I have yet to see part one. I am reposting this podcast in memory of Paula and to remind people what a joyful, life-affirming and fabulously flirtatious woman she was. I'll also re-post a podcast based on an interview I did wth with Bob Geldof - missing from the TV show - and in which I ask...

It's the Academy Awards weekend - which will be forgotten next weekend! But to celebrate the fact that so many of my countrymen and women are nominated this year, I am posting this podcast of part of an interview I did with Richard Harris - the full text and Richard's life story are in my new book Richard Hazrris Raising Hell and Reaching for Heaven -  in 1990 even before he was nominated for a Be...

Today, March 7th, Adrian Sibley's documentary, The Ghost of Richard Harris, which was inspired by my taped interviews with Richard and uses them to voice the 'ghost,' and of which I am an associate producer, was nominated for an IFTA award as one of the best documentaries of 2022. My book, Richard Harris Raising Hell and Reaching for Heaven, was published to coincide with the film, although it is...

Earliest this week, on the actual 25th anniversary of Dermot's death, I reposted part one of this two-part podcast I made in 2021.  I am delighted that so many people listened to it and responded on Facebook, Twitter and so on. I stand over my assertion that he need not have been driven out of Ireland to make Father Ted and to become yet another Irish icon abroad. And he sure as hell died way too...

I notice today that RTE is marking on social media the 25th anniversary of Dermot's death. I hear him laughing somewhere, ironically. In this podcast, which I first posted a few years back, he explains why he had to go to the UK to make Father Ted and so on. He was a great guy, I loved doing this interview, and I hope he rests in peace. 

I say in this interview that I don't particularly like Elvis Costello. That, with apologies to his many fans and the man himself, if it would concern him in the slightest, applies to the interviews we did and his music. But I love the music of Burt Bacharach, particularly when he worked with the truly poetic lyricist Hal David. Burt died this week. This is the second and last of my two podcasts ce...

I love Burt Bacharach's music. Simple as that, though I wish more people would similarly celebrate the work of his greatest lyricist, Hal David. Either way, Burt died this week, and in this, the first of two podcast tributes I want to upload, I read an interview I did with the man over the phone in 1998. My one regret is that we never did a face-to-face interview. And, by the way, after I told him...

"This man seems to have a bottomless well of things he wants to tell you," said one of my editors, Madeleine Keane, while reading the last interview I did with Richard in 2001. When I told him that, he said, "tell her she's right!" It's a great quote. But it's not in my latest book, Richard Harris: Raising Hell and Reaching for Heaven. Why is it not? Becuase, as I say in the introduction to this p...

At the heart of my best-selling Richard Harris biography is a tale that tells of the seminal bond between Richard Harris and myself - and it is a tale with which many fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters, will relate. Sadly, this aspect of Harris's life, soul, and psyche was not an area of exploration in the released version of the 2022 film The Ghost of Richard Harris, of which I was an as...

I am reposting this 2021 podcast right now, in February 2023, hoping that Christy will hear it during a difficult time for him, his family, and his fans, and thinking that it just may make us all smile for a while. This is me and Christy talking about something we both love - music, which, in and of itself, can be transcendent and help our spirits rise above everything that sooks to oppress us. I...

This is the second of maybe three podcasts based on interviews I did in late 2022 and early 2023 about my book Richard Harris: Raising Hell and Reaching for Heaven - the first hardback print run of which is nearly sold out I am happy to say Here is a half-hour chat - minus music which I can't use for copyright reasons - I had with the ever-effusive Marty Whelan, a legend in Irish broadcasting who...

I made this podcast when the movie Elivs was released in 2022. Now that it is nominated for Oscar awards, many of which it deserves - happily however Baz wasn't nominated as a director or as a screenplay writer - but I stand over my assertion that the movie ultimately betrays the soul of Elvis Presley. His real story is infinitely more fascinating and too deep for Baz to explore. This podcast has...

My podcasts are now available on Audible. So, I am putting free on Audible, which usually charges listeners to hear authors read their own work, and on other podcast servers, a podcast of me reading a section from a chapter in my book, Richard Harris: Raising Hell and Reaching for Heaven. It's part-memoir, because Haris was my friend, and this is a chat we had about Richard's nearly deadly affair...

Ninety or so minutes ago, here in Dublin, heading towards midnight, I read that David Crosby had died. As someone who came of age and fell in love for the first time during the early 1970s, the songs of Crosby, Still and Nash, particularly their debut album, meant so much to me. I also later in life became an interviewer and got to interview Crosby, Stills and Nash during one session circa 1990. I...