The Strange Brew - artist stories behind the greatest music ever recorded

Steve Tilston joins Jason Barnard for a tour through six decades of songwriting, picking thirteen tracks from across his career and talking through the stories behind them. Along the way he covers his early days on the London folk circuit, the frustrating experience of his second album on Transatlantic Records, and the decision to put out a record himself in 1976 when very few people were doing it...

Philip Norman returns to talk about Mr. Moonlight , his first book devoted entirely to Brian Epstein, and what emerges from decades of Beatles research focused through a single lens is a portrait more complex than the one most people think they know. Norman reveals the extraordinary story of how the Kray twins plotted to exploit Brian’s gambling addiction and seize control of The Beatles, th...

Martin Barre is already playing when the evening begins. Recorded live at The CAT Club in December 2025, this is Barre in conversation with Jason Barnard. Hendrix turns up, and Jimmy Page, and a French chateau that put Jethro Tull in the bathroom for a week. So does a Grammy, won at home because the record label wouldn’t pay for flights. He also talks about his autobiography – wrote it...

Otis Williams discusses over six decades of The Temptations and their upcoming UK tour . Williams talks about moving from Texas to Detroit as a kid, catching Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers at the Fox Theater, and getting spotted by Berry Gordy at a record hop. He remembers the strings going onto ‘My Girl’ in 1964 and knowing straight away it would be a hit, a hunch confirmed by telegr...

Anthony Phillips, founding Genesis guitarist, joins Jason Barnard to talk about the formation of Genesis, his departure, and his latest album, Gemini – Pieces For Piano . He traces the Genesis story back to Charterhouse and the summer of 1967, when he first heard a 12-string guitar. Peter Gabriel’s theatrical stage persona came about through necessity, filling dead time while Phillips and Mi...

John Leckie is one of British rock’s greatest producers, who started out as a tape operator at Abbey Road in 1970, thrown immediately into sessions for George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band . This interview, conducted live at The CAT Club in September 2025, focuses on Sunburst Finish , the Be Bop Deluxe album that gave Leckie his first official...

John Helliwell of Supertramp returns to talk about Crime of the Century , the newly restored 1975 concert film shot at Hammersmith Odeon, and the years in which the band went from complete obscurity to one of the biggest acts in the world. He discusses the creative relationship between Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson, and how the tensions between them eventually broke the classic line-up apart. Hell...

Boz Boorer talks about his life in music, from his earliest memories of Marc Bolan and T. Rex to punk shows in London in the late 70s, The Polecats, and eventually decades on the road and in the studio with Morrissey. Boz talks about touring with Dave Edmunds, working alongside Tony Visconti, Mick Ronson and Steve Lillywhite, and the stories behind some of Morrissey’s most beloved songs: &#8...

Mark Webber has been with Pulp for so long that his story and the group’s are almost the same thing. He started out as a teenager in Chesterfield with a fanzine called Cosmic Pig, booked Pulp at the local Conservative Club in 1986, became their tour manager with his dad’s old briefcase, and eventually found himself on stage with a Stylophone. Jason Barnard takes him through it all: the...

Singer-songwriter Michael Weston King picks tracks from across his career, a conversation bookended by his new solo album Nothing Can Hurt Me Anymore, shaped by the Southport attacks of summer 2024 and the loss of his granddaughter, Bebe. King recalls Fragile Friends, who put out singles through Probe Records in early 80s Liverpool. After their split he found country music and formed The Good Sons...

He wrote some of the greatest songs in American music, Dark End of the Street, Do Right Woman, I’m Your Puppet, and now, at 84, Dan Penn is back with an excellent new album, Smoke Filled Room. Penn got his first chart record while still a junior in high school, went on to produce The Box Tops, was in the room when Otis Redding recorded You Left the Water Running, and co-wrote Do Right Woman...

Gary Talley was 19 when The Box Tops scored a number one hit with ‘The Letter.’ Alex Chilton was 16, had been up all night before the session, and came from the kind of household where that sort of thing wasn’t questioned. What followed was two and a half years of relentless touring, five albums, and a management which took advantage of them. Talley talks about growing up in Memp...

In a market town seven miles south-east of Manchester, a recording studio opened above a shop in 1968 that became one of the most significant facilities in British music history. Strawberry Recording Studios in Stockport was where 10cc built their sound, where Paul McCartney brought Wings to record his brother Mike’s album, where Neil Sedaka revived his career, and where Joy Division and The...

Few works of musical theatre receive the recognition they deserve, and The Kibbo Kift is a prime example. Written by Judge Smith, co-founder of Van der Graaf Generator, and composer Maxwell Hutchinson, this ambitious rock musical told the stranger-than-fiction story of a breakaway anti-war scouting movement in 1920 that transformed, over two turbulent decades, from idealistic woodland campers into...

Duncan Mackay spent the 1970s at the keyboard of British popular and progressive music, often invisibly, yet seldom far from its most defining moments. MacKay first built a reputation in South Africa which brought him back to England where he joined Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, just as ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)’ reached number one, and it was at Abbey Road during those ses...

Rat Scabies needs little introduction as the thunderous drummer of The Damned. His collaborator in One Thousand Motels, Chris Constantinou, has had a career that has taken him from the studio with Chas Chandler, to the Live Aid stage at Wembley with Adam Ant, and into the recording booth with Sinéad O’Connor. Rat and Chris describe how they first met through The Mutants, a collaborative proj...

Jason Barnard is joined by music writer and artist Chris Wade to talk about The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society . They discuss how the US tour ban pushed Ray Davies inward, the extraordinary run of Kinks singles, and what it means to preserve an England that probably never existed in the first place. Davies kept returning to the village green and its characters into the early 70s...

Andrew Sandoval talks about THE KINKS – ALL DAY AND ALL OF THE NIGHT, The Day-By-Day Story Pt 1: 1940-1971, the new book he co-authored with the Doug Hinman. This is the most comprehensive record of the Kinks’ early career ever assembled. Andrew and Jason Barnard cover what it actually took to document The Kinks, from chasing down Shel Talmy’s original studio invoices (Pye Records kept...

Lou Gramm discusses his long-awaited album Released and how it brings unfinished songs back to life. Gramm also opens up about Foreigner’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the politics that delayed their recognition, and the emotional moment of finally taking the stage to accept the honour. The podcast explores the rekindling of his relationship with Mick Jones, overlooked Foreigner...

Tom Doyle digs into the remarkable, and surprisingly chaotic, story of Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles decade. Tom’s book Man on the Run , reissued to coincide with the official documentary of the same name, charts McCartney’s journey from 1969 to 1981: from morning drinking on a Scottish farm to headlining Madison Square Garden. Tom covers Linda’s role in keeping Paul from t...

If you’re a David Bowie fan, the names Earl Slick, Mike Garson, Tim Lefebvre, Gerry Leonard and Mark Plati will need no introduction. But KillerStar are not a Bowie tribute, and that’s what makes them so special. On this episode, KillerStar co-founder Rob Fleming explains how the whole thing started organically; a few demos, a call to vocalist Emm Gryner, and suddenly some of the most...

It’s been over a decade since I last spoke to Steve Ellis, and it felt like no time had passed at all. That’s the thing about Steve, he just pulls you straight back in. The prompt for this catch-up was his latest release, Love Affair – Edinburgh Live 1995 . The story of how it came to exist, a phone call at 7pm asking if they could record a live album that same night, is pure Ste...

Billy Sherwood discusses the upcoming YES UK tour featuring the complete Fragile album. He traces his path from drummer to bassist, learning the instrument by playing along to YES records, and development in groups Lodgic and World Trade. Sherwood details his first collaboration with Chris Squire in 1989, writing ‘The More We Live – Let Go,’ and his refusal to become YES’s...

The guitar player who helped define pub rock in the 1970s is still making records. Brinsley Schwarz’s latest album, Shouting at the Moon , asks the same question that runs through much of his recent work: why can’t we get it together before it’s too late? The podcast then moves back to when his eponymous band became accidental pioneers of a movement they never quite intended to l...

Across Big Big Train’s shifting line-ups, Greg Spawton’s songs connect the earliest records to their latest album, Woodcut . Greg selects eight tracks from Big Big Train’s catalogue that help tell their story; songs about Winchester Cathedral’s medieval foundations, record-breaking steam locomotives, and stories plucked from newspaper headlines, transforming historical curiosities into...