Word In Your Ear

Belfast author and old pal of the pod Stuart Bailie joins us to remember the lost captain of the good ship Pogues and we touch on Shane’s “feral” early life and the character he constructed to keep the world at bay; his place in the Irish literary pantheon, his intelligence worn lightly and Joycean use of language; the night they drank the proceeds from Fairytale Of New York; why the band’s St Pat...

Pauline Murray kept a diary when she and Penetration were on the punk rock frontline and her vivid and emotional memories appear in a new memoir, Life’s A Gamble, beautifully illustrated with personal photos, press cuttings, late ‘70s gig listings and other lovingly archived memorabilia. It teleports you back to a time when pop music made daily headlines and battles were lost and won in fragrant d...

Glen Matlock came to our live podcast recording at London’s 21Soho at the end of November and lit up the audience with tales from his new memoir ‘Triggers’, stories of his early life in the late ‘50s and ‘60s, his brief and riotous shift in the Sex Pistols and his colourful adventures since. The full cast list includes Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, the DJ Mike Raven, Gary Glitter, John Peel, Kenneth Horne,...

You wonder why her life hasn’t been made into a movie. Jenny Boyd’s mother had so many children she didn’t realise her daughter had quit school and become a model. The world of London clubs and fashion magazines was the start of 60 years’ close observation of rock stars in every context leading, eventually, to the publication of ‘Icons of Rock’, her interviews with 65 musicians. Among the highligh...

We ran our metal detector over this week’s rugged rock and roll terrain and dug deep when it beeped. Among those prime locations …   … the secret of Top Gear’s golden age.   … is Bob Dylan a “cold weather concept”?   … why Holger Czukay’s ‘Movies’ is a pivotal record.   … Daryl Hall’s restraining order on John Oates: inter-band fall-out scales brave new heights.   … the gr...

The week’s rock and roll luggage was put through the scanner by our sharp-eyed security chiefs and the following items kept back for scrutiny … … 82 year-old jazzer in lucrative samples windfall! … is there a more excruciating ‘mum’ moment than the 12 year-old Elijah Blue Allman’s in the Cher video If I Could Turn Back Time? …. the staggering sum total of what the Beatles did on 30 July 1963. … “M...

As if by some magical alignment of the planets, the  Specials, Madness and the Beat were all listening to the same music and developing the same look at precisely the same time, though completely unaware of each other. And when they started releasing records, the 10 year-old Daniel Rachel was transfixed. What happen next is recorded in his hectic and engrossing book, Too Much Too Young: the 2...

Jude Rogers – writer, broadcaster, old pal of the pod - first heard Kirsty MacColl when she was nine and felt a connection ever since. She’s just written the sleevenotes for ‘See That Girl’, the best, most diverse and exquisitely packaged compilation of her music ever assembled, an eight CD box-set of singles, rarities, unheard songs, live and Glastonbury appearances, demos, BBC sessions and colla...

This week’s winning hand from the rock and roll card deck includes …   … a silver salute to musicians who don’t dye their hair.   … did Al Pacino play Phil Spector? Roger Daltrey as Franz Liszt? Was Gary Oldman Joe Strummer?   … rock stars you’d swap lives with.   … the “theme-park-ification” of pop music.   … the mysteries of rock and roll are slowly evaporating. As Tom W...

Slade were as revolutionary as T. Rex or Roxy Music, Daryl Easlea points out. At one stage they were outselling Bowie and Bolan. They were the band that hauled the sedentary early ‘70s audience to its feet. The sound of the Ramones was built around ‘Slade Alive!’ and you can feel them in the bones of the Pistols and Oasis. We talk here to Daryl about his funny, energetic, nostalgic and affectionat...

John Higgs' brilliant and wide-ranging book 'The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned A Million Pounds' came out ten years ago and just keeps on selling. It sold initially to the fans who bought their records. Then to those absorbed by the fringe figures in their mythology - Ken Campbell, Alan Moore, Robert Anton Wilson, the Discordians. And then to people who just wanted a staggering and bar...

"The Beatles gave us a continuing soundtrack of unparalleled charm and reassurance", Derek Taylor said. "As long as they kept on delivering fresh songs along with the morning milk, everything was right in our optimistic world". It happened again on Thursday. Is the old magic still there? Also on the menu in this week's podcast... ... Fact or fiction? The extravagant adventures of Bill Drummond and...

There are broadly three Ian Broudies in the public imagination. One is the songwriter with a catalogue of softly psychedelic left-field pop tunes. The second is the record producer behind Echo & the Bunnymen, the Fall, the Coral and Terry Hall. The third is the co-composer of our new national anthem. He talks here about early life in Liverpool and the records that enthralled him (See Emily Pla...

Billy Sloan, Glaswegian broadcaster and music columnist, has written his memoir, ‘One Love, One Life’, about a career that’s allowed him to point his microphone at an astonishing array of musicians and started back in the old analogue world of tight-deadline newspaper journalism where you hammered out your Chuck Berry interview as the rolls of film were biked back to the office to be processed. Th...

We spin the reels of the rock and roll fruit machine this week and get the following pay-outs …   … the preposterous present they gave Bobby Charlton when he retired.   ... “the leaning man from Alabam”.   … ‘Skinny Minnie Shimmy’ by Lattie Moore And The Emperors and other apparently fictitious rock and roll hits.   … a Radio One DJ who was also an actor, erotic sculptor, trave...

Toothsome hors d’ouvres, mains and ‘items from the trolley’ on the rock and roll menu this week include …   … Bowie’s Pin-Ups v Ferry’s These Foolish Things: who won? … the worst band name in history and why.   … the fan who hired a plane to fly a message past Morrissey’s record label.   … the Stones’ Hackney Diamonds: best album since Black And Blue or tedious riff-less dirge? &nbs...

The godfather of British independent labels, Immediate, was started in 1965 by the Stones’ manager Andrew Oldham and Tony Calder, its winning slogan: “happy to be part of the industry of human happiness”. As Simon Spence correctly puts it, “it all got very messy”. Oldham tended to fall out with people and then threaten to kill them. Simon’s excellent book, ‘Immediate: the Rise And Fall of the UK’s...

As it emerges from the upheaval of Cross Rail, music historian Peter Watts looks at this densely-packed thoroughfare between Charing Cross Road and Covent Garden, which started off selling sheet music, grew into the place where many writers sold their tunes for a few quid while a wise minority hung on and made fortunes, a street that continues to provide a home for music businesses to this day. In...

Spicy and nutritious items in the rock and roll bouillabaisse this week include …   … Roger Waters at the Palladium: a masterclass in how to insult an audience.   … “without Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones would have been Manfred Mann.”   … the only rock star who can tell a story onstage.   … Nempnett Thrubwell, Hinton Blewett, Glaister Fagan … Leafy Somerset hamlet or venerable...

Nick Banks - nephew of the great Gordon Banks – saw a note pinned by his favourite band to a wall in 1986, his Sliding Doors moment: ‘Pulp Want Drummer. Call Russell or Jarvis’. What happened next he records in his memoir ‘It Started There: From Punk To Pulp’. We talk to him about life in Sheffield in the ‘70s and ‘80 and why it took 15 long years for Pulp to crack it. Among the highlights … &nbsp...

Engaging blips on the rock and roll radar this week include:-   … Iron Maiden album title or novel by Jeffrey Archer?   … selling Ringo’s ashtray.   … the Blood Doner: the Hancock script that keeps on giving.   … “Terrible album title. Terrible album cover, too.” The start of Rolling Stone’s review of which immortal record?   … how come acting runs in families but writing...

Will Sergeant’s just put out the second volume of his memoirs, both of them Sunday Times best-sellers, Echoes and the first edition, Bunnyman. Here he revisits the Liverpool of the ‘60s and ‘70s in extraordinary detail - the clothes, the records, the gangs, the school days, the early shows he saw - and the many reasons he wanted to form a band. On the agenda …   … ‘rockist’ cliches the Bunnym...

Crime novelist Cathi Unsworth turned Goth in her teens in rural Norfolk fired by a cocktail of Dennis Wheatley, the Damned on the Peel show and the dark arts of the York Festival “Gothtopia” bill in 1984. She devoted long hours to trying to construct Robert Smith’s “tarantula hair” and acquiring black lace garmentry. Something about its music and folklore chimed with a life marooned in the middle...

Richard Morton Jack interviewed over 200 people when assembling what’s unquestionably the best, most colourful, comprehensive, revealing and accurate portrait of Nick Drake ever published. We talked to him about ‘Nick Drake: The Life’ at a live podcast recording at 21Soho on September 25 and explored various remote corners of this sad, surprising and eternally gripping story, among them ….  ...

Spice-filled items tossed into the conversational cooking-pot this week include:-   … our charming encounter with Gary Numan, possibly the world’s most contented man.   … the next step in the age of spectacle: the sensory bombardment of U2’s shows at the Las Vegas Sphere and the crippling cost of experiencing it.    … Taylor Swift’s genius for publicity and the subtle art of co...