Word In Your Ear

Gary Numan is about to set out on a UK acoustic tour, some of it in churches and one date in a cathedral. He talks here - from the Scottish estate house he’s just bought – about some of the first shows he saw and what he’s learnt about live performance. This includes ...   … the peculiar effect of seeing Nazareth at the Rainbow in 1973.   … the fate of the £5 note he’d asked Queen to aut...

Neil Storey is an old pal from our magazine days who worked in the press office at Island. He looked after U2, Bob Marley, Steel Pulse, the B-52’s and many others. About 15 years ago he began the mammoth task of compiling a series of books telling the story of virtually every record the label released in its pioneering history, tracking down and talking to all those involved - musicians, producers...

Both of us were involved in the launch of Mojo 30 years ago in the autumn of 1993 and we dug out our copies of the first issue. As editor Paul Du Noyer said on page 3, it was “our confirmed intention to pitch a wang-dang-doodle – all night long, if necessary.” The cover story was about a sequence from Eat The Document, the film by DA Pennebaker of Bob Dylan’s ’66 tour that was never released and c...

This week’s pod was recorded just after we saw ‘Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm’ at London’s National Portrait Gallery, a warm and winning show that starts with him as a wide-eyed fan trying to take pictures of his heroes and soon switches to his shots of the whole world trying to photograph him. We talk about his pictures of French jazzers, Paris boulevards, backstage rooms...

David Remnick got his Pulitzer for his reporting on Russia. These days he edits The New Yorker, in which capacity he has had close encounters with some of music’s legends during their final acts, some of which is gathered in “Holding The Note”, a collection of his writings on music. From his ill-lit Manhattan eyrie he talks to David Hepworth of many matters, including: ….what was in the handbag wh...

Recorded together in Mark Ellen’s attic! Among the conversational footballs booted round the park this week you’ll find:-   … Freddie’s “exquisite clutter”: would YOU buy one of his bonzai plant-holders, his catsuit with ballet shoes and a $0.5m silver bangle?   … when did the story change from “the Stones are old, knackered and ought to give up!” to “the Stones are old, brilliant and sh...

Fired by the rock and roll revival of 1970 and a post-Easy Rider taste for American music, a circuit of some 35 London pubs filled with bands playing fizzing, small-scale shows that never sounded quite the same on record, bands whose moment in the sun was ultimately wrecked by the arrival of punk rock. This pod – and Simon’s book ‘Before It Went Rotten: the Music That Rocked London Pubs 1972-1976’...

Kevin Armstrong was the guitarist in the band David Bowie asked him to assemble for Live Aid and toured and recorded with him many times. Playing the guitar intro to Rebel Rebel in a stadium, he says, is “like lighting a match”. Start the Passenger with Iggy Pop and you’re greeted with “a great mass of love”. His memoir, Absolute Beginner, is “a window onto the high table of rock and roll” and ful...

We dipped the shrimping net of curiosity in the rock and roll rockpool this week and transferred the following items to the podcast bucket …   … who now regrets being the “little tyrant” that broke up their band 30 years ago?   … who was the real Bungalow Bill and how did the song about him change his life?   … Bing Crosby and Paul Whiteman are almost forgotten. Are the Doors and th...

Ray Padgett lives in Vermont, first discovered Dylan when he was 16 in the 21st Century and was fascinated and besotted, later launching the newsletter ‘Flagging Down the Double E’s’ and now publishing the enthralling ‘Pledging My Time’, a collection of his interviews with over 40 people who’ve worked, performed and recorded with the inscrutable old rogue. Both the book and this fast-moving, whip-...

Its tyres pumped, its engine tuned, its air-con still on the blink, the rock and roll charabanc trundles off on its circuit which, this week, makes the following stops …   … the singer who sold vials of her tears as part of a merchandise range.   … when Billy Bragg entered a Paul Simon lyric in his school poetry contest and only got 7 out of 10.   … why our favourite music stil...

Even podcasts take “annual leave” but we’re back and once again propelling the two-man Pedalo of Enquiry down the rock and roll seafront stopping off at sundry wave-rippled spots, among them …   … what Chuck Berry said about the Clash.   … a band whose keyboard player is the King’s second cousin.   … the song Art Garfunkel sang for years without realising it was about him.   …...

  The mellifluous melody and soaring counterpoint of this week’s podcast were comprised of the following notes …   … Morrissey’s broadside on the treatment of Sinead O’Connor – and her electrifying moment at Dylan’s 30th Anniversary tribute two weeks after she’d torn up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live.   … two unsettling events in the later life of Randy Meisner.  ...

Blips on the rock and roll radar this week include …     … Things You No Longer See, No 97: the celebrity airport arrival shot.   .. do we, in all honesty, need Roger Waters’ re-interpretation of the Dark Side Of The Moon for it is upon us on October 6?    … is there really an Edinburgh Fringe show called ‘Bald Man Sings Rihanna”, ‘A Shark Ate My Penis’ or ‘In The Cou...

Pat “PP” Arnold was hired as an Ikette by Ike & Tina’s Revue in 1965 and set off a 2,000 mile tour of America, coming to London a year later to support the Rolling Stones. Offered a record deal by Andrew Oldham, she lived in England for many years becoming “the First Lady Of Immediate” with a wide circle of friends and collaborators including the Small Faces, Cat Stevens, Hendrix, Rod Stewart,...

As Mark Ellen had taken his shrimping net to the coast Alex Gold steps into the breach to talk to David Hepworth about ….how solo acts like Bing Crosby and Bruce Springsteen get to play the common man in a way they never could if they were in a band ….the extraordinary sight and sound of the band called Punch trying to make their name on “Opportunity Knocks” in the vanished land of 1976 ….what to...

In his new biography “Nick Drake: The Life”, Richard Morton Jack set out to correct the misconceptions spread by magazines and former biographies, some ending up on Wikipedia. This involved talking to as many people as he could track down who’d met and remembered him, from key players like Joe Boyd, Francoise Hardy and Drake’s sister Gabrielle to the girl who played the cello on ‘Cello Song and a...

Growing up in remote rural Norfolk, crime writer Cathi Unsworth had a Goth conversion, a condition from which, she happily admits, you never fully recover. And never want to. She discovered Dennis Wheatley’s ‘To The Devil A Daughter’, heard Siouxsie & the Banshees on the Peel Show and saw a picture of Robert Smith in a magazine which she stuck by her bedroom mirror to help her construct his sp...

Filling the spinnaker of enquiry on the careering, two-mast schooner of rock and roll this week you will find …   … the prog drummer who made a fortune.   ... did Brian Wilson bring a horse into a recording studio? Or write a symphony for drums? Or have an idea involving a hen in tennis shoes?   … why the New York Times review of the new Wham! documentary is ridiculous and wrong. &n...

This week we paddle the two-man kayak of curiosity across the rock and roll seafront and make a few stops on the way, among them …   … “the future is always in the past”.   … the pure theatre of the E Street Band and its cast of characters – “our lives are repaired by the fact that they’re still together”.   … the growing appeal of Country & Western - and even “shronking” jazz –...

Sizzling hot topics patted back and forth across the ping-pong net of conversation this week include … … the republishing of Giles Smith’s Lost In Music, one of the funniest books ever written about our real life relationship with pop stars, records and being in bands. Giles – and Nick Hornby – kick-started a whole new literary vogue.   … has Cate Blanchett won Glastonbury?   … why do we...

Aged 21 in 1963, Harvey Lisberg wanted to be the next Brian Epstein and ended up managing Herman’s Hermits and 10cc, among others, before relaunching the snooker stars Jimmy White and Hurricane Higgins. We thoroughly recommend his just-published memoir ‘I’m Into Something Good’ and this wide-ranging encounter takes in …   ... the unique division of labour in 10cc and the magnificently doomed...

This week’s pod veers off the conversational highway to break out its picnic hamper at the following leafy locations ….   … the Stackwaddy game: metal band or clawed demon from Dante’s Inferno?   … when bands stopped being good-looking.   … Paul Simon’s Seven Psalms: how long can you give a record before it clicks?   … Tony ‘TS’ McPhee of the Groundhogs (RIP) and the great Brit...

The super-trouper of gentle enquiry alights this week upon …   … why bands are at their biggest when they’re over the hill.   … Fats Waller v Morrissey song titles: can YOU tell your Waller from your Wallower?   … how could Dylan have written Queen Jane Approximately aged only 24?   … why you should hear Pieces Of Treasure by Rickie Lee Jones, particularly the track All The Way...

Forty years ago Clare Grogan was on the cover of Smash Hits yet again and was the fourth guest at our garden party on June 3. Here she remembers the key events that have happened since which include meeting Bill Forsyth and the success of Gregory’s Girl (and why she only saw it for the first time recently), touring with Siouxsie & the Banshees when still at school, life as a pop star in the go...