Word In Your Ear

This week’s news gets a thorough shake-down to see what falls out of its pockets. Which includes …   … cupcakes, mobiles, rubber ducks, a dead swan: weird things thown at rock stars   … “polka-dotted micro-tonal space-rock from the planet Zog”: Alex gets the Angine de Poitrine live experience!   … is Shoegaze the Adrian Mole of pop?   … “Hands off my Husker Du!” Joint record co...

For nearly 60 years, Brian Eno has been a “proud non-musician” who changed the way people thought and sounded while inventing whole new ways of recording. We loved reading the updated edition of ‘On Some Faraway Beach’ which examines his staggering catalogue of avant garde experiment and wonders if there’s anyone remotely like him. Author David Sheppard looks back with us here at …   … a life...

Cheap tickets, warm beer, draughty halls and refectories, a whole new cobbled-together rock circuit was born in the ‘60s for an audience who watched and listened intently. Which allowed the music to take a different route. Paul Sexton spoke to Mark Knopfler, Nick Mason, Justin Hayward, Phil Manzanera and many others to piece together ‘Rock Goes To College: the Campus Music Scene That Shaped A Gene...

It’s polling day for this week’s news and these are the stories that got our vote …   ... Pussycat Dolls, Meghan Trainor and how ‘Blue Dot Fever’ is wrecking ticket sales   … how can you judge a songwriter with eight collaborators?   … Dylan’s ‘Judas’ moment 60 years later   … is everything becoming binary: thumbs-up or thumbs-down?   … Grandmaster Flash, Augustus Pablo, G...

Mass commercial nightlife began in a Japanese Pleasure Garden in 1657 and it’s blossomed ever since – via Victorian Vauxhall, cabaret Paris, jazz-driven New Orleans, flappers, speakeasies, moonshine, Studio 54 and the rave palaces of the 21st Century. Imogen Willetts tracks its riotous evolution in ‘Up All Night: A History of Going Out’ and wonders if the invention of the iPhone has burst the ball...

Andy Earl helped create the new dawn of colour photography in the ‘80s pop video age and went on to shoot a series of unforgettable portraits, album sleeves and magazine covers, many featuring in his new exhibition in Bankside Yards, London. He looks back here at some of his subjects and the analogue days when you flew halfway round the world for the right light and backdrop and every prop in the...

Talk Talk made just five albums, all written and recorded unconventionally and no-one’s entirely sure how they did it. And in the last two decades of his life Mark Hollis released only 92 seconds of music. Lifelong admirer Graeme Thomson explores the band’s endless mysteries in his memoir ‘In Another World: the Four Seasons of Talk Talk’, and looks back here at the last hurrah of the days of studi...

Penny Kiley moved to Liverpool in 1976, ran into punk rock and “became the person I’d never been allowed to be”, as vividly remembered in her memoir, Atypical Girl. It’s a moment of liberation mapped out by records, nights at Eric’s and the big personalities in the city’s Second Coming, the beat she later covered for Melody Maker. She looks back here at some unconquerable moments, among them … &nb...

In the 70s Paul Charles wrote lyrics for an Irish prog band. Now he writes mystery novels. Inbetween he’s been agent for Tom Waits, Nick Lowe, Van Morrison, Hothouse Flowers and many others and has forgotten more about live shows than most of us will ever know. Here he talks about: •⁠ ⁠hearing the Beatles for the first time through the family radio •⁠ ⁠meeting Tom Waits in a queue a...

This week’s news stories charge out onto the pitch but which are heading for promotion? In the running at the final whistle …   … “a ghoulish, soulless cash-grab”: the multiple disasters in the making of the Michael biopic   … how spectacle is replacing music   … which do we prefer, the truth or the myth?   … did Steve Reich re-invent music?   … when the Dalai Lama appeare...

Be glad for the pod has no ending! Now in our 20th year and, this week, ruminating fondly on the following …   … the “underhand” selling of Geese   … Morrissey’s absurd whinge about the Salford Lads Club photo   … Jay Leno’s $50 ruse to get comedy gigs   … when bands “didn’t even know what a hotel was”   … radio sessions in Andy Kershaw’s flat   … what’s the point of...

Take your protein pills and put your helmet on as we voyage to the far side this week to take a picture of …   … the Kanye West & Wireless ding-dong   … Springsteen with Tom Morello, Pet Shop Boys with Johnny Marr: the fine art of the ‘special guest’   … when Time Magazine invented Swinging London   … Gregg Allman and the judge’s wife   … Fake Plastic Trees! Pressure D...

Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley read a review of the Sex Pistols in February 1976, borrowed a car, drove to London, asked the NME where they’d find the band and were told ‘try a sex shop in the King’s Road’. The events that followed changed both the culture of Manchester and the course of rock history, a story mapped out in David Nolan’s excellent ‘I Swear I Was There’, a book as much about the aud...

The life of Keith Moon can be seen as Animal from the Muppets or as a dark, psychological odyssey. And the two co-exist in Tony Fletcher’s magnificent ‘Dear Boy’, first published in 1998, never out of print and now ‘remastered’ with new pictures, updates, epilogues and a foreword by Mandy Moon who “has to keep reminding myself this person was my father”. Tony looks back here at events along the wa...

Dominic Mohan saw Britpop on the inside from the showbiz desk of the Sun in the days when it sold 4.5m copies, a series of heated memories recorded in ‘1996: My Backstage Pass to the Wildest Year of Britain’s Wildest Decade’, a lost age of hedonism, stupidity, drunkenness and creativity. He makes a compelling case in this very funny and colourful podcast which stumbles into …   … the advice D...

A seasonal egg-hunt in the rock and roll backyard finds the following conversational confectionary …   .. Wild Bill Hickok? Valentino? Bob Dylan’s bizarre new media manoeuvre   … Liza Minnelli, Peter Sellers, Harrison Ford, Aaron Paul: people born to play one part   … how to spot writers using AI   … “dried-up old prune”? Trump’s pot-kettle war against Springsteen   … what...

Tony Visconti left Brooklyn for London in 1967, began working with the Move and Marc Bolan and formed a life-long friendship with the teenage David Bowie, playing on his first two albums and producing 10 of ones that followed. And in 2014 he formed Holy Holy with Woody Woodmansey, a live celebration of Bowie’s music from 1970 to Blackstar. They’re touring again in September with Glenn Gregory as l...

Matt Johnson’s life story has been mapped out as one long Q&A conversation from meetings with old friend, fan and BFI director Jason Wood. ‘Cognitive Dissident’ traces his trajectory from the East End to Soho to the beloved albums he made with a series of super-groups and his 2021 comeback. He looks back here at …   … his earliest musical memories – Donovan, the Move, the Crazy World of A...

When he was 19, New Yorker Brian Cullman covered the London music scene for Crawdaddy, landing at the birth of folk-rock and the singer-songwriter boom and watching its leading lights from unimaginably close quarters - Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, John Martyn among them. He even played on the same bill as Drake at Les Cousins club, all this recorded in his book ‘How To Prepare for the Past: Travels in...

Whooping, whistling, punching the air, standing on the arm-rests and generally adding our voice to the sound of the crowd this week involves …   … the creepy way Google eavesdrops our conversations   … the cleverly positioned “secret” on McCartney’s new album   … why a knackered piano made Keith Jarrett’s Cologne Concert a success   … Daryl Hannah, Mick McCarthy, Ray Manzarek:...

Paul Gorman, author and curator, has put together fascinating maps of the London haunts of Bowie and the Stones and just published one about the Clash built around key locations in the network that formed them and helped them to flourish. It’s a beautiful thing: buy one and take the walking tour! He talks to us here about …   … how an Agit-Prop alternative West London emerged with links to Oz...

A milky tea, a jam sponge and this week’s news served on a tin tray with a steam train painted on it points our very English conversation towards the following …   … what connects the Monkees and a British Prime Minister?   … when are you too old for Indie?   … A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi? A Bar on The Piccolo Marina? Noel Coward or Neil Tennant?   … the Move, the Streets, the Ki...

Neil Tennant co-wrote a musical at Primary School and soon decided that “learning other people’s songs was hard work compared with making up your own”. He’s chosen some from the Pet Shop Boys’ 40-year catalogue, hits and obscurities, in ‘One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem’, just out in paperback, and added fascinating notes about their context and composition. This very funny and revealing conversation...

At the age of four, Steve Nieve drew pictures of piano keys and pretended to play them. He joined Elvis Costello & the Attractions when he was 19, the start of a life that involves having to find a flight case for a Steinway Grand. He talks to us here from his Paris apartment about Stiff package tours, recording remotely, his upcoming shows with the French singer Kessada and …   … being a...

Watering the scented hedgerows of news to see if any green shoots appear. And they do, in the form of …   … the most effective protest song ever written   … the commendable box-ticking life of Country Joe McDonald   … the Timothée Chalamet ding-dong: is it still safe to voice an opinion?   … Harry Styles’ 67 dates in just 7 locations: how ‘Destination gigs’ throttle the competi...