Word In Your Ear

... before we play unplayable albums? Just how desperate do you have to be before you give John and Yoko’s “Two Virgins” or Michael Nesmith’s “The Prison” a spin? Also in this episode, another round of Alexa’s Favourites, more people sign up to be Patreon patrons, getting Lene Lovich’s autograph on a train ticket, exactly when people started having their pictures taken on the Abbey Road zebra, and...

... to the special talents of John Prine & Adam SchlesingerAlso in the episode: pink moon over London, waking up to birdsong, Brinsley Schwarz at the Fillmore and the strange majesty of old Melody Maker headlines. Plus name-checks for our inaugural patrons. If you'd like to joint them see below. And don't forget to catch up with our brand new "Word In Your Attic" with Mark Billingham at https://yo...

... in which Mark Ellen and David Hepworth discuss milk in rock, read your correspondence and invent a game you can play with Alexa. Massively encouraged by the fact that nobody tried to physically stop them doing it again, Mark and David podcast from their lofts to anyone who has nothing better to do for the next half an hour. Subjects covered include: the musical tastes of "Parks And Recreation"...

In which Mark Ellen and David Hepworth talk about Joni Mitchell, Krakatoa and the importance of dressing properly while WFH.Since they're spending a proportion of the Current Unpleasantness talking to each other anyway. Mark Ellen and David Hepworth thought they may as well record some of it, explaining what's happening with Word In Your Ear in the light of the current situation, how they're getti...

Pete Paphides' acclaimed "Broken Greek" is, as David says when introducing him, the best book written by a former Smash Hits reader and looks set to do for unjustly uncelebrated popular music what Nick Hornby did for football in "Fever Pitch". This chat encompasses: Abba, West Brom, the Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, Mind Your Language, shopping for singles at Woolworths, living above a chip shop, hopi...

Dan Franklin's first book "Heavy" chronicles his life-long love affair with heavy music in all its different manifestations, from Meat Loaf to Sunn 0))), and argues that it deserves a lot more respect than it gets as a rule. It's a story that takes us from a cassette copy of a Guns N' Roses album thrust into the hands of a puzzled eight-year-old, via the fields of Donington and the mosh pits of Ca...

John Mitchinson and Andy Miller do the award-winning Backlisted podcast which, as they like to say on the tin, "brings new life to old books". They're also big music fans so we thought they would be the ideal people to come along and talk in their own inimitable style about what they feel are some of the best and sometimes overlooked examples of the genre. That's how come, in a wide-ranging discus...

We were delighted to welcome Bethan Roberts to Word In Your Ear to talk about her novel “Graceland”. This is based on the most important relationship in the life of Elvis Presley. His mother Gladys brought him up single-handedly when his father went into prison, she encouraged his singing, she feared for what the girls would do to him and what the managers might take from him, wished he didn’t hav...

In his new book "A New Day Yesterday", an account of progressive rock in the 1970s, Mike Barnes tells the story of how this peculiarly British musical form was born out of the Small Faces' "Itchycoo Park" and the Graham Bond Organisation and went on to flourish throughout the 70s in the universities of Britain and the arenas of the United States. He talks to Mark and David about all the issues tha...

When Sid Smith first finished his definitive biography of King Crimson in 2001 he thought, not unreasonable that would be that. But then Robert Fripp reactivated the band and so Sid had to take up his pen once more. This has resulted in an even more definitive work "In The Court Of King Crimson". He came to Word In Your Ear to run Mark and David through the key facts of their extraordinary rise an...

Alexis Petridis was very lucky Elton John chose him to help tell the story in his best-selling memoir "Me". Elton John's equally lucky Alexis agreed because without him it probably wouldn't be half as good as it is. In fact it's two stories: the first is the story of a musical career that seems to be headed nowhere until a chance meeting with a lyricist began a partnership which operated in an unp...

On December 7th Thomas Alan Waits celebrates his 70th birthday and to mark that occasion we asked Barney Hoskyns, the author of his biography "Lowside Of The Road", to talk about what makes Waits one of the rare examples of a misfit who has prospered on his own terms. It's all here: developing his shtick entertaining the line of customers outside, choosing to dress in a way that had gone out of st...

It's always good to welcome Andrew Collins back to the pod. Andrew was with us most recently to talk about the new edition of his official biography of Billy Bragg. This time he's got his movie hat on, as befits the man who writes about films for the Radio Times and presents "Saturday Night At The Movies" on Classic FM. Since 2019 has been such a bumper year for music biopics we asked him to remin...

Graham Parker had an unusual career trajectory. "I didn't pay my dues until after I had some success," he says. In the wake of his greatest triumph, 1979's "Squeezing Out Sparks", he broke up his partnership with the Rumour and moved to America. Here he was the unwitting beneficiary of a record business which had difficulty adapting to a changed world. In the 80s and 90s, he says, they actually ga...

The big hit records of today are assembled. The great records of 1968 were made. In a few cases they just happened, seemingly brought into being by some higher power over and above the efforts of any one individual. In his new book “Wichita Lineman: Searching In The Sun For The World's Greatest Unfinished Song” Dylan Jones traces the combination of inspiration and chance which makes this “the worl...

Daniel Rachel talked to everyone from Noel Gallagher to Tony Blair for his new book “Don’t Look Back In Anger” and he came in to Word In Your Ear to talk about how Kate Moss, David Beckham, Alan Macgee, Damien Hirst, Alastair Campbell and many others, knowingly or otherwise, managed to shape Britain’s last feelgood decade, which began with Spike Island and finished with the death of Diana. We guar...

When Dave Lewis first went to see Led Zeppelin at the Empire Pool, Wembley in 1971 it cost him 75p. When they played their final show at the O2 in 2007 he was on Robert Plant's guest list. From the germ of his teenage scrapbook he built a small empire, based on his fanzine "Tight But Loose", which has produced a staggering range of titles dedicated to every aspect of Led Zeppelin's career. His boo...

For more than forty years Ian Penman has been one of the best writers about music in the country. His new book, "It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track", is made up of essays about James Brown, Prince, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, John Fahey and other musicians who have a strange fascination for him. Ian came to the Islington to talk about his career as a writer, the book and his plan to write a boo...

Is Nick Lowe the only musician of his generation who has actually got better as he’s got older? How did he survive the Famepushers hype? How did England’s most laid-back musician become the Midas of the punk era? What’s the secret of his success as a producer? What does he understand that most other musicians don’t? Will Birch, a musician himself, has known him a long time, and has written “Cruel...

Fifty years ago to the week the first Crosby, Stills and Nash LP was released in the UK, holding out the prospect of brotherly love in close harmony. Thus begun half a century of bitter infighting, chemical and sexual excess, regular break-ups and tearful reunions, all of which is documented in lip-smacking detail in “Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young” by one of our favourite authors Peter Doggett. H...

On Sunday the Dutch group The Analogues, who have set out to play the Beatles songs that the Beatles never played live, using the same equipment that was used fifty years ago, recreated the whole of "Abbey Road" in Studio 1 at Abbey Road. Mark and David were there and they haven't stopped babbling about it since. Hence we thought they should share their enthusiasm with the wider public. This conve...

In his new book "Fried and Justified", veteran PR Mick Houghton writes about his experience as the man whose job it was to get these bands and many others written about in the NME and Melody Maker, back in the days when thousands of bands formed, toured and split up purely in order to achieve their ultimate ambition, which was getting on the cover of a weekly music paper. Have we really seen the l...

In a departure from our usual way of doing things we were delighted to welcome Art Of Noise-nik, ABC arranger and purveyor of fine soundtrack music for everything from "Poldark" to "The Hustle" Anne Dudley to talk about a career that has been largely spent behind the scenes. Subjects covered include: the surprising things you can learn from working with people with no musical talent, why everythin...

Gary Crowley has just put together “Gary Crowley’s Lost 80s”, a lovingly-curated four CD set of the kind of oldies that the radio station computer doesn’t automatically reach for. It’s the kind of stuff that might have soundtracked his teenage discos, his nights at the Wag, his shows on Capital Radio and GLR or served to warm up the crowd as he presided over shows by Wham or the Style Council. He...

In 2007 private equity firm Terra Firma borrowed a lot of money from Citibank to buy EMI, the UK’s most venerable music company. Their plan was to transform this most traditional of companies to meet the challenges of a new age. A year later the economic crash came along to make what was already a difficult job even harder. Eamonn Forde covered what was going on at EMI for The Word as the smart gu...