Word In Your Ear

Carol Decker - another Smash Hits cover star on the podcast! T’Pau are playing dates this summer and autumn and she talks here – hilariously - about life on the ‘80s package tour circuit and the first shows she ever saw and played, which stops off at ….   … does any audience beat a Butlin’s Mid-Weeker on their third pint?   … from Black Mirror to PG Tips: the afterlife of a hit.   …...

As the great Warren Zevon said, ‘Enjoy every sandwich’. The two-man canoe navigates this week’s rock and roll rivulet which sadly entails reflections on a pair of towering musical giants ‘whose legend occupied the space where activity should have been’. Things considered include …   …are you born with genius or does a set of circumstances allow it to flourish?   … the impossible task of...

Liam Gallagher calls Ted Kessler and Hamish MacBain “the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore of music journalism”. Both worked at the NME (and Ted at Q), both interviewed the band many times and have just published ‘A Sound So Very Loud’ which, in the grand tradition of Revolution In The Head, tells the story of every Oasis song ever recorded. They talk to Mark here about …     … why Oasis...

Elkie Brooks was on a package tour aged 15, supported the Beatles and the Animals, made a single when she was 19, joined the jazz-rock Dada, then Vinegar Joe (with Robert Palmer) and has since made 20 albums. She’s now out on her ‘Long Farewell Tour’ and looks back with us here from her home in Devon at …   … supporting the Beatles in ’64 and an audience already screaming for the headliners.&...

Facing down the leg spinners of rock and roll news while trying to wallop the odd shot across the pavilion roof. On the scoreboard this week …   … has there ever been a rock feud as bitter as Trump v Musk?   … what Ray Charles, Taylor Swift and Dave Clark have in common.   … the 30-year golden age music video.   … things Van Morrison can’t forget.   … how some songs about...

Stuart Maconie – broadcaster, prolific author – has a brilliant and original new perspective on the Beatles. His latest book With A Little Help From Their Friends identifies the 100 people who had the greatest impact on their story, from the inner circle to bit-part players – schoolfriends, girlfriends, managers, muses, support acts, advisors and exploiters. It’s immensely entertaining – and revea...

Rob Caiger is one of those special people who turned their teenage obsession with music into a job   … from being the only one in ELO’s office who knew where the old tapes were   … to learning that what it says on the outside of the box isn’t always what’s on the tape   … through embarking on a ten-year project to put out the last Small Faces album from 1970 in its proper form ...

Hoary old tales retold – ideally in an Irish accent - and new ones prized from the giddy carousel of rock and roll news which, this week, features …   … was there a better stage name than Rick Derringer?   … Linda Ronstadt, Ronnie Spector, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and other new biopics under construction.   … genuinely ‘iconic’ rock images – the Ziggy lightning stipe, Johnny Cash at Sa...

Martha Wainwright is a key member of the Wainwright/McGarrigle clan, all of them big favourites of ours. She’s currently on her 20th anniversary tour and looks back here at the first shows she ever saw and played which involves …   … growing up in a folk dynasty in Montreal.     … the sight of Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen, backing singers on Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man...

Small boy begins breeding budgerigars in Liverpool, makes enough to buy a drum kit and becomes the power behind Big In Japan, the Slits, the Creatures and Siouxsie and the Banshees. And one half of punk rock’s most famous couples. The immensely engaging Budgie has finally written his memoir, ‘The Absence’, and talks to us from Berlin about …   … are bands only as good as their drummers? &nbsp...

The two-man pedalo of enquiry sets out on the Bank Holiday boating lake of news pausing to consider …     … Florence Welch, Dua Lipa and the rise of the rock and roll book club.   … the 92 year-old that Bob Dylan supported at the Cascades Amphitheatre, Ridgefield.   … the Beatles had 18 drummers!   … the sad end to Billy Joel’s tour schedule.   … is Hollywood dea...

Dylan Jones – writer, former editor of i-D, Arena and GQ - was 15 in 1975 and dressed like Jimmy McCulloch of Wings (“a lot of denim and silk scarves”), a time he thinks had enormous influence on the following five decades. There are many highlights in his latest book ‘1975: The Year The World Forgot’, a lot of them discussed here with David and Mark, including …   … the lasting impact of the...

The Beach Boys’ SMiLE was abandoned by Brian Wilson in 1967 and eventually performed at an emotional gathering of the faithful in London 37 years later. For writer and lecturer David Leaf it became an obsession. He made a documentary about it in 2004 and has just published ‘SMiLE: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Brian Wilson’ drawn from detailed conversations with the people involved. He talks...

Slapping the beanburger of news on the sizzling grill of scrutiny and served with relish by Alex Gold and Mark Ellen (David’s in Spain with his bucket and spade). This week’s specials include …   … Springsteen’s unprecedented speech onstage in Manchester about his nation’s “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration” and the Dixie Chicks’ career-popping anti-Trump manoeuvre of 2003. &...

Dennis Greaves took a week off from Nine Below Zero in 1980 but otherwise kept his nose firmly applied to the grindstone. They broke up in 1983 when he formed the Truth, who broke up in 1989 when he rebooted the old band. He looks back here at the first gigs he ever saw and played – a world with the attractive scent of spilt beer and tobacco – stopping off at various points, among them …   …...

Peter Capaldi – aka Malcolm Tucker, Dr Who, the universal screen delight and an Oscar-winning film director – was the singer in the punk band the Dreamboys in the late ‘70s who put out a single when he was at the art school in Glasgow. And then became an actor. And then - in the grand tradition of actors who’ve made albums, Hugh Laurie, Scarlett Johansson, Jeff Bridges and Keanu Reeves among them...

The teenage Alan Parsons was hired as a tape op by EMI and worked with the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Steve Harley, orchestras, comedians, Pinky And Perky and countless others in the control room at Abbey Road, and saw almost 60 years of technical revolution. He’s just finished a 50th anniversary box set of Harley’s the Best Years Of Our Lives and talks here from his Santa Monica home studio about …&nbs...

Perched outside the Vatican Of News awaiting puffs of white smoke, which this week arrive in the following fashion …   … Brandi Carlile’s Mothership Weekend and her genius for publicity.   … Jim Morrison is alive and living in Syracuse, New York!: barrel-scraping new rock documentary incoming.   … Hip Hop Wealth v Rock Wealth: the $57m house Kayne West bought, gutted and left to dis...

Dennis McNally was the Grateful Dead’s publicist in the mid-‘80s, one of many reasons why he’s supremely qualified to write his new book about the birth of the counterculture in America’s West and East Coast and Britain. ‘The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies And Created the Sixties’, a celebration of music, beat poetry, radical thinking, free speech and artistic liberty, seems even m...

Passing the thermometer of conversation over the rock and roll news to see where the mercury rises, which this week includes …   … the new Barbra Streisand duets album. Duets are ‘playlets’, small intense dramas that depend on human interaction, but so many are recorded separately (including, tragically, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell).   … but … duets you...

In which comedian Al Murray and historian James Holland talk about their new book Victory ’45 and our twin national obsessions, the Second World War and The Beatles. Includes: ….how being emotionally shut down enabled Montgomery to collect the surrender at Luneburg Heath ….how a profound sense of duty helped Harry Truman make the most dreadful decisions anyone has ever faced …how German soldi...

Derek Shulman was at the heart of two great transformations – Simon Dupree & the Big Sound switching to psychedelia, and then sensing the prog-rock trade winds and becoming Gentle Giant. One minute he was singing Kites, the next Pantagruel’s Nativity (Gentle Giant’s rebooted ‘Playing The Fool: The Complete Live Experience’ is just out). After which he was a record label president signing Bon J...

While Mark Ellen is hanging out with the other old ruins in Athens, David Hepworth and Alex Gold compare and contrast the organisation of the London Marathon with the Travellodge in Frimley and wonder… …Rolling Stone cover stars or members of Trump’s clown cabinet? …if you were interviewed as often as a rock star would you too make stuff up? …was Max Romeo’s innocent explanation of “Wet Dream" con...

Moon Zappa grew up in what appeared, on the outside, to be an enviably free-wheeling and creative household in Laurel Canyon. On the inside, not so much. Her extremely funny, soul-baring and colourful account of dysfunctional family life in her memoir Earth To Moon is as gripping as it’s unsettling. A typical day: “Your mother’s on the rampage, I need you to hide the gun!” Only other children with...

We like to think of Daryl Hall as a kindred spirit, his home-recorded Live At Daryl’s House series with its magnificent roster of guests now racking up 90 episodes. He’s about to tour in May and talks to us here from his house in the Bahamas – straw hat, roosters crowing! – looking back at the first gigs he ever saw and played and other delights such as …    … travelling with his mother’...