Word In Your Ear

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 HAVE to hear! eg Cash & Carter, Otis Redding & Carla Thomas, Ray Charles & Betty Carter, Siouxsie & Morrissey, Nick Cave & Kylie, Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush.

… the extraordinary story of the rebirth and...

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 soldiers could keep on invoicing right until the end

…what all this has to tell us about our present predicament

…why thousands of blokes in camo (and a surprising...

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 Jovi, Slipknot and Nickelback and rebooting AC/DC and Bad Company. It’s a phenomenal story and involves …  

… three pieces of advice for any band today.

… playing the ‘64 circuit in his...

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" convincing?

…where do you listen to the Word In Your Ear Podcast?

All this and more in your favourite p...

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 famous parents can fully gauge the emotional turmoil. She talks here about her memoir Earth To Moon – just out in paperback – and the impact of Frank’s work and tours on t...

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’s Broadway dance band when he was three.

… seeing the Temptations, Smokey Robinson, Patti LaBelle and the Bluetones in the Uptown Theater, Phi...

The chocolate Easter bunny of rock and roll news in highly nutritious and digestible fragments, such as … 

… the Who’s very public sacking of Zak Starkey.

… why no band ever wants to play quietly.

… how a magazine in a shop window sparked the Neil Tennant/Mark Springer album.

… Katy Perry’s space ‘mission’ and the trenchant observations by her and the ‘crew’ – “I can’t put it into words but I looked out the window and we got to see the moon!”

… The Thing In The Cellar...

Dave Pegg joined Fairport Convention 56 years ago and fully deserves some sort of medal. They’re playing their 49th Cropredy in August and touring the UK later in the year. He talks to us here about the first gigs he ever saw and played which, delightfully, involves …

… the night Hank Marvin took him to see Bjork.

… an all-nighter in Birmingham with John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Chris Farlowe and Spencer Davis.  

… memories of his “school hero” Denny Laine.

… the fine art of getting it together in the countr...

Boldly pursuing tariff-free trade in rock and roll news, nostalgia, gossip and old hokum since 2007 and, this week, featuring …

… the romantic allure of life as a critic.

… Sting’s part in the success of ‘Adolescence’.

… Mick Jagger’s long engagement to Melanie Hamrick (born when Steel Wheels came out!)

… "Contained within these grooves are twelve convincing arguments against the capitalist system" and other vicious reviews revisited.

… when Bob Marley recorded ‘Sugar Sugar’ by the Archies.

… Al Bowlly’s menacing ‘Midnight...

Sparks are touring – playing dates in the UK and Ireland in June and July – and with a new (and 28th) album, Mad!. Russell Mael looks back at the first shows he ever saw and played which entails …

… sitting on the floors of LA clubs watching Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Move, the Faces, the Who and Tyrannosaurus Rex.  

… his Mum taking him to see the Beatles in the Hollywood Bowl among “10,000 screaming girls”.

… “there was a faux honesty about the Laurel Canyon bands – ‘it’s just me and my guitar’ – whereas the...

The runners and riders in the rock and roll steeplechase first past the post this week include …

… how Ed Sheeran protects himself against song theft claims.

… ‘lost’ Hendrix, Beach Boys, Amy Winehouse and Jeff Buckley records: is anything unfinished ever any good?

… “The Unauthorised Breakfast Item”: can YOU tell a Bob Newhart sketch title from a Caravan song?

… US Office versus the UK original and the genius of Steve Carrell.

… The West Wing, Frasier, the Good Life and how romance is the root of al...

Ed Tudor Pole entered punk rock from stage school and always felt he was playing a part. After being hired to act in the Great Rock’N’Roll Swindle, he formed Tenpole Tudor and had a brief and dramatic moment in the sun, all recorded in his rollicking memoir ‘The Pen Is Mightier.’ He talks here about …

… his “quite posh” ancestry and a great-grandfather bankrupted by the Wall Street Crash.

… a “Damascene conversion” to the Rolling Stones and ten hours in the burning sun at their Hyde Park show, aged 14.

… being at RAD...

Scanning the rock and roll ether with our patent heat-seeking Ripple-Detector®️ to see what rings the bell. Which this week includes …

… how reformed ‘90s pop groups all look like Paul Whitehouse characters from the Fast Show.

… the mutual agony of parents taking kids to concerts.

… “Tap! Tap! Tap!”, the “gacked up” sound of the Heartbreakers’ at work in Fort Petty.

… “Two old voices crack through the static/ Vinyl souls dissected so erratic”: AI’s nerve-jangling interpretation of Word In Your Ear – in song!

… the four stages of sho...

The super-trouper of scrutiny scans this week’s events and lands upon …

… the man who’s played on 21,000 records.

… how Joni Mitchell is still stirring it up aged 81 and why we love her for it.

... the impact of the stadium circuit on rock festivals.

… the longest-surviving group in the world – bowing out at Glastonbury after 66 years!

… “fake indignation” on social media.

… the 40th anniversary of Dead Or Alive’s stunning You Spin Me Round (Like A Record).

… the...

Kate’s an old pal from our days at Word magazine. She was on the staff for six years before heading off to the New Statesman and has just put out a collection of the sizzling and revelatory profiles she wrote for us, them and the Observer about a particular sector of the musical landscape for whom she’s always carried a torch. As she wonders in ‘Men Of A Certain Age: My Encounters with Rock Royalty’, “how is it that in the presence of wrinkly rock stars twice my age I sometimes think I’m meeting … me?” This tremendous excha...

John Harris is an old pal from our days in the music press. You might remember him from Sounds, the NME and Select (which he edited) and he’s been one of the mainstays of the Guardian ever since, writing mostly about pop culture and politics. When his son James was diagnosed with autism and, looking for ways to connect with him and help his development, John began playing him various types of music. The results were life-changing for the family and recorded in his moving and revelatory book ‘Maybe I’m Amazed - A Story Of Love And Connec...

This one starts with memories of Genesis at Farnborough Tech in 1972 – Batwings? Fox heads? - looks back at school bands and the early ‘70s and ends with the current Mike & the Mechanics tour. But it mostly centres on the first live shows Mike Rutherford ever saw and played which features …

… his mum making him wash the Brylcreem from his hair before seeing Cliff & the Shadows when he was 17.

… buying an electric guitar before you realised it needed an amplifier.

… playing the same theatres he played with Genesis when he was 19...

The Waterboys’ new album comes with the magnificent title ‘Life, Death & Dennis Hopper’ and the band start touring in May. Mike Scott looks back here at the first gigs he ever saw and played and the performers he watched closely, which involves … the Stones “when they were still dangerous” and the connective genius of Mick Jagger, Dennis Hopper’s lost decade, Nazareth and Emerson Lake & Palmer at the Glasgow Apollo, a love affair with microphones, how not to look at the audience, the days when he wrote songs called ‘Freefall’, Joe Strummer singing on his back and McCartney’s crowd going “totally...

In eager pursuit of dance and merriment, we dust down the current events. Which this week involves ….

… are teenagers no longer in love? And what does this mean for pop music?

… are people better musicians now than 40 years ago? And is that because you can get online tutorials explaining how to play everything?

… Paul McCartney taking two buses across Liverpool just to learn the chord of B7.

… how the best pop songs start with someone walking into a room.

… Ghana! India! New...

Someone else we put on the cover of Smash Hits 40 years ago who’s touring in 2025! He’s playing European festivals, ‘80s packages, dates with his band and a string of solo shows billed as ‘Musings & Lyrics With Nik Kershaw’, and talks to us here about the first gigs he ever saw and played, which involves …

… a bad case of Imposter Syndrome.

… how the relationship with your audience changes over 40 years.

… “it all seemed so important back then. I was in this little bubble where I thought the world was waiting f...

Gang Of Four’s moment was dramatic but brief. It was littered with times when the future seemed impossibly bright before disaster crept up with a cosh in their relentless “refusal to do the obvious”. Being a musician, he points out, is a ridiculous life best not taken seriously. His memoir ‘To Hell With Poverty!’ rightly describes itself as “rich with stories”, many remembered in this spirited exchange with David and Mark, among them …

… the transformational effect of a scholarship to the boarding school where he met GO4 guitarist Andy Gill and future film-makers Adam Curtis and Paul Gre...

Tyres pumped, engine cranked, chromework winking in the Springtime sun, the two-man conversational jalopy sets off on its weekly spin and visits …

… the day America broke the news and showed its dark side.  

… Brian James RIP and Stiff’s brilliant ad campaign for the first Damned album: “Play it at your sister!”

… has entertainment been dwarfed by world events?

… why the Oscars were invented and what it said about American life.

… “negative publicity is the first response to everything”.

… why Adrien Bro...

We’re long-time admirers of Denny Tedesco’s “Wrecking Crew” doc which celebrated the studio musicians of 60s Hollywood, the unseen hands who can be heard on all those Beach Boys and Spector hits. Now he’s done something similar with the musicians who were so much part of the success of James Taylor, Carole King and Warren Zevon in the next decade in “The Immediate Family”. We’re delighted to have been able to organise a screening of the film at The Art House in Crouch End after which he spoke to David Hepworth about what it was like to grow up...

Ian Leslie posted his ‘64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney’ in 2020 and the viral reaction to its piercing and original points encouraged him to write ‘John & Paul: A Love Story In Songs’. Do we need another Beatles book? We do if it’s this one! It’s exceptionally good and highly recommended. The conventional wisdom for decades was that John was the tormented, anti-establishment genius and Paul the effortlessly tune-churning, bourgeois poser. Ian’s book points up that their deep devotion to each other and telepathic, close relationship was the root of the supernatural partnership that made those songs possible. The two of the...

In which we pedal the conversational tandem uphill and down dale, like a rabbit through the pea-vine or a turkey through the corn, stopping for moments of reflection which include …

… “If someone wants to steal your music, it means your music’s worth stealing.”

… cats, birdsong: spot the ‘silent track’ by Kate Bush.  

… when Gene Hackman smiles, be very afraid.

… what was written on Walter Matthau’s funeral card.

… “Home-Taping Is Killing Music!” and other threats that failed to sink the business.

…...

We first saw Graham Fellows as Jilted John on Top of the Pops in 1978 and we’ve followed his characters ever since, especially drawn to the keyboard-prodding, car-coated John Shuttleworth and his deathless pop anthems ‘Pigeons In Flight’, ‘Up And Down Like A Bride’s Nightie’ and ‘I Can’t Go Back To Savoury Now’. Graham talks here about how and why he created them (and rock media studies lecturer Brian Appleton) and his new book ‘John Shuttleworth Takes The Biscuit’, along with … the allure of romantic punk rock (Patrik Fitzgerald, Buzzcocks, the Undertones), Sheffield mouse-breeders, comic melancholy, whether Northern humour is funni...

As sinister autocrats stroke Persian cats in shark-pooled underground bunkers, their bony fingers reaching for the nuclear button, we shake another Vodka Martini and reflect on the week’s events, among them …

… Amazon buys Bond: but isn’t the essence of 007 its droll and unimpressible Britishness?

… and haven’t the lunatics taken over the asylum? Can you still invent unhinged fantasy villains with real life versions in the Kremlin and White House?

… why a Jam reunion would never have worked.

… when did ‘cool’ change from meaning exot...

Nights In White Satin - 260 million streams on Spotify - is still the central plank in the set Justin Hayward’s touring in October. He talks to us here about the first shows he ever saw and played, the ballroom circuit of the mid-’60s remembered in particularly vivid detail and involving the odd burst of song - “My kind of town, Great Yarmouth is …!”. Along with …

… the appeal of “a Moody Blues crowd”.

... “Name Singer seeks guitar player”: the Melody Maker ad that got him into the Marty Wilde band, aged 17.

…...

No musician is more closely associated with London or left more footprints than Bowie, and you can trace its influence on his life and work (and vice versa) through a series of landmarks from the suburbs to the centre. Author and curator Paul Gorman has just published an annotated street-map – David Bowie’s London - listing the places that played a formative role in his world and music, the places he rehearsed, performed, filmed and recorded, the homes of friends and managers, his schools and the addresses where he lived, worked and was photographed, made connections, bought clothes and gene...

We first saw Eddi Reader singing with the Gang Of Four on Whistle Test in 1982. This eventful pod traces her story from seven kids in a two-bedroom council flat (“me in the toilet with a guitar singing Your Cheating Heart”), to the Scottish folk clubs, busking with circus acrobats on the Left Bank, to radio jingles, life as a backing singer and the rapid rise of Fairground Attraction who reformed last year, 34 years after they split in 1990. It's highly entertaining from the kick-off, not least ….

… snogging the Earl of Moray’s son during Dylan at Blackbushe...

Passing the Dutchie 'pon the left-hand side, we sift through this week’s events, rants and theories which absorbingly include …

… that Drake v Kendrick Lamar beef in full!

… was Bowie only as good as his collaborators?

… Kingmaker, Toploader, Feeder, Slayer, Longdancer, Widowmaker …. has there ever been a good band with a name ending ‘-er’?

…… seeing the Jam at the Hope & Anchor.

… John Lennon was not a working-class hero. Bob Marley shot no sheriffs. Joe Strummer’s daddy wasn’t a bankrobber. Starship patently...

Direct from the Government Yard in Trenchtown where, over cornmeal porridge by a log wood fire, the events of the week are gently appraised, among them …

… how Bob Marley, the Walker Brothers, the Byrds, Hendrix, Ramones, Blondie and Nirvana “got the dust of England on their boots”.

… Chappell Roan’s demands for “a living wage” in a business built on inequity.

… why audio books surprise you in ways the print edition can’t.

… Beyonce? Best Country album? You sure?

… “separate immediately”: Marsha H...

The teenage Woody Woodmansey was offered the job of under-foreman in the Vertex spectacle factory in Hull but then got a call from Bowie inviting him to move to London and play drums on his new album - “plus food and somewhere to stay”. It took him all weekend to decide. And involved some cultural readjustment when he did. 56 years later he’s a founding member of Holy Holy and touring the UK in May – along with Tony Visconti and Glenn Gregory – performing songs from Bowie’s breakthrough early ‘70s albums. He talks here about …

… the life-changing s...

In a courageous stand against AI technology, a pair of old lags communing via two cocoa tins and a piece of string attempt to put the rock and roll world to rights. Which this week involves …

… what David saw in the HMV record store in Oxford Street “that shook me to the ground”.

... music that only works played loud.

… Marianne Faithfull - there’s no middle ground between Sacred Figure and Outrageous Diva.

… why ‘60s fame is like no other fame.

… is there a mor...

When we get off of this mountain, you know where we want to go? Straight down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. While surveying the week’s events as we paddle, which involves …

… the genius of Garth Hudson and the magnificent way he looked - “part lumberjack, part Old Testament prophet, part Brahms.”

… how Glyn Johns invented the sound of the Eagles.

… Carrie Underwood’s Inauguration catastrophe.

… only male voice choirs or gospel groups should be allowed to perform National Anthems!

… fiery...

We put Howard Jones on the cover of Smash Hits in 1983 billed as ‘the Most Promising New Act’ and, 15 albums and 42 years later, he’s about to set out on another tour, a double-bill with ABC. He looks back here at the first shows he ever saw and played which involves …

… rehearsing his Live Aid slot backstage to an audience of one: David Bowie. 

… pioneering the “one-man show” in the early days of Moogs and drum machines. 

… Emerson Lake & Palmer firing cannons onstage at the Isle of Wight in 1970 (his first gig, aged 15...

Another great hero on the podcast! We first heard Andy Fairweather Low with Amen Corner on jukeboxes in the late ‘60s and he’s touring the UK from February. Ten albums and countless collaborations later, he looks back here at teenage life on the psychedelic circuit and the first shows he saw and played, stopping off at …

… the Stones in Cardiff in ’64 - “they opened with Talkin’ ‘Bout You and it hit me like a virus.”

… Amen Corner – “you gauged how good a gig was by how many people fainted.”

… being The Face o...

David feels a rant coming on. Mark lights the blue touchpaper, pulls on a tin hat and retires to a safe distance as they consider …

… the US closure of TikTok: has a single governmental act ever had such impact on the music business?

… film posters, Dinky Toys, “obscure vinyls”: the new record stores that are effectively antique shops.  

.. why Virtually Parkinson is breath-takingly awful and an insult to the interviewers’ art.  

… Melania Trump’s monstrous payday.

… Bob Dylan joining TikTok - “Good God, I must...

Something happens when he walks out under the lights. He can never predict what but he’s programmed to perform. As he has for over 60 years and will again when he sets out on a 63-date tour in April peppered with stories of an extravagant life and billed as ‘an evening of Francis Rossi songs from the Status Quo songbook and more’.

He looks back here at the acts that showed him the way (Gene Pitney, Slade, ZZ Top, Mott the Hoople and “my uncles, the Stones”), Butlins in Clacton, the “elfin” David Bowie, the value of “dying...

We both first heard Graham Nash just over 60 years ago when the Hollies’ Just One Look was on the BBC’s swinging Light Programme and we’ve followed him ever since, not least his transformational shift in the late-‘60s from suburban Salford to the wood cabins of Laurel Canyon. He’s touring the UK in October, An Evening of Songs and Stories with Peter Asher in support, and looks back here at the first shows he ever saw and played, which involves …

… Bill Haley in 1958 – “he opened the curtains and said ‘See yer later, alligator!’, and I’ve...