Word In Your Ear

Stirring the spice-filled gumbo of news and turning the heat up. This week’s nutritious ingredients include ….

… is everything better shorter?

… the greatest opening line in a book ever written

… did Tom Waits, Warren Zevon, Joe Cocker, the Bee Gees, Cheap Trick, Sam Cooke, Talking Heads or Bill Evans make the greatest live album of all time?

… the worst beers Buster Poindexter ...

Helen’s violin at the start of Come On Eileen has filled a million wedding dancefloors. She was a member of Dexys Midnight Runners, later their musical director, at the boom time of Too Rye Ay (and its wobbly sequel) and captures the thrill of it all in her just-updated memoir, What’s She Like: A Violinist’s Tale. You’ll love this conversation - warm, candid, forgiving and touching on all the following &hell...

We first met Nigel Dick in the late ‘70s when he was the motorbike messenger for Stiff Records and watched him rocket to success in the video boom, directing career-launching clips for Guns N’Roses, Tears for Fears and Britney Spears and working with Cher, Joni Mitchell and McCartney, all recorded in his memoir ‘Music Video Mischief’. He looks back here on that big-budget golden age and the rise of the amate...

Two fearless men journey to the Edge Of News so that you don’t have to. Some highlights of this week’s report …

… when a gig’s all about the performer not the audience

… the power of singing other people’s songs

… can you ever trust a film critic?

… what connects Richard Thompson, Neil Tennant, Loudon Wainwright and Randy Newman?

… “bands can&rsq...

Richard Thompson has a new album, ‘Hippies, Thugs and Heroes’, and he’s touring again in 2027, the perfect excuse to get another of our favourite guests back in the chair again. He joins us here for a brilliant, free-wheeling conversation with a cast list including …

Arnold Schwarzenegger (and his son Wolfie)

William Shakespeare

Mandy Miller

Shostakovich

Fairport Convention

William Walton

Fellini

John Lennon

Lou...

You forget how huge and ubiquitous Rory Gallagher was in the ‘70s, just 22 at the Isle of Wight and auditioning for the Stones four years later, an inspiration for Johnny Marr, Andy Partridge, the Edge, Slash and countless others. And for his brother and manager Dónal - “it was a big wide world I wasn’t going to see unless I hung onto his coattails”. He’s just published a memoir, ‘Edged In Blue, ...

In this week’s extension of The Longest Conversation In Pop History™️ you’ll be happy to find …

… the front row audience driving Gillian Anderson mad and why we feel for her

... can you still buy anything for £1.10?

… when did rock nostalgia begin?

… what Andy Partridge paid “the Hermit of Mink Hollow”

… the famous playwright who wrote a Beatles film script

The third instalment of ‘The Island Book of Records’ is out, another sumptuous, elegantly designed, LP-sized chronicle of every album released on this most fabled of labels, in this case between 1971-72. They’re edited by Neil Storey who worked in the press office for years, and they’re magnificent, a painstaking assembly of the memories of producers, musicians and label staff involved in those records with ...

A lifelong Beatles obsessive, Gary Kemp bought Epstein’s black leather address book at auction and (with Simon Halfon) researched its 404 names to construct a picture of him, “a 360-degree look” built around musicians, managers, impresarios, hustlers, grifters, ‘walkers’, tricksters, writers, deejays, scene-makers and assorted fashion and media folk. It’s fascinating. As is this podcast where he ...

David Holzer was a Lou Reed fan from the moment he saw Walk On The Wild Side on Top Of The Pops but avoided Metal Machine Music for 42 years as it was supposedly unlistenable. He was transfixed when he finally heard it, began playing it daily and felt so strongly about “the most radical rock record ever made” he tracked down 60 fellow obsessives and wrote the enthralling ‘Lou Reed: Metal Machine Mystic’. And...

A long-running conversation that shifts from major to minor, back to major and all notes inbetween, this week’s lyrics including …

… can people who write ‘happy’ ever be cool?

… the best drummer who isn’t a drummer?

… when will Oasis buy Man City?

… why is Taylor Swift unmemorable?

… when’s “too old to mosh”?

… weird double-...

Jon Savage detested the UK’s mid-‘70s hits with a vengeance, “records so bad they made you want to strangle every deejay on Radio One, especially Dave Lee Travis”. Which is why he’s compiled ‘Jon Savage’s 1976: Something Was Going To Happen’, 24 ground-breaking tracks released the same year that paved the way to the future. He looks back here from his home in Anglesey at the thrill of...

The two-man conversational canoe paddles the rock and roll tideway, stopping off this week at …

… Van Morrison’s set-opener is Kidney Stew Blues by Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson. Do people have to play their big hits?

… what’s the key ingredient in success?

... “all great albums automatically have great sleeves. Bar one!”

… does Beyonce have a horsefly named aft...

While Mark Ellen visits his Scottish estates, David Hepworth and Alex Gold keep the home fires burning with a wide-ranging conversation, taking in:

• why every band containing a pair of brothers seems to inevitably succumb to fraternal warfare 

• how Ed Sheeran found himself caught in the cross-fire between a multi-millionaire and a bunch of support acts keen not to get caught on the wrong side of a social medi...

A whole new format we’ve invented for people who’ve been guests before and were so entertaining we wanted them back. So we’ve devised some random questions to spark a few memories and revelations. First up, Sid Griffin of the Long Ryders, touring the UK this autumn, who looks back here at his early life before he “went to L.A. to quote-unquote make it”. You’ll love this as much as we did, especia...

“Good hair, good shoes, something to say” were the requirements of Indie Sleaze whose vanguard lit up the fading music press in the first decade of the 21st Century – acts like Franz Ferdinand, the Rakes, the Cribs, Kaiser Chiefs and Bloc Party. Janine Warren saw the Strokes in Camden in 2001 and life took a whole new direction. Her book ‘The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect’ looks back at old...

This week’s news in three separate files - the Good, the Bad and the Befuddling. Which involves …

… have Oasis created their own economy?

… are stadium gigs now like historical re-enactment?

… “people listen to music more intently in Manchester as they’re inside while it rains”

… ‘includes All Things Must Pass miniature garden gnomes!’ The mad money-draining joy of ...

Clint Boon was at the heart of “the two biggest musical revolutions of my lifetime” – as a teenager for Joy Division and Buzzcocks, and later the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Hacienda and onstage with Inspiral Carpets, a world of characters as big as his own. His memoir ‘The Manchester Chronicles’ is about obsessions, schoolteachers, purple winklepickers, mobile discos, good luck, catastrophe and bei...

The Slits burned very brightly – but briefly - and were gone, their bumpy and courageous tale crisply told in Zoë Howe’s updated ‘Typical Girls?’. She looks back here at the unforgettable things they wore, said and did as “outsiders in an outsider scene”, a band celebrated before they’d even played a note. And touches on …

... how other all-girl groups got started - the Moodies, the R...