Word In Your Ear

Mark Lewisohn began his Beatles’ trilogy in 2003, the first volume appearing ten years later. He’s hoping the second, Turn On, which covers 1963 to 1966 and every recording session, might be ready by 2031 and working “nine days a week to achieve it, assembling a framework and then sliding it together”. Further good news – his lecture about their life in 1962, Evolver62, is now available on film! “No matter how deep you dig, there’s...

Spinning sides at the conversational disco to see what fills the dancefloor, which this week includes …

… Jerry Garcia had seven fingers! Brian Jones had seven children! Morrissey worked for the Inland Revenue!

… the most terrifying villain in the history of cinema  

... is pop music becoming inbred?

… when Neil Sedaka made records with 10cc (and Abba)

… Happy? Get Lucky? Crazy In Love? What was t...

Glenn Tilbrook wrote an album with Chris Difford about a futuristic nightclub when they were teenagers and, 52 years later, they’ve recorded it and are performing it on the upcoming tour. He looks back here at the partnership that once wrote 200 songs in three years, the first gigs he saw, his recent decision to take control of the group and what’s changed the way they sound. Among the highlights …

… what he learnt from watchi...

Stuart Adamson co-founded the Skids and Big Country but was profoundly ill-suited to the spoils of his success. Author Scott Rowley unpacks his passage from Dunfermline to Nashville and Hawaii to get a sense of his demons and what drove and inspired him. He talks to us here about his compelling new memoir ‘Stay Alive: the Life and Death of Stuart Adamson’ and touches on …

… hints of troubled family life in his early lyrics and...

Our ‘big air’ manoeuvres on the rock and roll ski jump this week land the following tricks …

… why don’t we re-use old protest songs instead of writing new ones?

… “a temple of music and gothic lust:” would YOU buy Jim Steinman’s unsellable home?

… when Madness played on the Buck House roof

… Ptolomaic Terrascope? Aquarium Drunkard? Real and made-up music magazines

… “too complicated, not catchy, like a hig...

Some shared stages. Some made records and films together. Some had love affairs. Matt Thorne is fascinated by stars’ collaborations and what they reveal about them. He talks here about 14 musicians who collided and the discoveries he made in the six years spent writing ‘Famous: Ego, Envy and Ambition in Pop, Rock and Hip-Hip’, with all this high in the mix …

… Frank Sinatra’s ‘Welcome Home Elvis’ TV Special and how threatened ...

Paul Rees fell in love with AOR when it began with Boston in 1976, the polished, ramped-up hits that were briefly the music of the American heartland. His book ‘Raised On Radio: Power Ballads, Cocaine & Payola – the AOR Glory Years 1976-1986’ remembers the age when records were launched via car stereos, their eternally appealing sound and the preposterous lives of the people who wrote and played them – Bon Jovi, Pat Benatar, As...

After 40 days of relentless rain, you need our little ray of sunshine. And here we all are! Sitting in the rock’n’roll rainbow this week you’ll find …

... the Wuthering Heights instagram gold-rush

… licensing Foreigner and Lynyrd Skynyrd: when is a band not a band?

.. what Michael Jackson asked the Superbowl promoter

… one long video for Charli XCX: “if that film was playing in my back garden I’d draw the curtai...

Andy Bown found the 20 year-old recordings of “a deep-space love story” he’d written with the sci-fi author Russell Hoban and he’s just reworked and released them. He talks to us here about “Out There” and life in the Herd, Judas Jump and Status Quo, which involves …

… playing the Three Tuns in Beckenham with Bowie

… “Foot gun, gun foot. I always tell the truth.”

… Peter Frampton when he was The Face of ‘68

… “w...

The album has had 25 years of being hammered by other formats – Napster, iTunes, Spotify, TikTok – and not only survived but thrived. For Keith Jopling it’s the irreplaceable way to hear music and to measure the people who make it. His new book Body Of Work celebrates its battle-scarred trajectory from the beating heart of pop culture to 21st Century affordable luxury, and stops off at …

… growing up in the age of cassettes

&nb...

Unredacted exchanges about the rock and roll underworld this week highlight the following …

… real or made-up stars’ kids’ names: Speck Wildhorse? Blue Ivy? Everly Bear? Motorhead Michelob?

… man plays drum solo with his head!

… Olivia Dean, Lola Young, FKA Twigs: what do today’s ‘professionals’ learn at the BRIT School and what happened to the age of the amateurs?

… why Joni Mitchell’s life was even more extrao...

Bowie’s early years have been scrutinised repeatedly but people tend to speed through the last act, from the early ‘90s to his death in 2016. Alexander Larman’s ‘Lazarus: The Second Coming Of David Bowie’ looks at his resurrection and the mystery of his final days in Manhattan in attractively honest detail, a book that’s as fondly critical of his artistic decisions as it’s celebratory. Under discussion here …

… ‘David Bowie wa...

David Sinclair was a long-running rock critic for the Times, Rolling Stone and many others and now makes records himself. He looks back here at some of the first bands he saw and the extraordinary people he interviewed, which touches on …

… the day Bowie took him to the Hammersmith Odeon to stand on the spot where he announced his retirement

… Keith Richards’ dark side (and what he said about Lady Di)

… interviewing ...

A bone-shaking ride on the weekly news cycle, stopping off here to pump up the tyres ….

… Springsteen’s Streets Of Minneapolis: it’s not what he said but the fact that he’s said it  

… “they’re all just Sly & Robbie records but with someone different singing on them”

… the price of stadium tickets: if it’s too high, don’t go – but stop complaining!

… Catherine O’Hara’s wit and humanity in Waiting F...

Adele Bertei got a Greyhound to New York in 1977 intent on joining a band. James Chance thought she “looked like a pimp” and hired her as the organist in the Contortions, an instrument she couldn’t play. Her memoir No New York captures the most intoxicating times imaginable, the rise of Blondie, Talking Heads, Television, Madonna and her fellow raft of No Wave cheerleaders in pursuit of dismantling music. Highlights include …

...

Steve Lillywhite first got a foot in the studio door aged 17 making demos for Ultravox and became a producer with credits on over 500 records. He doesn’t have a copy of any of them but kept his Grammys and his CBE. The job involves being a lightning-rod, cheer-leader, editor, finisher and “as diplomatic as Henry Kissinger”. He looks back here from his ‘Lillypad’ in Bali at the milestones along the way, among them …

… “I’d done...

Scanning the baggage carousel of news to see what sets off the alarm, which this week involves … 

 … Springsteen: why is America’s most American American so quiet about his President on home turf?

… the Seven Ages of Nepo: in defence of Julian Lennon, Joe Sumner and Brooklyn Beckham 

… the Robbie Williams story that gets our goat

… why do half the UK music venues make no profit?

… the onstage ‘...

Fairport tour again in 2026 and are playing their annual Cropredy Convention in August, its 50th year. The rolling Kent landscape behind him, co-founder Simon Nicol looks back at almost six decades in the line-up, the first shows he ever saw and played, why he can’t wait to get back on the tour bus again, and …  

… the intoxication of live music – “lost in a moment that’s never happened before and won’t be repeated”

&...

Miles Hunt is on tour in 2026 – solo, with Vent 414 and the Wonder Stuff - and looks back here at his 40 years on stage, which involves …

… stifling hecklers the John Lydon way: “the exits are clearly marked!”

… what percussion does to your ears

… “when a tout’s selling your £3 ticket for £50 you know you’ve made it!”

… keytars, flat drums, guitars without headstocks: things that are JUST PLAIN WRONG!

… see...