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PODCAST

Word In Your Ear

Mark Ellen, David Hepworth and Alex Gold

Mark Ellen and David Hepworth have been talking about and writing about music together and individually for a collective eighty years in magazines like Smash Hits, Mojo and The Word and on radio and TV programmes like "Rock On", "Whistle Test" and VH-1.Over thirteen years ago, when working on the late magazine The Word, they began producing podcasts. Some listeners have been kind enough to say these have been very special to them. When the magazine folded in 2012 they kept the spirit of those

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All Episodes

46:24

How Springsteen went “six deep”, fictional rock hacks...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/06/11

You’ll always find us in the kitchen at parties, near the hoppy summer ale and sausage rolls and, and this week discussing …… he hasn't changed his look or sound for 30 years: is there a more conservative concept than Liam Gallagher? And how he became the one-man Oasis.… the eye-watering sum Kevin Hart made from Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.… Loudermilk, Rob Gordon in High Fidelity and other Rock Snob stereotypes in fiction - “I’m a Rock Snob? It comes with the territory being right!” And how rock

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27:04

Why They Might Be Giants now perform an entire song...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/05/22

They Might Be Giants – old school fiends John Flansburgh and John Linnell – have been making elliptical, funny and adventurous records for over 40 years and writing music for children, advertising and TV comedies. We talk to John Linnell here about songwriting, early shows in art spaces, the way you saw the world when a "wiseacrey teenager" and what you can expect from their autumn tour. Which, incidentally, will include the "pointlessy difficult exercise" of performing Sapphire Bullets Of Love

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36:35

Guy Chambers - writing with Robbie, a tangle with...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/05/21

Guy Chambers was a teenager in Liverpool and at John Lennon’s old school - "same headmaster, Mister Pobjoy". He remembers the Beatles, Queen, Abba and Jesus Christ Superstar sparking his interest in the "perfect song package" and went on to work with Tina Turner, Rufus Wainwright, Kylie, Diana Ross and scores of others. He talks here about early shows he saw, records bought and his own tour in the autumn, "An Evening With Guy Chambers", stopping off at various points on the way, among them .....

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42:16

Alan Edwards, pop PR – ‘Bowie was like King Arthur...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/05/20

We’ve known Alan Edwards since the days when we’d ring him for a quote from Blondie or the Stranglers in the late ‘70s and he’s still one of the key figures in music PR. He’s looked after the Stones, Prince, Michael Jackson, Blondie, Amy Winehouse, the Beckhams and many others. No-one is better positioned to see how that world has changed, from the pre-Google days when you could invent a story and the press would happily buy it to a 21st century where his flat was burgled in pursuit of lucrative

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55:09

Rock’s image-makers, men on dancefloors and why bands...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/05/19

This week’s items slapped on the rock and roll barbecue and lightly grilled include …… why Eurovision will never avoid political controversy.… when AI does David Hepworth!… what’s the secret of NTS radio?… “there are two types of wedding disco, ones that start with Abba's Dancing Queen and terrible ones.”… Tony Hall’s prophetic preview of Revolver in May '66– “they shatter convention and may well have a far-reaching effect on the whole future of music”.… when listening to the radio was a group

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37:30

Paul Carrack has seen it all – beat, soul, prog, pub...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/05/16

We’ve followed Paul Carrack for 50 years, a big hit single – How Long – when he was with Ace, 19 albums, countless sessions (the Smiths, Eagles and Pretenders among them) and a touring band member with Squeeze, Roxy Music, Roger Waters and Nick Lowe. He once put out an album called ‘I Know That Name’ as for so many people he’s still under the radar. His newsagent assumes he’s called “Mike” as he was the singer in Mike & the Mechanics. He's touring the UK in the autumn and looks back here at ……

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35:19

Nige Tassell was so obsessed with Dexys he’s tracked...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/05/15

Nige Tassell used to go to school in full donkey-jacket-and-woolly-hat ensemble to express his boundless devotion to Dexys Midnight Runners. Forty years later he set out to find and interview everyone who’d ever been a member. For some, their time in the ranks was a joyful, career-launching delight. Others felt it was like a slightly chilly and controlling cult. They all took a while to recover and they all had extraordinary stories to tell in his latest book ‘Searching For Dexys Midnight Runners’

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27:29

Why Nick Mason’s “cottage industry” band plays just...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/05/14

Missing being on tour and exasperated by internal disputes, Nick Mason set out to tour small-scale venues with his band Saucerful Of Secrets in 2018. They’re mid-way through another world tour (Gary Kemp’s the main singer and one of the guitarists). He doesn’t miss the stadium circuit where “you need a golf cart to get from one side of the stage to the other” and they play only the early psychedelic Floyd material, from their first singles up to (but not including) the Dark Side of the Moon, which

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53:26

Let It Be revisited, the wisdom of Steve Albini and a...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/05/12

We were at the Curzon Mayfair on May 7 for the premier of the rebooted Let It Be in all its burnished finery and came away with a ton of things to unravel, among them …… what we never knew when the film came out 54 years ago... seeing it in the shadow of Peter Jackson’s Get Back.… how the edit was overtaken by events and the tangled reasons it turned out the way it did.… why Lindsay-Hogg’s amphitheatre concept would never have worked.… the divine symbolism of the Beatles v the police.… why it’s a

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46:14

The genius of Little Feat, the Man with the Twang &...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/05/05

We stuck a few coins in this week’s Wurlitzer and these were the tunes that got played …… when records became all about sound not songs.… Fonzworth Bentley, Puff Daddy’s butler, the man who held an umbrella over him on the beach at Cannes.… what Henry Kissinger, Martha Stewart and Leonardo DiCaprio kept very quiet about.… Manchester’s Co-Op, a tale of unprecedented hopelessness.… what’s the definition of a song? And can you steal a record?… the magical skill of Aston Barrett on I Shot The Sheriff

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30:18

Steve Diggle of the Buzzcocks remembers the day “a...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/05/03

Steve Diggle met Pete Shelley when the Pistols played Manchester in 1976 and the Diggle-fronted Buzzcocks are now on a world tour that began in Mexico and takes in North and South America, Europe and Australasia before winding up at the 100 Club where they played the Punk Festival 48 years ago – “we’ve come full circle”. He looks back here at the first shows he saw and played himself and talks about Silverhead, Status Quo, Leo Sayer dressed as a clown, George Best, the Groundhogs, The History of Mr

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1:03:52

Rock snobbery, the seven wives of Gregg Allman & the...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/04/29

This week’s theories, rants, ruminations, recollections, weak gags and free and frank exchanges of view alight upon the following …… is pop music now all about identity?…. the recording of the Animals’ House of the Rising Sun and other apocryphal tales.… has any act been as ubiquitous since Frankie Goes to Hollywood in 1984?… or has anyone inspired a greater level of personal devotion than Taylor Swift?… Peter Green, a shotgun and his accountant.… books bought but never read... re-reading Nick

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39:55

Harold Bronson of Rhino Records kept a 40-year rock...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/04/28

File this under ‘right place, right time’. Harold Bronson was a teenager in mid-60’s Los Angeles and saw every act imaginable. Then wrote for the Daily Bruin and Rolling Stone and interviewed everyone that interested him. Then managed a music store and co-founded Rhino Records, pretty much inventing the idea of the top-end reissue – “Sooner or later everyone ends up in a box.” All of this is in his memoir, ‘Time Has Come Today: Rock and Roll Diaries 1967 – 2007’, and many of its cast of thousands

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47:48

The “amniotic throb” of modern pop, the eternal life...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/04/21

With Mark Ellen in foreign parts David Hepworth and Alex Gold light cigars, pass the port in the correct direction and discuss…..…..the fact that there is only one way to play a Beatles song and that is the way the Beatles did it.…..the chances that Taylor Swift is reaching her imperial phase and nobody is prepared to tell her what she really needs to hear.….the very good reason that all contemporary pop records do literally sound the same.…the 50th anniversary of Richard and Linda Thompson’s “I

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43:54

Neil Tennant remembers life “with dyed red Bowie hair...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/04/11

Neil’s an old friend from our days back at Smash Hits in the early ‘80s. The first Pet Shop Boys demos were played on the office tape machine, though he was a bit self-conscious about “the one with the rap on it”. He’s always had a journalistic capacity for story-telling, remembering everything in famously entertaining detail, and we had so much material from this reunion we turned it into a two-part podcast. Here’s a taste of what you’ll find in this second half ...… “every group has to have an

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24:01

Richard Thompson – “you know it’s time to go when the...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/04/10

Richard Thompson first appeared onstage aged 14 playing Beatles covers in a school group “so bad we were pelted with pennies”. Sixty years later his range of operations includes touring solo and with his band, occasional reunions with Fairport Convention, residencies on Adriatic cruise ships and running a Guitar Camp in the Catskill Mountains (along with his sons and grandson). Much has he seen and learned about live entertainment along the way and he talks to us here from his home on the American

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36:37

Neil Tennant remembers the pop press and “the last...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/04/09

Neil’s an old friend from our days back at Smash Hits in the early ‘80s. The first Pet Shop Boys demos were played on the office tape machine, though he was a bit self-conscious about “the one with the rap on it”, and he’s one of the few people who’s seen the music press from every angle - as a reader in the ‘70s, as a writer and interviewer and as a musician on its front covers. We had so much great material from this wide-ranging conversation that we’ve turned it into a two-part podcast. Here’s a

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47:26

The Stones’ clothes, our love affair with Abba &...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/04/08

We lobbed the cracked wooden ball of enquiry at the rock and roll coconut shy this week and a few choice items dropped off their perch, among them …… was Kate Bush ‘the Queen of Prog’?… ELP, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple playing to 350,000 people on a Speedway track.… the three things that sparked the Abba revival.… the Further Adventures of Desmond and Molly Jones, Mean Mr Mustard, Polythene Pam, Father McKenzie, Rocky Raccoon, Maxwell Edison, Rose and Valerie, Sweet Loretta Martin, Vera, Chuck and

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46:51

Big Characters we have loved and why the Clash...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/03/31

We’ve applied our celebrated sheep/goats separation technique to the rock and roll pasture and shepherded the following into this week’s pod …… Beyoncé and why it’s hard to connect with songs written by committee.… are we too old for biopics?… Marvel films, the Arctic Monkeys and other things you either love or avoid.…reviewing Human Touch and Lucky Town in a high-security studio (and how you can only tell if an album’s any good if you’ve lived with it for two months).… why Tony Blackburn is the

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43:07

Phil Manzanera Part 2: an insider’s guide to Roxy...

Word In Your Ear ·

2024/03/24

Phil Manzanera – who thought “every day in the band felt like Christmas” – has just published his memoir, Revolución to Roxy, and talked to us about it in front of a rammed and captivated audience at London’s 21Soho, an evening so full of detail, intrigue and revelation we’re putting it out as two podcasts. This is the second. He lifts the bonnet of the Roxy Music “art collective” in its various line-ups and shows you how the engine worked and why the idea of Eno onstage was “frightening”. He

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