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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

54:55

Album sleeves the modern world would ban & the best...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/06/29

It’s Happy Hour in the Rock and Roll Lounge of News and we’re working our way through anything over 40 per cent proof. Which means ice, a slice and ….… how the F-Bomb lost its impact.… Mick Ralphs and Lalo Schifrin RIP – and chapeau to "There's A Whole Lalo Schifrin Goin' On’.… the Blush-o-meter! Album sleeves that’d get you lynched in the 21st Century – and that means you Roxy, UFO, BowWowWow, Blind Faith, Tom Waits and Supertramp!… why the TV comedy W1A was the last record of the world before

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54:05

10cc’s I’m Not In Love is still weird & wonderful! -...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/06/23

Chasing the shade and applying Factor 50 in the wilting heat of this week’s rock and roll news turns the conversation to …… Kneecap v the Prime Minister.… will any openly anti-Trump musician find it hard to tour the States?… the girl who’s listening to all 10,000 of her late father’s albums, one 60-second Instagram reel at a time.… a bottle of Snoop Dogg rosé, anyone?… why Carol Kaye turned down the Hall Of Fame.… Hollywood and “the genius of the system” v the current vogue for applauding individual

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46:49

Stuart Maconie – every character in the Beatles’...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/06/06

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 revealing, even for obsessives like us. Look out for these in particular …… memories of his Mum taking him to

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48:57

Genuinely ‘iconic’ rock pictures, words we should ban...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/06/01

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 San Quentin, Elvis dancing in Jailhouse Rock, Dylan and Suze Rotolo in Jones Street …… our old pal Barry McIlheney, his Belfast

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24:27

Martha Wainwright - ‘never nervous, always ballsy’...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/05/30

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 tour, “who made me want to be onstage too”.… the story of ‘Matapedia’, the song Kate McGarrigle wrote when an old boyfriend thought

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41:27

Budgie of Siouxsie And The Banshees started out in...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/05/29

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?… Siouxsie, the Ice Queen goth-in-waiting who was actually “a cackling crazy tomboy from Chiselhurst”.… playing

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38:14

Books rock stars want you to read, sacked drummers...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/05/26

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 dead?… what’s your relationship with reading if your first experience of literature is dressing up as a wizard on World Book Day?… why is there something

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32:22

Dylan Jones bangs the drum for 1975, an explosion of...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/05/25

Dylan Jones – writer, former editor of i-D, Arena and GQ - was 15 in 1975 and dressed like Henry McCullough 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 cover of Patti Smith’s Horses.… the “frightening” Millie Jackson, 50 years ahead of her time.… why Blood On

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51:45

The great lost Beach Boys SMiLE album – David Leaf...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/05/19

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 to us here about his discoveries, which include …... the Rolling Stone story that kick-started his

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49:29

Peter Capaldi’s life in a teenage Glasgow punk band...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/05/13

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 – released St Christopher in 2021. He’s just recorded a second, Sweet Illusions, and talks to us in this

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34:42

Alan Parsons – from the rooftop of Savile Row to Pink...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/05/12

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 …… the things you find buried in old recordings.… how AI will allow anyone to remix their favourite record.…

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40:10

Mom Rock v Dad Rock, the Oasis rumour mill and Kanye...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/05/11

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 disintegrate.… real or fictional ‘religious’ musicians – Saint Pepsi, Cardinal Rex, Pope Plastique, the Reverend Horton Heat?…

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39:54

Dennis McNally saw the Summer Of Love in London, New...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/05/08

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 more precious now in the light of recent events. All sorts are discussed here, these being some of the

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49:39

The greatest duet, rock cameos in Miami Vice and the...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/05/05

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

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42:51

Al Murray and James Holland talk the ending of the...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/05/02

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

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42:21

Derek Shulman – when Simon Dupree and Gentle Giant...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/04/30

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 ……

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52:19

Rock star pilots, sacking Zak Starkey and bold...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/04/20

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, Dogs Are Everywhere, Roadkill … Pulp

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39:03

Ed Tudor Pole – singer, actor, serial showman – saw...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/04/02

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

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39:22

AI’s Word In Your Ear theme tune (!!), the four...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/03/30

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

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42:06

Hearing 45 year-old records you’d never played & the...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/03/25

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 most unlikely looking person to have ever

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123 results

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