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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

music music commentary

All Episodes

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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55:34

Has politics eaten entertainment? What’s ‘perfect...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/03/10

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

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24:06

Film-maker Denny Tedesco on dad’s old band The...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/03/06

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

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44:21

Lennon & McCartney seen in a fresh, stirring and...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/03/05

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

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54:01

The threat of AI, the appeal of Gene Hackman & the...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/03/03

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.… double

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26:09

Graham Fellows, “the comedy of the underdog” and...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/02/28

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

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57:36

Eternally cool rock stars, the Bond takeover and...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/02/24

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

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28:32

Justin Hayward – ‘60s package tours, lost profits &...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/02/20

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,

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55:16

Your guided tour of David Bowie’s London with Paul...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/02/18

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

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40:27

Eddi Reader - busking, singing radio jingles and “men...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/02/18

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 ….…

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46:29

Why all great pop stars are cartoons, Bowie doing...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/02/17

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

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36:41

The rise of David Bowie and the Spiders From Mars...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/02/06

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

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53:40

So Long, Marianne Faithfull plus the Shipping...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/02/04

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 more enduring example of bad press than

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28:03

Andy Fairweather Low’s teenage psychedelic stardom

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/01/23

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

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50:10

A 3-part rant about LPs sold as ‘antiques’, TikTok &...

Word In Your Ear ·

2025/01/20

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

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