Word In Your Ear

Christine McVie - one of only two British girl rock musicians in the ‘60s and part of the greatest pop soap opera of all time. Neither in the backline or the frontline but occupying a unique middle ground. Packed it in for 16 years then returned to the fold. Lesley-Ann Jones’ fresh and emotional memoir Songbird follows “the trajectory of a male rock star played by a woman”, the home she was keen to escape, the outer limits of life in Fleetwood Mac’s “toxic Camelot” and the rigours of holding her ground in a man’s world. We cover all sorts here including …

 

… the lasting effect of not having “an ordinary mother”.  

 

… the night in Sunderland that made her think again.

 

… when your best friend sleeps with your fiancée.

 

… supporting the Shadows when she was 15 at the 2I’s in Soho.  

 

… Etta James, Chicken Shack and playing the Reeperbahn.

 

… why rock stars can never be part of a village community.

 

… Fleetwood Mac’s West Coast Elysium: “they were all as bad as each other”.

 

… “cute and dangerous” meets “lifeline and anchor”: the love affair with Dennis Wilson.

 

… why she and John McVie both needed a wife.

 

… and her lifelong connection with the blues, “a sadness you can’t cure”.

 

Order Songbird here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Songbird-Intimate-Biography-Christine-McVie/dp/1789467217

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Nick Heyward was one of our favourite cover stars when we were at Smash Hits in the ‘80s, the days when hardcore Haircut One Hundred fans turned out in Fair Isle sweaters and Sou’Westers. He now lives mostly in Florida, he’s made nine solo albums – one magnificently titled Open Sesame Seed - and he’s toured again with his old band after ten years’ painful separation. Touring the UK in October, he couldn’t be more upbeat about the road ahead – “I can do anything!” – and looks back here at the first shows he saw and played himself. Which involves …

 

… seeing Count Basie, Ray Charles and Oscar Peterson on the same bill when he was 12.

 

… “if you stop playing music you’re like the boxer that gave up the fight”.

 

… pop dress codes, knock-off pop merchandise and trips to Shellys Shoes.

 

… growing up in Beckenham where Bowie was “the lighthouse beam that made being a pop star possible”.

 

… old schoolfriends and Haircut One Hundred members Les and Graham and how “we got our friendship back”.

 

… why seeing XTC was “like plugging into electricity”.

 

… Buzzcocks and Boomtown Rats at the Croydon Greyhound.  

 

… how he was saved by management.

 

… singing Love Plus One in Salisbury Cathedral.

 

… and the lingering thrill of his first reviews (by Graham K Smith and Adrian Thrills).

 

Nick’s tour dates here:

https://nickheyward.com/

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“There was no Command-Zed back then!” John Wood engineered or produced some of the most magical, timeless and affecting records ever made - by Nick Drake, John Martyn, the McGarrigles, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, John Cale, Squeeze and many more. He’s 85 now and looks back here at a luminous career that started with mastering singles at Decca and transferred to Sound Techniques, the mecca he co-founded in an old cowshed in Chelsea when takes were spontaneous and even the tape-op was part of the performance. He misses those days, when albums were organic and the labels had less control, and talks here about …

 

… “the age when sound had perspective and seemed three-dimensional”.

 

… Nick Drake’s confidence and his guiding lights - eg the Beach Boys and Randy Newman (“who I’d never heard of”). And his final nighttime sessions.

 

… the way Fairport recorded – “We’re only going to do it once” – and why they could make three albums a year.

 

…managing the girls in the Incredible String Band, “especially when Licorice played drums”.

 

… John Cale in “maniac mode” and his sudden and unexpected friendship with Nick Drake.

 

… Cale and Nico at the Chelsea Hotel.

 

… and why ‘Geoff Muldaur Is Having A Wonderful Time’ was the job he remembers the fondest.

 

Also mentioned: the Downliners Sect, Judy Collins, The Marmalade, Graham Gouldman and Squeeze.

 

John’s got nothing to plug and just wanted to talk to us. Thanks, John, and bless your cotton socks.

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Ian Hunter – an image so familiar you’d recognise his silhouette - now lives in Connecticut and he’s just released expanded versions of two of his best-selling solo albums, You’re Never Alone With A Schizophrenic and Short Back N' Sides. He’s 85, born before any of the Beatles. We talk to him here about life growing up in the ‘40s and ‘50s when your father’s a copper and “music wasn’t allowed in the house”, and touch upon …

 

… the debt he owes Freddie ‘Fingers’ Lee.

 

… café jukeboxes full of Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino.

 

… beating 165 acts at a talent contest at Butlins.

 

… the record that made the Beatles (which they didn’t write).

 

… “a two-piece corduroy suit, open-toed sandals, overweight …”: the Mott the Hoople audition.

 

… Bowie playing All The Young Dudes – “a monster” – cross-legged on the floor in Denmark Street after they’d turned down Suffragette City.

 

… why Hendrix was thrown out of Regent Sound studios.

 

… playing the Reeperbahn in 1963.

 

… recording ‘Schizophrenic’ with three members of the E Street Band.

 

… “Do you want a cuddle?” The Mick Ronson recording method.

 

… the good thing about Covid.

 

… watching punk bands with Mick Jones.

 

… plus a ‘dyed-black’ Ford Anglia and the Greatest Record Ever Made.

 

Order Ian’s re-released albums here:

Buy link: https://ianhunter.lnk.to/sbns

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As the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness draws in, we poke the embers of this week’s rock and roll bonfire and rake out the following chestnuts …

 

… Maggie Smith on ‘70s chat shows.

 

… when Radiohead meets Shakespeare.

 

… the strange, circuitous and downright disgraceful launch of Francis Ford Coppola’s majestically bonkers Megalopolis.

 

… Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter: the slow ascent of two ‘overnight sensations’.

 

… is it big events anymore or just a low-level hum of distraction?

 

… Bryan Ferry as an interpreter: why we love his clubby renditions of Dylan, Amy, Frank, Elvis, Broadway ballads and old sea shanties.

 

… Movies In Waiting no 97: Butlin’s, skiffle, Hamburg and Ian Hunter’s 26-year clamber to the top.

 

... can any film still have instant world impact?

 

… the unsettling structure of the Graham Norton show.

 

… Simon Raymonde’s dad’s oceanic jazz adventure, 1949.

 

… plus birthday guest Matthew North sees Wayne Rooney doing Ring Of Fire at a Plymouth open mic night.

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Simon Raymonde’s affecting and beautifully written memoir ‘In One Ear’ records life in the ‘60s growing up with a father who wrote and arranged for Dusty Springfield, Helen Shapiro and the Walker Brothers, the impossibly shy promotional activities of the Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil and the struggles and eventual jackpot of the Bella Union record label he founded. He’s so perceptive, observant and self-mocking and we loved this energetic podcast which, among much else, lands upon …  

 

... why 1979 was the Golden Year.

 

… the time Scott Walker came to his parents’ house.

 

… why the Cocteau Twins might have tanked in the current age of self-promotion.

 

… how a loathing for Phil Collins was a Sliding Doors moment.  

 

… the problem with bands that don’t talk to each other.

 

… why they refused to appear on Top Of The Pops.

 

… following Rancid and the Ramones at Lollapalooza in 1996 and the sobering events that ensued.

 

… why the Old Grey Whistle Test was “not a happy experience”.

 

… the cryptic language of Elizabeth Fraser’s lyrics why he never asked her what they meant.  

 

… “if I hadn’t worked at the Beggars record shop I wouldn’t be talking to you now”.

 

… why bands are “less naïve now”.

 

… and “Cocteau Twins - swirling sepulchral shards of sound that patter like raindrops against the windows of your mind” – ©️ the Music Press in 1985.

 

Order Simon’s book here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Ear-Cocteau-Twins-Raymonde/dp/1788709381

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Abba’s biographer Jan Gradvall met and interviewed Abba many times and builds a fresh picture of their internal chemistry in his new book Melancholy Undercover. Highlights of this illuminating pod include …

 

… how Sweden rejected their early hits for not being sufficiently “socialist”.

 

…. the discomfiting early life of Anni-Frid Lyngstad.

 

… what Max Martin and Denniz Pop thought made Abba’s music so durable. 

 

… Strindberg, Bergman, the climate, the eight months of darkness and the role of melancholia in Swedish pop culture. 

 

… the influence of the Human League on their later catalogue.

 

… why manager Stig Anderson “became a burden”.

 

… “Norway has Grieg, Finland has Sibelius, Sweden has Benny …”

 

… the first band to write about divorce.

 

… the Abba song with 57 chords and the only two samples Abba ever approved.

 

… Elvis Costello, Joe Strummer and Ian Dury backstage at a 1979 London show.

 

… when Sid Vicious ran into Abba at an airport on the Pistols’ 1977 Swedish tour. 

 

… the role of the Lionesses football team, Kurt Cobain, Erasure, U2, Madonna and the Sydney gay community in the Abba revival. 

 

… why the Abbatars are better than Abba. 

 

… the myth of Agnetha as “the Greta Garbo of Pop”. 

 

… and why The Day Before You Came is more than the Abba swansong.

 

Order Melancholy Undercover here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Book-ABBA-Melancholy-Undercover/dp/0571390986

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A free-form spontaneous jam this week - the Dark Star of podcasts – which navigates the outer reaches of the rock and roll stratosphere by way of the following …

 

… was Michael Stipe’s father a military helicopter pilot in Korea?

 

… our fantasy Odd Couple tragi-comedy: Morrissey and Marr in a thin-skinned middle-aged flat share.  

 

… how the Golden Egg launched Roxy Music.

 

… can anyone name more than one member of Coldplay?

 

… did Paddy McAloon’s mum make the sets for the Clangers?

 

… the ’80s version of the Internet.

 

 … memories of lost London: international magazine shops, drinking in offices, Protein Man, roaming Hare Krishnas, “floating a curry”, wasp-covered sarnies in café windows, band flyers on derelict buildings, the romance of old Fleet Street.

 

… the tangled saga of Bonfire Of The Teenagers.

 

… “Oasis is the last of the household-name bands”.

 

… why Toyah is a movie waiting to happen.

 

… and birthday guest Jelltex on bands he thought had given up now filling stadiums.

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Mike Batt still wrestles with the emotional legacy of the Wombles, the act that simultaneously made him and cast a shadow over the rest of his career, not least his early days as a songwriter at Liberty Records, discussed here, hired after he’d answered the same ad as Elton John and Bernie Taupin, a time when A&R men wore kipper ties and had Picassos on their wall. He forged a path through psychedelia and into TV and films, taking huge financial risks with musicals, orchestral works and big-selling acts like Katie Melua, his Art Garfunkel hit ‘Bright Eyes’ eventually promoting him from the Haves to the Have-Yachts. Life, he says, has been “like running through traffic”. His memoir is just out, ‘The Closest Thing to Crazy: My Life of Musical Adventures’. All sorts discussed here including ...

  

… his brief satin-jacketed tenure in Hapshash & the Coloured Coat.

 

… parallels between record producers and traffic cops.

 

… Happy Jack and songs about outsiders.

 

… being in Savile Row when the Beatles played the Apple roof.

 

… life as “a square” during psychedelia.

 

… a snatch of abandoned teenage composition ‘The Man With The Purple Hand’.

 

… John D. Laudermilk and the magic of writing credits.

 

… how Bright Eyes “got me into the Officers’ Mess of Songwriters”.

 

… his publishers insisting there was a Womble on the book jacket.

 

… “circumcising” the world in a seven-crew yacht.

 

... and feeling simultaneously smug and guilty when driving a Roller.

 

Order ‘The Closest Thing To Crazy: My Life of Musical Adventures’ here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Closest-Thing-Crazy-Musical-Adventures/dp/1785120840

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Joe Boyd produced Fairport Convention, Nick Drake and many others, released acts from all over the globe on his Hannibal label and has just written a mighty and definitive account of the history of popular music, And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain, tracing the way different sounds from different countries became interwoven. Nobody is better qualified to write this book as you’ll discover from this enthralling conversation. Among the highlights …

 

… “if Mick and Keith had had Spotify there’d have been no Rolling Stones.”

 

… the African roots of Little Richard’s horn section.

 

… how a Zulu folk tune from 1939 ended up on the Lion King soundtrack.

 

… “Western musicians are governed by keys, valves and frets but what matters is the notes in between”.

 

… the evolution of ska as rock and roll was too exhausting in the heat of Jamaican dancehalls.

 

… Alan Freed, the “Pied Piper” that led white American teenagers into black music.

 

… Duke Ellington and music “too complicated for white audiences to follow”.

 

… the bossa nova in Nick Drake’s River Man.

 

… Paul Simon’s Graceland and the meaning of authenticity.

 

… world music’s problem with drum machines.

 

.. the attraction of music whose origin you can hear before the vocal comes in.

 

Order Joe’s highly recommended book here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Roots-Rhythm-Remain-Journey-Through/dp/0571360009

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