Word In Your Ear

‘Billy Bragg: A People’s History’ is just out, a new and wholly original kind of memoir written by himself, friends, collaborators and fans, and packed with old snapshots, concert bills, reviews and ephemera. It’s very good indeed. He looks back here with us at …

… meeting Taylor Swift – “and we both knew who the other was!”

… a total of 2,700 gigs – “not counting prisons, In-Stores, Port-A-Stacks and picket lines”

… old blokes trying to take selfies

… finding old diaries in his archives and sensing how the memory plays tricks

… songs that get you out of trouble on stage

… bootlegging albums on his reel-to-reel, aged 12, complete with noises off - eg “Bridge Over Troubled Water plus a voice telling me Reach For The Sky was on telly!”

… a word-perfect recitation of Mr Tambourine Man

… listening to the Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll when the rest of the school was Glam Rock

… buying Ronnie Lane’s amp, “like returning home with a religious relic”

… “the power of music”: meeting someone who’d heard him on the radio beyond the Iron Curtain

… anxiety about American border control: “I was advised to get a new phone. As if that’ll make any difference. I’m Billy Bragg, political songwriter!”

… lost off-grid in Salt Lake City in the days before internet

… “Music can’t change the world but it gives you the ability to think it can be changed”

…plus Ian McLagan, Desmond Dekker, Ry Cooder, Jam b-sides and Motown Chartbusters Vol 3.

Order Billy Bragg: A People’s History here: https://burningshed.com/billy-bragg_a-peoples-history_book

https://www.billybragg.co.uk/product/billy-bragg-a-peoples-history-an-oral-history-in-the-words-of-people-who-have-been-moved-by-his-music/

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The Graduate, Trainspotting, Jaws, Star Wars, Citizen Kane – films you can’t picture without thinking of the music. Mark Kermode has been gripped by the marriage of movie and soundtrack since Dougal and the Blue Cat (aged 6) and, with Jenny Nelson, has just published ‘Surround Sound: the Stories of Movie Music’. We talk to him here about…  

… Scorsese, Cameron Crowe, Sofia Coppola, Edgar Wright: the new generation “who grew up with a headful of not just music, but records”

… how John Williams is “the last Whistle Test composer”: two bars of ET, Jaws or Star Wars and you instantly know the film

… how “silent cinema was never silent” and his band the Dodge Brothers playing live soundtracks

… Butch Cassidy, Easy Rider, Blackboard Jungle … pioneers of the music video

… the genius of American Graffiti: “Lucas wanted it so marinated in music the town would sound like a pickle jar”

… how scores are recorded and edited and what happens when a director tells an orchestra he’s changed his mind

… “by the time each Lord of the Rings soundtrack reached New Zealand, Peter Jackson had re-cut the film”

… Forbidden Planet in 1956, the days when electronic scores weren’t real music

… Martha Reeves, Jonathan Richman and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion in Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver

… Tarantino’s kitsch use of “his own scratchy vinyl” and why Jonny Greenwood‘s There Will Be Blood is unique and exceptional

… plus the “atonal squonking” of the Exorcist and the greatest soundtrack of all time.

Order ‘Surround Sound: the Stories of Movie Music’ here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/mark-kermodes-surround-sound/mark-kermode/9781447230564

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This week’s news put through the wringer and hung out to dry. On the line you’ll find …

… Taylor Swift and Ophelia and other things pop videos turned into tourist attractions

… the appeal of D’Angelo’s Voodoo: “he made albums with no disdain for the listener”

…. David Hepworth and “the single most exciting thing that ever happened to me in my entire life”

… bands whose story means more than their music

… Nick Drake, Hendrix, Portishead, Nirvana: why three albums is the perfect back catalogue

… when Morrissey was just “Steve from Stretford” and Bowie “some bloke in Beckenham”

… Elvis Costello, the Nashville Rooms and how Mark escaped being “killed to bits”

… is there a better sign of obsession than being able to name all a band’s members?

… Your challenge: listen to the Dead’s Dark Star for the first time. Discuss!

… esoteric tracks played by mobile coffee vans

… “Gor Blimey, hello Mrs Jones. How’s old Bert’s lumbago?”

 … plus JJ Cale, Canned Heat, Cameron Crowe and Fred Neil’s The Dolphins.

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The Zombies formed before the Stones and had huge hits with She’s Not There and Time Of The Season. Their baroque masterpiece Odessey and Oracle now gets ranked beside Revolver and Pet Sounds. Colin Blunstone has a solo tour in 2026 and looks back here in his wood-panelled den at the first shows he played, the people he met and being No 1 in America aged 19. This too …

… when your career starts at 16 “and you think it’s over at 21”

… seeing the Beatles at Luton Odeon and the Stones at Studio 51 Leicester Square “sitting on stools playing acoustic R&B”

… winning the talent contest that got them a record deal and a worldwide hit with “the third song Rod ever wrote”

… playing Murray the K’s Christmas Show when No 1 in America with “all our heroes” - the Shirelles, Patti LaBelle and Ben E King

… his father’s warning when he wanted to go to Art School

… the misspelling of Odessey And Oracle and its rushed recording at Abbey Road – “in mono when everyone wanted stereo!”

… “only Kenny Everett and Penny Valentine liked it”: the album’s afterlife, “now ranked alongside Revolver and Pet Sounds”

… how he still hits “my suicidal top notes” and the old trick of pointing the mic at the audience if you don’t want to sing them

… life in an insurance office when the Zombies split and “the three writers had made all the money”

… and Al Kooper, Denny Laine, Russ Ballard, Rod Argent and the time Mike Hurst inexplicably relaunched him as ‘Neil MacArthur’.

Order tickets for the Believe In Miracles Tour here: https://www.colinblunstone.net/

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This lavish, beautifully designed collection of late ‘60s news stories, reviews and press clippings sheds new light on the band’s roots and ascent from the days when the Kidderminster Shuttle would spell their name wrong and print their parents’ address. Richard Morton Jack, author and compiler of ‘Led Zeppelin: The Only Way To Fly’, looks back here at ….

… the fact that there was already a group called ‘Lead Zeppelin’ in 1967

… the way Page has fudged early details of his and the band’s career

… why 1968 was Last Chance Saloon for Plant, Jones and Bonham

… the second British Invasion and why America was so ready for them

… “the Hindenburg was only 30 years earlier. Imagine using the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster on a cover now!”

… their claim that critics always hated them in the face of massive evidence to the contrary

… Plant’s publicity stunts before he joined the band – Harold Macmillan, Legalise Pot, the Noise Abatement Society …

… the ‘60s Birmingham scene v the London scene

… their eternal grievance about the press sparked by the “Ground Zero” moment of Rolling Stone’s 1968 review

… the venues they played - the Toby Jug in Tolworth, Pirate World, an aqua theater, an ice rink in Vegas

… and the bands they shared bills with - Frosty Moses, Kimla Taz, the Ladybirds.

Order a copy of Led Zeppelin: The Only Way To Fly here: https://lansdownebooks.com/

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Shifting the pass-the-parcel of news and removing the wrapping when the music stops. Which this week happens here …

… will rock bands get offered the Saudi money?

… “there could be no British nightclubs in 2030”

… Diane Keaton and why all men were besotted

… the day Led Zeppelin played an Aqua Theatre for an audience swimming and in boats

… “the optimum number of band members is either three or loads”

… did Easy Rider invent the music video?

… Trainspotting, Reservoir Dogs, Midnight Cowboy, Almost Famous – soundtrack moments that made their movies

… 12 million more UK tickets were sold than in 2019 yet 150 small venues closed in two years: “scale is now part of the appeal”

… the genius of John Sebastian

… the end of MTV UK and how video changed the landscape

… “Here’s to you Mrs Roosevelt”: how Simon & Garfunkel got into the Graduate

… can anyone fathom Ghost Town Blues by Prefab Sprout?

Plus Tim Hardin, Harry Nilsson and birthday guest Matthew Elliott on why three is the magic number.

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The look, sound, story and dynamic of the Beatles can’t be imagined without him. Nor can their success. Tom Doyle, author and drummer, examines the unexplored depths of the one at the back from 70 different angles, one per chapter, in his new memoir ‘Ringo: A Fab Life’ and talks to us here about ….

… how he learnt to read by looking at his Dad’s Beatles singles and the one that first made him notice the drumming

... what you learn re-watching him in Peter Jackson’s Get Back

… why Ringo gave them universal appeal and his key role in their conquest of America

… supernatural brilliance: exceptional moments such as the un-slowed original Rain and “the way he makes the sound of the holes in Blackburn, Lancashire”

… the delicious Britishness of comparing Rishikesh to Butlins and the mantra the Maharishi gave him he still uses every day

… the pre-Beatles time he applied to emigrate to Texas and what stopped him doing it

… the only Beatle who could dance: the proof!

… the Lost Years and the day he had his head and eyebrows shaved

… the mortifying fate of the first recording of the four Beatles together (in 1960)

… how all four spent the rest of their lives in recovery

… what Sam Mendes might accentuate in his upcoming portrait of Ringo

... and the clip that’ll be all over the news on the day he bows out.

Plus our campaign to buy the Sentimental Journey pub starts here!

Order Tom Doyle’s ‘Ringo: A Fab Life’ here: https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Ringo/Tom-Doyle/9781917923132

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Steering the supercar of enquiry round the rock and roll racetrack with the occasional stop for a tyre change. Foot-to-floor moments this week include…

… why are the British so hung up about posh pop stars?

… the 10-second moment of his stage routine that Springsteen must find addictive

… the flaming bra, the flying dress, the human horse: Lady Gaga’s most OTT entrances

.. would YOU want Madonna as a sister-in-law?

… Fleetwood Mac, the Grateful Dead, the Bee Gees: bands the NME said were finished in 1975

… John Paul Jones in Marks and Sparks

… musicians’ houses we’d most like to live in (actually one’s a lifeboat)

… the goth/fantasy allure of Steve Nicks on TikTok

… and the still-haunting times we died onstage “like a louse in a Russian’s beard”.

Plus Noel Coward, Julie Andrews, Jem Finer, birthday guest Phil Turner and Tony Bennett’s favourite meal.

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London’s Blitz club in 1980 had a huge impact on the way the decade looked and sounded, the launchpad for Boy George, Spandau Ballet, a new age of electro-pop and many writers, designers and photographers. The author and broadcaster Robert Elms was one of its cornerstones, “a place for people who’d outgrown the 20th Century”. We talk here about his book ‘Blitz: the Club That Created the ‘80s’ with all of this on the dancefloor …  

… the Blitz Club rules, “unspoken until Steve Strange spoke them”. And the door policy: “Look at yourself, darling. Would YOU let yourself in?”

… first nights “with a Space Cossack shirt and asymmetric wedge” and the origin of the term New Romantic

… the rise of the “home-made Macaronis” (dictionary definition: “over-dressed popinjays of dubious sexuality”)

… Bowie’s Starman, Roxy, soul, disco, Weimar, Max Ernst, Otto Dix, Edith Piaf, Swinging London, Andy Warhol and other keys strands of Blitz DNA

… its anti-rock stance and impact on the mid-‘80s American charts

… the news-friendly night Mick Jagger was barred entry

… “I was spat at by an old lady at a bus stop for wearing eyeliner and a kilt”

… when Island offered Spandau a deal after just three numbers  

… the role of the Face, Smash Hits and the new full-colour media

… the author’s “dilettante” passage through skinhead, suedehead, soul boy and punk

… and the night Bowie appeared, “like Jesus walking into your local church and sitting in a pew”.

Order ‘Blitz: The Club That Created the 80s’ here:

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/blitz-the-club-that-created-the-eighties-robert-elms/e672041a84e0cde9?ean=9780571394180&next=t&next=t

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Prince’s commercial peak was Purple Rain but John McKie thinks Sign O’ The Times was his creative masterpiece and tracked down over 200 collaborators, girlfriends, “Prince whisperers”, assistants and admirers to piece together the story of its construction (without allowing himself to use the word “genius”). Which leads us up some colourful, spot-lit alleys, among them …

… “a man in suspenders playing funk”: why a disastrous support slot on the ‘81 Stones tour was pivotal moment  

… Mozart/Salieri levels of rivalry: he once told a Paisley Park engineer to stop singing Culture Club “as that’s the competition”

... battles with Warners president Lenny Waronker: “he believed he was right and the rest were wrong”

… “creative incontinence”: an autocrat in need of an editor

… bodyguard “Big Chick” Huntsberry, performative stunts and the BRITS moment that immortalised him

… the controlling, manipulative nature of anyone who can play 27 instruments

… “he changed his cars to match the colour of his album campaigns”

… artistic parallels with his hero Joni Mitchell

… why he loved comedians in the way he loved jazz musicians

… what we know about his “secret” wives Mayte Garcia and Manuela Testolini

… and the four acts with eternal mystery – Prince, Bowie, Dylan, Dolly Parton.

Order ‘Prince: A Sign O’ The Times here:

https://www.waterstones.com/book/prince-a-sign-o-the-times/john-mckie/9781785121944

Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear

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