Word In Your Ear

A whole new age of psychedelia kicked off in the mid-‘80s, of dream-weavers and glorious underachievers, a complete rejection of the standard rock approach to stagecraft, sound and self-promotion. Simon Reynolds was at the heart of it, writing for Melody Maker and piping aboard the pioneering noise-mongers aiming to entrance and disorientate, as recalled in his new book ‘Still In A Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock 1984-1994’. He looks back with us here from his home in Los Angeles at its key bands, events and spiritual godfathers, these among them …

… the return to childhood via Syd Barrett and Jonathan Richman to Sarah Records 

… is ‘feeble little horse’ the most Shoegaze band name ever? 

... what it was about Morrissey that made Smiths singles sink after Top Of The Pops 

… the reason Bowie formed a band 

… charming/infuriating interviews with the Cocteau Twins: “words only have any meaning when they’re sung”

… how Britpop brought down the curtain of the wall of sound  

… Shoegaze, Dreampop, Lovelynoise, Wide-Brimmed Hat Music and the rock press attempt to impose order: “if a band was on the cover they could double their fee” 

... the divine arrogance of Lawrence of Felt who “didn’t want ordinary people buying my records”

… the ever-extending “noise chasms” of My Bloody Valentine

…  “shattering quartz”: reviewing music that’s about sound not words 

… Shoegaze DNA in the 21st Century

... and the greatest album of that decade, “each track like a session beer”.

Order copies of ‘Still In a Dream’ here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/still-in-a-dream/simon-reynolds/9781399618373

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This week’s news gets a thorough shake-down to see what falls out of its pockets. Which includes …

… cupcakes, mobiles, rubber ducks, a dead swan: weird things thown at rock stars

… “polka-dotted micro-tonal space-rock from the planet Zog”: Alex gets the Angine de Poitrine live experience!

… is Shoegaze the Adrian Mole of pop?

… “Hands off my Husker Du!” Joint record collections and who gets what when you split

… Sun Studios, the Albert Hall stage, the Savile Row roof: places where we’ve shivered with excitement

… why don’t they put an old phonebox back in Heddon Street so Bowie fans can take pictures?

… Ocean Blue, Washed Out, Skimming Stones, Pelt: Dreampop band or Farrow & Ball paint colour?

… Physical Graffiti, Anticipation, New Boots and Panties: album sleeve tourist locations

… plus burning wedding photos, when uncles gave you cash and the house Jackson Browne’s grandpa built.

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For nearly 60 years, Brian Eno has been a “proud non-musician” who changed the way people thought and sounded while inventing whole new ways of recording. We loved reading the updated edition of ‘On Some Faraway Beach’ which examines his staggering catalogue of avant garde experiment and wonders if there’s anyone remotely like him. Author David Sheppard looks back with us here at …

… a life of great good fortune: “luck is being ready”

… the rivalry with Bryan Ferry sparked by his getting more attention … and girls

... where you can hear the effect on his Oblique Strategy cards on the Bowie recordings

... the ingenious way he made U2 make up their minds

… his first experience of immersive sound via the organ his granddad built in the family home

… why Wire’s Colin Newman calling him “a Class A Bullshitter” was a compliment

… Bono: “We didn’t go to art school, we went to Brian Eno”

… was Coldplay “a Rubicon he should never have crossed?”

… the appeal of the sculptured sound of early ‘70s synths to someone who couldn’t play keyboards

… his greatest record, Another Green World, and the time he heard Music For Airports playing in an airport

Order copies of On Some Faraway Beach here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Some-Faraway-Beach-Times-Brian/dp/1399605712/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0

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Cheap tickets, warm beer, draughty halls and refectories, a whole new cobbled-together rock circuit was born in the ‘60s for an audience who watched and listened intently. Which allowed the music to take a different route. Paul Sexton spoke to Mark Knopfler, Nick Mason, Justin Hayward, Phil Manzanera and many others to piece together ‘Rock Goes To College: the Campus Music Scene That Shaped A Generation’ and talks to us here about the fans and amateurs who ran it and the lost world of motorway caffs and Ford Transits, stopping off at …

… Hendrix, Fairport, Free, Queen, Dire Straits: tales of the campus gig foot-soldiers

… no security, no lightshow, no seat, no stage: how the idea of live entertainment changed in 50 years  

… Pink Floyd not being allowed front-of house in Top Rank theatres without a tie

… the Stranglers and the Damned refusing to play college shows “unless townies were allowed in”

… the “chart clause” - £50 extra if a band’s in the Top 3!

… the Stones playing an Oxford ball

… bands market-researching songs before recording them

… why Leeds could afford the Who and Leonard Cohen

… what Harvey Goldsmith, Paul Conroy and Chris Wright learnt from booking bands

… why Wings chose the college circuit

… and the arrival of DJs and disco that put a nail in the college gig coffin, “a golden age with nothing like it before or after”.

Order ‘Rock Goes To College’ here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rock-Goes-College-campus-generation/dp/0008722412/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.EWpbXfJjfIq6DOGDGU8HMQMTbZ6fxtMSFJLLqnswcYo.7mGYWOOBglb6F5p42gs88d1lJ0uLxzWS4w3W0vPrwN0&qid=1775764128&sr=1-1

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It’s polling day for this week’s news and these are the stories that got our vote …

... Pussycat Dolls, Meghan Trainor and how ‘Blue Dot Fever’ is wrecking ticket sales

… how can you judge a songwriter with eight collaborators?

… Dylan’s ‘Judas’ moment 60 years later

… is everything becoming binary: thumbs-up or thumbs-down?

… Grandmaster Flash, Augustus Pablo, George McRea, Tangerine Dream and the times brand new music was invented

… when certain dances got you arrested

… Alice in Sunderland? See You In My Drums? Shadows’ song titles rebooted

… the hilarious self-positioning of the NME critics’ poll

… plus jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden and thrill of imagining the sound of acts who were never recorded.

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Mass commercial nightlife began in a Japanese Pleasure Garden in 1657 and it’s blossomed ever since – via Victorian Vauxhall, cabaret Paris, jazz-driven New Orleans, flappers, speakeasies, moonshine, Studio 54 and the rave palaces of the 21st Century. Imogen Willetts tracks its riotous evolution in ‘Up All Night: A History of Going Out’ and wonders if the invention of the iPhone has burst the balloon. She talks to us here about …

... the Tango, the Can-Can: dances that got you arrested

… how bourgeois French ‘slummers’ found a taste of danger

… the heady allure in the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens as an escape from Victorian squalor

… how Anita Berber’s chloroform ballet shocked and delighted Weimar Berlin

… when dancing was a mating ritual and the impact of Dating Apps  

… democracy on the dancefloor: the unrepeatable mix of punters and celebrities at Studio 54

… and how the invention of the electric light got people going out and the iPhone made them stay home

Order ‘Up All Night’ here: https://www.weidenfeldandnicolson.co.uk/titles/imogen-willetts/up-all-night/9781399617093/

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Andy Earl helped create the new dawn of colour photography in the ‘80s pop video age and went on to shoot a series of unforgettable portraits, album sleeves and magazine covers, many featuring in his new exhibition in Bankside Yards, London. He looks back here at some of his subjects and the analogue days when you flew halfway round the world for the right light and backdrop and every prop in the picture was real. Along with …

… that controversial BowWowWow shoot and how he got the job

… Johnny Cash in a cornfield near Melbourne and the dogs he called “Hell” and “Redemption”

… Duran Duran (and a mysterious nun) in Sri Lanka

… “my job was to create a look”

… why the age of digital photography brought a loss of control

… the Robbie Williams Life Thru a Lens “law court” shoot

… “he couldn’t have been more eccentric”: Prince in Monte Carlo and the confiscated camera

… Pink Floyd’s Delicate Sound of Thunder for Hipgnosis: where Dali met Magritte

… “in Monument Valley with a truckload of giant prosthetic eyeballs”: the Cranberries’ Bury the Hatchet cover

… how covers changed when the CD arrived

 … and Madonna opening the hotel window and inhaling the sound of screaming fans: “I just need my hit!”

Andy’s show at Bankside Yards runs from May to August and is free to enter. Details here: https://banksidelondon.co.uk/events/andy-earl-x-bankside-yards/

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Talk Talk made just five albums, all written and recorded unconventionally and no-one’s entirely sure how they did it. And in the last two decades of his life Mark Hollis released only 92 seconds of music. Lifelong admirer Graeme Thomson explores the band’s endless mysteries in his memoir ‘In Another World: the Four Seasons of Talk Talk’, and looks back here at the last hurrah of the days of studio extravagance, which includes …

… why Traffic in 1967 was the Mark Hollis Holy Grail

… “25 per cent of him never appeared above the surface”

… the Talk Talk ‘human sampling’ method – eg a few seconds of Danny Thompson, Steve Gadd or Larry Klein woven into the mix

… “music made with the blindfold on”

… the ‘80s press reaction to Mark’s eulogies about Miles Davis, Stockhausen and Shostakovich

… where you can hear Talk Talk in the music of Kate Bush

… making records the way Kubrick made films

… head music: how Spirit of Eden suits the rebirth of headphones

… band lynchpin Tim Friese-Greene, producer of the Lion Sleeps Tonight!

… what unlimited time and choice does to a studio bill

… and the 92 seconds of music he made for the Kelsey Grammer TV series Boss.

Order ‘In Another World: the Four Seasons of Talk Talk’ here: https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/In-Another-World/Graeme-Thomson/9781917923613

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Penny Kiley moved to Liverpool in 1976, ran into punk rock and “became the person I’d never been allowed to be”, as vividly remembered in her memoir, Atypical Girl. It’s a moment of liberation mapped out by records, nights at Eric’s and the big personalities in the city’s Second Coming, the beat she later covered for Melody Maker. She looks back here at some unconquerable moments, among them …

… the impact of Marc Bolan and David Cassidy - and later Patti Smith, Siouxsie, Pauline Murray and Poly Styrene

… punk’s “bad taste aesthetic” and the clothes she wore

… boomtown Liverpool in the late ‘70s – “everyone had a film script or a demo tape”

… how Boy George stole Pete Burns’ act

… the Clash, Talking Heads and the Ramones at Eric’s

… why her book is “like an historical novel about the way journalism changed”

 … first reviews, front covers and life as Melody Maker’s Liverpool correspondent, “which could be awkward with friends in bands”

… Orange Juice and the ground-breaking NME C81 tape

… and the adjustment to the ‘80s – “the Royal Wedding, Live Aid, Duran Duran, yuppies, a decade where I didn’t feel I fitted in”

Order a copy of Atypical Girl here: https://birlinn.co.uk/product/atypical-girl/

https://www.waterstones.com/book/atypical-girl/penny-kiley/9781846976919

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In the 70s Paul Charles wrote lyrics for an Irish prog band. Now he writes mystery novels. Inbetween he’s been agent for Tom Waits, Nick Lowe, Van Morrison, Hothouse Flowers and many others and has forgotten more about live shows than most of us will ever know. Here he talks about:

•⁠ ⁠hearing the Beatles for the first time through the family radio

•⁠ ⁠meeting Tom Waits in a queue at Tower Records in Hollywood

•⁠ ⁠why he likes to watch the way bands take the stage

•⁠ ⁠the changes he’s seen in the live music landscape

•⁠ ⁠why everybody suddenly wants to tour

•⁠ ⁠what will change about ticket prices and what probably won’t

•⁠ ⁠why the artist doesn’t want to see his agent in the bar after the show

•⁠ ⁠what it’s like when Jackson Browne plays you his new record

•⁠ ⁠why his latest McCusker mystery is called “Hi Love, You Just Dropped Your Glove”

Order “Hi Love, You Just Dropped Your Glove”: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B0GTC3M9CW/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0

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