Word In Your Ear

Mary Gauthier didn’t appear onstage ‘til a traumatic night in Boston aged 29 and she’s been a songwriter and storyteller ever since, much of the raw material from the rigours of her early life. She looks back here, in the euphoria of post-election Nashville, at the personal landmarks and what she’s learnt along the way, which includes … … how to connect with any audience … how the crowd treated the opening act at a Charlie Rich show she saw aged 10… memories of Led Zeppelin, Queen, Bad Company and Springsteen’s River tour (“our greatest living storyteller”)… in praise of troubadours – Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Neil Young, Judy Collins and John Prine (“the Mark Twain of our time”)… the ordeal of her first night onstage, an open mic in Boston aged 29… the thrill of Jimmy Buffett and Boy George covering her songs and Dylan playing her on Theme Time Radio Hour… the event that changed her relationship with her father… “love, fear, anger, loss, gratification, mortality and other universal themes”… “it’s lame to tell people what a song’s about before you play it”… what turns people into performers and the song she always plays.Order Mary Gauthier tickets here: www.marygauthier.com/tourAnd copies of ‘the Reckoning’ album here: https://soundlymusic.ffm.to/mg-reckoningalbum

Haircut 100’s moment in the sun was brief but dramatic and as vividly remembered as his childhood in Nick Heyward’s memoir Fantastic Days. The boy in marmalade corduroy shoes becomes the pop star in the sou’wester and, 45 years later, he’s finally made sense of the peaks and troughs along the way. He’s not bitter but has every right to be. It’s beautifully written, full of moments where time stands still, and this extraordinary and emotional conversation weaves its way through the following …… early ‘60s life with an old-school father – “beer, pubs, jazz, meat”… mid- ‘70s discos – “buck teeth, triple denim, imagining you’re Rick Parfitt” - and memories of Monster Mash, Tiger Feet, Monty Python, Stardust and That’ll Be The Day… the look the bank girl gave him when he paid in his first royalty cheque… the “hostile takeover” that expelled him from the band and has never been discussed since… being a father aged 15 and eventually meeting his long-lost daughter… is it a gift or a burden to have an over-active imagination?… the band blowing their earnings in some kind of Simon Tamplar fantasy… familiar tensions in the Beatles’ Get Back movie… “for me it was leadership, for them resentment”.Order copies of ‘Fantastic Days’ here: https://tr.ee/ITZXRHj-IaBook tour here: https://tr.ee/4r1Kj_oNVj

Seeking another landslide victory in our 20-year conversational campaign, this week’s vote-winners include …… did Bob Dylan take the Pope a jigsaw and some Lucozade?… the drummer whose first session was a Number One… did John Lennon mug a sailor?… albums by Duffy, Frankie, ABC and the Darkness that “died like a louse in a Russian's beard”… another cover that’s better than the Beatles’ original… Hal Blaine, the Knack, Joe Meek and the Stones Roses… why Ozzy Osbourne is ‘the Norman Wisdom of Crime’… and Tuppy Glossop, Bingo Little, ‘Catsmeat’ Potter-Pirbright and Freddie & the Nutters.

A “feral child” from Fife gets recruited by a punk band who have five long years in the sun and split up. Until rebooted when U2 and Green Day cover one of their singles 25 years later. The Skids are back on tour again, a show “that leaves nothing in the dressing-room” and once disastrously involved a backflip, and Richard Jobson’s stories of those early days here are tremendously funny and engaging. On the menu …… Steve Jones, two members of Legs & Co and a stolen car (and the day Jones burgled Francis Bacon)… “no member of Big Country was actually Scottish”… Hugh Cornwell as his ‘designated teacher’ on the Stranglers/Skids tour, aged 16: “main lesson, biology”… “my two heroes were Iggy Pop and Alex Harvey so I aimed for something in between”… 500 people at the stage door “and none of them women!”… how U2 and Green Day started the Skids revival… “bands of my vintage milking as much as they can of the King’s Pound on their last hurrah”… 1,000 miles on a stolen motorbike, aged 15, to buy a pair of leather trousers… on Top Of the Pops with Diana Ross… and the “natural melancholy and internal sadness” of Stuart AdamsonPlus his Hare Krishna brother and living with Steve Severin while besotted with Siouxsie of the Banshees.Skids tickets here: www.skidsofficial.com

The Pretty Things were dead centre in the mid-‘60s underground and they’ve been mythologised ever since - for the sound of those singles, for their SF Sorrow masterpiece and for their delicious eccentricities and the way they looked. Co-founder and guitarist Dick Taylor relives life in the blues clubs with the Stones and the whole psychedelic adventure that followed, now captured - along with outtakes, rehearsal tapes and unreleased tracks - on the gorgeous 12-CD box-set ‘Pretty Rare’. In the mix here …… the band he formed with Mick and Keith and the night they met Brian and Charlie… what his mother and sister thought of the teenage Jagger… seeing Miles Davis in the ‘50s… Arthur Brown’s plan to arrive at the Isle Of Wight festival by balloon “but the wind was blowing in the wrong direction”… Pete Townshend’s legal threat about SF Sorrow and the party where the demo tape was playing … “pink high-heeled shoes and Viv Prince with a crayfish on a lead”: when New Zealand said ‘never darken out shores again’… driving Hendrix to the Speakeasy… the pioneering sound of Rosalyn and Honey I Need… and Phil May, Derek Boshier, Jimmy Reed, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and the Dylan and Donovan songs they never recorded.Order copies of ‘Pretty Rare’ here: https://theprettythings.lnk.to/Pretty_Rare

London restaurants were where musicians, actors, writers and TV stars were seen “and how you knew where they were in the days before social media”. They were a form of theatre with a shifting cast and a way of gauging celebrity status. Dylan Jones – who’s lunched long and hard in the heart of the media – sees that vanishing world as a measure of changing times and fashions in his toothsome new book ‘Table Hopping: the Secret History of London Restaurants’. And pulls up two chairs for us here to look back at …… the birth of pop culture at the Speakeasy, Ad Lib and the Bag O’ Nails… Hockney, Jagger, Lucian Freud, the Sex Pistols and Ian Dury’s public beef with Omar Sharif… “restaurants were about learning how to behave in public”… Jeffrey Archer and Michael Winner fighting over Lady Di’s table… Michael Caine and Peter Langan creating the first internationally known London restaurant… the agony of celebrity hierarchy: “the Beckhams couldn’t get the top table as it was reserved for Harold Pinter”… Alex James, Damien Hirst and Keith Allen’s “bar tab as long as a bog roll”… Malcolm McLaren’s doomed Hammer of the Gods movie with Daniel Day-Lewis as Plant, Gary Oldman as Page and Robbie Coltrane as Peter Grant… “AA Gill could close a restaurant”… Anthony Bourdain, Marco Pierre White and the rise of the rock’n’roll chefs… and how the ‘90s are the new ‘60s “where everyone felt they were in the Green Room”.Order copies of ‘Table Hopping’ here:https://www.waterstones.com/book/table-hopping/dylan-jones/9780349000725https://www.amazon.co.uk/Table-Hopping-Restaurants-Brasserie-Wolseley/dp/0349000727https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/table-hopping-the-secret-history-of-london-restaurants-from-langan-s-brasserie-to-the-wolseley-dylan-jones/2def4f36390c3026?

‘To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and civilizations and to boldly go where no podcasters have been before!’ Which this week involves …… the lost 1978 Bowie footage about to tour arenas… why Indie songs have such long intros… Jagger’s great-granddaughter is three years older than one of his sons?!… how Bill Wyman survived Brian Jones and the letter Jones sent Charlie asking him to join the band… when Patrick Stewart worked for the Dewsbury Reporter… what John Steinbeck wrote to Marilyn Monroe... the two covers of Beatles songs that are better than the originals… and the best gag ever printed in Viz.Plus the Cure, Ed Sheeran’s daughter Antarctica and birthday guest Giles Fraser.

Whenever Carl Palmer joined a band, he was head-hunted by a bigger one - the King Bees, Chris Farlowe & the Thunderbirds, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Atomic Rooster and, eventually, Emerson Lake & Palmer. We get a vivid whirlwind tour here of six decades onstage – modest, very funny, barely pausing for breath – and a full account of how ‘An Evening with Emerson Lake & Palmer’ will work when he tours the show in 2027 (and the setlist). Tons of highlights, blink and you’ll miss them, these just a few …… “You can’t call the group Emerson Lake & Palmer! What if somebody leaves?”… playing jazz and cabaret from the age of 12 and memories of “formation dancing night”… the King Bees at a Birmingham All-Nighter with Chris Farlowe, Steampacket and “a few black bombers”.. the one-eyed bassist who drove the van… American 10,000-seaters with Arthur Brown… the Who in 1965 – “never seen anything like it!”… who owns the name Emerson Lake & Palmer?… the day he got a job for John Bonham… being choppered to the Isle of Wight in their stage gear... Vincent Crane sawing his Hammond in half… the ELP audition and “Ahmet Ertegun from NY” ringing to twist his arm… playing the Palladium where his grandpa conducted a Palm Court Orchestra… and drumming on a vegan diet.Mentioned in passing: Cozy Powell, Graham Bond, Erroll Garner, Oscar Peterson, Ginger Baker, Roy Orbison and Bruce Forsyth.Order ‘An Evening With ELP’ tickets here: https://crosstownconcerts.gigantic.com/carl-palmer-tickets

Tom Hagler works at the BBC with access to every TV and radio programme involving Joni Mitchell for 50 years, all full of revelations about her songs and the times she spent in London. So he transcribed the interviews – even the bits off-camera - and talked to the people who’d watched them being recorded, now published as ‘River Of Words: Joni Mitchell At the BBC’. It’s full of fresh angles and good stories, like this podcast which touches on …… Joni living on cigarettes, coffee and chocolate in a Bayswater flat in 1968… early exposure by John Peel and on Stanley Dorfman’s pioneering ‘In Concert’ (she was the first guest!)… her complete transparency in interviews – “I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes”… the night she met Graham Nash… the BBC failing to exploit their 1990 ‘scoop’ about her giving away her daughter for adoption, and the moment she thinks she met her (aged 3)… how she held her own in the ‘70s rock Boys’ Club… “save something of yourself”: when Kris Kristofferson heard Blue… the Tracey MacLeod interview where she claims to be a reincarnated Arab rug dealer… and the value of Big Yellow Taxi in the climate crisis.Order copies of ‘River Of Words: Joni Mitchell at the BBC’ here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/River-Words-Joni-Mitchell-interviews/dp/1035435780