Word In Your Ear

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

Stirring the spice-filled gumbo of news and turning the heat up. This week’s nutritious ingredients include …. … is everything better shorter?… the greatest opening line in a book ever written… did Tom Waits, Warren Zevon, Joe Cocker, the Bee Gees, Cheap Trick, Sam Cooke, Talking Heads or Bill Evans make the greatest live album of all time?… the worst beers Buster Poindexter ever had… rock stars’ alter egos – Lady Gaga as Jo Calderone, Andy Partridge as Sir John Johns, George Clinton as Mr Wiggles, Justin Hawkins as Sir Voltage Blackthorn!… Blur, Radiohead, Stones, Doors, Steely Dan, Bowie, Leonard Cohen … they all had a three-year golden streak… “I’m writing a short letter as I don’t have time to write a long one”… why the Matrix was a watershed moment … the three stages of success – getting known, the magnum opus, basking in the glow… and why we love August N'gutu Leibowitz-Clementine.Plus Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Buckshot La Funke, birthday guest Phil Hopwood and how everyone at the BBC is a gossip.

Helen’s violin at the start of Come On Eileen has filled a million wedding dancefloors. She was a member of Dexys Midnight Runners, later their musical director, at the boom time of Too Rye Ay (and its wobbly sequel) and captures the thrill of it all in her just-updated memoir, What’s She Like: A Violinist’s Tale. You’ll love this conversation - warm, candid, forgiving and touching on all the following …… the day the dungarees arrived… the tribal nature of bands… the social skills required in a group as tangled as Dexys who’d “go to the caff and just … not talk!"… what she learnt from the memorabilia found in her shed… the myth that she met Kevin Rowland at a bus-stop and her reinvention as “the belle from Ballymena” … working with Nicky Hopkins (“my hero”), Tom Dowd, Woody Woodmansey and Tanita Tikaram… Dexys studio method: “focus, discipline, tightness” and trying to record a 12-minute track in one take… hearing hits by Rod Stewart and Slade that featured violins… and her swansong: recording Because Of You for the TV sitcom Brush Strokes.Order copies of ‘What’s She Like’ here: https://www.route-online.com/all-books/whats-she-like

We first met Nigel Dick in the late ‘70s when he was the motorbike messenger for Stiff Records and watched him rocket to success in the video boom, directing career-launching clips for Guns N’Roses, Tears for Fears and Britney Spears and working with Cher, Joni Mitchell and McCartney, all recorded in his memoir ‘Music Video Mischief’. He looks back here on that big-budget golden age and the rise of the amateurs from his home in Colorado and stops off at …… ‘You have to work out where the power lies’… the story of the million dollar video… how he finally found the Axl Rose charisma… New Boots And Panties, ‘the most radical album to have that level of success’… Stiff’s ‘frightening, lovable, devious’ Dave Robinson, characteristics every label boss requires… ‘I’ll make sure you never work in this town again!’… why the 16 year-old (ex-Mickey Mouse Club) Britney Spears was born for video… working with his teenage heroes Yes: ‘the beautiful castles I’d built in my mind just collapsed to sand’… the rise of AI – ‘best to check people haven’t got six fingers and a changing haircut’… and working with McCartney, Cher, Band Aid, Oasis and Claude Van Damme.Order copies of ‘Music Video Mischief’ in the UK from: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/music-video-mischief-ozzy-to-britney-oasis-to-gn-r-mccartney-to-cher-a-lifetime-of-rock-and-chaos-nigel-dick/619386081ce90352?ean=9798999048783And in the U.S. from: https://www.trouserpressbooks.com