Dylan and the Pope, the drummer on 42 Number 1s & rock stars who were teenage crims
Seeking another landslide victory in our 20-year conversational campaign, this week’s vote-winners include … … did Bob Dylan take the Pope a...
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Music
Word In Your Ear
Mark Ellen and David Hepworth have been talking about and writing about music together and individually for a collective eighty years in magazines like Smash Hits, Mojo and The Word and on r...
Episodes
20 of 1,030 episodes
Richard Jobson on the Skids and the day Steve Jones burgled Francis Bacon
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 D...
Dick Taylor, the Pretty Things and the four months he spent in the Stones
The Pretty Things were dead centre in the mid-‘60s underground and they’ve been mythologised ever since - for the sound of those singles, fo...
Dylan Jones, past master of the long lunch, saw the music world from a restaurant table
London restaurants were where musicians, actors, writers and TV stars were seen “and how you knew where they were in the days before social...
What’s at the heart of Indie Rock? – plus Bowie rebooted and Patrick Stewart RIP
‘To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and civilizations and to boldly go where no podcasters have been before!’ Which this we...
Carl Palmer’s 64 years onstage and the ingenious way he’s touring as ELP
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...
Joni Mitchell’s fascinating treasure trove of lost interviews with the BBC
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...
Which bands pass the three-year test? – plus the great live albums & rock stars’ alter egos
Stirring the spice-filled gumbo of news and turning the heat up. This week’s nutritious ingredients include …. … is everything better shorte...
Dexys, their hits and flops and how I survived them by Helen O’Hara
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 th...
Nigel Dick shot videos for Band Aid, Guns N’Roses, Britney and Oasis by ‘failing upwards’
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 vide...
Tall stories about towering and tiny rock stars, ‘50s jazz and Mick Jagger’s gym shoes
Two fearless men journey to the Edge Of News so that you don’t have to. Some highlights of this week’s report … … when a gig’s all about the...
Another Word with … Richard Thompson: includes Fairport, Lennon, Schwarzenegger and a cast of thousands!
Richard Thompson has a new album, ‘Hippies, Thugs and Heroes’, and he’s touring again in 2027, the perfect excuse to get another of our favo...
Rory Gallagher – Ireland’s first rock star remembered by the brother who managed him
You forget how huge and ubiquitous Rory Gallagher was in the ‘70s, just 22 at the Isle of Wight and auditioning for the Stones four years la...
Q Magazine’s 40th, Ariel Bender and the most unlistenable music ever made
In this week’s extension of The Longest Conversation In Pop History™️ you’ll be happy to find … … the front row audience driving Gillian And...
Roxy, Traffic, Nick Drake, Mott the Hoople & the magic of Island Records
The third instalment of ‘The Island Book of Records’ is out, another sumptuous, elegantly designed, LP-sized chronicle of every album releas...
Gary Kemp bought Brian Epstein’s address book and discovered ‘the DNA of the Beatles’
A lifelong Beatles obsessive, Gary Kemp bought Epstein’s black leather address book at auction and (with Simon Halfon) researched its 404 na...
‘Metal Machine Music is a masterpiece!’ David Holzer has played it 1,000 times
David Holzer was a Lou Reed fan from the moment he saw Walk On The Wild Side on Top Of The Pops but avoided Metal Machine Music for 42 years...
Todd Rundgren’s outbursts, ‘too old to mosh’ & the happiest and saddest songwriters
A long-running conversation that shifts from major to minor, back to major and all notes inbetween, this week’s lyrics including … … can peo...
Jon Savage loathed the 1976 singles chart so he’s made an album of should-have-been hits
Jon Savage detested the UK’s mid-‘70s hits with a vengeance, “records so bad they made you want to strangle every deejay on Radio One, espec...
Stevie Wonder’s masterpiece and the daft, chequered history of Ties In Rock!
The two-man conversational canoe paddles the rock and roll tideway, stopping off this week at … … Van Morrison’s set-opener is Kidney Stew B...