Word In Your Ear

Martin Simpson got backstage when he was 15 and met Jimmy Reed and Big Joe Williams and it changed his life forever. He’s been on the folk circuit ever since, still at the top of his game and with the wealth of knowledge and experience reflected in this extremely entertaining podcast. His ‘Some Kind Of Jubilee’ album celebrates 50 years since his first record and he’s on tour in September. And talks to us here about …

… his operatic Dad born in the 19th Century

… the message carved with a knife on the door of the Bodmin Trad Music Club

… hearing Paul Robeson aged four and thinking “I want to make people cry for a living”

… ‘60s folk circuit snobbery and its disdain for “foreign songs”

… signing Big Joe Williams’ walking stick in a space between Bob Dylan and Joan Baez

… memories of Alex Campbell, Matin Carthy, Dave & Jo Ann Kelly and “that swarthy bunch of lunatics from Hull, the Watersons”

… the Nun & Ice Cream Cone, the Frog & Afterbirth: imaginary pub venues cooked up with June Tabor

… being managed by Tony Secunda, “an extremely unpleasant human being”

… “the only damage you can do to a folk song is to not sing it”

… supporting Steeleye Span and the night cash rained from the heavens

… Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right, These Days by Jackson Browne, Mississippi John Hurt and other songs that never let you down onstage

… second-lining at a New Orleans jazz funeral: “the slow drag and the racing return”

… and how folk songs travel abroad and evolve.

Order copies of ‘Some Kind Of Jubilee’ here: https://martinsimpsonmusic.com/pre-order-the-new-album/

Martin Simpson tickets here: https://martinsimpsonmusic.com/
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The Shadows were the strongest brand in British pop, adored and widely imitated. When they went out of fashion, no-one wanted them to change. Bob Stanley salutes their enormous influence and creation of the guitar hero and unravels their rapid post-Beatles decline in his superb new book, ‘The Shadows: the Definitive Story’. And talks to us here about …

… Hank and Bruce arriving in London aged 15 when the 2i’s coffee bar was a labour exchange and a social club

… entering a talent contest won by a Malayan opera singer

… the magic of cowboy culture transported to British suburbia and their four cartoonish stage names

… meeting Jacques Tati at the Paris Olympia and being asked to write a song for his upcoming movie

… the rapid post-Beatles crash – bow-ties, panto and Cliff announcing his Christianity

… “being thrown through a mangle twice a night by Arthur Askey in Stockton-on-Tees is not why they joined the music business”

… getting Hipgnosis to design their album sleeve while stuck playing Batley Variety Club

… the return of instrumentals with Albatross and the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

… when Hank was asked to join the Move

.. the Swedish vogue for “barbed wire groups”

… and Neil Young’s ‘From Hank to Hendrix’ – which everyone assumed was about Hank Williams.

Order copies of Bob’s book here: https://tr.ee/rSilFTJwfO
Help us to keep The Longest Continuous Conversation In Rock'n'Roll going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
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Stuff, nonsense, the white heat of debate and yesterday’s news today! Which this week involves …

… which of these didn’t host a TV chat show – Ian Botham, Charlotte Church, Lily Allen or Harold Wilson?

… if you’d paid £102 to see two-thirds of the Fugees show up an hour late, wouldn’t you SCREAM for a refund?

… Britain’s most rock’n’roll hotel and why the idea of “excess” seems purely American

… Dave and Stephane Grappelli at the Sunset Marquis

… Reversing Into Tomorrow! We Came, We Saw, We Left! The genius of Stiff Records, “the Motown of Bayswater”, and the oddballs and misfits they signed

… “there are only two types of record demand: too little and too much”

… “Artistic breakthrough, the first double B-side!” The single that started the Indie boom

… and why naked ballet doesn’t work.
Help us to keep The Longest Continuous Conversation In Rock'n'Roll going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
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A sense of melancholy hangs over the music of songwriters whose lives were tragically short – Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, Eva Cassidy, Judee Sill - and we’re left knowing very little about them. Jamie Fisher, writer and New York Times researcher, discovered Elliott Smith 12 years after he’d died and contacted 40 of his friends and fellow musicians to build a picture of him for her memoir Nobody Broke Your Heart. She looks back here at his background and ascent from the Portland club circuit to the Oscars, and touches on …

… the emotional impact of first hearing his music walking round Central Park in Lockdown

… “goofy, stubborn, wildly smart, addictively listenable”

… early life in Omaha and Texas (and the telling tattoo on his arm)

… the shy collegiate kid reading Dostoevsky who thought promotion was “distasteful”

… how a singer-writer broke through in Portland during the Grunge boom

… rejected stage-names - Johnny Panic, Elliott Stillwater-Rotter - and the pivotal moment when Steven became ‘Elliott’

.. his sense of humour – “a garbage truck passed him and he said, ‘there’s my ride!’”

… the archive of unreleased recordings she’d heard

… the Oscars appearance and signing to DreamWorks and Nirvana’s PR

… the root of his eventual unhappiness

… “he would have been more shielded if he’d been in a band”

… and his expanding legacy and adoption by Gen-Z.

Order ‘Nobody Broke Your Heart’ here: https://www.roughtrade.com/product/jamie-fisher/nobody-broke-your-heart-an-intimate-biography-of-elliott-smith
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Michael Cragg’s devotion to all things Kylie once led him to Melbourne in search of the actual carousel horse she rode in a pop video. He got a tattoo a day later. Can’t Get You Out Of My Head is a funny and fondly detailed personal account of the risk-taking variety of her records, the mystery of her private life and the irresistible nature of her appeal, a girl who, were there a war on, would be painted on the tail fins of aircraft. He looks back here at …

… her ‘90s reinvention by association – with Nick Cave, Michael Hutchence and Bobby Gillespie

… how records about joy never get enough credit

… wrestling back control after life with Stock Aitken & Waterman

… the root of her appeal as a gay icon

... being vilified by the press for any public pronouncement

… a capacity to charm her detractors when she meets them

… reciting I Should Be So Lucky at the Poetry Olympics alongside Patti Smith and Allen Ginsberg

… a mixture of the ordinary and the exotic and the ‘Carry On’ sexuality of her videos

… only Queen Elizabeth 11 has had more waxworks at Madame Tussauds

… and Michael’s meeting with her – “I’m six foot eight, she’s five foot one” - and the resulting photo.

Order copies of ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ here: https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571392766-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head-in-search-of-kylie/
Help us to keep The Longest Continuous Conversation In Rock'n'Roll going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
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