Word In Your Ear

Updated: 20 Jan 2025 • 925 episodes
www.patreon.com/wordinyourear

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 radio and TV programmes like "Rock On", "Whistle Test" and VH-1. Over thirteen years ago, when working on the late magazine The Word, they began producing podcasts. Some listeners have been kind enough to say these have been very special to them. When the magazine folded in 2012 they kept the spirit of those podcasts alive in regular Word In Your Ear evenings in which they spoke to musicians and authors in front of an audience.  Over these years they've produced hundreds of hours of material. As of the Current Unpleasantness of 2020, they've produced yet hundreds of hours more with a little help from guests kind enough to digitally show them around their attics such as Danny Baker, Andy Partridge, Sir Tim Rice and Mark Lewisohn. For the full span of the Word In Your Ear world, visit wiyelondon.com. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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David feels a rant coming on. Mark lights the blue touchpaper, pulls on a tin hat and retires to a safe distance as they consider …   … the US closure of TikTok: has a single governmental act ever had such impact on the music business?   … film posters, Dinky Toys, “obscure vinyls”: the new record stores that are effec

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Something happens when he walks out under the lights. He can never predict what but he’s programmed to perform. As he has for over 60 years and will again when he sets out on a 63-date tour in April peppered with stories of an extravagant life and billed as ‘an evening of Francis Rossi songs from the Status Quo songboo

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We both first heard Graham Nash just over 60 years ago when the Hollies’ Just One Look was on the BBC’s swinging Light Programme and we’ve followed him ever since, not least his transformational shift in the late-‘60s from suburban Salford to the wood cabins of Laurel Canyon. He’s touring the UK in October, An Evening

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Though you might hear laughing, spinning, swinging madly across the sun, it is in fact just two old lags reviewing the current events, which this week include …   … the made-up scene in A Complete Unknown which Dylan apparently insisted was included.   … the Day of the Locust: do the LA fires spell the end of the Holly

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It’s perishing cold in our frostbitten London HQ but we warmed our toes around a blazing conversational fire and roasted the following chestnuts …   … “the job of pop records is to be better than the year before”.   … the real reason new music tends to sound the same.   … Johnnie Walker – “his voice was his instrument”

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Among the walnut shells, wrapping paper, dried tangerine peel and broken toys beneath the Christmas Tree Of News we found a few unopened presents, among them …   … Marine Homicide Unit solving murders in Scottish waters or former rock star dumping toxic waste? A crime drama Stackwaddy special.   … Roy Bittan, Duke Elli

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