Word In Your Ear

It’s polling day for this week’s news and these are the stories that got our vote …

... Pussycat Dolls, Meghan Trainor and how ‘Blue Dot Fever’ is wrecking ticket sales

… how can you judge a songwriter with eight collaborators?

… Dylan’s ‘Judas’ moment 60 years later

… is everything becoming binary: thumbs-up or thumbs-down?

… Grandmaster Flash, Augustus Pablo, George McRea, Tangerine Dream and the times brand new music was invented

… when certain dances got you arrested

… Alice in Sunderland? See You In My Drums? Shadows’ song titles rebooted

… the hilarious self-positioning of the NME critics’ poll

… plus jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden and thrill of imagining the sound of acts who were never recorded.

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Mass commercial nightlife began in a Japanese Pleasure Garden in 1657 and it’s blossomed ever since – via Victorian Vauxhall, cabaret Paris, jazz-driven New Orleans, flappers, speakeasies, moonshine, Studio 54 and the rave palaces of the 21st Century. Imogen Willetts tracks its riotous evolution in ‘Up All Night: A History of Going Out’ and wonders if the invention of the iPhone has burst the balloon. She talks to us here about …

... the Tango, the Can-Can: dances that got you arrested

… how bourgeois French ‘slummers’ found a taste of danger

… the heady allure in the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens as an escape from Victorian squalor

… how Anita Berber’s chloroform ballet shocked and delighted Weimar Berlin

… when dancing was a mating ritual and the impact of Dating Apps

… democracy on the dancefloor: the unrepeatable mix of punters and celebrities at Studio 54

… and how the invention of the electric light got people going out and the iPhone made them stay home

Order ‘Up All Night’ here: https://www.weidenfeldandnicolson.co.uk/titles/imogen-willetts/up-all-night/9781399617093/

Help us to keep The Longest Continuous Conversation In Rock going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
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Andy Earl helped create the new dawn of colour photography in the ‘80s pop video age and went on to shoot a series of unforgettable portraits, album sleeves and magazine covers, many featuring in his new exhibition in Bankside Yards, London. He looks back here at some of his subjects and the analogue days when you flew halfway round the world for the right light and backdrop and every prop in the picture was real. Along with …

… that controversial BowWowWow shoot and how he got the job

… Johnny Cash in a cornfield near Melbourne and the dogs he called “Hell” and “Redemption”

… Duran Duran (and a mysterious nun) in Sri Lanka

… “my job was to create a look”

… why the age of digital photography brought a loss of control

… the Robbie Williams Life Thru a Lens “law court” shoot

… “he couldn’t have been more eccentric”: Prince in Monte Carlo and the confiscated camera

… Pink Floyd’s Delicate Sound of Thunder for Hipgnosis: where Dali met Magritte

… “in Monument Valley with a truckload of giant prosthetic eyeballs”: the Cranberries’ Bury the Hatchet cover

… how covers changed when the CD arrived

… and Madonna opening the hotel window and inhaling the sound of screaming fans: “I just need my hit!”

Andy’s show at Bankside Yards runs from May to August and is free to enter. Details here: https://banksidelondon.co.uk/events/andy-earl-x-bankside-yards/

Help us to keep The Longest Continuous Conversation In Rock going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
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Talk Talk made just five albums, all written and recorded unconventionally and no-one’s entirely sure how they did it. And in the last two decades of his life Mark Hollis released only 92 seconds of music. Lifelong admirer Graeme Thomson explores the band’s endless mysteries in his memoir ‘In Another World: the Four Seasons of Talk Talk’, and looks back here at the last hurrah of the days of studio extravagance, which includes …

… why Traffic in 1967 was the Mark Hollis Holy Grail

… “25 per cent of him never appeared above the surface”

… the Talk Talk ‘human sampling’ method – eg a few seconds of Danny Thompson, Steve Gadd or Larry Klein woven into the mix

… “music made with the blindfold on”

… the ‘80s press reaction to Mark’s eulogies about Miles Davis, Stockhausen and Shostakovich

… where you can hear Talk Talk in the music of Kate Bush

… making records the way Kubrick made films

… head music: how Spirit of Eden suits the rebirth of headphones

… band lynchpin Tim Friese-Greene, producer of the Lion Sleeps Tonight!

… what unlimited time and choice does to a studio bill

… and the 92 seconds of music he made for the Kelsey Grammer TV series Boss.

Order ‘In Another World: the Four Seasons of Talk Talk’ here: https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/In-Another-World/Graeme-Thomson/9781917923613

Help us to keep The Longest Continuous Conversation In Rock going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
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Penny Kiley moved to Liverpool in 1976, ran into punk rock and “became the person I’d never been allowed to be”, as vividly remembered in her memoir, Atypical Girl. It’s a moment of liberation mapped out by records, nights at Eric’s and the big personalities in the city’s Second Coming, the beat she later covered for Melody Maker. She looks back here at some unconquerable moments, among them …

… the impact of Marc Bolan and David Cassidy - and later Patti Smith, Siouxsie, Pauline Murray and Poly Styrene

… punk’s “bad taste aesthetic” and the clothes she wore

… boomtown Liverpool in the late ‘70s – “everyone had a film script or a demo tape”

… how Boy George stole Pete Burns’ act

… the Clash, Talking Heads and the Ramones at Eric’s

… why her book is “like an historical novel about the way journalism changed”

… first reviews, front covers and life as Melody Maker’s Liverpool correspondent, “which could be awkward with friends in bands”

… Orange Juice and the ground-breaking NME C81 tape

… and the adjustment to the ‘80s – “the Royal Wedding, Live Aid, Duran Duran, yuppies, a decade where I didn’t feel I fitted in”

Order a copy of Atypical Girl here: https://birlinn.co.uk/product/atypical-girl/

https://www.waterstones.com/book/atypical-girl/penny-kiley/9781846976919

Help us to keep The Longest Continuous Conversation In Rock going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
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