Word In Your Ear

Dominic Mohan saw Britpop on the inside from the showbiz desk of the Sun in the days when it sold 4.5m copies, a series of heated memories recorded in ‘1996: My Backstage Pass to the Wildest Year of Britain’s Wildest Decade’, a lost age of hedonism, stupidity, drunkenness and creativity. He makes a compelling case in this very funny and colourful podcast which stumbles into …

… the advice David Hepworth gave him when he was 16

… Euro 96 and headlines you couldn’t run now

… how the deaths of Kurt Cobain and John Smith changed the picture

… doorstepping Phil Collins’ ex-wife

… the wreath for Noel Gallagher “the fat dancer from Take That” sent to the Sun

… Cool Britannia and that brief love affair between music and politics

… on the dancefloor at the Labour Conference with Mo Mowlam, John Prescott and Chris Evans

… Knebworth 1996, the perfect marriage of alternative music and club culture with a £250,000 bar bill

… the debt Pulp, Oasis and Blur owe Ray Davies - “less the Godfather of Britpop, more a concerned uncle”

… is it hard to identify a new zeitgeist when people don’t congregate as much?

… the ‘reverse-ferret’ from American culture towards bespectacled blokes from Sheffield

… the shameless age before people public apology

… how the post-Spice Girls TV talent shows soaked up the budgets and column inches

… and Madonna dancing with Dennis Hopper.

Order copies of ‘1996’ here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/1996-Backstage-Wildest-Britains-Decade/dp/B0FZBZHPNR

The Barbican Show curated by Dominic: https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2026/event/1996-a-celebration-of-the-wildest-year-of-britains-wildest

Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
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A seasonal egg-hunt in the rock and roll backyard finds the following conversational confectionary …

.. Wild Bill Hickok? Valentino? Bob Dylan’s bizarre new media manoeuvre

… Liza Minnelli, Peter Sellers, Harrison Ford, Aaron Paul: people born to play one part

… how to spot writers using AI

… “dried-up old prune”? Trump’s pot-kettle war against Springsteen

… what BBC DJs must think when they see ‘Woo’ Gary Davies in reception

… “Neil Young looks like an unmade bed”

… when invincible ignorance meets invincible confidence: the stupidest thing we’ve ever done

… do most rock stars eventually get ‘work’ done?

… plus the Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, the Roots, Daisy Age hip-hop and our link with the Hatton Garden heist.

Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
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Tony Visconti left Brooklyn for London in 1967, began working with the Move and Marc Bolan and formed a life-long friendship with the teenage David Bowie, playing on his first two albums and producing 10 of ones that followed. And in 2014 he formed Holy Holy with Woody Woodmansey, a live celebration of Bowie’s music from 1970 to Blackstar. They’re touring again in September with Glenn Gregory as lead singer – “you can’t mourn forever.” He talks to us here about …

… the gig they played the night Bowie died

… life at Bowie’s commune at Haddon Hall – “I kept my door firmly locked!”

… Marc Bolan at Middle Earth, “a hundred spellbound kids sitting cross-legged on the floor”

… hearing Flowers In The Rain (which he arranged) as the first record on Radio One

… “A little chinwag?” How Bowie broke the news about his illness

… his dislike of Space Oddity, “I told him it was novelty, a sell-out”

… producing The Man Who Sold The World and the emotional Blackstar

… the night he met the teenage Bowie and they wound up in a Chelsea cinema

… “Why are you doing this?” Bowie’s reaction to the first Holy Holy tour in 2014

… his time as the red-caped Hypeman and Ronson and Woody’s resistance to make-up, “macho boys from Hull”

… walking round New York with a cassette of secret The Next Day album in his pocket

… and the big emotional moments in the Holy Holy set list

Order Holy Holy tickets here: https://www.ticketmaster.co.uk/holy-holy-tickets/artist/2096354

Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
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Matt Johnson’s life story has been mapped out as one long Q&A conversation from meetings with old friend, fan and BFI director Jason Wood. ‘Cognitive Dissident’ traces his trajectory from the East End to Soho to the beloved albums he made with a series of super-groups and his 2021 comeback. He looks back here at …

… his earliest musical memories – Donovan, the Move, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown

… the old East End and the Two Puddings pub run by his parents, “full of ghosts”, Bobby Moore, Francis Bacon and the Krays

… his Uncle Kenny promoting the Who, the Kinks and Jerry Lee Lewis

… “Get yourself on a sunbed!” and other advice from George Michael

... what he learnt at De Wolfe Music, aged 15, in the red-light Soho of the late ‘70s

… legendary manager Stevo signing the band’s CBS contract at midnight in Trafalgar Square

… “cigarettes, coffee, warm analogue equipment”: the Proustian scent of old studios

… his NME ad recruiting The The members via the Residents, the Velvet Underground, Syd Barrett and Throbbing Gristle

… being part of “the Long Mack Brigade” with Cabaret Voltaire, This Heat, Wire and the Gang of Four

… Leonard Cohen’s premonition of the internet

… the Albert Hall: “like a tennis player playing Wimbledon”

… the genius of Hank Williams

… and his 2018 comeback, “like reunion of old army buddies”

Order ‘Cognitive Dissident’ here: https://omnibuspress.com/products/cognitive-dissident?_pos=1&_psq=cognitive+dissi&_ss=e&_v=1.0

Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
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When he was 19, New Yorker Brian Cullman covered the London music scene for Crawdaddy, landing at the birth of folk-rock and the singer-songwriter boom and watching its leading lights from unimaginably close quarters - Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, John Martyn among them. He even played on the same bill as Drake at Les Cousins club, all this recorded in his book ‘How To Prepare for the Past: Travels in Music and Time’. He talks to us here about that golden age and the American stars he met later, stopping off at …

… Ed Sullivan at the shoe-shine: “in six months the Beatles will be lucky to be playing a bowling alley!”

… Nick Drake in the same clothes he wore on the cover of Five Leaves Left

… Sandy Denny: “She knew she was extraordinary but didn’t know if she was any good”

… Jackson Browne, onstage from the age of 12

… being hired by rock encyclopaedist Lillian Roxon, “my fairy godmother”

… Tim Hardin making Bird On A Wire, “so wasted they followed him round the room with a microphone”

... and “14 hotdogs”? The cavernous appetite of Big Joe Turner.

Order ‘How To Prepare for the Past’ here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Prepare-Past-Travels-Music/dp/B0FTS8ZPTW

Or here: https://www.zebooks.com/books/how-to-prepare-for-the-past

Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.