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 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.
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- Update frequency
- every 2 days
- Average duration
- 43 minutes
- Episodes
- 857
- Years Active
- 2007 - 2025
Fish is bowing out to become a Hebridean shepherd. What’s he learnt in 45 years onstage?
Fish has announced a Farewell Tour in 2025. “I’ve been there, done that and sold the t-shirt.” He’s moving to a croft on a remote Scottish island with nesting eagles, a flock of sheep named after the…
The extraordinary story of Steve Harley’s greatest hit
Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me) was a slow-paced, vicious dirge about the band members who forsook and betrayed him which magically evolved into what appeared to be an optimistic love song, a radi…
Great divorce albums, Powerpop snobs and dark tales of 1999
Various items set off the alarm in the rock and roll bag-check this week and were hauled back for closer inspection, among them …
… when did records first try to sound like the past?
… why Karl Walli…
Stephen Fall’s reviewed 3,333 of his albums. Buy the book!
Stephen Fall wrote reviews of his records, one a day, to make him a better listener. A decade later he published them in a book so colossal that we drop it on a desk to prove it’s passed the Boff Tes…
It’s Arthur Brown, the god of hellfire … paging Health & Safety!
Arthur Brown – enduring psychedelic godfather – is out on tour again 57 years after first performing Fire in a flaming metal crown. He’s nearly 82. This is the most old-school podcast we’ve ever done…
Suzi Ronson - Bowie’s stylist - knows why rock and roll is all about hair
Suzi Ronson was working in a hairdressers in Beckenham in 1970 when a Mrs Jones dropped in for a shampoo and set talking gaily about her son, “an artistic boy who plays guitar and piano”. The same so…
How the Beatles invented pop video and acts we love who always sound the same
Nutritious items on the rock and roll tasting menu this week include …
… the curious life of Tom Verlaine, his grocery cart and his 50,000 books.
… was March 9 1984 the worst week ever for the Brit…
Is social media killing pop music? And where have all the bands gone?
Caught in the piercing super-trouper of perusal this week …
... the BRITS 2024, a howling embarrassment.
… Medieval Beatles! She Came In Through the Privy Window, Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Ex…
For Henry Normal comedy is like “sugar and salt”
Henry Normal set up Baby Cow Productions with Steve Coogan, co-wrote the Royle Family, Coogan’s Run and Mrs Merton and produced Gavin & Stacy and Red Dwarf. He’s been a central plank in British comed…
Steve Howe of Yes tells a few tales from topographic oceans
Steve Howe talks to us from the old house and studio in Devon where they rehearsed ‘The Yes Album’ in 1970. He’s been recording there for 54 years and is part of the current line-up about to set out …
The evergreen record that’s 50 years old & Jeremy Thorpe at a hippie commune
As this week’s rock and roll steeplechase thunders out over the jumps, the following runners and riders make it past the post …
… “First he changed music. Then he changed the world!” and other over-c…
Richard Coles has faced every audience imaginable, one armed with pea-shooters
The Reverend Richard Coles is back on tour with his ‘Borderline National Trinket’ show and talks to us from his home in Sussex where he’s “the only person in the village who hasn’t won a BAFTA”. This…
For Jah Wobble driving tube trains was even more thrilling than playing Glastonbury
Jah Wobble - aka John Wardle - wrote ‘Dark Luminosity: Memoirs of a Geezer’ in 2009. It’s just been reworked, expanded and republished and it’s well worth reading, full of detail about growing up in …
Steve Wright and other great radioheads, McCartney’s bass & the non-profits of Python
Pausing occasionally to spark a Senior Service and sink a milk stout, we kick cans down this week’s rock and roll boulevard stopping off at the following hotspots …
… the “Grunge Dripdown”: why Pe…
Max Décharné reboots the golden age of the Teddy Boys
If a film director wanted to flag up incoming violence in the late ‘50s, the camera would fall upon a couple of Teds lurking in the street outside. The teenage Keith Richards remembers razors, bike c…
Guy Garvey remembers the Grumbleweeds in panto, Santana fantasies & a song nicked from Roy Castle
Guy Garvey and Elbow start touring the UK in May and he looks back here at the first shows he saw growing up in Bury in the ’70s - when his five elders introduced him to punk, prog, folk, soul and El…
Lulu, when Prince did a bad thing and how the Beatles changed the shape of the human head
This week the two-man kayak of curiosity tackles the following rock and roll rapids …
… when was the last time there was a truly universal hit?
… why Waylon Jennings walked out of We Are The World.
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Musicians and their mothers and the records we could never sell
We spun the week’s rock and roll roulette wheel and this is where the balls landed …
… why all rock biopics are worth seeing once.
… ‘demixing’: we spent ages perfecting records. Now we’re unperfect…
Tom Hibbert (the world’s funniest music writer) and why Madonna should be sued
Our piercing Hubble Telescope Of Truth scans the rock and roll heavens to see what new patterns emerge, among them …
… running into Rod Stewart at a friend’s funeral.
… the priceless spectacle of roc…
TV's greatest musical moment - and are we still allowed to laugh at hopeless old rock bands?
Applying our patent ACME wheat/chaff separator to the rock and roll cornfield, this week’s podcast reaps the following harvest ….
… Stray, Budgie, Fat Mattress, Atomic Rooster … ropey bargain-bin fi…