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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Music Commentary Music Music Interviews Music History

Update frequency: every 2 days
Average duration: 43 minutes
Episodes: 858
Years Active: 2007 - 2025

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Word Podcast 271 - with Sarfraz Manzoor

Usually our guests are talking about freshly-published books. It's actually ten years since Sarfraz Manzoor put out Greetings From Bury Park, his memoir about growing up in a traditional Pakistani fa…

00:35:40 | Tue 18 Jul 2017

Word Podcast 270 - Uncommon People

We loved them because they could do things we could never do. We adopted them as our fantasy friends when we were teenagers and were still measuring ourselves against them forty years after. David He…

00:34:55 | Wed 07 Jun 2017

Word Podcast 269 - Thomas Dolby

Thomas Dolby’s career has seen him sharing a helicopter with a terrified David Bowie over Wembley Stadium, labouring on the nightshift at a New York studio in search of noises that Foreigner might li…

00:57:04 | Thu 25 May 2017

Word Podcast 268 - John Ingham

John Ingham used to sign himself Jonh Ingham when he covered the very early stirrings of punk rock in 1976 for Sounds. Although he was a writer by trade he took along his camera because literally nob…

00:45:37 | Sun 21 May 2017

Word Podcast 267 - Miranda Sawyer and Barry McIlheney

David Hepworth started at Smash Hits in the late 70s, Mark Ellen joined in the early 80s, Barry McIlheney arrived in the middle of the decade and Miranda Sawyer came along in the late 80s. Therefore …

00:57:31 | Sun 30 Apr 2017

Word Podcast 266 - Tom Doyle on Elton Hercules John

“Captain Fantastic” is Tom Doyle’s account of Elton’s most tumultuous decade, the 70s, during which time he assumed every role from bedsitter poet to intercontinental hell raiser, from singing fronti…

00:43:58 | Sun 30 Apr 2017

Word Podcast 265 - David “Ram Jam” Rodigan

There’s a rich British tradition of well brought up young men from the leafier suburbs developing a fixation on music from a very different culture and somehow getting themselves a job playing said m…

00:49:40 | Thu 06 Apr 2017

Word Podcast 264 - Tessa Niles and Gina Foster talking BVs

We were delighted to be joined by two of the UK’s most respected providers of backing vocals and harmonies, who between them have sung with everybody from David Bowie at Live Aid on down. They showed…

00:50:36 | Wed 29 Mar 2017

Word Podcast 263 - Jon Savage shortcast

In this shortcast Jon Savage talks to David Hepworth about his new compilation album, “1967 - The Year Pop Divided”. Forty-eight tracks of psych-flavoured pop, rock and soul from the last year before…

00:18:00 | Tue 07 Mar 2017

Word Podcast 262 - Tony Fletcher

In Which Tony Fletcher tells us about Wilson Pickett, who was impossible as a child, inimitable as a singer and incorrigible as a success, and how he came to write “In The Midnight Hour”.

Hosted on A…

01:05:26 | Sun 19 Feb 2017

Word Podcast 261 - Barney Hoskyns

In which Barney Hoskyns talks to us about Woodstock and the part it played in the lives of Dylan, the Band, Albert Grossman and Van Morrison, as related in his book “Small Town Talk”.

Hosted on Acast…

00:55:41 | Mon 13 Feb 2017

Word Podcast 260 - Jeff Evans

In which Jeff Evans returns from researching the full history of "Rock and Pop On TV" for his new book and talks to Mark Ellen and David Hepworth about not just "Six Five Special" but also "Cool For …

00:53:02 | Thu 09 Feb 2017

Word Podcast 259 - with Paul Gambaccini

In which Paul Gambaccini, that son of New York who became an institution of British broadcasting, talks to Mark Ellen and David Hepworth about how the Beatles changed his life, how he got into broadc…

01:16:16 | Sun 29 Jan 2017

Word Podcast 258 - Mick Houghton & Adam White

In which Mick Houghton, the author of a book about the legendary folk-rock label Elektra, and Adam White, the man behind a huge tome about the history of Motown, talk to David Hepworth about the uniq…

01:15:55 | Sun 11 Dec 2016

Word Podcast 257 - Richard Houghton

In which Richard Houghton, the author of “I Was There”, a collection of first-hand reminiscences from people who saw the Beatles back in the sixties, from under-attended dance halls in England to ove…

00:29:33 | Fri 09 Dec 2016

Word Podcast 256 - Paul Morley on David Bowie

In which David Hepworth talks to legendary journalist and author Paul Morley about how David Bowie inflamed his young imagination and his new book The Age Of Bowie.

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00:58:07 | Thu 22 Sep 2016

Word Podcast 255 - Hunter Davies

In which David Hepworth talks to legendary journalist and author Hunter Davies about his time as a fly on the wall with the Beatles in the middle sixties and his newly-published Beatles Book.

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00:53:20 | Sat 17 Sep 2016

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