Podcasts about Graeme Thomson

On this week's Spectator Out Loud: Rachel Johnson reads her diary for the week (1:19); James Heale analyses the true value of Labour peer Lord Alli (6:58); Paul Wood questions if Israel is trying to drag America into a war with Iran (11:59); Rowan Pelling reviews Want: Sexual Fantasies, collated by Gillian Anderson (19:47); and Graeme Thomson explores the ethics of the posthumous publication of new music (28:00).    Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

On this week's Spectator Out Loud: Rachel Johnson reads her diary for the week (1:19); James Heale analyses the true value of Labour peer Lord Alli (6:58); Paul Wood questions if Israel is trying to drag America into a war with Iran (11:59); Rowan Pelling reviews Want: Sexual Fantasies, collated by Gillian Anderson (19:47); and Graeme Thomson explores the ethics of the posthumous publication of new music (28:00).    Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Graeme Thomson, author of the acclaimed biography Under the Ivy, explores the life and music of Kate Bush. The post Kate Bush – Her Life and Music appeared first on The Strange Brew .

For the latest podcast Ali caught up with previous podcast guest Graeme Thomson to talk about Under The Ivy, his biography of Kate Bush which has been updated as part of Omnibus Press' Remastered Series. Graeme explains the challenges in writing about such a well-loved, and private, person, the reaction of those interviewed, the formative years of her seemingly idyllic childhood, the questionable press coverage of the artist and her career, and the renewed interest in her career due to Netflix' Stranger Things. The two then discuss Small Hours, Graeme's book about the enigmatic, and problematic, John Martyn, and you could hardly get a more different subject from Bush than Martyn. Graeme discusses the difficulties in writing about controversy, the levels of research required, needing to admire your subject, and keeping the music to the fore. The conversation also touches upon the differing approaches to writing biographies, the importance of being respectful, how the procedure varies depending on the subject, and his hopes for future projects. Graeme also talks about the warm reception to Themes for Great Cities: A New History of Simple Minds which is now available in paperback, and which was the subject of our previous SWH! podcast with Graeme. One of the finest music journalists and writers around, Graeme Thomson is always a pleasure to talk to as he offers further insight into his books and their subjects, and we hope you enjoy listening as much as we did recording it. For full details, and all the ways to listen, head to https://www.scotswhayhae.com

Graeme is an old friend of the podcast. We've talked to him in the past about his books on Phil Lynott and John Martyn. ‘Under The Ivy: the Life And Music of Kate Bush' first appeared in 2010, and was revised in 2015 after her Before the Dawn concerts and it's now been updated again as, despite no new music or public appearances, her worldwide reputation has rocketed through the roof. We look back here at various key points in the story including ...   … why the way she made records was ahead of its time. … the ‘70s footage and recordings that were “supressed”. … the “reclusive” decade and how the press filled the vacuum. … divinely daft and humorous TV appearances eg with Delia Smith: “Waldorf Salad – that's got waldorfs in it!” … her bohemian childhood and the powerful influence of male counterparts, particularly eldest brother and erotic poet John Carder Bush. … the unconventional Smash Hits interview of 1981. … the ‘Before the Dawn' concerts and the reason she staged them. … her seven-year stand-off with Top Of The Pops. … her ‘70s rock group – the KT Bush Band (still going!) – and the songs they played eg The Stealer by Free, Brooklyn by Steely Dan, Shame Shame Shame by Johnny Winter. … Danny Baker's NME review – “nothing she writes about matters”. … Pamela Stephenson's vicious pastiche and Alan Partridge's part in her comeback. ... Talk Talk, Blackadder, Monty Python, Powell & Pressburger, Oscar Wilde, Celtic folk, the Pre-Raphaelites and other early influences. … and the advantage of never being cool. Order 'Under The Ivy' here …https://www.amazon.co.uk/Under-Ivy-Music-Omnibus-Remastered/dp/1915841356Find out more about how you can help us keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Graeme is an old friend of the podcast. We've talked to him in the past about his books on Phil Lynott and John Martyn. ‘Under The Ivy: the Life And Music of Kate Bush' first appeared in 2010, and was revised in 2015 after her Before the Dawn concerts and it's now been updated again as, despite no new music or public appearances, her worldwide reputation has rocketed through the roof. We look back here at various key points in the story including ...   … why the way she made records was ahead of its time. … the ‘70s footage and recordings that were “supressed”. … the “reclusive” decade and how the press filled the vacuum. … divinely daft and humorous TV appearances eg with Delia Smith: “Waldorf Salad – that's got waldorfs in it!” … her bohemian childhood and the powerful influence of male counterparts, particularly eldest brother and erotic poet John Carder Bush. … the unconventional Smash Hits interview of 1981. … the ‘Before the Dawn' concerts and the reason she staged them. … her seven-year stand-off with Top Of The Pops. … her ‘70s rock group – the KT Bush Band (still going!) – and the songs they played eg The Stealer by Free, Brooklyn by Steely Dan, Shame Shame Shame by Johnny Winter. … Danny Baker's NME review – “nothing she writes about matters”. … Pamela Stephenson's vicious pastiche and Alan Partridge's part in her comeback. ... Talk Talk, Blackadder, Monty Python, Powell & Pressburger, Oscar Wilde, Celtic folk, the Pre-Raphaelites and other early influences. … and the advantage of never being cool. Order 'Under The Ivy' here …https://www.amazon.co.uk/Under-Ivy-Music-Omnibus-Remastered/dp/1915841356Find out more about how you can help us keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Graeme is an old friend of the podcast. We've talked to him in the past about his books on Phil Lynott and John Martyn. ‘Under The Ivy: the Life And Music of Kate Bush' first appeared in 2010, and was revised in 2015 after her Before the Dawn concerts and it's now been updated again as, despite no new music or public appearances, her worldwide reputation has rocketed through the roof. We look back here at various key points in the story including ...   … why the way she made records was ahead of its time. … the ‘70s footage and recordings that were “supressed”. … the “reclusive” decade and how the press filled the vacuum. … divinely daft and humorous TV appearances eg with Delia Smith: “Waldorf Salad – that's got waldorfs in it!” … her bohemian childhood and the powerful influence of male counterparts, particularly eldest brother and erotic poet John Carder Bush. … the unconventional Smash Hits interview of 1981. … the ‘Before the Dawn' concerts and the reason she staged them. … her seven-year stand-off with Top Of The Pops. … her ‘70s rock group – the KT Bush Band (still going!) – and the songs they played eg The Stealer by Free, Brooklyn by Steely Dan, Shame Shame Shame by Johnny Winter. … Danny Baker's NME review – “nothing she writes about matters”. … Pamela Stephenson's vicious pastiche and Alan Partridge's part in her comeback. ... Talk Talk, Blackadder, Monty Python, Powell & Pressburger, Oscar Wilde, Celtic folk, the Pre-Raphaelites and other early influences. … and the advantage of never being cool. Order 'Under The Ivy' here …https://www.amazon.co.uk/Under-Ivy-Music-Omnibus-Remastered/dp/1915841356Find out more about how you can help us keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week's Spectator Out Loud: reporting from St Helena, Douglas Murray reflects on the inhabitants he has met and the history of the British Overseas Territory (1:12); Lionel Shriver opines on the debate around transgender care (9:08); following a boyhood dream to visit the country to watch cricket, Mark Mason reads his letter from India as he travels with his son (17:54); and, Graeme Thomson reviews Taylor Swift's new album (22:41).   Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

On this week's Spectator Out Loud: reporting from St Helena, Douglas Murray reflects on the inhabitants he has met and the history of the British Overseas Territory (1:12); Lionel Shriver opines on the debate around transgender care (9:08); following a boyhood dream to visit the country to watch cricket, Mark Mason reads his letter from India as he travels with his son (17:54); and, Graeme Thomson reviews Taylor Swift's new album (22:41).   Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Graeme Thomson in conversation with David Eastaugh https://omnibuspress.com/products/small-hours-the-long-night-of-john-martyn Small Hours is an intimate, unflinching biography of one of the great maverick artists. Though Martyn never had a hit single, his extraordinary voice, innovative guitar playing and profoundly soulful songs secured his status as a much admired pioneer. Covered by Eric Clapton, revered by Lee Scratch Perry, produced by Phil Collins, Martyn influenced several generations of musicians, but beneath the songs lay a complicated and volatile personality. He lived his life the same way he made music: improvising as he went; scattering brilliance, beauty, rage and destruction in his wake. Drawing on almost 100 new interviews, Small Hours is a raw and utterly gripping account of sixty years of daredevil creativity, soaring highs and sometimes unconscionable lows.  

This week: Richard Madeley reads his diary (01:06), Kate Andrews describes how Kate-gate gripped America (06:18), Lloyd Evans warns against meddling with Shakespeare (11:38), Sam McPhail details how Cruyff changed modern football (18:17), and Graeme Thomson reads his interview with Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera (25:23).  Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson. 

This week: Richard Madeley reads his diary (01:06), Kate Andrews describes how Kate-gate gripped America (06:18), Lloyd Evans warns against meddling with Shakespeare (11:38), Sam McPhail details how Cruyff changed modern football (18:17), and Graeme Thomson reads his interview with Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera (25:23).  Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson. 

Episode 171 looks at "Hey Jude", the White Album, and the career of the Beatles from August 1967 through November 1968. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on "I Love You" by People!. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata Not really an error, but at one point I refer to Ornette Coleman as a saxophonist. While he was, he plays trumpet on the track that is excerpted after that. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. This time I also used Steve Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. I referred to Philip Norman's biographies of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney, to Graeme Thomson's biography of George Harrison, Take a Sad Song by James Campion, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life by Donald Brackett, Those Were the Days 2.0 by Stephan Granados, and Sound Pictures by Kenneth Womack. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of “Hey Jude” is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but a remixed stereo mix is easily available on the new reissue of the 1967-70 compilation. The original mixes of the White Album are also, shockingly, out of print, but this 2018 remix is available for the moment. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a quick note -- this episode deals, among other topics, with child abandonment, spousal neglect, suicide attempts, miscarriage, rape accusations, and heroin addiction. If any of those topics are likely to upset you, you might want to check the transcript rather than listening to this episode. It also, for once, contains a short excerpt of an expletive, but given that that expletive in that context has been regularly played on daytime radio without complaint for over fifty years, I suspect it can be excused. The use of mantra meditation is something that exists across religions, and which appears to have been independently invented multiple times, in multiple cultures. In the Western culture to which most of my listeners belong, it is now best known as an aspect of what is known as "mindfulness", a secularised version of Buddhism which aims to provide adherents with the benefits of the teachings of the Buddha but without the cosmology to which they are attached. But it turns up in almost every religious tradition I know of in one form or another. The idea of mantra meditation is a very simple one, and one that even has some basis in science. There is a mathematical principle in neurology and information science called the free energy principle which says our brains are wired to try to minimise how surprised we are --  our brain is constantly making predictions about the world, and then looking at the results from our senses to see if they match. If they do, that's great, and the brain will happily move on to its next prediction. If they don't, the brain has to update its model of the world to match the new information, make new predictions, and see if those new predictions are a better match. Every person has a different mental model of the world, and none of them match reality, but every brain tries to get as close as possible. This updating of the model to match the new information is called "thinking", and it uses up energy, and our bodies and brains have evolved to conserve energy as much as possible. This means that for many people, most of the time, thinking is unpleasant, and indeed much of the time that people have spent thinking, they've been thinking about how to stop themselves having to do it at all, and when they have managed to stop thinking, however briefly, they've experienced great bliss. Many more or less effective technologies have been created to bring about a more minimal-energy state, including alcohol, heroin, and barbituates, but many of these have unwanted side-effects, such as death, which people also tend to want to avoid, and so people have often turned to another technology. It turns out that for many people, they can avoid thinking by simply thinking about something that is utterly predictable. If they minimise the amount of sensory input, and concentrate on something that they can predict exactly, eventually they can turn off their mind, relax, and float downstream, without dying. One easy way to do this is to close your eyes, so you can't see anything, make your breath as regular as possible, and then concentrate on a sound that repeats over and over.  If you repeat a single phrase or word a few hundred times, that regular repetition eventually causes your mind to stop having to keep track of the world, and experience a peace that is, by all accounts, unlike any other experience. What word or phrase that is can depend very much on the tradition. In Transcendental Meditation, each person has their own individual phrase. In the Catholicism in which George Harrison and Paul McCartney were raised, popular phrases for this are "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner" or "Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen." In some branches of Buddhism, a popular mantra is "_NAMU MYŌHŌ RENGE KYŌ_". In the Hinduism to which George Harrison later converted, you can use "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare", "Om Namo Bhagavate Vāsudevāya" or "Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha". Those last two start with the syllable "Om", and indeed some people prefer to just use that syllable, repeating a single syllable over and over again until they reach a state of transcendence. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude" ("na na na na na na na")] We don't know much about how the Beatles first discovered Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, except that it was thanks to Pattie Boyd, George Harrison's then-wife. Unfortunately, her memory of how she first became involved in the Maharishi's Spiritual Regeneration Movement, as described in her autobiography, doesn't fully line up with other known facts. She talks about reading about the Maharishi in the paper with her friend Marie-Lise while George was away on tour, but she also places the date that this happened in February 1967, several months after the Beatles had stopped touring forever. We'll be seeing a lot more of these timing discrepancies as this story progresses, and people's memories increasingly don't match the events that happened to them. Either way, it's clear that Pattie became involved in the Spiritual Regeneration Movement a good length of time before her husband did. She got him to go along with her to one of the Maharishi's lectures, after she had already been converted to the practice of Transcendental Meditation, and they brought along John, Paul, and their partners (Ringo's wife Maureen had just given birth, so they didn't come). As we heard back in episode one hundred and fifty, that lecture was impressive enough that the group, plus their wives and girlfriends (with the exception of Maureen Starkey) and Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, all went on a meditation retreat with the Maharishi at a holiday camp in Bangor, and it was there that they learned that Brian Epstein had been found dead. The death of the man who had guided the group's career could not have come at a worse time for the band's stability.  The group had only recorded one song in the preceding two months -- Paul's "Your Mother Should Know" -- and had basically been running on fumes since completing recording of Sgt Pepper many months earlier. John's drug intake had increased to the point that he was barely functional -- although with the enthusiasm of the newly converted he had decided to swear off LSD at the Maharishi's urging -- and his marriage was falling apart. Similarly, Paul McCartney's relationship with Jane Asher was in a bad state, though both men were trying to repair their damaged relationships, while both George and Ringo were having doubts about the band that had made them famous. In George's case, he was feeling marginalised by John and Paul, his songs ignored or paid cursory attention, and there was less for him to do on the records as the group moved away from making guitar-based rock and roll music into the stranger areas of psychedelia. And Ringo, whose main memory of the recording of Sgt Pepper was of learning to play chess while the others went through the extensive overdubs that characterised that album, was starting to feel like his playing was deteriorating, and that as the only non-writer in the band he was on the outside to an extent. On top of that, the group were in the middle of a major plan to restructure their business. As part of their contract renegotiations with EMI at the beginning of 1967, it had been agreed that they would receive two million pounds -- roughly fifteen million pounds in today's money -- in unpaid royalties as a lump sum. If that had been paid to them as individuals, or through the company they owned, the Beatles Ltd, they would have had to pay the full top rate of tax on it, which as George had complained the previous year was over ninety-five percent. (In fact, he'd been slightly exaggerating the generosity of the UK tax system to the rich, as at that point the top rate of income tax was somewhere around ninety-seven and a half percent). But happily for them, a couple of years earlier the UK had restructured its tax laws and introduced a corporation tax, which meant that the profits of corporations were no longer taxed at the same high rate as income. So a new company had been set up, The Beatles & Co, and all the group's non-songwriting income was paid into the company. Each Beatle owned five percent of the company, and the other eighty percent was owned by a new partnership, a corporation that was soon renamed Apple Corps -- a name inspired by a painting that McCartney had liked by the artist Rene Magritte. In the early stages of Apple, it was very entangled with Nems, the company that was owned by Brian and Clive Epstein, and which was in the process of being sold to Robert Stigwood, though that sale fell through after Brian's death. The first part of Apple, Apple Publishing, had been set up in the summer of 1967, and was run by Terry Doran, a friend of Epstein's who ran a motor dealership -- most of the Apple divisions would be run by friends of the group rather than by people with experience in the industries in question. As Apple was set up during the point that Stigwood was getting involved with NEMS, Apple Publishing's initial offices were in the same building with, and shared staff with, two publishing companies that Stigwood owned, Dratleaf Music, who published Cream's songs, and Abigail Music, the Bee Gees' publishers. And indeed the first two songs published by Apple were copyrights that were gifted to the company by Stigwood -- "Listen to the Sky", a B-side by an obscure band called Sands: [Excerpt: Sands, "Listen to the Sky"] And "Outside Woman Blues", an arrangement by Eric Clapton of an old blues song by Blind Joe Reynolds, which Cream had copyrighted separately and released on Disraeli Gears: [Excerpt: Cream, "Outside Woman Blues"] But Apple soon started signing outside songwriters -- once Mike Berry, a member of Apple Publishing's staff, had sat McCartney down and explained to him what music publishing actually was, something he had never actually understood even though he'd been a songwriter for five years. Those songwriters, given that this was 1967, were often also performers, and as Apple Records had not yet been set up, Apple would try to arrange recording contracts for them with other labels. They started with a group called Focal Point, who got signed by badgering Paul McCartney to listen to their songs until he gave them Doran's phone number to shut them up: [Excerpt: Focal Point, "Sycamore Sid"] But the big early hope for Apple Publishing was a songwriter called George Alexander. Alexander's birth name had been Alexander Young, and he was the brother of George Young, who was a member of the Australian beat group The Easybeats, who'd had a hit with "Friday on My Mind": [Excerpt: The Easybeats, "Friday on My Mind"] His younger brothers Malcolm and Angus would go on to have a few hits themselves, but AC/DC wouldn't be formed for another five years. Terry Doran thought that Alexander should be a member of a band, because bands were more popular than solo artists at the time, and so he was placed with three former members of Tony Rivers and the Castaways, a Beach Boys soundalike group that had had some minor success. John Lennon suggested that the group be named Grapefruit, after a book he was reading by a conceptual artist of his acquaintance named Yoko Ono, and as Doran was making arrangements with Terry Melcher for a reciprocal publishing deal by which Melcher's American company would publish Apple songs in the US while Apple published songs from Melcher's company in the UK, it made sense for Melcher to also produce Grapefruit's first single, "Dear Delilah": [Excerpt: Grapefruit, "Dear Delilah"] That made number twenty-one in the UK when it came out in early 1968, on the back of publicity about Grapefruit's connection with the Beatles, but future singles by the band were much less successful, and like several other acts involved with Apple, they found that they were more hampered by the Beatles connection than helped. A few other people were signed to Apple Publishing early on, of whom the most notable was Jackie Lomax. Lomax had been a member of a minor Merseybeat group, the Undertakers, and after they had split up, he'd been signed by Brian Epstein with a new group, the Lomax Alliance, who had released one single, "Try as You May": [Excerpt: The Lomax Alliance, "Try As You May"] After Epstein's death, Lomax had plans to join another band, being formed by another Merseybeat musician, Chris Curtis, the former drummer of the Searchers. But after going to the Beatles to talk with them about them helping the new group financially, Lomax was persuaded by John Lennon to go solo instead. He may later have regretted that decision, as by early 1968 the people that Curtis had recruited for his new band had ditched him and were making a name for themselves as Deep Purple. Lomax recorded one solo single with funding from Stigwood, a cover version of a song by an obscure singer-songwriter, Jake Holmes, "Genuine Imitation Life": [Excerpt: Jackie Lomax, "Genuine Imitation Life"] But he was also signed to Apple Publishing as a songwriter. The Beatles had only just started laying out plans for Apple when Epstein died, and other than the publishing company one of the few things they'd agreed on was that they were going to have a film company, which was to be run by Denis O'Dell, who had been an associate producer on A Hard Day's Night and on How I Won The War, the Richard Lester film Lennon had recently starred in. A few days after Epstein's death, they had a meeting, in which they agreed that the band needed to move forward quickly if they were going to recover from Epstein's death. They had originally been planning on going to India with the Maharishi to study meditation, but they decided to put that off until the new year, and to press forward with a film project Paul had been talking about, to be titled Magical Mystery Tour. And so, on the fifth of September 1967, they went back into the recording studio and started work on a song of John's that was earmarked for the film, "I am the Walrus": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] Magical Mystery Tour, the film, has a mixed reputation which we will talk about shortly, but one defence that Paul McCartney has always made of it is that it's the only place where you can see the Beatles performing "I am the Walrus". While the song was eventually relegated to a B-side, it's possibly the finest B-side of the Beatles' career, and one of the best tracks the group ever made. As with many of Lennon's songs from this period, the song was a collage of many different elements pulled from his environment and surroundings, and turned into something that was rather more than the sum of its parts. For its musical inspiration, Lennon pulled from, of all things, a police siren going past his house. (For those who are unfamiliar with what old British police sirens sounded like, as opposed to the ones in use for most of my lifetime or in other countries, here's a recording of one): [Excerpt: British police siren ca 1968] That inspired Lennon to write a snatch of lyric to go with the sound of the siren, starting "Mister city policeman sitting pretty". He had two other song fragments, one about sitting in the garden, and one about sitting on a cornflake, and he told Hunter Davies, who was doing interviews for his authorised biography of the group, “I don't know how it will all end up. Perhaps they'll turn out to be different parts of the same song.” But the final element that made these three disparate sections into a song was a letter that came from Stephen Bayley, a pupil at Lennon's old school Quarry Bank, who told him that the teachers at the school -- who Lennon always thought of as having suppressed his creativity -- were now analysing Beatles lyrics in their lessons. Lennon decided to come up with some nonsense that they couldn't analyse -- though as nonsensical as the finished song is, there's an underlying anger to a lot of it that possibly comes from Lennon thinking of his school experiences. And so Lennon asked his old schoolfriend Pete Shotton to remind him of a disgusting playground chant that kids used to sing in schools in the North West of England (and which they still sang with very minor variations at my own school decades later -- childhood folklore has a remarkably long life). That rhyme went: Yellow matter custard, green snot pie All mixed up with a dead dog's eye Slap it on a butty, nice and thick, And drink it down with a cup of cold sick Lennon combined some parts of this with half-remembered fragments of Lewis Carrol's The Walrus and the Carpenter, and with some punning references to things that were going on in his own life and those of his friends -- though it's difficult to know exactly which of the stories attached to some of the more incomprehensible bits of the lyrics are accurate. The story that the line "I am the eggman" is about a sexual proclivity of Eric Burdon of the Animals seems plausible, while the contention by some that the phrase "semolina pilchard" is a reference to Sgt Pilcher, the corrupt policeman who had arrested three of the Rolling Stones, and would later arrest Lennon, on drugs charges, seems less likely. The track is a masterpiece of production, but the release of the basic take on Anthology 2 in 1996 showed that the underlying performance, before George Martin worked his magic with the overdubs, is still a remarkable piece of work: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus (Anthology 2 version)"] But Martin's arrangement and production turned the track from a merely very good track into a masterpiece. The string arrangement, very much in the same mould as that for "Strawberry Fields Forever" but giving a very different effect with its harsh cello glissandi, is the kind of thing one expects from Martin, but there's also the chanting of the Mike Sammes Singers, who were more normally booked for sessions like Englebert Humperdinck's "The Last Waltz": [Excerpt: Engelbert Humperdinck, "The Last Waltz"] But here were instead asked to imitate the sound of the strings, make grunting noises, and generally go very far out of their normal comfort zone: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] But the most fascinating piece of production in the entire track is an idea that seems to have been inspired by people like John Cage -- a live feed of a radio being tuned was played into the mono mix from about the halfway point, and whatever was on the radio at the time was captured: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] This is also why for many decades it was impossible to have a true stereo mix of the track -- the radio part was mixed directly into the mono mix, and it wasn't until the 1990s that someone thought to track down a copy of the original radio broadcasts and recreate the process. In one of those bits of synchronicity that happen more often than you would think when you're creating aleatory art, and which are why that kind of process can be so appealing, one bit of dialogue from the broadcast of King Lear that was on the radio as the mixing was happening was *perfectly* timed: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] After completing work on the basic track for "I am the Walrus", the group worked on two more songs for the film, George's "Blue Jay Way" and a group-composed twelve-bar blues instrumental called "Flying", before starting production. Magical Mystery Tour, as an idea, was inspired in equal parts by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, the collective of people we talked about in the episode on the Grateful Dead who travelled across the US extolling the virtues of psychedelic drugs, and by mystery tours, a British working-class tradition that has rather fallen out of fashion in the intervening decades. A mystery tour would generally be put on by a coach-hire company, and would be a day trip to an unannounced location -- though the location would in fact be very predictable, and would be a seaside town within a couple of hours' drive of its starting point. In the case of the ones the Beatles remembered from their own childhoods, this would be to a coastal town in Lancashire or Wales, like Blackpool, Rhyl, or Prestatyn. A coachload of people would pay to be driven to this random location, get very drunk and have a singsong on the bus, and spend a day wherever they were taken. McCartney's plan was simple -- they would gather a group of passengers and replicate this experience over the course of several days, and film whatever went on, but intersperse that with more planned out sketches and musical numbers. For this reason, along with the Beatles and their associates, the cast included some actors found through Spotlight and some of the group's favourite performers, like the comedian Nat Jackley (whose comedy sequence directed by John was cut from the final film) and the surrealist poet/singer/comedian Ivor Cutler: [Excerpt: Ivor Cutler, "I'm Going in a Field"] The film also featured an appearance by a new band who would go on to have great success over the next year, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. They had recorded their first single in Abbey Road at the same time as the Beatles were recording Revolver, but rather than being progressive psychedelic rock, it had been a remake of a 1920s novelty song: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "My Brother Makes the Noises For the Talkies"] Their performance in Magical Mystery Tour was very different though -- they played a fifties rock pastiche written by band leaders Vivian Stanshall and Neil Innes while a stripper took off her clothes. While several other musical sequences were recorded for the film, including one by the band Traffic and one by Cutler, other than the Beatles tracks only the Bonzos' song made it into the finished film: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "Death Cab for Cutie"] That song, thirty years later, would give its name to a prominent American alternative rock band. Incidentally the same night that Magical Mystery Tour was first broadcast was also the night that the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band first appeared on a TV show, Do Not Adjust Your Set, which featured three future members of the Monty Python troupe -- Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and Terry Jones. Over the years the careers of the Bonzos, the Pythons, and the Beatles would become increasingly intertwined, with George Harrison in particular striking up strong friendships and working relationships with Bonzos Neil Innes and "Legs" Larry Smith. The filming of Magical Mystery Tour went about as well as one might expect from a film made by four directors, none of whom had any previous filmmaking experience, and none of whom had any business knowledge. The Beatles were used to just turning up and having things magically done for them by other people, and had no real idea of the infrastructure challenges that making a film, even a low-budget one, actually presents, and ended up causing a great deal of stress to almost everyone involved. The completed film was shown on TV on Boxing Day 1967 to general confusion and bemusement. It didn't help that it was originally broadcast in black and white, and so for example the scene showing shifting landscapes (outtake footage from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, tinted various psychedelic colours) over the "Flying" music, just looked like grey fuzz. But also, it just wasn't what people were expecting from a Beatles film. This was a ramshackle, plotless, thing more inspired by Andy Warhol's underground films than by the kind of thing the group had previously appeared in, and it was being presented as Christmas entertainment for all the family. And to be honest, it's not even a particularly good example of underground filmmaking -- though it looks like a masterpiece when placed next to something like the Bee Gees' similar effort, Cucumber Castle. But there are enough interesting sequences in there for the project not to be a complete failure -- and the deleted scenes on the DVD release, including the performances by Cutler and Traffic, and the fact that the film was edited down from ten hours to fifty-two minutes, makes one wonder if there's a better film that could be constructed from the original footage. Either way, the reaction to the film was so bad that McCartney actually appeared on David Frost's TV show the next day to defend it and, essentially, apologise. While they were editing the film, the group were also continuing to work in the studio, including on two new McCartney songs, "The Fool on the Hill", which was included in Magical Mystery Tour, and "Hello Goodbye", which wasn't included on the film's soundtrack but was released as the next single, with "I Am the Walrus" as the B-side: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Incidentally, in the UK the soundtrack to Magical Mystery Tour was released as a double-EP rather than as an album (in the US, the group's recent singles and B-sides were added to turn it into a full-length album, which is how it's now generally available). "I Am the Walrus" was on the double-EP as well as being on the single's B-side, and the double-EP got to number two on the singles charts, meaning "I am the Walrus" was on the records at number one and number two at the same time. Before it became obvious that the film, if not the soundtrack, was a disaster, the group held a launch party on the twenty-first of December, 1967. The band members went along in fancy dress, as did many of the cast and crew -- the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band performed at the party. Mike Love and Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys also turned up at the party, and apparently at one point jammed with the Bonzos, and according to some, but not all, reports, a couple of the Beatles joined in as well. Love and Johnston had both just met the Maharishi for the first time a couple of days earlier, and Love had been as impressed as the Beatles were, and it may have been at this party that the group mentioned to Love that they would soon be going on a retreat in India with the guru -- a retreat that was normally meant for training TM instructors, but this time seemed to be more about getting celebrities involved. Love would also end up going with them. That party was also the first time that Cynthia Lennon had an inkling that John might not be as faithful to her as she previously supposed. John had always "joked" about being attracted to George Harrison's wife, Patti, but this time he got a little more blatant about his attraction than he ever had previously, to the point that he made Cynthia cry, and Cynthia's friend, the pop star Lulu, decided to give Lennon a very public dressing-down for his cruelty to his wife, a dressing-down that must have been a sight to behold, as Lennon was dressed as a Teddy boy while Lulu was in a Shirley Temple costume. It's a sign of how bad the Lennons' marriage was at this point that this was the second time in a two-month period where Cynthia had ended up crying because of John at a film launch party and been comforted by a female pop star. In October, Cilla Black had held a party to celebrate the belated release of John's film How I Won the War, and during the party Georgie Fame had come up to Black and said, confused, "Cynthia Lennon is hiding in your wardrobe". Black went and had a look, and Cynthia explained to her “I'm waiting to see how long it is before John misses me and comes looking for me.” Black's response had been “You'd better face it, kid—he's never gonna come.” Also at the Magical Mystery Tour party was Lennon's father, now known as Freddie Lennon, and his new nineteen-year-old fiancee. While Hunter Davis had been researching the Beatles' biography, he'd come across some evidence that the version of Freddie's attitude towards John that his mother's side of the family had always told him -- that Freddie had been a cruel and uncaring husband who had not actually wanted to be around his son -- might not be the whole of the truth, and that the mother who he had thought of as saintly might also have had some part to play in their marriage breaking down and Freddie not seeing his son for twenty years. The two had made some tentative attempts at reconciliation, and indeed Freddie would even come and live with John for a while, though within a couple of years the younger Lennon's heart would fully harden against his father again. Of course, the things that John always resented his father for were pretty much exactly the kind of things that Lennon himself was about to do. It was around this time as well that Derek Taylor gave the Beatles copies of the debut album by a young singer/songwriter named Harry Nilsson. Nilsson will be getting his own episode down the line, but not for a couple of years at my current rates, so it's worth bringing that up here, because that album became a favourite of all the Beatles, and would have a huge influence on their songwriting for the next couple of years, and because one song on the album, "1941", must have resonated particularly deeply with Lennon right at this moment -- an autobiographical song by Nilsson about how his father had left him and his mother when he was a small boy, and about his own fear that, as his first marriage broke down, he was repeating the pattern with his stepson Scott: [Excerpt: Nilsson, "1941"] The other major event of December 1967, rather overshadowed by the Magical Mystery Tour disaster the next day, was that on Christmas Day Paul McCartney and Jane Asher announced their engagement. A few days later, George Harrison flew to India. After John and Paul had had their outside film projects -- John starring in How I Won The War and Paul doing the soundtrack for The Family Way -- the other two Beatles more or less simultaneously did their own side project films, and again one acted while the other did a soundtrack. Both of these projects were in the rather odd subgenre of psychedelic shambolic comedy film that sprang up in the mid sixties, a subgenre that produced a lot of fascinating films, though rather fewer good ones. Indeed, both of them were in the subsubgenre of shambolic psychedelic *sex* comedies. In Ringo's case, he had a small role in the film Candy, which was based on the novel we mentioned in the last episode, co-written by Terry Southern, which was in itself a loose modern rewriting of Voltaire's Candide. Unfortunately, like such other classics of this subgenre as Anthony Newley's Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, Candy has dated *extremely* badly, and unless you find repeated scenes of sexual assault and rape, ethnic stereotypes, and jokes about deformity and disfigurement to be an absolute laugh riot, it's not a film that's worth seeking out, and Starr's part in it is not a major one. Harrison's film was of the same basic genre -- a film called Wonderwall about a mad scientist who discovers a way to see through the walls of his apartment, and gets to see a photographer taking sexy photographs of a young woman named Penny Lane, played by Jane Birkin: [Excerpt: Some Wonderwall film dialogue ripped from the Blu-Ray] Wonderwall would, of course, later inspire the title of a song by Oasis, and that's what the film is now best known for, but it's a less-unwatchable film than Candy, and while still problematic it's less so. Which is something. Harrison had been the Beatle with least involvement in Magical Mystery Tour -- McCartney had been the de facto director, Starr had been the lead character and the only one with much in the way of any acting to do, and Lennon had written the film's standout scene and its best song, and had done a little voiceover narration. Harrison, by contrast, barely has anything to do in the film apart from the one song he contributed, "Blue Jay Way", and he said of the project “I had no idea what was happening and maybe I didn't pay enough attention because my problem, basically, was that I was in another world, I didn't really belong; I was just an appendage.” He'd expressed his discomfort to his friend Joe Massot, who was about to make his first feature film. Massot had got to know Harrison during the making of his previous film, Reflections on Love, a mostly-silent short which had starred Harrison's sister-in-law Jenny Boyd, and which had been photographed by Robert Freeman, who had been the photographer for the Beatles' album covers from With the Beatles through Rubber Soul, and who had taken most of the photos that Klaus Voorman incorporated into the cover of Revolver (and whose professional association with the Beatles seemed to come to an end around the same time he discovered that Lennon had been having an affair with his wife). Massot asked Harrison to write the music for the film, and told Harrison he would have complete free rein to make whatever music he wanted, so long as it fit the timing of the film, and so Harrison decided to create a mixture of Western rock music and the Indian music he loved. Harrison started recording the music at the tail end of 1967, with sessions with several London-based Indian musicians and John Barham, an orchestrator who had worked with Ravi Shankar on Shankar's collaborations with Western musicians, including the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack we talked about in the "All You Need is Love" episode. For the Western music, he used the Remo Four, a Merseybeat group who had been on the scene even before the Beatles, and which contained a couple of classmates of Paul McCartney, but who had mostly acted as backing musicians for other artists. They'd backed Johnny Sandon, the former singer with the Searchers, on a couple of singles, before becoming the backing band for Tommy Quickly, a NEMS artist who was unsuccessful despite starting his career with a Lennon/McCartney song, "Tip of My Tongue": [Excerpt: Tommy Quickly, "Tip of My Tongue"] The Remo Four would later, after a lineup change, become Ashton, Gardner and Dyke, who would become one-hit wonders in the seventies, and during the Wonderwall sessions they recorded a song that went unreleased at the time, and which would later go on to be rerecorded by Ashton, Gardner, and Dyke. "In the First Place" also features Harrison on backing vocals and possibly guitar, and was not submitted for the film because Harrison didn't believe that Massot wanted any vocal tracks, but the recording was later discovered and used in a revised director's cut of the film in the nineties: [Excerpt: The Remo Four, "In the First Place"] But for the most part the Remo Four were performing instrumentals written by Harrison. They weren't the only Western musicians performing on the sessions though -- Peter Tork of the Monkees dropped by these sessions and recorded several short banjo solos, which were used in the film soundtrack but not in the soundtrack album (presumably because Tork was contracted to another label): [Excerpt: Peter Tork, "Wonderwall banjo solo"] Another musician who was under contract to another label was Eric Clapton, who at the time was playing with The Cream, and who vaguely knew Harrison and so joined in for the track "Ski-ing", playing lead guitar under the cunning, impenetrable, pseudonym "Eddie Clayton", with Harrison on sitar, Starr on drums, and session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan on bass: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Ski-ing"] But the bulk of the album was recorded in EMI's studios in the city that is now known as Mumbai but at the time was called Bombay. The studio facilities in India had up to that point only had a mono tape recorder, and Bhaskar Menon, one of the top executives at EMI's Indian division and later the head of EMI music worldwide, personally brought the first stereo tape recorder to the studio to aid in Harrison's recording. The music was all composed by Harrison and performed by the Indian musicians, and while Harrison was composing in an Indian mode, the musicians were apparently fascinated by how Western it sounded to them: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Microbes"] While he was there, Harrison also got the instrumentalists to record another instrumental track, which wasn't to be used for the film: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "The Inner Light (instrumental)"] That track would, instead, become part of what was to be Harrison's first composition to make a side of a Beatles single. After John and George had appeared on the David Frost show talking about the Maharishi, in September 1967, George had met a lecturer in Sanskrit named Juan Mascaró, who wrote to Harrison enclosing a book he'd compiled of translations of religious texts, telling him he'd admired "Within You Without You" and thought it would be interesting if Harrison set something from the Tao Te Ching to music. He suggested a text that, in his translation, read: "Without going out of my door I can know all things on Earth Without looking out of my window I can know the ways of heaven For the farther one travels, the less one knows The sage, therefore Arrives without travelling Sees all without looking Does all without doing" Harrison took that text almost verbatim, though he created a second verse by repeating the first few lines with "you" replacing "I" -- concerned that listeners might think he was just talking about himself, and wouldn't realise it was a more general statement -- and he removed the "the sage, therefore" and turned the last few lines into imperative commands rather than declarative statements: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] The song has come in for some criticism over the years as being a little Orientalist, because in critics' eyes it combines Chinese philosophy with Indian music, as if all these things are equally "Eastern" and so all the same really. On the other hand there's a good argument that an English songwriter taking a piece of writing written in Chinese and translated into English by a Spanish man and setting it to music inspired by Indian musical modes is a wonderful example of cultural cross-pollination. As someone who's neither Chinese nor Indian I wouldn't want to take a stance on it, but clearly the other Beatles were impressed by it -- they put it out as the B-side to their next single, even though the only Beatles on it are Harrison and McCartney, with the latter adding a small amount of harmony vocal: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] And it wasn't because the group were out of material. They were planning on going to Rishikesh to study with the Maharishi, and wanted to get a single out for release while they were away, and so in one week they completed the vocal overdubs on "The Inner Light" and recorded three other songs, two by John and one by Paul. All three of the group's songwriters brought in songs that were among their best. John's first contribution was a song whose lyrics he later described as possibly the best he ever wrote, "Across the Universe". He said the lyrics were “purely inspirational and were given to me as boom! I don't own it, you know; it came through like that … Such an extraordinary meter and I can never repeat it! It's not a matter of craftsmanship, it wrote itself. It drove me out of bed. I didn't want to write it … It's like being possessed, like a psychic or a medium.” But while Lennon liked the song, he was never happy with the recording of it. They tried all sorts of things to get the sound he heard in his head, including bringing in some fans who were hanging around outside to sing backing vocals. He said of the track "I was singing out of tune and instead of getting a decent choir, we got fans from outside, Apple Scruffs or whatever you call them. They came in and were singing all off-key. Nobody was interested in doing the tune originally.” [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] The "jai guru deva" chorus there is the first reference to the teachings of the Maharishi in one of the Beatles' records -- Guru Dev was the Maharishi's teacher, and the phrase "Jai guru dev" is a Sanskrit one which I've seen variously translated as "victory to the great teacher", and "hail to the greatness within you". Lennon would say shortly before his death “The Beatles didn't make a good record out of it. I think subconsciously sometimes we – I say ‘we' though I think Paul did it more than the rest of us – Paul would sort of subconsciously try and destroy a great song … Usually we'd spend hours doing little detailed cleaning-ups of Paul's songs, when it came to mine, especially if it was a great song like ‘Strawberry Fields' or ‘Across The Universe', somehow this atmosphere of looseness and casualness and experimentation would creep in … It was a _lousy_ track of a great song and I was so disappointed by it …The guitars are out of tune and I'm singing out of tune because I'm psychologically destroyed and nobody's supporting me or helping me with it, and the song was never done properly.” Of course, this is only Lennon's perception, and it's one that the other participants would disagree with. George Martin, in particular, was always rather hurt by the implication that Lennon's songs had less attention paid to them, and he would always say that the problem was that Lennon in the studio would always say "yes, that's great", and only later complain that it hadn't been what he wanted. No doubt McCartney did put in more effort on his own songs than on Lennon's -- everyone has a bias towards their own work, and McCartney's only human -- but personally I suspect that a lot of the problem comes down to the two men having very different personalities. McCartney had very strong ideas about his own work and would drive the others insane with his nitpicky attention to detail. Lennon had similarly strong ideas, but didn't have the attention span to put the time and effort in to force his vision on others, and didn't have the technical knowledge to express his ideas in words they'd understand. He expected Martin and the other Beatles to work miracles, and they did -- but not the miracles he would have worked. That track was, rather than being chosen for the next single, given to Spike Milligan, who happened to be visiting the studio and was putting together an album for the environmental charity the World Wildlife Fund. The album was titled "No One's Gonna Change Our World": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] That track is historic in another way -- it would be the last time that George Harrison would play sitar on a Beatles record, and it effectively marks the end of the period of psychedelia and Indian influence that had started with "Norwegian Wood" three years earlier, and which many fans consider their most creative period. Indeed, shortly after the recording, Harrison would give up the sitar altogether and stop playing it. He loved sitar music as much as he ever had, and he still thought that Indian classical music spoke to him in ways he couldn't express, and he continued to be friends with Ravi Shankar for the rest of his life, and would only become more interested in Indian religious thought. But as he spent time with Shankar he realised he would never be as good on the sitar as he hoped. He said later "I thought, 'Well, maybe I'm better off being a pop singer-guitar-player-songwriter – whatever-I'm-supposed-to-be' because I've seen a thousand sitar-players in India who are twice as better as I'll ever be. And only one of them Ravi thought was going to be a good player." We don't have a precise date for when it happened -- I suspect it was in June 1968, so a few months after the "Across the Universe" recording -- but Shankar told Harrison that rather than try to become a master of a music that he hadn't encountered until his twenties, perhaps he should be making the music that was his own background. And as Harrison put it "I realised that was riding my bike down a street in Liverpool and hearing 'Heartbreak Hotel' coming out of someone's house.": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Heartbreak Hotel"] In early 1968 a lot of people seemed to be thinking along the same lines, as if Christmas 1967 had been the flick of a switch and instead of whimsy and ornamentation, the thing to do was to make music that was influenced by early rock and roll. In the US the Band and Bob Dylan were making music that was consciously shorn of all studio experimentation, while in the UK there was a revival of fifties rock and roll. In April 1968 both "Peggy Sue" and "Rock Around the Clock" reentered the top forty in the UK, and the Who were regularly including "Summertime Blues" in their sets. Fifties nostalgia, which would make occasional comebacks for at least the next forty years, was in its first height, and so it's not surprising that Paul McCartney's song, "Lady Madonna", which became the A-side of the next single, has more than a little of the fifties about it. Of course, the track isn't *completely* fifties in its origins -- one of the inspirations for the track seems to have been the Rolling Stones' then-recent hit "Let's Spend The Night Together": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Let's Spend the Night Together"] But the main source for the song's music -- and for the sound of the finished record -- seems to have been Johnny Parker's piano part on Humphrey Lyttleton's "Bad Penny Blues", a hit single engineered by Joe Meek in the fifties: [Excerpt: Humphrey Lyttleton, "Bad Penny Blues"] That song seems to have been on the group's mind for a while, as a working title for "With a Little Help From My Friends" had at one point been "Bad Finger Blues" -- a title that would later give the name to a band on Apple. McCartney took Parker's piano part as his inspiration, and as he later put it “‘Lady Madonna' was me sitting down at the piano trying to write a bluesy boogie-woogie thing. I got my left hand doing an arpeggio thing with the chord, an ascending boogie-woogie left hand, then a descending right hand. I always liked that, the  juxtaposition of a line going down meeting a line going up." [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] That idea, incidentally, is an interesting reversal of what McCartney had done on "Hello, Goodbye", where the bass line goes down while the guitar moves up -- the two lines moving away from each other: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Though that isn't to say there's no descending bass in "Lady Madonna" -- the bridge has a wonderful sequence where the bass just *keeps* *descending*: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] Lyrically, McCartney was inspired by a photo in National Geographic of a woman in Malaysia, captioned “Mountain Madonna: with one child at her breast and another laughing into her face, sees her quality of life threatened.” But as he put it “The people I was brought up amongst were often Catholic; there are lots of Catholics in Liverpool because of the Irish connection and they are often religious. When they have a baby I think they see a big connection between themselves and the Virgin Mary with her baby. So the original concept was the Virgin Mary but it quickly became symbolic of every woman; the Madonna image but as applied to ordinary working class woman. It's really a tribute to the mother figure, it's a tribute to women.” Musically though, the song was more a tribute to the fifties -- while the inspiration had been a skiffle hit by Humphrey Lyttleton, as soon as McCartney started playing it he'd thought of Fats Domino, and the lyric reflects that to an extent -- just as Domino's "Blue Monday" details the days of the week for a weary working man who only gets to enjoy himself on Saturday night, "Lady Madonna"'s lyrics similarly look at the work a mother has to do every day -- though as McCartney later noted  "I was writing the words out to learn it for an American TV show and I realised I missed out Saturday ... So I figured it must have been a real night out." The vocal was very much McCartney doing a Domino impression -- something that wasn't lost on Fats, who cut his own version of the track later that year: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Lady Madonna"] The group were so productive at this point, right before the journey to India, that they actually cut another song *while they were making a video for "Lady Madonna"*. They were booked into Abbey Road to film themselves performing the song so it could be played on Top of the Pops while they were away, but instead they decided to use the time to cut a new song -- John had a partially-written song, "Hey Bullfrog", which was roughly the same tempo as "Lady Madonna", so they could finish that up and then re-edit the footage to match the record. The song was quickly finished and became "Hey Bulldog": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Bulldog"] One of Lennon's best songs from this period, "Hey Bulldog" was oddly chosen only to go on the soundtrack of Yellow Submarine. Either the band didn't think much of it because it had come so easily, or it was just assigned to the film because they were planning on being away for several months and didn't have any other projects they were working on. The extent of the group's contribution to the film was minimal – they were not very hands-on, and the film, which was mostly done as an attempt to provide a third feature film for their United Artists contract without them having to do any work, was made by the team that had done the Beatles cartoon on American TV. There's some evidence that they had a small amount of input in the early story stages, but in general they saw the cartoon as an irrelevance to them -- the only things they contributed were the four songs "All Together Now", "It's All Too Much", "Hey Bulldog" and "Only a Northern Song", and a brief filmed appearance for the very end of the film, recorded in January: [Excerpt: Yellow Submarine film end] McCartney also took part in yet another session in early February 1968, one produced by Peter Asher, his fiancee's brother, and former singer with Peter and Gordon. Asher had given up on being a pop star and was trying to get into the business side of music, and he was starting out as a producer, producing a single by Paul Jones, the former lead singer of Manfred Mann. The A-side of the single, "And the Sun Will Shine", was written by the Bee Gees, the band that Robert Stigwood was managing: [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "And the Sun Will Shine"] While the B-side was an original by Jones, "The Dog Presides": [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "The Dog Presides"] Those tracks featured two former members of the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck and Paul Samwell-Smith, on guitar and bass, and Nicky Hopkins on piano. Asher asked McCartney to play drums on both sides of the single, saying later "I always thought he was a great, underrated drummer." McCartney was impressed by Asher's production, and asked him to get involved with the new Apple Records label that would be set up when the group returned from India. Asher eventually became head of A&R for the label. And even before "Lady Madonna" was mixed, the Beatles were off to India. Mal Evans, their roadie, went ahead with all their luggage on the fourteenth of February, so he could sort out transport for them on the other end, and then John and George followed on the fifteenth, with their wives Pattie and Cynthia and Pattie's sister Jenny (John and Cynthia's son Julian had been left with his grandmother while they went -- normally Cynthia wouldn't abandon Julian for an extended period of time, but she saw the trip as a way to repair their strained marriage). Paul and Ringo followed four days later, with Ringo's wife Maureen and Paul's fiancee Jane Asher. The retreat in Rishikesh was to become something of a celebrity affair. Along with the Beatles came their friend the singer-songwriter Donovan, and Donovan's friend and songwriting partner, whose name I'm not going to say here because it's a slur for Romani people, but will be known to any Donovan fans. Donovan at this point was also going through changes. Like the Beatles, he was largely turning away from drug use and towards meditation, and had recently written his hit single "There is a Mountain" based around a saying from Zen Buddhism: [Excerpt: Donovan, "There is a Mountain"] That was from his double-album A Gift From a Flower to a Garden, which had come out in December 1967. But also like John and Paul he was in the middle of the breakdown of a long-term relationship, and while he would remain with his then-partner until 1970, and even have another child with her, he was secretly in love with another woman. In fact he was secretly in love with two other women. One of them, Brian Jones' ex-girlfriend Linda, had moved to LA, become the partner of the singer Gram Parsons, and had appeared in the documentary You Are What You Eat with the Band and Tiny Tim. She had fallen out of touch with Donovan, though she would later become his wife. Incidentally, she had a son to Brian Jones who had been abandoned by his rock-star father -- the son's name is Julian. The other woman with whom Donovan was in love was Jenny Boyd, the sister of George Harrison's wife Pattie.  Jenny at the time was in a relationship with Alexis Mardas, a TV repairman and huckster who presented himself as an electronics genius to the Beatles, who nicknamed him Magic Alex, and so she was unavailable, but Donovan had written a song about her, released as a single just before they all went to Rishikesh: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Jennifer Juniper"] Donovan considered himself and George Harrison to be on similar spiritual paths and called Harrison his "spirit-brother", though Donovan was more interested in Buddhism, which Harrison considered a corruption of the more ancient Hinduism, and Harrison encouraged Donovan to read Autobiography of a Yogi. It's perhaps worth noting that Donovan's father had a different take on the subject though, saying "You're not going to study meditation in India, son, you're following that wee lassie Jenny" Donovan and his friend weren't the only other celebrities to come to Rishikesh. The actor Mia Farrow, who had just been through a painful divorce from Frank Sinatra, and had just made Rosemary's Baby, a horror film directed by Roman Polanski with exteriors shot at the Dakota building in New York, arrived with her sister Prudence. Also on the trip was Paul Horn, a jazz saxophonist who had played with many of the greats of jazz, not least of them Duke Ellington, whose Sweet Thursday Horn had played alto sax on: [Excerpt: Duke Ellington, "Zweet Zursday"] Horn was another musician who had been inspired to investigate Indian spirituality and music simultaneously, and the previous year he had recorded an album, "In India," of adaptations of ragas, with Ravi Shankar and Alauddin Khan: [Excerpt: Paul Horn, "Raga Vibhas"] Horn would go on to become one of the pioneers of what would later be termed "New Age" music, combining jazz with music from various non-Western traditions. Horn had also worked as a session musician, and one of the tracks he'd played on was "I Know There's an Answer" from the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Know There's an Answer"] Mike Love, who co-wrote that track and is one of the lead singers on it, was also in Rishikesh. While as we'll see not all of the celebrities on the trip would remain practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, Love would be profoundly affected by the trip, and remains a vocal proponent of TM to this day. Indeed, his whole band at the time were heavily into TM. While Love was in India, the other Beach Boys were working on the Friends album without him -- Love only appears on four tracks on that album -- and one of the tracks they recorded in his absence was titled "Transcendental Meditation": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Transcendental Meditation"] But the trip would affect Love's songwriting, as it would affect all of the musicians there. One of the few songs on the Friends album on which Love appears is "Anna Lee, the Healer", a song which is lyrically inspired by the trip in the most literal sense, as it's about a masseuse Love met in Rishikesh: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Anna Lee, the Healer"] The musicians in the group all influenced and inspired each other as is likely to happen in such circumstances. Sometimes, it would be a matter of trivial joking, as when the Beatles decided to perform an off-the-cuff song about Guru Dev, and did it in the Beach Boys style: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] And that turned partway through into a celebration of Love for his birthday: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] Decades later, Love would return the favour, writing a song about Harrison and their time together in Rishikesh. Like Donovan, Love seems to have considered Harrison his "spiritual brother", and he titled the song "Pisces Brothers": [Excerpt: Mike Love, "Pisces Brothers"] The musicians on the trip were also often making suggestions to each other about songs that would become famous for them. The musicians had all brought acoustic guitars, apart obviously from Ringo, who got a set of tabla drums when George ordered some Indian instruments to be delivered. George got a sitar, as at this point he hadn't quite given up on the instrument, and he gave Donovan a tamboura. Donovan started playing a melody on the tamboura, which is normally a drone instrument, inspired by the Scottish folk music he had grown up with, and that became his "Hurdy-Gurdy Man": [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man"] Harrison actually helped him with the song, writing a final verse inspired by the Maharishi's teachings, but in the studio Donovan's producer Mickie Most told him to cut the verse because the song was overlong, which apparently annoyed Harrison. Donovan includes that verse in his live performances of the song though -- usually while doing a fairly terrible impersonation of Harrison: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man (live)"] And similarly, while McCartney was working on a song pastiching Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys, but singing about the USSR rather than the USA, Love suggested to him that for a middle-eight he might want to sing about the girls in the various Soviet regions: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Back in the USSR"] As all the guitarists on the retreat only had acoustic instruments, they were very keen to improve their acoustic playing, and they turned to Donovan, who unlike the rest of them was primarily an acoustic player, and one from a folk background. Donovan taught them the rudiments of Travis picking, the guitar style we talked about way back in the episodes on the Everly Brothers, as well as some of the tunings that had been introduced to British folk music by Davey Graham, giving them a basic grounding in the principles of English folk-baroque guitar, a style that had developed over the previous few years. Donovan has said in his autobiography that Lennon picked the technique up quickly (and that Harrison had already learned Travis picking from Chet Atkins records) but that McCartney didn't have the application to learn the style, though he picked up bits. That seems very unlike anything else I've read anywhere about Lennon and McCartney -- no-one has ever accused Lennon of having a surfeit of application -- and reading Donovan's book he seems to dislike McCartney and like Lennon and Harrison, so possibly that enters into it. But also, it may just be that Lennon was more receptive to Donovan's style at the time. According to McCartney, even before going to Rishikesh Lennon had been in a vaguely folk-music and country mode, and the small number of tapes he'd brought with him to Rishikesh included Buddy Holly, Dylan, and the progressive folk band The Incredible String Band, whose music would be a big influence on both Lennon and McCartney for the next year: [Excerpt: The Incredible String Band, "First Girl I Loved"] According to McCartney Lennon also brought "a tape the singer Jake Thackray had done for him... He was one of the people we bumped into at Abbey Road. John liked his stuff, which he'd heard on television. Lots of wordplay and very suggestive, so very much up John's alley. I was fascinated by his unusual guitar style. John did ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun' as a Jake Thackray thing at one point, as I recall.” Thackray was a British chansonnier, who sang sweetly poignant but also often filthy songs about Yorkshire life, and his humour in particular will have appealed to Lennon. There's a story of Lennon meeting Thackray in Abbey Road and singing the whole of Thackray's song "The Statues", about two drunk men fighting a male statue to defend the honour of a female statue, to him: [Excerpt: Jake Thackray, "The Statues"] Given this was the music that Lennon was listening to, it's unsurprising that he was more receptive to Donovan's lessons, and the new guitar style he learned allowed him to expand his songwriting, at precisely the same time he was largely clean of drugs for the first time in several years, and he started writing some of the best songs he would ever write, often using these new styles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Julia"] That song is about Lennon's dead mother -- the first time he ever addressed her directly in a song, though  it would be far from the last -- but it's also about someone else. That phrase "Ocean child" is a direct translation of the Japanese name "Yoko". We've talked about Yoko Ono a bit in recent episodes, and even briefly in a previous Beatles episode, but it's here that she really enters the story of the Beatles. Unfortunately, exactly *how* her relationship with John Lennon, which was to become one of the great legendary love stories in rock and roll history, actually started is the subject of some debate. Both of them were married when they first got together, and there have also been suggestions that Ono was more interested in McCartney than in Lennon at first -- suggestions which everyone involved has denied, and those denials have the ring of truth about them, but if that was the case it would also explain some of Lennon's more perplexing behaviour over the next year. By all accounts there was a certain amount of finessing of the story th

Graeme Thomson has just had the paperback of his 2022 Simple Minds book, Themes for Great Cities: A New History of Simple Minds, released into the world, and so I thought now was a pretty good time to speak to the author about a band I like, but am only now really learning the cultural significance of. Graeme has written some of my favourite music books in recent times, not least the superb Phil Lynott biography Cowboy Song, released back in 2016, and Themes for Great Cities is no dud in his illustrious biography; it's illuminating, thoughtful and positions these underground heroes-cum-stadium superstars in an admirable new light. Enjoy the episode! Twitter - @jamesjammcmahon Substack - https://spoook.substack.com YouTube - www.youtube.com/channel/UC8Vf_1E1Sza2GUyFNn2zFMA Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/jamesmcmahonmusicpod/

This week: Niru Ratnam argues that teachers are putting principles before children (00:59), Gus Carter discusses the curious business of fertility (08:14), and Graeme Thomson reviews Beyonce at Murrayfield Stadium (14:24).  Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson. 

This week: Katy Balls discusses why Humza Yousaf is the Union's best hope (01:00), Lisa Haseldine reads her interview with former Georgian defence minister David Kezerashvili (07:00), and Graeme Thomson asks whether supergroups are really that super (13:54).  Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson. 

Det här är berättelsen om den säregna brittiska popartisten som slog igenom som tonåring, gjorde succé, försvann och sedan kom tillbaka. Det är den 20 juni 1993 och den 34-åriga brittiska popartisten Kate Bush stegar in i en TV-studio.Bush har nyligen släppt sitt sjunde album, The Red Shoes, och ikväll ska hon medverka i Aspel & Company - en populär talkshow där kändisar frågas ut.Stämningen i studion är avslappnad, trots att programledaren Michael Aspel inleder med att ifrågasätta varför Bush skyr offentligheten. Did you shun publicity in the spotlight deliberately? I think on some levels, yes, I do. But the main thing was that I wanted to spend a lot more time working, rather than spending a lot of time promoting the work. Tonen i studion är skämtsam. Bush och Aspel skojar om hur det är att vara föremål för mäns fantasier och Bush får prata om varför hon hellre är i studion än på scen.Det finns inga tecken på att något skaver. Men bakom kulisserna döljer sig en annan verklighet Bush liv håller på att krackelera.När hon sätter sig framför pianot i studion och börjar sjunga låten Moments of pleasure är den skämtsamma tonen plötsligt som bortblåst. Bush ser sorgsen och sammanbiten ut.Ingen kan förutse att framträdandet den här kvällen är ett av Bush sista och att hon snart kommer att försvinna helt. P3 Musikdokumentär om Kate Bush är berättelsen om den kompromisslösa och säregna brittiska popartisten som trots långa pauser från offentligheten alltid kommer tillbaka.Dokumentären är gjord av Anna Lillkung hösten 2022. Producent Siri Hill. Exekutiv producent Hanna Frelin. Tekniker Fredrik Nilsson. Programmet görs av produktionsbolaget Tredje Statsmakten Media.Medverkande: Nanna Olasdotter Hallberg, Nils Hansson och Karolina Larsson.Ljudklippen i dokumentären kommer från BBC, Netflix, DailyMotion och YouTube-kontona The KT Bush Band, Dave, Pikachuonetwo, Symphonyofflowers, Bryan RW, abba2shay, Sir Bob, mrbrickylad, ronnepon haneveren, Saiq, citytransportinfo, GijsPiano, AureyoBoss, bakerist, LewisPringle, EmptyNestExplorers, MythicalMusic, samt Polly.Huvudsakliga källor som använts som underlag för dokumentären är Kate Bush - The Biography av Rob Jovanovic och Under the Ivy - The Life and Music of Kate Bush av Graeme Thomson.

On this week's episode, Jade McGlynn reads her article on the Russian mothers and wives turning against Putin, because of their sons and husbands missing in the war (00:55). Lucy Dunn, a former junior doctor, asks whether pharmacists aren't part of the solution to the crisis in the NHS (09:45). And Graeme Thompson reads his Notes On protest songs (15:50). Presented and produced by Cindy Yu.

This week: Isabel Hardman asks how Ed Miliband is the power behind Kier Starmer's Labour (00:57), Matthew Parris says we've lost interest in our dependencies (05:03), Graeme Thomson mourns the loss of the B-side (11:57), and Caroline Moore reads her Notes on... war memorials (16:51).  Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.

In this podcast we explore learning about loyalty by discussing where loyalty professionals can turn to find out more about our fascinating industry. With Paula Thomas, Graeme Thomson and Adam Posner.

The new book by Graeme Thomson answers many of the questions Simple Minds fans have had for decades. In Themes For Great Cities, Thomson explains (with participation from almost all band members past and present) how their artistically challenging beginning gave rise to their commercial peak in the mid-80s. What were their influences, how were songs like "I Travel" and "Love Song" even constructed, and what was behind the good and bad decisions the band made along the way. Theme is manna from heaven for SM obsessives because as enjoyable as the band is to listen to, they're equally as enjoyable to discuss.  www.graemethomson.net www.patreon.com/thehustlepod

This week we have a fantastic interview with Graeme Thomson about his new history of Simple Minds " Themes For Great Cities". As Ian Rankin has said "This book is a a deep and thrilling dive into some of the greatest musical minds to have come out of Scotland in modern times" It tracks Simple Minds from their earliest days in the pubs and clubs of Glasgow to having the world at their feet in a little under a decade. Its a real must for all Simple MInds fans. Graeme was a great guest and we also covered his work with Kate Bush and Mark Hollis. We also have the usual chat and reviews, hope you enjoy it.

AKOM on GET BACK: Brothers, Friends, Bandmates Episode 2 is all about George, Paul and George & Paul; we take a look into their dynamic as bandmates, friends and surrogate brothers. We also examine George as a Producer for insight into the creative conflicts between Paul and George.  Other topics include: The Beatles' Rooftop Performance, Eric Clapton and Scenes that Surprised Us. SOURCES/REFERENCES Get Back, dir. Peter Jackson (2021) "Why the Beatles Broke Up" by Mikael Gilmore for Rolling Stone (2000) "Paul McCartney: the Musical Genius with Staying Power" The Times UK, Caitlin Moran (Dec 25, 2021) George Harrison, NME: This Song. (December 11th, 1976) “The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back” Ian Leslie  (Jan 26 2022) George Harrison, Guitar World: When We Was Fab. (1992) Paul McCartney on Egypt Station, NME interview w/ Dan Stubbs (2018) "Beatlesongs," William J Dowlding (1989) "Get Back Halftime Report" on Hey Dullblog Geoff Emerick interview w/ Alan Light for Blender.com (2009) George Martin interviewed by Richard Buskin (March 3,1987) "Behind the Locked Door," Graeme Thomson (2013) Michael Lindsay Hogg, Interview for Radio New Zealand (Dec 4, 2021) Paul McCartney interview with Parkinson (1997)

For the first Scots Whay Hae! podcast of 2022 Ali speaks to journalist, cultural commentator, and music biographer Graeme Thomson to talk all about his latest book, 'Themes For Great Cities: A New History of Simple Minds', which concentrates on the early years and albums of one of Scotland's most successful and lauded bands. The two talk about the unusual working methods of the band, the many changes they went through, and the feverish work ethic which defined them from the start. They also talk about the influence Simple Minds' music had on others, the influence of individual members, the inspiration taken from their home town, the ambition which drove them on to bigger, if not necessarily better, things, and why the music endures. It's an insightful interview which will interest not only admirers of 'the Minds', but music fans more generally as a picture emerges of a band unlike any other.

Let's Talk Loyalty celebrated its first birthday in August 2020, so in episode 49, I was celebrating this milestone with some special guests. It featured my friends from the Loyalty Academy, with a focus on the scholarship competition that listeners could enter, with one lucky listener winning a FREE Loyalty Academy Scholarship worth $1,750! My two guests on this show - Graeme Thomson, a Director of the Loyalty Academy, and Emily Ong who was a recent graduate of the course. In this short summary episode, I summarise the background and approach taken by the Loyalty Academy for anyone studying the CLMP, which is designed to support loyalty professionals with ideas and concepts they can use immediately in their day to day roles around the world. Show Notes: 1) Let's Talk Loyalty Episode 49 - One Year Anniversary 2) Graeme Thomson - Director of the Loyalty Academy 3) Emily Ong - CLMP

We thought our time talking about Tom Brady and the New England Patriots was at an end... but how wrong we were. When the Bucs made a stop in Foxborough, it was time for us to dust off this subject one more time and reflect on the game itself, Mac Jones, and the legacies of Tom Brady and Bill Belichick for the last time. Or is it....? Programming note - This was recorded the evening after that game, but our editing has been slowed the last couple of weeks. We're hoping to get back on track this week barring any setbacks from Patrick burning down the office or squirting Cheez Whiz into a USB port.   LINKS OF INTEREST: - Here's the No Time To Die trailer in case you haven't seen it already. And since we're horribly late getting to this, Uncle Todd's already been out to see the flick and gives it a hearty thumbs up (for what that's worth) - A little more information on how the ScarJo - MickeyMoMo dust-up has been settled, giving us peace in our time... for now - Here are Tom Brady's career stats, which are worth a look if only to see the stupid-long list of appearances on leaderboards and such towards the bottom   ...AND ANOTHER THING: Tim recommends listening to the episode of NPR's How I Built This featuring Fawn Weaver - author and founder/owner of Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey Todd thinks you should check out Complicated Shadows: The Life and Music of Elvis Costello by Graeme Thomson as well as Wise Up Ghost And Other Songs by Elvis Costello and The Roots   FOLLOW US ON THE SOCIAL MEDIAS: Did you love what you listened to? Fantastic - we love people with questionable taste that enjoy a couple chuckleheads cracking each other up. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for more of the internet funny.

Philip Lynott packed a vast amount into his 36 years. An instantly identifiable singer, charismatic stage performer and supremely gifted songwriter, the guiding spirit of Thin Lizzy combined the instincts of a wild man with the soul of a poet.Author Graeme Thomson joins us and talks about Lynott's unique childhood, his embrace of Irish history and mythology, and his fascinating contradiction between rock star excess and the shy, sensitive “orphan” raised in working-class Dublin. And, of course, Thin Lizzy.

Philip Lynott packed a vast amount into his 36 years. An instantly identifiable singer, charismatic stage performer and supremely gifted songwriter, the guiding spirit of Thin Lizzy combined the instincts of a wild man with the soul of a poet. Author Graeme Thomson joins us and talks about Lynott's unique childhood, his embrace of Irish history and mythology, and his fascinating contradiction between rock star excess and the shy, sensitive “orphan” raised in working-class Dublin. And, of course, Thin Lizzy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip Lynott packed a vast amount into his 36 years. An instantly identifiable singer, charismatic stage performer and supremely gifted songwriter, the guiding spirit of Thin Lizzy combined the instincts of a wild man with the soul of a poet.Author Graeme Thomson joins us and talks about Lynott's unique childhood, his embrace of Irish history and mythology, and his fascinating contradiction between rock star excess and the shy, sensitive “orphan” raised in working-class Dublin. And, of course, Thin Lizzy.AllMusicPodcasts is a proud member of the Pantheon Media Network.

Philip Lynott packed a vast amount into his 36 years. An instantly identifiable singer, charismatic stage performer and supremely gifted songwriter, the guiding spirit of Thin Lizzy combined the instincts of a wild man with the soul of a poet. Author Graeme Thomson joins us and talks about Lynott's unique childhood, his embrace of Irish history and mythology, and his fascinating contradiction between rock star excess and the shy, sensitive “orphan” raised in working-class Dublin. And, of course, Thin Lizzy. Part of Pantheon Podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Author Graeme Thomson discusses George Harrison's 1968 debut album 'Wonderwall Music' with Chris Shaw.

I'm joined by one of Britain's leading music writers, Graeme Thomson, to discuss his elegant and insightful account of George Harrison's extraordinary life and career; 'Behind The Locked Door'. We look at George's changes and conflicts and pay particular attention to George's under appreciated post Beatle career.  

A new biography sheds light on the difficult life of 70s songwriter and friend of Nick Drake. And the Sydney International Women's Jazz Festival is right around the corner.

Stuart and Eamonn are joined by Gayle Anderson (journalist) to discuss the media's response to COVID-19 in Scotland, President Trump's coronavirus diagnosis and the closure of cinemas. Stuart, Eamonn and Gayle go on to share their personal media recommendations. RECOMMENDATIONS: Stuart: 'Dennistoun in Glasgow is named one of the world’s coolest neighbourhoods' - TimeOut article - https://www.timeout.com/news/dennistoun-in-glasgow-was-named-one-of-the-worlds-coolest-neighbourhoods-heres-how-locals-reacted-100720 Gayle: 'Small Hours: The Long Night of John Martyn' - book by Graeme Thomson (a biography of the late great singer-songwriter) - https://omnibuspress.com/products/small-hours-the-long-night-of-john-martyn Eamonn: 'Rebel in the Rye' - 2017 USA biographical drama directed and written by Danny Strong (based on the book, J.D. Salinger: A Life by Kenneth Slawenski, about writer J.D. Salinger during and after World War II) - https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/videoFirst Draft - a global network of journalists investigate and verify emerging stories - firstdraftnews.org For more information about Talk Media, visit: www.thebiglight.com/talkmedia

Stuart and Eamonn are joined by Gayle Anderson (journalist) to discuss the media's response to COVID-19 in Scotland, President Trump's coronavirus diagnosis and the closure of cinemas. Stuart, Eamonn and Gayle go on to share their personal media recommendations.RECOMMENDATIONS:Stuart: 'Dennistoun in Glasgow is named one of the world’s coolest neighbourhoods' - TimeOut article - https://www.timeout.com/news/dennistoun-in-glasgow-was-named-one-of-the-worlds-coolest-neighbourhoods-heres-how-locals-reacted-100720Gayle: 'Small Hours: The Long Night of John Martyn' - book by Graeme Thomson (a biography of the late great singer-songwriter) - https://omnibuspress.com/products/small-hours-the-long-night-of-john-martynEamonn:'Rebel in the Rye' - 2017 USA biographical drama directed and written by Danny Strong (based on the book, J.D. Salinger: A Life by Kenneth Slawenski, about writer J.D. Salinger during and after World War II) - https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/videoFirst Draft - a global network of journalists investigate and verify emerging stories - firstdraftnews.orgSupport the podcast and gain access to bonus content: www.patreon.com/talkmediaKeep up to date with the show on Twitter: @TBLTalkMediaFor more information about the podcast, visit: www.thebiglight.com/talkmedia See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Graeme Thomson on John Martyn's "lifelong grudges and huge, messy explosion of records"Music writer, author and old pal from Word magazine, Graeme Thomson on his spledid new book, "Small Hours: the Long Night of John Martyn", a tale involving immaculately delicate music, dark undercurrents, Glaswegian folk clubs, Nick Drake, Lee Perry, Joe Boyd, countless chaotic relationships, oceans of booze and a manager with two broken ribs. @GraemeAThomson https://www.amazon.co.uk/Small-Hours-Long-Night-Martyn/dp/178760019X https://www.amazon.co.uk/Graeme-Thomson/e/B001JS877A%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share https://www.graemethomson.net/Subscribe to our Patreon for exclusive content and benefits: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Graeme Thomson on John Martyn's "lifelong grudges and huge, messy explosion of records" Music writer, author and old pal from Word magazine, Graeme Thomson on his spledid new book, "Small Hours: the Long Night of John Martyn", a tale involving immaculately delicate music, dark undercurrents, Glaswegian folk clubs, Nick Drake, Lee Perry, Joe Boyd, countless chaotic relationships, oceans of booze and a manager with two broken ribs. @GraemeAThomson https://www.amazon.co.uk/Small-Hours-Long-Night-Martyn/dp/178760019X https://www.amazon.co.uk/Graeme-Thomson/e/B001JS877A%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share https://www.graemethomson.net/ Subscribe to our Patreon for exclusive content and benefits: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear

Graeme Thomson on John Martyn's "lifelong grudges and huge, messy explosion of records"Music writer, author and old pal from Word magazine, Graeme Thomson on his spledid new book, "Small Hours: the Long Night of John Martyn", a tale involving immaculately delicate music, dark undercurrents, Glaswegian folk clubs, Nick Drake, Lee Perry, Joe Boyd, countless chaotic relationships, oceans of booze and a manager with two broken ribs. @GraemeAThomson https://www.amazon.co.uk/Small-Hours-Long-Night-Martyn/dp/178760019X https://www.amazon.co.uk/Graeme-Thomson/e/B001JS877A%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share https://www.graemethomson.net/Subscribe to our Patreon for exclusive content and benefits: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Music writer, author and old pal from Word magazine, Graeme Thomson on his spledid new book, "Small Hours: the Long Night of John Martyn", a tale involving immaculately delicate music, dark undercurrents, Glaswegian folk clubs, Nick Drake, Lee Perry, Joe Boyd, countless chaotic relationships, oceans of booze and a manager with two broken ribs. @GraemeAThomson https://www.amazon.co.uk/Small-Hours-Long-Night-Martyn/dp/178760019X https://www.amazon.co.uk/Graeme-Thomson/e/B001JS877A%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share https://www.graemethomson.net/ Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Music writer, author and old pal from Word magazine, Graeme Thomson on his spledid new book, "Small Hours: the Long Night of John Martyn", a tale involving immaculately delicate music, dark undercurrents, Glaswegian folk clubs, Nick Drake, Lee Perry, Joe Boyd, countless chaotic relationships, oceans of booze and a manager with two broken ribs. @GraemeAThomson https://www.amazon.co.uk/Small-Hours-Long-Night-Martyn/dp/178760019X https://www.amazon.co.uk/Graeme-Thomson/e/B001JS877A%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share https://www.graemethomson.net/ Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Music writer, author and old pal from Word magazine, Graeme Thomson on his spledid new book, "Small Hours: the Long Night of John Martyn", a tale involving immaculately delicate music, dark undercurrents, Glaswegian folk clubs, Nick Drake, Lee Perry, Joe Boyd, countless chaotic relationships, oceans of booze and a manager with two broken ribs. @GraemeAThomson https://www.amazon.co.uk/Small-Hours-Long-Night-Martyn/dp/178760019X https://www.amazon.co.uk/Graeme-Thomson/e/B001JS877A%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share https://www.graemethomson.net/ Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Wir begrüßen heute die aktuelle Nr. 2 in Deutschland Jan Lennard Struff, Wimbledon Doppel Sieger Frederik Nielsen & Australischer Serve & Volley Profi Spieler aus den 70ern Graeme Thomson mit 40+ Jahren Trainererfahrung, Timo Grützediek als Aufsteiger zum LK1er ohne Volley ;-) Zudem Ein Live Schnitt aus dem Training mit zwei 13 jährigen Mädels mit Clinton zum Thema „ich habe Angst vor dem Volley“. Mari berichte aus der Tiefgarage im Lambo zum Thema „wir müssen mehr Volleys trainieren“. Der Volley fängt bereits im Kopf an. Oft bei den Mädels eine Hürde. Trainieren wir ihn genug ? 5min Volley gegen die Wand reichen zum Aufbau der Muskulatur. Übergänge ans Netz, die Wichtigkeit des Angriffsballs, Laufwege, Positionierung. Die Nr. 1 im Damen Tennis spielt viel Volley. Baut den Volley mehr in Euer Spiel ein. Min 1:25 JL Struff 6:55 HEAD Extreme 8:20 F.Nielsen 12:50 Clinton 19:00 Mari 22:15 Graeme 25:45 Timo 29:10 Outro Fazit / Bei Fragen schickt uns eine Nachricht auf Facebook, Instagram, TikTOk, Youtube, oder eine Mail an info@tennisewigeliebe.de

Octopuses, a rebuild and 11 Stanley Cups… Detroit Red Wings have missed the playoffs two years in a row, but how long will it take for them to return?   NFFA guest Graeme Thomson fell in love with the red and whites when Drew Miller came to play in Scotland during the 2012/13 NHL lockout. He says there’s nothing quite like watching an NHL game and saying “I know him”, having met him several times off ice during his 23 games in the Elite League. Now an admirer of the team’s young home star Dylan Larkin, Graeme shares his hopes and dreams as the Atlantic Division club continue a long rebuild.   Plus – It was bye bye to John Stevens as LA Kings’ head coach AND Joel Quenneville of Chicago Blackhawks – but does a team’s success really live and die with the head coach? Mock dives and players’ acting out – is it entertaining or just downright stupid? Was Boston Bruins’ Brad Marchand right to demo a mock dive during the game against Nashville Predators’ Colton Sissons? A video of some Ottawa Senators players making derogatory comments about their coach was leaked by a taxi driver this week. When it comes to players and privacy – do they have a right to an opinion, or should they keep their heads down and do their job?   NHL Fans From Afar Podcast is presented by Clare Freeman and Jolon Kemp Walker. Produced by ASFB Productions. (Picture credit: NHL/Dave Reginek) --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/nhlfansfromafar/message

At last, we come to the final track on The Kick Inside, the title track. This week's episode features a very special guest: Graeme Thomson, the author of the music biography Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. Cecilee and Graeme discuss the original Celtic murder ballad that this song comes from (whether you … Continue reading S01E13 – The Kick Inside

At last, we come to the final track on The Kick Inside, the title track. This week’s episode features a very special guest: Graeme Thomson, the author of the music biography Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. Cecilee and Graeme discuss the original Celtic murder ballad that this song comes from (whether you … Continue reading S01E13 – The Kick Inside

At last, we come to the final track on The Kick Inside, the title track. This week’s episode features a very special guest: Graeme Thomson, the author of the music biography Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. Cecilee and Graeme discuss the original Celtic murder ballad that this song comes from (whether you … Continue reading S01E13 – The Kick Inside

In the post-PRISM age of mass surveillance and invisible war, artists, alongside journalists, whistleblowers and activists, reveal the technological infrastructures that enable events like drone-strikes to occur. Some of the works here are poetic by nature, inviting the audience to placidly reflect. Others create a more immediate, visceral response, making them physically experience awe and apprehension. As often in tragedy, humour can be the most fearless messenger. Curator: Juha van ’t Zelfde, Artistic Director Lighthouse Artists: AeraCoop (Lot Amorós, Cristina Navarro y Alexandre Oliver), ES / Lot Amorós, ES / James Bridle, UK / Alicia Framis, ES / Laurent Grasso, FR / Roger Hiorns, UK / Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson (terminal beach) UK/IT / Metahaven, NL / Mariele Neudecker, DE / Martha Rosler, US / Roman Signer, CH / Hito Steyerl, DE Initiation of concept and collaboration: Honor Harger Exhibition architecture: Miroslav Rajic Exhibition graphics: Metahaven With thanks to: All of the artists involved and courtesy of Abraaj Capital Art Prize and Rose Issa Projects, Open Data Institute, Laurent Grasso Studio, Edouard Malingue Gallery (Hong Kong), ADAGP Gallery (Paris), Corvi-Mora Gallery, UK, Gallerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin, Martha Rosler Studio & Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin, Gallerie Martin Janda, Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam.

En la era de vigilancia de masas y guerra invisible surgida tras el programa PRISM, los artistas se unen a los periodistas y a los activistas para delatar ilegalidades y poner a descubierto las infraestructuras tecnológicas que hacen posible que sucesos como los ataques con drones ocurran. Algunas de las piezas presentadas en Llega un grito a través del cielo son poéticas por naturaleza e invitan al espectador a una reflexión tranquila. Otras, en cambio, suscitan una respuesta más inmediata y visceral, haciendo experimentar la vivencia física del horror y la aprensión. Y, como tan a menudo ocurre con la tragedia, el humor puede ser el mensajero más intrépido. Comisario: Juha van ’t Zelfde, Director Artístico de Lighthouse Artistas: Aeracoop (Lot Amorós, Cristina Navarro y Alexandre Oliver), España/ Lot Amorós, España / James Bridle, Reino Unido / Alicia Framis, España / Laurent Grasso, Francia / Roger Hiorns, Reino Unido / Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson (terminal beach) Reino Unido/Italia / Metahaven, Holanda / Mariele Neudecker, Alemania / Martha Rosler, EE.UU. / Roman Signer, Suiza / Hito Steyerl, Alemania Iniciación del concepto y colaboración: Honor Harger, Directora Ejecutiva del ArtScience Museum de Singapur y antigua Directora Artística de Lighthouse Arquitectura expositiva: Miroslav Rajic Diseño Gráfico: Metahaven Agradecimientos: A todos los artistas involucrados y a Open Data Institute; Laurent Grasso Studio; Edouard Malingue Gallery (Hong Kong); ADAGP Gallery (París); Corvi-Mora Gallery, Reino Unido; Gallerie Barbara Thumm, Berlín; Martha Rosler Studio & Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlín; Gallerie Martin Janda; Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam

In der ersten Folge sprechen wir über beide Teile von Goethes Faust, Batman, Stefan Zweig, unsere Nachttisch-Bücher und über Bücher, die uns zuletzt begeistert haben. Shownotes: Nachttisch-Buch Charles Dickens. Große Erwartungen. 1861 (Reclam RT 20208) Graeme Thomson. The Resurrection Of Johnny Cash-Hurt Redemption And American Recordings. Jawbone Press 2011 Der Klassiker Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Faust. Der Tragödie erster Teil (Reclam UB Nr. 1) Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Faust. Der Tragödie zweiter Teil (Reclam UB Nr. 2) Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Faust. Erster Teil. »Urfaust«, Fragment, Ausgabe letzter Hand (1828). Paralleldruck (Studienausgabe). (Reclam UB Nr.18355) Historia von D. Johann Faust. Kritische Ausgabe der jüngeren Version von 1589. Weidler Berlin 2006 Die literarische Figur Auflistung der Comics und Filme in: Hannes Fricke. Batmans Metamorphosen als intermedialer Superheld in Comic, Prosa und Film: Das Überleben der mythischen Figur, die Urszene - und der Joker. http://www.iaslonline.de/index.php?mode=context&keyword=Batman Batman (Spinoff der Fernsehserie). Regisseur: Lesli Martinson. 1966. Theme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtoMN_xi-AM The Dark Knight. Regisseur: Christopher Nolan. 2008. Folterszene: Batman & Joker http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8PxG5zvgOM Jan Philipp Reemtsma. Folter im Rechtsstaat? Hamburger Edition HIS. Hamburg 2005 Grant Morrison/ Dave McKean: Batman: Arkham Asylum (15th Anniversary Edition). New York (1989) 2004. Frank Miller. The Dark Knight returns. New York Jonathan Shay. Achilles in Vietnam - Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (deutsch: Achill in Vietnam - Kampftrauma und Persönlichkeitsverlust. Hamburger Edition 1998) Batman. Regisseur: Tim Burton. 1989. Joker: Jack Nicolson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63iuB-cSY7Q Frank Miller/ David Mazzucchelli: Batman – Year one. New York 1988. Dracula. Regisseur: Tod Browning. 1931. Dracula: Bela Lugosi Der Autor Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europäers. 1942 Stefan Zweig, Sternstunden der Menschheit. Fünf historische Miniaturen. 1927 Stefan Zweig, Ungeduld des Herzens.Roman. 1939 Stefan Zweig, Schachnovelle. 1942 Jan Philipp Reemtsma. Im Keller. Hamburger Edition HIS. Hamburg 1997 Buchtipps Martin Cruz Smith. Tatiana. C. Bertelsmann. München 2013 Martin Cruz Smith. Treue Genossen. 2004 Martin Cruz Smith. Polar Star. 1989 Peter Schneider. Die Lieben meiner Mutter. Kiepenheuer&Witsch. Köln 2013

The Word helicopter takes off from just the battlements of Graeme Thomson's castle in Edinburgh, hugs the coastline on its way south, dropping off at the massive Victorian folly occupied by Mark Hodkinson on the borders or Yorkshire and Lancashire and then makes a detour into Berkshire where it lands on the vast rolling lawns of John Naughton's massive country seat. Finally it hovers over Cast Iron Studios in Caledonian Road to record two tunes and some chat with The Miserable Rich. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Word helicopter takes off from just the battlements of Graeme Thomson’s castle in Edinburgh, hugs the coastline on its way south, dropping off at the massive Victorian folly occupied by Mark Hodkinson on the borders or Yorkshire and Lancashire and then makes a detour into Berkshire where it lands on the vast rolling lawns of John Naughton’s massive country seat. Finally it hovers over Cast Iron Studios in Caledonian Road to record two tunes and some chat with The Miserable Rich.

The Word helicopter takes off from just the battlements of Graeme Thomson's castle in Edinburgh, hugs the coastline on its way south, dropping off at the massive Victorian folly occupied by Mark Hodkinson on the borders or Yorkshire and Lancashire and then makes a detour into Berkshire where it lands on the vast rolling lawns of John Naughton's massive country seat. Finally it hovers over Cast Iron Studios in Caledonian Road to record two tunes and some chat with The Miserable Rich. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hommage à Woody Guthrie Bound for glory Un wagon qui passe réveille le souvenir des hobos, ces vagabonds qui voyageaient dans les trains de marchandise aux Etats-Unis. Et conduit à une évocation sonore et musicale de Woody Guthrie, chanteur folk engagé, héros du 'protest-song' qui avait écrit sur sa guitare 'cette machine tue les fascistes'. Avec les voix de Silvia Maglioni et Graeme Thomson ; les mots de Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, David Carradine, Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie. Enregistrements : mai 10 - Mise en ondes & mix : Samuel Hirsch - Réalisation : Olivier Apprill

Mark Ellen, David Hepworth and Matt Hall on: why Ringo won't sign, how to pass yourself off in the Mob, premiership footballers who look like characters in "The Wire", members of bands who did nothing and Graeme Thomson's book about death in popular song. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mark Ellen, David Hepworth and Matt Hall on: why Ringo won't sign, how to pass yourself off in the Mob, premiership footballers who look like characters in "The Wire", members of bands who did nothing and Graeme Thomson's book about death in popular song. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Mark Ellen, David Hepworth and Matt Hall on: why Ringo won't sign, how to pass yourself off in the Mob, premiership footballers who look like characters in "The Wire", members of bands who did nothing and Graeme Thomson's book about death in popular song.