Podcast appearances and mentions of Kate Bush

For those who haven't heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention, and the intertwining careers of Joe Boyd, Sandy Denny, and Richard Thompson. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-one-minute bonus episode available, on Judy Collins’ version of this song. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, 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/ Erratum For about an hour this was uploaded with the wrong Elton John clip in place of “Saturday Sun”. This has now been fixed. Resources Because of the increasing problems with Mixcloud’s restrictions, I have decided to start sharing streaming playlists of the songs used in episodes instead of Mixcloud ones. This Tunemymusic link will let you listen to the playlist I created on your streaming platform of choice — however please note that not all the songs excerpted are currently available on streaming. The songs missing from the Tidal version are “Shanten Bells” by the Ian Campbell Folk Group, “Tom’s Gone to Hilo” by A.L. Lloyd, two by Paul McNeill and Linda Peters, three by Elton John & Linda Peters, “What Will I Do With Tomorrow” by Sandy Denny and “You Never Know” by Charlie Drake, but the other fifty-nine are there. Other songs may be missing from other services. The main books I used on Fairport Convention as a whole were Patrick Humphries' Meet On The Ledge, Clinton Heylin's What We Did Instead of Holidays, and Kevan Furbank's Fairport Convention on Track. Rob Young's Electric Eden is the most important book on the British folk-rock movement. Information on Richard Thompson comes from Patrick Humphries' Richard Thompson: Strange Affair and Thompson's own autobiography Beeswing.  Information on Sandy Denny comes from Clinton Heylin's No More Sad Refrains and Mick Houghton's I've Always Kept a Unicorn. I also used Joe Boyd's autobiography White Bicycles and Chris Blackwell's The Islander.  And this three-CD set is the best introduction to Fairport's music currently in print. Transcript Before we begin, this episode contains reference to alcohol and cocaine abuse and medical neglect leading to death. It also starts with some discussion of the fatal car accident that ended last episode. There’s also some mention of child neglect and spousal violence. If that’s likely to upset you, you might want to skip this episode or read the transcript. One of the inspirations for this podcast when I started it back in 2018 was a project by Richard Thompson, which appears (like many things in Thompson’s life) to have started out of sheer bloody-mindedness. In 1999 Playboy magazine asked various people to list their “songs of the Millennium”, and most of them, understanding the brief, chose a handful of songs from the latter half of the twentieth century. But Thompson determined that he was going to list his favourite songs *of the millennium*. He didn’t quite manage that, but he did cover seven hundred and forty years, and when Playboy chose not to publish it, he decided to turn it into a touring show, in which he covered all his favourite songs from “Sumer Is Icumen In” from 1260: [Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “Sumer is Icumen In”] Through numerous traditional folk songs, union songs like “Blackleg Miner”, pieces by early-modern composers, Victorian and Edwardian music hall songs, and songs by the Beatles, the Ink Spots, the Kinks, and the Who, all the way to “Oops! I Did It Again”: [Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “Oops! I Did it Again”] And to finish the show, and to show how all this music actually ties together, he would play what he described as a “medieval tune from Brittany”, “Marry, Ageyn Hic Hev Donne Yt”: [Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “Marry, Ageyn Hic Hev Donne Yt”] We have said many times in this podcast that there is no first anything, but there’s a reason that Liege and Lief, Fairport Convention’s third album of 1969, and the album other than Unhalfbricking on which their reputation largely rests, was advertised with the slogan “The first (literally) British folk rock album ever”. Folk-rock, as the term had come to be known, and as it is still usually used today, had very little to do with traditional folk music. Rather, the records of bands like The Byrds or Simon and Garfunkel were essentially taking the sounds of British beat groups of the early sixties, particularly the Searchers, and applying those sounds to material by contemporary singer-songwriters. People like Paul Simon and Bob Dylan had come up through folk clubs, and their songs were called folk music because of that, but they weren’t what folk music had meant up to that point — songs that had been collected after being handed down through the folk process, changed by each individual singer, with no single identifiable author. They were authored songs by very idiosyncratic writers. But over their last few albums, Fairport Convention had done one or two tracks per album that weren’t like that, that were instead recordings of traditional folk songs, but arranged with rock instrumentation. They were not necessarily the first band to try traditional folk music with electric instruments — around the same time that Fairport started experimenting with the idea, so did an Irish band named Sweeney’s Men, who brought in a young electric guitarist named Henry McCullough briefly. But they do seem to have been the first to have fully embraced the idea. They had done so to an extent with “A Sailor’s Life” on Unhalfbricking, but now they were going to go much further: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Matty Groves” (from about 4:30)] There had been some doubt as to whether Fairport Convention would even continue to exist — by the time Unhalfbricking, their second album of the year, was released, they had been through the terrible car accident that had killed Martin Lamble, the band’s drummer, and Jeannie Franklyn, Richard Thompson’s girlfriend. Most of the rest of the band had been seriously injured, and they had made a conscious decision not to discuss the future of the band until they were all out of hospital. Ashley Hutchings was hospitalised the longest, and Simon Nicol, Richard Thompson, and Sandy Denny, the other three surviving members of the band, flew over to LA with their producer and manager, Joe Boyd, to recuperate there and get to know the American music scene. When they came back, the group all met up in the flat belonging to Denny’s boyfriend Trevor Lucas, and decided that they were going to continue the band. They made a few decisions then — they needed a new drummer, and as well as a drummer they wanted to get in Dave Swarbrick. Swarbrick had played violin on several tracks on Unhalfbricking as a session player, and they had all been thrilled to work with him. Swarbrick was one of the most experienced musicians on the British folk circuit. He had started out in the fifties playing guitar with Beryl Marriott’s Ceilidh Band before switching to fiddle, and in 1963, long before Fairport had formed, he had already appeared on TV with the Ian Campbell Folk Group, led by Ian Campbell, the father of Ali and Robin Campbell, later of UB40: [Excerpt: The Ian Campbell Folk Group, “Shanten Bells (medley on Hullaballoo!)”] He’d sung with Ewan MacColl and A.L. Lloyd: [Excerpt: A.L. Lloyd, “Tom’s Gone to Hilo” ] And he’d formed his hugely successful duo with Martin Carthy, releasing records like “Byker Hill” which are often considered among the best British folk music of all time: [Excerpt: Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, “Byker Hill”] By the time Fairport had invited him to play on Unhalfbricking, Swarbrick had already performed on twenty albums as a core band member, plus dozens more EPs, singles, and odd tracks on compilations. They had no reason to think they could actually get him to join their band. But they had three advantages. The first was that Swarbrick was sick of the traditional folk scene at the time, saying later “I didn’t like seven-eighths of the people involved in it, and it was extremely opportune to leave. I was suddenly presented with the possibilities of exploring the dramatic content of the songs to the full.” The second was that he was hugely excited to be playing with Richard Thompson, who was one of the most innovative guitarists of his generation, and Martin Carthy remembers him raving about Thompson after their initial sessions. (Carthy himself was and is no slouch on the guitar of course, and there was even talk of getting him to join the band at this point, though they decided against it — much to the relief of rhythm guitarist Simon Nicol, who is a perfectly fine player himself but didn’t want to be outclassed by *two* of the best guitarists in Britain at the same time). And the third was that Joe Boyd told him that Fairport were doing so well — they had a single just about to hit the charts with “Si Tu Dois Partir” — that he would only have to play a dozen gigs with Fairport in order to retire. As it turned out, Swarbrick would play with the group for a decade, and would never retire — I saw him on his last tour in 2015, only eight months before he died. The drummer the group picked was also a far more experienced musician than any of the rest, though in a very different genre. Dave Mattacks had no knowledge at all of the kind of music they played, having previously been a player in dance bands. When asked by Hutchings if he wanted to join the band, Mattacks’ response was “I don’t know anything about the music. I don’t understand it… I can’t tell one tune from another, they all sound the same… but if you want me to join the group, fine, because I really like it. I’m enjoying myself musically.” Mattacks brought a new level of professionalism to the band, thanks to his different background. Nicol said of him later “He was dilligent, clean, used to taking three white shirts to a gig… The application he could bring to his playing was amazing. With us, you only played well when you were feeling well.” This distinction applied to his playing as well. Nicol would later describe the difference between Mattacks’ drumming and Lamble’s by saying “Martin’s strength was as an imaginative drummer. DM came in with a strongly developed sense of rhythm, through keeping a big band of drunken saxophone players in order. A great time-keeper.” With this new line-up and a new sense of purpose, the group did as many of their contemporaries were doing and “got their heads together in the country”. Joe Boyd rented the group a mansion, Farley House, in Farley Chamberlayne, Hampshire, and they stayed there together for three months. At the start, the group seem to have thought that they were going to make another record like Unhalfbricking, with some originals, some songs by American songwriters, and a few traditional songs. Even after their stay in Farley Chamberlayne, in fact, they recorded a few of the American songs they’d rehearsed at the start of the process, Richard Farina’s “Quiet Joys of Brotherhood” and Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn’s “Ballad of Easy Rider”: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Ballad of Easy Rider”] Indeed, the whole idea of “getting our heads together in the country” (as the cliche quickly became in the late sixties as half of the bands in Britain went through much the same kind of process as Fairport were doing — but usually for reasons more to do with drug burnout or trend following than recovering from serious life-changing trauma) seems to have been inspired by Bob Dylan and the Band getting together in Big Pink. But very quickly they decided to follow the lead of Ashley Hutchings, who had had something of a Damascene conversion to the cause of traditional English folk music. They were listening mostly to Music From Big Pink by the Band, and to the first album by Sweeney’s Men: [Excerpt: Sweeney’s Men, “The Handsome Cabin Boy”] And they decided that they were going to make something that was as English as those records were North American and Irish (though in the event there were also a few Scottish songs included on the record). Hutchings in particular was becoming something of a scholar of traditional music, regularly visiting Cecil Sharp House and having long conversations with A.L. Lloyd, discovering versions of different traditional songs he’d never encountered before. This was both amusing and bemusing Sandy Denny, who had joined a rock group in part to get away from traditional music; but she was comfortable singing the material, and knew a lot of it and could make a lot of suggestions herself. Swarbrick obviously knew the repertoire intimately, and Nicol was amenable, while Mattacks was utterly clueless about the folk tradition at this point but knew this was the music he wanted to make. Thompson knew very little about traditional music, and of all the band members except Denny he was the one who has shown the least interest in the genre in his subsequent career — but as we heard at the beginning, showing the least interest in the genre is a relative thing, and while Thompson was not hugely familiar with the genre, he *was* able to work with it, and was also more than capable of writing songs that fit in with the genre. Of the eleven songs on the album, which was titled Liege and Lief (which means, roughly, Lord and Loyalty), there were no cover versions of singer-songwriters. Eight were traditional songs, and three were originals, all written in the style of traditional songs. The album opened with “Come All Ye”, an introduction written by Denny and Hutchings (the only time the two would ever write together): [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Come All Ye”] The other two originals were songs where Thompson had written new lyrics to traditional melodies. On “Crazy Man Michael”, Swarbrick had said to Thompson that the tune to which he had set his new words was weaker than the lyrics, to which Thompson had replied that if Swarbrick felt that way he should feel free to write a new melody. He did, and it became the first of the small number of Thompson/Swarbrick collaborations: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Crazy Man Michael”] Thompson and Swarbrick would become a brief songwriting team, but as much as anything else it was down to proximity — the two respected each other as musicians, but never got on very well. In 1981 Swarbrick would say “Richard and I never got on in the early days of FC… we thought we did, but we never did. We composed some bloody good songs together, but it was purely on a basis of “you write that and I’ll write this, and we’ll put it together.” But we never sat down and had real good chats.” The third original on the album, and by far the most affecting, is another song where Thompson put lyrics to a traditional tune. In this case he thought he was putting the lyrics to the tune of “Willie O'Winsbury”, but he was basing it on a recording by Sweeney’s Men. The problem was that Sweeney’s Men had accidentally sung the lyrics of “Willie O'Winsbury'” to the tune of a totally different song, “Fause Foodrage”: [Excerpt: Sweeney’s Men, “Willie O’Winsbury”] Thompson took that melody, and set to it lyrics about loss and separation. Thompson has never been one to discuss the meanings of his lyrics in any great detail, and in the case of this one has said “I really don't know what it means. This song came out of a dream, and I pretty much wrote it as I dreamt it (it was the sixties), and didn't spend very long analyzing it. So interpret as you wish – or replace with your own lines.” But in the context of the traffic accident that had killed his tailor girlfriend and a bandmate, and injured most of his other bandmates, the lyrics about lonely travellers, the winding road, bruised and beaten sons, saying goodbye, and never cutting cloth, seem fairly self-explanatory: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Farewell, Farewell”] The rest of the album, though, was taken up by traditional tunes. There was a long medley of four different fiddle reels; a version of “Reynardine” (a song about a seductive man — or is he a fox? Or perhaps both — which had been recorded by Swarbrick and Carthy on their most recent album); a 19th century song about a deserter saved from the firing squad by Prince Albert; and a long take on “Tam Lin”, one of the most famous pieces in the Scottish folk music canon, a song that has been adapted in different ways by everyone from the experimental noise band Current 93 to the dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah to the comics writer Grant Morrison: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Tam Lin”] And “Matty Groves”, a song about a man killing his cheating wife and her lover, which actually has a surprisingly similar story to that of “1921” from another great concept album from that year, the Who’s Tommy. “Matty Groves” became an excuse for long solos and shows of instrumental virtuosity: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Matty Groves”] The album was recorded in September 1969, after their return from their break in the country and a triumphal performance at the Royal Festival Hall, headlining over fellow Witchseason artists John and Beverly Martyn and Nick Drake. It became a classic of the traditional folk genre — arguably *the* classic of the traditional folk genre. In 2007 BBC Radio 2’s Folk Music Awards gave it an award for most influential folk album of all time, and while such things are hard to measure, I doubt there’s anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of British folk and folk-rock music who would not at least consider that a reasonable claim. But once again, by the time the album came out in November, the band had changed lineups yet again. There was a fundamental split in the band – on one side were Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson, whose stance was, roughly, that Liege and Lief was a great experiment and a fun thing to do once, but really the band had two first-rate songwriters in themselves, and that they should be concentrating on their own new material, not doing these old songs, good as they were. They wanted to take the form of the traditional songs and use that form for new material — they wanted to make British folk-rock, but with the emphasis on the rock side of things. Hutchings, on the other hand, was equally sure that he wanted to make traditional music and go further down the rabbit hole of antiquity. With the zeal of the convert he had gone in a couple of years from being the leader of a band who were labelled “the British Jefferson Airplane” to becoming a serious scholar of traditional folk music. Denny was tired of touring, as well — she wanted to spend more time at home with Trevor Lucas, who was sleeping with other women when she was away and making her insecure. When the time came for the group to go on a tour of Denmark, Denny decided she couldn’t make it, and Hutchings was jubilant — he decided he was going to get A.L. Lloyd into the band in her place and become a *real* folk group. Then Denny reconsidered, and Hutchings was crushed. He realised that while he had always been the leader, he wasn’t going to be able to lead the band any further in the traditionalist direction, and quit the group — but not before he was delegated by the other band members to fire Denny. Until the publication of Richard Thompson’s autobiography in 2022, every book on the group or its members said that Denny quit the band again, which was presumably a polite fiction that the band agreed, but according to Thompson “Before we flew home, we decided to fire Sandy. I don't remember who asked her to leave – it was probably Ashley, who usually did the dirty work. She was reportedly shocked that we would take that step. She may have been fragile beneath the confident facade, but she still knew her worth.” Thompson goes on to explain that the reasons for kicking her out were that “I suppose we felt that in her mind she had already left” and that “We were probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, though there wasn't a name for it back then.” They had considered inviting Trevor Lucas to join the band to make Denny more comfortable, but came to the (probably correct) conclusion that while he was someone they got on well with personally, he would be another big ego in a band that already had several, and that being around Denny and Lucas’ volatile relationship would, in Thompson’s phrasing, “have not always given one a feeling of peace and stability.” Hutchings originally decided he was going to join Sweeney’s Men, but that group were falling apart, and their first rehearsal with Hutchings would also be their last as a group, with only Hutchings and guitarist and mandolin player Terry Woods left in the band. They added Woods’ wife Gay, and another couple, Tim Hart and Maddy Prior, and formed a group called Steeleye Span, a name given them by Martin Carthy. That group, like Fairport, went to “get their heads together in the country” for three months and recorded an album of electric versions of traditional songs, Hark the Village Wait, on which Mattacks and another drummer, Gerry Conway, guested as Steeleye Span didn’t at the time have their own drummer: [Excerpt: Steeleye Span, “Blackleg Miner”] Steeleye Span would go on to have a moderately successful chart career in the seventies, but by that time most of the original lineup, including Hutchings, had left — Hutchings stayed with them for a few albums, then went on to form the first of a series of bands, all called the Albion Band or variations on that name, which continue to this day. And this is something that needs to be pointed out at this point — it is impossible to follow every single individual in this narrative as they move between bands. There is enough material in the history of the British folk-rock scene that someone could do a 500 Songs-style podcast just on that, and every time someone left Fairport, or Steeleye Span, or the Albion Band, or Matthews’ Southern Comfort, or any of the other bands we have mentioned or will mention, they would go off and form another band which would then fission, and some of its members would often join one of those other bands. There was a point in the mid-1970s where the Albion Band had two original members of Fairport Convention while Fairport Convention had none. So just in order to keep the narrative anything like wieldy, I’m going to keep the narrative concentrated on the two figures from Fairport — Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson — whose work outside the group has had the most influence on the wider world of rock music more broadly, and only deal with the other members when, as they often did, their careers intersected with those two. That doesn’t mean the other members are not themselves hugely important musicians, just that their importance has been primarily to the folk side of the folk-rock genre, and so somewhat outside the scope of this podcast. While Hutchings decided to form a band that would allow him to go deeper and deeper into traditional folk music, Sandy Denny’s next venture was rather different. For a long time she had been writing far more songs than she had ever played for her bandmates, like “Nothing More”, a song that many have suggested is about Thompson: [Excerpt: Fotheringay, “Nothing More”] When Joe Boyd heard that Denny was leaving Fairport Convention, he was at first elated. Fairport’s records were being distributed by A&M in the US at that point, but Island Records was in the process of opening up a new US subsidiary which would then release all future Fairport product — *but*, as far as A&M were concerned, Sandy Denny *was* Fairport Convention. They were only interested in her. Boyd, on the other hand, loved Denny’s work intensely, but from his point of view *Richard Thompson* was Fairport Convention. If he could get Denny signed directly to A&M as a solo artist before Island started its US operations, Witchseason could get a huge advance on her first solo record, while Fairport could continue making records for Island — he’d have two lucrative acts, on different labels. Boyd went over and spoke to A&M and got an agreement in principle that they would give Denny a forty-thousand-dollar advance on her first solo album — twice what they were paying for Fairport albums. The problem was that Denny didn’t want to be a solo act. She wanted to be the lead singer of a band. She gave many reasons for this — the one she gave to many journalists was that she had seen a Judy Collins show and been impressed, but noticed that Collins’ band were definitely a “backing group”, and as she put it “But that's all they were – a backing group. I suddenly thought, If you're playing together on a stage you might as well be TOGETHER.” Most other people in her life, though, say that the main reason for her wanting to be in a band was her desire to be with her boyfriend, Trevor Lucas. Partly this was due to a genuine desire to spend more time with someone with whom she was very much in love, partly it was a fear that he would cheat on her if she was away from him for long periods of time, and part of it seems to have been Lucas’ dislike of being *too* overshadowed by his talented girlfriend — he didn’t mind acknowledging that she was a major talent, but he wanted to be thought of as at least a minor one. So instead of going solo, Denny formed Fotheringay, named after the song she had written for Fairport. This new band consisted at first of Denny on vocals and occasional piano, Lucas on vocals and rhythm guitar, and Lucas’ old Eclection bandmate Gerry Conway on drums. For a lead guitarist, they asked Richard Thompson who the best guitarist in Britain was, and he told them Albert Lee. Lee in turn brought in bass player Pat Donaldson, but this lineup of the band barely survived a fortnight. Lee *was* arguably the best guitarist in Britain, certainly a reasonable candidate if you could ever have a singular best (as indeed was Thompson himself), but he was the best *country* guitarist in Britain, and his style simply didn’t fit with Fotheringay’s folk-influenced songs. He was replaced by American guitarist Jerry Donahue, who was not anything like as proficient as Lee, but who was still very good, and fit the band’s style much better. The new group rehearsed together for a few weeks, did a quick tour, and then went into the recording studio to record their debut, self-titled, album. Joe Boyd produced the album, but admitted himself that he only paid attention to those songs he considered worthwhile — the album contained one song by Lucas, “The Ballad of Ned Kelly”, and two cover versions of American singer-songwriter material with Lucas singing lead. But everyone knew that the songs that actually *mattered* were Sandy Denny’s, and Boyd was far more interested in them, particularly the songs “The Sea” and “The Pond and the Stream”: [Excerpt: Fotheringay, “The Pond and the Stream”] Fotheringay almost immediately hit financial problems, though. While other Witchseason acts were used to touring on the cheap, all packed together in the back of a Transit van with inexpensive equipment, Trevor Lucas had ambitions of being a rock star and wanted to put together a touring production to match, with expensive transport and equipment, including a speaker system that got nicknamed “Stonehenge” — but at the same time, Denny was unhappy being on the road, and didn’t play many gigs. As well as the band itself, the Fotheringay album also featured backing vocals from a couple of other people, including Denny’s friend Linda Peters. Peters was another singer from the folk clubs, and a good one, though less well-known than Denny — at this point she had only released a couple of singles, and those singles seemed to have been as much as anything else released as a novelty. The first of those, a version of Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” had been released as by “Paul McNeill and Linda Peters”: [Excerpt: Paul McNeill and Linda Peters, “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”] But their second single, a version of John D. Loudermilk’s “You’re Taking My Bag”, was released on the tiny Page One label, owned by Larry Page, and was released under the name “Paul and Linda”, clearly with the intent of confusing particularly gullible members of the record-buying public into thinking this was the McCartneys: [Excerpt: Paul and Linda, “You’re Taking My Bag”] Peters was though more financially successful than almost anyone else in this story, as she was making a great deal of money as a session singer. She actually did another session involving most of Fotheringay around this time. Witchseason had a number of excellent songwriters on its roster, and had had some success getting covers by people like Judy Collins, but Joe Boyd thought that they might possibly do better at getting cover versions if they were performed in less idiosyncratic arrangements. Donahue, Donaldson, and Conway went into the studio to record backing tracks, and vocals were added by Peters and another session singer, who according to some sources also provided piano. They cut songs by Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band: [Excerpt: Linda Peters, “You Get Brighter”] Ed Carter, formerly of The New Nadir but by this time firmly ensconced in the Beach Boys’ touring band where he would remain for the next quarter-century: [Excerpt: Linda Peters, “I Don’t Mind”] John and Beverly Martyn, and Nick Drake: [Excerpt: Elton John, “Saturday Sun”] There are different lineups of musicians credited for those sessions in different sources, but I tend to believe that it’s mostly Fotheringay for the simple reason that Donahue says it was him, Donaldson and Conway who talked Lucas and Denny into the mistake that destroyed Fotheringay because of these sessions. Fotheringay were in financial trouble already, spending far more money than they were bringing in, but their album made the top twenty and they were getting respect both from critics and from the public — in September, Sandy Denny was voted best British female singer by the readers of Melody Maker in their annual poll, which led to shocked headlines in the tabloids about how this “unknown” could have beaten such big names as Dusty Springfield and Cilla Black. Only a couple of weeks after that, they were due to headline at the Albert Hall. It should have been a triumph. But Donahue, Donaldson, and Conway had asked that singing pianist to be their support act. As Donahue said later “That was a terrible miscast. It was our fault. He asked if [he] could do it. Actually Pat, Gerry and I had to talk Sandy and Trevor into [it]… We'd done these demos and the way he was playing – he was a wonderful piano player – he was sensitive enough. We knew very little about his stage-show. We thought he'd be a really good opener for us.” Unfortunately, Elton John was rather *too* good. As Donahue continued “we had no idea what he had in mind, that he was going to do the most incredible rock & roll show ever. He pretty much blew us off the stage before we even got on the stage.” To make matters worse, Fotheringay’s set, which was mostly comprised of new material, was underrehearsed and sloppy, and from that point on no matter what they did people were counting the hours until the band split up. They struggled along for a while though, and started working on a second record, with Boyd again producing, though as Boyd later said “I probably shouldn't have been producing the record. My lack of respect for the group was clear, and couldn't have helped the atmosphere. We'd put out a record that had sold disappointingly, A&M was unhappy. Sandy's tracks on the first record are among the best things she ever did – the rest of it, who cares? And the artwork, Trevor's sister, was terrible. It would have been one thing if I'd been unhappy with it and it sold, and the group was working all the time, making money, but that wasn't the case … I knew what Sandy was capable of, and it was very upsetting to me.” The record would not be released for thirty-eight years: [Excerpt: Fotheringay, “Wild Mountain Thyme”] Witchseason was going badly into debt. Given all the fissioning of bands that we’ve already been talking about, Boyd had been stretched thin — he produced sixteen albums in 1970, and almost all of them lost money for the company. And he was getting more and more disillusioned with the people he was producing. He loved Beverly Martyn’s work, but had little time for her abusive husband John, who was dominating her recording and life more and more and would soon become a solo artist while making her stay at home (and stealing her ideas without giving her songwriting credit). The Incredible String Band were great, but they had recently converted to Scientology, which Boyd found annoying, and while he was working with all sorts of exciting artists like Vashti Bunyan and Nico, he was finding himself less and less important to the artists he mentored. Fairport Convention were a good example of this. After Denny and Hutchings had left the group, they’d decided to carry on as an electric folk group, performing an equal mix of originals by the Swarbrick and Thompson songwriting team and arrangements of traditional songs. The group were now far enough away from the “British Jefferson Airplane” label that they decided they didn’t need a female vocalist — and more realistically, while they’d been able to replace Judy Dyble, nobody was going to replace Sandy Denny. Though it’s rather surprising when one considers Thompson’s subsequent career that nobody seems to have thought of bringing in Denny’s friend Linda Peters, who was dating Joe Boyd at the time (as Denny had been before she met Lucas) as Denny’s replacement. Instead, they decided that Swarbrick and Thompson were going to share the vocals between them. They did, though, need a bass player to replace Hutchings. Swarbrick wanted to bring in Dave Pegg, with whom he had played in the Ian Campbell Folk Group, but the other band members initially thought the idea was a bad one. At the time, while they respected Swarbrick as a musician, they didn’t think he fully understood rock and roll yet, and they thought the idea of getting in a folkie who had played double bass rather than an electric rock bassist ridiculous. But they auditioned him to mollify Swarbrick, and found that he was exactly what they needed. As Joe Boyd later said “All those bass lines were great, Ashley invented them all, but he never could play them that well. He thought of them, but he was technically not a terrific bass player. He was a very inventive, melodic, bass player, but not a very powerful one technically. But having had the part explained to him once, Pegg was playing it better than Ashley had ever played it… In some rock bands, I think, ultimately, the bands that sound great, you can generally trace it to the bass player… it was at that point they became a great band, when they had Pegg.” The new lineup of Fairport decided to move in together, and found a former pub called the Angel, into which all the band members moved, along with their partners and children (Thompson was the only one who was single at this point) and their roadies. The group lived together quite happily, and one gets the impression that this was the period when they were most comfortable with each other, even though by this point they were a disparate group with disparate tastes, in music as in everything else. Several people have said that the only music all the band members could agree they liked at this point was the first two albums by The Band. With the departure of Hutchings from the band, Swarbrick and Thompson, as the strongest personalities and soloists, became in effect the joint leaders of the group, and they became collaborators as songwriters, trying to write new songs that were inspired by traditional music. Thompson described the process as “let’s take one line of this reel and slow it down and move it up a minor third and see what that does to it; let’s take one line of this ballad and make a whole song out of it. Chopping up the tradition to find new things to do… like a collage.” Generally speaking, Swarbrick and Thompson would sit by the fire and Swarbrick would play a melody he’d been working on, the two would work on it for a while, and Thompson would then go away and write the lyrics. This is how the two came up with songs like the nine-minute “Sloth”, a highlight of the next album, Full House, and one that would remain in Fairport’s live set for much of their career: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Sloth”] “Sloth” was titled that way because Thompson and Swarbrick were working on two tunes, a slow one and a fast one, and they jokingly named them “Sloth” and “Fasth”, but the latter got renamed to “Walk Awhile”, while “Sloth” kept its working title. But by this point, Boyd and Thompson were having a lot of conflict in the studio. Boyd was never the most technical of producers — he was one of those producers whose job is to gently guide the artists in the studio and create a space for the music to flourish, rather than the Joe Meek type with an intimate technical knowledge of the studio — and as the artists he was working with gained confidence in their own work they felt they had less and less need of him. During the making of the Full House album, Thompson and Boyd, according to Boyd, clashed on everything — every time Boyd thought Thompson had done a good solo, Thompson would say to erase it and let him have another go, while every time Boyd thought Thompson could do better, Thompson would say that was the take to keep. One of their biggest clashes was over Thompson’s song “Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman”, which was originally intended for release on the album, and is included in current reissues of it: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman”] Thompson had written that song inspired by what he thought was the unjust treatment of Alex Bramham, the driver in Fairport’s fatal car crash, by the courts — Bramham had been given a prison sentence of a few months for dangerous driving, while the group members thought he had not been at fault. Boyd thought it was one of the best things recorded for the album, but Thompson wasn’t happy with his vocal — there was one note at the top of the melody that he couldn’t quite hit — and insisted it be kept off the record, even though that meant it would be a shorter album than normal. He did this at such a late stage that early copies of the album actually had the title printed on the sleeve, but then blacked out. He now says in his autobiography “I could have persevered, double-tracked the voice, warmed up for longer – anything. It was a good track, and the record was lacking without it. When the album was re-released, the track was restored with a more confident vocal, and it has stayed there ever since.” During the sessions for Full House the group also recorded one non-album single, Thompson and Swarbrick’s “Now Be Thankful”: [Excerpt, Fairport Convention, “Now Be Thankful”] The B-side to that was a medley of two traditional tunes plus a Swarbrick original, but was given the deliberately ridiculous title “Sir B. McKenzie’s Daughter’s Lament For The 77th Mounted Lancers Retreat From The Straits Of Loch Knombe, In The Year Of Our Lord 1727, On The Occasion Of The Announcement Of Her Marriage To The Laird Of Kinleakie”: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Sir B. McKenzie’s Daughter’s Lament For The 77th Mounted Lancers Retreat From The Straits Of Loch Knombe, In The Year Of Our Lord 1727, On The Occasion Of The Announcement Of Her Marriage To The Laird Of Kinleakie”] The B. McKenzie in the title was a reference to the comic-strip character Barry McKenzie, a stereotype drunk Australian created for Private Eye magazine by the comedian Barry Humphries (later to become better known for his Dame Edna Everage character) but the title was chosen for one reason only — to get into the Guinness Book of Records for the song with the longest title. Which they did, though they were later displaced by the industrial band Test Dept, and their song “Long Live British Democracy Which Flourishes and Is Constantly Perfected Under the Immaculate Guidance of the Great, Honourable, Generous and Correct Margaret Hilda Thatcher. She Is the Blue Sky in the Hearts of All Nations. Our People Pay Homage and Bow in Deep Respect and Gratitude to Her. The Milk of Human Kindness”. Full House got excellent reviews in the music press, with Rolling Stone saying “The music shows that England has finally gotten her own equivalent to The Band… By calling Fairport an English equivalent of the Band, I meant that they have soaked up enough of the tradition of their countryfolk that it begins to show all over, while they maintain their roots in rock.” Off the back of this, the group went on their first US tour, culminating in a series of shows at the Troubadour in LA, on the same bill as Rick Nelson, which were recorded and later released as a live album: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Sloth (live)”] The Troubadour was one of the hippest venues at the time, and over their residency there the group got seen by many celebrities, some of whom joined them on stage. The first was Linda Ronstadt, who initially demurred, saying she didn’t know any of their songs. On being told they knew all of hers, she joined in with a rendition of “Silver Threads and Golden Needles”. Thompson was later asked to join Ronstadt’s backing band, who would go on to become the Eagles, but he said later of this offer “I would have hated it. I’d have hated being on the road with four or five miserable Americans — they always seem miserable. And if you see them now, they still look miserable on stage — like they don’t want to be there and they don’t like each other.” The group were also joined on stage at the Troubadour on one memorable night by some former bandmates of Pegg’s. Before joining the Ian Campbell Folk Group, Pegg had played around the Birmingham beat scene, and had been in bands with John Bonham and Robert Plant, who turned up to the Troubadour with their Led Zeppelin bandmate Jimmy Page (reports differ on whether the fourth member of Zeppelin, John Paul Jones, also came along). They all got up on stage together and jammed on songs like “Hey Joe”, “Louie Louie”, and various old Elvis tunes. The show was recorded, and the tapes are apparently still in the possession of Joe Boyd, who has said he refuses to release them in case he is murdered by the ghost of Peter Grant. According to Thompson, that night ended in a three-way drinking contest between Pegg, Bonham, and Janis Joplin, and it’s testament to how strong the drinking culture is around Fairport and the British folk scene in general that Pegg outdrank both of them. According to Thompson, Bonham was found naked by a swimming pool two days later, having missed two gigs. For all their hard rock image, Led Zeppelin were admirers of a lot of the British folk and folk-rock scene, and a few months later Sandy Denny would become the only outside vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin record when she duetted with Plant on “The Battle of Evermore” on the group’s fourth album: [Excerpt: Led Zeppelin, “The Battle of Evermore”] Denny would never actually get paid for her appearance on one of the best-selling albums of all time. That was, incidentally, not the only session that Denny was involved in around this time — she also sang on the soundtrack to a soft porn film titled Swedish Fly Girls, whose soundtrack was produced by Manfred Mann: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “What Will I Do With Tomorrow?”] Shortly after Fairport’s trip to America, Joe Boyd decided he was giving up on Witchseason. The company was now losing money, and he was finding himself having to produce work for more and more acts as the various bands fissioned. The only ones he really cared about were Richard Thompson, who he was finding it more and more difficult to work with, Nick Drake, who wanted to do his next album with just an acoustic guitar anyway, Sandy Denny, who he felt was wasting her talents in Fotheringay, and Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band, who was more distant since his conversion to Scientology. Boyd did make some attempts to keep the company going. On a trip to Sweden, he negotiated an agreement with the manager and publisher of a Swedish band whose songs he’d found intriguing, the Hep Stars. Boyd was going to publish their songs in the UK, and in return that publisher, Stig Anderson, would get the rights to Witchseason’s catalogue in Scandinavia — a straight swap, with no money changing hands. But before Boyd could get round to signing the paperwork, he got a better offer from Mo Ostin of Warners — Ostin wanted Boyd to come over to LA and head up Warners’ new film music department. Boyd sold Witchseason to Island Records and moved to LA with his fiancee Linda Peters, spending the next few years working on music for films like Deliverance and A Clockwork Orange, as well as making his own documentary about Jimi Hendrix, and thus missed out on getting the UK publishing rights for ABBA, and all the income that would have brought him, for no money. And it was that decision that led to the breakup of Fotheringay. Just before Christmas 1970, Fotheringay were having a difficult session, recording the track “John the Gun”: [Excerpt: Fotheringay, “John the Gun”] Boyd got frustrated and kicked everyone out of the session, and went for a meal and several drinks with Denny. He kept insisting that she should dump the band and just go solo, and then something happened that the two of them would always describe differently. She asked him if he would continue to produce her records if she went solo, and he said he would. According to Boyd’s recollection of the events, he meant that he would fly back from California at some point to produce her records. According to Denny, he told her that if she went solo he would stay in Britain and not take the job in LA. This miscommunication was only discovered after Denny told the rest of Fotheringay after the Christmas break that she was splitting the band. Jerry Donahue has described that as the worst moment of his life, and Denny felt very guilty about breaking up a band with some of her closest friends in — and then when Boyd went over to the US anyway she felt a profound betrayal. Two days before Fotheringay’s final concert, in January 1971, Sandy Denny signed a solo deal with Island records, but her first solo album would not end up produced by Joe Boyd. Instead, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens was co-produced by Denny, John Wood — the engineer who had worked with Boyd on pretty much everything he’d produced, and Richard Thompson, who had just quit Fairport Convention, though he continued living with them at the Angel, at least until a truck crashed into the building in February 1971, destroying its entire front wall and forcing them to relocate. The songs chosen for The North Star Grassman and the Ravens reflected the kind of choices Denny would make on her future albums, and her eclectic taste in music. There was, of course, the obligatory Dylan cover, and the traditional folk ballad “Blackwaterside”, but there was also a cover version of Brenda Lee’s “Let’s Jump the Broomstick”: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Let’s Jump the Broomstick”] Most of the album, though, was made up of originals about various people in Denny’s life, like “Next Time Around”, about her ex-boyfriend Jackson C Frank: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Next Time Around”] The album made the top forty in the UK — Denny’s only solo album to do so — and led to her once again winning the “best female singer” award in Melody Maker’s readers’ poll that year — the male singer award was won by Rod Stewart. Both Stewart and Denny appeared the next year on the London Symphony Orchestra’s all-star version of The Who’s Tommy, which had originally been intended as a vehicle for Stewart before Roger Daltrey got involved. Stewart’s role was reduced to a single song, “Pinball Wizard”, while Denny sang on “It’s a Boy”: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “It’s a Boy”] While Fotheringay had split up, all the band members play on The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Guitarists Donahue and Lucas only play on a couple of the tracks, with Richard Thompson playing most of the guitar on the record. But Fotheringay’s rhythm section of Pat Donaldson and Gerry Conway play on almost every track. Another musician on the album, Ian Whiteman, would possibly have a profound effect on the future direction of Richard Thompson’s career and life. Whiteman was the former keyboard player for the mod band The Action, having joined them just before they became the blues-rock band Mighty Baby. But Mighty Baby had split up when all of the band except the lead singer had converted to Islam. Richard Thompson was on his own spiritual journey at this point, and became a Sufi – the same branch of Islam as Whiteman – soon after the session, though Thompson has said that his conversion was independent of Whiteman’s. The two did become very close and work together a lot in the mid-seventies though. Thompson had supposedly left Fairport because he was writing material that wasn’t suited to the band, but he spent more than a year after quitting the group working on sessions rather than doing anything with his own material, and these sessions tended to involve the same core group of musicians. One of the more unusual was a folk-rock supergroup called The Bunch, put together by Trevor Lucas. Richard Branson had recently bought a recording studio, and wanted a band to test it out before opening it up for commercial customers, so with this free studio time Lucas decided to record a set of fifties rock and roll covers. He gathered together Thompson, Denny, Whiteman, Ashley Hutchings, Dave Mattacks, Pat Donaldson, Gerry Conway, pianist Tony Cox, the horn section that would later form the core of the Average White Band, and Linda Peters, who had now split up with Joe Boyd and returned to the UK, and who had started dating Thompson. They recorded an album of covers of songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, Johnny Otis and others: [Excerpt: The Bunch, “Willie and the Hand Jive”] The early seventies was a hugely productive time for this group of musicians, as they all continued playing on each other’s projects. One notable album was No Roses by Shirley Collins, which featured Thompson, Mattacks, Whiteman, Simon Nicol, Lal and Mike Waterson, and Ashley Hutchings, who was at that point married to Collins, as well as some more unusual musicians like the free jazz saxophonist Lol Coxhill: [Excerpt: Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band, “Claudy Banks”] Collins was at the time the most respected female singer in British traditional music, and already had a substantial career including a series of important records made with her sister Dolly, work with guitarists like Davey Graham, and time spent in the 1950s collecting folk songs in the Southern US with her then partner Alan Lomax – according to Collins she did much of the actual work, but Lomax only mentioned her in a single sentence in his book on this work. Some of the same group of musicians went on to work on an album of traditional Morris dancing tunes, titled Morris On, credited to “Ashley Hutchings, Richard Thompson, Dave Mattacks, John Kirkpatrick and Barry Dransfield”, with Collins singing lead on two tracks: [Excerpt: Ashley Hutchings, Richard Thompson, Dave Mattacks, John Kirkpatrick and Barry Dransfield with Shirley Collins, “The Willow Tree”] Thompson thought that that album was the best of the various side projects he was involved in at the time, comparing it favourably to Rock On, which he thought was rather slight, saying later “Conceptually, Fairport, Ashley and myself and Sandy were developing a more fragile style of music that nobody else was particularly interested in, a British Folk Rock idea that had a logical development to it, although we all presented it our own way. Morris On was rather more true to what we were doing. Rock On was rather a retro step. I'm not sure it was lasting enough as a record but Sandy did sing really well on the Buddy Holly songs.” Hutchings used the musicians on No Roses and Morris On as the basis for his band the Albion Band, which continues to this day. Simon Nicol and Dave Mattacks both quit Fairport to join the Albion Band, though Mattacks soon returned. Nicol would not return to Fairport for several years, though, and for a long period in the mid-seventies Fairport Convention had no original members. Unfortunately, while Collins was involved in the Albion Band early on, she and Hutchings ended up divorcing, and the stress from the divorce led to Collins developing spasmodic dysphonia, a stress-related illness which makes it impossible for the sufferer to sing. She did eventually regain her vocal ability, but between 1978 and 2016 she was unable to perform at all, and lost decades of her career. Richard Thompson occasionally performed with the Albion Band early on, but he was getting stretched a little thin with all these sessions. Linda Peters said later of him “When I came back from America, he was working in Sandy’s band, and doing sessions by the score. Always with Pat Donaldson and Dave Mattacks. Richard would turn up with his guitar, one day he went along to do a session with one of those folkie lady singers — and there were Pat and DM. They all cracked. Richard smashed his amp and said “Right! No more sessions!” In 1972 he got round to releasing his first solo album, Henry the Human Fly, which featured guest appearances by Linda Peters and Sandy Denny among others: [Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “The Angels Took My Racehorse Away”] Unfortunately, while that album has later become regarded as one of the classics of its genre, at the time it was absolutely slated by the music press. The review in Melody Maker, for example, read in part “Some of Richard Thompson’s ideas sound great – which is really the saving grace of this album, because most of the music doesn’t. The tragedy is that Thompson’s “British rock music” is such an unconvincing concoction… Even the songs that do integrate rock and traditional styles of electric guitar rhythms and accordion and fiddle decoration – and also include explicit, meaningful lyrics are marred by bottle-up vocals, uninspiring guitar phrases and a general lack of conviction in performance.” Henry the Human Fly was released in the US by Warners, who had a reciprocal licensing deal with Island (and for whom Joe Boyd was working at the time, which may have had something to do with that) but according to Thompson it became the lowest-selling record that Warners ever put out (though I’ve also seen that claim made about Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle, another album that has later been rediscovered). Thompson was hugely depressed by this reaction, and blamed his own singing. Happily, though, by this point he and Linda had become a couple — they would marry in 1972 — and they started playing folk clubs as a duo, or sometimes in a trio with Simon Nicol. Thompson was also playing with Sandy Denny’s backing band at this point, and played on every track on her second solo album, Sandy. This album was meant to be her big commercial breakthrough, with a glamorous cover photo by David Bailey, and with a more American sound, including steel guitar by Sneaky Pete Kleinow of the Flying Burrito Brothers (whose overdubs were supervised in LA by Joe Boyd): [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Tomorrow is a Long Time”] The album was given a big marketing push by Island, and “Listen, Listen” was made single of the week on the Radio 1 Breakfast show: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Listen, Listen”] But it did even worse than the previous album, sending her into something of a depression. Linda Thompson (as the former Linda Peters now was) said of this period “After the Sandy album, it got her down that her popularity didn't suddenly increase in leaps and bounds, and that was the start of her really fretting about the way her career was going. Things only escalated after that. People like me or Martin Carthy or Norma Waterson would think, ‘What are you on about? This is folk music.'” After Sandy’s release, Denny realised she could no longer afford to tour with a band, and so went back to performing just acoustically or on piano. The only new music to be released by either of these ex-members of Fairport Convention in 1973 was, oddly, on an album by the band they were no longer members of. After Thompson had left Fairport, the group had managed to release two whole albums with the same lineup — Swarbrick, Nicol, Pegg, and Mattacks. But then Nicol and Mattacks had both quit the band to join the Albion Band with their former bandmate Ashley Hutchings, leading to a situation where the Albion Band had two original members of Fairport plus their longtime drummer while Fairport Convention itself had no original members and was down to just Swarbrick and Pegg. Needing to fulfil their contracts, they then recruited three former members of Fotheringay — Lucas on vocals and rhythm guitar, Donahue on lead guitar, and Conway on drums. Conway was only a session player at the time, and Mattacks soon returned to the band, but Lucas and Donahue became full-time members. This new lineup of Fairport Convention released two albums in 1973, widely regarded as the group’s most inconsistent records, and on the title track of the first, “Rosie”, Richard Thompson guested on guitar, with Sandy Denny and Linda Thompson on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Rosie”] Neither Sandy Denny nor Richard Thompson released a record themselves in 1973, but in neither case was this through the artists’ choice. The record industry was changing in the early 1970s, as we’ll see in later episodes, and was less inclined to throw good money after bad in the pursuit of art. Island Records prided itself on being a home for great artists, but it was still a business, and needed to make money. We’ll talk about the OPEC oil crisis and its effect on the music industry much more when the podcast gets to 1973, but in brief, the production of oil by the US peaked in 1970 and started to decrease, leading to them importing more and more oil from the Middle East. As a result of this, oil prices rose slowly between 1971 and 1973, then very quickly towards the end of 1973 as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict that year. As vinyl is made of oil, suddenly producing records became much more expensive, and in this period a lot of labels decided not to release already-completed albums, until what they hoped would be a brief period of shortages passed. Both Denny and Thompson recorded albums at this point that got put to one side by Island. In the case of Thompson, it was the first album by Richard and Linda as a duo, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight: [Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight”] Today, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight is widely regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time, and as one of the two masterpieces that bookended Richard and Linda’s career as a duo and their marriage. But when they recorded the album, full of Richard’s dark songs, it was the opposite of commercial. Even a song that’s more or less a boy-girl song, like “Has He Got a Friend for Me?” has lyrics like “He wouldn’t notice me passing by/I could be in the gutter, or dangling down from a tree” [Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “Has He got a Friend For Me?”] While something like “The Calvary Cross” is oblique and haunted, and seems to cast a pall over the entire album: [Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “The Calvary Cross”] The album itself had been cheap to make — it had been recorded in only a week, with Thompson bringing in musicians he knew well and had worked with a lot previously to cut the tracks as-live in only a handful of takes — but Island didn’t think it was worth releasing. The record stayed on the shelf for nearly a year after recording, until Island got a new head of A&R, Richard Williams. Williams said of the album’s release “Muff Winwood had been doing A&R, but he was more interested in production… I had a conversation with Muff as soon as I got there, and he said there are a few hangovers, some outstanding problems. And one of them was Richard Thompson. He said there’s this album we gave him the money to make — which was I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight — and nobody’s very interested in it. Henry the Human Fly had been a bit of a commercial disappointment, and although Island was altruistic and independent and known for only recording good stuff, success was important… Either a record had to do well or somebody had to believe in it a lot. And it seemed as if neither of those things were true at that point of Richard.” Williams, though, was hugely impressed when he listened to the album. He compared Richard Thompson’s guitar playing to John Coltrane’s sax, and called Thompson “the folk poet of the rainy streets”, but also said “Linda brightened it, made it more commercial. and I thought that “Bright Lights” itself seemed a really commercial song.” The rest of the management at Island got caught up in Williams’ enthusiasm, and even decided to release the title track as a single: [Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight”] Neither single nor album charted — indeed it would not be until 1991 that Richard Thompson would make a record that made the top forty in the UK — but the album got enough critical respect that Richard and Linda released two albums the year after. The first of these, Hokey Pokey, is a much more upbeat record than their previous one — Richard Thompson has called it “quite a music-hall influenced record” and cited the influence of George Formby and Harry Lauder. For once, the claim of music hall influence is audible in the music. Usually when a British musician is claimed to have a music ha

Send us a message, so we know what you're thinking!A “Deep Cut” is something that is recognisable or familiar to passionate fans but not usually to others.  As a special treat this week, we've delved into our collections to give you some deep cuts from our favourites – things like Queen, Bowie, Joe Cocker, Nick Cave and TISM. We think you'll love them,   In Rock News, Jeff delves into songs that turn 60 on 2025, looks at Sunday Lunch with Toyah and Robert Fripp, and looks at Yachtley Crew, a strange phenomenon from California.  Our Album You Must Hear Before You Die this week is Raw Power (1973) by Iggy and the Stooges. The lo-fi production on this highly influential album is the source of much tension between Bowie and Iggy, much of it not fair. We liked it!  Enjoy.  Playlist  Songs that turn 60 this year  Sunday Lunch with Robert and Toyah  Yachtley Crew Peter Cook as The BishopREM on Letterman References:  Raw Power, Iggy Pop, The Stooges, John Cale, Columbia Records, Sex Pistols, Johnny Marr & The Smiths, Kurt Cobain, Nirvana, MainMan, Tony DeFries, Sonny Boy Williamson, Ron Asheton, Scott Asheton, “Gimme Danger”, “Search and Destroy”, Iggy on Countdown, radio-friendly, Bowie, “The Man Who Sold the World”, Unplugged, Roxy Music, “For Your Pleasure”, Roxy live in Sydney – 2001 & 2011, The Police, “Bring on the Night”, Regatta de Blanc, white reggae, T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, Joe Cocker, “Many Rivers to Cross”, Sheffield Steel, Queen, “Fairy Fellers Master Stroke”, Richard Dadd, State Criminal Lunatic Asylum of Bethlem Royal Hospital – Bedlam, Nick Cave, “Papa Won't Leave You, Henry”, Henry's Dream, John Cale, “Close Watch (I Keep a)”, Helen of Troy, Music for a New Society, Fragments of a Rainy Season, REM, "So. Central Rain (Sorry)", Reckoning, Lou Reed, “Street Hassle”, Warren Zevon, “Hit Somebody!  (The Hockey Song)”, My Ride's Here, Carl Hiassen, “Bad Monkey”, Vince Vaughan, David Letterman, Enjoy Every Sandwich, Jimmy Webb, “Galveston”, Kate Bush, Aerial, "Pi”, Pete Townshend, “The Sea Refuses No River”, All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, TISM, Great Trucking Songs of the Renaissance, "The Ballad of John Bonham's Coke Roadie"  

Singer songwriter Brian Kennedy choses five songs that tell the story of his life. He talked to Dearbhail about growing up in Belfast during the troubles, busking on the streets of London before playing with Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell. His music includes ABBA, U2, and Kate Bush

Hoy en La Gran Travesía viajamos hasta el año 1978, donde podréis escuchar a Van Halen, The Police, Blondie, The Undertones, Cheap Trick, The Damned, Dire Straits, Warren Zevon, Kate Bush, Cars, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Big Star, Lou Reed, The Slits... y muchos más. También recordaros que ya podéis comprar La gran travesía del rock, un libro interactivo que además contará con 15 programas de radio complementarios, a modo de ficción sonora... Jimi y Janis, dos periodistas musicales, vienen de 2027, un mundo distópico y delirante donde el reguetón tiene (casi) todo el poder... pero ellos dos, deciden alistarse al GLP para viajar en el tiempo, salvar el rock, rescatar sus archivos ocultos y combatir la dictadura troyana del FPR. ✨ El libro ya está en diversas webs, en todostuslibros.com Amazon, Fnac y también en La Montaña Mágica, por ejemplo https://www.amazon.es/GRAN-TRAVES%C3%8DA-DEL-ROCK-autoestopista/dp/8419924938 ▶️ Y ya sabéis, si os gusta el programa y os apetece, podéis apoyarnos y colaborar con nosotros por el simple precio de una cerveza al mes, desde el botón azul de iVoox, y así, además podéis acceder a todo el archivo histórico exclusivo. Muchas gracias también a todos los mecenas y patrocinadores por vuestro apoyo: Gin1975, Alberto Velasco, Poncho C, Don T, Francisco Quintana, Gastón Nicora, Con,, Dotakon, Tete García, Jose Angel Tremiño, Marco Landeta Vacas, Oscar García Muñoz, Raquel Parrondo, Javier Gonzar, Poncho C, Nacho, Javito, Alberto, Pilar Escudero, Blas, Moy, Dani Pérez, Santi Oliva, Vicente DC,, Leticia, JBSabe, Flor, Melomanic, Arturo Soriano, Gemma Codina, Raquel Jiménez, Pedro, SGD, Raul Andres, Tomás Pérez, Pablo Pineda, Quim Goday, Enfermerator, María Arán, Joaquín, Horns Up, Victor Bravo, Fonune, Eulogiko, Francisco González, Marcos Paris, Vlado 74, Daniel A, Redneckman, Elliott SF, Sementalex, Miguel Angel Torres, Suibne, Javifer, Matías Ruiz Molina, Noyatan, Estefanía, Iván Menéndez, Niksisley y a los mecenas anónimos.

This week, I've hit the 60 percent mark on the draft of The Prince and the Fool (Ravenglass Legends, Book 4). The story is moving steadily, and I'm excited to see it coming together.I've also been reading the 33 1/3 book on Kate Bush's Hounds of Love—a fascinating deep dive into one of my all-time favourite albums. And I've finally started watching House of Cards on Netflix—dark, sharp, and brilliantly acted.I'm still dealing with a bad back, which has been slowing me down. I'm really hoping it improves soon, especially with Nine Inch Nails coming up next week—fingers crossed I'll be well enough to go!

Podcast #742 is gonna put a bop in your step thanks to Erik Voeks, The Airport 77s, Ty Segall, Lines of Drift, The States, Wayne Pain & the Shit Stains, & Kate Bush.

With a megastar like Tom Cruise bringing back his 8th Mission Impossible movie, we call upon a major guest in ⁠Zach⁠ of the ⁠Movie Ladder Podcast⁠ (+ Allix!) to unpack the summer blockbuster + recent releases like the comedies Mountainhead and Friendship and very different takes on "action" with MCU's Thunderbolts* and the Iraq War portrayal Warfare.Mild SPOILERS for Mission Impossible Final Reckoning.Outro is Aquarela do Brasil, also called Brazil, composed 1939 by Ary Barroso, recorded 1985 by Michael Kamen with Kate Bush

Feeling co-o-old? Come on into our window! That's right, it's me, I'm Cathvy, along with my only master, ashcliff, here to welcome you to our Wuthering, Wuthering Wuthering Heights... MOVIE WATCHALONG! That's right baby, it's the start of HOT HEATH SUMMER, and what better way to begin than to watch perhaps the worst film adaptation of the book, Wuthering Heights (2003) produced my MTV. Join us, watch along with us, as this film raises many, many questions: Why does it take them so long to tell us anyone's name? Wait, is that the guy from Malcom in the Middle? Why is his beard always so terrible? Why did they make Isabella gay but unable to accept this part of herself? What's with the audio balance? What's with the telescopes? And finally, does Ivy actually know what happens in Wuthering Heights? "Wuthering Heights" by Kate Bush 8-bit cover by RubenEdit:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlvQ4V1BvwI Support the show:  https://ko-fi.com/ivyfoxart Follow the show on Tumblr:  https://soul-mates-podcast.tumblr.com/ Follow the show on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/@Soul-Mates-Podcast Listen to Together We'll Shine: An Utena Rewatch Podcast:  https://bunnygirlbrainwave.substack.com/archive Art by Ryegarden:  https://www.instagram.com/ryegarden Music by Sueños Electrónicos:  https://suenoselectronicos.bandcamp.com/ Follow and support ash:  https://ko-fi.com/asherlark

The year is 1395. The city: London. The crime: an "unmentionable, ignominious vice" commonly known as sodomy.And the perp? A rascally, resourceful enigma named John Rykener, who enters the court records "calling herself Eleanor," wearing women's clothes, and defying gravity / everything we know about medieval gender.But John/Eleanor Rykener – or Jeleanor, as they shall henceforth be known to scholars – doesn't map easily onto our modern categories of "trans," "queer," or "sex worker."Jeleanor lived and presented as both a man and a woman, depending on when it suited them. That made them highly creative with their gender, especially when it came to their day job, but does it mean they were "trans"?They learned the cons that kept them surviving and thriving from a local madam. But in medieval London, to be a prostitute was to be a woman. The court is clear that Jeleanor was AMAB and that their crime was sodomy, not prostitution. So can we say they were seen as a sex worker in their own time?And finally, they took to bed men and women from all walks of medieval life, for money and for fun. Does that make them queer or "bisexual"? Can we trust this court record to tell us about Jeleanor's experience of sexual desire? Did the court care more about the gender of Jeleanor's conquests, or their ties to the Church?Join Bash and the brilliantly clever medievalist, Dr. Mireille Pardon, as we unpick and unpack the surviving legal record that details Jeleanor's deliciously saucy life.Along the way we'll learn about:Streetside sodomy in the Little Ice AgeCommon cons to make sure your medieval john paysThe wages for a sex worker in the 1390sWhy the cops REALLY cared about busting trans sex workers 600+ years agoYou can follow Historical Homos for more on our ⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠, and you should ⁠⁠⁠sign up to our newsletter⁠⁠⁠ too, if you care about gay people at all.Credits: "Running up that hill Cover in Early Middle English BARDCORE/MEDIEVAL version. Original by Kate Bush." Accessed June 2025 on YouTube. Owned by @the_miracle_aligner.

100 Folgen „Urban Pop“! 100mal haben Peter Urban und Ocke Bandixen über legendäre Bands gesprochen, über Künstlerinnen und Künstler. Seit 2021 erscheint alle zwei Wochen eine neue Folge, in der zum Beispiel der künstlerische Weg von Joni Mitchell nachgezeichnet wird - oder der von Bruce Springsteen, dem Peter schon bei seinem ersten Konzert in Hamburg begegnet ist. Viele persönliche Treffen, Interviews und Konzerterinnerungen machen die Geschichten im Gespräch mit Ocke lebendig: von Kate Bush bis David Bowie, von Udo Lindenberg bis Jackson Browne. Taylor Swift ist bei „Urban Pop“ genauso ein Thema wie die Rolling Stones, Kinks oder Beatles, Tracy Chapman wechselt sich ab mit Led Zeppelin und The Who. Zur 100. Folge von Urban Pop haben Peter Urban und Ocke Bandixen sich einen großartigen Gast eingeladen: Ulla Meinecke – für ein ausführliches Gespräch und einen exklusiven Auftritt. Musikliste: Meinecke Fuchs (1978): Wenn ich jetzt weiterrede Überdosis Großstadt (1980): Die Blonde, Frankfurt, Rücken zur Wand, Made in Germany Nächtelang (1981): Zu fett fürs Ballett, Dach der Welt, Nächtelang Wenn Schon Nicht Für Immer Dann Wenigstens Für Ewig (1983): Nie wieder, Die Tänzerin, Zauberformel, Feuer unterm Eis, 50 Tips, Süße Sünden, Kleine Schwester Der Stolz Italienischer Frauen (1985): Der Stolz italienischer Frauen, Gewitter, Was ich an dir mag Erst Mal Gucken - Dann Mal Sehen (1988): Hafencafé, Schlendern ist Luxus, Unten am Ufer, Ein großes Herz Löwen (1991): Da kommt ein Tag, Ein Schritt vor und zwei zurück, König von Hollywood, Die Zeit wartet auf niemand, Langsames Lied An! (1994): Alles schäumt, Winter aus Gold, Gut Nacht, 13. Dezember Die Luft Ist Rein (2002): In Berlin, Nur Gerede, Wenn Du mich nicht verstehst, Marlene an der Wand, Geh mir aus dem Licht, Wer will schon Becky Thatcher sein?, Schlaf Im Augenblick (2005): Feuer unterm Eis, Tiere, Wenn 2, In Berlin, Alles schäumt, Süsse Sünden, Die Tänzerin Unser Podcast-Tipp in dieser Folge: IQ Feature: Hysterie oder Liebe - was steckt hinter dem Fantum? / https://www.ardaudiothek.de/sendung/iq-wissenschaft-und-forschung/5941402

Ce soir, Marjorie Hache vous accompagne sur RTL2 Pop-Rock Station pour deux heures de nouveautés et de classiques. On commence avec Sparks et "My Devotion", extrait de leur dernier album "Mad", avant de retrouver Them avec le classique "Gloria" de 1964. Aujourd'hui, on fête l'anniversaire de Samantha Spracklin, alias Safron de Republica, et pour l'occasion, on écoute "Drop Dead Gorgeous". On poursuit avec Tunde Adebimpe (TV On The Radio) et son projet solo Thee Black Bolts avec "Somebody New". On enchaîne avec Suede et "Desintegrate" ainsi que le dernier single de Garbage, "Hold". On vous fait aussi découvrir Arcade Fire avec "Year Of The Snake". Dans la deuxième heure, on retrouve Dinosaur Pile Up avec "Big Dogs", avant de se plonger dans The B-52s avec "Planet Claire". Puis, Kate Bush avec "Running Up That Hill". Finissons en beauté avec Deftones et "Be Quiet and Drive" et Eels avec "Mr E's Beautiful Blues". Sparks - My Devotion Them - Gloria Republica - Drop Dead Gorgeous Moon Martin - Bad News (Chorus Version) Tunde Adebimpe - Somebody New Greta Van Fleet - Highway Tune Thin Lizzy - The Boys Are Back In Town Garbage - Hold Beastie Boys - Sabotage Arcade Fire - Year Of The Snake The B-52's - Planet Claire Suede - Disintegrate Ty Segall - 20Th Century Boy Florence + The Machine - Dog Days Are Over Dinosaur Pile Up - Big Dogs The Byrds - Mr Tambourine Man The Libertines - Gunga Din Kate Bush - Running Up That Hill (Live J.O. 2012) Electric Light Orchestra - Don't Bring Me Down Viagra Boys - Punk Rock Loser Big Thief - Incomprehensible Pink Floyd - Money Deftones - Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away) Eels - Mr. E's Beautiful Blues Metz - A Boat To Drown InDistribué par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

In this soul-stirring episode, Kaye sits down with legendary music producer Martin Glover—known globally as Youth. From working with icons like Kate Bush, U2, and Paul McCartney to recording with the Gyuto Monks of Tibet, Youth’s legacy in sound is undeniable. But behind the fame lies a profound spiritual odyssey. Youth shares his journey from a life-shattering LSD experience at 21—followed by hospitalization, medication, and biblical hallucinations—to a 7-year integration that sparked his spiritual awakening. His path led through Shamanism, Druidry, and ancient mystery schools in a deep search for meaning. Together, Kaye and Youth explore the sacred intersection of sound, spirit, and self—alchemy, opposites, the Druid’s cup and sword—and the universal truth: all paths lead to the same place. Subscribe to Inner Voice of Knowing Podcast by clicking the plus or follow button and let's get this journey started. Connect with Kaye Doran - http://kayedoran.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ciara Lawless, known as the Celtic songbird, and hails from Roscommon, released her Debut Album ‘Paint My Soul' on 26th April 2024 and her second album ‘Divine Intervention' on the 2nd May 2025. Described as the Irish Kate Bush, Ciara is a professional Irish singer, performer, with a strong background in pop, classical and opera music. Ciara is a seasoned singer/songwriter with a proven track record of winning competitions and entertaining diverse audiences. Ciara competed and won in both national and international competitions as a Soprano at the Austria international Choral competitions in 2017 with the Tullamore Academy Chamber Choir, where she was the youngest member to be given a solo. Ciara also performed at the Winter Namm music show in Los Angeles in 2019. Ciara is one of the strongest Irish emerging artists that is set for world domination with her powerful voice that has hints of Kate Bush and Florence And The Machine. With 2 albums recorded and ready and a tour on the horizon, Ciara is ready to take the main stage and solidify her place as one of Ireland's next big names in the Music Industry.

Quels sont les copieurs de Chic, quelle est la position du pianiste et comment devenir un gorille, vous saurez tout ! Kate Bush - Babooshka Prosper - Juge NxWorries - Everybody Gets Down Feist - My Moon My Man (Boys Noize Classic Remix) Visage - Fade to Grey (12" version) OMD - Enola Gay Kurtis Blow - The Breaks The Jam - Going Underground George Benson - Give Me The Night Change - The Glow of Love feat. Luther Vandross Sister Sledge - I'm a Good Girl Paul Simon - God Bless the Absentee Michel Berger - La groupie du pianiste France Gall - Il jouait du piano debout The Feelies - The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness Bro. Valentino - Ah Wo (Brand New Revolution)Linton Kwesi Johnson - Di Black Petty Booshwah Roxy Music - Same Old Scene Stevie Wonder - All I Do (Reverend P edit)Mary Clark - Take Me I'm Yours Was (Not Was) - Wheel Me Out Loose Joints - Is It All Over My FaceDistribué par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Growing up in the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic left Pete Crighton with a huge fear of sex … and he threw himself into music as a way to cope with his anxieties. Decades later, he realized that he needed to face his fears and live his queer life to the fullest. Pete writes about this journey in his new memoir, The Vinyl Diaries, where he uses his favourite songs, albums and artists as the backdrop to his story. He tells Mattea Roach about his later-in-life exploration of sex and why music was so formative to his queer experience. If you enjoyed this conversation, check out these episodes:Kate Bush spins a magical story on her album Hounds of LoveZoe Whittall: Why heartbreak is a valid form of grief

This week, we're revisiting our fascinating conversation with one of the UK's most respected journalists and broadcasters – Emma Barnett!In this episode, Emma reflects on her journey to becoming the voice of Woman's Hour, her deep love of the landline and the importance of long-form conversation in a world of shrinking attention spans. She also shares the story behind that rare and unforgettable interview with Kate Bush, which went viral around the globe. You're in for a treat!For all the latest news, click here to follow us on Instagram!***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!*** Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

They're two great tastes that taste great together. They are the chocolate and peanut butter of music. We will never tire of this reference. Gen X forever. Anyway, here in Top Ten Unique Voices That Sound Great Together, we wrap things up with Gabe Scalone and finish our count down of those unlikely and unique voice combos that sound incredible when those combos combine. Picks 5-1 are featured here in Part 2.If you missed Part 1, start here:https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/alltimetopten/episodes/2025-05-12T04_00_00-07_00There ain't nothin' wrong with the music heard in this here playlist, people. Enjoy this collection of all the songs heard in Parts 1 & 2, bumper songs included.https://open.spotify.com/playlist/78hjDFayS2pOntnFB9DdDJ?si=8cd1fd45b2714508We've lowered our prices, but not our standards over at the ATTT Patreon! Those who are kindly contributing $2 a month are receiving an exclusive monthly Emergency Pod episode featuring our favorite guests and utilizing our patent-pending improv format in which we miraculously pull a playlist out of thin air. The Old Boy Himself Ryan Blake joined for May's bonus episode.Find out more at https://www.patreon.com/c/alltimetoptenWe're having a blast chatting it up about music over on the ATTT Facebook Group. Join us and start a conversation!https://www.facebook.com/groups/940749894391295

Spéciale Kate Bush avec le journaliste français Frédéric Delâge, qui publie "Kate Bush : Le temps du rêve" (Le Mot et le Reste). En 1978, à l'âge de dix-neuf ans, Kate Bush sort Wuthering Heights, son premier 45-tours, qui détonne en pleine déferlante punk et fait d'elle la première femme autrice- compositrice-interprète à atteindre le sommet des charts au Royaume-Uni. Au fil de ses disques, de ses vidéos et de ses rares concerts, elle a cultivé un sens de l'audace et de l'autonomie, transgressant les codes de la pop, imposant son univers hors des modes et sans compromis. Musicienne, productrice, danseuse et auteure-interprète, elle reste par ses performances vocales et son style unique, une référence transcendant les générations. En 2014, trente-cinq ans après son unique tournée, son retour sur scène est un triomphe. En 2022, l'utilisation dans la série « Stranger Things » de « Running Up That Hill », chanson sortie trente-sept ans plus tôt, permet à Kate Bush de conquérir un nouveau public et de renouer avec les sommets des charts internationaux. Merci pour votre écoute Entrez sans Frapper c'est également en direct tous les jours de la semaine de 16h à 17h30 sur www.rtbf.be/lapremiere Retrouvez l'ensemble des épisodes et les émission en version intégrale (avec la musique donc) de Entrez sans Frapper sur notre plateforme Auvio.be : https://auvio.rtbf.be/emission/8521 Abonnez-vous également à la partie "Bagarre dans la discothèque" en suivant ce lien: https://audmns.com/HSfAmLDEt si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement. Vous pourriez également apprécier ces autres podcasts issus de notre large catalogue: Le voyage du Stradivarius Feuermann : https://audmns.com/rxPHqEENoir Jaune Rouge - Belgian Crime Story : https://feeds.audiomeans.fr/feed/6e3f3e0e-6d9e-4da7-99d5-f8c0833912c5.xmlLes Petits Papiers : https://audmns.com/tHQpfAm Des rencontres inspirantes avec des artistes de tous horizons. Galaxie BD: https://audmns.com/nyJXESu Notre podcast hebdomadaire autour du 9ème art.Nom: Van Hamme, Profession: Scénariste : https://audmns.com/ZAoAJZF Notre série à propos du créateur de XII et Thorgal. Franquin par Franquin : https://audmns.com/NjMxxMg Ecoutez la voix du créateur de Gaston (et de tant d'autres...) Distribué par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Message de l'animateur Starchild :  Je vous donne rendez-vous ce soir pour le 89ème numéro de Freeway. Le neuvième de la saison 8, qui cette année porte le nom générique de « My Name Is David » pour les cinq épisodes à venir. Le chapitre de ce soir s'intitulant « Shell Shock ». Comme toujours, une histoire que je vous conte à l'antenne, illustrée sonorement par une playlist de 16 titres, tirés des repertoires Hard Rock, AOR et Pop : Foreigner, John Waite, Tears For Fears, Pretenders, Foo Fighters, Cher, Erasure, Kate Bush, Boston, Aerosmith, James McCartney & Sean Lennon, Rah Band, Van Halen,Hall & Oates, Peter Gabriel et SBD.

Novelist Elif Shafak, artist and writer Edmund de Waal and Professor Rachel Bowlby join Samira to discuss the centenary of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. As the Semi Finals of Eurovision start tonight in Basel, Switzerland, Paddy O'Connell talks about this year's contest. Four hundred leading British Artists such as Paul McCartney and Kate Bush have been giving their support to a campaign to try and stop tech films being able to use their work for AI training. Film director and peer Baroness Beeban Kidron talks about leading a successful amendment to this Data bill in the House of Lords. Morcheeba's Skye Edwards and Ross Godfrey are celebrating 30 years in the music business with new album Escape the Chaos. Formed in 1995 the band, who have been called trip hop pioneers, have had 3 top ten albums and gained global success. They perform, for the first time, an acoustic version of Call For Love from their forthcoming album. Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Claire Bartleet

In this episode of In the Key of Q, Dan Hall speaks with Ben McGarvey, who performs as Minute Taker. Ben's music is characterized by a signature blend of retro synth-pop, haunting piano melodies, and emotionally charged lyrics that explore the depth of human experience.Episode SummaryBen opens up about the origins of his stage name "Minute Taker" – a reference to his former day job that created an ironic contrast with his artistic identity. He describes it as "simultaneously mundane and otherworldly," reflecting the dual nature of his creative life.The conversation traverses Ben's musical evolution from a teenager in the 90s who was drawn to 80s synth music to his current work creating atmospheric, emotionally resonant songs. Ben reflects on how living in rural Shropshire as a young gay man shaped his relationship with music as a form of escape and self-expression.Throughout the episode, Ben courageously discusses his experiences with depression and how this has informed the melancholic quality of his music. Rather than viewing this melancholia as something negative, he explores how it can be "so beautiful" and serves as a connective tissue between artist and listener.Key Moments02:59 - Ben discusses his musical influences growing up, including Kate Bush, Pet Shop Boys, Tori Amos, and PJ Harvey07:47 - Reflections on growing up as a gay child in rural Britain during the Section 28 era09:35 - Ben shares his early songwriting experiences and how music became a form of escape16:46 - Discussion about representation and the importance of addressing songs explicitly to men22:46 - Ben speaks candidly about his experiences with depression and how it manifests24:44 - The evolution of Ben's work into audiovisual projects, including his concept album exploring gay men's lives throughout history28:32 - Details about his upcoming album "The Oblivion," inspired by Blade Runner and 80s sounds34:20 - Information about Ben's subscription service for fans to access exclusive musicGuest BioBen McGarvey is a Manchester-based musician who performs under the name Minute Taker. His work blends retro synth sounds with piano and emotional lyrics to create atmospheric, often melancholic music. Beyond traditional albums, Ben has expanded into audiovisual projects that explore LGBTQ+ experiences throughout history. His most recent album "Wolf Hours" included an accompanying visual narrative, and he's currently finishing his new album "The Oblivion."Gateway TrackBen recommends "Lead You Home," the opening track from his album "Wolf Hours," as the perfect introduction to his music. The song encapsulates his recent musical direction with its melancholic, synthy, and atmospheric qualities while remaining catchy. The accompanying music video alternates between scenes set in the 1980s and 1918, telling the story of two World War I soldiers.Gateway TrackMinute Taker website.In the Key of Q celebrates queer musicians and their stories. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, or email us at intheKeyofQ@gmail.com.Theme music by Paul Leonidou at Unstoppable Monsters.

"No, I would not give you false hopeOn this strange and mournful dayBut the mother and child reunionIs only a motion away"Please join me for a musical reunion and pay tribute to Mother's on this week's Super Sounds Of The 70's, Joining us are Wishbone Ash, David Bowie, Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell, Alan Parsons Project, Yes, Ten Years After, Randy Newman, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Pink Floyd, John Lennon, Neil Young, Savoy Brown, Pure Prairie League, Lou reed, Mott The Hoople, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles, Eric Clapton, Queen, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Paul Simon.

Kate Bush's Never for Ever album didn't just mark her ascendancy, it broadcasted her metamorphosis into a true The post Inside Kate Bush's Never For Ever appeared first on The Strange Brew .

Is it true?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lainey Schooltree is a musician, comedian, streamer, and former half of the musical comedy duo The Steamy Bohemians. She then formed the solo art rock project Schooltree. When the pandemic hit, she began performing on Twitch and found that live-streaming offered the interdisciplinary playground she'd been after. What began as a temporary pivot became a long-term transformation and these days she captains a spaceship on Lainey Schooltree TV - a live show where she’s an “astro-streamer” assigned to deliver packages while improvising music with analog synthesizers, electronic drums, and layered vocals in a show that blends surreal comedy, retro-futurist visuals, and themes of corporate absurdity and creative resistance. SONG 1: Kashmir by Led Zeppelin from their 1975 album Physical Graffiti.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzVJPgCn-Z8 SONG 2: Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra, Sz. 116: IV. Intermezzo interrotto. Allegretto performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1993.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUZ83BzCQNM SONG 3: Hammer Horror by Kate Bush off her album Lionheart released in 1978.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR4KnfcgLm0 PARTING TUNE: Cat Centipede by Schooltree from the album Heterotopia released in 2017.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF14v_qeVu8See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Passing the thermometer of conversation over the rock and roll news to see where the mercury rises, which this week includes … … the new Barbra Streisand duets album. Duets are ‘playlets', small intense dramas that depend on human interaction, but so many are recorded separately (including, tragically, Ain't No Mountain High Enough by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell). … but … duets you HAVE to hear! eg Cash & Carter, Otis Redding & Carla Thomas, Ray Charles & Betty Carter, Siouxsie & Morrissey, Nick Cave & Kylie, Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush. … the extraordinary story of the rebirth and Indian Summer of Mississippi John Hurt after 40 years of invisibility.   … blues lyrics that now seem unimaginable. … Frank Zappa as a drug dealer? Miles Davis as a pimp? Cyndi Lauper as a trophy wife? Real or made-up Miami Vice rock star cameos.  … great opening lines – “We got married in a fever …!” … how you always learn something you never knew about someone from their obituary - like Mike Peters' involvement in the highest altitude concert ever performed (on Everest with Glenn Tilbrook and Slim Jim Phantom). … where people listen to the Word In Your Ear “poddy” – eg in the bath, in court, at wedding receptions, by the Allman Brothers' graveside. Plus birthday guest John Montagna on rock stars who should be in a TV series.Help us to keep the conversation going by joining our Patreon community: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Passing the thermometer of conversation over the rock and roll news to see where the mercury rises, which this week includes … … the new Barbra Streisand duets album. Duets are ‘playlets', small intense dramas that depend on human interaction, but so many are recorded separately (including, tragically, Ain't No Mountain High Enough by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell). … but … duets you HAVE to hear! eg Cash & Carter, Otis Redding & Carla Thomas, Ray Charles & Betty Carter, Siouxsie & Morrissey, Nick Cave & Kylie, Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush. … the extraordinary story of the rebirth and Indian Summer of Mississippi John Hurt after 40 years of invisibility.   … blues lyrics that now seem unimaginable. … Frank Zappa as a drug dealer? Miles Davis as a pimp? Cyndi Lauper as a trophy wife? Real or made-up Miami Vice rock star cameos.  … great opening lines – “We got married in a fever …!” … how you always learn something you never knew about someone from their obituary - like Mike Peters' involvement in the highest altitude concert ever performed (on Everest with Glenn Tilbrook and Slim Jim Phantom). … where people listen to the Word In Your Ear “poddy” – eg in the bath, in court, at wedding receptions, by the Allman Brothers' graveside. Plus birthday guest John Montagna on rock stars who should be in a TV series.Help us to keep the conversation going by joining our Patreon community: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Passing the thermometer of conversation over the rock and roll news to see where the mercury rises, which this week includes … … the new Barbra Streisand duets album. Duets are ‘playlets', small intense dramas that depend on human interaction, but so many are recorded separately (including, tragically, Ain't No Mountain High Enough by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell). … but … duets you HAVE to hear! eg Cash & Carter, Otis Redding & Carla Thomas, Ray Charles & Betty Carter, Siouxsie & Morrissey, Nick Cave & Kylie, Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush. … the extraordinary story of the rebirth and Indian Summer of Mississippi John Hurt after 40 years of invisibility.   … blues lyrics that now seem unimaginable. … Frank Zappa as a drug dealer? Miles Davis as a pimp? Cyndi Lauper as a trophy wife? Real or made-up Miami Vice rock star cameos.  … great opening lines – “We got married in a fever …!” … how you always learn something you never knew about someone from their obituary - like Mike Peters' involvement in the highest altitude concert ever performed (on Everest with Glenn Tilbrook and Slim Jim Phantom). … where people listen to the Word In Your Ear “poddy” – eg in the bath, in court, at wedding receptions, by the Allman Brothers' graveside. Plus birthday guest John Montagna on rock stars who should be in a TV series.Help us to keep the conversation going by joining our Patreon community: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the mid 1990's, experiencer and abductee Ken Rose approached Linda Moulton Howe after a presentation and described seeing Linda herself and two other women in large clear tubes aboard a craft. One of these women was singer song writer phenom Kate Bush who at the tender age of 19 was the first female artist to have a number one self written hit in the UK. I take a look at Kates career in light of this revelation.credit to Linda Moulton Howe 1998 Glimpes of Other Realties Vol 2 High StrangenessIntro Are They Real? MGR ProductionsOutro The Sixth Sense Danijel Zambosupport the show Venmo @AFBpodcastTikTok Patrick Roy @aliensforbeginnerIG @aliensforbeginnerspodemail aliensforbeginnerspod@gmail.comalso find me on X, Threads, FB, YouTube, Substack

Award-winning author John Boyne has just brought out the 4th and final novella, ‘Air', in his ‘Elements' series of books. He talked about the book and chose five songs that have meant something special to him throughout his life from Backstreet Boys to Kate Bush to Drake.

Paddy steps into the Celtic time machine for Phoenyx, a San Fran band's 35 year old recording is finally released! A Touch of the familiar from Kate Bush (she lives in a castle so, Celtic adjacent). And, out standing Celtic from The Gloaming, The Dreadnoughts and Karen Matheson. Join Patricia Fraser for Canada's contemporary Celtic Radio Hour!   Phoenyx - Banish Misfortune  Feufollet - Cette Fois  The Dreadnoughts - Cider Holiday CANCON Enter The Haggis - Gone​ CANCON Firkin - Those Irish Punk Girls  Flook - Jig For Sham  Kate Bush - Running Up That Hill  The Gloaming - The Old Road To Garry  Paddy Murphy - Hot Girl  Gnoss - Stroma  Artists For Action - Which Side Are You On​? CANCON (proceeds to Ukraine) Karen Matheson - Recovery Susan McKeown - Goodbye And Farewell  Peatbog Faeries - Captain Coull's Parrot    59:56

Emotions, Epicness & Everything In Between

Send us a textYour host Brad Brock is back in the JNC Lounge with the ever-delightful Jordyn Taylor for a truly nostalgic and hilarious ride through the unexpected comeback stories of some of our favorite songs. In this episode, we're talking about those hidden musical gems and forgotten hits that found second lives years—sometimes decades—after their original release... thanks to none other than TikTok.From Fleetwood Mac's “Dreams” riding a skateboard with cranberry juice to Kate Bush's dramatic return via Stranger Things, we're diving into the TikTok time warp that's resurrecting B-sides, indie anthems, and underrated bops. We also chat about viral AI-generated action figures (yes, including butt plugs), taste-test the Pink Pony Pop cocktail, and bring you live music, entertainment headlines in The Jordy Files, a throwback edition of Name That Tune, and our signature Midweek Motivation. Trust us—this one's jam-packed (pun intended) with fun, laughs, and earworms!LinksJNC Officialhttps://www.jncpodcast.comSupport us on Patreonhttps://www.patreon.com/jncpodcast

Your host Brad Brock is back in the JNC Lounge with the ever-delightful Jordyn Taylor for a truly nostalgic and hilarious ride through the unexpected comeback stories of some of our favorite songs. In this episode, we're talking about those hidden musical gems and forgotten hits that found second lives years—sometimes decades—after their original release... thanks to none other than TikTok.From Fleetwood Mac's “Dreams” riding a skateboard with cranberry juice to Kate Bush's dramatic return via Stranger Things, we're diving into the TikTok time warp that's resurrecting B-sides, indie anthems, and underrated bops. We also chat about viral AI-generated action figures (yes, including butt plugs), taste-test the Pink Pony Pop cocktail, and bring you live music, entertainment headlines in The Jordy Files, a throwback edition of Name That Tune, and our signature Midweek Motivation. Trust us—this one's jam-packed (pun intended) with fun, laughs, and earworms!LinksJNC Officialhttps://www.jncpodcast.comSupport us on Patreonhttps://www.patreon.com/jncpodcast

In 2022, Kate Bush's song Running Up That Hill topped charts around the world … nearly 40 years after its initial release. The resurgence came after the song was featured on the Netflix series Stranger Things — but according to the musician and writer Leah Kardos, the entire album is a masterpiece. Leah's new book, Hounds of Love, is a deep dive into Kate's 1985 album of the same name. It tells the remarkable story of how the album came to be, explores Kate's enduring appeal and paints a portrait of Kate as a visionary musician and storyteller. If you enjoyed this conversation, check out these episodes:Why Heather O'Neill believes in magic Leslie Jamison: Capturing Peggy Guggenheim in fiction and honouring a friend's dream 

Second part with Bill discussing more great LP/single artwork courtesy ofBill Smith Studios...6. QUEEN (1984)BSS work with Queen on The Works LP and associated singles. Also discussed is other work in the rock world; AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and Shakey.7. LOOSE ENDS (1985 - 88)Location! Location! Location! Bill draws the short straw and shoots some Loose Ends covers all over the world. It's a tough life...8.  KATE BUSH (1985-89)The utterly iconic Hounds of Love LP cover is discussed as well as the associated single sleeves.Then the greatest hits, the box set and Sensual World LP are also covered.9. ERIC CLAPTON (1982-89)BSS first worked with EC on the Timepieces best of compilation.Then talk leads on to the Journeyman and Unplugged LP artwork.10. MISCELLANEOUS (1980-89)A-ha! Heaven 17! (not in the book, if I had known the work he did, this would have been a chapter) The B-52s! Van Morrison! And more Shaky! (can't have too much)And we end with the Quickfire Round as per the norm.Bill can be found on Facebook.80sography@gmail.com and Twitter/Blue Sky                                     I'm a-gettin' ready to meet the saints Send us a text

It's a good thing ANOHNI and I decided to leave the cameras turned off for the interview included in episode 118 of the LSQ podcast, because there were moments when she was talking --about her creative process, about using her voice and her music as a survival strategy, about what it felt like to grow up as a trans femme amidst the violence of patriarchy -- that I was nearly in tears, so moved by the way she described her experience. And since crying while interviewing is as cringe as "crying in baseball," it was a relief not to be seen in those moments. It was fascinating to hear ANOHNI's story of discovering her musical spirit as a child, motivated by a desire to reveal feminine emotion and power in a way that she felt her mother was not allowed to, and to learn how she developed her creative process from there. ANOHNI talks about drawing inspiration from artists such as Kate Bush, Boy George, Marc Almond, Alison Moyet, Nina Simone, Ray Charles, Diamanda Galas and more, and how she has learned to adapt musical forms to suit her voice (both the literal voice and the symbolic voice). She also shares about her relationship with her mentor, the late Lou Reed, how greatly he encouraged her early in her career, and what it was like to recently perform some of his music live for the first time since he passed. You can keep up with ANOHNI here. This is also the first video episode of the LSQ podcast, with awesome illustrations and animation crafted by Jess Rotter and Andrew Deselm. Thanks to them for the wonderful work!

Fáilte ar ais chuig eagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo ar an 3ú lá de mí Aibreán, liomsa Lauren Ní Loingsigh. I 1965 tháinig an nuacht amach go raibh 1,000 oifigeach den stát nach raibh ag obair a thuilleadh – bhí siad mar ionadaí de státseirbhíseach, múinteoirí gardaí agus an airm, chuala siad gearán den Aire Airgeadas dá dhearcadh chuig a pinsean. I 1998 bhí an National Irish Bank I dtrioblóid mar tháinig an nuacht amach go raibh siad ag tógáil níos mó airgead as a chustaiméirí. I 1981 tháinig an nuacht amach go raibh a lán uasghrádú déanta do sheirbhísí máithreachais sa chontae agus bhí na hothar an-sásta. I 1998 bhí a lán athrúchán sa daonra sa chontae agus de bharr sin bhí daoine ag smaoineamh nach mbeadh na toghcháin mar an gcéanna san iarthar den chontae agus cheap siad nach mbeadh suíochán ag an tSionainn agus Cill Dalua. Sin Run DMC le It's Like That – an t-amhrán is mó ar an lá seo I 1998. Ag lean ar aghaidh le nuacht cheoil ar an lá seo I 1979 thosaigh Kate Bush a turas ceoil darbh ainm Tour Of Life sa Learpholl. Bhí na daoine a raibh ticéad acu an ádhúil mar dúradh go mbeadh sé 25 bhliain roimh a mbeadh Kate Bush ag déanamh turas ceoil eile. I 2011 chuaigh Adele chuig uimhir a haon sna cairteacha lena albam 21 agus d'fhan sí ann ar feadh 10 seachtain. Bhí amhráin ar an albam cosúil le Rolling In The Deep agus Set Fire To The Rain. Agus ar deireadh breithlá daoine cáiliúla ar an lá seo rugadh amhránaí Leona Lewis sa Bhreatain I 1985 agus rugadh aisteoir Eddie Murphy I Nua Eabhrac ar an lá seo I 1961 agus seo chuid de na rudaí a rinne sé. Beidh mé ar ais libh amárach le heagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo. Welcome back to another edition of Ar An Lá Seo on the 3rd of April, with me Lauren Ní Loingsigh In 1965 nearly 1,000 retired state officers who were representing civil servants, teachers, gardai and the army, heard severe critcism of the minister for finance for his attitude towards their pension claims In 1998 The northern ireland wing of beleagured national irish bank was at the centre of fresh allegations of overcharging its customers In 1981 There was a significant upgrade of services available to maternity patients in co.clare announced by Mr MJ Duffy. In 1998 Major shifts in population were assumed to cause a dramatic shakeup for the next years county council elections with the west clare area which was likelly to loose two seats to the growing shannon and killaloe electoral areas. That was Run DMC with It's Like That – the biggest song on this day in 1998. Onto music news on this day in 1979, singer-songwriter Kate Bush, then 20, kicked off her 28-date Tour Of Life at Liverpool's Empire Theatre. Ticket holders were particularly lucky, given that it would be another 25 years before Bush committed herself to another extended run of concerts. In 2011, British singer-songwriter Adele broke a UK chart record when her second album, 21, spent ten consecutive weeks at No.1. Featuring the hits “Rolling in the Deep” and “Set Fire to the Rain.” And finally celebrity birthdays on this day – Leona Lewis was born in England in 1985 and actor Eddie Murphy was born in New York City on this day in 1961 – and these are some of the things he has done. I'll be back with you tomorrow with another edition of Ar An Lá Seo.

Susan Morrison joins us to discuss her definitive biography of SNL creator Lorne Michaels. Author Leah Kardos tells us why Kate Bush's album, “Hounds of Love,” is as fresh as ever 40 years after its release. Also, Maggie Su on her very funny and very moving debut novel, “Blob: A Love Story.”

Chip and Jeff chat about running and the awesome Fraud Street Loop with Philadelphia's premier running coach Gerard Pescatore! As a reward for all you good people supporting this fundraiser for Philabundance, Chip and Jeff take turns asking some of the best music trivia questions from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and beyond! We also chat about dogs named Franklin, losing our eyesight, Segway tours, Stephen Tobolowsky, Kate Bush, the height difference between Hall and Oates, MTV Veejays, Fake movie bands, bands with umlauts, Dolly Parton, and so much more fun!

Send us a textIt's time to go running up that hill to discuss Hounds of Love from the lovely and talented Kate Bush. This week, Robert hosts special guest and Kate Bush Super Fan, Bradley Brady from across the pond, and Liam Lewis for some young energy. website for Bradley's and John's shop in the UKhttps://cosmicjos.co.uk/Twitter @dockingbay77podFacebook @dockingbay77podcastdockingbay77podcast@gmail.compatreon.com/dockingbay77podcasthttps://discord.gg/T8Nt3YB7

Eric Idle returns to SNL for the first time since his two Season 2 hosting gigs! This time, he brings along new British pop sensation Kate Bush for her first - and still ONLY - US television appearance. In a much-needed jolt to the season, Idle delivers his signature brilliance alongside recurring characters, lots of Jane Curtin, not one but TWO classic sketches, and singing dogs.With Saturday Night Live showcasing two English guests on the program (yes, evidently there's a difference from British), we welcome Pop Culture Five's Thomas Sena to OUR 5-Timers Club as he helps break down this amazing episode. Thomas tackles it all - from the comedic genius of Eric Idle and his analysis of what makes an effective cold open to his apparent dislike of dogs. He also educates our hosts on the musical talents of Kate Bush.---------------------------------Subscribe today!Follow us on social media: X (Twitter): NR4PTProjectBluesky: nr4ptproject.bsky.socialInstagram: nr4ptprojectFacebook: The Not Ready for Prime Time ProjectContact Us: Website: https://www.nr4project.comEmail: nr4ptproject@gmail.com

In which we pedal the conversational tandem uphill and down dale, like a rabbit through the pea-vine or a turkey through the corn, stopping for moments of reflection which include … … “If someone wants to steal your music, it means your music's worth stealing.” … cats, birdsong: spot the ‘silent track' by Kate Bush.   … when Gene Hackman smiles, be very afraid. … what was written on Walter Matthau's funeral card. … “Home-Taping Is Killing Music!” and other threats that failed to sink the business.  … double albums: never mind the quality, feel the width. … how Exile On Main St became a symbol of peak-Stones grimy decadence. … Hunter Davies, Mark Lewisohn, Ian Leslie, Richard DiLello?: the best Beatles book ever written? … “is genius worth the collateral damage?”: homelife in Frank Zappa's house. … things we never say on the Word podcast. … when rock critics get it wrong. Plus birthday guest Nick Foreman flies the flag for Hunter Davies.Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In which we pedal the conversational tandem uphill and down dale, like a rabbit through the pea-vine or a turkey through the corn, stopping for moments of reflection which include … … “If someone wants to steal your music, it means your music's worth stealing.” … cats, birdsong: spot the ‘silent track' by Kate Bush.   … when Gene Hackman smiles, be very afraid. … what was written on Walter Matthau's funeral card. … “Home-Taping Is Killing Music!” and other threats that failed to sink the business.  … double albums: never mind the quality, feel the width. … how Exile On Main St became a symbol of peak-Stones grimy decadence. … Hunter Davies, Mark Lewisohn, Ian Leslie, Richard DiLello?: the best Beatles book ever written? … “is genius worth the collateral damage?”: homelife in Frank Zappa's house. … things we never say on the Word podcast. … when rock critics get it wrong. Plus birthday guest Nick Foreman flies the flag for Hunter Davies.Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Seán introduces an exclusive interview between Darrell Babidge and Govert de Roos. Dutch photographer, Govert de Roos was Kate's European photographer. Many of the photos that were taken of Kate in 1978 and were posted on many a bedroom wall were taken by Govert. In this interview we get a glimpse into his work with Kate Bush, as well as the rock and pop stars of the 70's and 80's. We also find out more about his work during the Efteling Special in Amsterdam and taking photos of Kate's Tour of Life concert there. Other artists he worked with include Grace Jones, Queen, ABBA, Debbie Harry, Tina Turner, Prince and many more. In this interview we hear about some of his work with these other great artists. We also get to hear a great story about when he was 15 years old, sneaking into the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam with a fake ID and taking the iconic photos of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. We hope you enjoy this chat with Govert de Roos.

Do the charts have the same relevance they once did? Annie and Nick discuss the potential reasons why there are no UK artists in the annual global top 10 for the first time since 2003. Elsewhere, Kate Bush is one of a thousand musicians behind a silent album to protest the government's proposed changes to copyright law. Should we be worried about artists having their identities stolen, or should we embrace change? Plus, Rihanna is set to release new music but it won't be “radio digestible”, Lola Young has a tough question, and Nick's back on the radio. Get in touch with Annie and Nick! If you're over 16, WhatsApp on 079700 82700 or email sidetracked@bbc.co.uk SONGS: Rihanna - Umbrella Rihanna - Pon De Replay Rihanna - Shut Up and Drive Roberta Flack - Killing Me Softly Roberta Flack – The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face Gwen McCrae – All This Love That I'm Giving Gwen McCrae - Keep The Fire Burning Benson Boone – Beautiful Things Sabrina Carpenter – Espresso Billie Eilish – Birds of a Feather Kendrick Lamar – Not Like Us Noah Kahan – Stick Season Hozier – Too Sweet Artemas – I Like the Way You Kiss Me Oasis - Whatever ALBUMS: Rihanna – ANTI 1,000 UK Artists – Is This What We Want? ARTISTS MENTIONED: The Clash, Paul Simonon, Joe Strummer, Madonna, Rihanna, Kate Bush, Damon Albarn, Annie Lennox, Roberta Flack, Gwen McCrae, Benson Boone, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, Noah Kahan, Hozier, Dua Lipa, Coldplay, Charli XCX, Artemas, Chase & Status, Stormzy, Wham!, Oasis, Ezra Collective, Lola Young, Central Cee, English Teacher, Sam Fender, Stray Kids, FKA Twigs, Myles Smith, Ed Sheeran, Adele, Oslo Twins, Joy Crookes, JADE, Robert Smith, CMAT, James Blake EXHIBITION: Leigh Bowery! at the Tate Modern, London

C'est l'aléatoire du mercredi ! Groove Theory Feat. Brand Nubian - Tell Me (6 Karat Hip Hop Mix)JENNIE: Doechii - ExtraLSaya Gray - Puddle (Of Me)Yunè Pinku - SportsJenny Hval - To be a rosehelen island - INVINCIBLSeven Davis Jr. - is this the apocalvoseZelooperz, Real Bad Man - Lost All ControlTriathalon - RIPMaria Somerville - GardenEvergreen - 02 Whiplash [Master Digital Album]D PPJ - Que isso (Master)Diana Brown & Barrie K.Sharpe - The Masterplan 12' mix1 John Glacier - Dancing In The RainYouth Lagoon - My Beautiful GirlBarbara Lewis - Hello StrangerJames White - Contort Yourself (August Darnell remix)Hector Lavoe - Mi Gente (Louie Vega AOL Dub)Kate Bush - L'Amour Looks Something Like YouPapooz - Danger To MyselfPierre Vassiliu - Spider ManBusta Rhymes & Mariah Carey - I Know What You WantBaishe Kings - LikeHannah Diamond - Every NightClams Casino - I'm God

For today's episode, I am joined by Caroline Kingsbury to discuss how art can transform feelings ranging from joy to grief. We also discuss the rich queer history of rock and roll, prioritizing queer joy, and her upcoming tour with Pom Pom Squad. ✨ MORE ABOUT CAROLINE KINGSBURY ✨With a sound that fuses the anthemic spirit of The Killers, the raw vulnerability of Bruce Springsteen, and the theatrical bombast of Kate Bush, Caroline Kingsbury crafts electrifying pop that's nostalgic, refreshingly modern, and unapologetically queer. ✨ KEEP UP TO DATE WITH CAROLINE KINGSBURY ✨Web: https://www.carolinekingsbury.com/Instagram: instagram.com/kingsburyxx/YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UC2nfrwFICTfHpugoytxeyFwTikTok: tiktok.com/@carolinekingsburyxxApple Music: music.apple.com/us/artist/caroline-kingsbury/1113174915Spotify: open.spotify.com/artist/0uE0bzpIfuZ9XVduu0byzg✨ CONNECT WITH IZZY ✨Blog:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://agrrrlstwosoundcents.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠youtube.com/channel/UCv6SBgiYCpYbx9BOYNefkIg⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/agrrrlstwosoundcents/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠twitter.com/grrrlsoundcents⁠⁠⁠⁠

Prepare for a sonic assault on your ears as Jason Gore and Geoff Garlock unleash the ultimate countdown of the WORST classic rock covers ever conceived! Broadcasting LIVE from the sometimes-adjacent-to Seabirds Burritos (long story…), Jason and Geoff serve up two-for-one burrito deals alongside a heaping helping of musical travesties. This episode is a wild ride of hot takes, bizarre tangents, and enough cringe-worthy covers to make you question the very fabric of reality.Weezer's Double Dose of Disaster: Jason and Geoff dissecttwo Weezer covers that should have been confined to a dusty demo tape. Why covering Toto is a cardinal sin, why Rivers Cuomo needs to stay in his lane, and why Jason's Weezer back tattoo is a constant source of embarrassment.The Gunt Brothers' Polka-fied "It's Been A While": This Staind cover gets a bizarre polka makeover. Is it ironic? Is it awful? It's definitely…something.AC/DC's Bass-Less "Big Bottom": Angus Young's duck walk can't save this cover from its fundamental lack of bass. Plus, AC/DC's adult diaper line and the "World War II Veterans Who Love AC/DC" Reddit group.Silver Springs: The TikTok Fail: Lindsay Buckingham tries to recreate the viral "Dreams" skateboarder video…with "Silver Springs."The Doors' Coke-Fueled Confusion: Jim Morrison covers "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing," and it's exactly as strange as you'd expect. Plus, speculation about Jim Morrison's alleged Coca-Cola bathing habits.Kate Bush's "Super Bowl Shuffle": A Flat-Earther's Delight: Kate Bush tackles the Chicago Bears' Super Bowl Shuffle, and the results are…unique. Plus, flat-Earth theories and a discussion of weather-controlling machines.Plus, a new PSA from Geoff “The Angry Man” Garlock and your updated 108.9 The Hawk Concert Calendar!Sponsored by: Seabirds Burittos!Love 108.9 The Hawk? THEN DIVE ON IN!Subscribe on Apple. Follow on Spotify!Subscribe to our channel on YouTube!Give a five-star review on Apple Podcasts!Get official merch:http://tee.pub/lic/goodrockshirtsEarly access to audio and video episodes & bonus shows:https://patreon.com/1089thehawkFollow us on social media: YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, ThreadsLearn more & sign up for our mailing list:https://1089thehawk.comKeywords: Classic Rock, Worst Covers, Music Podcast, Comedy Podcast, Jason Gore, Geoff Garlock, Seabirds Burritos, Weezer, Toto, AC/DC, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Sheryl Crow, Kate Bush, Dweezil Zappa, George Lucas, Pauly Shore, Skid Row, The Doors, Frank Zappa, 108.9 The Hawk, Val Verde, Radio, Funny, Humor, Music Review, Bad Music, Cover Songs, Musical Atrocities, Rock Music, 80s Music, 70s Music, 90s Music.

Anna B Savage is down to earth and witchy as hell at the same time. Over her three albums, she's cultivated a memorizing sound and epic image – like David Bowie, Bjork, Kate Bush, etc. – that's gained her a god-like reputation. A reputation which preceded the actual human being behind the art, leaving some to wonder what it would be like to speak to her. Turns out, she's a grounded, kind of goofy, and perfectly normal person. In our Basic Folk conversation, we explore the duality of her persona – Anna Savage versus her stage name of Anna B Savage – and how her new album, 'You & i are Earth,' reflects a blending of these identities with a focus on nature and love.In this episode, Anna reflects on the realization of her parents' unusual musical paths (they are both opera singers) and how it influenced her own creative pursuits. We delve into her songwriting journey, her love for birds, and the evolution of her unique singing voice, which blends classical influences with a jazz singer's sensibility. Anna also opens up about her stage fright and the progression of her confidence as a performer. She touches on the complexities of being an English person living in Ireland and the importance of understanding the historical context of her new home.As we navigate the themes of 'You & i are Earth,' Anna reveals the inspiration behind the track "Agnes" and the mysterious allure of the 17th-century plate that inspired the album's title. With a lighthearted lightning round, we learn about her favorite birthday tea, her ideal stage outfit, and her witchiest recent activity, too.Follow Basic Folk on social media: https://basicfolk.bio.link/  Sign up for Basic Folk's newsletter: https://bit.ly/basicfolknews  Help produce Basic Folk by contributing: https://basicfolk.com/donate/ Interested in sponsoring us? Contact BGS: https://bit.ly/sponsorBGSpods Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands