Podcast appearances and mentions of Paul Nicholas

MORENOby Pravin WilkinsNovember 1-24American Premiere!When Kaepernick kneels, will he?
2016. The NFL has been shaken by Colin Kaepernick's controversial decision to take a knee during the national anthem to protest against police brutality. Superstar running back Luis Moreno, who is all about his game – and his paycheck -- has joined a new team with championship aspirations. But America's leadership is changing, and when a painful new reality hits close to home, Luis is forced to ask whether politics have a place on the field, and if he is willing to risk his career to take a stand for his own community.CastFrank Jimenez* - LUIS MORENOCharvez Grant* - EZEKIEL WILLIAMSAbdul Sesay* - CRE'VON GARCONGabriel Elmore* - DANNY LOMBARDO* appearing courtesy of a contract agreement with Actor's Equity AssociationIn this podcast episode, host Darnelle Radford engages with directors Seth Rozin and J. Paul Nicholas to discuss the Interact Theater Company's production of 'Moreno' by Praveen Wilkins. The conversation explores the play's timely themes surrounding social change, the complexities of its characters, and the dynamics of influence within the context of sports and politics. The directors share insights into the character development, the authenticity of the dialogue, and the audience's reception of the play, particularly in relation to current events. In this conversation, the speakers discuss the vital role of theater in promoting social change, fostering empathy, and building community. They emphasize the importance of understanding diverse perspectives through performance and the value of audience engagement, particularly through talkbacks. The discussion highlights how theater can reflect societal issues and encourage critical thinking among citizens. The speakers also share insights on the current state of theater and its relevance in today's world, concluding with a call to action for audiences to participate in the ongoing conversation.FOR MORE INFORMATION: https://interacttheatre.org

This week Gary and Iain review and discuss, Julie Darling (1982) by Director, Paul Nicholas. Starring, Isabelle Mejias, Anthony Franciosa and Sybil Danning. For more Off The Shelf Reviews: Merch: https://off-the-shelf-reviews.creator-spring.com https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChWxkAz-n2-5Nae-IDpxBZQ/join Podcasts: https://offtheshelfreviews.podbean.com/ Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/@OTSReviews Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/OffTheShelfReviews Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OffTheShelfReviews Support us: http://www.patreon.com/offtheshelfreviews Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/offtheshelfreviews Discord: https://discord.gg/Dyw8ctf

46. PressureAfter a weekend where the Premier League, Championship and Scottish Premier League all tightened up at the top, Jack & Rob get together in the clubhouse to talk about pressure, who will buckle and why.They talk through how they have handled pressure on stage and off and discuss their various coping strategies. Jack shares his press night pressures on ‘Dear Evan Hansen' and coping with stress on ‘War Horse' and Rob talks about facing the cameras for the first time on ‘Eastenders' as well as his I'm OK-You're OK psychological approach. But remember folks…pressure makes Diamonds! #jackloxton #robertshawcameron #dearevanhanson #deh #eastenders #warhorse #nationaltheatre #liverpoolfc #manu #mancity #arsenalfc #gooners #pressure #premierleague #championship #rorymcolroy #golf #actors #westend #theatre #billyjoel #hairthemusical #musicals #TikTok #Instagram #StageDoorAthletic #Podcast #sportspodcast #theatrepodcastHosts: Jack Loxton & Rob Shaw CameronProducer: James CourtEdited by: Rob Shaw CameronDesign by: Charlie Finn@jackloxton1 @robshawcameron@thecourtofjames @finn__studioStage Door Athletic is a [NON]FICTION PEOPLE Podcast© Robert Shaw Cameron, Jack Loxton and James CourtPRS Licence Reference: LE-0031956Music:Pressure, Billy Joel - ℗ 1982 Columbia Records, a division of Sony Music EntertainmentHair, Paul Nicholas, Oliver Tobias & Original London Cast - ℗ 2001 Universal Classics Group, a Division of UMG Recordings Inc. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gala Avary of The Gala Show & The Video Archives Podcast celebrates her birthday by joining me to talk Uncle Ken's lurid 1984 classic CRIMES OF PASSION. We examine the magic mirth and mayhem of Russell's aesthetic, Anthony Perkins' penchant for poppers, the majesty of Kathleen Turner, sex-worker positivity, Gala & Craig's “Correct Cut” feud, Oliver Reed, Robert Stigwood, Paul Nicholas, Sir Paul Williams, Celebrity Big Brother as well as Movies, Cinema AND Film

❤️ Speak w/ Someone Who Cares: https://bit.ly/3Ndh0RU

Interview by Peter Jonathan Robertson in London in 1984 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 166 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Crossroads", Cream, the myth of Robert Johnson, and whether white men can sing the blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “Tip-Toe Thru' the Tulips" by Tiny Tim. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I talk about an interview with Clapton from 1967, I meant 1968. I mention a Graham Bond live recording from 1953, and of course meant 1963. I say Paul Jones was on vocals in the Powerhouse sessions. Steve Winwood was on vocals, and Jones was on harmonica. Resources As I say at the end, the main resource you need to get if you enjoyed this episode is Brother Robert by Annye Anderson, Robert Johnson's stepsister. There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Cream, Robert Johnson, John Mayall, and Graham Bond excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here -- one, two, three. This article on Mack McCormick gives a fuller explanation of the problems with his research and behaviour. The other books I used for the Robert Johnson sections were McCormick's Biography of a Phantom; Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson, by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow; Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guralnick; and Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald. I can recommend all of these subject to the caveats at the end of the episode. The information on the history and prehistory of the Delta blues mostly comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum, with some coming from Charley Patton by John Fahey. The information on Cream comes mostly from Cream: How Eric Clapton Took the World by Storm by Dave Thompson. I also used Ginger Baker: Hellraiser by Ginger Baker and Ginette Baker, Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins, Motherless Child by Paul Scott, and  Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro. The best collection of Cream's work is the four-CD set Those Were the Days, which contains every track the group ever released while they were together (though only the stereo mixes of the albums, and a couple of tracks are in slightly different edits from the originals). You can get Johnson's music on many budget compilation records, as it's in the public domain in the EU, but the double CD collection produced by Steve LaVere for Sony in 2011 is, despite the problems that come from it being associated with LaVere, far and away the best option -- the remasters have a clarity that's worlds ahead of even the 1990s CD version it replaced. And for a good single-CD introduction to the Delta blues musicians and songsters who were Johnson's peers and inspirations, Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson, compiled by Elijah Wald as a companion to his book on Johnson, can't be beaten, and contains many of the tracks excerpted in this episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick note that this episode contains discussion of racism, drug addiction, and early death. There's also a brief mention of death in childbirth and infant mortality. It's been a while since we looked at the British blues movement, and at the blues in general, so some of you may find some of what follows familiar, as we're going to look at some things we've talked about previously, but from a different angle. In 1968, the Bonzo Dog Band, a comedy musical band that have been described as the missing link between the Beatles and the Monty Python team, released a track called "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?": [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Band, "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?"] That track was mocking a discussion that was very prominent in Britain's music magazines around that time. 1968 saw the rise of a *lot* of British bands who started out as blues bands, though many of them went on to different styles of music -- Fleetwood Mac, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Chicken Shack and others were all becoming popular among the kind of people who read the music magazines, and so the question was being asked -- can white men sing the blues? Of course, the answer to that question was obvious. After all, white men *invented* the blues. Before we get any further at all, I have to make clear that I do *not* mean that white people created blues music. But "the blues" as a category, and particularly the idea of it as a music made largely by solo male performers playing guitar... that was created and shaped by the actions of white male record executives. There is no consensus as to when or how the blues as a genre started -- as we often say in this podcast "there is no first anything", but like every genre it seems to have come from multiple sources. In the case of the blues, there's probably some influence from African music by way of field chants sung by enslaved people, possibly some influence from Arabic music as well, definitely some influence from the Irish and British folk songs that by the late nineteenth century were developing into what we now call country music, a lot from ragtime, and a lot of influence from vaudeville and minstrel songs -- which in turn themselves were all very influenced by all those other things. Probably the first published composition to show any real influence of the blues is from 1904, a ragtime piano piece by James Chapman and Leroy Smith, "One O' Them Things": [Excerpt: "One O' Them Things"] That's not very recognisable as a blues piece yet, but it is more-or-less a twelve-bar blues. But the blues developed, and it developed as a result of a series of commercial waves. The first of these came in 1914, with the success of W.C. Handy's "Memphis Blues", which when it was recorded by the Victor Military Band for a phonograph cylinder became what is generally considered the first blues record proper: [Excerpt: The Victor Military Band, "Memphis Blues"] The famous dancers Vernon and Irene Castle came up with a dance, the foxtrot -- which Vernon Castle later admitted was largely inspired by Black dancers -- to be danced to the "Memphis Blues", and the foxtrot soon overtook the tango, which the Castles had introduced to the US the previous year, to become the most popular dance in America for the best part of three decades. And with that came an explosion in blues in the Handy style, cranked out by every music publisher. While the blues was a style largely created by Black performers and writers, the segregated nature of the American music industry at the time meant that most vocal performances of these early blues that were captured on record were by white performers, Black vocalists at this time only rarely getting the chance to record. The first blues record with a Black vocalist is also technically the first British blues record. A group of Black musicians, apparently mostly American but led by a Jamaican pianist, played at Ciro's Club in London, and recorded many tracks in Britain, under a name which I'm not going to say in full -- it started with Ciro's Club, and continued alliteratively with another word starting with C, a slur for Black people. In 1917 they recorded a vocal version of "St. Louis Blues", another W.C. Handy composition: [Excerpt: Ciro's Club C**n Orchestra, "St. Louis Blues"] The first American Black blues vocal didn't come until two years later, when Bert Williams, a Black minstrel-show performer who like many Black performers of his era performed in blackface even though he was Black, recorded “I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,” [Excerpt: Bert Williams, "I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,”] But it wasn't until 1920 that the second, bigger, wave of popularity started for the blues, and this time it started with the first record of a Black *woman* singing the blues -- Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] You can hear the difference between that and anything we've heard up to that point -- that's the first record that anyone from our perspective, a hundred and three years later, would listen to and say that it bore any resemblance to what we think of as the blues -- so much so that many places still credit it as the first ever blues record. And there's a reason for that. "Crazy Blues" was one of those records that separates the music industry into before and after, like "Rock Around the Clock", "I Want to Hold Your Hand", Sgt Pepper, or "Rapper's Delight". It sold seventy-five thousand copies in its first month -- a massive number by the standards of 1920 -- and purportedly went on to sell over a million copies. Sales figures and market analysis weren't really a thing in the same way in 1920, but even so it became very obvious that "Crazy Blues" was a big hit, and that unlike pretty much any other previous records, it was a big hit among Black listeners, which meant that there was a market for music aimed at Black people that was going untapped. Soon all the major record labels were setting up subsidiaries devoted to what they called "race music", music made by and for Black people. And this sees the birth of what is now known as "classic blues", but at the time (and for decades after) was just what people thought of when they thought of "the blues" as a genre. This was music primarily sung by female vaudeville artists backed by jazz bands, people like Ma Rainey (whose earliest recordings featured Louis Armstrong in her backing band): [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider Blues"] And Bessie Smith, the "Empress of the Blues", who had a massive career in the 1920s before the Great Depression caused many of these "race record" labels to fold, but who carried on performing well into the 1930s -- her last recording was in 1933, produced by John Hammond, with a backing band including Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Give Me a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer"] It wouldn't be until several years after the boom started by Mamie Smith that any record companies turned to recording Black men singing the blues accompanied by guitar or banjo. The first record of this type is probably "Norfolk Blues" by Reese DuPree from 1924: [Excerpt: Reese DuPree, "Norfolk Blues"] And there were occasional other records of this type, like "Airy Man Blues" by Papa Charlie Jackson, who was advertised as the “only man living who sings, self-accompanied, for Blues records.” [Excerpt: Papa Charlie Jackson, "Airy Man Blues"] But contrary to the way these are seen today, at the time they weren't seen as being in some way "authentic", or "folk music". Indeed, there are many quotes from folk-music collectors of the time (sadly all of them using so many slurs that it's impossible for me to accurately quote them) saying that when people sang the blues, that wasn't authentic Black folk music at all but an adulteration from commercial music -- they'd clearly, according to these folk-music scholars, learned the blues style from records and sheet music rather than as part of an oral tradition. Most of these performers were people who recorded blues as part of a wider range of material, like Blind Blake, who recorded some blues music but whose best work was his ragtime guitar instrumentals: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Southern Rag"] But it was when Blind Lemon Jefferson started recording for Paramount records in 1926 that the image of the blues as we now think of it took shape. His first record, "Got the Blues", was a massive success: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues"] And this resulted in many labels, especially Paramount, signing up pretty much every Black man with a guitar they could find in the hopes of finding another Blind Lemon Jefferson. But the thing is, this generation of people making blues records, and the generation that followed them, didn't think of themselves as "blues singers" or "bluesmen". They were songsters. Songsters were entertainers, and their job was to sing and play whatever the audiences would want to hear. That included the blues, of course, but it also included... well, every song anyone would want to hear.  They'd perform old folk songs, vaudeville songs, songs that they'd heard on the radio or the jukebox -- whatever the audience wanted. Robert Johnson, for example, was known to particularly love playing polka music, and also adored the records of Jimmie Rodgers, the first country music superstar. In 1941, when Alan Lomax first recorded Muddy Waters, he asked Waters what kind of songs he normally played in performances, and he was given a list that included "Home on the Range", Gene Autry's "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle", and Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo-Choo". We have few recordings of these people performing this kind of song though. One of the few we have is Big Bill Broonzy, who was just about the only artist of this type not to get pigeonholed as just a blues singer, even though blues is what made him famous, and who later in his career managed to record songs like the Tin Pan Alley standard "The Glory of Love": [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "The Glory of Love"] But for the most part, the image we have of the blues comes down to one man, Arthur Laibley, a sales manager for the Wisconsin Chair Company. The Wisconsin Chair Company was, as the name would suggest, a company that started out making wooden chairs, but it had branched out into other forms of wooden furniture -- including, for a brief time, large wooden phonographs. And, like several other manufacturers, like the Radio Corporation of America -- RCA -- and the Gramophone Company, which became EMI, they realised that if they were going to sell the hardware it made sense to sell the software as well, and had started up Paramount Records, which bought up a small label, Black Swan, and soon became the biggest manufacturer of records for the Black market, putting out roughly a quarter of all "race records" released between 1922 and 1932. At first, most of these were produced by a Black talent scout, J. Mayo Williams, who had been the first person to record Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, but in 1927 Williams left Paramount, and the job of supervising sessions went to Arthur Laibley, though according to some sources a lot of the actual production work was done by Aletha Dickerson, Williams' former assistant, who was almost certainly the first Black woman to be what we would now think of as a record producer. Williams had been interested in recording all kinds of music by Black performers, but when Laibley got a solo Black man into the studio, what he wanted more than anything was for him to record the blues, ideally in a style as close as possible to that of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Laibley didn't have a very hands-on approach to recording -- indeed Paramount had very little concern about the quality of their product anyway, and Paramount's records are notorious for having been put out on poor-quality shellac and recorded badly -- and he only occasionally made actual suggestions as to what kind of songs his performers should write -- for example he asked Son House to write something that sounded like Blind Lemon Jefferson, which led to House writing and recording "Mississippi County Farm Blues", which steals the tune of Jefferson's "See That My Grave is Kept Clean": [Excerpt: Son House, "Mississippi County Farm Blues"] When Skip James wanted to record a cover of James Wiggins' "Forty-Four Blues", Laibley suggested that instead he should do a song about a different gun, and so James recorded "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues"] And Laibley also suggested that James write a song about the Depression, which led to one of the greatest blues records ever, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues"] These musicians knew that they were getting paid only for issued sides, and that Laibley wanted only blues from them, and so that's what they gave him. Even when it was a performer like Charlie Patton. (Incidentally, for those reading this as a transcript rather than listening to it, Patton's name is more usually spelled ending in ey, but as far as I can tell ie was his preferred spelling and that's what I'm using). Charlie Patton was best known as an entertainer, first and foremost -- someone who would do song-and-dance routines, joke around, play guitar behind his head. He was a clown on stage, so much so that when Son House finally heard some of Patton's records, in the mid-sixties, decades after the fact, he was astonished that Patton could actually play well. Even though House had been in the room when some of the records were made, his memory of Patton was of someone who acted the fool on stage. That's definitely not the impression you get from the Charlie Patton on record: [Excerpt: Charlie Patton, "Poor Me"] Patton is, as far as can be discerned, the person who was most influential in creating the music that became called the "Delta blues". Not a lot is known about Patton's life, but he was almost certainly the half-brother of the Chatmon brothers, who made hundreds of records, most notably as members of the Mississippi Sheiks: [Excerpt: The Mississippi Sheiks, "Sitting on Top of the World"] In the 1890s, Patton's family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, and he lived in and around that county until his death in 1934. Patton learned to play guitar from a musician called Henry Sloan, and then Patton became a mentor figure to a *lot* of other musicians in and around the plantation on which his family lived. Some of the musicians who grew up in the immediate area around Patton included Tommy Johnson: [Excerpt: Tommy Johnson, "Big Road Blues"] Pops Staples: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken"] Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Crossroads"] Willie Brown, a musician who didn't record much, but who played a lot with Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson and who we just heard Johnson sing about: [Excerpt: Willie Brown, "M&O Blues"] And Chester Burnett, who went on to become known as Howlin' Wolf, and whose vocal style was equally inspired by Patton and by the country star Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] Once Patton started his own recording career for Paramount, he also started working as a talent scout for them, and it was him who brought Son House to Paramount. Soon after the Depression hit, Paramount stopped recording, and so from 1930 through 1934 Patton didn't make any records. He was tracked down by an A&R man in January 1934 and recorded one final session: [Excerpt, Charlie Patton, "34 Blues"] But he died of heart failure two months later. But his influence spread through his proteges, and they themselves influenced other musicians from the area who came along a little after, like Robert Lockwood and Muddy Waters. This music -- or that portion of it that was considered worth recording by white record producers, only a tiny, unrepresentative, portion of their vast performing repertoires -- became known as the Delta Blues, and when some of these musicians moved to Chicago and started performing with electric instruments, it became Chicago Blues. And as far as people like John Mayall in Britain were concerned, Delta and Chicago Blues *were* the blues: [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "It Ain't Right"] John Mayall was one of the first of the British blues obsessives, and for a long time thought of himself as the only one. While we've looked before at the growth of the London blues scene, Mayall wasn't from London -- he was born in Macclesfield and grew up in Cheadle Hulme, both relatively well-off suburbs of Manchester, and after being conscripted and doing two years in the Army, he had become an art student at Manchester College of Art, what is now Manchester Metropolitan University. Mayall had been a blues fan from the late 1940s, writing off to the US to order records that hadn't been released in the UK, and by most accounts by the late fifties he'd put together the biggest blues collection in Britain by quite some way. Not only that, but he had one of the earliest home tape recorders, and every night he would record radio stations from Continental Europe which were broadcasting for American service personnel, so he'd amassed mountains of recordings, often unlabelled, of obscure blues records that nobody else in the UK knew about. He was also an accomplished pianist and guitar player, and in 1956 he and his drummer friend Peter Ward had put together a band called the Powerhouse Four (the other two members rotated on a regular basis) mostly to play lunchtime jazz sessions at the art college. Mayall also started putting on jam sessions at a youth club in Wythenshawe, where he met another drummer named Hughie Flint. Over the late fifties and into the early sixties, Mayall more or less by himself built up a small blues scene in Manchester. The Manchester blues scene was so enthusiastic, in fact, that when the American Folk Blues Festival, an annual European tour which initially featured Willie Dixon, Memhis Slim, T-Bone Walker, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and John Lee Hooker, first toured Europe, the only UK date it played was at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, and people like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Jimmy Page had to travel up from London to see it. But still, the number of blues fans in Manchester, while proportionally large, was objectively small enough that Mayall was captivated by an article in Melody Maker which talked about Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies' new band Blues Incorporated and how it was playing electric blues, the same music he was making in Manchester. He later talked about how the article had made him think that maybe now people would know what he was talking about. He started travelling down to London to play gigs for the London blues scene, and inviting Korner up to Manchester to play shows there. Soon Mayall had moved down to London. Korner introduced Mayall to Davey Graham, the great folk guitarist, with whom Korner had recently recorded as a duo: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, "3/4 AD"] Mayall and Graham performed together as a duo for a while, but Graham was a natural solo artist if ever there was one. Slowly Mayall put a band together in London. On drums was his old friend Peter Ward, who'd moved down from Manchester with him. On bass was John McVie, who at the time knew nothing about blues -- he'd been playing in a Shadows-style instrumental group -- but Mayall gave him a stack of blues records to listen to to get the feeling. And on guitar was Bernie Watson, who had previously played with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. In late 1963, Mike Vernon, a blues fan who had previously published a Yardbirds fanzine, got a job working for Decca records, and immediately started signing his favourite acts from the London blues circuit. The first act he signed was John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, and they recorded a single, "Crawling up a Hill": [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "Crawling up a Hill (45 version)"] Mayall later called that a "clumsy, half-witted attempt at autobiographical comment", and it sold only five hundred copies. It would be the only record the Bluesbreakers would make with Watson, who soon left the band to be replaced by Roger Dean (not the same Roger Dean who later went on to design prog rock album covers). The second group to be signed by Mike Vernon to Decca was the Graham Bond Organisation. We've talked about the Graham Bond Organisation in passing several times, but not for a while and not in any great detail, so it's worth pulling everything we've said about them so far together and going through it in a little more detail. The Graham Bond Organisation, like the Rolling Stones, grew out of Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated. As we heard in the episode on "I Wanna Be Your Man" a couple of years ago, Blues Incorporated had been started by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, and at the time we're joining them in 1962 featured a drummer called Charlie Watts, a pianist called Dave Stevens, and saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, as well as frequent guest performers like a singer who called himself Mike Jagger, and another one, Roderick Stewart. That group finally found themselves the perfect bass player when Dick Heckstall-Smith put together a one-off group of jazz players to play an event at Cambridge University. At the gig, a little Scottish man came up to the group and told them he played bass and asked if he could sit in. They told him to bring along his instrument to their second set, that night, and he did actually bring along a double bass. Their bluff having been called, they decided to play the most complicated, difficult, piece they knew in order to throw the kid off -- the drummer, a trad jazz player named Ginger Baker, didn't like performing with random sit-in guests -- but astonishingly he turned out to be really good. Heckstall-Smith took down the bass player's name and phone number and invited him to a jam session with Blues Incorporated. After that jam session, Jack Bruce quickly became the group's full-time bass player. Bruce had started out as a classical cellist, but had switched to the double bass inspired by Bach, who he referred to as "the guv'nor of all bass players". His playing up to this point had mostly been in trad jazz bands, and he knew nothing of the blues, but he quickly got the hang of the genre. Bruce's first show with Blues Incorporated was a BBC recording: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, "Hoochie Coochie Man (BBC session)"] According to at least one source it was not being asked to take part in that session that made young Mike Jagger decide there was no future for him with Blues Incorporated and to spend more time with his other group, the Rollin' Stones. Soon after, Charlie Watts would join him, for almost the opposite reason -- Watts didn't want to be in a band that was getting as big as Blues Incorporated were. They were starting to do more BBC sessions and get more gigs, and having to join the Musicians' Union. That seemed like a lot of work. Far better to join a band like the Rollin' Stones that wasn't going anywhere. Because of Watts' decision to give up on potential stardom to become a Rollin' Stone, they needed a new drummer, and luckily the best drummer on the scene was available. But then the best drummer on the scene was *always* available. Ginger Baker had first played with Dick Heckstall-Smith several years earlier, in a trad group called the Storyville Jazzmen. There Baker had become obsessed with the New Orleans jazz drummer Baby Dodds, who had played with Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. Sadly because of 1920s recording technology, he hadn't been able to play a full kit on the recordings with Armstrong, being limited to percussion on just a woodblock, but you can hear his drumming style much better in this version of "At the Jazz Band Ball" from 1947, with Mugsy Spanier, Jack Teagarden, Cyrus St. Clair and Hank Duncan: [Excerpt: "At the Jazz Band Ball"] Baker had taken Dobbs' style and run with it, and had quickly become known as the single best player, bar none, on the London jazz scene -- he'd become an accomplished player in multiple styles, and was also fluent in reading music and arranging. He'd also, though, become known as the single person on the entire scene who was most difficult to get along with. He resigned from his first band onstage, shouting "You can stick your band up your arse", after the band's leader had had enough of him incorporating bebop influences into their trad style. Another time, when touring with Diz Disley's band, he was dumped in Germany with no money and no way to get home, because the band were so sick of him. Sometimes this was because of his temper and his unwillingness to suffer fools -- and he saw everyone else he ever met as a fool -- and sometimes it was because of his own rigorous musical ideas. He wanted to play music *his* way, and wouldn't listen to anyone who told him different. Both of these things got worse after he fell under the influence of a man named Phil Seaman, one of the only drummers that Baker respected at all. Seaman introduced Baker to African drumming, and Baker started incorporating complex polyrhythms into his playing as a result. Seaman also though introduced Baker to heroin, and while being a heroin addict in the UK in the 1960s was not as difficult as it later became -- both heroin and cocaine were available on prescription to registered addicts, and Baker got both, which meant that many of the problems that come from criminalisation of these drugs didn't affect addicts in the same way -- but it still did not, by all accounts, make him an easier person to get along with. But he *was* a fantastic drummer. As Dick Heckstall-Smith said "With the advent of Ginger, the classic Blues Incorporated line-up, one which I think could not be bettered, was set" But Alexis Korner decided that the group could be bettered, and he had some backers within the band. One of the other bands on the scene was the Don Rendell Quintet, a group that played soul jazz -- that style of jazz that bridged modern jazz and R&B, the kind of music that Ray Charles and Herbie Hancock played: [Excerpt: The Don Rendell Quintet, "Manumission"] The Don Rendell Quintet included a fantastic multi-instrumentalist, Graham Bond, who doubled on keyboards and saxophone, and Bond had been playing occasional experimental gigs with the Johnny Burch Octet -- a group led by another member of the Rendell Quartet featuring Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, Baker, and a few other musicians, doing wholly-improvised music. Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, and Baker all enjoyed playing with Bond, and when Korner decided to bring him into the band, they were all very keen. But Cyril Davies, the co-leader of the band with Korner, was furious at the idea. Davies wanted to play strict Chicago and Delta blues, and had no truck with other forms of music like R&B and jazz. To his mind it was bad enough that they had a sax player. But the idea that they would bring in Bond, who played sax and... *Hammond* organ? Well, that was practically blasphemy. Davies quit the group at the mere suggestion. Bond was soon in the band, and he, Bruce, and Baker were playing together a *lot*. As well as performing with Blues Incorporated, they continued playing in the Johnny Burch Octet, and they also started performing as the Graham Bond Trio. Sometimes the Graham Bond Trio would be Blues Incorporated's opening act, and on more than one occasion the Graham Bond Trio, Blues Incorporated, and the Johnny Burch Octet all had gigs in different parts of London on the same night and they'd have to frantically get from one to the other. The Graham Bond Trio also had fans in Manchester, thanks to the local blues scene there and their connection with Blues Incorporated, and one night in February 1963 the trio played a gig there. They realised afterwards that by playing as a trio they'd made £70, when they were lucky to make £20 from a gig with Blues Incorporated or the Octet, because there were so many members in those bands. Bond wanted to make real money, and at the next rehearsal of Blues Incorporated he announced to Korner that he, Bruce, and Baker were quitting the band -- which was news to Bruce and Baker, who he hadn't bothered consulting. Baker, indeed, was in the toilet when the announcement was made and came out to find it a done deal. He was going to kick up a fuss and say he hadn't been consulted, but Korner's reaction sealed the deal. As Baker later said "‘he said “it's really good you're doing this thing with Graham, and I wish you the best of luck” and all that. And it was a bit difficult to turn round and say, “Well, I don't really want to leave the band, you know.”'" The Graham Bond Trio struggled at first to get the gigs they were expecting, but that started to change when in April 1963 they became the Graham Bond Quartet, with the addition of virtuoso guitarist John McLaughlin. The Quartet soon became one of the hottest bands on the London R&B scene, and when Duffy Power, a Larry Parnes teen idol who wanted to move into R&B, asked his record label to get him a good R&B band to back him on a Beatles cover, it was the Graham Bond Quartet who obliged: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "I Saw Her Standing There"] The Quartet also backed Power on a package tour with other Parnes acts, but they were also still performing their own blend of hard jazz and blues, as can be heard in this recording of the group live in June 1953: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Quartet, "Ho Ho Country Kicking Blues (Live at Klooks Kleek)"] But that lineup of the group didn't last very long. According to the way Baker told the story, he fired McLaughlin from the group, after being irritated by McLaughlin complaining about something on a day when Baker was out of cocaine and in no mood to hear anyone else's complaints. As Baker said "We lost a great guitar player and I lost a good friend." But the Trio soon became a Quartet again, as Dick Heckstall-Smith, who Baker had wanted in the band from the start, joined on saxophone to replace McLaughlin's guitar. But they were no longer called the Graham Bond Quartet. Partly because Heckstall-Smith joining allowed Bond to concentrate just on his keyboard playing, but one suspects partly to protect against any future lineup changes, the group were now The Graham Bond ORGANisation -- emphasis on the organ. The new lineup of the group got signed to Decca by Vernon, and were soon recording their first single, "Long Tall Shorty": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Long Tall Shorty"] They recorded a few other songs which made their way onto an EP and an R&B compilation, and toured intensively in early 1964, as well as backing up Power on his follow-up to "I Saw Her Standing There", his version of "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "Parchman Farm"] They also appeared in a film, just like the Beatles, though it was possibly not quite as artistically successful as "A Hard Day's Night": [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat trailer] Gonks Go Beat is one of the most bizarre films of the sixties. It's a far-future remake of Romeo and Juliet. where the two star-crossed lovers are from opposing countries -- Beatland and Ballad Isle -- who only communicate once a year in an annual song contest which acts as their version of a war, and is overseen by "Mr. A&R", played by Frank Thornton, who would later star in Are You Being Served? Carry On star Kenneth Connor is sent by aliens to try to bring peace to the two warring countries, on pain of exile to Planet Gonk, a planet inhabited solely by Gonks (a kind of novelty toy for which there was a short-lived craze then). Along the way Connor encounters such luminaries of British light entertainment as Terry Scott and Arthur Mullard, as well as musical performances by Lulu, the Nashville Teens, and of course the Graham Bond Organisation, whose performance gets them a telling-off from a teacher: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat!] The group as a group only performed one song in this cinematic masterpiece, but Baker also made an appearance in a "drum battle" sequence where eight drummers played together: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat drum battle] The other drummers in that scene included, as well as some lesser-known players, Andy White who had played on the single version of "Love Me Do", Bobby Graham, who played on hits by the Kinks and the Dave Clark Five, and Ronnie Verrell, who did the drumming for Animal in the Muppet Show. Also in summer 1964, the group performed at the Fourth National Jazz & Blues Festival in Richmond -- the festival co-founded by Chris Barber that would evolve into the Reading Festival. The Yardbirds were on the bill, and at the end of their set they invited Bond, Baker, Bruce, Georgie Fame, and Mike Vernon onto the stage with them, making that the first time that Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce were all on stage together. Soon after that, the Graham Bond Organisation got a new manager, Robert Stigwood. Things hadn't been working out for them at Decca, and Stigwood soon got the group signed to EMI, and became their producer as well. Their first single under Stigwood's management was a cover version of the theme tune to the Debbie Reynolds film "Tammy". While that film had given Tamla records its name, the song was hardly an R&B classic: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Tammy"] That record didn't chart, but Stigwood put the group out on the road as part of the disastrous Chuck Berry tour we heard about in the episode on "All You Need is Love", which led to the bankruptcy of  Robert Stigwood Associates. The Organisation moved over to Stigwood's new company, the Robert Stigwood Organisation, and Stigwood continued to be the credited producer of their records, though after the "Tammy" disaster they decided they were going to take charge themselves of the actual music. Their first album, The Sound of 65, was recorded in a single three-hour session, and they mostly ran through their standard set -- a mixture of the same songs everyone else on the circuit was playing, like "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Got My Mojo Working", and "Wade in the Water", and originals like Bruce's "Train Time": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Train Time"] Through 1965 they kept working. They released a non-album single, "Lease on Love", which is generally considered to be the first pop record to feature a Mellotron: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Lease on Love"] and Bond and Baker also backed another Stigwood act, Winston G, on his debut single: [Excerpt: Winston G, "Please Don't Say"] But the group were developing severe tensions. Bruce and Baker had started out friendly, but by this time they hated each other. Bruce said he couldn't hear his own playing over Baker's loud drumming, Baker thought that Bruce was far too fussy a player and should try to play simpler lines. They'd both try to throw each other during performances, altering arrangements on the fly and playing things that would trip the other player up. And *neither* of them were particularly keen on Bond's new love of the Mellotron, which was all over their second album, giving it a distinctly proto-prog feel at times: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Baby Can it Be True?"] Eventually at a gig in Golders Green, Baker started throwing drumsticks at Bruce's head while Bruce was trying to play a bass solo. Bruce retaliated by throwing his bass at Baker, and then jumping on him and starting a fistfight which had to be broken up by the venue security. Baker fired Bruce from the band, but Bruce kept turning up to gigs anyway, arguing that Baker had no right to sack him as it was a democracy. Baker always claimed that in fact Bond had wanted to sack Bruce but hadn't wanted to get his hands dirty, and insisted that Baker do it, but neither Bond nor Heckstall-Smith objected when Bruce turned up for the next couple of gigs. So Baker took matters into his own hands, He pulled out a knife and told Bruce "If you show up at one more gig, this is going in you." Within days, Bruce was playing with John Mayall, whose Bluesbreakers had gone through some lineup changes by this point. Roger Dean had only played with the Bluesbreakers for a short time before Mayall had replaced him. Mayall had not been impressed with Eric Clapton's playing with the Yardbirds at first -- even though graffiti saying "Clapton is God" was already starting to appear around London -- but he had been *very* impressed with Clapton's playing on "Got to Hurry", the B-side to "For Your Love": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Got to Hurry"] When he discovered that Clapton had quit the band, he sprang into action and quickly recruited him to replace Dean. Clapton knew he had made the right choice when a month after he'd joined, the group got the word that Bob Dylan had been so impressed with Mayall's single "Crawling up a Hill" -- the one that nobody liked, not even Mayall himself -- that he wanted to jam with Mayall and his band in the studio. Clapton of course went along: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] That was, of course, the session we've talked about in the Velvet Underground episode and elsewhere of which little other than that survives, and which Nico attended. At this point, Mayall didn't have a record contract, his experience recording with Mike Vernon having been no more successful than the Bond group's had been. But soon he got a one-off deal -- as a solo artist, not with the Bluesbreakers -- with Immediate Records. Clapton was the only member of the group to play on the single, which was produced by Immediate's house producer Jimmy Page: [Excerpt: John Mayall, "I'm Your Witchdoctor"] Page was impressed enough with Clapton's playing that he invited him round to Page's house to jam together. But what Clapton didn't know was that Page was taping their jam sessions, and that he handed those tapes over to Immediate Records -- whether he was forced to by his contract with the label or whether that had been his plan all along depends on whose story you believe, but Clapton never truly forgave him. Page and Clapton's guitar-only jams had overdubs by Bill Wyman, Ian Stewart, and drummer Chris Winter, and have been endlessly repackaged on blues compilations ever since: [Excerpt: Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, "Draggin' My Tail"] But Mayall was having problems with John McVie, who had started to drink too much, and as soon as he found out that Jack Bruce was sacked by the Graham Bond Organisation, Mayall got in touch with Bruce and got him to join the band in McVie's place. Everyone was agreed that this lineup of the band -- Mayall, Clapton, Bruce, and Hughie Flint -- was going places: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Jack Bruce, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] Unfortunately, it wasn't going to last long. Clapton, while he thought that Bruce was the greatest bass player he'd ever worked with, had other plans. He was going to leave the country and travel the world as a peripatetic busker. He was off on his travels, never to return. Luckily, Mayall had someone even better waiting in the wings. A young man had, according to Mayall, "kept coming down to all the gigs and saying, “Hey, what are you doing with him?” – referring to whichever guitarist was onstage that night – “I'm much better than he is. Why don't you let me play guitar for you?” He got really quite nasty about it, so finally, I let him sit in. And he was brilliant." Peter Green was probably the best blues guitarist in London at that time, but this lineup of the Bluesbreakers only lasted a handful of gigs -- Clapton discovered that busking in Greece wasn't as much fun as being called God in London, and came back very soon after he'd left. Mayall had told him that he could have his old job back when he got back, and so Green was out and Clapton was back in. And soon the Bluesbreakers' revolving door revolved again. Manfred Mann had just had a big hit with "If You Gotta Go, Go Now", the same song we heard Dylan playing earlier: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] But their guitarist, Mike Vickers, had quit. Tom McGuinness, their bass player, had taken the opportunity to switch back to guitar -- the instrument he'd played in his first band with his friend Eric Clapton -- but that left them short a bass player. Manfred Mann were essentially the same kind of band as the Graham Bond Organisation -- a Hammond-led group of virtuoso multi-instrumentalists who played everything from hardcore Delta blues to complex modern jazz -- but unlike the Bond group they also had a string of massive pop hits, and so made a lot more money. The combination was irresistible to Bruce, and he joined the band just before they recorded an EP of jazz instrumental versions of recent hits: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Bruce had also been encouraged by Robert Stigwood to do a solo project, and so at the same time as he joined Manfred Mann, he also put out a solo single, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'" [Excerpt: Jack Bruce, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'"] But of course, the reason Bruce had joined Manfred Mann was that they were having pop hits as well as playing jazz, and soon they did just that, with Bruce playing on their number one hit "Pretty Flamingo": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Pretty Flamingo"] So John McVie was back in the Bluesbreakers, promising to keep his drinking under control. Mike Vernon still thought that Mayall had potential, but the people at Decca didn't agree, so Vernon got Mayall and Clapton -- but not the other band members -- to record a single for a small indie label he ran as a side project: [Excerpt: John Mayall and Eric Clapton, "Bernard Jenkins"] That label normally only released records in print runs of ninety-nine copies, because once you hit a hundred copies you had to pay tax on them, but there was so much demand for that single that they ended up pressing up five hundred copies, making it the label's biggest seller ever. Vernon eventually convinced the heads at Decca that the Bluesbreakers could be truly big, and so he got the OK to record the album that would generally be considered the greatest British blues album of all time -- Blues Breakers, also known as the Beano album because of Clapton reading a copy of the British kids' comic The Beano in the group photo on the front. [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Ramblin' On My Mind"] The album was a mixture of originals by Mayall and the standard repertoire of every blues or R&B band on the circuit -- songs like "Parchman Farm" and "What'd I Say" -- but what made the album unique was Clapton's guitar tone. Much to the chagrin of Vernon, and of engineer Gus Dudgeon, Clapton insisted on playing at the same volume that he would on stage. Vernon later said of Dudgeon "I can remember seeing his face the very first time Clapton plugged into the Marshall stack and turned it up and started playing at the sort of volume he was going to play. You could almost see Gus's eyes meet over the middle of his nose, and it was almost like he was just going to fall over from the sheer power of it all. But after an enormous amount of fiddling around and moving amps around, we got a sound that worked." [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Hideaway"] But by the time the album cane out. Clapton was no longer with the Bluesbreakers. The Graham Bond Organisation had struggled on for a while after Bruce's departure. They brought in a trumpet player, Mike Falana, and even had a hit record -- or at least, the B-side of a hit record. The Who had just put out a hit single, "Substitute", on Robert Stigwood's record label, Reaction: [Excerpt: The Who, "Substitute"] But, as you'll hear in episode 183, they had moved to Reaction Records after a falling out with their previous label, and with Shel Talmy their previous producer. The problem was, when "Substitute" was released, it had as its B-side a song called "Circles" (also known as "Instant Party -- it's been released under both names). They'd recorded an earlier version of the song for Talmy, and just as "Substitute" was starting to chart, Talmy got an injunction against the record and it had to be pulled. Reaction couldn't afford to lose the big hit record they'd spent money promoting, so they needed to put it out with a new B-side. But the Who hadn't got any unreleased recordings. But the Graham Bond Organisation had, and indeed they had an unreleased *instrumental*. So "Waltz For a Pig" became the B-side to a top-five single, credited to The Who Orchestra: [Excerpt: The Who Orchestra, "Waltz For a Pig"] That record provided the catalyst for the formation of Cream, because Ginger Baker had written the song, and got £1,350 for it, which he used to buy a new car. Baker had, for some time, been wanting to get out of the Graham Bond Organisation. He was trying to get off heroin -- though he would make many efforts to get clean over the decades, with little success -- while Bond was starting to use it far more heavily, and was also using acid and getting heavily into mysticism, which Baker despised. Baker may have had the idea for what he did next from an article in one of the music papers. John Entwistle of the Who would often tell a story about an article in Melody Maker -- though I've not been able to track down the article itself to get the full details -- in which musicians were asked to name which of their peers they'd put into a "super-group". He didn't remember the full details, but he did remember that the consensus choice had had Eric Clapton on lead guitar, himself on bass, and Ginger Baker on drums. As he said later "I don't remember who else was voted in, but a few months later, the Cream came along, and I did wonder if somebody was maybe believing too much of their own press". Incidentally, like The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd, Cream, the band we are about to meet, had releases both with and without the definite article, and Eric Clapton at least seems always to talk about them as "the Cream" even decades later, but they're primarily known as just Cream these days. Baker, having had enough of the Bond group, decided to drive up to Oxford to see Clapton playing with the Bluesbreakers. Clapton invited him to sit in for a couple of songs, and by all accounts the band sounded far better than they had previously. Clapton and Baker could obviously play well together, and Baker offered Clapton a lift back to London in his new car, and on the drive back asked Clapton if he wanted to form a new band. Clapton was as impressed by Baker's financial skills as he was by his musicianship. He said later "Musicians didn't have cars. You all got in a van." Clearly a musician who was *actually driving a new car he owned* was going places. He agreed to Baker's plan. But of course they needed a bass player, and Clapton thought he had the perfect solution -- "What about Jack?" Clapton knew that Bruce had been a member of the Graham Bond Organisation, but didn't know why he'd left the band -- he wasn't particularly clued in to what the wider music scene was doing, and all he knew was that Bruce had played with both him and Baker, and that he was the best bass player he'd ever played with. And Bruce *was* arguably the best bass player in London at that point, and he was starting to pick up session work as well as his work with Manfred Mann. For example it's him playing on the theme tune to "After The Fox" with Peter Sellers, the Hollies, and the song's composer Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: The Hollies with Peter Sellers, "After the Fox"] Clapton was insistent. Baker's idea was that the band should be the best musicians around. That meant they needed the *best* musicians around, not the second best. If Jack Bruce wasn't joining, Eric Clapton wasn't joining either. Baker very reluctantly agreed, and went round to see Bruce the next day -- according to Baker it was in a spirit of generosity and giving Bruce one more chance, while according to Bruce he came round to eat humble pie and beg for forgiveness. Either way, Bruce agreed to join the band. The three met up for a rehearsal at Baker's home, and immediately Bruce and Baker started fighting, but also immediately they realised that they were great at playing together -- so great that they named themselves the Cream, as they were the cream of musicians on the scene. They knew they had something, but they didn't know what. At first they considered making their performances into Dada projects, inspired by the early-twentieth-century art movement. They liked a band that had just started to make waves, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band -- who had originally been called the Bonzo Dog Dada Band -- and they bought some props with the vague idea of using them on stage in the same way the Bonzos did. But as they played together they realised that they needed to do something different from that. At first, they thought they needed a fourth member -- a keyboard player. Graham Bond's name was brought up, but Clapton vetoed him. Clapton wanted Steve Winwood, the keyboard player and vocalist with the Spencer Davis Group. Indeed, Winwood was present at what was originally intended to be the first recording session the trio would play. Joe Boyd had asked Eric Clapton to round up a bunch of players to record some filler tracks for an Elektra blues compilation, and Clapton had asked Bruce and Baker to join him, Paul Jones on vocals, Winwood on Hammond and Clapton's friend Ben Palmer on piano for the session. Indeed, given that none of the original trio were keen on singing, that Paul Jones was just about to leave Manfred Mann, and that we know Clapton wanted Winwood in the band, one has to wonder if Clapton at least half-intended for this to be the eventual lineup of the band. If he did, that plan was foiled by Baker's refusal to take part in the session. Instead, this one-off band, named The Powerhouse, featured Pete York, the drummer from the Spencer Davis Group, on the session, which produced the first recording of Clapton playing on the Robert Johnson song originally titled "Cross Road Blues" but now generally better known just as "Crossroads": [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] We talked about Robert Johnson a little back in episode ninety-seven, but other than Bob Dylan, who was inspired by his lyrics, we had seen very little influence from Johnson up to this point, but he's going to be a major influence on rock guitar for the next few years, so we should talk about him a little here. It's often said that nobody knew anything about Robert Johnson, that he was almost a phantom other than his records which existed outside of any context as artefacts of their own. That's... not really the case. Johnson had died a little less than thirty years earlier, at only twenty-seven years old. Most of his half-siblings and step-siblings were alive, as were his son, his stepson, and dozens of musicians he'd played with over the years, women he'd had affairs with, and other assorted friends and relatives. What people mean is that information about Johnson's life was not yet known by people they consider important -- which is to say white blues scholars and musicians. Indeed, almost everything people like that -- people like *me* -- know of the facts of Johnson's life has only become known to us in the last four years. If, as some people had expected, I'd started this series with an episode on Johnson, I'd have had to redo the whole thing because of the information that's made its way to the public since then. But here's what was known -- or thought -- by white blues scholars in 1966. Johnson was, according to them, a field hand from somewhere in Mississippi, who played the guitar in between working on the cotton fields. He had done two recording sessions, in 1936 and 1937. One song from his first session, "Terraplane Blues", had been a very minor hit by blues standards: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Terraplane Blues"] That had sold well -- nobody knows how well, but maybe as many as ten thousand copies, and it was certainly a record people knew in 1937 if they liked the Delta blues, but ten thousand copies total is nowhere near the sales of really successful records, and none of the follow-ups had sold anything like that much -- many of them had sold in the hundreds rather than the thousands. As Elijah Wald, one of Johnson's biographers put it "knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington was like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles" -- though *I* would add that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much bigger during the sixties than Johnson was during his lifetime. One of the few white people who had noticed Johnson's existence at all was John Hammond, and he'd written a brief review of Johnson's first two singles under a pseudonym in a Communist newspaper. I'm going to quote it here, but the word he used to talk about Black people was considered correct then but isn't now, so I'll substitute Black for that word: "Before closing we cannot help but call your attention to the greatest [Black] blues singer who has cropped up in recent years, Robert Johnson. Recording them in deepest Mississippi, Vocalion has certainly done right by us and by the tunes "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" and "Terraplane Blues", to name only two of the four sides already released, sung to his own guitar accompaniment. Johnson makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur" Hammond had tried to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts we talked about in the very first episodes of the podcast, but he'd discovered that he'd died shortly before. He got Big Bill Broonzy instead, and played a couple of Johnson's records from a record player on the stage. Hammond introduced those recordings with a speech: "It is tragic that an American audience could not have been found seven or eight years ago for a concert of this kind. Bessie Smith was still at the height of her career and Joe Smith, probably the greatest trumpet player America ever knew, would still have been around to play obbligatos for her...dozens of other artists could have been there in the flesh. But that audience as well as this one would not have been able to hear Robert Johnson sing and play the blues on his guitar, for at that time Johnson was just an unknown hand on a Robinsonville, Mississippi plantation. Robert Johnson was going to be the big surprise of the evening for this audience at Carnegie Hall. I know him only from his Vocalion blues records and from the tall, exciting tales the recording engineers and supervisors used to bring about him from the improvised studios in Dallas and San Antonio. I don't believe Johnson had ever worked as a professional musician anywhere, and it still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way onto phonograph records. We will have to be content with playing two of his records, the old "Walkin' Blues" and the new, unreleased, "Preachin' Blues", because Robert Johnson died last week at the precise moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall on December 23. He was in his middle twenties and nobody seems to know what caused his death." And that was, for the most part, the end of Robert Johnson's impact on the culture for a generation. The Lomaxes went down to Clarksdale, Mississippi a couple of years later -- reports vary as to whether this was to see if they could find Johnson, who they were unaware was dead, or to find information out about him, and they did end up recording a young singer named Muddy Waters for the Library of Congress, including Waters' rendition of "32-20 Blues", Johnson's reworking of Skip James' "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "32-20 Blues"] But Johnson's records remained unavailable after their initial release until 1959, when the blues scholar Samuel Charters published the book The Country Blues, which was the first book-length treatment ever of Delta blues. Sixteen years later Charters said "I shouldn't have written The Country Blues when I did; since I really didn't know enough, but I felt I couldn't afford to wait. So The Country Blues was two things. It was a romanticization of certain aspects of black life in an effort to force the white society to reconsider some of its racial attitudes, and on the other hand it was a cry for help. I wanted hundreds of people to go out and interview the surviving blues artists. I wanted people to record them and document their lives, their environment, and their music, not only so that their story would be preserved but also so they'd get a little money and a little recognition in their last years." Charters talked about Johnson in the book, as one of the performers who played "minor roles in the story of the blues", and said that almost nothing was known about his life. He talked about how he had been poisoned by his common-law wife, about how his records were recorded in a pool hall, and said "The finest of Robert Johnson's blues have a brooding sense of torment and despair. The blues has become a personified figure of despondency." Along with Charters' book came a compilation album of the same name, and that included the first ever reissue of one of Johnson's tracks, "Preaching Blues": [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Preaching Blues"] Two years later, John Hammond, who had remained an ardent fan of Johnson, had Columbia put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album. At the time no white blues scholars knew what Johnson looked like and they had no photos of him, so a generic painting of a poor-looking Black man with a guitar was used for the cover. The liner note to King of the Delta Blues Singers talked about how Johnson was seventeen or eighteen when he made his recordings, how he was "dead before he reached his twenty-first birthday, poisoned by a jealous girlfriend", how he had "seldom, if ever, been away from the plantation in Robinsville, Mississippi, where he was born and raised", and how he had had such stage fright that when he was asked to play in front of other musicians, he'd turned to face a wall so he couldn't see them. And that would be all that any of the members of the Powerhouse would know about Johnson. Maybe they'd also heard the rumours that were starting to spread that Johnson had got his guitar-playing skills by selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads at midnight, but that would have been all they knew when they recorded their filler track for Elektra: [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] Either way, the Powerhouse lineup only lasted for that one session -- the group eventually decided that a simple trio would be best for the music they wanted to play. Clapton had seen Buddy Guy touring with just a bass player and drummer a year earlier, and had liked the idea of the freedom that gave him as a guitarist. The group soon took on Robert Stigwood as a manager, which caused more arguments between Bruce and Baker. Bruce was convinced that if they were doing an all-for-one one-for-all thing they should also manage themselves, but Baker pointed out that that was a daft idea when they could get one of the biggest managers in the country to look after them. A bigger argument, which almost killed the group before it started, happened when Baker told journalist Chris Welch of the Melody Maker about their plans. In an echo of the way that he and Bruce had been resigned from Blues Incorporated without being consulted, now with no discussion Manfred Mann and John Mayall were reading in the papers that their band members were quitting before those members had bothered to mention it. Mayall was furious, especially since the album Clapton had played on hadn't yet come out. Clapton was supposed to work a month's notice while Mayall found another guitarist, but Mayall spent two weeks begging Peter Green to rejoin the band. Green was less than eager -- after all, he'd been fired pretty much straight away earlier -- but Mayall eventually persuaded him. The second he did, Mayall turned round to Clapton and told him he didn't have to work the rest of his notice -- he'd found another guitar player and Clapton was fired: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, "Dust My Blues"] Manfred Mann meanwhile took on the Beatles' friend Klaus Voorman to replace Bruce. Voorman would remain with the band until the end, and like Green was for Mayall, Voorman was in some ways a better fit for Manfred Mann than Bruce was. In particular he could double on flute, as he did for example on their hit version of Bob Dylan's "The Mighty Quinn": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann "The Mighty Quinn"] The new group, The Cream, were of course signed in the UK to Stigwood's Reaction label. Other than the Who, who only stuck around for one album, Reaction was not a very successful label. Its biggest signing was a former keyboard player for Screaming Lord Sutch, who recorded for them under the names Paul Dean and Oscar, but who later became known as Paul Nicholas and had a successful career in musical theatre and sitcom. Nicholas never had any hits for Reaction, but he did release one interesting record, in 1967: [Excerpt: Oscar, "Over the Wall We Go"] That was one of the earliest songwriting attempts by a young man who had recently named himself David Bowie. Now the group were public, they started inviting journalists to their rehearsals, which were mostly spent trying to combine their disparate musical influences --

The third episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1975 features the year's biggest flop, Ken Russell's Lisztomania. Written and directed by Ken Russell and starring Roger Daltrey, Sara Kestelman, Paul Nicholas, Fiona Lewis and Veronica Quilligan, Lisztomania was intended as part of a never-completed series of biopics about composers directed by Russell.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/lisztomania-1975), Richard Eder in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1975/10/11/archives/screen-lisztomaniaits-ken-russells-spangled-postbeatles-rococo-and.html), and Janet Maslin in The Boston Phoenix.Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1975 installment, featuring a Cannes Film Festival award winner, Werner Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

Welcome back to YOU HAVE BEEN WATCHING, a podcast about British sitcoms.Join your hosts Tony Black & Robert Turnbull, in their first new episode of 2023, as they celebrate Valentine's week with a trip into the romantic world of John Sullivan's JUST GOOD FRIENDS, one of the sitcom sensations of the 1980s starring Paul Nicholas & Jan Francis...Host / EditorTony BlackCo-HostRobert TurnbullSupport the We Made This podcast network on Patreon:www.patreon.com/wemadethisTwitter: @yhbwatchingpodWe Made This on Twitter: @we_madethisWebsite: www.wemadethisnetwork.comTitle music: Jumping Cricket (c) Birdies via epidemicsound.com

Richard plays Samantha in the week's final PopMaster Podcast with Ken Bruce.

Jose Guzman is a 20-year-old Psychology major and today he's sharing his testimony on how Jesus healed him after he was physically abused,  molested multiple times, struggled with depression, and anxiety. If you have been moved in your heart to donate, you can do it here, thank you so much for your support: https://givebutter.com/missiondelafeWatch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/bCJiNQy3XwcVideo CreditsDirected & Edited by Eric Villatoro: https://bit.ly/3sAGpv8Audio Mixed by Paul Nicholas https://www.facebook.com/james.p.nicholasTestimonies Recorded in King of the Nations Church in Rockville, MDJoin Our Community

Elia Cruz is a worship leader, wife, and lover of Jesus. Today, she is sharing her testimony of Jesus and how He led her through healing after experiencing molestation, sex before marriage, and abandonment problems as she stumbled through relationships with men. If you have been moved in your heart to donate, you can do it here, thank you so much for your support:  https://givebutter.com/missiondelafeWatch Testimony on Youtube: https://youtu.be/_cMMtWRrWCYVideo CreditsDirected & Edited by Eric Villatoro: https://bit.ly/3sAGpv8Assistant Director - Jr Mayen https://www.instagram.com/junemayen/Audio Mixed by Paul Nicholas https://www.facebook.com/james.p.nicholasTestimonies Recorded in Nova Hub Church in Woodbridge, VAJoin Our Community

Bryan Aponte, popularly known as  @Tommy Royale , is a popular Latin artist From Puerto Rico with a sold-out tour and multiple Netflix placements. Today he's joining us to share his testimony on how he found God after the collapse of his childhood church.If you have been moved in your heart to donate, you can do it here, thank you so much for your support: https://givebutter.com/missiondelafeVideo CreditsDirected & Edited by Eric Villatoro: https://bit.ly/3sAGpv8Audio Mixed by Paul Nicholas https://www.facebook.com/james.p.nicholasTestimonies Recorded in Orlando, FLJoin Our Community

Rich Whitter is the Lead Pastor of  @Life Pointe Church . Before pastoring in the United States, Rich was a missionary in China for several years. Today he will be sharing his testimony of how Jesus revealed his calling to the mission field and what he learned from sharing the Gospel in China, a country where Christians experience a high level of persecution. If you have been moved in your heart to donate, you can do it here, thank you so much for your support: https://givebutter.com/missiondelafeVideo CreditsDirected & Edited by Eric Villatoro: https://bit.ly/3sAGpv8Audio Mixed by Paul Nicholas https://www.facebook.com/james.p.nicholasTestimonies Recorded at  @Life Pointe Church   in FloridaJoin Our Community

Joshua Zatkoff is a 29-year man born in Maryland of Russian and Puertorican descent. He is currently a member of Nova Hub Church in Woodbridge Virginia and is here today to share his testimony of how Jesus restored his family, delivered him from multiple drug addictions, and ultimately saved his life! If you have been moved in your heart to donate, you can do it here, thank you so much for your support: https://givebutter.com/missiondelafeWatch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/gcroxLlkmjgVideo CreditsDirected & Edited by Eric Villatoro: https://bit.ly/3sAGpv8Assistant Director - Jr Mayen https:https://www.instagram.com/junemayen/Audio Mixed by Paul Nicholas https://www.facebook.com/james.p.nicholasTestimonies Recorded at Nova Hub ChurchJoin Our Community

If you have been moved in your heart to donate, you can do it through here, thank you so much for your support: https://givebutter.com/missiondelafeDr. Ines Furume Mangala is an Author, Speaker, Ordained Minister of the Gospel, an Entrepreneur, a Philanthropist with extensive knowledge in Strategic communication, Leadership as it applies to Global consulting.Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/_qRWBx-tsx0Video CreditsDirected & Edited by Eric Villatoro: https://bit.ly/3sAGpv8Assistant Director - Justin Artis https://www.instagram.com/jartis_219/Audio Mixed by Paul Nicholas https://www.facebook.com/james.p.nicholasTestimonies Recorded at Relentless DC ChurchWHAT WE USE TO MAKE VIDEOS:Our YouTube Camera Gear: https://amzn.to/3EyyUaCWhere we get our Music: https://www.epidemicsound.com/referral/s0rucbOur Main Microphone: https://amzn.to/3qm75x6Our Goto Lav Mic: https://amzn.to/3mBjqwkOur Main Light: https://amzn.to/3px6vxgDome for Light: https://amzn.to/3HfeSn7External Audio Recorder: https://amzn.to/3FAf2VJJoin Our Community

If you have been moved in your heart to donate, you can do it through here, thank you so much for your support: https://givebutter.com/missiondelafeWatch Testimony on Youtube:https://youtu.be/rMy43QxM1O4Video CreditsDirected & Edited by Eric Villatoro: https://bit.ly/3sAGpv8Audio Mixed by Paul Nicholas https://www.facebook.com/james.p.nicholasTestimonies Recorded at King of the Nations ChurchJoin Our Community

If you have been moved in your heart to donate, you can do it through here, thank you so much for your support: https://givebutter.com/missiondelafeAsa Williams is a 23-year-old man of God from Portsmouth, VA currently serving under Relentless DC Church in Springfield VA as the Kids Ministry Co-Executive Director. Asa is a multi-percussionist prodigy who grew up in a Christian household but was introduced to secular rap music, which opened a door that began to lead him to act and think in a self-destructive way, highly influenced by the culture of the secular hip hop lifestyle. Asa found himself lost but his eyes were opened to the darkness that surrounded him as he came in contact with the power of the Holy Spirit.Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/cIYwv3BkmGEVideo CreditsDirected & Edited by Eric Villatoro: https://bit.ly/3sAGpv8Assistant Director - Justin Artis https://www.instagram.com/jartis_219/Audio Mixed by Paul Nicholas https://www.facebook.com/james.p.nicholasTestimonies Recorded at Relentless DC ChurchJoin Our Community

Paul Nicholas - Musicals, Marigolds and Me... with TRE's Selina MacKenzie

Clive Anderson and Scottee are joined by Samantha Morton, Armando Iannucci, Paul Nicholas and Simon Barnes for an eclectic mix of conversation, music and comedy. With music from Orlando Weeks and Woom.

Clare and I have worked some unique events together one being the Ideal Home exhibition then Wintercon where I actually met Darth Vader and I then had to enter your Marquee of free Haribo. With TV, Radio, Corporate presenting as well as voiceover artist Clare's vocal range impresses me no end. We enjoy talking about here work with Puppets, Skins, pantomime and so much more.Clare trained at Middlesex Uni and has worked at Thorpe Park, The Palladium in London as well as Productions of a Fawlty Towers Touring Show put on by John Cleese himself. Clare went on to play many more characters such as Morticia Adams in The Addams Family, Edina in Absolutely Fabulous and Sybil Fawlty in Fawlty and has played Paddy McGuinness's girlfriendClare talks about Mel & Sue, Paul Nicolas, Pudsey Bear, Linda Nolan and our dear mutual friend Graham Cole as well as presenting on Red Carpet events for Bafta, Virgin Media.Hear more of Clare's story on the 3rd edition of Eyes & Teeth Voices of Variety when I talk to Clare Sloane

Michael joins me to talk gay gangsters, life becoming life again, Marc Bolan, Zoom vibes, 2023, Lenny & Wally, the majesty of Robert Stigwood, the mystery of Paul Nicholas, HAIM, Rosanna Arquette, Melanie Griffith, working with Tawny Kitaen, and more! Michael Des Barres’ Marquis Collection https://www.markschwartzmensshoes.com/the-marquis-collection Get into CHRISSY & CRAIG, my new show with the fabulous Chrissy Chlapecka https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chrissy-craig/id1561827264 Head over to https://www.patreon.com/CraigAndFriends to support the show and get hours and hours of exclusive content, including early & ad-free versions of ‘regular’ episodes, bonus episodes, Listener Questions and Movie Club episodes. Get a hott Harry’s Razors starter pack worth $13.00 for only THREE BUCKS! https://www.harrys.com/CRAIG Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/craigandfriendspod Twitter: https://twitter.com/craigandfriends Craig’s Linktree: https://linktr.ee/CraigAndFriends Help End Anti-Asian Hate! https://caasf.org/stop-aapi-hate For ways to help fight the fascists and support Black Lives Matter & Black Trans Lives Matter: https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co https://blacktranslivesmatter.carrd.co

In this  last episode of I Don't Like Reggae, I Love It, a special audio series on the historical origins and impact of reggae on popular music, I focus on the 1976 UK top 20  hit “Reggae Like It Used To Be” by Paul Nicholas , who before he took a turn as a pop star had a very successful career in musical theatre starring in Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar and more. Nicholas was also cast as “Cousin Kenny” Tommy's sadistic biker punk cousin in The Who's 1975 rock opera film Tommy. Some people consider "Reggae Like It Used To Be" to be one of the worst cod reggae tracks, but have a listen and watch the Top Of The Pops video on YouTube and decide for yourself! If you've listened and received some value from this episode, then please help support the podcast for as little as $3 per month on Patreon. Supporters get access to exclusive content like special episodes of this series and advanced promo chapters from my forthcoming book Ska Boom: An American Ska & Reggae Oral History which is now available for pre-oder from DiWulf Publishing.  Just go to patreon.com/skaboompodcast for more information. Please note: The music clips included in this podcast fall under the “Fair Use Doctrine” as defined by Section 107 of the Copyright Act. The law allows for use of music clips for purposes of criticism, comment, and news reporting

It was an honor to have a conversation with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band star Diane Steinberg Lewis. As "Lucy" in the film, Diane worked closely with Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees, Paul Nicholas and Donald Pleasence as she shined on the screen as the leader of Lucy and the Diamonds. Her rendition of the Beatles classic "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" with Stargard is a classic in its own right, and her scene stealing performances throughout the film prove to be supremely enjoyable. We discuss what it was like to work with Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb, as well as being a love interest to Peter Frampton's "Billy Shears." She tells stories of the wild times on set, as well as other memories from that infamous movie musical.

After 3 probing gripping podcasts about Evita’s early days (podcasts 12-14), Tim reveals all (or most, anyway) about his first theatrical misfire - Blondel, a show written with the late Stephen Oliver, which ran for a year in London 1983. He takes the blame for its problems but plays some selections from the score which shows that Stephen was as suited and as gifted in the musical theatre sphere as he was in the classical music world. One day, maybe, it will return.  Features the wonderful Cantabile (The London Quartet), Paul Nicholas, Stephen Tate, Sharon Lee Hill and David Burt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The first episode of Doug and Elly Watch Telly, a weekly show where we sit down and revisit some old favourites, some obscurities, bicker lightly and generally fail to take things too seriously. Contains some immoderate language, all of which is Elly's fault. This week, 1980's sci-fi flop Star Cops and 1980's Paul Nicholas vehicle Just Good Friends. Next week, it's Round The World With Willy Fogg and One Foot In the Grave. Please get in touch @dandewatchtv with your comments, leave a review on iTunes or InTune, and we will see you then!

You are cordially invited to the book launch of "Ben Baker's Fun Book For The Apocalypse" at the Social Distancing Rooms, Up Tarn. Bring a bottle and a...nother bottle as this is about to get off the chain. Guests include Paul Nicholas, a lifeboat, Hale and Pace, a blind man's wand, Derek Dick, the opposite of badmington, the worst S Clubs, some marbles, Clive Dunn's sex drive, the novelisation of Jaws: The Revenge, Uncle Grandpa Joe, Winifred Atwell, skiffle, war, Showaddywaddy and many more. And remember: there aint no party like a Grandma's Party cos a Grandma's Party stops at a reasonable hour and doesnt upset the neighbours. Nice. ================================ Bored from lockdown? Tired of playing charades with the dog? Screamed "EFF YOU TOP HAT EFFER!" too many times at the Monopoly set? Then you'll be ready for "Ben Baker's Fun Book For The Apocalypse" - over 100 pages of quizzes, games, puzzles, silly things to do, procraftination and jokes designed to take the pain out of paindemic. Which is a bit like pandemic if you spell it wrong. Suitable for all the family! Print: https://www.lulu.com/en/gb/shop/ben-baker/ben-bakers-fun-book-for-the-apocalypse/paperback/product-p5m4zm.html Kindle: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ben-Bakers-Fun-Book-Apocalypse-ebook/dp/B088F5LNW7/

Young Southpaw offers a unique career retrospective of The Indelicates, speaking with Simon & Julia about time travel, spectral presences, Ohio, Paul Nicholas, and much more Their info: www.theindelicates.comFB/Twitter/IG: @theindelicates    

If you want to listen to music about staying in bed on Sunday, going to Grandma's party AND losing your virginity in an orgy, you've come to the right place!

In this episode of Encore Meets, we're chatting to Peter Straker, who currently stars in La Cage aux Folles at Park Theatre in Finsbury Park. Peter was part of the original London production of Hair alongside Paul Nicholas and Elaine Paige. He's also is a solo artist, and is soon to release an album full of music which was co-produced by Freddie Mercury. He tells us all about La Cage aux Folles, his memories of performing in the West End in the '60s, and what it was like working with Freddie. Encore Meets is an Encore Radio podcast series. Go backstage in the West End, Broadway and beyond with Encore Radio’s exclusive theatre interviews. Subscribe to get the latest episodes.

Coming to you LIVE from egghole in Kent! Join us with special guest Paul Nicholas Carlson as we talk about everything! Grab your "Friends with Benedicts" and let's get started!

John Taylor is a composer and lyricist with a life long career in musical theatre. He is the composer of the joyous Charlie Girl, a show that played 2,202 performances in London’s West End and enjoyed a celebrated Australian production starring John Farnham, Anna Neagle, Geraldine Morrow and Derek Nimmo.The show was revived in London in 1986 starring Paul Nicholas, Dora Bryan and Cyd Charisse. Drawing from the Cinderella narrative, the class system and the inheritance tax, the musical was one of the most successful theatre shows of the sixties. Further musical compositions by John Taylor include Doddy’s Here, Mr & Mrs and The Royalty Follies.For several years he worked for Richard Rodgers, as Musical Supervisor for London and touring productions of The King and I with Yul Brynner and Virginia McKenna, and revivals of The Sound of Music at The Apollo Theatre starring Petula Clark.John possesses an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Musical form and offers marvellous insights into the process of composition, and shares anecdotes from a thrilling career in the theatre.The Stages podcast is available in iTunes, Spotify and Whooshkaa.

Nat is joined by darts legend and devout Steelers fan Paul Nicholas to sift through the rubble of last night's altercation, talk Kap and pick all the weekend's action.

Listen up, Canninmates!  We’re not messing around here! Fall in line and there won’t be any trouble in this women’s prison. Paul Nicholas is the Warden (director) and Shari Shattuck is our model prisoner (star of the movie). I don’t want to hear anything from your cells or we’ll have to reinstate the hotbox...and that’s not sexual! Nick and AJ will be your appeal attorneys so don’t expect an early release. They will, however, break down this episode’s movie for you: “The Naked Cage”! Now...Lights Out! Email us with any schematics of the prison, including escape routes, at creatingcannon@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook @CreatingCannon! And Subscribe to us on YouTube!

Going up! On this episode of THE STORY SONG PODCAST, join your hosts for a trip full of awkward small talk and Muzak, as they travel from the lobby to what some call heaven but others call a claustrophobic's nightmare. Come explore one of the many chapters in the career of actor/writer/singer Paul Nicholas as we review his 1977 disco hit, "Heaven on the 7th Floor." Room for one more... Continue the conversation -- follow THE STORY SONG PODCAST on Twitter (@Story_Song), Instagram (storysongpodcast), and on Facebook (facebook.com/thestorysongpodcast).  THE STORY SONG PODCAST is a member of the Forge Audio Network

At a time when the language of diplomacy has been reduced to a 140-character tweet transmitted at 3 am, it’s good to be reminded of the men and women for whom the quest for peace demanded actual thought and personal interaction. J. T. Rogers’ Oslo, now running in its West Coast premiere at the Marin Theatre Company through October 28, is a look at the circumstances and personalities responsible for the Oslo Accords. The 1993 Accords, considered to be a breakthrough in the search for Middle Eastern peace, brought about Israeli acceptance of the Palestinian Liberation Organization as official representatives of the Palestinian people and the PLO’s recognition of the state of Israel. Norwegians Terje Rod-Larsen (Mark Anderson Phillips) and Mona Juul (Erica Sullivan) are a well-connected husband and wife. He runs a think tank in Oslo; she is an official in the Foreign Ministry. They are the unlikely leaders of a plan to try a “gradualist” approach in middle east diplomacy. Issues would be dealt with one at a time, from the smallest to the largest, and they would be resolved person-to-person, not nation-to-nation. As it was the official stance of both parties to never deal directly with each other, this had to be accomplished through secret, back-channels. Those channels, though far from Washington, D.C., led to that moment on the White House South Lawn when Israeli Prime Minister Rabin shook the hand of PLO chairman Arafat. Rogers’ play takes the same approach as the negotiations. We get to gradually know the individuals involved. As they become better acquainted, we become better acquainted. As the process evolves, the audience evolves with it to the point where you would swear you were in the room with them. Director Jasson Minadakis has gathered a terrific ensemble to tell this riveting story. It’s an exceptional cast of fourteen players. Sullivan’s Juul acts as the narrator, providing context and humor and facilitating the initial connection between the audience and the play. Phillips is magnificent as the part strutting peacock, part heartfelt peacemaker Rod-Larsen. His alcohol-fueled takedown at one point in the negotiations by the participants was wrenching. J. Paul Nicholas and Ashkan Davaran as the PLO representatives and Brian Herndon and Ryan Tasker as the initial Israeli contacts are excellent as the across-the-table enemies who soon develop a friendship. While a true peace remains elusive, and regardless of how much of this dramatization is actually factual, Oslo reminds us that when humanity is allowed to enter a political process, there’s still hope. ‘Oslo’ runs through October 28 at Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley. Tuesday through Saturday evening performances are at 7:30pm. The Sunday matinee is at 2pm. For more information, go to marintheatre.org.

Émission consacrée à "Cousin Kevin" des Who, extraite de leur tant décrié opéra rock "Tommy". Cette chanson, pour moi l'un des sommets de l'album, a été composée par le bassiste John Entwistle qui, on ne le dira jamais assez, fut un songwriter talentueux, avec un sens de la mélodie (et de la perversité) vraiment particulier. Pour voir l'extrait du film, joué par Paul Nicholas (ne manquez pas les commentaires) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omYH2MFEERw

The latest episode of the podcast which asks: what, him out of Brotherhood Of Man with the ‘tache? How old? Fucking hell! After an extended hiatus, the greatest podcast in the world about old episodes of Top Of The Pops roars back with its usual melange of incisive music criticism, flare-baiting, dodgy microphones and the language of the billiard hall. This episode, we’re on the cusp of The Great Drought, and Tony Blackburn is on hand, bearing the gormlessly smiley visage of a man who knows he’s going to be giving his next-door neighbour a seeing-to in a Kensington flat after the show is over. Musicwise, this episode is pitted with British rubbishness, saved by the advent of Disco and the intervention of black America, who are repaid with comedy racism. Yes, Diana Ross and Gladys Knight drop two of the greatest tunes of the era, but we’re forced to listen to the Genuine Concerns of Paul Nicholas, an early appearance of Midge Ure trying to be James Dean, some Racist Animal Disco, and the most hated lorry driver of the Seventies who wasn’t Peter Sutcliffe. Oh, and because it’s April 1976, you already know what the No.1 is. On the upside, we get two appearances by Pans People. On the downside, it’s because this is the week they are made redundant, marking the very end of TOTP’s Golden Age. Taylor Parkes and Simon Price join Al Needham for a rummage through the skip of mid-70s Pop, breaking off to discuss if you can actually wring any kind of enjoyment out of 70s grot films, Monk Rock, the futility of CB radio, the lack of Birmingham accents in Pop, having your 8th birthday ruined by Manchester United, passing out in a lion suit, and some quality swearing. Download  |  Video Playlist  |  Subscribe Follow us on Facebook here. Link up with us on Twitter here. Subscribe to us on iTunes here. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Financial Executives International Managing Editor Olivia Berkman discusses cyber resilience with Paul Nicholas, Senior Director, Global Security Strategy and Diplomacy at Microsoft. Special Guest: Paul Nicholas.

Update: Paul is turning heads again with his demake of No Man's Sky. Check out Low Mem Sky at Itch.io! This week, UK-based retro developer Paul Nicholas Skypes in to talk about his recent development project, SCUMM-8, a Pico-8 recreation of LucasArts' legendary engine for Maniac Mansion among other hits from the golden age. Much thanks to Paul for his time, you can follow him @Liquidream on Twitter, try SCUMM-8 for yourself at the Pico-8 forum, and visit Paul's development site at liquidream.co.uk. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/gamedevbreakdown/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/gamedevbreakdown/support

Retro developer Paul Nicholas (@Liquidream) Skypes in to talk about his excellent game project, SCUMM-8, and share the inspirations behind his work.

Discuss on Reddit ➤ Support the Show ➤ Come back with us to the Middle Ages as we follow the pursuits of everyone’s favourite court misntrel: ‘Blondel!’ Potentially winning the award for the most unknown show so far on the podcast, Jimi and Tommy talk about what might be some of Tim Rice’s best lyrics, how this show comes packaged as a surprisingly feminist political satire and discuss Great Comet-gate and the social responsibility of fan culture. Blondel: Original London Cast Amazon SHOW NOTES If you want a bit of 80s camp fabulousness, here is Paul Nicholas in the role of Blondel with his glorious Blondettes! Tim Rice is one of musical theatre’s coolest cats. Check out this (slightly peculiar) interview of him discussing the rewrites to turn ‘Blondel’ into ‘Lute!’ Not just a Pointless presenter, Alexander Armstrong has had a great string of roles in British musical theatre. Here he is singing some of Tim Rice’s best lyrics in “No Rhyme for Richard.” Stage Door Records are leading their own crusade in reviving lost west end hits (and misses!), check them out! What are your thoughts on musical theatre fan culture? Are you going to be a Blondelite? Head over to Reddit and give us your thoughts! A QUIZ QUESTION FOR A GORILLA Originally act one of this show was slated to end with a round of musical chairs emceed by a gorilla. However, the producer didn’t think think this number worked – much to the dismay of the choreographer. Strangely, when they adapted the musical into a movie, this same choreographer performed in the new number that replaced the gorilla piece. What show?   

The actor Paul Nicholas talks about his recent visit to The Real Marigold Hotel and his early career in the first rock musical Hair. 'Punk potter' Keith Brymer Jones describes how he made his first item, a pottery owl, when he was 11 years old, but reveals that he actually started out as a ballet dancer. Saturday Live listener and retired nurse, Maggie Jones, has an obsession for photography and ... the ordinary. She can be seen snapping doors and alleyways, or checking for initials on bollards... Brenna Hassett is a bio-archaeologist who digs up bones for living, but she started her career running a record shop in California. Sooty and Sweep have graced our TV screens since the 1950s firstly with Harry Corbett and then with his son Matthew. They're now in the hands of Richard Cadell. Richard, Sooty and Sweep recently came into the Saturday Live studio to meet JP. And Corinne Bailey Rae shares her Inheritance Tracks - Me and Mrs Jones performed by Billy Paul, and There's More To Life Than This, by Bjork. The Real Marigold Hotel is on BBC One on Wednesday at 9pm. Earlier episodes are available on iplayer. "Built on Bones", by Brenna Hassett, is out now. Sooty and Sweep (and Soo) are on tour until June. The Great British Throw Down is on BBC Two on Thursdays at 8pm. Producer: Louise Corley Editor: Eleanor Garland.

On today's podcast, we catch up with Theatre Exile producing artistic director Deborah Block to talk about Theatre Exile's 20th anniversary season. We start off with congratulations on Exile's 13 Barrymore Award nominations (which Monday night became five wins for their production of Ayad Akhtar's The Invisible Hand:Production of a Play, Direction of a Play (Matt Pfeiffer), Leading Actor in a Play (Maboud Ebrahimzadeh), Supporting Actor in a Play (J. Paul Nicholas), and Sound Design (Michael Kiley). We also focus on Exile's next production, Rajiv Joseph's Guards at the Taj and tease with the rest of the season, which includes John Pollono's Lost Girls, and Tracey Scott Wilson's Buzzer, It's always a pleasure to chat with Deb. I hope you are as excited about their 20th season as I am.

Actor and singer Paul Nicholas chooses 'Singing In The Rain' by Gene Kelly and 'Don't Worry About Me' by Frank Sinatra.

Sian Williams and Richard Coles with writer and comedian Viv Groskop, the Inheritance Tracks of actor Paul Nicholas, author Sara Wheeler's first attempts to learn Russian and the sounds of a balalaika band. There's Angela's story of a broken family healed, David Chilvers's sighting of the world's first cosmonaut and Professor Carole Hough reveals what our names tell us about our origins.Producer: Harry Parker.