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If, like me, you've been waiting years for the fifth and final volume of Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson biography the announcement of the release of "Turn Every Page" can only be taken as a hopeful sign. It's a documentary about the relationship between Caro and his editor Robert Gottlieb, who can also boast that he has been the midwife of such trifles as "Catch 22", that he's edited both John Le…
According to Two Brothers by Jonathan Wilson, when Bobby and Jack Charlton were both playing for England in the semi-finals of the 1966 World Cup, their father Robert Charlton, who had no interest in football, was at work. He was that kind of man. When David Coleman heard that he’d missed the match he made sure that Dad was sent a tape and the means to play it on. If he had been bothered he would…
We've been talking about greatcoats on the pod . In the late sixties and early seventies every male student or head would be wearing one, bought for small sums at Millett's or your local army surplus store. We often followed bands who wore the same thing, though theirs probably came from trendier outlets. I found this pic of me in a standard greatcoat of the times. This was taken in a north London…
I haven’t been watching this World Cup. I’d like to say this was because I objected to the naked corruption which led FIFA to award this tournament to Qatar. It would be more true to say I didn’t want my life dominated by the media narrative around the World Cup. I’ve been following World Cups since the sixties. The clamour drowned out the actual football years ago. So when the match was on last…
"The Turning Point" is about what Charles Dickens did in the year 1851. This was the year of the Great Exhibition. It was the high point of the Victorian Era. He was spending a lot of his time on semi-pro theatricals, on editing a weekly magazine and gearing up to write "Bleak House" , the book that would transform him from Great Entertainer to Great Novelist. He was mapping out the book in his…
I was on a school trip to France when England won the World Cup in 1966. When we returned the following week there was a mysterious-looking LP in the window of the shop near school. It turned out to be The Beatles “Revolver”. I can’t honestly remember exactly how it struck us at the time. Maybe we were spoilt. Certainly we’d grown accustomed to having our clock cleaned by pop music on a weekly…
What most intrigues me about the Bob Dylan’s automated signature story is the implication that resorting to the auto-pen is standard practice. I don’t have any doubt that a machine signs the American President’s name for them but I was taken aback by the idea that it was widely used by famous musicians, authors and the like. My modest adventures in book signing obviously have never taken into that…
Finally got round to reading "No More Champagne" , David Lough's book about Churchill and his money. This confirmed me in my view that we are mistaken when we assume that the wealthy aren't bothered about money because they've got enough. He was obsessed. Churchill was born with all the expectations of a 19th century aristocrat without any of the funds. Everything he bought was charged and paid…
.....they didn’t tell the management. I don’t mean Klopp or Guardiola. I mean the people who manage the business of these clubs day to day, the people who are closely involved in how many shirts they sell in Taiwan, the people whose annual bonus is based on the commercial deals they pull in, the people who are kept awake worrying about whether they can persuade the goalkeeper to spare ten minutes…
There's a good new edition of Matthew Bannister's podcast "Folk On Foot" in which he accompanies Richard Thompson as he revisits places in London that played a part in shaping him and his music: William Ellis School in Highgate, where he formed his first group with fellow pupil Hugh Cornwell, the house on Fortis Green Road in Muswell Hill which is still named Fairport, the Lamb and Flag in Covent…
I haven't learnt a foreign language during the pandemic but I have finally read "A Dance To The Music Of Time" by Anthony Powell . As Tony Hancock said, there ought to be a badge. I started the first volume, "A Question Of Upbringing" back in March. Last night I finally laid down the 12th, "Hearing Secret Harmonies". I was helped in reading this by Andy Miller of the excellent books podcast…
I just heard that Mike Appleton has died. Mike's the guy second from the right in the back row, alongside Robyn Hitchcock, Trevor Dann, Andy Kershaw and Rick Wright of Pink Floyd. The front row is Mark Ellen, Bob Harris, Billy Bragg and me. Mike was the BBC man behind "The Old Grey Whistle Test". He was the one who launched it as producer and for years as Editor managed to keep it on the air until…
Last Monday we recorded interviews with Pete Paphides and Dan Franklin about their books. Both interviews are published as podcasts right now. You can get them at the Word Podcast or usual suppliers. Given the circs that's likely to be the last Word In Your Ear for a while. We've postponed the April 14th event with Paul Gorman for the moment. If you've got tickets, don't worry. You'll be contacted…
Fraser's worked some everyday magic and now all the Word podcasts are on Spotify. That means you can follow this link and go back all the way to the first weekly one from 2007, done in the small room where Mixmag used to store all the clothes for fashion shoots, right through to the most recent ones, which are recorded at the Islington in front of a live audience. There are over three hundred of…
Following the death of Ginger Baker I asked on Twitter if there were any famous drummers left. People replied with their nominations. There were the obvious ones such as Ringo Starr and Charlie Watts. Then there were names like Jim Keltner, who are known to people who study album credits. Somebody pointed out that in the world of metal the drummer still had a certain celebrity. But still the…
When I visited Italy a year ago to publicise my book my excellent translator was Seba Pezzani. Seba helps run an annual festival in Fiorenzuola d'Arda, a small town south of Milan in Emilia-Romagna. This year we were there for it. The festival goes under the name Dal Mississippi Al Po to emphasise the link between two famous rivers and it brings together Seba's two passions, edgy fiction,…
Driving down to Bath to take part in a chat about the Beatles with former cabinet minister Alan Johnson and Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn I listened to Mark talking about Brian Epstein on Radio Four's Great Lives . Mark pointed out that the Beatles lived in an era when the male hug was largely unknown and therefore you would look in vain for overt demonstrations of affection between them. That's…
Not everything that came out in 1967 was bitten by psychedelia. I bought this copy of Scott Walker's first solo LP in the same shop in the same year that I bought “Sgt Pepper”. Scott Walker was just coming out of three years of being a scream idol with the Walker Brothers and he was determined that this time he was going to undersell himself. I fancy the picture on the back which has him looking…
I watched the whole of the first part of Leaving Neverland . Then I watched the whole of the second part. Finally I watched Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Wade Robson and Jimmy Safechuck , the two men whose recollections of their time in Michael Jackson’s retinue of pretty young boys make up the film. Before I watched it I wondered why it needed to be four hours long. Afterwards I thought the…
One of the most striking revelations in Andrew Roberts book about Churchill is how much work he put into every single piece of communication he authored. He had a prodigious memory, which meant he could call upon every poem, Bible reading or Shakespearean speech he had ever heard, and he was almost incapable of writing an inelegant sentence. But that didn’t mean he would wing it. Churchill would…
My new Cyrus CD player (remember those?) recommends that it be 'run in' for 72 hours with a CD on repeat play (at low volume if preferred). Now, I wonder which piece of music should enjoy this honour? #gaucho #steelydan pic.twitter.com/Z8HwDyrkyV — Will Birch (@Will_Birch) February 10, 2019 When Will Birch tweeted this the other day I couldn't help but agree with his choice of Steely Dan. They’re…
I’ve read four volumes of Robert Caro’s epic biography of Lyndon Johnson . The fifth volume hasn’t been finished yet. In the course of an excellent piece in the New Yorker he explains that that fifth volume is “some years away”. (He's eighty-three.) If you read the piece, which is about how he has researched the book so far, you understand why. Caro's driven by a compulsion to unearth the story…
Blurbs on the covers of real-life stories of espionage that invoke the name of John Le Carré too often seem like a devalued currency. They’re like those reviews of new Stones albums that say “their best since ‘Exile On Main Street’. However I can assure you that The Spy and The Traitor , Ben Macintyre’s book about Oleg Gordievsky, fully warrants that kind of billing and that's for two reasons. The…
Chris Shaw does a podcast called I Am The Egg Pod in which he asks people to talk about a Beatles or Beatles-related record. I was too late for "A Hard Day's Night" because that had already been picked and so I chose "With The Beatles". I dipped into some of the earlier interviews, which featured the likes of David Quantick and Samira Ahmed, and was frankly a little intimidated by how much people…
I came to George Beardmore's "Civilians At War" after Kate Atkinson credited it as a source for her own "Transcription" . It's one of the best books I've ever read about the experience of World War II. Beardmore was an unsuccessful novelist living in North London with a young family when the war broke out. His asthma disqualified him from military service and so he did a variety of jobs. He was…