Nige Tassell used to go to school in full donkey-jacket-and-woolly-hat ensemble to express his boundless devotion to Dexys Midnight Runners. Forty years later he set out to find and interview everyone who’d ever been a member. For some, their time in the ranks was a joyful, career-launching delight. Others felt it was like a slightly chilly and controlling cult. They all took a while to recover and they all had extraordinary stories to tell in his latest book ‘Searching For Dexys Midnight Runners’. Here’s a flavour of what gets discussed …

… ‘No drugs or alcohol! No smiling! No eye contact with the audience!’ and other unsettling Dexys mantras.

… examples of Kevin Rowland ‘snatching defeat from the jaws of victory’.

… the many ways the band made themselves deliberately different’.

… the event supporting Bowie that got their power cut onstage in Paris and had them thrown off the tour.

... the heavy-handed recruitment of Helen O’Hara.

… Geno Washington and other strands of the Dexys DNA.

… the ad they took in the NME that soured their relationship with the music press.

… and how Rowland’s approach today remains resolutely unchanged.

Order Nige’s book here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Searching-Dexys-Midnight-Runners-Tassell/dp/178512059X

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Missing being on tour and exasperated by internal disputes, Nick Mason set out to tour small-scale venues with his band Saucerful Of Secrets in 2018. They’re mid-way through another world tour (Gary Kemp’s the main singer and one of the guitarists). He doesn’t miss the stadium circuit where “you need a golf cart to get from one side of the stage to the other” and they play only the early psychedelic Floyd material, from their first singles up to (but not including) the Dark Side of the Moon, which audiences are less inclined to want to be note-perfect versions of the records. And he talks mid-set about the origins of the songs and his memories of Syd Barrett and life at the time. This podcast looks back at the first live shows he saw and played himself and how Saucerful of Secrets came about. Which includes …

… Tommy Steele at the Hackney Empire – “I came straight from school in short trousers with my satchel”.

… seeing the Rolling Stones on a ‘63 package tour.

… performing Beatles songs at parties in Cuban heels and Oliver Goldsmith shades.

… playing the International Times launch party at the Roundhouse in ‘66 on the back of a cart.

…. early gigs at the Countdown Club, Regent Street Poly and the Albert Hall (with Alan Price and Peter & Gordon).

… the difference between Saucerful of Secrets and the stadium circuit – and the time Roger Waters played with them in New York.

… and the ‘60s demos of unreleased Floyd songs they’re hoping to add to the set.

Saucerful of Secrets tour dates here …

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kjkhMKXv4wPaR2XVbZ6h3WVMJ4ivesVn/view?usp=drivesdk

Buy tickets here …

https://myticket.co.uk/artists/nick-mason-saucerful-of-secrets

Nick’s re-released solo albums here …

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uwB_CYLuszOUNqsfeiWQH3nXd2TxGVf7/view

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We were at the Curzon Mayfair on May 7 for the premier of the rebooted Let It Be in all its burnished finery and came away with a ton of things to unravel, among them …

… what we never knew when the film came out 54 years ago.

.. seeing it in the shadow of Peter Jackson’s Get Back.

… how the edit was overtaken by events and the tangled reasons it turned out the way it did.

… why Lindsay-Hogg’s amphitheatre concept would never have worked.

… the divine symbolism of the Beatles v the police.

… why it’s a perfect social document of late-’60s London.

… the band’s three-film film contract.

… was the world really as distraught about their break-up as the 21st Century assumes?

… herringbone coats, red plastic macs, hairy black jackets: why someone should open a Beatles ‘69 clothes emporium.

Plus … the noble philosophies of the late Steve Albini expressed in a letter to Nirvana in November 1992.

… and what happens when rock stars don’t leave wills: Exhibit A - Steve Marriott.

Read Steve Albini’s letter to Nirvana here: https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/nirvana

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We stuck a few coins in this week’s Wurlitzer and these were the tunes that got played …

… when records became all about sound not songs.

… Fonzworth Bentley, Puff Daddy’s butler, the man who held an umbrella over him on the beach at Cannes.

… what Henry Kissinger, Martha Stewart and Leonardo DiCaprio kept very quiet about.

… Manchester’s Co-Op, a tale of unprecedented hopelessness.

… what’s the definition of a song? And can you steal a record?

… the magical skill of Aston Barrett on I Shot The Sheriff and James Jamerson on You Can’t Hurry Love.

… ‘Duane Eddy Does Bob Dylan’ and its ingenious sleeve.

… does anybody still want pop posters?

… “I'd watch Jeremy Clarkson boil an egg.”

… Moneybagg Yo & DaBaby, Cigarettes After Sex and other acts playing the O2 and Wembley Arena we’ve ever heard of.

… the ultimate autograph.

… and New Whirl Odor, Road To Rouen, Sax And Violins, Lead Me Not Into Penn Station and other tortuous album titles.

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Steve Diggle met Pete Shelley when the Pistols played Manchester in 1976 and the Diggle-fronted Buzzcocks are now on a world tour that began in Mexico and takes in North and South America, Europe and Australasia before winding up at the 100 Club where they played the Punk Festival 48 years ago – “we’ve come full circle”. He looks back here at the first shows he saw and played himself and talks about Silverhead, Status Quo, Leo Sayer dressed as a clown, George Best, the Groundhogs, The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells, the Buzzcocks as “Lennon and McCartney in a blender”, “Led Zeppelin for Comprehensive schoolkids, Deep Purple for Grammar schoolkids” and a great story about Patrick Moraz of Yes with a bank of keyboards like a telephone exchange and an alpine horn.

Buzzcocks world tour dates here: https://www.buzzcocks.com/events

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This week’s theories, rants, ruminations, recollections, weak gags and free and frank exchanges of view alight upon the following …

… is pop music now all about identity?

…. the recording of the Animals’ House of the Rising Sun and other apocryphal tales.

… has any act been as ubiquitous since Frankie Goes to Hollywood in 1984?

… or has anyone inspired a greater level of personal devotion than Taylor Swift?

… Peter Green, a shotgun and his accountant.

… books bought but never read.

.. re-reading Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity and the changing benchmarks for good and bad musical taste.

… intriguing parallels between the book and record industries.

… and Neil Tennant braves the digital lynch-mob.

Plus Adam Clayton’s garden, Konstantin Chernenko, Richard Burton, Rebel Wilson, Dark Academia, creepy weepies and birthday guest John Montagna looks at singles by the same act that are ‘descendants’ – ie pretty much identical – eg the Monkees’ Teardrop City and Last Train To Clarksville, the Kinks’ You Really Got Me and All Day And All of the Night and Mark Knopfler’s Cannibals and Walk Of Life. Or just try the first few seconds of these four by the Inkspots – Maybe, I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire, If I Didn’t Care and Whispering Grass.

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File this under ‘right place, right time’. Harold Bronson was a teenager in mid-60’s Los Angeles and saw every act imaginable. Then wrote for the Daily Bruin and Rolling Stone and interviewed everyone that interested him. Then managed a music store and co-founded Rhino Records, pretty much inventing the idea of the top-end reissue – “Sooner or later everyone ends up in a box.” All of this is in his memoir, ‘Time Has Come Today: Rock and Roll Diaries 1967 – 2007’, and many of its cast of thousands appear in this podcast, among them Johnny Horton and ‘the Battle of New Orleans’, the Purple People Eaters, the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra, the Doors at the Hollywood Bowl, the Stones supported by Ike & Tina (for $12), Ozzy Osbourne (“I’d never meet anybody with a tattoo before”), Hilton Valentine working at a Henry The Eighth-themed restaurant, Groucho Marx at a Led Zeppelin launch, a ‘Best of Louie Louie’ that sold 100,000 copies and a Ritchie Valens record made on a dictaphone.

You can order Harold’s book here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Has-Come-Today-Diaries/dp/B0CGTX2YN8

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With Mark Ellen in foreign parts David Hepworth and Alex Gold light cigars, pass the port in the correct direction and discuss…..

…..the fact that there is only one way to play a Beatles song and that is the way the Beatles did it.

…..the chances that Taylor Swift is reaching her imperial phase and nobody is prepared to tell her what she really needs to hear.

….the very good reason that all contemporary pop records do literally sound the same.

…the 50th anniversary of Richard and Linda Thompson’s “I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight”.

….the story of the Allman Brothers’ “Jessica”, a jam that turned into Dickey Betts’ pension.

….how the Blue Nile got a plug which is worth all the bought media in the world.

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