Word In Your Ear

Jonathan Richman, on-the-road songs and the best-known solo ever recorded

Word In Your Ear

Show Notes

This week’s news in a conversational cocktail-shaker and served with ice and a little paper parasol. Those Happy Hour highlights include …

… six musicians who keep getting better looking

… Plas Johnson RIP, a part of everyone’s life for 60 years

… the Odyssey and how Hollywood thinks the rest of the world has a foreign accent

… why you couldn’t make Bugsy Malone today

… Jonathan Richman’s genuine wide-eyed love of the modern world

… Clare Torry’s Pink Floyd payday

… “Styrofoam ice buckets full of ice”: the greatest song ever written about life on the road

… Mick Jagger, the art of evasion and the exquisite boredom of Stones’ B-sides about America

… the four rock stars who played the Artful Dodger

… and what John Wayne said to ‘Jesus’. Help us to keep The Longest Continuous Conversation In Rock'n'Roll going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

More from Word In Your Ear

Oct 21, 2026

Helen’s violin at the start of Come On Eileen has filled a million wedding dancefloors. She was a member of Dexys Midnight Runners, later their musical director, at the boom time of Too Rye Ay (and its wobbly sequel) and captures the thrill of it all in her just-updated memoir, What’s She Like: A Violinist’s Tale. You’ll love this conversation - warm, candid, forgiving and touching on all the following …

Oct 20, 2026

We first met Nigel Dick in the late ‘70s when he was the motorbike messenger for Stiff Records and watched him rocket to success in the video boom, directing career-launching clips for Guns N’Roses, Tears for Fears and Britney Spears and working with Cher, Joni Mitchell and McCartney, all recorded in his memoir ‘Music Video Mischief’. He looks back here on that big-budget golden age and the rise of the amateurs from his home in Colorado and stops off at …

Oct 19, 2026

Two fearless men journey to the Edge Of News so that you don’t have to. Some highlights of this week’s report …

Oct 15, 2026

Richard Thompson has a new album, ‘Hippies, Thugs and Heroes’, and he’s touring again in 2027, the perfect excuse to get another of our favourite guests back in the chair again. He joins us here for a brilliant, free-wheeling conversation with a cast list including …

Oct 14, 2026

You forget how huge and ubiquitous Rory Gallagher was in the ‘70s, just 22 at the Isle of Wight and auditioning for the Stones four years later, an inspiration for Johnny Marr, Andy Partridge, the Edge, Slash and countless others. And for his brother and manager Dónal - “it was a big wide world I wasn’t going to see unless I hung onto his coattails”. He’s just published a memoir, ‘Edged In Blue, A Rock’n’Roll Odyssey with Rory Gallagher’, and looks back here at some of the highlights, these among them …

See all episodes →