Show Notes
Clint Boon was at the heart of “the two biggest musical revolutions of my lifetime” – as a teenager for Joy Division and Buzzcocks, and later the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Hacienda and onstage with Inspiral Carpets, a world of characters as big as his own. His memoir ‘The Manchester Chronicles’ is about obsessions, schoolteachers, purple winklepickers, mobile discos, good luck, catastrophe and being in the right place at the right time for 30 years. Along with …
… why Manchester listens to music so intently: “we’re stuck inside while it rains”
… auditioning Noel Gallagher “as the Lockerbie plane flew directly overhead”
… the new economy: making a Number 2 album funded by t-shirt and cassette sales
… growing up on Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, Little Richard and Gary Lewis & the Playboys
… Inspiral Carpets’ obsession with West Coast psychedelia
… when the band all got houses with their Mute advance “and I just bought some $800 sunglasses”
… great bowl-heads haircuts (Stones, Byrds, Jefferson Airplane) and why he got one too
… seeing the Pistols at the Electric Circus: “I left college the next morning”
… the sudden split: playing Glastonbury one minute, living on milk tokens and income support the next
… his 1975 disco playing Mud, the Rubettes and Showaddywaddy (“I was a 14 year-old Ted”)
… and how 24 Hour Party People captured “the spirit, chaos, colour and madness”.
Order copies of ‘The Manchester Chronicles: True Tales of Music, Madness and Mayhem 1976-2006’ here: https://geni.us/manchesterchronicles 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
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 …
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 …
Two fearless men journey to the Edge Of News so that you don’t have to. Some highlights of this week’s report …
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 …
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 …