Word In Your Ear

Stuart Adamson co-founded the Skids and Big Country but was profoundly ill-suited to the spoils of his success. Author Scott Rowley unpacks his passage from Dunfermline to Nashville and Hawaii to get a sense of his demons and what drove and inspired him. He talks to us here about his compelling new memoir ‘Stay Alive: the Life and Death of Stuart Adamson’ and touches on …

… hints of troubled family life in his early lyrics and the shadows of his father and grandfather

… that famous three-word review: “More crusading porridge!”

… the guilt of his success when he returned to his Dunfermline roots

… why learning to sing is unwise!

… how Big Country were saved by Steve Lillywhite and the resentment about their being sold as a pop group

… Nick Drake, Sinead O’Connor … “people who should never have been given a record contract”

… insurmountable friction with Richard Jobson

… how Nevermind made the old rock landscape look outmoded

… “guitars that sounded like bagpipes!” and other hoary old clichés

… “empty, breast-beating, bombastic!”: the rigours of the rock press consensus

… and how Big Country nearly played Live Aid.

Order ‘Stay Alive: the Life and Death of Stuart Adamson’ here: https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Stay-Alive-The-Life-and-Death-of-Stuart-Adamson/Scott-Rowley/9781917923538

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Our ‘big air’ manoeuvres on the rock and roll ski jump this week land the following tricks …

… why don’t we re-use old protest songs instead of writing new ones?

… “a temple of music and gothic lust:” would YOU buy Jim Steinman’s unsellable home?

… when Madness played on the Buck House roof

… Ptolomaic Terrascope? Aquarium Drunkard? Real and made-up music magazines

… “too complicated, not catchy, like a high-minded think-piece”: U2’s Days Of Ash EP

… when the Ramones invaded the London library

… Rod, Elton, Adele, Noel, Ed … do they cut it as National Treasures?

… “the best sport still works with the sound off”

… what links Steely Dan to American College Football?

… plus the Bishop of Ramsbury, Robyn’s “dream doner” and birthday guest Keith Adsley with a quiz about American college football walk-out music.

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Some shared stages. Some made records and films together. Some had love affairs. Matt Thorne is fascinated by stars’ collaborations and what they reveal about them. He talks here about 14 musicians who collided and the discoveries he made in the six years spent writing ‘Famous: Ego, Envy and Ambition in Pop, Rock and Hip-Hip’, with all this high in the mix …

… Frank Sinatra’s ‘Welcome Home Elvis’ TV Special and how threatened he felt by rock’n’roll

… “Chuck Berry thrived on tension in exactly the way Mark E Smith controlled the Fall”

… what you’ll find in Lou Reed’s archive at New York’s Library for the Performing Arts

… McCartney at “the showbiz event of the year”, January 1968, at a rare low ebb in the Beatles’ fortunes

… the mystifying One Trick Pony where Paul Simon inexplicably chose to play a failure, and his comic turn on Saturday Night Live

… Bowie’s and Tina Turner’s TV ad and love affair

… what Chuck Berry tried to hide about his studio trickery and the “psychological terrorism” of what played on his TV sets

… “all musicians are obsessed with the idea that they’re on the way out”

… why a book like this would have been impossible 30 years ago

… and Dave Stewart’s vision of Lou Reed as a piece of pasta on a motorcycle.

Order copies of ‘Famous: Ego, Envy and Ambition in Pop, Rock and Hip-Hip’ here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/famous/matt-thorne/9781474616386

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Paul Rees fell in love with AOR when it began with Boston in 1976, the polished, ramped-up hits that were briefly the music of the American heartland. His book ‘Raised On Radio: Power Ballads, Cocaine & Payola – the AOR Glory Years 1976-1986’ remembers the age when records were launched via car stereos, their eternally appealing sound and the preposterous lives of the people who wrote and played them – Bon Jovi, Pat Benatar, Asia, REO Speedwagon, Don Henley and Toto among them. “It’s happy music,” he points out. “Music that makes you raise a quizzical eyebrow.” In the mix …

… the original AOR sound: “Led Zeppelin hard rock with Eagles harmonies and a stratospheric high-tenor voca|”

… the absolute power of producers like Mutt Lange (a man raised on radio jingles)

… Pat Benatar, the former married bank clerk who wanted to be Robert Plant in a leotard

… “AOR stars were all salesmen who talked in quotes”

... the many reasons Don Henley fired people on a whim

… Def Leppard’s vision of America built on AOR and cowboy movies

… “Chicago and the Tubes never played on their records”

… “he ended up butterball-naked in a cocaine threesome sting with two disguised police women”

… the producer who had his trout pond realigned as he couldn’t work looking at a garden that wasn’t symmetrical

… the story of Toto’s Africa: “tape loops strung round chair-backs and a quick flick through a geography book”

… “if this record’s a hit I’ll run naked down Sunset Boulevard”.

Order a copy of ‘Raised On Radio: Power Ballads, Cocaine & Payola – the AOR Glory Years 1976-1986’ here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Raised-Radio-Paul-Rees/dp/1408721112

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After 40 days of relentless rain, you need our little ray of sunshine. And here we all are! Sitting in the rock’n’roll rainbow this week you’ll find …

... the Wuthering Heights instagram gold-rush

… licensing Foreigner and Lynyrd Skynyrd: when is a band not a band?

.. what Michael Jackson asked the Superbowl promoter

… one long video for Charli XCX: “if that film was playing in my back garden I’d draw the curtains”

… Bob Dylan & Kurtis Blow, Kate Winslet & ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic: a brief history of weird duets

… a walk-on forest, 300 extras, 29 hidden messages: how can you top Bad Bunny? (“Disgusting!” – D Trump)

… what a 1969 Rock Encylopedia said about “the poets and minstrels of our time”

… “biopics are designed for people who don’t know the subject”

... Paul Anka did Smells Like Teen Spirit? The Flaming Lips did Kylie Minogue?

… whippets, flat caps, bottles of stout: begone hoary old Yorkshire clichés!

… “that’s the biggest power station in Western Europe – and I know the manager!”: our love for Alan Bennett

… plus Top Gear, M*A*S*H, Twins Peaks, Arena (by Brian Eno) and birthday guest Paul Monaghan on great TV theme tunes.

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