It seems like there was a lot of mess around me at the end of 2024, not literal mess as that is always there, more like life mess that needed wading through before I could get the new year started. So, this monthly playlist is a little later in the month than usual but, I am happy to report, it is no less lovingly curated. A lot of my working day is solitary and offers plentiful opportunity for listening; albums and playlists come out top, but I never lose my love of radio and nowadays podcasts too can be great company to fill an hour or two. You can find pods that cater to most musical tastes presented by people with varying degrees of personality, enthusiasm and knowledge, elements that do not always go together. Musically one of my favourite shows is ‘Discord & Rhyme’, an albums themed podcast where a large group of America based music fans rotate their cast for each episode according to taste, pick a record to discuss then go through it track by track with a lead host steering the talk, pulling in clips and background information. It is a brilliant set up wherein the genius lies in how each contributor will have a differing perspective on the song in question. Often, where one of the Discord & Rhymers will eloquently enthuse about a tune the next will state they cannot see any merit in it whatsoever and give a passionate takedown.

They are a respectful crew, no one ever takes offence at another one’s dislike of their favourite artist and the gentle ribbing that takes place feels sincere, not staged. For more details on each individual presenter and episodes go to the Discord & Rhyme website https://discordpod.com/ but the two I’d like to give special mention to are John McFerrin and Amanda Rogers; whenever I encounter an episode with either of these contributing I know I am going to be in for the duration. John is like that affable, eccentric uncle who spends most of his life locked away in a study with ‘do not disturb’ sellotaped to the door. However, the man’s knowledge is seriously deep, his love of Prog Rock is open eared (he knows all too well where that genre goes wrong) and his ability to make connections from the worlds of classical music and jazz, pulling in relevant sound clips and audio examples, frequently open up new doors of musical exploration for listeners like myself. The episodes this podcast did on King Crimson were exceptional, really deepening my appreciation of the band and sending me off into unexplored territories with recommendations that located appropriate entry points to the maze that is that bands live recordings. By contrast, Amanda Rogers is a far more emotive presenter, often endearingly sneering in the face of music I love (check out the Velvet Underground episode) and bafflingly loyal to the Moody Blues whose output, to my ears, can be patchy. Out of the blue she will react to something, like when becoming genuinely tearful talking about a Traveling Wilburys song, in a touching way that tells you her relationship with music is relatably like your own.

At the other end of my regular podcast listens is a show I return to for the infuriated anger and jocular pleasure it instigates in equal measure. David Hepworth and Mark Ellen’s podcast ‘Word In Your Ear’ offers conversations between the two on a wide range of music culture hot topics and sometimes amusing anecdotes from their illustrious careers in music journalism. Hepworth and Ellen have been there all my life. From the days of my early teens when they were behind Smash Hits, to their involvement with magazines like Q and Mojo, their TV presenting roles at Live Aid and The Old Grey Whistle Test to their 2000’s stewardship of the very readable Word Magazine, if I was reading the music press there was a good chance either one of these two were involved somewhere along the line. My problem, other than the vomit inducing smugness of their presentation and the way they are constantly patting each other on the back for the “really quite extraordinary” quality of the others observation, is the way they both retain the basic templates of editor in chief. These two will never let the facts get in the way of an eye catching, readership grabbing front page headline and they boil every single subject they tackle down to this dimension. They go in depth on absolutely nothing but always find an angle from which they can weave a hot narrative; this results in headline statements like ‘The Age Of Mystique Is Dead’, after which the chat failed to acknowledge how a contemporary band like SAULT (of whom so little is actually known) could have less mystery around their identity, or ‘Robert Fripp Has Won Rock ‘n’ Roll’ which then neglects to explore any details on how Fripp has built an enviable career without appearing to bow to compromise at any juncture.

The primary villain is Hepworth, who talks with the not-up-for-debate authority of an editor who has decided what the angle is with no expectation that everyone will not fall in line, the print deadline on the horizon. He recently ranted about the ‘Beatles 64’ movie, describing how he had to stop it after 15 minutes wanting to throw missiles at the TV. His issue was simply that, as far as Hepworth believed, that the story of the Beatles first US visit in 1964 should be a before and after story, painting us a monochrome world before the band appeared on Ed Sullivan and the explosion of technicolor pop culture and all that erupted immediately after the Beatles invaded every US home via the television screen. Hepworth wanted a narrative based film with that big penetrative moment but what he got was more documentary with talking heads, most of whom he deemed irrelevant, stitching the footage together. But in making this argument he conveniently ignored that the backbone of the picture was to upgrade and re-present the access all areas footage captured by Albert and David Maysles and stitch it together with context and historical insight. I felt the film was both a delight and succeeded in placing the Beatles bullseye strike to the heart of US mainstream culture informatively and entertainingly and even the footage of Smokey Robinson performing ‘Yesterday’ on US TV, which Hepworth was apoplectic with rage over, was appropriate within the framing of the film. Still, he got his ‘Hepworth In Beatle Movie Fury’ moment out of it for that episode, so I guess that is all that mattered.

In the past I have heard Hepworth go for a ‘Bob Dylan Is Not A Poet’ attention grabber which, again, sounds to me like a man adopting a posture rather than an intellectual positing a valid view. His basic premise was that poets are cheats; they will take a rhyme because it fits the pace and scheme of a verse regardless of whether it has poetic meaning. Well, for one you cannot claim that a poet would never do the same when constructing a verse, like integrity always rules in the world of poetry creation (nonsense) and secondly, anyone looking to argue that there is no poetic quality in the lyric writing of Bob Dylan has instantly backed themselves into a corner of irrelevance as far as I’m concerned. You might as well have ‘I don’t know what I’m talking about’ tattooed to your forehead. It is just hollering for effect, like those people who claim the Beatles are overrated. Ironically, David Hepworth does have one of my favourite Bob Dylan anecdotes from the time he got to interview him in the eighties, in fact both him and Mark Ellen do have a bucketful of fantastic stories to tell from their time circling the epicenter of popular music culture. It is this that keeps me coming back to them I suppose, that and the unspoken pleasure, as David tasted with the Beatles movie, of wanting to venomously hurl objects at your speakers. This month’s playlist features seventy-five tracks from 2024 all previously unfeatured in the playlists of the past year. You can guarantee Hepworth and Ellen will not have listened to anything on it, but they will have fashioned an interesting thought on Rod Stewarts barnet and why hairstyles in Rock ‘n’ Roll are more important than the music…