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

Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free - access to all of our content, plus a whole load more!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.