Word In Your Ear

At the age of four, Steve Nieve drew pictures of piano keys and pretended to play them. He joined Elvis Costello & the Attractions when he was 19, the start of a life that involves having to find a flight case for a Steinway Grand. He talks to us here from his Paris apartment about Stiff package tours, recording remotely, his upcoming shows with the French singer Kessada and …

… being a teenager as fond of Stravinsky as Alice Cooper and the Carpenters

… playing in a mid-‘70s Top Forty covers band

… the ad for a “rockin’ pop combo” that changed his life

… touring with Costello and Ian Dury and how he got his stage name

… playing the Thunderbirds theme as a chat show bandleader on the Last Resort

… a giant Klavins piano “that has stairs leading up the seat”

… working on Morrissey’s Kill Uncle

… the 40,000 audience that watched his online Lockdown shows

… unreliable stage pianos and the story of Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert.

Tickets here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/westhampsteadartsclub/2059256

The “About Love” album: https://music.apple.com/gb/album/about-love/1834791707

Steve’s new album: https://stevenieve.hearnow.com/piano-night-2026

Steve’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/steveprofessornieve/

Kessada’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamkessada/

www.stevenieve.com
www.kessada.com

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Watering the scented hedgerows of news to see if any green shoots appear. And they do, in the form of …

… the most effective protest song ever written

… the commendable box-ticking life of Country Joe McDonald

… the Timothée Chalamet ding-dong: is it still safe to voice an opinion?

… Harry Styles’ 67 dates in just 7 locations: how ‘Destination gigs’ throttle the competition

… was Wings a worse name than the Beatles? And McCartney as a shepherd: discuss

… what makes a song work as a football chant?

... the most unusual things we've heard sung by crowds

…. Stormfront, Gothic Serpent, Midnight Hammer, Rolling Thunder … album title or US military campaign?

… why we love improv theatre

… when Champion Jack Dupree lived in Halifax and Kid Creole in Rotherham

… plus barrelhouse blues piano, ‘inflicting’ music on people and birthday guest Avi Chaudhuri & rock music as community singing.

Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
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Pointing the scanner of inquiry at the baggage carousel of news to see what gets the lights flashing, which this week includes …

… we know what’s making Morrissey miserable

… bands that can get a whole stadium singing

… the rock star who misses the music press most

… “a Likely Lads for the rave generation”, anyone?

… the speed at which news now travels

… Loudon Wainwright and Richard Thompson, Ben Sidran and Boz Scaggs, Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer, Steve Martin and Martin Short … in praise of inseparable old pals!

… Anfield Rap (Red Machine in Full Effect)! Lift it High (All About Belief)! Whatever happened to football singles?

… I Started Out with Nothin and I Still Got Most of It Left, Musta Notta Gotta Lotta, Trouble Over Bridgewater: albums you bought because you liked the title

… “English radio stations won’t play new music!” Really?

Plus birthday guest Adrian Ainsworth on the Sensual World, Us, Monster, the Rhythm of the Saints and other great experimental sequels to big-selling albums.

Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
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A gorgeous and lavish new publication tells the story of the Kinks in the ‘60s via the key events in their unsteady trajectory plus concert bills, letters and ephemera assembled by Andrew Sandoval, the kind of non-digital research that’s filled his archive with yellowing back numbers of Disc & Music Echo. It’s “nirvana for any fan”, the title hinting at the level of detail – ‘The Kinks: All Day and All of the Night, the Day By Day Story Part 1: 1940 – 1971’. He joins us here from Los Angeles to talk frock coats, deathless tunes and own-foot-shooting setbacks, and what he learnt about the band from compiling it. Which involves …

… their magical run of 16 hits from 1964–68 (by a sole songwriter)

… the five people who ran and managed the band and what they had to put up with

… the last chance saloon backstory of You Really Got Me and the Jimmy Page rumours

… the Kinks’ alleged black-listing on the American tour circuit

… Ray’s “unauthorised autobiography” and perpetual self-sabotage

… Granada TV’s record of Alan Bennett and John Betjeman as possible co-writers for Arthur

... the 12,000 miles required to re-record three seconds of “Lola”

… the ways Reprise, Pye and Marble Arch sold the Kinks catalogue

… and Ray and Dave’s live debut as “the Kelly Brothers”.

Order copies of ‘The Kinks: All Day and All of the Night’ here: https://beatlandbooks.myshopify.com/

Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
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Author and broadcaster Samira Ahmed used to watch A Hard Day’s Night once a week and she’s just written an enthralling account of the shoot and its impact for the BFI’s Classic Films series. A movie, she points out, that celebrates Britishness and suburbia made largely by immigrants that broke every Hollywood rule, a film made to capture the essence of the Beatles before the bubble burst “which turned out to be the start of something not the end”. She talks to us here about …

… the film’s connections with the Goons, the Young Ones, Dr Strangelove, Star Wars, Billy Liar, It’s Trad Dad and the Nouvelle Vague

… and its influence - from the Dave Clark Five’s Catch Us If You Can and Paul Jones’ Privilege to Charlie XCX and the Moment

… how the train sequence for I Should Have Known Better invented pop video

… the play John and Paul wrote (Pilchard!) that was a homage to its scriptwriter Alun Owen

… Paul’s two-day solo shoot with Isla Blair and other (mercifully) deleted scenes

... Profumo, pirate radio, the changing Britain of 1964

… Pattie Boyd, Anna Quayle, Alison Seebohm and other stand-out female stars

… Wilfred Brambell’s gigantic fee and how badly his part has aged

… why George and Ringo emerged as the stars

… surely the greatest scene? – “She's a drag, a well-known drag. We turn the sound down on her and say rude things”

… “hair that moved!”: the film’s impact in the USA

… “beat-up and depraved in the nicest possible way”

… and how the dubbed-on dialogue about Ingmar Bergman made the German version “a film for cineastes”.

Order Samira’s book here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/hard-days-night-9781839029394/

Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
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