The Strange Brew - artist stories behind the greatest music ever recorded

Graham Parker didn’t get a record deal until he was 24, having worked in a rubber glove factory and picked tomatoes in Guernsey before that. Fifty years on, he’s still telling those stories the way he always...

George Bunnell, Mark Weitz, Howie Anderson, Gene Gunnels and Randy Seol discuss the history of Strawberry Alarm Clock. They cover the writing and recording of their 1967 number one single Incense and Peppermints...

The Iveys came together in Swansea in the early 1960s, with Ron Griffiths on bass alongside guitarist Pete Ham. Bill Collins took over as manager, and it was during their residency at the Marquee that Beatles aide Mal...

Steve Tilston joins Jason Barnard for a tour through six decades of songwriting, picking thirteen tracks from across his career and talking through the stories behind them. Along the way he covers his early days on the...

Philip Norman returns to talk about Mr. Moonlight , his first book devoted entirely to Brian Epstein, and what emerges from decades of Beatles research focused through a single lens is a portrait more complex than the...

Otis Williams discusses over six decades of The Temptations and their upcoming UK tour . Williams talks about moving from Texas to Detroit as a kid, catching Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers at the Fox Theater, and...

<p >John Leckie is one of British rock’s greatest producers, who started out as a tape operator at Abbey Road in 1970, thrown immediately into sessions for George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and John Lennon’s...

<p >John Helliwell of Supertramp returns to talk about Crime of the Century, the newly restored 1975 concert film shot at Hammersmith Odeon, and the years in which the band went from complete obscurity to one of the...

<p >Boz Boorer talks about his life in music, from his earliest memories of Marc Bolan and T. Rex to punk shows in London in the late 70s, The Polecats, and eventually decades on the road and in the studio with...

<p >Mark Webber has been with Pulp for so long that his story and the group’s are almost the same thing. He started out as a teenager in Chesterfield with a fanzine called Cosmic Pig, booked Pulp at the local...

Singer-songwriter Michael Weston King picks tracks from across his career, a conversation bookended by his new solo album Nothing Can Hurt Me Anymore, shaped by the Southport attacks of summer 2024 and the loss of his...

<p >He wrote some of the greatest songs in American music, Dark End of the Street, Do Right Woman, I’m Your Puppet, and now, at 84, Dan Penn is back with an excellent new album, Smoke Filled Room. Penn got his first...

<p >Gary Talley was 19 when The Box Tops scored a number one hit with ‘The Letter.’ Alex Chilton was 16, had been up all night before the session, and came from the kind of household where that sort of thing wasn’t...

<p >In a market town seven miles south-east of Manchester, a recording studio opened above a shop in 1968 that became one of the most significant facilities in British music history. Strawberry Recording Studios in...

<p >Few works of musical theatre receive the recognition they deserve, and The Kibbo Kift is a prime example. Written by Judge Smith, co-founder of Van der Graaf Generator, and composer Maxwell Hutchinson, this...