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Music Podcasts for Stowaways

The ghosts of musics past can easily send seekers down online rabbit holes in search of enlightenment. For many, this often begins with The Fall. Oh! Brother is the tellingly named show hosted by siblings Paul and Steve Hanley, who both served lengthy stints in the ultimate outsider group and lived to tell the tale.

 

Since 2021, Oh! Brother has seen the Hanleys engage an array of former band members, celebrity fans and other fellow travellers for discursive chats about life in and out of Mark E Smith’s ever changing ensemble. Highlights include chats with the band’s former keyboardist Marcia Schofield, ex footballer Pat Nevin, Ian Rankin and John Niven. If at times it sounds like a bunch of old blokes in a pub gathered like a post punk reincarnation of Last of the Summer Wine, that’s because sometimes it is.

 

Working in similar territory is Electronically Yours with Martyn Ware, with former Human League and current Heaven 17 stalwart Ware opening up his even more extensive address book. Since beginning with a chat with Richard Hawley back in 2020, Ware has featured more than two hundred conversations with assorted new and not so new pop stars and producers, including Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Holly Johnson, Howard Jones and all four members of Propaganda. 


Closer to home, Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai and novelist Irvine Welsh have both made an appearance. Best of all was Bob Last, the co-founder of Edinburgh’s Fast Product records and Human League manager who sacked Ware from his own band.

 

Coming out of the same Sheffield late 1970s music scene as Ware and co was Roger Quail, the original drummer with Clock DVA, who, like Heaven 17, took their name from Anthony Burgess’ novel, A Clockwork Orange. In My Life in the Mosh of Ghosts, Quail charts his personal musical coming of age by way of bite size episodes that moves from him seeing The Runaways and 999 in 1977 through his own time playing as part of Sheffield’s fertile underground scene.

 

Finally, the C86 show sees David Eastaugh in conversation with a host of parallel universe indie pop survivors, from the Nightingales’ Robert Lloyd and Swell Maps’ Jowe Head to Helen McCookerybook of The Chefs and Johny Brown of The Band of Holy Joy. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s history. 


The List, April 2025

 

ends

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