At home with Nick Drake, Sandy Denny & John Martyn in the golden year of 1970

At home with Nick Drake, Sandy Denny & John Martyn in the golden year of 1970

Author: Mark Ellen, David Hepworth and Alex Gold April 1, 2026 Duration: 28:29

When he was 19, New Yorker Brian Cullman covered the London music scene for Crawdaddy, landing at the birth of folk-rock and the singer-songwriter boom and watching its leading lights from unimaginably close quarters - Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, John Martyn among them. He even played on the same bill as Drake at Les Cousins club, all this recorded in his book ‘How To Prepare for the Past: Travels in Music and Time’. He talks to us here about that golden age and the American stars he met later, stopping off at …

 

… Ed Sullivan at the shoe-shine: “in six months the Beatles will be lucky to be playing a bowling alley!”

 

… Nick Drake in the same clothes he wore on the cover of Five Leaves Left

 

… Sandy Denny: “She knew she was extraordinary but didn’t know if she was any good”

 

… Jackson Browne, onstage from the age of 12

 

… being hired by rock encyclopaedist Lillian Roxon, “my fairy godmother”

 

… Tim Hardin making Bird On A Wire, “so wasted they followed him round the room with a microphone”

 

... and “14 hotdogs”? The cavernous appetite of Big Joe Turner.

 

Order ‘How To Prepare for the Past’ here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Prepare-Past-Travels-Music/dp/B0FTS8ZPTW

 

Or here: https://www.zebooks.com/books/how-to-prepare-for-the-past


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There’s a particular kind of conversation about music that happens between friends who’ve spent a lifetime immersed in it-not as distant critics, but as participants in the culture. That’s the atmosphere you’ll find in Word In Your Ear, a podcast from Mark Ellen, David Hepworth, and Alex Gold. With a collective eighty years of writing and broadcasting for titles like Smash Hits and Mojo, and shows from "The Old Grey Whistle Test" to VH-1, they don’t just recount history; they unpack the stories behind it with the ease of a shared laugh. This podcast grew naturally from their work on the late, great magazine The Word, where they began recording over thirteen years ago, building a dedicated following who found something genuinely special in the mix. Each episode weaves together music, commentary, history, and interviews, moving seamlessly from deep-dive analysis of a seminal album to a frank chat with a surprising guest, all delivered with the warmth and wit of a late-night chat. It feels less like a formal show and more like you’ve been invited to pull up a chair in a room where the anecdotes are plentiful and the expertise is worn lightly. The result is a consistently engaging listen that treats music not as a museum piece but as a living, breathing part of our lives.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Word In Your Ear
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