Clint Boon saw Manchester lift off twice and auditioned the young Noel Gallagher

Clint Boon saw Manchester lift off twice and auditioned the young Noel Gallagher

Author: Mark Ellen, David Hepworth and Alex Gold September 11, 2026 Duration: 38:19

Clint Boon was at the heart of “the two biggest musical revolutions of my lifetime” – as a teenager for Joy Division and Buzzcocks, and later the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Hacienda and onstage with Inspiral Carpets, a world of characters as big as his own. His memoir ‘The Manchester Chronicles’ is about obsessions, schoolteachers, purple winklepickers, mobile discos, good luck, catastrophe and being in the right place at the right time for 30 years. Along with …

 

… why Manchester listens to music so intently: “we’re stuck inside while it rains”

 

… auditioning Noel Gallagher “as the Lockerbie plane flew directly overhead”

 

… the new economy: making a Number 2 album funded by t-shirt and cassette sales

 

… growing up on Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, Little Richard and Gary Lewis & the Playboys

 

… Inspiral Carpets’ obsession with West Coast psychedelia

 

… when the band all got houses with their Mute advance “and I just bought some $800 sunglasses”

 

… great bowl-heads haircuts (Stones, Byrds, Jefferson Airplane) and why he got one too

 

… seeing the Pistols at the Electric Circus: “I left college the next morning”

 

… the sudden split: playing Glastonbury one minute, living on milk tokens and income support the next

 

… his 1975 disco playing Mud, the Rubettes and Showaddywaddy (“I was a 14 year-old Ted”)

 

… and how 24 Hour Party People captured “the spirit, chaos, colour and madness”.

 

Order copies of ‘The Manchester Chronicles: True Tales of Music, Madness and Mayhem 1976-2006’ here: https://geni.us/manchesterchronicles

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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: 50

Word In Your Ear
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