Mark Kermode tells us stories about music in movies

Mark Kermode tells us stories about music in movies

Author: Mark Ellen, David Hepworth and Alex Gold October 21, 2025 Duration: 40:41

The Graduate, Trainspotting, Jaws, Star Wars, Citizen Kane – films you can’t picture without thinking of the music. Mark Kermode has been gripped by the marriage of movie and soundtrack since Dougal and the Blue Cat (aged 6) and, with Jenny Nelson, has just published ‘Surround Sound: the Stories of Movie Music’. We talk to him here about…  

 

… Scorsese, Cameron Crowe, Sofia Coppola, Edgar Wright: the new generation “who grew up with a headful of not just music, but records”

 

… how John Williams is “the last Whistle Test composer”: two bars of ET, Jaws or Star Wars and you instantly know the film

 

… how “silent cinema was never silent” and his band the Dodge Brothers playing live soundtracks

 

… Butch Cassidy, Easy Rider, Blackboard Jungle … pioneers of the music video

 

… the genius of American Graffiti: “Lucas wanted it so marinated in music the town would sound like a pickle jar”

 

… how scores are recorded and edited and what happens when a director tells an orchestra he’s changed his mind

 

… “by the time each Lord of the Rings soundtrack reached New Zealand, Peter Jackson had re-cut the film”

 

… Forbidden Planet in 1956, the days when electronic scores weren’t real music

 

… Martha Reeves, Jonathan Richman and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion in Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver

 

… Tarantino’s kitsch use of “his own scratchy vinyl” and why Jonny Greenwood‘s There Will Be Blood is unique and exceptional

 

… plus the “atonal squonking” of the Exorcist and the greatest soundtrack of all time.

 

Order ‘Surround Sound: the Stories of Movie Music’ here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/mark-kermodes-surround-sound/mark-kermode/9781447230564


Help us to keep The Longest Conversation In Rock going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear

Help us to keep The Longest Continuous Conversation In Rock'n'Roll going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.


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
Podcast Episodes
Albums we bought because we liked the title [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:55
Spinning sides at the conversational disco to see what fills the dancefloor, which this week includes … … Jerry Garcia had seven fingers! Brian Jones had seven children! Morrissey worked for the Inland Revenue! … the mos…
How Glenn Tilbrook transformed the life of Squeeze [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 33:53
Glenn Tilbrook wrote an album with Chris Difford about a futuristic nightclub when they were teenagers and, 52 years later, they’ve recorded it and are performing it on the upcoming tour. He looks back here at the partne…
The Skids, Big Country and the unsettling story of Stuart Adamson [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:12
Stuart Adamson co-founded the Skids and Big Country but was profoundly ill-suited to the spoils of his success. Author Scott Rowley unpacks his passage from Dunfermline to Nashville and Hawaii to get a sense of his demon…
There are only three Rock National Treasures – and we name them! [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:25
Our ‘big air’ manoeuvres on the rock and roll ski jump this week land the following tricks … … why don’t we re-use old protest songs instead of writing new ones? … “a temple of music and gothic lust:” would YOU buy Jim S…
Boston, Def Leppard, bad hair & the golden age of rock radio [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 35:20
Paul Rees fell in love with AOR when it began with Boston in 1976, the polished, ramped-up hits that were briefly the music of the American heartland. His book ‘Raised On Radio: Power Ballads, Cocaine & Payola – the AOR…
Was Bad Bunny at the Superbowl the greatest show ever staged? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:03:58
After 40 days of relentless rain, you need our little ray of sunshine. And here we all are! Sitting in the rock’n’roll rainbow this week you’ll find … ... the Wuthering Heights instagram gold-rush … licensing Foreigner a…
Andy Bown remembers the Herd, Judas Jump and 47 years in Status Quo [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 32:20
Andy Bown found the 20 year-old recordings of “a deep-space love story” he’d written with the sci-fi author Russell Hoban and he’s just reworked and released them. He talks to us here about “Out There” and life in the He…
How the album survived and why it satisfies the soul! [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 38:46
The album has had 25 years of being hammered by other formats – Napster, iTunes, Spotify, TikTok – and not only survived but thrived. For Keith Jopling it’s the irreplaceable way to hear music and to measure the people w…