Word In Your Ear Presents | Dylan Jones (GQ) & The Rise And Fall Of Cool Britannia

This will be highly entertaining, as you’ll know if you heard Daniel Rachel on our 2017 podcast about Walls Come Tumbling Down, the book he wrote on Rock Against Racism and the politics in pop.

His latest is Don’t Look Back In Anger, an almighty celebration of the ’90s when Britain came rocketing back on all fronts, even reinvading America, and it talks to the key figures in music, comedy, politics, film and fashion who were at the heart of it all and watched it unfold. And let’s be honest, a decade that took off in a blaze of Britpop, energy and optimism might be rather cheering to revisit.

We’re also delighted to welcome back old friend of the podcast Dylan Jones who’ll be talking about his new book dissecting The Greatest Song Of All Time, The Wichita Lineman: Searching In The Sun For The World’s Greatest Unfinished Song.

If ever a song deserves an entire book to itself it’s the luminous Wichita Lineman. Most of us listened to it for years, transfixed, without even being entirely sure what linemen were or the precise nature of their activities on the great plains of Oklahoma Jimmy Webb was remembering from his childhood, a place so flat “you could see fifty miles around you, a hundred if you stood on a matchbox”.