Helen Barrett
Explicit content warning
02/19/23 • 53 min
Journalist Helen Barrett was lullabied to sleep as her mother sang Mr. Tambourine Man; she had it played at her mother’s funeral (“the Dylan version, not the Byrds cover”). To top it off, Baby, Stop Crying was the soundtrack to her Dylan-loving parents’ divorce. Helen analyses Dylan’s clothes (“John Lennon wasn’t given to copying people, but he copied Dylan’s look”), his album covers (“when I was nine, I wanted to be Sally Grossman”) and his current incarnation (“he’s the ringmaster of a magical circus show.”) Download this stylish episode and discover oddities like the name of the Soho shop where Bob Neuwirth purchased his famous orange and white “Highway 61” T-shirt.
Helen Barrett is a writer and editor, based in London. From 2012 - 2021, she was a journalist at the Financial Times. She currently writes for the FT, the Telegraph, the Spectator and other publications on art, design, architecture, music, fashion, travel, modern life and popular culture. Her work includes features and opinion pieces which cover everything from the future of gastropubs to the new era of protest music. She also reviews theatre, dance, books and films.
Bob Dylan clothes shopping in 1965
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Twitter @isitrollingpod
Recorded 20th December 2022
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Journalist Helen Barrett was lullabied to sleep as her mother sang Mr. Tambourine Man; she had it played at her mother’s funeral (“the Dylan version, not the Byrds cover”). To top it off, Baby, Stop Crying was the soundtrack to her Dylan-loving parents’ divorce. Helen analyses Dylan’s clothes (“John Lennon wasn’t given to copying people, but he copied Dylan’s look”), his album covers (“when I was nine, I wanted to be Sally Grossman”) and his current incarnation (“he’s the ringmaster of a magical circus show.”) Download this stylish episode and discover oddities like the name of the Soho shop where Bob Neuwirth purchased his famous orange and white “Highway 61” T-shirt.
Helen Barrett is a writer and editor, based in London. From 2012 - 2021, she was a journalist at the Financial Times. She currently writes for the FT, the Telegraph, the Spectator and other publications on art, design, architecture, music, fashion, travel, modern life and popular culture. Her work includes features and opinion pieces which cover everything from the future of gastropubs to the new era of protest music. She also reviews theatre, dance, books and films.
Bob Dylan clothes shopping in 1965
Listeners: please subscribe and/or leave a review and a rating.
Twitter @isitrollingpod
Recorded 20th December 2022
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Previous Episode
Michael Bonner
Michael Bonner, editor of music magazine Uncut, takes on Dylan’s 2022 UK concerts, as well as The Philosophy of Modern Song (“Dylan mimicking the critical noise around Dylan”). Other topics include an in-depth dissection of Key West (“ambient, amniotic and immersive”), Dylan’s “thing that he has about dual guitarists” and a couple of unfortunate Donovan concerts. Plus David Lynch, Sam Shepard, Tom Verlaine, Nick Cave and novelist Jim Thompson. Bonner considers the difference between “artists who allow themselves to be manacled to the expectations of their fans” versus an artist who continues to be concerned with “what’s real and what is not” in this rough and rowdy episode.
For Uncut, Michael Bonner has interviewed Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, David Gilmour, Willie Nelson, Jeff Tweedy and Daniel Lanois, among many others. After working for magazines including Melody Maker and Deadline, he joined Uncut in 1997 as Film Editor, before becoming editor in 2018. He masterminded two of Uncut's most successful free CDs, both about Dylan: a Best Of The Bootleg Series (2018) and a 2021 album of bespoke cover versions, released as part of Uncut's celebrations of Bob’s 80th birthday.
Listeners: please subscribe and/or leave a review and a rating.
Twitter @isitrollingpod
Recorded 29th November 2022
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Next Episode
Simon Munnery
Like his main man Bob Dylan, comedian Simon Munnery knows a few things about heckles: aside from being arrested in Edinburgh for heckling Arthur Smith, he met his future wife when she heckled him in Australia. When not on the road, Simon joins his local Morris Men in Bedfordshire pubs, serenading fellow drinkers with his version of Blind Willie McTell. But he no longer owns any Dylan albums (“I’ve given them all away. I went through a period of being quite evangelist”). Munnery cracks us up with his drunken plot to meet Madonna at a record launch, enlightens us with his passionate appreciation of The Velvet Underground’s Beginning To See The Light, cracks us up again with his theory about Kate Bush swapping places with God and mystifies us as to why he played Kind of Blue on a loop for six months. There’s lots about Bob Dylan, too.
Simon Munnery is “one of the most original and talented comics in the country” (The Observer). After Cambridge University in the mid-eighties, he worked with Steve Coogan, Patrick Marber, Richard Herring and Stewart Lee on an Edinburgh Fringe piece called The Dum Show. In the nineties, he performed sell-out solo shows at London theatres and international festivals, featuring characters including Alan Parker: Urban Warrior, The League Against Tedium and Buckethead. Simon starred in ITV’s flagship stand-up show Saturday Live, won a Sony Gold Radio Award for his BBC Radio 1 series Alan Parker’s 29 Minutes of Truth and was nominated for a British Comedy Award for his BBC2 show London Shouting. His TV series Attention Scum was directed by Stewart Lee. Simon appeared as Alan Parker on a music track by The Orb called Grey Clouds. He is currently touring Simon Munnery: Trials And Tribulations.
Listeners: please subscribe and/or leave a review and a rating.
Twitter @isitrollingpod
Recorded 10th January 2023
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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