Power pop got its name in an advert. In May 1967, promoting "Pictures Of Lily" to the NME, Pete Townshend said "power pop is what we play" — and In The Mix returns to the genre with the man who named it sitting at track five, playing a record made fourteen months before the name existed. Around The Who's "Substitute" there's Split Enz at number one, The Hollies doing a top-five single about being nosy on a train, and three songs nobody involved wanted to release: The Muffs' "Sad Tomorrow", which Kim Shattuck agreed to only "begrudgingly" and thought was a ballad; Squeeze's "Up The Junction", a
Dolly Parton died in Nashville on Tuesday at the age of eighty, and this week In The Mix gives the whole hour to her — not to the wigs and the nails, which she deployed as a very effective decoy for sixty years, but to the thing she insisted on every time somebody credited the wrong one. She reckoned she wrote about three thousand songs, and she said flatly that it was the songwriting, not the look, that got her out of the Smoky Mountains. We open with a song she wrote at seventy-six about a girl leaving home for Nashville with nothing, because she’d done exactly that on the second of June, 19
On this edition of Musical Musings: Five of the Best, Armando Venditti — host of The Music Den on YouTube, joining us from Edmonton — comes back to the show to take on a band that is practically a Canadian institution: Rush. It starts in August 1968 in Willowdale, a suburb north of Toronto, with three high-school kids playing Cream covers in church basements. Six years later, four days after original drummer John Rutsey walked out, a bookish young man from St Catharines named Neil Peart — lately selling farm equipment parts for his father — turned up to audition in shorts, in a battered Ford P
Jarrett McCall is back on Musical Musings: Five of the Best, and after last time’s romp through the American seventies alphabet he’s narrowed his sights to a single band — one of the most quietly influential groups of the last thirty-five years. Stereolab were born in London in 1990 out of a Paris romance: Tim Gane, guitarist with the fiercely political indie band McCarthy, met the French singer Lætitia Sadier at one of his own gigs, and the two of them built something new around the relentless forward pulse of German krautrock, banks of vintage analogue keyboards, sixties lounge and French po
The Moog synthesiser could only play one note at a time, and it went out of tune if somebody opened a window. For about ten years it was the most exciting instrument in music. This week In The Mix gives the whole hour over to it, starting with the accident that started everything: Emerson, Lake & Palmer‘s “Lucky Man”, where Keith Emerson — who had gone to the pub because he wasn’t feeling the session — came back, found a Moog that had just been delivered, and began working out what the glide knob did. Greg Lake kept the take. Emerson called it “the solo I’ve had to live with”, and years later
Apologies for some dropouts on the audio on this show – we think you’ll agree though Sughosh provides a wonderful and touching introduction to the dramatic story of this band. This week on Musical Musings: Five of the Best, Sughosh joins me to make the case for a band who can fairly claim to have invented something: Fairport Convention. They formed in London in 1967 and took their name from the house in Muswell Hill where they rehearsed — a group of English kids besotted with the American West Coast who, within a couple of years, had turned around entirely and started plugging centuries-old En
Join Jim Bricker and I to discuss the mission of our new show Ten From Then and the story behind it. Broadcast 17 August 2026
Today on Musical Musings: Five of the Best, I’m joined by the endlessly knowledgeable Leon from Adelaide (South Australia) to take on one of the most influential bands Britain has ever produced: Depeche Mode. Their story begins in Basildon, Essex, at the turn of the 1980s, where a group of school friends — Vince Clarke, Martin Gore and Andrew “Fletch” Fletcher — started making music, before a young Dave Gahan, overheard singing Bowie’s “Heroes,” completed the line-up. Named after a French fashion magazine (Dépêche mode — roughly “fashion dispatch”), they began as bright synth-pop upstarts and
Today on Musical Musings we do something gloriously different. Rather than one band and five songs, my guest Jarrett McCall arrives with an alphabet. Jarrett recently took on a challenge organized by @metaphoralaura on X — the hashtag was #USAtoZ — to run through American bands letter by letter, A to Z, and this episode is his pick of the ones he chose, every one of them, by his own happy insistence, drawn from the 1970s. He’s titled it USA A-Z (Missing Some!), and the “missing some” is the whole charm of it: we get C, D, F, H, J, L, P, R, S, V and W, and cheerfully skip the other fifteen lett
For this edition, Ken Cheshire champions a band whose ridiculous name (lifted from a Monty Python sketch Eric Idle designed to be “so silly nobody would ever use it”) has always undersold the quiet brilliance underneath. High-school friends from Santa Barbara — Glen Phillips, Todd Nichols, Dean Dinning and Randy Guss — they made warm, jangly, thoughtful alt-rock that could land a knockout blow by playing softly, with two platinum albums in Fear and Dulcinea. What makes Ken’s five so satisfying is that they quietly tell the band’s whole story: the gorgeous hit “Walk on the Ocean,” the platinum
Today on Musical Musings: Five of the Best, I'm joined by the erudite Armando Venditti to dig into one of Canada's most distinctive and criminally under-celebrated rock bands: The Tea Party. Formed in Windsor, Ontario around 1990, the trio of Jeff Martin, Stuart Chatwood and Jeff Burrows built a sound they cheekily christened "Moroccan roll" — hard rock and blues shot through with sitars, ouds, hurdy-gurdies and Middle Eastern textures, all wrapped around Jeff Martin's brooding, Jim Morrison-esque baritone. They were huge in Canada and Australia, drew constant comparisons to The Doors and Led
Power pop is the genre that never quite got its moment — and somehow that’s the whole point. It’s a sound built on the Beatles’ Revolver-era jangle and the Who’s coiled aggression, then handed down through a lineage of bands who wrote perfect three-minute songs and watched them sail straight past the charts. This week’s show traces that line from the source: “And Your Bird Can Sing” and “Pictures Of Lily” set the template in the mid-60s, and the Flamin’ Groovies’ “Shake Some Action” and Big Star’s “In The Street” carried it into the 70s, where commercial indifference became something close to
Blame friend-of-the-station Jim Bricker. He got in touch the other day, asked “how awesome was 1971?”, and wouldn’t let it go — and the more we dug, the more the question answered itself. So we’ve built a special around it: two hours (all right, a little more) making the case that 1971 might just be the greatest year popular music ever had. Jim chose the tracks – and I added a few bonus tracks at the end. The idea isn’t ours alone. Music writer David Hepworth wrote a whole book on it, 1971 — Never a Dull Moment, arguing this was the year the album grew up and everyone seemed to make the record
We were delighted to be joined by Kelly and Dave from the highly recommended It’s The Groove podcast for this show. We put Kool & the Gang on trial this week, and it turns out sixty years of music doesn’t sort itself into neat halves quite as easily as we’d hoped. Kelly came for the 70s with “Hollywood Swinging” and “Summer Madness”. Dave came for the 80s with “Celebration” and “Fresh”. Both of them arrived with more evidence than they needed, which is always the sign of a good guest. The 70s case turned out to be an argument about what a band is. Seven musicians from Jersey City, no lead sing
Today’s In the Mix stays close to home. New Zealand isn’t a country anyone associates with prog rock — no stadium tours, no Mellotron-stacked arena shows — but for a brief window in the early-to-mid 1970s, a handful of bands here were chasing the same ambitions as Yes, Genesis and King Crimson, usually on a fraction of the budget and often with only one Mellotron between the lot of them (allegedly). Most of these records sold in the hundreds, not thousands, when they came out. Decades on, original pressings of albums like Think’s We’ll Give You a Buzz or Ragnarok’s self-titled debut change han
We were pleased to be joined by Sughosh Varadarajan to talk about five of his favourite tracks from Al Stewart. Note unfortunately we have a short audio dropout in the last discussion. Not many songwriters can claim to have invented their own genre — but Al Stewart arguably did exactly that. Born Alastair Ian Stewart in Greenock, Scotland in 1945 and raised in Bournemouth on the English south coast, Stewart came up through the 1960s London folk club scene before carving out a unique niche combining folk-rock with meticulously researched historical storytelling. He called it, simply, his way of
Everybody thinks they know what a one-hit wonder is. But dig into the fine print and it gets wonderfully strange. Our rule for this episode is simple: one Top 40 single, on at least one side of the Atlantic. That little phrase — "one side" — is where the fun lives, because pop is full of acts who were superstars at home and total strangers across the water. Corey Hart notched nine hits in North America yet cracked the UK Top 40 exactly once. Talk Talk did the reverse, becoming post-rock legends with a string of British hits and just a single American chart entry. And of our thirteen records, o
In this episode, we are pleased to welcome Jarrett McCall. Jarrett brings his keen ear and diverse musical taste to the station, sharing his carefully selected list of the top ten albums that have defined the first half of 2026. This discussion is not just a countdown of favourites; it’s an exploration of emerging trends and an inside look at how these albums, from all corners of the musical spectrum, have impacted a passionate music lover. From the glitch-pop energy of feeble little horse and the soulful sounds of the ES:MO collaboration, to the deeply emotional post-punk of The Twilight Sad,
In this episode of Musical Musings, we dive deep into the extraordinary, multi-decade career of one of rock and soul’s ultimate chameleons: Steve Winwood. From his early days as a teenage prodigy to his genre-defining work with legendary bands and his massive 1980s solo success, Winwood’s musical footprint is massive. However, instead of spinning the global chart-toppers, we are bypassing the casual hits to unearth the deeper cuts that truly define his genius. Joining the show today is special guest Ken Cheshire, who shares his hand-picked selections and deep musical insights into what makes W
In this episode, we are joined by special guest Armando Vendetti, host of The Music Den on YouTube — a channel covering everything from Classic Rock and Prog to Jazz Fusion and Pop. Armando brings his passion and deep knowledge of music to New Zealand Net Radio for a special Five of the Best: Queen session, sharing five personally chosen tracks and the stories behind why they matter to him. The selections span the full range of what made Queen so extraordinary — from sprawling progressive epics and intimate ballads to flamenco-tinged surprises and prescient electronic experimentation — proof t
Step inside the sonic time machine as this episode of In the Mix dives headfirst into the spectacular, high-contrast landscape of 1986. Globally, the year was defined by a sense of high-stakes drama and profound transition. The world watched in awe and heartbreak through major historical milestones like the tragic Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and the chilling wake of the Chernobyl nuclear crisis. It was a time of ideological friction, the rise of the digital dawn marked by the birth of Pixar, and a thriving counter-culture movement pushing back against the slick, polished surface of mains
In this episode of Five of the Best, we are joined by Ken Cheshire (X: @klcheshire) for a deep dive into the cinematic, electronic, and influential sound of Ultravox. Focusing exclusively on the Midge Ure-fronted era, we explore how this legendary four-piece transformed from post-punk roots into the architects of the 1980s synth-pop explosion. From the "electronic cathedral" grandeur of their George Martin-produced hit "Hymn," to the dark, cinematic mood of Vienna, we break down five standout tracks that define the band’s peak. We discuss the stories behind the music—including their struggle t
In this episode, we count down a definitive Top 20 tracklist sourced straight from the music curators of the X timeline. We’re spinning everything from the kaleidoscopic, genre-shifting blog-rock of Animal Collective and the haunting, nocturnal synth-pop of Bat for Lashes, to the arena-sized alternative anthems of Kings of Leon and Depeche Mode. Finally, we build all the way down to the minimalist, nocturnal masterpiece from a group of south London teenagers that completely redefined the sound of the decade: The xx. Broadcast 29 March 2026
Get ready to hit the open road with this edition of In the Mix, where we track the legendary evolution of Country Rock. In this 50-minute curated set, we travel from the sun-drenched, harmony-rich hills of Laurel Canyon straight down to the gritty, blues-drenched swamps of the American South. We’re spinning the absolute gold standard of the genre—featuring the timeless storytelling of the Eagles, CCR, and Linda Ronstadt, building up to the roaring twin-guitar anthems of the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and closing with a powerhouse heartland finish. Whether you're a lifelong fan of the
Step back into 1993, a transitional year when alternative rock collided with the electronic underground and established icons completely reinvented themselves for the dance floor. In this episode of In the Mix: 1993 Extended, we are dusting off the vinyl crates to spin ten iconic 12” singles, promo rarieties, and extended mixes that defined the era. From an early, moody trip-hop rework of Depeche Mode by a pre-fame Portishead, to Andrew Weatherall’s ten-minute Balearic masterpiece for One Dove, and Paul Oakenfold’s legendary, stadium-sized progressive house remix of U2’s Lemon, we are diving d
