Let's hear from a serious guitar legend - Mike Campbell.

He played, produced and co-wrote with Tom Petty as guitarist in The Heartbreakers and last year it was announced he'd be joining Fleetwood Mac.

A new retrospective box set titled The Best of Everything is out on March 1st.

It spans the whole of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers career with all the tracks re-mastered and there are two previously unreleased songs. 

Here's Mike Campbell speaking to me for BBC 6 Music firstly about that, how they went about putting the set together and then we get onto Fleetwood Mac as he is on a mammoth tour with them this year...

HILARIOUS SUNDAY SPENT ON SOHO RADIO WITH SELF ESTEEM.

You might find this amusing. Self Esteem and yours truly talking about her new album Compliments Please via Diet Coke, Impulse body spray and Mr Blobby.

Full interview and show here:

https://www.mixcloud.com/sohoradio/georgie-rogers-with-self-esteem-17022019/

The Beatles White Album celebrated its 50th Anniversary so I was part of an event alongside producer Giles Martin, Miles Kane, Felix White, Andy Bell and Dan Stubbs that discussed its legacy and whether it could have been made today.  The panel was hosted by Matt Everitt at the You Tube space in London. It was an honour to be part of it and you can watch the full live stream below:

Stephen Malkmus of Pavement fame has been in the UK this week touring his seventh album Sparkle Hard, as Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks.
 
Cat Power’s Chan Marshall was also in the UK the same week for her Roundhouse Camden show which Stephen went along to.
 
The Sparkle Hard LP came out back in May and featured Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon on a track Refute.
 
Next year will be Pavement’s 30th Anniversary but Malkmus has downplayed any chance of a reunion in interviews because of the Jicks touring and him having other projects going on.
 
We’ll hear more on those in due course in the music news - I checked in with Stephen Malkmus for BBC Radio 6 Music to see how it’s all been going on the road…

​A special run of gigs for Warchild have been announced with Jon Hopkins, Alexis Taylor and Everything Everything on the bill.
 
The three ‘Safe and Sound’ shows are taking place on the 25th, 26th and 27th November at Shepherd’s Bush Empire with all proceeds going towards Warchild’s Learn To Live campaign, raising money for children affected by conflict.
 
Jon has played a few charity gigs in the past few years for Help Refugees, Amnesty and the David Lynch Foundation and has Alexis Taylor and George Fitzgerald providing support on November 25th kicking off the trio of gigs.
 
The producer has had a huge year, releasing his fifth solo album Singularity in May, headlining festival stages including Wilderness, touring Europe and the next run is a huge UK tour.
 
I checked in with Jon Hopkins for BBC Radio 6 Music to discuss this charity show and how it marks the start of a different kind of live setting for his music…

We recently heard from Reeves Gabrels on his work on the re-versioned Never Let Me Down album coming out on the new Bowie Box Set Loving The Alien later this year.

He of course is also a member of The Cure and played with them at their British Summertime Hyde Park show earlier this month.

There’s no doubt about it, that show will be remembered in years to come.

In the midst of a heat wave, England had got through to the semi-final of the World Cup for the first time in many years earlier that day and the band played a storming set including many of their hits.

I spoke to Reeves for BBC Radio 6 Music to get a bit more insight into what it was like from the band’s viewpoint…

​Cat Power has announced details of her very much anticipated and rumoured new album, her first in six years. I for one am EXCITED ABOUT THIS VERY MUCH!
 
It’s titled Wanderer and will be released October 5th. The last album we got from Cat Power was Sun back in 2012.  Her fourth studio album from 1998 Moon Pix is celebrating its 20th Anniversary this year.
 
Produced entirely by Chan Marshall her 10th offering Wanderer includes appearances from long-time friends and compatriots and guest vocals from friend and recent tour mate Lana Del Rey on the song Woman.
 
The LP was written and recorded in Miami and Los Angeles over the course of the last few years. 
 
Cat Power will be touring internationally from September 15th in the US, Europe with a London Roundhouse show on October 23rd. The album is available to pre-order now on baby blue vinyl.
 
Here’s Chan Marshall on the phone with yours truly (a genuine pleasure from start to finish) for BBC 6 Music, with one of her very first interviews about the new record….

Irish electronic producer Max Cooper is back with a brand new record.

I was well into Max’s last Emergence album from 2016 and went to see his visual spectacular live, it was a treat. He’s remixed artists from Nils Frahm to Hot Chip, started making music in 2007 with multiple EPs and two studio albums already in his catalogue.
 
He is back with a new album, his third studio album, coming out on September 21st. There’s a show at London’s KOKO on September 20th as part of a full European tour.
 
The new record came out of a month of cutting himself off fully from all communication.  For what is an exclusive sneak peak at the new recordI sat down with him for BBC 6 Music to discuss its title and how science, isolation and emotion affected it and his process…

Hi there - BOWIE BOXSET NEWS.

The 12th October will see the release of the latest in the series of career spanning David Bowie box sets. So far the first three have covered from 1969 through to 1982.
 
The next is called 'LOVING THE ALIEN' and reflects 1983 - 1988.
 
The eleven CD, fifteen-piece vinyl set which includes newly remastered versions of Bowie's most successful period - starting off with 'LET'S DANCE' which propelled him into a commercially mainstream stadium-filling stratosphere, then it's follow up  'TONIGHT', 'NEVER LET ME DOWN, the live album 'GLASS SPIDER (Live Montreal '87)' and the previously unreleased 'SERIOUS MOONLIGHT' live album.
 
Now the accepted wisdom is that while 'LET'S DANCE' was all killer, and 'TONIGHT' has its moments (Loving The Alien) but 'NEVER LET ME DOWN' wasn't Bowie's finest moment, and admittedly the 80's production hasn't aged that well.
 
So this set includes a complete re-versioning of the album.
 
Early this year engineer Mario McNulty - who had remixed the album's track Time Will Crawl back in 2008 with Bowie - he got in the studio with drummer Sterling Campbell, bassist Tim Lefebvre (who played on Blackstar) and guitarists Reeves Gabrels and David Torn to record a new version of the album with Bowie's original vocals.
 
Reeves Gabrels was David's guitarist from 1988 through to 1999. He was also in Bowie's heavy alt rock group Tin Machine and plays in The Cure. I spoke to him for BBC 6 Music about the project...

In 2008 David called Mario McNulty in New York and said he wanted to redo Time Will Crawl.
 
Mario first met David in 2001, he had just moved to New York to start an internship at The Looking Glass Studios and met Bowie as an intern, later becoming studio assistant and working for Philip Glass and then becoming friends with Tony Visconti and Bowie. He was asked to engineer the Reality album.
 
I spoke to him for BBC 6 Music about work on the first 2008 remix of Time Will Crawl forming the basis for a re-working of the whole album which had been something Bowie had wanted to do…