Jeffrey: Recent Episodes
The Jeffrey Podcast
Jeffrey is a podcast about music. John & Gords talk through the careers of top bands & rank their albums. The resultant Jeffrey Podcast Playlists are on Spotify and Deezer - also on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as @JeffreyPodcast
In the last ever Jeffrey Music podcast, our heroes (John and Gordon, for clarity) head to London's Shepherd's Bush Empire to see dEUS on their Worst Case Scenario v In a Bar tour.
Do not despair, the Jeffrey Podcast will relaunch as the Music Explorers Podcast with a tighter format and no website or social media, because that's too much of a faff. If you are already a subscriber, there is no need to do anything, the feed remains the same.
Jethro Tull's Seven Decades tour hit Madrid at the back end of 2024 and Jeffrey Music was there, or at least John was there ... so join us as we talk through the gig and complain about how uncomfortable the venue was.
Click here to see the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website with links to all our podcasts and articles and whatnot.
Late 2024, John headed off to London to see one of the UK's finest four-piece art rock bands: Cud, supported by the amusing and eccentric John Mouse.
In this episode John and Gordon discuss the gig and various tangential topics, including, but not limited to, the importance of being able to sit down sometimes.
Here's the article on the website that has a bit more about the trip, as well as the gig: https://jeffreymusicrocks.wordpress.com/2024/11/11/the-cud-band-in-london/
The fellas head off to a stormy Madrid and a rain-soaked poorly-located Halifax to see a favourite artist of theirs, the brilliant PJ Harvey!
See here for the article on the website with a few photos from the Madrid gig.
At the end of each Season of the popular Jeffrey Music Podcast, your hosts John and Gordon ask each other a series of pop trivia questions about the artists featured in the previous season: the Jeffrey Music Amusing Pop Quiz (or APQ for short). You will recall that after season one's enthralling episode, Our Gords is one-nil to the good, so it's all to play for!
Click here to visit our JeffreyMusic.Rocks website page that includes all the questions.
At the end of each Season of the popular Jeffrey Music Podcast, your hosts John and Gordon ask each other a series of pop trivia questions about the artists featured in the previous season: the Jeffrey Music Amusing Pop Quiz (or APQ for short).
Click here to visit our JeffreyMusic.Rocks website page that includes all the questions.
The winner of the quiz receives one point in the overall Jeffrey Music's APQ score, or in the case of a draw each will receive a half-point. A system similar to the Ryder Cup in a deliberate attempt to produce an underwhelming and unimpressive overall score for quite a lot of time and effort.
The last in our boring series of Top 10s, and we complete our look at Season 2 alumni by revisiting the Canadian trio Rush! The (very long) original podcast, 8 months in the making, was both a trip down memory lane and a voyage of discovery, and proved to be an absolute delight for the Jeffrey Music fellas ... so enjoy (sort of) listening to them waffle on about their favourite tracks!
Here's the link to the post on the JeffreyMusic website, and here to the playlists on Spotify and Deezer.
We're nearly through with this ill-advised idea to do Top 10s, but seeing as we've got this far, let's get to the end - this one is about the brilliant Belgian band Balthazar, a real gem we uncovered since doing this podcast, and we're quite pleased with ourselves for having done so! It's one thing to claim to be musical explorers, not stuck in the past with just playing the same old stuff from long ago, it's quite another to actually do it - at Jeffrey Music we damn well walk the talk.
Anyway, enough about how ace we are, here's the link to website version of this, over on JeffreyMusic.Rocks and the playlists on Spotify and Deezer.
Our top ten tracks from soul legend Otis Redding.
Here’s a link to the original Otis Redding episode in which we talk through his career and rank the albums - we think this is one of our best episodes because it's all so new to us.
Here's a link to this episode's page on our website, although there's not much on it that isn't on here, so no point in clicking, it's just to get another link out into the world.
Here are the playlists of our combined top 10s on Spotify and Deezer.
Top music journalists and hangers-on, John and Gordon, talk us through their top ten tracks of American punk poet Patti Smith. You can read more about it here on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website and for those wanting to delve deeper, here's a link to the original Patti Smith episode in which we talk through their career and rank the albums, and here for the Jeffrey Goes to Patti Smith (gig review) podcast and webpage.
Here are the playlists of our combined top 10s on Spotify and Deezer.
The Jeffrey Music gang talk through their top ten tracks of New York folk-rock harmony duo Simon and Garfunkel - more info here on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website and for those wanting to delve deeper, here's a link to the original Simon and Garfunkel episode in which they talk through their career and rank the albums.
Here are the playlists of our combined top tens on Spotify and Deezer.
John and Gordon present their top ten tracks of British rockers Dire Straits - more info here on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website and for those wanting to delve deeper, here's a link to the original Dire Straits episode in which they talk through their career and rank the albums.
The composite playlist of our top tracks can be found here on Spotify and over here on Deezer, or in the widget beneath this text (which doesn’t seem to be working properly).
Here's a link to the website pagee on JeffreyMusic.Rocks.
Our top ten tracks from British indie pop giants Suede (known as the London Suede in the US due to a name clash) - a band that bowled us over in the early-/mid-nineties and who are that rare breed of indie pop bands who seem to be getting better and better, despite their advanced years.
Our original podcast ranking the albums of Suede can be found here.
The composite playlist of our top tracks can be found here on Spotify and over here on Deezer, or in the list beneath this text.
The website version is here.
The Jeffrey team discuss their top 10 tracks by Americana band The Devil Makes Three in this podcast.
Our original podcast ranking the albums of The Devil Makes Three can be found here.
The playlist of our top tracks is here on Spotify and over here on Deezer, and here's the link to the webpage for this episode.
The Jeffrey team reveal their top 10 tracks by British glam pop rock megastars Queen.
The composite playlist of our top tracks can be found here on Spotify and over here on Deezer.
As usual, check out the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website for more info and whatnot.
A reflective discussion on the second series of the podcast (nearly three years in the making!), in which we look at any new activity from podcast alumni (namely Jethro Tull, dEUS and Muse), talk a bit about Komeda (and Marcus Holmberg's band Woodlands) and hand out the Golden Jeffrey for best album, as well as a few other big awards.
We also add continue where we left off three years ago by adding to the Jeffrey Podcast Jolly Party Playlist™ and creating a new one for Season Two.
If you want to party like Jeffrey, click here for a link to the playlist on Spotify (same Season Two playlist Spotify or here on Deezer.
Find out more here on our website: JeffreyMusic.Rocks!
The music of Queen is possibly the most recognised music of any British band in history - obviously The Beatles are the most well-known, their story still fascinates us, but we reckon if you were to ask a random group of people to hum a few songs by any British band, Queen would emerge as the band having the most universally recognised tunes among the masses.
The Queen Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.
The Queen page on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website is here.
In this episode Gordon's love of Americana rears its head again and we explore the works of country-bluegrass-ragtime sorts The Devil Makes Three, the episode coinciding with Gords seeing them live in Nottingham (so he goes on a bit about that too).
The The Devil Makes Three Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.
The The Devil Makes Three page on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website is here.
Suede bounded onto the pop scene in the early 90s with their unique brand of Smiths-Bowie glam pop-rock and we were hooked. From the first chords of the single Animal Nitrate, then their smash hit debut album (then the fastest-selling debut album in UK chart history) we were a couple of insatiable young Suede fans.
It didn't last long, they soon lost Bernard Butler, their influential guitarist and main songwriter, but surprisingly that didn't seem to faze them ... they bounced back immediately with a cluster of top ten hits and a masterful pop album (Coming Up) that proved they didn't need the moody Butler to flourish ... but it didn't last long, they began to fall apart as alcohol, drugs, exhaustion and illness saw them stumbling and crashing, and eventually going their separate ways.
A decade later they were back, and the post-hiatus mature sober Suede knocked out four albums over the following ten years, culminating in 2022's marvellous Autofiction.
The podcast is part nostalgia as we remember those early albums, and part discovery as we explore the newer stuff. Do those early ones still stand up 30 years later? Do the new one cut the mustard and meet the sky-high expectations set by those early masterpieces? You'll need to listen to find out! (or just click here to see the ranking on the website if you can't be bothered).
The Suede Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Suede page on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website is here.
John and Gordon discuss their recent experiences of seeing Placebo at two different festivals. Actually not that recent, Gordon's was last year, but John's was only the other day, so it counts (Gords also saw them in between at the O2 Academy in Leeds, but we're not really including that).
Links to the setlist on Spotify and Deezer, and the page on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website (with a couple of cheeky photos, despite the band's restrictions).
A bit of a dEUS theme emerging at the moment, but it will pass now the album has landed and the tour has made its way through Paris (where Gordon saw them) and Madrid (where John saw them) - this here podcast is the review of those splendid evenings with the Antwerp quintet.
Link to the setlist (on Spotify and Deezer) and photos on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website.
A firm favourite of the Jeffrey Podcast fellas, the innovative indie aces dEUS have only gone and cranked out a new album, the first in over a decade - what do we think of it? You'll need to listen to find out ...
(Unless you just want to read where we've ranked it on the dEUS page on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website) - and here's the link to the How to Replace It page.
Dire Straits were inescapable in the 1980s, from Sultans of Swing's omnipresence on rock radio, to smash-hit album Brothers in Arms smothering the charts in hit singles, Mark Knopfler and the gang were everywhere!
Despite this, we didn't know them that well. We knew the obvious hit singles, and a couple of albums, but we didn't know that much about the lesser-known stuff. So, in a spirit of (re-)discovery, we - clutching John Ilsley's biography "My Life in Dire Straits" - set out to explore their six-album discography, and what we discovered was that there is very little we agree on when it comes to Dire Straits.
The Dire Straits Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.
The Dire Straits page on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website is here.
We've always known about Simon and Garfunkel as a thing, and known about both men as solo artists (mainly Paul Simon), but until now we'd never taken the time to listen properly to their five album output and decide which we liked best.
Their songs are inescapable, they're part of the furniture of Western Civilization, you cannot not know Mrs Robinson and The Sound of Silence and Hazy Shade of Winter and Bridge Over Troubled Water because even now, half a century later, these songs are still meaningful, still poignant, and still played.
So, as usual, we read some books and did some research and got to know the story of the band. It wasn't easy to rank the albums, there was a fair bit of disagreement, especially around the final two. We try to use disagreement to better inform our decisions by listening to each others opinions and being willing to change our minds and see things differently; we try not to just compromise by calculating an average view numerically ... but we don't always get that right and sometimes we just have to run the numbers - this felt like one of those times.
The Simon and Garfunkel Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.
The Simon and Garfunkel page on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website is here.
Neither of us knew much about Patti Smith when we started this podcast, we knew her name and thought of her as a mystical punk poet from the seventies, but didn't know much more ... then as we have explored other artists over the past few years, Patti Smith's name kept popping up over and again as a one of the most influential people of her generation ... and so we thought why not put her on the list for the Jeffrey Music treatment, and here we are!
The Patti Smith Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.
The Patti Smith page on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website is here.
John and Gordon head off to see the legendary Patti Smith, not an artist they knew particularly well before the research for this podcast. John goes to Madrid's Noches del Botánico festival and Gordon to Bearded Theory's Spring Gathering at Catton Hall in Derbyshire.
The Patti Smith playlist (in combined/fudged setlist order) is here.
Link to the post (including photos) on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website.
Second in a series of live gig reviews, the fellas teamed up to see The Dead South at Madrid's La Riviera, supported by Elliott Brood.
The The Dead South playlist (in setlist order) is here.
Link to the post (including photos) on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website.
This podcast is not just about us wallowing in the music we already know and love (although it is mainly that), it's also about us exploring new stuff and addressing our musical blind spots ... and thus we decided to delve into 1960s soul and Motown with the great Otis Redding!
Our main source of research was Jonathan Gould's book Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life.
The
The Otis Redding Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.
The Otis Redding page on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website is here.
In a change of pace, John and Gordon treat us to a discussion on Belgian indie-rock-pop-electro-soul types Balthazar and rank their five studio albums. This coincided (not by accident!) with seeing the band live and so there is separate gig review podcast available for your listening pleasure!
There wasn't much research done because there's not much information out there. Their website is devoid of facts, although there's a bit here on their Wikipedia page.
Here is the link to the La Cigale concert in Paris we mention.
The Balthazar Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.
Jefflinks Not strictly speaking a Jefflink, but In their early years, Balthazar often toured with the brilliant dEUS.
No rankings audio product would be complete without discussing legendary heavy-rock / prog-metal / synth-pop / math-rock trio Rush, and Jeffrey is no exception in that regard. John and Gords head off to Toronto to go through their discography, ranking their albums, drooling at the musicianship, whining at the thin 80s production, and argumentatively struggling to put the bloody albums in any sort of sensible order.
The Rush Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.
Research for this podcast included many online interviews, including this recent one with Alex Lifeson and this with Geddy Lee, the documentaries The Boys in Brazil and Beyond the Lighted Stage, and books by Martin Popoff (Anthem, Limelight, and Driven covering the 70s, 80s, and beyond respectively, and the Album by Album book) and Roadshow by drummer and lyricist Neil Peart.
(There is a sound issue in the fourth, and final, section, due to an overheating laptop, apologies!)
In a new series of podcasts from the Jeffrey Musical Empire, the fellas head off to see Belgian electro-indie aces Balthazar live in concert.
John saw them in Madrid's Sala Mon, and Gordon in London's Electric Ballroom.
The Balthazar playlist (in setlist order) is here.
A reflective discussion on the first series of the podcast, dishing out the Golden Jeffreys: best album, best album cover and a special mention for the coolest character. We also add a couple of live tracks to the playlists to illustrate the live side of each artist ... and, because we know a thing of two about parties at Jeffrey Towers, we collate a Jeffrey Podcast Jolly Party Playlist™ with tracks from all featured artists.
If you want to party like Jeffrey, click here for a link to the playlist on Spotify, or here if you just want to listen to the Season One playlist.
Golden Jeffreys Nominations Best album nominations: Jethro Tull (Thick as a Brick); Muse (Black Holes and Revelations); Komeda (The Genius of ...); Radiohead (In Rainbows); dEUS (In a Bar, Under the Sea and The Ideal Crash); Pink Floyd (Animals); and Fiona Apple (Fetch the Bolt Cutters).
Best album cover nominations: Jethro Tull (Thick as a Brick); Pink Floyd (Wish You Were Here and Animals); Radiohead (Hail to the Thief); The White Stripes (The White Stripes); Talking Heads (More Songs About Buildings and Food); Komeda (The Genius of ...); and Muse (Absolution and Origin of Symmetry).
Not strictly speaking a Golden Jeffrey, but the honourable mention for coolest character nominations: Mauro Pawlowski (ex-dEUS); Jack White (ex-The White Stripes); and Fiona Apple.
Listen to the podcast to find out the results!
The Jeffrey podcast ends Season One with prog rock pioneers Pink Floyd. John and Gordon discuss (at length) the music and career of one of England's most admired and successful bands - John's favourite during those awkward teenage years - and rank their albums. No easy task for a band with so much variety covering such a lengthy career, but we got there in the end.
The Pink Floyd Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.
(This is a reissue of the podcast as the original release was not the final draft).
There are countless interviews, documentaries and other content about Pink Floyd that fed into this podcast (including the Rockonteurs podcast interview with Nick Mason), we also read Nick Mason's Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd and Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd by Mark Blake.
Jefflinks Roger Waters's solo album "Is This the Life We Really Want?" was produced by Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich.
The late Storm Thorgerson, album cover designer and Hipgnosis co-founder, went to school with Pink Floyd founders Syd Barrett and Roger Waters and was a good friend of guitarist David Gilmour. He went on to design most of Pink Floyd's album covers, and also designed the covers for "Absolution" and "Black Holes and Revelations" by Muse (their best covers by a mile).
John and Gordon explore the career of Detroit delta-blues rockers The White Stripes, discussing their music and upholstery, ranking their albums and picking their favourite songs for the playlist. A mix of nostalgia, discovery and incredulity, the glamorous gothic duo do not escape the sharp-edge of Jeffrey's critical tongue.
Special guest appearance by Daisy Dog.
The The White Stripes Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.
In preparation for the podcast we (i.e. Gordon) read The White Stripes: 21st Century Blues by Dick Porter and Fell in Love With a Band: The Story of The White Stripes by Chris Handyside.
Sparks fly as brothers John and Gordon disagree about the relative merits of Fiona Apple's output, in particular her highly-regarded 2020 album "Fetch the Bolt Cutters" - some may argue that the fact that John so obviously fancies Apple may have influenced his judgement, but they're your words, not mine.
The Fiona Apple Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.
Research for the podcast was not so easy, there isn't a great deal out there about Fiona Apple. We watched various online interviews (including this for the WTF podcast with Marc Maron) and the movie Fiona Has Wings, so maybe's there's a gap in the market for a biography ... now there's an idea!
John and Gords head to Teignmouth in Devon (not literally) to discuss the career and discography of power rock trio Muse, ranking their albums and assembling a playlist of their favourite tracks from each. Warning: we overuse the word "bombastic" but we try not to overdo the Radiohead comparisons, so it's not too bad.
The Muse Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.
As part of the research for this podcast we read Muse: Out of this World by Mark Beaumont and Muse: Inside The Muscle Museum by Ben Myers.
Jefflinks Produced David Bottrill ("Origin of Symmetry") also produced top album "The Ideal Crash" by Jeffrey favourites dEUS, as well as their 2011 album "Keep You Close" and a couple of tracks on 2012's "The Following Sea".
The late Storm Thorgerson, album cover designer and Hipgnosis co-founder, went to school with Pink Floyd founders Syd Barrett and Roger Waters and was a good friend of guitarist David Gilmour. He went on to design most of Pink Floyd's album covers, and also designed the covers for "Absolution" and "Black Holes and Revelations" by Muse (their best covers by a mile).
In this episode John and Gordon head stateside for new-wave-post-punk-pop maestros Talking Heads and rank their albums - a favourite of John's but a band that had largely passed Gordon by, so a voyage of discovery for the little fella!
The Talking Heads Jeffrey Podcast Playlist can be found here on Spotify and here on Deezer
There are quite a few documentary films (including this from The South Bank Show and Well How Did We Get Here? A Brief History of the Talking Heads) and interviews on YouTube we used in preparation for the podcast. Gordon also read Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa: The Adventures of "Talking Heads" in the 20th Century by David Bowman
We'd also recommend the excellent This Must Be The Talking Heads podcast - unfortunately this came out after our own Talking Heads podcast, so we couldn't use it as reference for our discussion.
Jefflinks The Talking Heads song Radio Head, from True Stories, was the inspiration for the name of the band Radiohead
Supplemental Jeffrey (1.4a) is a companion piece to Jeffrey 1.4 (Komeda) and contains the full interview with their bass player Marcus Holmberg, discussing Koemda's career and music.
Marcus also ranks the albums and picks his favourite tracks - the playlist is here on Spotify or here on Deezer.
Komeda fans may also be interested in Marcus's current band Woodlands (link opens in Spotify).
In this episode we head to Sweden, where John & Gordon gush embarrassingly about one of their favourite indie pop bands from the 90s Komeda and rank their albums and ask why they don't get together and record some more stuff FFS!! ... if you don't know the band, here's your big chance.
The Komeda Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.
There's very little information anywhere about the great Swedish popsters, so we were very fortunate to get to speak to their bass player Marcus Holmberg. You can hear the full interview here.
Komeda fans may also be interested in Marcus's current band Woodlands (link opens in Spotify).
In this episode John and Gordon bicker about one of John's top bands Radiohead and rank their albums, you can probably guess which albums cause the most controversy but who seriously thinks Amnesiac is better than Kid A? You'll have to listen to find out (it was Gordon!)
The Radiohead Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.
Among other things, we read Present Tense: A Radiohead Compendium by Barney Hoskyns and Radiohead - The Deluxe Ultimate Music Guide ahead of recording this podcast.
Jefflinks Radiohead took their band name from the Talking Heads song Radio Head
John and Gords talk through the career of one of their favourite bands, super-cool Belgian indie rockers dEUS, and rank their albums and reveal their awkward man-crush on Mauro Pawlowski (he has since left dEUS, but this is unconnected to the content of this podcast).
The dEUS Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.
We had some technical problems with the sound of Gordon's audio, but please persevere, it gets better.
There isn't a lot out there about dEUS, but in preparation for this discussion we watched Time Is The State of My Jeans film and various interviews with Tom Barman, especially on FaceCulture channel
Jefflinks Producer David Bottrill ("The Ideal Crash", "Keep You Close", two tracks on "The Following Sea") also produced "Origin of Symmetry" by Jeffrey alumnus Muse.
dEUS also toured a lot with Balthazar in the latter's early years, being strong champions of their compatriots.
The Jeffrey Podcast makes it's debut as John and Gords talk through the career of eccentric British rockers Jethro Tull and rank their albums. There are some long-forgotten gems, some fun discoveries, and some stuff that let's just say hasn't stood the test of time quite so robustly.
The Jethro Tull Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.
There are loads of interviews and concert movies on YouTube that helped with the research for this discussion. The book we mention is Original Jethro Tull: The Glory Years (1968-1980) by Gary Parker and here is the link to the 1977 Capitol Centre concert (Songs from the Wood tour).
We'd also recommend the Ian Anderson interview on the Rockonteurs podcast. This came out after our episode so we couldn't use it, but definitely worth a listen!
