Though largely (and perhaps unfairly) remembered as a one-hit wonder in the US, where their 1993 single “Laid” reached #3 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart (and #61 on the Hot 100) and helped their album of the same name sell over half a million copies in the States, James remain massively popular in the UK. Yummy, the band’s 18th and latest studio album, even topped the UK charts upon its release this past April, giving James the first Number One album of their lengthy career.

Will Tony make a convincing case for the enduring brilliance of James? Will Dan be able to move past his long-held suspicion of the band and actually find ways to connect with them and their music? Will a certain accusation about James made by a certain member of the British band Thee Hypnotics be squarely refuted once and for all? Listen to this episode of CROSSED CHANNELS and find out!

As always, this podcast episode is only available in full to paid subscribers of Jagged Time Lapse and Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith - where Tony also recently posted the transcript of his 2011 interview with Tim Booth for his Smiths biography - though a short preview of the episode is available to all. To hear it in full, along with all of our previous CROSSED CHANNELS episodes, just sign up for a paid subscription to one (or both!) of our Substacks.

Welcome to Episode 11 of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast, in which music journalists/obsessives Dan Epstein (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Brit) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond.

Actually, we should probably change it to KROSSED CHANNELS for this episode, since it finds us discussing one of Dan’s all-time favorite bands: Southern California cult heroes Redd Kross!

Welcome to Episode 10 of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast, in which music journalists/obsessives Dan Epstein (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Brit) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond.

This time out, we taken on of the greatest rock n’ roll bands to ever demolish a stage: the MC5!

Formed in the mid-1960s in the suburbs of Detroit, Michi…

Welcome to Episode 9 of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast, in which music journalists/obsessives Dan Epstein (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Brit) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond.

Elton John calls her "a most beautiful mystery.” Tricky notes how “you can’t hear her influences.” And yet, as St. Vincent observes, “You can hear one no…

Welcome to Episode 8 of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast, in which two music journalists/obsessives, Dan Epstein (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Brit) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond.

In our last episode, we took a deep dive into The Clash’s controversial 1980 album Sandinista!, and attempted to whittle down its sprawling three LPs into a 12-track single album. Just as the three Clash albums that preceded Sandinista! have tended to loom the largest in that band’s legacy, so too is the case with today’s subject: Love, the groundbreaking, genre-blending American band led by the brilliant and mercurial Arthur Lee.

For decades, Love has been (rightly) celebrated for their phenomenal 1967 album Forever Changes — a record which regularly appears near the top of “Greatest Psychedelic Albums of All Time” lists, and sometimes “Greatest Albums of All Time, Period” lists, too — as well as their half-great 1966 pop-jazz-psych LP Da Capo and their self-titled folk-punk debut from earlier that same year.

But there is far more to Arthur Lee and Love’s discography than those first three albums and their non-LP 1968 single “Your Mind and We Belong Together,” which was the last thing Lee cut with Love’s “classic lineup”. 1969’s Four Sail was ignored or denigrated by music critics for decades, simply because it featured an almost entirely new Love lineup, and because its acid-rock sound was such a radical departure from the pastoral soft-psych of Forever Changes.

And yet, Four Sail contains some of Lee’s finest songs — and there are even some days where Dan actually prefers this underrated album to anything else in the Love catalog, Forever Changes included. Will Dan convince him of that album’s enduring brilliance, or will it all be a bit too “West Coast hippie” for his punk rock liking? Tune in to the latest episode of CROSSED CHANNELS to find out!

A free preview of Episode 8 is available to all listeners, but the full episodes of CROSSED CHANNELS are only available to paid subscribers of Jagged Time Lapse https://danepstein.substack.com/ or Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith. https://tonyfletcher.substack.com/ If you’re already a free subscriber to either of these Substacks (or better yet, both), upgrade your subscription now to hear the whole thing, as well as all our previous episodes. As always, we are immensely grateful for your encouragement and support! Cheers!

Welcome to Episode 7 of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast, in which two music journalists/obsessives, Dan Epstein (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Brit) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond.

A free preview of Episode 7 is available to all listeners, but the episode is only available in its entirety to paid subscribers of Jagged Time Lapse or Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith. If you’re already a free subscriber to either of these Substacks (or better yet, both), upgrade your subscription now to hear the whole thing, along with other bonus features. As always, we are immensely grateful for your encouragement and support! Cheers! On this occasion, paid subscribers can also win a copy of Tony’s book on The Clash: The Music That Matters to be won.

In Episode 6, we discussed Blondie, a band from the NYC punk scene that hit it big in the UK before most Americans had ever heard of them. This time, we’re tackling one of the most important bands from the original wave of British punk: The Clash.

After making their live debut with a July 4, 1976 performance at The Screen on the Green in London (at which they supported the Buzzcocks and the Sex Pistols), the Clash quickly gained a massive UK following on the strength of their high-energy gigs and outspoken left-wing ideology. But Epic Records, the American arm of their label CBS Records, flat-out refused to issue the band’s self-titled 1977 debut album, assuming that it had no commercial potential in the US.

By 1980, however, the Clash had become immensely popular in the States — their third album, 1979’s double-length London Calling, made it all the way to #27 on the Billboard 200, thanks to the surprise radio hit “Train in Vain” — and the band spent so much time on the road in there that they were regularly accused of forsaking their homeland in pursuit of the Yankee dollar.

This transatlantic shift in the band’s fortunes was underlined by the December 1980 release of Sandinista!, the most politically-charged and stylistically wide-ranging album that the band ever made. The three-LP set received rave reviews in the US, surpassed London Calling on the Billboard 200, and went on to sell over 500,000 copies; in the UK, however, Sandinista! was poorly received by critics and fans alike, and would become the lowest-charting album of the band’s career.

Though often hailed as a masterpiece, Sandinista! has been almost equally criticized as being a mess. Many folks think it would have been a far better listening experience as a double LP, or even a single album. On this episode of CROSSED CHANNELS, we dig deep into this incredibly diverse record, and attempt to assemble the ideal single-album version of Sandinista! by slimming it down from 36 tracks to 12. As it turns out, however, we have wildly divergent opinions on which tracks should make the cut…

Welcome to Episode 6 of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast, in which two music journalists/obsessives, Dan Epstein (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Brit) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond.

Our 5th Episode, Oasis: What's The Story?, in which we discussed the 1995 album that catapulted the Manchester band to international fame, is now available in full, on all streaming platforms, for anyone who is not one of our paid-up Substack subscribers and wants to hear where we go with these discussions. We now head back to the United States for a look at the strange case of Blondie.

A cornerstone of the original New York punk scene that revolved around CBGB, Club 82 and Max’s Kansas City, Blondie were a group with roots in both the pure pop of 1960s girl groups like the Shangri-La’s and the pop art experiments of the early Velvet Underground. Fronted by the gorgeously talented Debbie Harry, Blondie were the biggest (and arguably the best) pop band in the US from 1979 through 1981, though they actually scored two massive hits in the UK — “Denis” and “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear” — in 1978, before most American listeners were even aware of their existence.

Blondie’s US breakthrough came in 1979 via “Heart of Glass,” the Mike Chapman-produced disco smash that provoked cries of “Sellout!” from punk and new wave fans, but completely connected with the cultural zeitgeist of the time. Of course, Blondie — a band who were never shy about experimenting with musical styles and forms beyond accepted punk parameters — had actually been playing versions of the song well before “disco” became a dirty word.

In this episode of CROSSED CHANNELS, Dan and Tony take a look at Blondie’s incredible run of six albums between 1976-82, and discuss how a band that was largely written off by critics and scenesters in their early days wound up scoring Number One hits on both sides of the Atlantic — as well as why British record buyers fell for them first. Along the way, our hosts answer these questions and more:

• What was the original title for "Heart of Glass,” and how far back does the song date?

• When did Debbie Harry first show up on an album?

• What was the group that Chris Stein and Debbie Harry first played in together?

• What cassette did drummer Clem Burke bring back with him from London in 1975?

• And was it Farfisa or Vox that gave keyboard player Jimmy Destri Blondie’s distinctive retro sound?

A free preview of Episode 6 is available to all listeners, but the episode is only available in its entirety to paid subscribers of Jagged Time Lapse or Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith. If you’re already a free subscriber to either of these Substacks (or better yet, both), upgrade your subscription now to hear the whole thing. As always, we are immensely grateful for your encouragement and support! Cheers!

…A couple of photographic references from the episode:

Welcome to the fifth episode of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast, in which Dan Epstein (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Brit) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond

Having tackled the rise and premature demise of Otis Redding in our last episode, we now return to England — Manchester, to be specific — to discuss the band Oasis and the 1995 album that catapulted them to international stardom, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?

Originally a quartet formed in 1991 as the Rain, Oasis – which became a five-piece once singer Liam Gallagher's older brother, the songwriter Noel Gallagher, joined the band - were signed to Creation Records in the summer of 1993. They scored their first UK Top 10 hit a year later with “Live Forever,” and generated such a buzz that their 1994 debut album Definitely Maybe entered the Number One spot on the UK albums chart in its first week of release, becoming the fastest selling debut album in British history.

But it was their second album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, that turned Oasis into a genuine phenomenon. Released in October 1995, the record spent ten weeks at the top of the UK albums chart and spawned four UK #1 or #2 hits with “Some Might Say,” “Roll With It,” “Wonderwall” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger”. For anyone in Britain in 1995-96, it was impossible to get away from the sound of the band’s music; discussion of their antics (the Gallagher brothers took “sibling rivalry” to new extremes and the group as a whole was known for its rabble-rousing); and coverage of the Britpop phenomenon, which Oasis were drawn into after the media created a rivalry between themselves and Blur.

This astonishing success climaxed in the UK in August 1996 with a two-night stand at Knebworth Park (see below), the biggest ever concerts in the UK's history; they drew a record 250,000 people, only 1/10th the number who applied. (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? went on to sell over 5 million records in the UK, and over 4 million in the USA, accompanied by Grammy nominations, Brits and Ivor Novello awards, and commensurate international sales adding up to over 20 million globally, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time.

Why did Oasis — and especially (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? — strike such a massive chord with British record buyers? What was it about the band’s music, message and attitude that resonated so deeply in the UK? And how was this exceedingly British band received in the US at a time when the seismic rumbles of the grunge movement were still being heard and felt on that side of the Atlantic?

Dan and Tony discuss these topics and more, including their memories of their first Oasis concerts, and have a look to see just how well (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? holds up today, nearly 29 years after its release.

A free preview of Episode 5 is available to all listeners, but the entire episode (along with all previous CROSSED CHANNELS episodes) is only available to paid subscribers of Jagged Time Lapse or Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith. If you’re already a free subscriber to one of these Substacks (or, even better, both), upgrade your subscription now to ensure that you don’t miss out on all the fun. As always, we thank you for the encouragement and support! Cheers!

This episode was recorded on Zoom, rather than in person per usual, due to Tony being in the UK, and there are a couple of minor audio glitches for which we apologize. We figure you can fill in the gaps! If you have comments on this episode, or suggestions for future episode subjects, we are all ears!