Music Explorers Podcast

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.
 

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 playlist here on Deezer), or here if you just want to listen to the 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 Deezer.
The 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.