A Word in Your Attic: The Official Companion

Based on the legendary podcast, now running to over 180 episodes, A Word in Your Attic book takes us through the series's ultimate highlights.

In March 2020, as the world locked down, Mark Ellen and David Hepworth, revered veterans of 1980s pop bible Smash Hits and founders of the still much mourned Word magazine, opened up their attics, fired up zoom and invited former colleagues, fellow experts and enthusiasts and some of the greatest figures in the music industry from the last fifty years to join them down the line in a virtual show and tell with items stowed away for safekeeping.

The result was Word in Your Attic, a vidcast where personal mementos served as the spur to a series of often brilliantly digressive, funny, and at times surprisingly poignant and informative exchanges. 

For those for whom pop trivia is far from a trivial matter, each episode contains real gems. Who knew, for instance, that Marc Bolan was inspired to form the duo Tyrannosaurus Rex after seeing Ravi Shankar wow 3000 people in Luxembourg. Or that John Lydon’s first concert was Cliff Richard and The Shadows and that he has a soft spot for the Bee Gees. Or that Roxy Music were ushered on to the roster of Island Records after a meeting with Bryan Ferry at the Golden Egg on Fleet Street. Or indeed that Clare Grogan of Altered Images was discovered while working, almost Human League Don’t You Want Me-style, as a waitress in the Spaghetti Factory restaurant in Glasgow. And that she never saw Gregory’s Girl, the 1981 film that helped make her a cover star of Just Seventeen, until some thirty years after its original release. Or that her band’s first gig poster was designed by Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream. 

A Word in Your Attic Companion will aim to replicate the freewheeling conversations of the podcast, with transcripts and extracts. It will mine selected episodes for bon mots, nuggets of gossip and the personal anecdotes and insights of its knowledgeable hosts and interlocutors that its most ardent listeners and music fans of all stripes will relish having on their bookshelves.