The great Steve Cropper wrote Dock Of The Bay with Otis Redding a week before the singer perished in a plane crash in December 1967. It went on to become the sixth most played song of the 20th century. Cropper also produced the track, which ushered in a long career writing, producing and appearing with some of the greatest artists of his time. A reluctant frontman, he considers himself a collaborator, a skill he proved for many years as part of Booker T & The MiGs, with whom he wrote...

The role of the arranger is often overlooked in the story of pop music, so let’s meet one of the busiest in the business in the 1960s and ‘70s, John Cameron, who’s very first commissioned arrangement, Donovan’s Sunshine Superman went to No. 1 in the USA. It started a long association with producer Mickie Most and the RAK label, which, in 1970, led to Most signing Cameron’s own act, C.C.S - aka The Collective Consciousness Society - a 25-piece big band featuring the cream of British jazz...

Jim Irvin chats with an artist he has collaborated with extensively, Lissie, a restless native of Rock Island, Illinois, about When I’m Alone, the first song they wrote together (with writer and producer Julian Emery), which made her known all over the world.  She talks about her memories of the session in London, how the song launched her career and what it led to, but also how the enforced hiatus caused by the pandemic, coupled with a painful break-up earlier in 2020, have made her view her...

Producer Mick Glossop has one of the most extraordinary CVs of any British record maker. Raised in Birkenhead in the ‘60s, he has inhaled the beefy aroma of lunchtime gigs at The Cavern in Liverpool, survived 17 albums behind the desk with Van Morrison, and travelled the world as an in-demand “gatherer” of sound since the 1970s. We discuss his life and his production techniques in this episode and focus on a cult classic he cut in 1979, The Crack,  the sole complete album by West London...

The million-selling, most played song of 2017, Hold Back The River, came out of a two-day writing session between artist James Bay and writer-producer Iain Archer, a native of Bangor, Northern Ireland Archer’s picaresque career has seen him release several solo albums, briefly join Snow Patrol - where he helped write Run and other songs that powered their breakthrough - and co-write key songs for Jake Bugg, You Me At Six, Steve Mason, Frank Turner, Nina Nesbitt and many others. Wary of being...

After 13 years in the business, James Warren, had his first hit in the summer of 1980 with a song written in minutes.  Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime has regularly reappeared in the charts since, becoming a modern-day standard. Its simplicity and directness has seen it enthral artists across numerous genres -  reggae, jungle, shoegaze, plainsong, you name it - in covers from Beck, Baby D, Erasure, Glasvegas, The Dream Academy, The Cantemus Girl’s Choir, Richard Thompson and many, many...

When cut with multi-racial British soul band The Foundations, half-finished song, “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You” became the first No.1 hit for human hit-machine Tony Macauley. This prolific writer and producer was responsible for an impressive strings of successes during the late ‘60s and ‘70s with Long John Baldrey, Edison Lighthouse, David Soul, The Drifters, The New Seekers, Picketywitch, The Paper Dolls, Donna Summer, Elvis Presley and many others. He then went on to new careers in...