Episode 69 : Martin Colyer on Greil Marcus + Lucinda Williams + Rufus Wainwright

In this week's episode, your regular co-hosts are joined for the second time by RBP's original co-founder Martin Colyer, beamed in from Leyton, to offer his invaluable thoughts on Lucinda Williams and Greil Marcus' classic Mystery Train. 

Williams prompts near-rapturous approval for her 1998 masterpiece Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, with Mark and Barney similarly admiring its southern poetics and its Americana-defining country soul. Conversation flows seamlessly into the impact of Marcus' game-changing 1975 book, newly reissued (with lavish illustrations) by the Folio Society. Discussion of the book's chapters on Elvis Presley and The Band takes the RBP team back to Marcus' profound influence on British fans of American music.

Rounding out the episode's American theme, these four horsemen of the rock apocalypse hear clips from Maureen Paton's 2005 phone interview with the ever-amusing Rufus Wainwright, who covers all the topics you might expect from him, following the release of his remarkable Want albums: addiction, AIDS, America and the Wainwright/McGarrigle clans.

As per usual, Messrs. Pringle, Hoskyns & Murison-Bowie sift through some of the new library pieces that most intrigued them, including a Dawn James Rave interview with Small Face Steve Marriott from 1966; Michael Watts' underwhelmed Melody Maker response to Herbie Hancock's 1974 show at Carnegie Hall; Dave Thompson's fascinating 2004 Goldmine piece on the late Alan ('I Love Rock 'n Roll') Merrill's little-known Japanese glam band Vodka Collins; and, from 2006, a terrific Pete Paphides Times profile of Gogol Bordello's Eugene Hütz…