Jeremy and Tim continue our mini-series on post-punk with a bit of 1978 scene-setting. Describing the inflationary crises, militant shop stewards and series of strikes in the UK and US, Jeremy paints a picture of the historic moment out of which a series of self-consciously anti-bourgeois bands were emerging. We hear about Jonny Rotten’s metamorphosis into John Lydon, take a moment to reflect on some of Leeds’ favourite sons the Gang of Four, and cross over to the Rust Belt to listen to an early...
Feb 26, 2026•1 hr 24 min•Season 7Ep. 11
UNLOCKED: we've decided to share this interview with writer Toby Manning that we originally distributed to patrons in May 2025. To hear dozen more bonus episodes on a vast array of topics, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod to become a patron. In this episode we welcome writer Toby Manning to the show to discuss his recent book Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music. Toby's book offers a political reading of popular music, taking as its methodological starting point the songs ...
Feb 19, 2026•1 hr 23 min
This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full thing and dozens more like it, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod to sign up. In this episode we begin a patrons mini-series on one of the most unique and beloved characters of the LITM story, Arthur Russell. Given Tim literally wrote the book on the singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist, you’re in good hands. We begin with the story of Arthur’s early life in Iowa and his move to San Francisco, including experiences with Buddhis...
Feb 12, 2026•8 min•Season 7Ep. 10
On this week’s episode we return to 70s for the first of a mini-series on post-punk. A historical period, an unhelpful genre descriptor, a structure of feeling? Whatever it is, the guitar bands of the UK and NYC in 1978 were creating some serious music. Jeremy and Tim discuss where the term came from, what exactly the ‘punk’ it was following was, and some the music’s early proponents. With reference to The Slits, Wire, Talking Heads and more, we hear about the Hacienda, John Peel, Modernism and ...
Jan 28, 2026•1 hr 27 min•Season 7Ep. 9
To hear the extended, 12", almost-2-hour version of this conversation, including discussion on Maximo Park, Kenickie and Bob Davenport, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod and become a patron from just £3 a month. In this episode of LITM Jeremy is joined by writer and editor of Tribune magazine Alex Niven to talk about the musical history of England’s North East. Our interest in this subject was piqued by Sam Fender’s victory in last year’s Mercury Music Prize. Fender is himself an artist indebted ...
Jan 14, 2026•1 hr 21 min•Season 7Ep. 8
This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full thing, and dozens more like it, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod to sign up. In our final episode of 2025, Jeremy and Tim spend some time exploring the life and times of Bruce Springsteen. Tracing his life from his early career up to 1984, they unpack specificities of the Boss’s politics, his particular aesthetic, and the often confused reception of his repertoire. We hear about the sense of place in his music, the influence of Dyl...
Dec 18, 2025•11 min•Season 7Ep. 7
It’s Mamdani time! On this episode of the show we’re bringing things right up to the here and now to celebrate New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani. Tim and Jeremy recount the emergence of Zohran as a political figure, his background and parents, his democratic socialist politics and what his election means for the Left and anti-imperialism more broadly. We also hear a potted history of the DSA, consider the particularities of Left Populism as a contemporary political tendency, spend time wi...
Dec 04, 2025•1 hr 42 min•Season 7Ep. 6
In this episode we conclude our look at the Democratic Republic of Congo with an exploration of the music and politics of the country from 1960 to the present day. Beginning with the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba, Jeremy and Tim discuss the colonial and imperialist dynamics that have buffeted the country for the last half century, the cycles of violence this engenders and the role of nations like the US, China and Rwanda have played in destabilising the country. They also unpack the ‘resource cur...
Nov 20, 2025•1 hr 28 min•Season 7Ep. 5
This is an excerpt from a patrons episode. To hear the full thing, and dozens more like it, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod and become a patron from £3 a month. In this patrons-only episode Jeremy and Tim revive the long-dormant ‘What We’re Listening To’ format for an exploration of what’s been on their turntables recently. Tim pulls extensively from the bag he packed for a recent Lucky Cloud party, including selections from SAULT and Cotontete, while Jeremy shares a modern slice of Bukem-esque...
Nov 06, 2025•11 min•Season 7Ep. 4
We’re continuing our series of episodes inspired by the 2024 documentary Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat with an examination of some of the film’s key characters: the so-called ‘Jazz Ambassadors’, a group of mostly black US musicians sent around the world to (unwittingly) promote American soft power during the Cold War. Tim and Jeremy give a brief history of the emergence of the CIA in the post-war USA, explain the role of NATO, and detail a few of the great many instances of US interference in newl...
Oct 23, 2025•1 hr 29 min•Season 7Ep. 3
This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full thing, and dozens more like it, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod and become a patron from £3 a month. In this patrons episode we’re taking some time to explore some of the background to our recent main feed show about colonialism, jazz diplomacy and the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat with a bitesize primer on the origins of the Cold War. Jeremy and Tim run it all the way back to 1917 to unpack the Bolshevik revolution in R...
Oct 09, 2025•10 min•Season 7Ep. 2
Love is the Message is back! After last series’ mammoth 18-month excavation of the year 1977 we’re switching things up a bit. While we’ll continue to chart our rough way through the history explored in our work to date, for the moment we’re going to focus on a few smaller, more bite-size topics, starting with the 2024 film Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat. A natural partner piece to our beloved Summer of Soul, Johan Grimonprez’s documentary tracks in vivid and exhilarating style the Cold War episode ...
Sep 25, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Season 7Ep. 1
This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode of the show. To hear the full episode and dozens more like it, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod and sign up from £3 a month. In this episode of LITM Extra, Jeremy takes the mic solo to expand a little on our recent patrons show on Kneecap, turning an eye specifically to musical and cultural antecedents of the Irish trio’s project. With reference to music both from the island of Ireland and abroad, Jeremy discusses Stiff Little Fingers, dancehall cha...
Aug 07, 2025•6 min
Here it is: our 18th and final episode of series 6. We’ve covered punk, Studio 54, the Warehouse, Black Disco, Eurodisco and Saturday Night Fever, but today Jeremy and Tim summarise some final reflections on the city of New York in the pivotal year of 1977. They discuss the early career of a businessman who liked to frequent the discotheques and would go on to become president of the USA, linking Mr Trump to a culture of corporate welfare and downtown development. We hear about the Son of Sam, t...
Jul 31, 2025•55 min
In response to the death of the Ozzy Osborne this week, we've unlocked this patrons episode from last year about heavy metal, Black Sabbath and the Prince of Darkness himself. If you like this you can hear a lot more like it by becoming a patron at Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this episode Jeremy raises a devil’s horn salute to the gods and demons of heavy metal. He explores the etymology of the genre term, excavating its shared roots with acid rock, and explaining how heavy metal compliments ...
Jul 24, 2025•55 min
This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full thing, and dozens more, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod and become a patron from £3 a month. In this patrons episode we wanted to spend some time talking about the band on everyone’s lips: Kneecap. The Belfast three-piece have been in the headlines of all the papers in recent weeks for their vocal support of Palestine, trouble with the law, and Transatlantic festival shutdowns. Tim and Jeremy provide a healthy dollop of context to...
Jul 17, 2025•7 min
We’re almost at the end of our 1977 series, but in true LITM fashion why have just one show on a topic when you could have two? Across this and the next episode we’ll be filling in a few gaps we haven’t touched on so far, and providing some broad economic and political scene-setting for this seminal year in both Britain and the States. In this episode we hear about the emergent neoliberal order, the oil crisis, austerity then and now, and OPEC. Jeremy and Tim consider escapism in music and film,...
Jul 03, 2025•54 min•Season 6Ep. 17
This is an excerpt from a patrons episode. to hear the full thing and dozens more, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod and become a patron from £3 per month. In this patrons-only episode we welcome writer and anti-fascist activist Joe Mulhall to the show to discuss his fantastic book Rebel Sounds: Music as Resistance, a survey across time and place of groups and cultures using musics as part of their resistance to forms of racism and imperialism. We hear about Irish rebel songs, Kneecap and an impr...
Jun 19, 2025•6 min
In this episode, Tim and Jeremy complete our mini-series on Saturday Night Fever by looking at the film in its cinematographic context alongside two other huge movies of the late1970s. With reference to Rocky and Taxi Driver, the guys unearth the shared visions of class and race politics in the USA of the period. They discuss the particular place of Italian Americans in the culture more broadly, discuss particular forms of American-ness, and spend some time on the real life events that inspired ...
Jun 05, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Season 6Ep. 16
This is am excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full thing along with dozen more, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod and sign up for as little as £3 a month. In this patrons-only episode we welcome writer Toby Manning to the show to discuss his recent book Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music. Toby's book offers a political reading of popular music, taking as its methodological starting point the songs found in the charts from the 1950s to the present day, to exp...
May 22, 2025•9 min
In this episode, Tim and Jeremy pull on their white suits for a full run-down rewatch of Saturday Night Fever. Starting with the iconic 'Stayin' Alive' opening sequence, they draw out the class, race and gender politics of the film, including Italian American stereotypes, consumer culture, Bruce Lee, meritocracy and male grooming. On the music side, they talk blue-eyed Soul, falsetto, an early drum loop, Bee Gees, Kool and the Gang, MFSB and more. Produced by Matt Huxley. We are now on Youtube! ...
May 08, 2025•1 hr 33 min•Season 6Ep. 15
The day has finally come: after 79 episodes of Love is the Message, it’s time to talk Travolta. Saturday Night Fever was always coming down the pipe for us, and now we’re giving it the LITM treatment. In this episode, Tim and Jeremy establish some of the pre-history to the seminal 1977 film. With musical examples drawn from Vince Aletti’s Disco Files playlists, we hear about the rise of the suburbs in the USA, the dynamics between the different boroughs of mid-70s NYC, and consider the suburban ...
Apr 10, 2025•1 hr 34 min•Season 6Ep. 14
This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full thing and dozens more episodes on topics ranging from Walter Gibbons to Glam Rock, visit patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this patrons episode we conclude our two-parter on Bob Dylan, dragging him from where we left off last time in 1966 all the way up to the freewheeling year of 1977. Through a glut of albums we hear about John Hammond, spirituality, gnosis, religious iconography, St Augustine, Joe Hill and The Band. Dylan meets the...
Mar 27, 2025•6 min
Tim and Jeremy conclude our look at Eurodisco with a series of cuts from the mighty Giorgio Moroder. We hear the silky vocals of Donna Summer, the relentlessness of the 4-to-the-floor, the aesthetics of whiteness and what can only be called Prog Disco. Also in the episode Tim recounts a recent visit to the Philharmonie de Paris, Jeremy revels in a Star Wars rework, and we board the Trans Europe Express once again to spend some time with Kraftwerk. Remember, we have a rolling playlist of all the ...
Mar 13, 2025•1 hr 28 min•Season 6Ep. 13
This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full thing and a hell of a lot more, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. Timothée Chalamet is currently lighting up the silver screen as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. Have you seen in? We haven’t, but we still thought it high time to dig into some Dylanology. In this episode Tim and Jeremy discuss Bob’s early albums up to 1966, interrogating his intentions, his seriousness, his self-mythology, and whether he invented rock music. Trackl...
Mar 02, 2025•9 min
Tim and Jeremy are back on European soil for our second episode on Eurodisco. Examining their record boxes with a post-colonial lens they discuss the aesthetics and politics of race within the genre. We also here about homoeroticism, history-themed tracks, ‘the honky box’, and the life and times of two of the key players in the scene: Jacques Morali and Richie Rome. And of course… Village People. Next time – Moroder! Tracklist: The Ritchie Family - Istanbul (Not Constantinople) The Ritchie Famil...
Feb 13, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Season 6Ep. 12
This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full show and lots more like it, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. For the first time in a while Tim and Jeremy dig into their record bags for a selection of tracks they’ve been enjoying recently. We hear the strange deep tones of the Rudra Veena, contemporary virtuosic New Age noodling out of California and some Antipodean sitar funk. Elsewhere in the episode Jeremy buys his first D’n’B white label in a long while, we get a few tribute...
Jan 30, 2025•9 min
In the first episode of 2025 Jeremy and Tim attempted to understand a somewhat maligned genre: Eurodisco. What is it and where did it come from? We hear about the cross-continental currents that gave rise to the form, unpack its aesthetics and spend time with some of its key proponents like the French composer and drummer Cerrone. Tim and Jeremy also take time to unpack the Switched On Classics, play us an infamous Beethoven reinvention, ask what the Enlightenment has to answer for, and compare ...
Jan 16, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Season 6Ep. 11
This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full show and lots more, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. On this patrons episode we complete our close reading of Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain’. Jeremy and Tim take in chapters on criminality and culture, Style, and feminist analysis of girls’ culture. They refer to another seminal work ‘Policing the Crisis’, interrogate the links between class and generational consciousness, and return to the Mods...
Dec 18, 2024•5 min
In this episode of Love is the Message Jeremy and Tim have packed a bag chock full of stone cold 1977 dance floor classics that share a Black Disco aesthetic. We hear a number of cuts from Tom Moulton and Walter Gibbons that can be pinpointed as some of the most important contributions to early remix culture (whilst still guaranteed to go off at a party). François K makes a fleeting appearance, alongside Boney M, Grace Jones, Miami, the SalSoul Orchestra and Henri Bergson. We close out the show ...
Dec 05, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Season 6Ep. 10
