No Stairway
By Bill McLocklan, Carl Messenger and Tim Bulmer
Bill, Carl and Tim are three middle-aged men brought together amidst a chaotic and uncaring universe by the shared desire to make, distribute and discuss mixtapes.
Each week, your hosts produce playlists according to a theme picked at random and discuss them for an hour or so of your valuable time. To maximise your entertainment for this brief window of opportunity, they are guided by three simple rules:
Rule One: All playlists should be of album length (no more than 20 songs or 80 minutes).
Rule Two: No artist can be repeated in a playlist.
Rule Three: There is no Stairway to Heaven.
Each week, your hosts produce playlists according to a theme picked at random and discuss them for an hour or so of your valuable time. To maximise your entertainment for this brief window of opportunity, they are guided by three simple rules:
Rule One: All playlists should be of album length (no more than 20 songs or 80 minutes).
Rule Two: No artist can be repeated in a playlist.
Rule Three: There is no Stairway to Heaven.
Latest episode
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No Stairway 32 (Season 2, Episode 9) - Onomatapoeia
Poets and lyricists had long desired to use words that phonetically imitate the sound they describe. Philosophers from antiquity to the modern era, linguists of all schools and several noted East Coast beatboxers have all attempted to capture the maj… -
No Stairway 31 (Season 2, episode 8) - All About the Bass
Learned folk have often disagreed on the origins of the bass line. Today, the daemonic bastard child of the drums and the guitar is the undisputed driving force beneath all of our favourite modern popular songs, but there was a time in the r… -
No Stairway 30 (season 2, episode 7) - The Beatles
It would be facetious for a music podcast to go for any length of time without acknowledging the Beatles - as has been observed many times, the undisputed greatest album of all time is The Best of The Beatles; anyone who tells you different … -
No Stairway 29 (Season 2, episode 6) - The Four Seasons
It is easy to forget, in these times of endless drought, burned tundra and an inevitable future when our children choke on atmospheric red dust whilst android overlords decide our reproductive rights, that there was once a time when very small pieces… -
No Stairway 28 (Season 2, episode 5) - Me, Myself and I
Billie Holiday’s invention of the phrase “Me, Myself & I” with the song of the same name in 1937, had led her at the time, quite undeservedly, to be described as “The Narcissist’s favourite chanteuse.” However the first person singular has, in re… -
No Stairway 27 (Season 2, Episode 4) - Songs from Debut Albums
Nineties Michael Jackson baiter Jarvis Cocker once asked in song “Do you remember the first time?” The song’s narrator is quick to add that he “can’t remember a worse time” – this is particularly ironic as Cocker’s debut outing with Pulp, 1983’s “It”… -
No Stairway 26 (Season 2, Episode 3) - Three Chords and Everything About Japan
The Sakoku Edict of 1635 made Japan an isolated state, cutting off trade relationships with most other countries of the world and banning foreigners from entering Japan upon pain of death. Over the next two hundred years, the land of the ris… -
No Stairway EP 1 - Sad Songs that are Bangers
In the first of what could be an on going occurrence of No Stairway EPs, Bill ventures into his self-styled “crying corner” to give you a 60 minute playlist of sadness. A sad song can keep you move you, raise your spirits,… -
Episode 25 (Season 2, episode 2) - Covers that are better than the originals
Cover versions of popular hits are often much maligned as lesser copies of their more authentic (and therefore somehow superior) original recordings. However, while no sane person would defend the Take That cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, there a… -
Season 2, Episode 1 - Space
Joint winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics, Felix Bloch, famously recounted a walk he took with his doctoral supervisor, Werner Heisenberg, pioneer of Quantum mechanics and himself a Nobel Laureate in 1928. During this walk Bloch remarked that,…
