Graham Gouldman wrote For Your Love for The Yardbirds, Bus Stop for The Hollies, Tallyman for Jeff Beck, No Milk Today for Herman's Hermits and I"m Not In Love and lots of others for 10cc. He has worked with Kirsty MacColl, Kasenetz-Katz, Andrew Gold, Gary Barlow, The Ramones, Mickie Most, John Paul Jones, Neil Sedaka and the Manchester City FA Cup squad of 1972. He's got a new record coming out called Love & Work.

You think we ran out of things to talk about?

Chaz Jankel - co-author of Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, Sweet Gene Vincent and Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick - looks back at the rollicking rise of The Blockheads, and Derek "The Draw" Hussey contemplates Ian Dury, the man whose shoes he fills in the current line-up.

Contains their charming performance of A Little Knowledge, the greatest piece of music recording in Word podcast history, we're saying.

You can buy tickets for our Word In Your Ear show with the Blockheads. It's on June 12 at the Lexington in London.

Kate Mossman, David Hepworth and Fraser Lewry go through the A's in John Peel's Record Collection and ponder what you can tell about personality type from flicking through anyone's accumulated spines. We also wonder whether Woodface's Alabama Shakes anxiety indicates the impossibility of trying to like things just because other people do.

Captain Underpants' elegy to the vanished world of the key-tar had us wondering which other instruments have vanished from the rock and roll stage. Maraccas? The Chapman Stick? The twin-necked guitar?

In other news, we thought of a preferable alternative to the Duran Duran/Stereophonics/Paolo Nutini/Snow Patrol attempt to represent the union in musical terms and we're quite pleased with the iPad app. If you haven't got it, do so with all haste.

And Fabrice Muamba came back. God bless whoever decided this didn't need commentary.

One of the greatest shows I ever saw was Ian Dury and The Blockheads at Sheffield City Hall in 1979. They had two things going for them: one was the unique charisma of their singer; the other was the effortless whomp of one of Britain's greatest bands, The Blockheads.

Ian's passed on but the Blockheads are still performing all those classics and on June 12th they're bringing their riotous show to our local The Lexington. Among their number will be Chaz Jankel, Mick Gallagher, Norman Watt-Roy, John Turnbull, John Roberts and Derek The Draw. Among their numbers will be a whole mess of your favourites - Wake Up & Make Love With Me, Sweet Gene Vincent, Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll - plus some new compositions.

Mark Ellen will be your host, I'll be the disco and a full supporting programme will be announced in due course. There's only room for 200 people in the Lexington, tickets are a mere £19 so get booking right now.

Click here to purchase tickets.

It's here at last - the Word Magazine iPad app. Every word that's in the magazine is now available for you to read on your tablet. If you're a subscriber all you have to do is download the app and key in your web ID and you'll be reading instantly. We hope it means you'll be able to increase your opportunities to enjoy the magazine and that overseas subscribers won't be quite so much in the hands of their local postal services. We hope to have this joined by an Android version in due course. We hope you find it useful.

This is a big initiative for an independent company and it means that we're now having to coordinate closely with our subscriptions partner, Apple's Newsstand and our technology providers to ensure that you get the smoothest service possible. Please be patient. We're learning a lot day by day and the main thing we're learning is for everything that becomes easier, something else becomes more difficult.

For the time being access to tablet editions is free for print subscribers. We can't include the music from the Now Hear This CDs because of licensing issues. We can't include the podcasts either at the moment because app subscribers are registering with Apple and not us, and therefore we can't generate a Web ID to enable you to access the podcast. (Existing print subscribers will know that they can get the podcast with the same Web ID they use to get the app.)

For the moment please give it a go if you've got an iPad. And tell your friends!

Download the app from iTunes.

Over the last week we've welcomed three authors into the pod: Stanley Booth went on the road and down to Muscle Shoals with the Rolling Stones in 1969 and eventually wrote all about it in the ultimate access all areas on tour book, The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones; Paul Charles is one of the UK's leading live music agents and he's also the author of The Last Dance, a new novel set against the background of the Irish showband scene of the 60s; Andrew Martin is a journalist and author who's taken his fascination with railways of all kinds into fiction as well as fact. His new book is Underground Overground, a passenger's history of the tube. They were all terrific. Think you might enjoy this.

Further Watching:
1. Stanley Booth (round about 1:30) with the Stones and the Grateful Dead in 1969.
2. Van Morrison in the 70s doing his showband thing.
3. An armchair tour of the Tube.

It's been a while since we've been gathered together. Hence this bumper edition which covers: the only other person called Levon, the Band and the question of authorship, why celebrities always feel the need to put one over on interviewers in public forums, the life of Bob Marley as described in the new movie, whether documentaries are the best rock films, who Record Store Day is supposed to be benefiting, the upsides and downsides of travelling in south-east Asia and podcasts about farming and Shakespeare. You'll only get the gag in the picture if you listen to the whole thing and you can only listen to the whole thing if you subscribe.

Former Word cover star and scion of Loudon Wainwright and Kate McGarrigle Rufus Wainwright will be providing the Sunday lunchtime entertainment on the Obelisk stage at this year's Latitude Festival. This prestigious slot, which has previously accommodated Tom Jones, Thom Yorke and Joanna Newsom, has been moved back to one p.m. This will allow people to watch Wainwright's show without missing concert pianist Lang Lang's performance on the floating Waterfront Stage, which begins at noon.

The Waterfront Stage will also be playing host to Golden Fables 2012, a multimedia poetic drama which has been devised for the Cultural Olympiad. Taking part will be poets Liz Lochhead, Ian McMillan, Gillian Clarke and Joel Stickley, composers Gabriel Prokofiev and Tim Dalling and the 90-strong Choir Invisible - The Desmond and Leah Tutu Peace Choir and graphic novelist Kate Brown.

To find out more details and book tickets go here.

We're thrilled to announce that one of our favourite songwriters Boo Hewerdine is joining the bill for our Word In Your Ear show with Dodgy on May 1st. Boo will be playing some of his own songs and also performing with Brooks Williams, the American slide guitarist with whom he's made the excellent new album State of The Union, featured on the Now Hear This CD with the current issue. The press release for the album, which is also one of our favourites, says: "Their plan was to record an album using vintage mics and equipment live in just 5 days. After a day and a half they realised they had finished." The record contains a range of material including their version of Pet Shops Boys' "Rent".

That means you get Dodgy, Boo Hewerdine, Brooks Williams, the famous deejay stylings of David Hepworth and the end of the pier compering skills of Mark Ellen - plus, no doubt, some surprises - and the company of an audience who are every bit as civilised as you are, for a mere £15. Tickets available here. See you there.

In the new issue of The Word, which comes out this week, there's a piece called The Test of Time in which some of our writers look back over the years 1967-2000 and pick one record from each year which was overrated at the time and now sounds anachronistic and clunky. On the positive side they also pick out one from each year which was underrated at the time and now sounds good. For those who want to do an instant sampling we've put together a Spotify playlist as far as we can. Most of the albums on the list were on Spotify. Where they weren't we included a track which is on a sampler. Let us know if you have any great revelations when listening to it.

We're delighted to announce that world-class bluegrass outfit Punch Brothers (a Mossman favourite), Belgian outfit dEUS, Academy Award-winning songwriter Glen Hansard and American band Low plus Breton and Walls have all been added to the bill at Latitude which takes place on July 12th-15th.

To buy tickets for the festival, which already features Bon Iver, Paul Weller, Elbow and Richard Hawley, go here.

Things we’ve been talking about this week:

* the great NME mis-selling scandal of the 90s - first raised as an issue by Prestonia and here further explored by Mark Ellen and David Hepworth with particular reference to Fabulous and “the Nef”

* the great Scottish rapper Mchammer is 50 today so it would be below the belt holding up his voluminous trousers to recapitulate the grisly details of his 1998 bankruptcy - but it’s our duty

* when you could see Neil Young and have enough change to buy a bag of chips on the way home

* Pugwash drop in to talk about getting fan mail from Jeff Lynne and play a song from their new album

* an amazing documentary called Dreams Of A Life.

We're thrilled to announce that Lana Del Rey, 2012's most talked-about new pop star and the woman behind Video Games, which dominated The Word's Festive Fifty vote in 2011, will be performing on our stage at this year's Latitude Festival.

Other acts announced today include Ben Howard, Dave Gorman, School of Comedy, Sarfarz Manzoor, Simon Armitage, Phenomenal Handclap Band, Twin Primes Theatre Company, Theatre Ad Infinitum, Boogaloo Stu, Checkley Bush, Richard Dedomenici, Oyster Eyes, Christmas For Two, Idiots of Ants, Guilt & Shame, Joel Dommett, Matt Rees, Late Night Gimp Fight, Danny McLoughlin, Nish Kumar and Joe Wells. Meanwhile, in the Faraway Forest, Noise of Art will be entertaining festival-goers with their Psychedelic Curiosity Show, which mashes retro-futuristic steampunk with 60’s psychedelia via the medium of Volkswagen camper-van.

For more information and to purchase tickets, go to www.latitudefestival.co.uk

Latitude and Reading/Leeds promoter Melvin Benn remembers his first event – an anti-Thatcher gig in ’79 featuring Shane MacGowan on a flatbed truck “which surely led to her eventual downfall 11 years later”. There’s the unadulterated chaos of Axl Rose and girlfriend at Reading (the festival he helped save from bankruptcy), memories of Nirvana, the time he and Michael Eavis defended Worthy Farm against anarchists with petrol bombs, and the revelation that promoters can “play God” with the weather conditions.

Latitude is at Henham Park, Suffolk, July 12-15. Tickets from http://www.latitudefestival.co.uk

“Comeback albums” very rarely cut the mustard but mid-‘90s gap-year soundtrack suppliers Dodgy have returned with Stand Upright In A Cool Place, an exquisite, faintly psychedelic pop album full of rich autumn shades that sounds as though it was recorded in log cabin in Big Sur co-owned by the Fleet Foxes and Crosby Stills & Nash.

Much of this kind of thing, and all kinds of glory days revisited, will be on show as the band join us for one of our regular Word In Your Ear events on Tuesday 1st May. Details of the support acts will follow, but tickets are on sale now. A swift take-up for this toe-tapping event is strongly advised - earlybird tickets at a discount price of just £12 are available until Wednesday.

Click here to buy tickets.