Listen With Others

Some wonderful feints in this puzzle – excellent stuff, thank you Llig!  I’d like to highlight three in particular:

• Debris heaps on sailor’s transatlantic comms device (7) This appears, in HEAPSON*, to have something containing PHONE, with debris ‘perhaps’ a slightly loose anagram indicator?  No, it’s simply the charade TELS TAR!
• There’s nothing to a go tourney in Japan, perhaps (5).  In this one you’d be forgiven in guessing that tourney would become journey after correcting a misprint but no, it’s again a bluff.  It really parses as O after BASH.
• An angry response to a point cropped up (6).  Again, if you guessed the actual definition to be, after misprint correction, ‘chopped up’, then I suspect you wouldn’t be alone!  This was another charade, A RISE N.

But now to the nub of it.  The phrase ‘Sisyphean toil’ hidden message may have led you to thinking about moving various stones uphill or something similar.  But surely the Title is musically based …

… so it’s really a music-based ‘odd one out’ puzzle, disguised as an advanced thematic  [Are you sure?  Ed.].  In a puzzle entitled ‘Rock Group’ can you spot which of the following might just be the odd one out?

• At 2 down we have “Money” by Pink Floyd
• At 35 down, “Skin (and Bones)” by the Foo Fighters
• At 33 down, the rock group “Camel”
• At 37 across, “(Brown) Sugar” by the Rolling Stones
• At 27 down, “Telstar” by The Tornados
• At 9 down, “(Burning of the midnight) Lamp” by the Jimi Hendrix Experience
• At 31 across, Dr. Dre’s record label “Death Row”
• At 34 down, “(Teddy) Bear” by ZZ Top
• And at 6 down, “(The) Dragon” by Rick Wakeman

I’ll leave you to see if you come to the same conclusion as me.

Cheers all,

Tim / Encota

PS Only nine more Listeners left in 2017 after this one.  Goodness, they’ve flown past!