I like singers who sing like they talk

Mark Ellen won't mind me saying he can be absent-minded. In the early days of The Word he forgot he'd arranged to do a phone interview and went out to get a sandwich.

Reception rang looking for him. "There's a Tony Bennett on the line." I couldn't help wondering whether this was the great saloon singer or a decorator ringing Mark with an estimate. It's a common name.

I asked them to put him through. Soon as I heard the voice say "Mark?" I knew it was the Tony Bennett. The voice speaking to me was unmistakably the same one that had sung to us all those years. He could no more disguise it than fake his fingerprints.

Since then I've decided the singers I really like sing in the way they speak. For instance I prefer Christine McVie to Stevie Nicks. That doesn't mean they sound exactly the same but it does mean their musical sound is identifiably related to their spoken one. The best singer of all, Sinatra, was the classic example. That's how he made songs make sense. He slipped from speech to song without stopping to arrange himself into the posture of a singer.

On the other hand, and here I'm obviously an old git, an increasing number of singers don't seem to feel they're performing until they've put on what they clearly think is a singerly voice. And I don't just mean the usual diva tricks - showy melisma, notes sustained beyond reason, the word "my" delivered as "mah". I also find myself being exposed to a lot of guitar-playing stool-roosters who deliver in a mannered "hello sky, hello trees" style from the back of the throat with minimal involvement of the articulators. They wouldn't talk like that. The result is their songs make no sense whatsoever.

The richer and more stupid the footballer the more untouchable

Numbskull Sunderland player has picture taken covered in £50 notes at a casino. Martinet Italian manager vows to sell him and anybody else who misbehaves.

It won't be as easy as that. Players aren't lining up to go to the north-east. Nor are other clubs lining up to buy Sunderland's reprobates. High-earning players hold their clubs hostage rather than the other way around. Watching these stand-offs I'm reminded of the old line about debt: if you owe the bank £5, it's your problem. If you owe them £5 million, it's theirs.

Media can't hype people any longer but they're quite at liberty to hype themselves

Twitter positions itself as an accompaniment to watching TV. There's a term for it - double-screening. You're watching one. The other's on your knee.

Double-screening works best with TV that requires low engagement. Eurovision, X Factor, a football match between two teams you don't support. Somebody in advertising told me that they can track the amount of conversational "noise" on programmes of that kind. It continues all the way through.

On the other hand programmes that require high levels of engagement, such as Homeland, are preceded and followed by lots of Twitter traffic. While the programme's on people are too busy watching. Makes sense.

I wish somebody would come up with a name for the shows of enthusiasm that Twitter increasingly tempts people into. I'm getting the feeling that people's desire to be seen to enthuse about some new things, particularly in music, is greater than the actual enthusiasm they feel.

Media can't hype people any longer but they're quite at liberty to hype themselves.

Waitresses, Top Forty radio and the illusion of diversity

When I wrote about something I heard on Planet Rock, somebody who didn't wish to be named took me to task for slating the station having only listened to it for five minutes. In fact it was a bit longer than that but no matter.

All the people I know in radio accept that the very most of a new listener's attention they're going to get is a few minutes. That's why they design playlists in the way they do so that they hear something familiar, something hot and something new but familiar-sounding.

I was reading John Seabrook's piece about the songwriters behind Rihanna in an old copy of The New Yorker. Here he quotes from Marc Fisher's excellent book Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation. Fisher credits Todd Storz with the invention of Top Forty radio. When Storz was in the army during the war he watched how customers in diners tended to pick the same records again and again on the jukebox. When the customers left the waitresses took their own coins, put them in the jukebox and punched up the same records. They didn't want change. They wanted familiarity.

It was this concept he took into radio - in an era when it was considered bad form to play the same song twice in a twenty-four hour period. It's this principle of heavy rotation which still underpins all music radio, whether it professes to provide all the hits and more or pretends to follow a higher agenda. Behind the scenes programmers, producers and algorithms are working very hard to make sure you're never too far from something warm and familiar.

It's the same thing when you do research around people's preferences in music magazines. When asked everybody will describe themselves as having very eclectic tastes. In practice very few of them do. They all say they want informative pieces about new bands. In practice they all read the old one about Oasis.

Meet Mr Gig

Nige Tassell, who used to write for The Word, has published a book called Mr Gig, which details his quest to discover what live music means nowadays. This takes him from a package tour of former Smash Hits cover stars through Glastonbury and Cornbury to All Tomorrow's Parties in Butlin's, Minehead and a festival on the remote Hebridean island of Eigg.

Stuart Maconie has described it as "a sweet and tender paean to a very particular lost love, the live gig". Nige is joining us at next Monday's Word In Your Ear show, which also features My Darling Clementine and David Ford, where I'll be talking to him about the live experience past and present. Come one, come all. Tickets here.

An Othello review for short attention spans

We went to see Othello at the National Theatre.

With modern dress productions I always feel that for everything you gain (this is set in a Bastion-style military encampment on Cyprus) you sacrifice just as much in lost appreciation of just how deeply sunk in his times Shakespeare was (the play starts with Iago complaining about missing a preferment, which simply wouldn't come again in his lifetime.)

Brought up on a diet of "wot me guv?" wide boys, modern audiences sneakily prefer Iago to Othello whose nobility we're expected to take his own word for. The audience yesterday snickered nervously at Rory Kinnear's asides. But by the time the bed was piled with bodies, some of whom had expired at great length, one even confirming the fact with the words "I die", you could have heard a pin drop in the full house.

No intelligent life on Planet Rock

It's always a delight to hear someone mangling a really rotten idea for a listener competition on the radio.

I was listening to Planet Rock the other day. A listener had proposed the following list of artists as a competition: George Harrison, Peter Frampton, Rolling Stones and Weezer. The thing they had in common was that they'd all once covered Buddy Holly songs. All except Weezer who had recorded a song called Buddy Holly.

It's the kind of "so what?" question that makes you want to lynch the inquisitor. The answer should always be more interesting than the question and this really isn't.

But it was made worse by the fact that the presenter hit the wrong button on the play out machine (nobody has actual CDs in the studio any more) and played Wheatus instead of Weezer. He didn't notice and ploughed blithely on with the competition, far too busy to listen to the music.

The only thing I ask of any DJ is that they be enjoying the same experience they're providing. Most of them aren't.

I see from their site they're asking "want to be a Planet Rock presenter?" Tempting.