When Scott Walker was Robbie Williams big

During the Scott Walker Prom at the Albert Hall on Tuesday night I looked around at my fellow concertgoers and thought, this is what most pop concerts will be like in the future - people gathering to enjoy a re-creation of something which was originated long before. A bit like the rest of the Proms in that respect.

The hall was packed with people who, by the looks of them, weren't born in 1967, back when Scott Walker was as big a star as Robbie Williams. In their eyes Scott Walker is a misunderstood genius, an indie pioneer, a prophet without honour, a man who apparently had to wait until today to get his due. This narrative is repeated by Luke Walker in a review in The Guardian.



It's not quite the way I remember it. Scott Walker was a very big deal in the Walker Brothers but he was still a very big deal as a solo artist. His albums were in the shop window. He was played on the radio. He had his own TV series. And it wasn't stuck away in late night. It was prime time BBC television.

As for "the albums struggling commercially", the first three were all top-three hits and the fourth might have done the same if he hadn't made it more difficult for himself by putting it out under his birth name Scott Engel. Then he made a few albums of covers just to run down his contract. As for his name fading he had a big hit with "No Regrets" when he rejoined the Walker Brothers in 1976.

Scott Walker was never actually forgotten. He was simply adopted by another generation and they preferred to think they were the ones who discovered him.

Social media and BBC pay cheques

The unveiling of the BBC pay list provoked lots of comment on social media. None of it was very interesting. 

On Facebook and Twitter people were either falling over themselves to tell you how the BBC was the best bargain in Britain and therefore every penny it paid was money well-spent or they wanted to tell you that it was about time the whole featherbedded lot was privatised. Such positioning statements are largely for show or to keep in with mates and useful contacts.

Meanwhile all the real chat about who was worth it and who was getting away with daylight robbery had tactically withdrawn into Direct Messages on Twitter, individual emails from Gmail accounts, texts and indignant WhatsApp groups.

Maybe this is a tipping point for social media. We've seen the same thing in recent elections. If people are going to say what they think they're going be increasingly choosy about who they say it to. We don't really know any more about what the mass of people think than we did back in the days when nobody asked their opinion about anything.

Weather fronts don't "rock up". Nor do rock bands.

Just heard the weatherman on BBC Radio Four talk about when some weather front would "rock up".

I talked about the rockification of everything in "Uncommon People". Now that we no longer have actual rock stars we have rock star chefs, politicians or cyclists instead.

Clearly I should have added something about the unchecked growth of the verb "rock up", which is now so widespread that even weather forecasters, who used to be dull and sort of proud of it, feel they should use it to lend their bulletins a raffish air.

"Rock up" isn't mentioned at all in the 2008 edition of Jonathon Green's Dictionary of Slang so it must be a recent thing.  But it's not all that recent. According to the OED it was first recorded in a dictionary of South African English in 1996 where it meant "to arrive, turn up, esp. casually, late, or unexpectedly".

Strikes me that two things never turn up casually or unexpectedly. One is a weather front, which takes weeks to build up; the other is a touring rock band, which is encumbered by so much equipment and so in thrall to the soundcheck that it is incapable of doing anything quickly and without fuss.

If rock bands could get on, get it on and get off without fuss they would be a good deal more popular than they are.

Here's a thing the Beatles didn't do very often

I was at the Chalke Valley History Festival this weekend, talking about Sgt Pepper with Giles Martin and Kevin Howlett.

These are two men who've heard more unreleased Beatles session tapes than anyone.

Over dinner beforehand I asked them to confirm what I had always suspected: that The Beatles didn't swear much.

Giles and Kevin thought about it and then said that the Beatles swore but only occasionally. When they did it was in extremis. It wasn't part of their standard flow.

That's one of those things which underlines just what a different the world of fifty years ago was.

Back then most of the swearing was done by men doing heavy work out of doors. It wouldn't have been heard in public or in a white collar environment. The EMI studios was a white collar environment.

If you were to eavesdrop on any bunch of people at work in 2017 on the other hand, from a band in the recording studio to people trying to fix an I.T. system,  I think you'd hear quite a lot of casual, even playful profanity.

I wonder when that started to change.