Fopp - what does it all mean?

So now Fopp has gone out of business. This just a few days after HMV posted some poor results and Prince announced that his new album will be given away with the Mail On Sunday.
The first Fopp I went into was in Glasgow about six years ago. It was small but they knew how to organise their material in clusters and if they got their price points right you ended up filling a basket, either with the kind of middling back catalogue like Pink Floyd's "Meddle" you had never bought on CD or something faintly camp like a Jimmy Smith record from the late 60s. What I always liked about Fopp was that they didn't have everything. I find masses of catalogue over-facing these days. I know I can always get those things on line in my own time. I used to buy things at Fopp as presents. But then the shops got bigger and suddenly they were everywhere, the prices of the other stores came down to meet theirs and the experience was no longer so special.
The reaction of the City pages to all this news is pretty glib. It's the internet, apparently. I don't think it's as straightforward as that. I don't have any definitive handle on this but I've spent enough time in record shops - on both sides of the counter - to offer this ten point guide to what may be going on with CD sales:

1. The supermarkets now discount the top sellers from which the specialist shops traditionally made their money.
2. Even megastores find it hard to match the breadth and depth of an Amazon, iTunes or eMusic. The harder they try the less congenial they become.
   
3. Too much mainstream music has had the magic surgically removed from it, the better to suit the marketing machine.
4. The time and money that used to be invested in recorded music is now just as likely to go into other forms of entertainment.
5. The CD is an essentially unlovable medium. It does not quicken the pulse.
6. An increasing number of men now avoid going into shops, because they can.
7. File sharing.
8. Because we know everything will be available forever, we no longer feel the same urgency to buy.
9. Most records are overrated as a matter of course. The public has been hyped too often.
   
10. On the internet you can spend hours just mooching around music. (You're doing it now.) This is an experience you previously could only get in a record shop.
    

It's an old man's man's man's man's world

The Spice Girls reunion has been flagged up for nearly as long as the Blair/Brown handover. It's going to be announced later today, apparently. Not a moment too soon for the members of the group, who have to face the hard fact that they must either do it now or not at all. Cream can get back together forty years after they formed and nobody cares that they're a bunch of craggy old scrotes. Nobody needs to fancy them.
But the same rules don't apply to women in show business. Just as the male newsreader can get older while his female colleague is always traded in for a younger model and actresses disappear at the age of 38 and aren't allowed back until they can play eccentric grandmothers, the market for classic pop'n'rock will continue to be dominated by older white males.

Turpe Nescire

They've been discussing school mottos on "Today" following Gordon Brown's quoting his old one yesterday. My own grammar school motto used to float over my fourteen-year-old head, like so many things. Lately I've come to believe in it profoundly. Turpe Nescire means "it is disgraceful to be ignorant". It comes to mind every time I hear somebody boasting of their own ignorance.

Of sheep and willies

Contemporary politicians are not known for their quick wits. They've had to think so hard about the career implications of anything they say that you generally hear their jokes coming for weeks before they arrive. Last night's BBC Four history of deputy Prime Ministers, "Every Prime Minister Needs A Willie", had a few good ones. When Herbert Morrison, Peter Mandelson's grandfather, was told that cabinet rival Ernest Bevin was his own worst enemy he muttered "not while I'm alive he's not". Dennis Healey's line about Geoffrey Howe and the dead sheep retains its surreal fascination. Everyone who knew her agrees that Margaret Thatcher not only never told jokes - she literally didn't understand them either. This is a rare and worrying quality in anyone. She uttered the line that gave the show its name and didn't see why people laughed.

Gosh! I say!

Years ago a female colleague pointed out to me that women who'd had facelifts tended to look perpetually surprised. If you're watching Wimbledon, I'd be interested in your view of the Sue Barker situation.

Let's hear it for Harumphrys!

There ought to be more radio like John Humphrys' series of reports on social mobility on this week's Today Programme. Humphreys is one of the last of a breed who will probably be professionally extinct in ten years: people who have reached great eminence in British life despite leaving school at fifteen and starting work as an office junior.
He goes back to the poor area of Cardiff where he was brought up and on to the council estates of Middlesbrough and finds that, despite huge amounts of investment, hundreds of well intentioned "initiatives" and the energetic efforts of our educational institutions, a child from a poor background is now less likely to "get on" than at any point in his lifetime.
Unlike your average guilt-ridden middle class BBC reporter, what Humphrys is not afraid to bring out is that some people don't want to better themselves because they can get by on benefits and anyway it's all the immigrants' fault.
What he probably won't bring out, because his antennae aren't adjusted that way, is that we live in a Culture of Display and as long as the kids in the underclass have the same iPods, mobile phones and fashionable clothes as the kids in the middle class, they've got even less to "aspire" to.

Guardian magazines column

You won't find an executive in British magazines who doesn't believe that in the near future 30% of publishing revenues will come from digital ventures. But neither will you find one prepared to tell you precisely how that 30% will be achieved or give you a definition of "near future".
Read it in full here.

That Glastonbury report in full

Just been and got the son and heir from the tube station. Looked like he'd been paintballing for a month. Quote: "There were some good bands but if you can't sit down for three days it's not worth it."

Up to their necks in muck and Monkeys

We have had one brief phone contact with our son since he left for Glastonbury on Thursday night. He was on a coach that was supposed to leave London at five in the afternoon. It was delayed so long that he ended up pitching his tent at four on Friday morning. He's supposed to leave there at 2.a.m. tomorrow morning. According to the report we've had from a friend who's just returned from their first Glastonbury visit, it's chaos at the site and he'll probably be a good deal later than planned. Mark's texts have been unfailingly upbeat - and he went with flu! (I would expect nothing less.) He'd bumped into some young friends who had been unable to find their tent one night and had instead just occupied somebody else's. My guess is that when our son does come back he will have been standing up for four days straight. He will then compensate for this by lying down for four days straight.

The Way They Were

"Last Orders" the movie is, if anything, better than "Last Orders" the book. For a start you can keep track of the characters. It's interesting for anyone studying good looks. Whereas Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins and Tom Courtenay never traded much on their looks, David Hemmings had the blazing eyes back in the ’60s when he played Nolan in "The Charge Of The Light Brigade".
These days he looks like a man who's recently woken after a thirty year party.
There's a lot of flashback in "Last Orders". Nolan Hemmings, who is named after his father's character, plays Lenny as a young man. The young Helen Mirren is played by Kelly Reilly, who is photographed in such a way that she is actually distractingly beautiful. Helen Mirren is a powerfully attractive woman but you can't buy the idea that at the age of 19 she looked like this.

Nation shall flog tat to nation

I've just noticed that the mission statement of BBC Worldwide, which is, they confess, "the commercial arm of the BBC", goes as follows:
"Entertaining the world. Bringing value to the BBC".
I love these little mottos because they're often trying to claim one thing while concealing another.
This is a classic. The first sentence suggests that, like St Francis of Assisi or Medicins Sans Frontieres, they are driven by a desire to ease the pain, suffering and long winter evenings of a significant number of God's creatures. The second suggests they're not actually earning vast sums of money out of DVDs of The Office or Archers tea towels. What they're actually doing is more like a form of charity work that helps defray some of the running expenses of their venerable parent organisation. Bit like a bring & buy sale at your local church.

I could write like this - I just don't feel like it

Anthony Lane on Angelina Jolie in the current New Yorker:
"Official estimates as to how many children Jolie now possesses, and from how many continents, change on a weekly basis. When not giving birth herself, she likes to order in. How this has affected Mr. Pitt is unclear, but his expression is sometimes that of a man who stepped out to hail a cab and got run over by a fleet of trucks."

Living In The Past

Most extraordinary outdoor musical event of the summer has to be Lovebox in Victoria Park. If the posters on the Tube are anything to go by they've got more acts than all the other events put together. Which is fine and I hope the sun shines on them.
What I don't understand is how Sly and The Family Stone get to be top of the bill on the Saturday night. For about three years at the turn of the 60s Sly Stone made wonderful records, but ever since he decided to get married on stage at Madison Square Garden he's been pretty much barking. His appetite for drugs is well documented and he hasn't plinked out a note of consequence since 1973. His behaviour for the last forty years has re-defined "erratic". Promoters in the US stopped using him when Richard Nixon was President because, well, mostly he didn't turn up.
There have been sad attempts to get back to the garden across the years, most recently a Grammy Awards appearance in 2006 where he could only bring himself to stay on stage for three minutes. One can only surmise that the reason some loon has decided to pay him good money to allegedly appear at Victoria Park is because his lack of activity has lent lustre to his legend and, as is the case of Brian Wilson, there are people who will pay to see a casualty provided they can see that casualty through the smoke and mirrors of mystique.
Sly had one brief shining moment at Woodstock. We were all fortunate that the cameras were there to record it. The idea that anyone still believes it will be re-created 40 years later is desperately sad.

Ways to waste your time

Over at Word we're looking for examples of thing that would have been unimaginable twenty years ago. Examples? Shirley Bassey at Glastonbury. A ban on smoking in public places. Michael Jackson being potless. That kind of thing. And while I'm in plugging mode there's an excellent radio documentary about smoking and popular culture you can listen again to here. As usual I'm Voice of Rock.

Sohemian Rhapsody

There's always an evening out you've never had before. Last night Keith and I went to The Wheatsheaf in what used to be called Fitzrovia for an event organised by The Sohemian Society to mark the re-publication of Patrick Hamilton's Gorse Trilogy. Nigel Jones, who wrote a biography of Hamilton which is now sadly out of print, spoke and a couple of actors, one dressed up as a lounge bar cad from the era of rationing, read from Hamilton's works. It was in an upstairs room full of the kind of people who can read a book in a day. But then there were a few sorts whose carefully selected clothing - a pork pie hat here, a trilby there - suggested the desire to live in a Soho that actually disappeared thirty years ago. One of them was carrying a ukulele.

Fill Your Head With Rock

Five Live are asking listeners to vote for the key record of the Tony Blair era, illustrated by a picture of him playing the guitar left handed. The top ten you can choose from includes: The Verve, Robbie Williams, Kaiser Chiefs, Arctic Monkeys, Coldplay, James Blunt, David Gray, Oasis, Franz Ferdinand and the Libertines. I am genuinely amazed that none of the diversity advisers that the BBC has invested in over the last ten years has thought fit to point out to them that there's nothing there by anyone who isn't white and male. I'm not suggesting that there should be a quota system but this reeks of somebody's cloth-eared idea of what constitutes "proper music by people who can play their instruments, like". Dizzee Rascal? The Streets? Girls Aloud? Jamelia? Amy Winehouse? Lily Allen? The Chemical Brothers? Damn this indie-rock orthodoxy! It's more suffocating than the old Light Programme.

Detail, people, detail!

This picture appears among the NME's coverage of the Muse shows at the weekend. The caption says "fans waiting for Muse". Did nobody think it worth pointing out that the woman third from the right is presumably somebody's Mum? Did nobody think that was interesting? Bloody hell, boys, let's not forget that we're here to keep the ball in the air.

The Noise of Summer

The Boy was out last night practising erecting his Glastonbury tent in the back garden. Today he will continue to comb London for size 10 wellies. The Career Girl was at Wireless in Hyde Park on Sunday watching the Kaiser Chiefs and hundreds of other contemporary acts that I have trouble telling apart. The Young One, now alarmingly fifteen, was at Wembley on Sunday watching Muse from a distant postal code. She loved it but it was more to do with the excitement of being among that many people than the music. They're not particularly rock and roll offspring. Certainly not compared to my mates' kids. None of them have even thought about forming a band, for instance, and neither have they threatened to adopt a music-inspired haircut. It's just that going to the giant open air gig has become the thing that everybody has to do. I got through the whole of the 60s, the 70s (apart from one work connected day at Reading and a few Hyde Parks and Knebworths, which don't really count), the 80s and the 90s without going near a festival. I still feel that rock and roll is better when there's a roof over its head. I go to Cornbury and enjoy it but the music is the least important element. I've had many great days at the Test Match where I couldn't tell you a thing about the play.

Nation shall read Wikipedia to nation

"He is known for collaborations with artists such as Pat Metheny and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead." That's the BBC website tonight on Ornette Coleman who has collapsed at a music festival at the age of 77. The BBC website really has become the toothless mouthpiece of the conventional wisdom, up to here with words written by people with not the remotest understanding of the subjects they're called upon to update us on, all delivered in a language which is half Daily Mail gossip page and half Wikipedia. I know a little about Ornette Coleman but I was not even aware that he'd played with Jerry Garcia, let alone that he was "known" for it. Presumably had he not played with a few white guys who had at one time or another flitted across the night time sky of the writer's cavernous ignorance and then, when he was no longer any threat to anyone, been given a lifetime's achievement Grammy for outliving his peers, he would have been "unknown". Why can't these clowns speak the truth? We've just read an agency report about some weird old jazz guy who's collapsed in the states. Black, apparently. Never mind. On Radio Two a bunch of hamfisted British bands are remaking Sergeant Pepper.

I beg to differ

"In 1997, Radiohead released OK Computer and, in one blow, killed Britpop."
This is the banner headline on the BBC website this evening. (Things must be slow over there.)
Assuming that Britpop was a genre of pop music, following it with the even bigger assumption that one record is ever enough to shift the tectonic plates and then topping it off with the giant leap of faith involved in convincing yourself that Radiohead's "Ok Computer" meant much to anyone outside a narrow section of the population, is it not the case that no genre has ever been killed? Everything just goes on forever.
It's about time we blew the whistle on this linear view of pop history. It gets on my wick.