Is this Johann Hari business the death rattle of the old way?

I wonder if this current to-do about Johann Hari using quotes from previously published sources in interviews is one of the dying twitches of traditional journalism. If I've understood it correctly he inserts quotes from elsewhere if they seem to make the point better than the interviewee did when his own recording machine was turned on.

I'm sure the interviewee doesn't mind this because it makes him sound more eloquent. The reader probably doesn't mind either because for them clarity is all. But I think most journalists would consider this sharp practice, particularly if the quotes are not flagged up with something like "as he said in an earlier interview". He may well have said it but the fact is he didn't say it to you.

Interviewing is like fishing. Sometimes you get a bite. Most of the time you don't. In fact increasingly you're going to a lake that has been intensively fished for some time before you got there. Interviewees don't have an endless supply of original things to say. Mostly what you get is what they've been saying to the person who interviewed them half an hour ago. You may get a slight variation but the essence remains the same. All that makes your encounter distinct is your ability to write a more nuanced account.

The current pretence that each encounter is in some way exclusive is dear to the hearts of editors and journalists, who think of themselves as competing in the traditional fashion. The new way, in which all information and opinion merges into one giant Wiki, is the way of the future. And where do big-name columnists and the newspapers who pay them stand in that world?

People in glass houses have difficulty re-engineering their businesses

Whiskery old joke. Country bumpkin sitting on five-barred gate is asked for directions by holidaymaking couple trying to find their hotel. "Well, I wouldn't start from here," he says, which is absurd and profound at the same time.

I've been thinking of this in a week which has been dominated by stories of major media and entertainment groups spelling out their strategies. EMI is for sale once again, the Guardian and Observer are contemplating a predominantly digital future within five years, the BBC wonder whether they should close a channel or change the daytime output of BBC-2.

All of these are strategies for survival, not expansion. They're the right thoughts to be thinking. But here's the thing. All the thinking about these momentous issues is being done inside massive new architect-designed corporate HQs which have been built in the last ten or so years. The media boom of the 90s provided them with the cash to build their own temples and imbued them with the belief that the expansion would go on forever. But they never dreamed that they would be thinking such frightened thoughts inside them. Ever since these companies - and many other media and publishing firms - moved into their airy new offices they've been shedding the staff they were intended to house and looking nothing like the masters of the universe the temples were intended to exalt.

Like the man on the gate said, you wouldn't start from here.

It's the smoking ban that did for Galliano

If this does prove to be the end of John Galliano's career then he may well go down as the first victim of the disruption that the smoking ban has caused in the lives of celebrities. The facts appear to be: Galliano, while pissed, went to the outside smoking area of fashionable Paris bar La Perle and was more than unpleasant to a few other drinkers, some of whom filmed his behaviour on a mobile.

You can't do much about the behaviour but you can keep it in the family. Had it not been for the smoking ban he would have remained in the bar with his fashionable friends and not been exposed to the chance of meeting people who didn't think he was fabulous and, what's worse, might engage him in conversation. These days if you want to find a celebrity don't go looking inside places. Try instead the goods entrance of one of London's luxury hotels or the fire escape outside its most expensive restaurants. They'll be there - probably sans minder - running the risk of rubbing shoulders with chummy from the accounts department and just possibly some patient soul with a video camera from The Sun.

Why you should use your full name and nothing but your full name

Laura Kuenssberg is leaving the BBC to become the Business Editor of ITV, leading to speculation that her Twitter handle @BBCLauraK (with its 58,832 followers) may have to be changed to @ITVLauraK. I even wonder whether some enterprising soul at the independent broadcaster might have already asked the BBC how much they want for that list or whether some coding genius is working on a way that old Twitter names could be subsumed into new ones.

In the course of a long and no doubt distinguished career somebody like Kuenssberg can expect to work for many different organisations (as well quite a few that remain the same and yet change their names) so it doesn't make any sense for her to sell or lease her identity to them. It's enough to sell or lease her services.

On a less exalted level I've always told my kids that when they start work they should use their full name in every interaction. There's no use developing strong recognition as "Jane from Acme Magazines" because it's obvious that one day you won't be that any more and you'll have to start all over again, identifying yourself with some other organisation. Build your own brand. It'll last longer than theirs.

People used to go to rock festivals to escape the things they now find at rock festivals

I’ve never been a big festival goer. I watch with interest as the people I know who are big ones for Glastonbury stiffen as the big weekend approaches. In the world I inhabit, where some kind of privileged access is what people are used to, the jockeying for position started months ago. Have you got the right kind of ticket with the right kind of pass and the right access to the right car park or camp site? Have you got the right equipment? Bin bags? Wellies? Wet wipes? Plastic bottle full of ready mixed gin and tonic? Insurance? Insect spray? Anxiety pills?

I seem to remember that in the late sixties and early seventies people set off to festivals with a tenner in their pocket and a carefree skip in their stride. Nowadays they seem to take with them all the comforts and anxieties of home. A friend of a friend’s daughter turned up at Glastonbury a few years ago with a pull-along suitcase and some hair straighteners. I thought this was funny until I saw, at last year’s Latitude, a special tent where one could go and, for a fee, plug in your hair and beauty aids.

What’s even more surprising is that while the original festival goers set off to the country intent on shrugging off the hierarchies and strictures of everyday society and getting back to the garden, nowadays people go to the country in order to obey the festival organiser's rules, codes which are far more draconian and much less amenable to reason than any they would expect to deal with in their daily life. If ever you think the law of the land is unreasonable, think again. Try arguing with a festival steward over whether you’ve got the right wrist band. That’s when you learn about unreasonable authority and how a dog's obeyed in office. But nobody seems to mind. They accept it as the price of taking part. It particularly amuses me how my daughter and friends keep the wristbands on for months afterwards – as if they’d like to prolong their weekend serfdom.

The long memories of would-be rock stars

At a 60th birthday party in a suburban garden yesterday somebody uttered the words that always send a chill down the spine of this old hack.

"I was in a band once and you reviewed us."

If ever you're tempted to worry that nobody is actually paying any attention to what you write, then all you need do is make the glancing acquaintance of any musician you have ever described in less than glowing terms, no matter how long ago. They'll quote you verbatim, even, as in this case, if thirty-two years have elapsed since you loosed-off your one-liner in a singles review at the end of a no doubt trying day and thought no more of it.

Mark Hodkinson has done an excellent piece in the new issue of The Word where he finds a bunch of uncelebrated indie 45s in a record shop and goes in search of the people who made them a quarter of a century before. What he finds in almost every case is that this record was the most important episode in those people's lives.

The former musician I met at the party had a refreshingly clear-eyed view of his own distant brush with rock stardom. "As soon as we'd been on Top of The Pops, I realised it was all rubbish," he said. Most musicians you meet are not quite so reconciled. They all sport one item of clothing or jewellery which hints that, no matter how straight and settled they may appear today, there was once a time when they were on the highway to hell. They can all explain in very simple terms what deal, what TV strike, what distribution cock-up prevented them from being as successful as the handful of successful acts.

And, what's more, they're usually just about to put out a record or put together a tour. Which they hope you'll review.

Clarence Clemons and the greatest pose in rock history

The death of Clarence Clemons means that nothing can ever be quite the same any more in the world of the E Street Band. He wasn't the most original saxophonist but his playing was integral to their sound. He wasn't the most animated live performer but Springsteen gave him the starring role in the band's inner drama.

I still can't get over the fact that when it came time to shoot some pictures for Springsteen's third album "Born To Run", he just turned up at the studio of Eric Meola with Clarence. Not on his own, not with the whole band, just with Clarence. He knew what would make not just a great shot but a defining shot. Whenever you saw him live after that there would always be a moment or two when they would snap into that pose. It could be that photo session was the most important day's work he did with the band.

It's a common misconception about big rock stars that they leave all the image mongering to somebody else, that they're only interested in the music and that they're above manipulating the people around them. Not so.

The sad story of Darren Burn

I'd never heard of Darren Burn until Pete Paphides dropped in to the Word podcast to talk about his collection of old music papers. Thanks to Gavin Hogg I got hold of a DVD of the Man Alive documentary that was made about Darren in 1973. At the time he was an 11-year-old schoolboy living just up the road from where I live now and attending City of London.

His father was Colin Burn, a promotion man working for EMI. When EMI decided they needed to be competing in the Donny Osmond market Darren's mother Joanna put him forward. He could sing, he looked cute and he was a bright lad. His first single was a cover of Gene Pitney's "Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart". He was given the big label treatment, much of which was captured in John Pitman's film "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" for Man Alive.

The record wasn't a hit and Darren had to go back to school where his classmates called him "top of the flops". The Man Alive film, which is very disapproving of everyone at the record company for exploiting the child, really can't have helped. In the eighties the BBC caught up with him for a "Where Are They Now?" slot. He was unemployed and living on his own in south London. All the youthful twinkle had been replaced by a cold bitterness. He blamed his mother for using him to further her own show business ambitions. A couple of years later he was dead following an overdose of anti-depressants.

Please come along to True Stories on July 5th

True Stories Told Live started life when I was talking to Malcolm Gladwell about where he got his experience of talking in public. He told me about The Moth in New York City. "It's a load of people in a dark room drinking too much and listening to people tell stories," he said. Clearly London could do that just as well.

I talked to Kerry Shale and Kate Bland about it. Kerry's an actor, Kate's a radio producer and they're both based in Islington, which made it easy for us to meet up. I spent ages looking round at potential venues. Initially I had the idea that there must be some kind of old gentlemen's club we could use. Nothing worked. Either there were too many restrictions on use or the venues were too big, too small or too difficult to get to. I was on the points of giving up when I got an email from John Rensten who had just finished turning the Compass on the corner of Chapel Market into a pub/restaurant. I went and looked and found to my delight it had a small but pleasant room upstairs with a very basic sound system in it.

We did the first one in September 2009. I told the first story and the other "turns" were all mates that we'd cajoled into telling theirs. The audience was made up of mates of the storytellers. Since then we've done one every month, it's sprouted other True Stories events in Brighton, Cambridge, Hebden Bridge, Stroud and Cardiff and we're regularly turning away scores of people. We run it on a guest list basis. People sign up to our mailing list, we invite people to apply to come and we put together a list, mainly made up of people who've never been before. We don't want to have the same people month after month. It's not about stars, although some of the turns are well known. Imelda Staunton came to watch and said to me afterwards "this is the best night out ever." You can get a further idea here.

Apart from the warm feeling of starting something that works, why do we do it? Not for money, that's for sure. We don't charge anything for admission at The Compass and we give our time (the three of us plus Meg Rosoff) for free, as do the turns. We'd like to think that there might be a radio format in it at some stage but that's out of our hands. Because we want to get the funds we would need to improve our very basic website and also look at taking what we've learned about live storytelling into other areas like schools, we're having a fundraiser on July 5th at The Crypt in Clerkenwell. We've asked six of our favourite turns to come back and tell their stories that night. The tickets, which cost £22, include some very drinkable wine and some very cold beer.

If you've always wanted to see what TSTL is all about and been unable to get in, if you've been and feel this is something that deserves more support or if you just fancy a genuinely unique night out, which starts at 7.30 and finishes no later than 9.30, please come along. You can buy tickets on line here. Thank you.

Is Newsbeat suffering from Crowded Cabin Syndrome?

John Myers' independent report on Radios One and Two came up with one eye-catching fact. Newsbeat, Radio One's news service, employs 52 full-time staff. I've no idea how busy they all are but that figure caught my eye because it seems to demonstrate how all institutions grow first and then post-justify the increased head count.

According to my old colleague Trevor Dann, who used to be part of the management, in the 80s Newsbeat had just 15 staff. That means its staff has grown by a few hundred per cent in a period when the number of listeners has gone down by, well, quite a lot. Newspapers have responded to the same decline by shedding staff. Newsbeat seems to have gone the other way.

I'm sure you could point to lots of things that keep them all busy: the digital station that they also have to do work for, the website and the increased sophistication with which all forms of news are put together. But still that wouldn't account for a staff of 52 in what it increasingly a small-portions world. I can only assume that it's succumbed to Crowded Cabin Syndrome.

This is inspired by the scene in the Marx Brothers "A Night At The Opera" where more and more people come into the room and nobody leaves. Crowded Cabin Syndrome particularly affects the media because media folk have one key objective - staying in the media. Thus when junior employees get bored with doing mundane tasks they take on even more junior employees to perform them. Senior staff, unless they're exceptional, have nowhere else to go so they stick around longer and longer.

In the private sector this growth is reversed every few years by bankruptcy or corporate takeover. In the public it just keeps on growing until somebody commissions somebody else to write a report to tell them what they shouldn't need to be told.

My J.R. Hartley moment

I can remember most of the plays I was in at college but "Lunchtime Concert" by Olwen Wymark has slipped my mind. It was directed by Tim Evans who lives Out East nowadays and occasionally chides me on Facebook about forgetting it. The other day I was walking past French's Theatre Bookshop so I popped in and asked the young woman behind the counter, probably a drama student, if she could look it up. She looked and said it was out of print. "It was published in 1969," she said with the air of one for whom this may as well have been just after the Relief of Mafeking.

"I know," I said. "It was around that time I was in it."

She looked at me and tilted her head to one side, as one would with a very old person. "Aah," she said. "Have you tried Abe Books?"

I can imagine her meeting her boyfriend in the pub after work. At some point in the evening, when the conversation really flags, she might say "do you know, I had this old bloke in this morning and he was trying to find a script to a play he was in in 1969. Can you imagine that?"

You can take the girl out of Yorkshire and apparently take the Yorkshire out of the girl

The sculptor Barbara Hepworth came from Wakefield in Yorkshire and went to the Girls High School. At the age of 16 she went to Leeds College of Art and then on to the Royal College in London. She didn't return to Yorkshire and spent most of the rest of her life in St Ives. One thing that nobody seemed to mention when they opened the Hepworth Wakefield recently was what happened to her Yorkshire accent. Her father was a prominent civil servant and so it's likely that as a teenager she may have had a genteel Yorkshire accent but it must have been a Yorkshire accent nonetheless. It wouldn't be surprising if in the years living away the tone of her speaking voice had changed but that wouldn't account for her apparent transformation into the dowager we see and hear in this clip from 1968.

It's even more marked when you contrast with that other sculptor contemporary Henry Moore who went to school in nearby Castleford and was also at Leeds with Hepworth. His voice has obviously changed by about the same time but you can still hear the Yorkshire in it.

It's one thing to change your voice. In the case of Barbara Hepworth she seems to have adopted somebody else's entirely.

Graham Linehan was right

I've been away so I didn't hear the interview with Graham Linehan on the Today Programme which led to him accusing the BBC of promoting a style of debate where there are "no positions possible except diametrically opposed ones". I'm not sure it was wise to try to make that point in a live radio programme but I do sympathise with his point of view. I've been amazed at how often I get rung up to offer some anodyne views on some release or anniversary to find that the BBC have also lined up somebody whose job it is to oppose me. "On the other line, here's somebody who doesn't think Bob Dylan should have a 70th birthday" - that kind of thing.

I suppose it's inevitable that in radio and TV they confuse drama with debate. That's why I never watch programmes like Question Time. They're all about what Matthew Parris calls "boo words and hooray words". Boo words are spoken by boo people. Hooray words are spoken by hooray people. I'm particularly glad that I didn't watch last night's show in which Germaine Greer made some remarks about a link between girls' talent for flirtation and their relationship with their fathers. This seems like the kind of observation which would be almost commonplace if made round the average suburban dinner party table. It only becomes incendiary once it's voiced in the adversarial bear pit that TV favours. I don't get indignant or energised when I hear people being shouted down. I'm just embarrassed for all of us.

TV and radio don't care whether the debate creates any light. Just as long as it creates some heat.

How to write

Found this little gem in a New Yorker piece about the value of a college education. It comes from Professor X, the author of “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower”, which is about the difficulties of trying to get non-academic students to perform traditional academic tasks such as writing essays.

“I have come to think that the two most crucial ingredients in the mysterious mix that makes a good writer may be (1) having read enough throughout a lifetime to have internalized the rhythms of the written word, and (2) refining the ability to mimic those rhythms.”

Seems as good a working definition as I've ever heard.

A Low Expectation Holiday

We've just come back from five days on Harris in the outer Hebrides. I often fantasise about starting a travel firm called Low Expectation Holidays. It would offer things like: mooching tours round military cemeteries in Flanders during February, days spent wandering round sites loosely associated with the Beatles, drives through the featureless industrial wastes of New Jersey and short trips to the Hebrides. My target demographic would be glass half-full people, the kind of people who treat good weather as a pleasant bonus rather than a civil right. This is the way you have to approach the Hebrides. When the sun does shine up there, people say, "why can't it be like this all the time?" The obvious answer to that is that if it were sunny all the time it would be overrun with tourists from all over the world and would no longer offer the peace and solitude that makes it so precious.

Even six year olds have bad days at the office

I was walking up from the station the other night when ahead of me I spied a mother in her early thirties and a girl of about six. The mother, I deduce, had just got off the train from town and was picking up the girl from a child minder and hearing about the day at school as they walked home.

The girl had blonde hair in a pony tail and was wearing a cardigan over a school summer dress. She walked with that sweet solemnity of kids that age. Mother was burdened with her own stuff plus the child's. Standard stuff. As I got closer I could hear the conversation:

Mother: So why did the teacher get cross?

Child: (inaudible)

Mother: And did Robert get into trouble too?

Child: (even less audible)

Mother: And what about Kirsty? Was she told off as well?

Child: (not even a bat could have heard what she said but she was clearly saying something and breathing quite hard)

Mother: So why didn't you explain? She would have understood.

By this time I had drawn level and was overtaking. I looked across at this little girl's face and saw a look I've seen occasionally in the past on the faces of my own children when they were little. It indicates that something had snapped that day in the child's fragile ecosystem, somebody had spoken sharply to someone who wasn't used to being spoken sharply to, it was all a terrible misunderstanding and all of a sudden black uncertainty had darkened the normally sunny, carefree disposition of a small child

I found that looking at that girl's expression upset me far more now than it ever used to do at the time. I wanted to put my arm round her and give her a squeeze. Knowing how the smallest things loom large for young kids it wouldn't have done any good at all. It would have made me feel better. Are these the first pangs of a potential grandfather?

75% of footballers play away

Once the current fuss about super injunctions has died down and we realise we have built a world where the tabloid newspapers suddenly look like models of restraint next to Twitter Nation, we should think about this. Given the recent revelations about carnal actitivy on the far side of the red rope, does it not seem likely that a working majority of rich, famous and fit young men must at one time or another have been unfaithful to their partners, whether married or not?

It doesn't matter what figure you put on it - I think 75% would be realistic, 90% not impossible, 25% laughably naive - it seems childish to think that they're not. Footballers, actors, rock stars, deejays, TV personalities - they're all bundles of hormones and ego. They also don't have to go far to be surrounded by young women happy to help them discharge some of that fissile matter. Some of them do it all the time. Some of them stray occaionally. Hardly any are innocent.

I've met hundreds of rock stars and would swear on a stack of Bibles that at least 90% of them have been unfaithful. And if you don't believe me, go and ask anyone who's been married to them. They consider their promiscuity a fact of life. So why are we so outraged? What we think of their lifestyle weighs about as heavily as what we think about China's environmental policy and is about as likely to bring about a change. In fact it says a lot for our credulousness that we are shocked when details occasionally finds their way into the daylight.

Maybe we only pretend to be shocked because we like to pretend to be disgusted. It makes us feel superior. It's no use asking them to grow up. They don't have to. We're the ones who should grow up. The sooner we stop pretending to be shocked the sooner the problem may go away.

What the Queen could teach the Obamas

I note that Michelle Obama is due to visit the school across the road from the office again. When she first came, soon after they moved into the White House, hundreds of local people waited patiently at the top of Chapel Market to see her. If you know the area you'll realise that it's not the kind of place where people normally turn out for public figures. After three quarters of an hour a motorcade appeared made up of blacked-out vehicles, most of which were duplicates of the one behind. It drove straight into the school gates. The waiting crowd saw literally nothing.

Around about the same time I was walking through Green Park one summer evening when I arrived at the Mall to find that the police had stopped the traffic because the Queen was going from Buckingham Palace to Lancaster House. I waited, completely on my own, on the pavement as a couple of outriders drove ahead of a large limousine with the royal standard on top. It was one of those vehicles which has been designed so that the people outside it can see the people in it. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh smiled at me – not at a crowd but at me – and waved. I smiled and waved back.

All heads of state are equally concerned about security. But all heads of state also have a duty to be seen. It seems the Queen understands this better than the Obamas.

The pathetically grateful interviewer

It's not surprising that a fashion writer from the Daily Telegraph is so star-stuck when meeting Kate Moss that she files a piece that reads like an over-excited text between teenage girls. One of its more coherent lines, as she describes a brief roundtable chat with a couple of overseas journalists, is "I am standing in front of Kate!"

There's always a tendency with these kind of encounters to describe the drama of the meeting rather than to relate anything that happens to be said. The PR is always "harassed", the subject is always "running late" and room is usually found for the line "and with that she was gone". We'd better get ready for a lot more of this kind of thing as celebrities find they can get by without the press and brands like Mango take their advertising budget and give it instead to somebody like Kate Moss.

However, if the BBC's Andrew Marr is to be given only eighteen minutes to interview the President of the United States, I'm not sure I wish to be made aware of it - not to the extent of reading a piece on the BBC website about just how nervous the interviewer was beforehand and how relieved he was that it turned out OK in the end. What is this? Jackie?

Talent borrows, genius steals - and sometimes it's a Big Job

This afternoon, while recording a Word podcast to mark Bob Dylan's 70th, we were talking about the lines that he borrowed from other songs and how the images that seemed to spring from his psychedelic imagination were often flown in from earlier traditions. An instance is the line about "the railroad men drink up your blood like wine" from "Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again" which he got from Bascom Lamar Lunsford's 1924 song "I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground" which contained the lines "'Cause a railroad man they'll kill you when he can/And drink up your blood like wine."

When I was at school I learned T.S. Eliot's "Journey Of The Magi", which begins:

A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.

Reading Adam Nicholson's excellent book God's Secretaries about the men who made the King James Bible I learned that one of their leaders was Lancelot Andrewes who preached a sermon one Christmas Day in the early 17th century which began with these lines:

"A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, the very dead of winter."

Eliot didn't try to pass this off as his own but nonetheless starting his poem with it, and such a large chunk of it, got him off the mark and provided the rhythm that makes the poem work. I wonder whether he blushed as he read it back. Probably not. Think I'll start doing the same.