If you're going to make up quotes, don't make up Dylan quotes

I see another smart young writer from a smart publication has been caught misrepresenting quotes, this time from Bob Dylan. That's never a good idea.

Jonah Lehrer claimed that the quotes came from an unreleased interview done for the film No Direction Home. He said that he'd been given access to this by Jeff Rosen, who is not so much Dylan's manager as his Boswell. An experienced editor would have raised an eyebrow at this point because this kind of thing doesn't happen.

Oddly enough, while artists and their representatives rarely complain about being misquoted, their most devoted fans are often the first to smell a rat. It's these people that Lehrer should have been worried about because they know the most and care the most.

I interviewed Bob Dylan in 1986 for a magazine which was yet to be announced. I got back from New York later that week and was accosted, at a press event, by somebody who said "I understand you interviewed Bob Dylan on Tuesday night".

That was my first meeting with the late John Bauldie, at the time Britain's leading "Bobcat". I was spooked by the fact that he knew. However the more I learned about John's world - and this was in the days before the web accelerated the sharing of information between like minds - the more I realised that there are some artists who are not so much followed as stalked. Dylan is foremost among that group. The stalkers may not know everything straightaway but they get to know everything eventually. Lehrer should have picked somebody else.

A big thank you to the people who sat out last night's show

We watched last night's opening ceremony thanks to the hospitality of the German family holidaying next door to us in Brittany. I managed to stop myself saying, forgive the sentimentality but public displays of national characteristics don't come naturally to us.

I'm told Danny Boyle removed half an hour from the running order just last week, which must have been heartbreaking for those who were due to take part and didn't. However in the end it was the ruthless pacing of the whole thing that made it work so brilliantly. Nothing lingered long enough to become boring. The hits were coming so thick and fast I was leaning towards the screen for fear of missing anything.

It seemed like a bit of a triumph to me, for which we have to thank Danny Boyle, his celeb wranglers, all those volunteers and, most of all, the people who were in the half hour that was cut. They're the ones who made the biggest difference.

Why Hilary Mantel's books aren't historical fiction at all

What I like about historical novels is the feeling of god-like superiority that comes from knowing things that the characters don't yet know. I've just come from reading Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger, set in the slave trade of the 18th century, and Ian Pears' An Instance Of The Fingerpost which is wrapped up in the scientific discoveries of the late 17th, to Hilary Mantel's chest-thumping Bring Up The Bodies, which is all about Thomas Cromwell and Ann Boleyn.

In the first two books you feel your knowledge of the way things turned out might give you an advantage over the key characters. Not so Thomas Cromwell. The character in Mantel's book has burrowed so far into the hearts of men that, even with the advantage of a further 500 years of history, you suspect you really couldn't tell him anything at all.

Fraser Lewry, the digital Jeeves

Closing a magazine is one thing. Closing its accompanying web site is another, particularly one as dependent on its users as The Word blog. It would have been rude to have abruptly unplugged the jukebox, flicked on the strip lighting and ushered people towards the car park. Instead we gave the hard-core site users a couple of weeks to make alternative arrangements to move the community to a new site.

Many and tearful were the tributes to the oasis of civility which had been built here over the last few years. That garden has been tended 365 days a year, sometimes from distant tyrannies with indifferent internet access, by Fraser Lewry.

If you thought this job called for technical competence you'd be right. If you guessed that it would also suit somebody whose sense of duty didn't stop at normal office hours, you wouldn't be far off either.

What you probably underestimate is the saint-like reserves of patience it takes to run a web community, even one as generally polite as this. You only have to look at the comments on the Guardian site to see how the ownership of an internet connection has turned us into a nation of preening know-alls dispensing redundant advice at the scene of traffic accidents. There wasn't much of this on the Word site but there was some.

Every so often in the nether regions of some thread about Manic Street Preachers B-sides it would kick off. My natural instinct would be to charge in there shouting "you're barred", after the style of Al Murray. Not Fraser. Like Jeeves he was never far away. Like Jeeves he never did anything as vulgar as entering a room. Instead he would shimmer in, materialise or, when the occasion called for it, ooze.

He would keep an eye on each succeeding post - as he did every single word that was ever posted on the site - and then, judiciously picking his moment, intervene with a pithy post usually combining practical advice with, for those who had ears to hear, the distant whisper of consequences.

He rarely had to banish anyone because most regular visitors to the site had learned, as the rest of us in the office had learned, that you shouldn't get on the wrong side of Fraser. That's because the very few people who are on the wrong side of Fraser have one important thing in common. They're wrong.

Can a chipmunk derail the Wrecking Crew?

It's three years since I blogged about music doc "The Wrecking Crew" and it's still not released. Last night they had a screening at BAFTA. I spoke to producer Denny Tedesco about the thing that's holding it up, the slow process of getting permission to use the scores of records on the soundtrack. (There's a full list here with links to the original musicians union contracts. This is a decent Spotify playlist of the kind of records involved.)

Tedesco still needs three hundred thousand dollars to clear the hits his father and other Wrecking Crew members played on, which range from "Be My Baby" through "Mr Tambourine Man" to "California Dreaming". He's keen to stress that many people have been helpful and generous. Artists such as Herb Alpert who own their masters have granted permission. Wealthy music industry people have written cheques.

The track he's having special trouble with is, ironically enough, "The Chipmunks Theme". The Chipmunks were the invention of Ross Bagdasarian who had some hits at the end of the 50s by speeding up his voice in playback to create the sound of a pop-singing squirrel. Ross died in 1972 but his son keeps the Chipmunks franchise going. In 2000 he and his wife sued Universal Studios for $100 million for failing to properly promote the Chipmunks and thereby "destroying an American icon".

Fictional creatures always bring out the worst in people. As many lawyers have ruefully advised after going to court with the Disney Corporation, "you don't mess with the mouse."

There's a screening of "The Wrecking Crew" next Friday at the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club. Details here.

You can't take a record back once you've made it, Def Leppard

Having fallen out with their former record label Universal, Def Leppard have taken a kind of revenge by re-recording their biggest hits. They claim these versions are so close to the hit versions that even the producer of the originals, Mutt Lange, was impressed.

Down the years scores of acts have gone in for this kind of self-plagiarising. It may work for the performer, who's probably quite happy to have the chance to iron out weaknesses in the original performance. It never works for the fans because they know those records better than anyone else possibly can.

What musicians don't understand is that once a record is out there in the world it's no longer theirs. A big pop record is listened to repeatedly and internalised more completely than anything in human history. These listeners aren't aware of what went into the record but they're hyper-aware of what they got out of it. The imprint of their favourite records is something they carry deep inside. One of the reasons Paul McCartney has been able to recreate the sound of the Beatles' records on his recent tours is because his band is made up of people who grew up as Beatle fans and consequently know those records in a different way than he does.

People talk about re-recording "note-for-note" copies as if that meant we would end up with a version that would pass a blindfold test. It's not the notes we're bothered about. We don't even care whether it's the original performers. It's the record we care about. That one, not one quite like it. Our familiarity with these records goes beyond the singer and the song. I know Like A Rolling Stone or Penny Lane better than any piece of prose or any scene from a film. They're inside me. I know them in the same way that I can find my way around my house in the dark.

Def Leppard will argue these are their songs and their performances, which they are. But they're competing against the records, which actually belong to the fans.

Technology won't make football any happier

They're talking about goal-line technology again. A meeting taking place today could vote to give it a try. I don't know anything about officiating but it seems to me;

This is a game into which cheating, deception, rule-bending, intimidation, finagling and arguing black's white is hard-wired. It's coached. This is Jarndyce and Jarndyce in shorts. Nobody is interested in what's right. They're interested in what goes for them or against them. There is nothing that top managers won't do to get an inch of advantage.

In the light of this the argument advanced by the proponents of goal-line technology, that its introduction will "settle the disputes", is naive.

Furthermore, arguments on football pitches expand to fill the time available for them. If there is a stoppage during which the referee has to consult, either a person or a piece of technology, said stoppage will be used as an opportunity for further argument. If there isn't a stoppage, somebody will be arguing there should have been one.

There's only one way to run a football match and that's with one official who's the final arbiter of everything that's gone on and what should be done about it. If you open it up beyond that you're getting into questions of what happened in real life. That way madness lies.

The best thing on Radio Four at the moment

The New Elizabethans is the best thing on Radio Four at the moment. Each fifteen-minute programme (also available as a podcast) is devoted to an individual who shaped British life during the Queen's reign. If you want to argue who's on or off the 60-strong list, it's here. I see Lennon and McCartney are treated as one person, which is about right.

The composition of the list is less interesting than the programmes themselves, which are authored pieces by James Naughtie. They drop in a little archive from time to time but mostly it's just Naughtie describing the things that made these people exceptional.

It's one of those programmes that should be forced on eighteen-year-olds during "reading week". There were just six people at the third performance of Pinter's Birthday Party. Edmund Hillary had to spend the first two hours of the morning of the assault on Everest holding his boots over a fire to thaw them out. When Benjamin Britten died in 1976 the story led the BBC news.

But it goes further than that. Naughtie manages to weave fact and observation together: Pinter's dialogue has a "fugue-like structure", Alfred Hitchcock was never happier than when "managing disturbance and alarm" and Phillip Larkin's poems were imbued with "the lurking fear of inadequacy and discovery".

I've learned to dread that change of gear which announces that somebody who usually presents the news is about to tell us what's in their heart. I can't even get on with From Our Own Correspondent. The "colour" is always laid in great primary slabs and the reporter seems in too much of a hurry to get on side with the good guys.

Naughtie's different. Like the best teachers he's at his most appealing when you get him off the thing he's supposed to be teaching you, in his case the news. Most news presenters sound very shaky once they're off the script. Naughtie on the other hand sounds as if he could keep his end up in a conversation about sport or soap opera or the Booker prize. I'm sure he had to do a lot of mugging up before writing the scripts for this series. But I like to think it was just revision. That's what makes the difference.

Sometimes the Stones surpassed the old masters

In yesterday's Times Richard Hawley said that the Chuck Berry original of Around and Around "pisses on the Stones version from a massive height". He's making a point about them trying to copy something and ending up with something of their own. This is valid but he's picked a rotten example. The Rolling Stones' Around And Around is far better than Chuck Berry's original. It has an electricity that Chuck's doesn't. It has a rhythm guitar, which Chuck's doesn't. It's sung from the point of view of an 18-year-old who doesn't want the night to end. Chuck on the other hand seems to be checking his watch. Look. He put it on a B-side.

I once sat on a panel at an American university talking about the British Invasion. The American rock critic Robert Christgau said that the early r&b cover versions of the Stones were terrible but they had "ironic distance". Simon Frith, who was on the same panel, leaned towards me and said "I think they were trying to make the best sound they could". I agreed. At the time it was one of the best sounds I'd ever heard in my life. It still is.

What closing a magazine tells you about why you had to close a magazine

We had to close The Word yesterday. We'd told the team the day before. All that remained was to announce it to the readers, advertisers and other interested parties.

Not long ago this would have meant a call to Media Guardian. There would have been some bargaining over exclusivity. A press release would have been sent. There would have been a tense wait to see whether the story was treated sympathetically or shoehorned into a larger narrative. Then you would hope that your readers and interested parties happened to read Media Guardian.

This is what actually happened. Before I went to the office I posted a statement explaining the closure on the Word website. Then I tweeted saying that the magazine was closing in both mine and the magazine's account. This linked to my statement.

By the time I got to work forty minutes later the story was everywhere. The Word site had fallen over twice through weight of traffic. People I hadn't seen for years were in touch. Slower ones were told about it by relatives in China. Media Guardian were on the phone, chasing after the conversation that they once would have started.

People love a funeral and in the digital age they don't even have to dress for it. This funeral was even more attractive because the deceased was there to hear what was said about them. The words of tribute were kindly meant but sometimes over the top. A surprising number of them were laced with anger. Surely somebody must be to blame for this. Somebody suggested getting up a petition, which made me wonder who they would present it to. Others seemed to hint at a wider tragedy about the decline and fall of so-called intelligent debate. Speaking as one who's played that card occasionally when in a tight spot this kind of forehead-smiting, woe-is-us reaction is, to use the adjective of our times, "inappropriate".

Here's what I learned yesterday. The speed with which this item of news spread and became a news event in which people could happily participate and the "disintermediation", to use a jargon word, of the traditional news outlets was a live demonstration of the same forces which mean you can't publish magazines, or indeed anything, the way you once did.

Even the most established and successful ones are having to go about it in a different way. The boss of Hearst Magazines in the United States said recently that all magazines needed to have five revenue streams. They used to have two. It was hard enough to get those.

The organs of the media once sat athwart the roads down which information travelled, charging readers a premium for access to information they couldn't get elsewhere, and advertisers for access to readers they couldn't identify any more precisely.

That doesn't apply anymore. Both readers and advertisers have got hundreds of choices and they use them, which is fine. I don't yearn for the old days. I think the new wide open media world is more interesting and fun than the old one. But I also wouldn't be surprised to see any media enterprise - from massive household name newspaper brands to tiny ones like The Word - shut their doors tomorrow. I wouldn't bat an eyelid.

We don't talk anymore but TV drama never stops

In the opening scene of Aaron Sorkin's new drama The Newsroom the hero Jeff Daniels is asked by a college student why America is the greatest country in the world. In the course of launching into an attack on the assumptions implicit in her question and pointing out, in great statistical detail, all the many ways in which America no longer fits the bill, he almost makes her cry.

Obviously it's fiction. I'm starting to wonder if it's also something more. The popular TV writers of today, exemplified by Sorkin in his way and Armando Iannucci in his, always put torrents of words into their characters' mouths. Their dramas are all words. They have so many words to get through that they have to bustle down corridors in flying-V formations as they debate complex moral points. They often stand in open offices directing open abuse to each other. They say what they mean at the top of their voice. They demand that everyone listens to them.

That's not how life is today. In the real 2012 anything that matters is confined to an email or a text. In business meetings people avoid saying what they think, often because they aren't entirely sure what they think and they're terrified at the prospect of getting out of step with the group.

Many of these shows, such as The Good Wife and Mad Men, are set in workplaces, which seem to offer endless scope for drama - the board meeting, the problem in reception, the late night heart to hearts over the bottle of Scotch in the filing cabinet.

In fact places of work have never been quieter or more decorous than they are today. There's very little drinking or fornication going on in today's office. There are less open arguments than there were in the 70s. People steer clear of anything personal because they know that a free and frank exchange of views might land them in a disciplinary procedure. When they use expletives it's usually in an affectionate way.

Maybe the oratorical flights of President Jed Bartlett in The West Wing and the gothic abuse dished out by Malcolm Tucker in The Thick Of It are compensation for the tongue-tied timidity we see around us every day. They're a form of wish fulfilment, doing for middle aged men of leftish views what Harry Potter does for ten year old boys, allowing them to believe that if they could only come up with the right zinger they could make the world do their bidding.

There's nothing essentially wrong with that as long as they understand that it's no more authentic an account of human behaviour than The Ring Cycle.

You can see some of the Newsroom scene here.

It's surprising how boring great football can be

I've read a few accounts of last night's game in the sports pages of the broadsheets. They haven't used the word that most people I know were using about it. Boring.

This was the match we were all supposed to be looking forward to. It was the one that was most keenly anticipated by those who talk about football as if it's art, who talk about "Meelan" and "Barsa", who speak in formations and say players and managers have "a body of work".

Spain were the superior side. Their superiority was manifest in the way they got the ball and kept it, making France run until they looked tired, demoralised and eventually as bored as the rest of us.

When there's no contest you look for entertainment in goals, which is the usual outcome of a one-sided contest. After the game Roberto Martinez actually said that Spain weren't all that bothered about goals. They looked slightly embarrassed by the second one, a penalty in the last few minutes, as if they didn't need anything quite so vulgar as a two-nil scoreline to prove their superiority.

There was lots of very fine football played, most of it by Spain. What was missing was drama. Given a choice between football and drama, I'll take drama every time.

Hip hop is just a noise

Yesterday I bumped into a distinguished academic. He was on his way to record an item for the Today programme about whether rap music had a corrosive effect on society. He was going to argue that rap was all part of a rich tradition of words. Similarly, Annie Nightingale is in The Times this morning talking up Radio One's Hackney show and saying that Plan B is "a brilliant wordsmith".

Hip hop, if we can call it that, certainly features a lot of words but it isn't about words so much as sound and that sound comes from the way it's done. This music and all the variants that have come along in the last thirty or so years is about hooks, drama, personality, comedy, sex, tone of voice, anything it takes to achieve the required air of sad swagger. That's why in all those thirty years it hasn't really produced a single worthwhile song, not in the sense of one that you could sit down and play. That's why live performances of hip hop always look like a bit of an afterthought.

Fifty years ago they used to have the same arguments about Bob Dylan. Was he a poet or just a noise? This was the wrong question, the same wrong question they now ask about rap. As a poet Dylan was mediocre. As a noise he was immense.

Brian Wilson and the best opening line in pop

Brian Wilson's 70 today. My favourite Beach Boys record is "Don't Worry Baby" from 1964 because "Don't Worry Baby" has the best opening line in pop.

"Well, it's been building up inside of me for, oh, I don't know how long..."

If you know this record at all that line has probably been embedded in your memory since the first time you heard it, so perfectly do its seventeen syllables carry the tune. (Presumably he needed seventeen. That's why he puts an "of" between "inside" and "me".) In later years Wilson chased complication for its own sake. In "Don't Worry Baby" he was simply expressing in music the feelings of a young man whose heart was so full it hurt.

Wilson wrote the song with Roger Christian, a DJ who specialised in words for songs about cars. Presumably it's Roger we should thank for lines like "And if that ain't enough to make you flip your lid/ There's one more thing, I've got the pink slip, Daddy" in "Little Deuce Coupe". Christian could have come up with that first line. I doubt it. It wouldn't be hooky or detailed enough for a wordsmith. Wordsmiths read words. Musicians hear the sounds they make. Whenever a musician wants to bring another artist's song into conversation he'll quote it by singing a snatch of it. That's how he remembers it. A songwriter's job is to make sure you can never hear it any other way. With "Don't Worry Baby" Brian Wilson nailed it, as they say on The X Factor.

Do all men become their scrotums?

When David Hockney met WH Auden he remarked "if his face is like that, imagine what his scrotum is like". It's an apocryphal tale. Hockney's not denying it. The story was in Alan Bennett's play The Habit Of Art and it's repeated in Paul Johnson's "Brief Lives", which I've just been reading.

Johnson adds that the lines on Auden's face were connected with his smoking. I've never heard this one before, though I do know that line of George Orwell's about a man at fifty having the face he deserves.

The late George Melly remarked on the wrinkles on the face of Mick Jagger, possibly in this famous picture by Jane Bown, prompting somebody to say they were "just laughter lines".

"Laughter lines?" said George. "Nothing's that funny."

P.S. In Viv Stanshall's Sir Henry At Rawlinson End the hero is attended by Scrotum The Wrinkled Retainer. This is still a good joke.

A day in the life of 23-year-old James Paul McCartney

He's 70 today. For a reminder of his range, look at what he did on June 14th 1965.

On that day the Beatles recorded three songs at Abbey Road. In the first session, which began at 2:30 and finished three hours later, they did "I've Just Seen A Face", an up-tempo, almost Western Swing pop tune, and "I'm Down", a larynx-shredding stormer in the Little Richard mould. In the second session, which began at 7:00, he recorded the acoustic ballad "Yesterday".

He wrote, arranged and sang lead on all three. You're welcome to find other examples of artists recording three songs as different, memorable and enduring as these in the same afternoon and evening. Take your time.

Country music knows that Father's Day is changing

I'm listening to the new record by Kenny Chesney and quite enjoying it. I'll be honest. These arena country stars are much of a muchness to me but every now and then one of their songs strikes a chord. This happens because country is the only branch of pop music that really knows how its audience's lives change.

Track eight on Welcome To The Fishbowl is probably going to be a Father's Day favourite for the future.

It's callled "While He Still Knows Who I Am". You can probably imagine how it goes.

Why bands will never again change their names

In 1966 something happened in pop music that hadn't happened before, hasn't happened since and probably won't happen again in the future.

Lots of groups changed their names. They did it more or less simultaneously.

They did it to give themselves a fresh start, to signal the fact that they were bands rather than groups and to announce which side they were on in the cultural revolution of the late 60s.

As usual, this sudden overthrow of the old order was swiftly followed by the establishment of a newer, more rigid one.

Their old group names had consisted of the definite article followed by a plural noun. Buddy Holly's group The Crickets had begun this trend in the 50s. The Beatles modelled their name on the Crickets. Everybody else fell in behind.

Few of the new, post-1966 band names were plurals. They were often a concrete noun with a modifying adjective that was slightly unusual or, as we might say today, inappropriate.

In this way, the Human Beans became Love Sculpture, the Pigeons turned into Vanilla Fudge, the Ingoes became Blossom Toes, The Action became Mighty Baby and the Screaming Abdabs were reborn as Pink Floyd. The last was an example of taking something from the real world (the blues musicians Pink Anderson and Floyd Council) and bending it to achieve the desired air of meaninglessness.

The Warlocks adopted the words The Grateful Dead from a book. As did the Wilde Flowers when they turned into Soft Machine.

Sometimes the change was suggested by the record company. Fantasy owner Saul Zaentz didn't want a group called The Golliwogs and told them to come up with ten alternatives. He picked the first one, the entirely meaningless Creedence Clearwater Revival.

The Ashes were encouraged to restyle themselves as the Peanut Butter Conspiracy so that their first album could be called The Peanut Butter Conspiracy Is Spreading.

Round about the same time, in a fictional dimension, the self-explanatory Thamesmen became the puzzling Spinal Tap.

Most of the acts who changed their names hadn't made enough of a name to risk a great deal in the changing. The same didn't apply to the proven musicians who played in the popular road bands of the mid-60s. Zoot Money's Big Roll Band were re-badged as Dantalion's Chariot. A few years later Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers became Toe Fat and Simon Dupree and the Big Sound was reborn as Gentle Giant.

At the same time The Beatles were retiring, chummy name and all. How would they have got on with that name if they'd still been going in the mid-70s? Maybe not so well. There are plenty of excellent groups from the 60s whose names made them seem dated in the 70s: The Zombies, The Hollies and Pretty Things never prospered as much as they deserved in the new world of puzzling names and opaque song titles.

This naming revolution has never been repeated. Since 1966 nobody has dared to re-badge themselves quite as boldly and as touchingly as those groups did at the time. Many groups have toyed with the idea of reappearing in a new guise. By now most of them know that their name is actually their fortune.

The acts who took on the new name in 1966 probably weren't thinking it would last them more than a few years. They didn't think *they* would last more than a few years.

You can't imagine it happening today. Even a middling band isn't going to radically change their name. That would mean admitting that they want a new image. It would be letting daylight in on magic, admitting that the whole idea of bands as gangs is just a ruse. Nobody renames a gang. It can't start again.

Renaming a band means you have to admit that the name you had before wasn't right, that it didn't match your aspirations. It attracts the question all Englishmen dread the most - who do you think you are?

One thing a magazine app can't do

The new Vanity Fair has one of their "more stars than there are in heaven" picture spectaculars, this time to mark the 100th anniversary of Paramount Pictures. Problem with these things nowadays is that Photoshop post-production is so capable that even things that were done for real look at least a bit faked.

It's also a clear case of paper doing something that a screen can't. I grabbed the above from the app. You can pinch and zoom all you like but this is one of those cases where the interface between hand, eye and paper is an unimprovable way to process the information. On paper you look at the little groups of people - Demi Moore next to Bruce Willis, Jack Nicholson just so far from Dustin Hoffman, Jack Black safely in cult corner with David Lynch - at the same time as you're looking at the whole picture. You can't do that with a screen. On paper it would keep you going for an hour. On a screen it gets a bit tiring after a few minutes.

The best football podcast is done by a bunch of rank amateurs

I listen to loads of football podcasts. I can tolerate any amount of bollocks on this subject provided it's entertaining. My current favourite is The Football Ramble. Those are the four blokes who do it. I don't really know who they are. I get the impression some of them do stand-up but I don't know any more than that. No disrespect. They don't reek of the press box. I don't need to know any more.

When I first started listening to it I thought, these guys obviously aren't as expert as the ones from the newspapers but I like their enthusiasm, the easy, bantering relationship they have with each other, the funny regular slots and the way they laugh at each other's jokes, which is something journalists are never caught doing. Knowing what I know about podcasts I suspect they're doing it for love rather than a salary.

I recently revised my opinion. Not only do they know as much as the guys from the newspapers, they probably know more - and not just about the same five clubs and one nation. Their knowledge implies they spend every waking hour watching football. Their manner implies they don't. They wear their knowledge lightly and never let it get in the way of their main duty as podcasters, which is to play keepy-uppy with the bright red beach ball of human interest. Long may they run.