We may have the best radio in the world but we don't have this

Harper High School is a two-part programme from NPR in the States. I heard it via the This American Life podcast. It's the kind of radio you don't get in this country, not even from Radio 4. It sets out to discover what it's like in a school on the south side of Chicago where they've "lost" (how the language of warfare clings) over twenty students in the last year.

The teachers and social workers of Harper High patrol the halls relentlessly exuding positivity. One of them, Crystal, says "let me appreciate you in advance" as soon as any student doesn't directly refuse to comply with an instruction. This is the kind of school where they have to offer students a cookie for turning up at a class on time.

Even the police around Harper High reckon it's impossible to escape being allied to one gang or another. It's not to do with drugs. It's to do with where you live. The kids are frightened, which is why they sound depressed. One boy, who has gone back into his shell after accidentally shooting and killing his brother, says "I don't like to remember". His words are those of a toddler. His voice is that of a man.

Harper High School flips the picture presented by British teacher recruitment advertising. You know that one - "work with the most exciting people in the country". At Harper teachers are the ones who sound like the brightest, most questioning people in the world. The children are the ones who sound closed off, beaten down by life. They walk down the middle of the street, not merely to annoy the traffic, but because experience has taught them it's the best place to be if the shooting starts. A star football player says he has learned that when you hear a shot you should go down as if you've been hit. It's safer than running. If you run you will definitely be shot.

One of the reasons Harper High succeeds is because because at no stage does a government spokesman or a representative of the teachers union or an academic pop up to try and explain it all. The relative looseness of the format allows them to break off and explain complex sequences of cause and effect without needing a single interviewee to stand them up, as would probably happen here.

Because the programme is not committing itself to coming up with a solution, because it doesn't fit into any pre-existing current affairs strand, because it's only setting out to answer the "what's it like?" question, it can do at least a tiny bit of justice to the exhausting complexity of the problem.

Kevin Ayers was a great singles artist and there's nothing better than that

We tend to think of Kevin Ayers as someone who failed to live up to his potential because he never made the kind of career as album artist that contemporaries like Pink Floyd and Genesis did. He never had hit singles either but I still think of him as a singles act because he made a few that distilled his appeal. Whenever and wherever they pop up I'm always in the mood for them. Albums are what get you those obits in the heavy papers. Singles are what keep you alive in people's hearts. Like this one.

 

There's no such thing as underrated these days

I was tweeting yesterday about Face Value by Phil Collins. Somebody responded that it was underrated. Since it sold ten million copies I think it's a bit of stretch to describe it as underrated. Abused, yes, dismissed out of hand, sneered at for reasons that had nothing to do with music, all these would serve as descriptions, but not underrated.

It's funny the way we use that term. Underrated was always a popular thread in The Word magazine and on its website. Readers like to think that the music they like is underrated, presumably because it plays to our image of ourselves as fearless swimmers against the tide.

I'm not sure there's very much you can call underrated these days. The big hits reach a level of ubiquity of which even The Beatles could only have dreamed. At the other end of the scale, the tiny cults of yesteryear now have entire evenings devoted to them on BBC Four. Scott Walker put out another album recently and while very few people bought it or heard it he can't complain that it has gone unnoticed. I sometimes think that the real reason groups reform is that they know that this time they'll be overrated.

Furthermore time and chance eventually ensure that everybody gets their chance to be rated, even overrated. I'm sure it amuses Wilko Johnson greatly to see his inbox jammed with interview requests from people who have been avoiding his PR's calls for years. The only aspect of his current situation which could remotely be described as satisfactory is he's getting the chance to read his obituaries. In which he will probably be described as "criminally underrated". 

P.S. One of the small children who's pictured on the gatefold of "Face Value" is now forty.

Bad men can be great sportsmen

I'm reading Beyond A Boundary by CLR James, which is about growing up in Trinidad in the early part of the 20th century. His passion is cricket. He talks about a local called Matthew Bondman.

He was a young man already when I first remember him, medium height and size, and an awful character. He was generally dirty. He would not work. His eyes were fierce, his language was violent and his voice was loud. His lips curled back naturally and he intensified it by an almost perpetual snarl. My grandmother and my aunts detested him. But that is not why I remember Matthew. For ne'er-do-well, in fact vicious character that he was, Matthew had one saving grace--Matthew could bat. More than that, Matthew, so crude and vulgar in every aspect of his life, with a bat in his hand was all grace and style.

It's funny reading this in the same week the papers are full of the chaotic lives of prominent sportsmen. CLR James could cope with the idea of a man who was hopeless in every respect but one - happening to be a great athlete. We on the other hand, being softer and more superstitious, seem to believe that any man who has shown a great sporting talent should be at the very least capable when it comes to daily life, as if genius in one respect ought to spill over into bare competence elsewhere. Journalists, biographers, chat-show hosts and voice-over artists try to persuade us that virtue follows talent around. There's lots of evidence that it doesn't.

Just in time for Valentine's Day, an unromantic love song

I don't expect anyone to seek my advice when choosing an appropriate record for the happy couple's first dance at their wedding. Therefore, in the week of Valentine's Day, for anybody who's merely fantasising about getting married and could use some further inspiration, I propose the best first dance song of the modern era.

Erin Bode (it's pronounced Beau-day) wrote "Long, Long Time" with her piano player Adam Maness. It begins "the rest of your life is a long, long time/It's hard to gauge when you're twenty-five".

What I like about this song is it celebrates not the first flush of romance, which is easy, but the patience required for the long haul. "We're taking all the rest of our lives." In fact it's a great love song which isn't actually romantic at all.

I like to feel it's a musical repudiation of those couples who split the minute both parties feel the married state has failed to magically transfigure their lives. If they asked me I'd say "what were you expecting?" Of course they don't ask.

Why is Lincoln a film and not a TV series?

I saw "Lincoln" yesterday. It would have been so much better as a TV film, which is not a thought I've ever entertained before.

I couldn't follow half of what went on in it and it's not long since I read the book it's based on. As if conscious of the byzantine complexity of the plot, which is acted out in the smoke-filled rooms of Washington in 1865, Spielberg's film is topped and tailed by a prologue and epilogue which seem to have been parachuted in from children's TV to make up for the fact that the audience is historically illiterate.

As a three-part HBO series it would have been able to introduce the main characters, explain a bit about the party political background, convey some idea of the agony of the civil war they were in the midst of and paint in a bit of the path that had got Lincoln to that point. An episodic framework would, most importantly, have given the viewer the vital opportunity to consult with a fellow viewer and ask "remind me, who's the guy with the funny whiskers?"

In recent years, in shows like "The Wire" and "The Killing", TV has shown it can handle complexity. On the other hand the only feature film I've seen that did it was "The Social Network", and that was dealing with events that had happened very recently.

There are times these days when I wonder why feature films are still around.

John Adams and the fourth of July myth

Just finished "John Adams" by David McCullough, which I've enjoyed as much as any political biography I've ever read. I knew nothing about him until I saw the HBO mini-series. If anything, that series undersells him.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were known as the voice and pen respectively of the American Declaration Of Independence. Their lives, while completely different, were intertwined. They both served as President. They both lived far longer than any of their contemporaries and died, hundreds of miles apart, on the same day, the fourth of July, 1826, which was the nation's 50th birthday.

Although the declaration is dated July 4th it was actually passed by Congress two days earlier and celebrations didn't take place until July 8th. At the time Adams said that July 2nd would be the date that would go down in history. According to McCullough's book Jefferson actually spent July 4th shopping for ladies gloves. However in later life both Adams and Jefferson bought into the national tradition so completely that they would argue vehemently that it all happened on the fourth. So much for primary sources.

Mini Disc was the home taping technology that dare not speak its name

Sony have announced they are no longer making MiniDisc players. This is not a surprise.

They were launched in 1992 as an attempt to challenge the compact disc, which had been developed primarily by Philips. Sony still believed, as it had believed when it launched Betamax, that if it controlled the hardware it would control the software.

MiniDisc was a fiddly medium and difficult to love but it had one great thing going for it. For the first time it offered the home taper a flexibility you could never achieve with cassette. You could record a bunch of tunes, then edit or delete them and change their order. In 1992 that was heady stuff.

Problem was Sony could never be seen to say anything positive about home taping. I was once paid to present this technology to a dealers convention but it was made plain that they didn't want me lingering on the one thing that made it an exciting technology.

After that you only ever saw it being used by bands or radio producers. The public didn't get why they might like it because every effort was made to keep it from them. Thus it languished and bigger technological fish came along to eat the record companies' lunch.

Last week Philips announced that it was no longer in the consumer electronics market. Amazing.

Reg Presley and the people who know the chart position of everything and the value of nothing

I caught the end of a short Reg Presley obit this morning. Its central thrust seemed to be that Wild Thing went to number one in the USA and only got to number two in the UK.

 I hate this kind of thing. Chart positions are statistical happenings which depend on the amount of competition in a particular week and the level of corruption and statistical accuracy prevailing at the time of a record's release. Otherwise they don't prove much.

 It's sometimes interesting to reflect on those acts who had scores of number ones because it reflects consistency and popularity but to attempt to prove a point about whether, say, Abba are better or more successful than Elton John based on totting up the number of top ten records they had is the pursuit of idiots. The people who say these things are the same people who put the words "Oscar-winning" in the first line of an obit of a film person, as if that bauble justified whatever they are about to follow it with.

 Reg Presley traded his narrow range and strange sincerity into a place among the immortals. We all know that. And if we don't the stats aren't going to make any difference.

The most interesting conversation ever captured at a recording session

On November 4th 1940 John Lomax and his wife Ruby were in Atlanta, Georgia, looking for folk musicians to record for the Library of Congress.

As they drove past the Pig and Whistle, a whites-only drive-in barbecue, Ruby saw an African American playing guitar and singing for the customers. Blind Willie McTell, who was dressed in the smart suit, cap, collar and tie in which he preferred to perform, was 42 at the time. The Lomaxes had been told to look out for McTell and they paid him a dollar to turn up the Fulton Hotel the following day with his guitar.

November 5th was election day in the United States but McTell came to the hotel room where Lomax had set up his equipment and for two hours played his songs and talked. Unlike Robert Johnson, who was so shy during his two recording sessions that he would only sing while facing the corner, McTell gives a performance which is so confident and polished it's almost a lecture.

He plays spirituals, gambling songs, rags and songs about chasing women. Unlike the bluesmen of the Delta his articulation is clear, which means the lyrics are intelligible. His command of the twelve-string guitar and bottleneck allows him to break off lines and let the instrument do the talking, in a way that Jimi Hendrix would do years later. Many bluesmen are hard to listen to for long periods. You can listen to Blind Willie McTell all day long.

Between songs he addresses the Lomaxes as if they were a public meeting, telling them about what "the country people" used to do in "the old days" and how one particular song dates from the days when "the blues first started being original". He recounts the name - and full addresses - of all the various record companies he has recorded for under different names during the 30s. He is clearly a sophisticated, worldly-wise, seasoned, even slightly pompous professional entertainer.

Lomax, who had discovered Leadbelly, knew the white audience preferred its blues musicians miserable and oppressed and so asks if he's got any "complaining songs". Willie refuses to play along. Listen.


Then again, we do get this. One man and a guitar, in a hotel room, in the middle of the afternoon.

When do you hang up your air guitar?

Played Tres Hombres by ZZ Top on Saturday. It sounded as good as it did in the early 70s, when I first heard it. Back then I shared a flat in Wood Green with a bunch of blokes and one of them had an import copy. He worked an office job and every night when he came home he would fire up his prized Pioneer PL12D and play this. He played it so loud I reckon I can still recognise the pregnant hum and crackle of the stylus on the vinyl in the few seconds before the opening bars of "Waiting For The Bus".

On playing the record the other day I found my right index finger and thumb wielding a non-existent pick while my left hand reached for an invisible neck at round about the point Billy Gibbon would have done on the real one. Some air guitarists favour high notes at the top of the neck. Other prefer windmilling chords. The sound of Tres Hombres is obviously the sound that connects with my inner air guitarist.

It's a while since I played air guitar. It's not seemly when you've got grown-up children. Playing pretend is a huge part of growing up with pop. I used to have a knitting needles and pillows arrangement on the end of my bed in emulation of a drumkit. I collected old tennis rackets of different sizes to serve as guitars. My enjoyment of the music intensified in direct proportion to the extent to which I could pretend I was the one who's making it. Among boys the dawning love for music comes in at the end of their love affair with military hardware. It touches a lot of the same buttons.

I wonder when it wanes and finally dies. Probably when your children reach the age that you run the risk they might happen upon you doing it. They know what you were doing because they've started doing it themselves.

The French have cracked the secret of boringly perfect coffee

Today we went to Lille on the Eurostar to celebrate a friend's birthday. We arrived at the station in time to have a cup of coffee before lunch.

The French seem to have avoided the plague of speciality coffees. Instead it seems that every bar, cafe and restaurant, when faced with the words "un café s'il vous plait", seems to offer exactly the same boringly perfect cup of coffee.

It's never too strong. It's never too weak. It tastes of coffee but it won't keep you up for days. Each cup is exactly like the one you had the day before in a completely different establishment hundreds of miles away. It doesn't come from some self-important machine that sits behind the counter like the Albert Hall organ.

It takes seconds to appear. I love every cup. How do they do that?

Cheer up, Colin Murray, you're too clever for MOTD

Colin Murray is being dropped as presenter of Match Of The Day 2. Regular viewers of programmes like this often entertain surprisingly violent opinions of the people whose job it is simply to read the autocue and lob a few questions at the pundits without exhibiting any obvious bias towards any particular team.

I like Colin Murray. In leaving Radio One to go to BBC 5Live he showed he was prepared to take his chances as a general broadcaster and he's been equal to anything they've thrown at him. I'll listen to anything he presents and never miss "Fighting Talk" on Saturday morning or "Kicking Off" on Friday evening.

I read the news about him losing the Match Of The Day 2 slot just after  watching, for the first time, Match Of The Day 3, a web-only post script which seems designed to offer a more discursive approach to the weekend's events. It had struck me while watching it that maybe his problem is he looks and acts just slightly too clever for a presenter. And there are two institutions which mistrust cleverness more than most. Telly is one. Football is the other.

When did pop become the dominant culture?

There was an interesting irem on the Today Programme this morning in which James Naughtie talked to a couple of politicians about the remarks of Liz Forgan, outgoing chair of the Arts Council. She said nowadays politicians are reluctant to let their constituents know they've been to classical concerts or the opera, for fear of being seen as elitist. Whereas, she said, they're happy to be seen going to rock festivals.

This was followed by a very good Start The Week which featured America's foremost classical composer John Adams talking about where "serious" music stands. Adams described popular culture as a behemoth flattening everything in its path. "You can't try on a pair of pants without listening to hip hop," he said.

Of course Adams is right. Pop is now culture's default position. It's unimaginable that a new arts programme or supplement could be launched today without an interview with Damon Albarn or a think piece about Scandinavian detectives. It wasn't always like this. When did this change take place? Some of us grew up in a world where pop was still the sub-culture. It was always being chased up trees by the dominant culture of serious music and serious books and serious people. Pop was the brightly-coloured alternative world into which you could momentarily escape through "Top Of The Pops" every Thursday or every other Wednesday with "Smash Hits".

About fifteen years ago I realised there had been a war between serious culture and pop culture. It had ended and Pop had won. Clearly. Trouble is I have no memory of that war taking place.

The best pop songs begin with an entrance; the best pop song is about an entrance

My favourite pop song is Jackie De Shannon's "When You Walk In The Room". The Searchers did a great version. Where the Searchers go Bruce Springsteen is never far away and he's featured it in his act over the years.

It's not the greatest pop song just because it's got that 60s surge, which seems to come from a place halfway between Motown and folk-rock. (Somebody should write a book about the tambourine in pop music.) It's not just the opening guitar peal, attempted by anyone who ever held a 12-string Rickenbacker. It's not even the fact that it's catchy.

What makes it the best pop song ever written is that the activity it describes is at the heart of pop music. It's about walking into a room. Hundreds of great pop songs begin with an entrance, with somebody walking into a room. This isn't an accident.

"You walked into the party like you were walking on to a yacht. 

"Well he walked up to me and he asked me if I wanted to dance." 

"The screen door slams, Mary's dress waves, like a vision she dances across the porch as the readio plays"

An entrance is an obvious way to start a pop song: it can be slapstick ("She came in through the bathroom window, protected by a silver spoon") or menacing ("You walk in the room with your pencil in your hand") or triumphant ("I'm comin' out") or it can even be an exit ("There she goes, there she goes again").

Pop music's a crutch, never more useful than when helping you enter a room full of strangers. This is something that still causes most adults a tremble of apprehension. When you're fifteen it's worse than that. In fact most fifteen-year-olds would rather stay out of a room indefinitely than go in without the support of their crew. The right music helps carry them across that difficult threshold. It stiffens the sinews and makes the blood pump more quickly. It's why 50% of movies nowadays have a sequence where the main characters move purposefully towards the camera in slow motion. There's a good sample here.

When you're a teenager rooms are like stage sets and life is fraught with drama. *He* might enter. *She* might leave. *He* might be with another girl. He might see *her* kissing somebody else. Remember what that was like? Remember the delicious agony of teenage romance?

"When You Walk In The Room" ("I can feel a new expression on my face/I can feel a glowing sensation taking place...I close my eyes for a moment and pretend it's me you want/Meanwhile I try to act so nonchalant") isn't just about walking in the room. It can also give you the courage to do it yourself.

P.S. And when anybody tries to tell you that the pop songs of the 60s were charmingly naive, ask them to point out where in the pop chart of today you'd find a line that hits the emotional bullseye  like "meanwhile I try to act so nonchalant".

Twenty quid will get you the last great record shop carrier bag

One of the most interesting record shops in London used to be Dobells on Charing Cross Road. It finally shut its doors in 1989.

Dobells dealt exclusively in jazz and folk, operating such a strict apartheid between the genres that they had separate entrances from the street. When I first came to London it was just about the only place you could get imports. I couldn't possibly afford to buy them but I used to go in to read the covers and inhale the atmosphere of tobacco and superiority.

On the few occasions I bought anything there I was most delighted to take my swag home in a Dobells bag. Its design, copied many times in the years since, by me and lots of others, showed the spines of a shelf-full of records, in the days when no home could have anything more impressive than that.

Leon Parker, who used to work there and now runs the British Record Shop Archive, is mounting an exhibition all about Dobells. He's soliciting small donations on Kickstarter on a page here which explains all about it. If you give over £20 he'll give you one of the 50 Dobells bags he managed to rescue from the ruins. I'm tempted.

Remember what we used to pay for the privilege of renting videos?

Blockbuster going into administration gives me an excuse to recall the first video library I joined.

It was over twenty-five years ago in a London suburb. I'm pretty sure it cost £40 to join, it was £2 for each video you rented and you had to buy a £40 video to activate your membership.

I paid it. With a fairly light heart in fact. After all it was a small price to pay for the miracle of being able to watch something other than the four TV channels.

If HMV goes the Long Tail goes with it

I bought this old Bonnie Raitt album for three quid in HMV last week. It was among a bunch of Warner Bros offers.

I then went to the Bonnie Raitt section to see if there were any other titles. There weren't. "Give It Up" was the only one. This is odd because Raitt has made 16 albums and most of them will still nominally be in the catalogue.

 HMV has always prided itself on catalogue. It was the place you came to get the things your local record shop couldn't afford to stock. It certainly did when I worked there and it still did a few years ago.

HMV must have slowly stopped re-ordering records like Bonnie Raitt's - and there are tens of thousands of artists like Raitt from all generations and styles - as they went out of stock. You can't blame them. If they're struggling to pay the rent and make payroll they're not going to buy in stock that they might not sell for another year, if at all. And if HMV, who represent 38% of the UK record retail market, stop ordering records like that then after a while record companies stop manufacturing records like that.

Now that HMV is headed either for extinction or a very different business model under a new owner then they're likely to stop completely and if you want Bonnie Raitt you'll have to download it or wait until the rights owner decides there's enough of a market for a giant reissue programme. There, my friends, goes the Long Tail.

The Long Tail was a theory expounded ten years ago in a book by Chris Anderson. It was sub-titled "how the future of business is in selling less of more". It was a theory that lots of us took to, because it was encouraging to anyone who needed to make a living without "selling out" to the mass market.

HMV, particularly in its big shops, was a key patron of the Long Tail. It would stock your cultish folk record. It would keep the entire catalogue of classical composers. It would order your music magazine. When Virgin went HMV was the only place keeping the Long Tail going.

It's a mistake to think that when HMV's gone it will instantly be a better day for independent record retailers. The majority of music sold in this country comes from the big hits which are increasingly sold as downloads. For the hit CDs, the Adeles and Mumfords, the supermarkets will continue to pile high and sell cheap.

That leaves the few remaining record shops to sell the rest. That's if the record companies, once 38% of their market is taken away, think it's worthwhile to produce it in the traditional way and to support the star-making machinery and the distribution experts, salesmen, PRs, pluggers, reviewers and image-makers who have traditionally laboured in it. The big record companies may not think it's worth their while and the small ones won't be able to afford it.

This would be not just the end of another large commercial organisation which really should have seen the writing on the wall years ago and anyway last time I went in there they didn't have the second album by the Blue Aeroplanes and we never go there anymore because we prefer to support our plucky little indie. It's also the end of a whole way of doing things, a way which has been unchanged since the 70s, a way which many people have come to confuse with the natural pattern of real life.

Put it this way. This time next year people may have stopped saying "have you heard the new album by....."

Summarising the genius of Joni Mitchell in thirty seconds

I've spent the last few days listening to Joni Mitchell's Court And Spark and trying to explain to myself why I gets me the way it does.

Most of the celebrated albums have one song that encapsulates their appeal. Most of those songs have a bit within them that in turn sums them up. With this record it's "Free Man In Paris", the song she wrote about David Geffen, the man who owned her record company, getting away from his work in Hollywood and having a holiday in Paris. She visited the city with Geffen and Robbie Robertson in the early 70s.

The bit is the middle eight. "If I had my way I'd just walk through those doors and wander down the Champs Elysees...."

The words tumble towards the two syllables of "wander" (which is barely a letter away from "wonder") which she extends into three and a half and then holds. As she does so you're rushing through the revolving door of that posh hotel lobby and into the Parisian sunshine with her. At that point the entire record opens up. You can listen to it below.

How much is that doggie in the window? And what if there's no window?

HMV are cutting their prices today. They need to quickly raise cash to meet their banking covenants at the end of the month. It's not good when one of Britain's most prestigious retailers has to behave like the Trotter brothers running scared of Boycie. This is in the same week that Jessop's, the camera chain with almost 200 stores, goes into administration. This is very worrying for the people who work in these places. It's an urgent concern to suppliers who've extended credit to these outlets for the good of their own businesses.

In the long term it will also have a profound effect on the way the rest of us view products like cameras, CDs and CVDs, products which not long ago we might have called "luxuries", to use a term that seems to belong in an age when austerity was a permanent condition, not a temporary inconvenience.

We can now buy a tune without buying a record and take a picture by holding up our phone. For most people that's enough. Most people will go through life without ever feeling that they ought to have a boxed set of The Godfather, a copy of David Bowie's new LP on vinyl or an SLR camera in a nice leather case. The handful of people who still yearn for things like these will be able to buy them on the web. Once the rest of us are no longer walking past shop windows with glinting pyramids of metal and glass we'll no longer think much about cameras. We'll allow them to slip off the shopping list of our dreams. When there are no longer adverts on Channel 4 on a Friday night exhorting us to go and buy Beyonce's new record with a bonus DVD in HMV we'll slowly stop thinking of records as items that exist in physical space, as objects that have the power to quicken pulses and excite envy. That lust for objects has underpinned all consumer activity since the war and the first flickering of that lust always came by looking in a shop window.

I won't insult the intelligence of the professionals by pretending I know how to secure the future of retail businesses like HMV and Jessop's. I suspect that a lot of their problems come from being spread too thin but there's not much they can do about that. If I go to HMV in Oxford Street today I'll probably drop into the Apple Store at Oxford Circus. It'll no doubt be packed. I won't buy anything but I'll still call. It has that effect on people. Why? I suppose it's selling a product which has a rare lustre. It's not seeking to be comprehensive which makes it far less overwhelming than traditional megastores. And since Apple store aren't in every city, let alone on every corner, it's as exciting as a visit to the HMV Shop in Oxford Street used to be.

The busiest shop I went into in the week before Christmas was Daunt's bookshop in Marleybone High Street. This is always full. Its specialism is travel books but it stocks pretty much everything, without overfacing the customer, and appears to know precisely what sells to the well-heeled clientele who live or work nearby. There's no obvious discounting and the place feels more like a church than a souk. I never go in there without buying something. It's usually something I could have bought for less money somewhere else. It just has that effect on me.

I'm sure there will be shops in the future but there probably won't be so many of them. There will be a handful of places that are congenial destinations and they'll be sought out by a self-selecting group of shoppers. How chains like HMV and Jessop's find a place in that future I don't exactly know. Again I'm reminded of the old story about the countryman being asked for directions by a smart young couple in a sports car. "Well," he said, "I wouldn't start from here."