What do you call a suit without a tie?

If you're a man it doesn't really matter how you feel about ties. There are some occasions when you'd be foolish not to wear one. If I were being asked to appear before a select committee, for instance, I would wear a tie.

Matt Brittin, the CEO of Google UK, didn't feel he needed to when he turned up yesterday to talk about his company's tax arrangements. It seemed to say a lot about how seriously his company takes Parliament.

Tim Davie also went for the open-necked shirt in his first day as acting Director General of the BBC. When he gave his interview down the line to Sky News it gave an impression of informality which was at odds with the formal meetings he was having with colleagues. This can't have been what he wanted. (People who work in TV should surely know better than anyone that when you're on camera viewers are getting most of their signals from what you look like rather than what you say.)

Both these men work in companies where even the senior management go tieless nowadays. Maybe they should dress differently when representing those organisations in the outside world. The "one of the guys" look may work OK if you're squeezing into the lift in the morning, clutching a cup of coffee. When you're facing the music it can easily look disrespectful.

We seem to have a generation of  male executives who think it doesn't matter. They ought to ask their female colleagues. No woman would have dreamed of appearing in front of parliament or the media in anything other than her best armour.

When George Entwistle got the job of Director General of the BBC Alastair Campbell congratulated him and said "get yourself some decent suits". There was nothing particularly wrong with Entiwistle's suits but maybe Campbell  detected that he didn't wear them seriously enough.

The wearing of a proper suit in the so-called "creative industries" indicates many things, one of them being that you are prepared to be a hardass. The subliminal message is "I no longer care particularly whether you like me or not - I will do what I think is right."

Some managers make the mistake of thinking that the staff will like them more if they appear to be dressing like them. They don't. Particularly in the creative industries staff prefer to think that the management is not like them. They like to think they're grown-ups. They like to think somebody else is steering the ship while they're having all kinds of fun below decks. Martin Scorsese hasn't made a memorable film in years but his personal stock remains high because every time he appears in public he looks as if he's about to walk his daughter down the aisle.

When people are sent to see a male specialist they want somebody who looks like a headmaster from the 1960s and not somebody who might be running a copy shop.  Even those authority figures who don't bother with suits appreciate the important of looking as if they've thought about their uniform. Steve Jobs didn't wear a black turtle neck because it was the nearest thing to hand when he got up in the morning. It was part of his identity. With his thin and no doubt expensive sweaters Simon Cowell has proved that it's possible to make a uniform out of anything.

The suit without tie get-up looks like the wearer hasn't got the courage of his convictions. He's trying to look "smart" without looking smart. He's trying not to look like a grown-up. Paul Du Noyer says too many men today dress "like toddlers". You can see what he means in the supermarket queue. Baggy sweat shirts, hoodies, the kind of footwear that inspired Ian Dury to talk about "shoes like dead pig's noses". It's as if they want to crawl back into mother's arms and go to sleep.

The point in men's lives when they have to grow up has receded over the years. It's no longer strictly 21 or 30 or even 40. When you're a father the signal arrives in the eyes of your teenage daughter as she scans your dress and gives you the unspoken "what are you wearing?" look. Not everyone has children so they have to pick up clues elsewhere. Any man over the age of 40 who has more than one pair of trainers really should have a word with himself.

Ask yourself, what would Sinatra do? He had two modes of dress. One was immaculately suited and booted. The other was immaculately suited and booted but with tie slightly loosened. This was no accident. What this look said is "I may be slightly relaxed at this moment but don't let this deceive you because my natural state is alert and ready for battle". The look adopted by Davie and Brittin yesterday didn't say anything quite as powerful as that.

Apropos of nothing in particular

I've presided over my share of defamation scares. This is the conclusion I've reached.

There are two ways to avoid problems. One is to share the responsibility between, let's say, ten people, which means they all think that responsibility is ten per cent theirs. The other is to give that responsibility to one person, who is then aware that the responsibility is entirely theirs.

I recommend the latter.

Why I can't love your new records as much as your old ones. "It's not you. It's me."

It's the challenge for any heritage act. The main competition for your new records comes from your old records. Old fans only have so much bandwidth and they'd rather ease back into the embrace of their old favourite than get used to the unfamiliar shape of the new one.

I recently played the new Donald Fagen album, Sunken Condos, alongside The Nightfly, his first solo record from thirty years ago. Some reviews have pointed out the things they have in common: high-concept covers, a song about nuclear dread, one deadpan cover version, lots of playing that sounds like it was hard to do and a certain set-em-up-Joe resignation about the delivery.

I doubt the untutored ear could detect which one was the old record and which was the new one, which says something about the last thirty years. Some reviewers think the new one could have done with a little more of one quality and a little less of another. Funny how we treat musicians like chefs, as if they could just pop their record back in the oven for a moment and make it better.

It's difficult to decide why one record works and another doesn't. Some parties are huge fun without anyone trying while others are no fun at all despite everyone trying like crazy. You can't accuse "Sunken Condos" of not making the effort. It probably took more heavy lifting than "The Nightfly". Maybe it's the absence of catchy tunes that brings its busyness to your attention. It has moments but it never flies in the way that "The Nightfly" did and still does. Only on "Weather In My Head" does the groove achieve escape velocity. Nothing get under your skin. It's cold.

"The Nightfly", on the other hand, is like a summer evening's drive. Even the songs with quite a bit of plot, "Goodbye Look", about a gangster with an appointment with the fishes, and "I.G.Y", which peers at the future through the binoculars of the year 1957, and "New Frontier", which is about getting a Tuesday Weld-lookalike alone in your dad's fallout shelter, glide by as if on castors. It's one of those cases where the session guys are doing more than the minimum. Each tiny instrumental fill at the end of a line is distinct from the one at the end of the last line. Each one is a new spring driving the watch. "The Nightfly" is one of those records where you don't just sing along with the songs. You play the arrangements with your eyebrows and the drums with your extremities.

But then you would, wouldn't you, because you've lived with it for thirty years. That record is imprinted in you because you've heard it so much. No new record by Donald Fagen or Bruce Springsteen or Tom Petty or anyone else who was making records back in the mid-70s is ever going to be listened to as intently as the records that made their names. Elvis Costello still talks passionately about the day he bought Joni Mitchell's "Blue" and took it home to his dad's place in Twickenham where he listened to it so hard he almost took the shine off it. "I'll never listen to music that way again."

In his book The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember Nicholas Carr argues that the human brain changes all the time and that in recent years the internet has re-routed our neural pathways. I wish he'd do something similar about what repeated exposure to the same music does to us. It must change us. Repeated listening must make us different. The people who heard the first performances of Beethoven's works expected to never hear those works again in their lives. I've heard the great records of Donald Fagen literally thousands of times. I've heard them far more than Donald Fagen will have heard them. (The reason Paul McCartney's backing band can do the Beatles so well is that they've spent thousands of hours listening to Beatle records. Paul McCartney never did.)

Whenever an old favourite releases a new album some of the reviewers want to persuade us the artist has got the old magic back. They always list the familiar ingredients: the choruses, the hooks, the sense of purpose which has apparently returned. The laundry list of qualities is the first refuge of the rock critic who can't really think of anything to say. Lists move in when love moves out. After a while they don't play it anymore, which is the only review that really counts. What he should say is what he's probably found himself saying back in the dim and distant past when other affairs came to a natural end. It's not you. It's me.

Thank God there was no Twitter when the last baseless rumours were around

Just over twenty years ago a prominent figure in British life was the victim of an unexplained act of violence. In the absence of an explanation a story quickly spread among people who apparently had some inside knowledge of the incident because they worked in what was then called "the media". 

I heard more than one version of this story which involved a reference to sexual abuse and children. That's probably what helped the story spread so quickly. I was assured that it would be just days before this story was "all over the papers".

I'm still waiting. A subsequent court case proved the rumours groundless.  Probably not before the prominent figure and his family had got to hear about them. He must look back on it now and thank God there was no Twitter at the time. 

On Twitter people who really ought to know better, and are often familiar with the laws regarding defamation, publish things they would never dream of publishing in a newspaper or on a TV programme. This is on the grounds that the story is "out there" and in the awareness/hope that they will somehow bully the victim of the rumours into coming out to defend themselves.

They pretend that they're doing it to campaign for the victims and to respond to the public's concern. They're not. They're doing it out of personal ambition and malice. Mostly the latter.

What Mick Jagger's mum thought about him buying antiques

Just finished reading James Lees-Milne's diaries. His wife Alvilde Chaplin is a garden designer to the quality, which explains this passage:

Danny Baker, otherwise known as David Essex's brother, added to our gig

I first met Danny Baker in, well, it was probably 1975. I was working in the HMV Shop in Oxford Street, which in those days was near Bond Street station. There's a Foot Locker there now. They used to say that before fame the Beatles had made some kind of demo in the stockroom on the first floor. Anyway, it was a big store in the days before megastores. This was in the days when confused-looking middle-aged parents up in London for the Rugby League Challenge Cup or the Ideal Home Exhibition would approach the counter carrying a piece of paper on which was written "ZZ Top" or "Sex and Soul by Roy C". In those days you didn't believe those records existed until you saw them in places like HMV.

Danny worked round the corner in the far trendier Harlequin (late One Stop) in South Molton Street. He used to come round occasionally to pick up something mainstream for one of his star customers. He was only a teenager and very handsome. "That's Danny," said one of my fellow drudges. "He's David Essex's brother." I nodded. It seemed to make sense. He wasn't, of course, but it was a good way to get the attention of girls.

Forty years later Danny is living proof that you may be able to take the boy out of the record shop but you never quite take the record shop out of the boy. Sparks of esoterica concerning The Fatback Band or Todd Rundgren are likely to illuminate exchanges with puzzled former footballers on his Saturday morning show on BBC Five Live. They obviously also litter the pages of Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography which is out now.

The reason I'm telling you this is that Danny will be appearing alongside Skinny Lister (left) and other acts yet to be announced at the Word In Your Ear show which "Magic" Alex Gold and I are putting on at the Lexington in London's swinging Islington on Tuesday, December 4th. Danny will be talking to me about times past, present and future (he may well touch upon recent events that took him to the front page of the The Times) and signing copies of his book.

I'm delighted he's doing this and really hope as many people as possible can come along for what promises to be a great start to the run-up to Christmas. 

Tickets are £15, I shall be taking care of MC duties while also presenting my legendary 1971 was the annus mirabilis of the rock album roadshow. There will be further announcements in due course but if you want to be sure of your ticket you need to book now.

Memo to Radio Three - all discs are records but not all records are discs

Listening to BBC Radio Three first thing this morning my ears prick up when "the announcer" (I feel sure they should still be called "announcers" on Radio Three) talks about playing "some new discs".

"Discs" is a term that seems to hang on at Radio Three and in certain corners of Radio Four. It wasn't long ago that Desert Island Discs (there it is again) asked guests to pick eight "gramophone records" to be cast away with.

All terms used to decribe sound carriers have a moment in the sun and quickly become quaint. In the late 60s people talked about having "an album collection" because it implied a whole new level of sophistication. In the late 70s cassette was the dominant format. At the time my mother would describe any recorded music as "a tape".  I cling on to "LP" because it puzzles young people. I have known people point at 12" vinyl LPs and call them CDs.

"Album" itself is a word borrowed from the world of photography, used to describe the packages in which the first classical works could be spread over a number of 78s. "Waxing" and "vinyl" were borrowed from the production process. "Hot biscuit" was a hipster term for a record, so-called because early 78s would be apparently baked during manufacture.

There's actually only one word that would cover anything from an early Edison cylinder to the latest stream, anything from a rare Black Patti to a Paul Young cassette with a cracked case picked up in a motorway service area, from a Jamaican dub plate to the most recent classical performance.

That's the word "record".

"Record" doesn't apply to the physical object. It applies to the medium. Therefore, that music they're playing on Radio Three may be coming from a disc or it may not, it may be a download or it may not, it may in ten years' time be played in via a machine that we cannot imagine now. It will however still be a record.

Bands are like tree surgeons

I don't want to manage any bands but there are times when I wouldn't mind being a coach. Last night was one of those times. I was a guest at the Mercury Music Prize show at the Roundhouse. Twelve acts did one song each, which gives you a rare chance to compare and contrast.

Most of the bands took to the stage with the slightly self-important air of tree surgeons about to perform a delicate operation from which you'd be best advised to stand well clear. They further resemble tree surgeons in the way they appear to be preoccupied with important matters while hoping against hope that you're admiring them. When you consider how far technology has advanced in the last thirty years it's remarkable that musicians still look so burdened by the increasing amount of kit they take on stage with them and distracted by the fear that it might go wrong. This is of course even worse when it's a TV taping.

Does this self-consciousness matter? Only if you think the musician should be reaching out to the audience rather than operating a machine. The folk singer Sam Lee clearly does. When he began his number he looked directly into the audience and defied them to look away. In doing this he proved it was possible to establish some kind of relationship, even with an industry crowd.

I once went on a public speaking course taught by an actor. He was full of all kinds of drama school tricks, the sort that make normal people roll their eyes and blush. At one stage he said, before a performance I like to go on stage and cast my net over the audience. Here he mimed flinging a Biblical fishing net over the front stalls. I find it helps me project myself into the room, he added. To conquer the space.

We all sniggered, of course. Nonetheless, whenever I'm about to talk to a room full of people, I fling that net. Only in my head, of course. Something similar makes athletes believe in the power of visualisation. I wonder if any member of any band has ever thought about their performance in those terms.

If there had been a Mercury Music Prize in 1971, this would have been the shortlist

I'm going to the Mercury Music Prize tonight. The shortlisted acts are alt-J, Ben Howard, Django Django, Field Music, Jessie Ware, Lianne La Havas, The Macabees, Michael Kiwanuka, Plan B and Richard Hawley.

When I was compiling my Spotify playlist 1971- the Annus Mirabilis of the Rock Album, it struck me that if you'd been doing a similar exercise in that year, your Mercury shortlist would have been:

The Who's "Who's Next"
Rod Stewart's "Every Picture Tells A Story"
The Rolling Stones' "Sticky Fingers"
David Bowie's "Hunky Dory"
Paul McCartney's "Ram"
T. Rex's "Electric Warrior"
Yes's "The Yes Album"
"Led Zeppelin IV"
Pink Floyd's "Meddle"

Better? I couldn't possibly say. But one thing I promise you is that some radio station somewhere will be playing every single one of those records today.

Nothing beats the stately homos of England

I love a diary. I'm just reading the second volume of James Lees-Milne's.

I'm not greatly bothered about the professional world he operated in - he was one of the prime movers behind the National Trust - but I find his dogged old-fashionedness cracking fun. Even in the 1970s he's still using the words "motor" and "lunch" as verbs. He talks about the ringing of the "telephone bell" and describes his struggles with a "self-photographic box" at the Passport Office. His concerns are refreshingly out of sync with his age, let alone ours. He describes, in painful detail, a dinner with Princess Margaret's circle and lists everyone at the table with the exception of one woman he describes only as "a film star". That's what today they would call "cool".

One of the famous stately homos of old England, Lees-Milne and his old pal, the no-less married John Betjeman, get together in old age and chuckle over who used to "tuck up" with whom back at Oxford. I wonder if publishers are going to fight shy of paras like this in the post-Savile era: "

Walking to church he said, I wonder what the bell-ringer will look like. I said boy bell-ringers should be plain, spotty and wear spectacles. Yes, he said, men don't make passes at boys wearing glasses. We were mistaken, our bell-ringer was a very pretty boy with a cream complexion.....At Westonbirt, where I took him during the afternoon, he was sent into ecstasies by a girl with flaming red hair and blue jeans who was lolling lasciviously over a table in the library. These thrills and what he calls "letchings" are sheer fantasy, I presume.

But what I most like about him is also what I think I most like about great diaries. These are the moments when he says things to his diary that are simply too bleak to say to another person. When an old friend dies he thinks about them for a few seconds and then turns the page of his paper. That, he reflects, is what happens when you die. Your friends think about you and then turn the page. And then this:

Have been pondering over what someone said the other day, that when one is awake at 3 a.m. then one sees life and death, as they truly are, in their stark, terrible, hopeless reality; that at all other times of the day, one sees these infinite thing through rose-tinted spectacles...

Worth reading.

Listen to Johnnie Walker's Long Players tonight at ten

Over the last year I've recorded a bunch of programmes in the above series for Radio Two in which Johnnie and I enthuse over old favourite LPs, often while fondling the sleeves. I don't think I've ever been more enthusiastic than I am in tonight's programme, which goes out at ten. That's because we were celebrating "Who's Next" in general and "Baba O'Riley" in particular. A bit like this:

listen to ‘David Hepworth on 'Who's Next'’ on Audioboo

And it was made in 1971, which was of course the Annus Mirabilis of the Rock Album.

Pop annuals and the ghosts of Christmas Past

I came upon these two while sorting through some old books. The Radio Luxembourg Book of Record Stars must come from 1963 because the Beatles are in it, thought most of it's devoted to Peggy Lee, Frank Ifield and other artists who probably didn't get much Luxembourg play once they'd arrived. It's an awkward mix of PR shots accompanied by copy which purports to come from the performers and DJs. Jimmy Savile writes about his passion for country and western music. Nevill Skrimshire contributes a piece called "Categories in jazz don't matter".

Young people always looked forward to annuals but they rarely justified the anticipation. Publishers traditionally regarded them as money for old rope. The editorial was recycled from the files, the cover prices were high and they were bought by indulgent aunties for Christmas. I like to think we briefly changed that in the early 80s with the Smash Hits Yearbooks. When I look back it's amazing to see how much work we put into them: special photo sessions, very expensive "Look and learn"-style strips depicting the career of the Sex Pistols or how an edition of Top Of The Pops is put together plus features that looked back at what had happened in pop and what might happen in the future ("he'll be able to exchange video gossip with his girlfriend by computer", we wrote, looking forward to the unimaginably distant year of 1987.)

The interesting thing about them is that since they're an ephemeral item in more permanent form they tend to hang around long after the magazines have been boxed up and taken to the tip. Anyone else still got theirs?

Why do rock fans pretend they've *always* been into things?

I watched "Last Orders", the BBC 4 doc about Chas and Dave.

It must be funny being them. They've played the same music for over forty years. Sometimes they've sold a lot of records, sometimes they haven't. Sometimes they've played big halls, sometimes they've played small ones.  During that time they must have been aware that their star rose and fall according to the public mood.

Now they find that the music, which has never changed, is suddenly acceptable to the people who decide what's acceptable. Hence a BBC 4 documentary full of talking heads talking about how most people didn't realise that Chas & Dave have been acceptable for years. A clip is shown from a Jools Holland New Year's Show in which Ben Elton and Hugh Laurie enthuse about them with the shifty expression of men who suspect that the wind has changed in the last ten minutes. Even Pete Doherty is hauled out to perform his own fuddled benediction. Are there really people who would have their minds changed about music on their say-so?

The show is so full of people who apparently liked them all the time that you wonder where it got its revisionist zeal from. You wonder why the people who used to do them down aren't represented. If the film is all about presenting them in a new light, wouldn't it be natural to look at them in the old light for a minute or two? I suspect that the old light would have been the same light in which all British working class entertainment is seen as corny while working class entertainment from Louisiana or Lusaka is regarded as edgy and cool. In many ways this version of the cultural cringe would have been as interesting as Chas & Dave themselves.

Of all the arts pop music is the one in which people change their minds most often. Why is it also the one where they're least likely to admit that they do so?

Is this one of the futures of magazine publishing?

Yesterday I took part in a debate about digital magazines at the London College Of Communications. The last time I was there it was the London School Of Printing.

These debates are usually dominated by CEOs of major publishing companies who have to make optimistic predictions without really having a clue what they're talking about.

This was different because all the panellists had sufficient experience of actually producing magazines in both paper and digital formats to have shed most of their illusions.

Interestingly, nobody even used the words "bells and whistles", which is the term industry people use to describe the "feature-rich" iPad magazine apps which got all the attention when the medium first appeared. Everybody seemed to regard them as an irrelevance.

Afterwards I was talking to Adam Banks, the editor of Mac User. This used to have a staff of thirteen. It's now produced by Adam from his home in Newcastle. That's both paper and tablet editions. Fortnightly. Edited, commissioned, laid out and subbed by one, clearly very energetic man. I asked him if he found he got things done more quickly because he was doing them on his own. He said he did.

We're putting on a gig

In the last couple of years of The Word's life the Word In Your Ear gigs were one of the most popular things we did. These were generally put together by Alex Gold, who managed to persuade bands that they could make a few pounds for playing in front of an attentive, discriminating audience at the Lexington, which is just over the road from the old office on Pentonville Road. Among the people who said yes were Wilko Johnson, the Blockheads, Neil Hannon, David Ford and Eliza Carthy. A good time was had by all. Just ask anyone who went.

It's now a few months since the magazine folded and Alex and I have decided to have a crack at continuing the tradition. The idea is to put together balanced bills with the accent on variety. On Tuesday December 4th we're bringing back Skinny Lister, the young band who were a sensation supporting the Blockheads back in June. They've done more than most to explore the pop music possibilities of sea shanties, they're the gamest young band around, as their videos attest, and Lorna Thomas has been known to come jigging into the audience offering people rum from the band's communal jug. Their video for Seventeen Summers (see below) demonstrates well the nothing-can-phase us attitude it takes to get the top - or at least to the Lexington.

There will be a full supporting bill to be announced in due course, I'll be MC-ing and fronting my world famous Annus Mirabilis disco, in which all the records come from 1971. We hope to see as many old friends as possible and anyone else who wants to come is more than welcome. We'll be announcing the other "acts" in due course, but meanwhile I'm in a position to offer you, as a valued reader of this blog, special "early bird" rates. That's just £12 a ticket to you. Hope you can come.

Which sixties singers can still sing in their sixties?

An opera professional said to me recently: "No operatic tenor would dream of performing one of their old songs in the same key that they first recorded it but Paul McCartney does it all the time."

We notice it in McCartney's case because he's so clearly trying to emulate his younger self in every respect. Most of his contemporaries have stopped trying. Robert Plant's still got a good voice but it's not the same one that he used to front Led Zeppelin with, which probably explains why he hasn't rejoined the band. Bob Dylan's reed is broken but can still sell a song somehow and he probably likes sounding like an old man. But when Joni Mitchell re-recorded "A Case of You" in 2000 you could tell the way she sung the word "Canada" that she couldn't get near the bell-like top note of her 1971 recording. It seemed like a terrible capitulation.

James Taylor is one of the few people who was performing in the sixties who still seems to sing in the way he did in his pomp. Nick Lowe sings better than he did in the days when he was having hits. Both of them seem to sing their age. They record quietly, which makes a a difference. Georgie Fame's almost seventy. If the evidence of his new album Lost in a Lover's Dream is anything to go by, his voice has lost nothing since the sixties. He doesn't have to stretch because the most he's competing with is a guitar and bass and the songs, standards like "Cry Me A River" and "My Foolish Heart", are the kind of saloon-scaled material that are well within his range. I even like this one, which is about winter sports. Listen for the plosive at 3:17.

George McGovern and The History Man

George McGovern died this weekend at ninety. Most of the people furiously tweeting about the Presidential election won't know who he was. For my generation he was quite a big story. He opposed the Vietnam war. He also served with distinction in the Second World War. As the Economist piece says, in those days politicians thought it tasteless to talk about it.

The funny thing is this weekend I've also been re-reading Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, his satire of campus politics in the 70s, first published in 1975 and turned into a hit TV drama in 1981. McGovern's there in the first paragraph of the book, referred to by just his surname as if it was bound to reverberate down the ages.

Is there a better song about an inanimate object than A Thing Well Made?

Don McGlashan wrote some great songs for the Mutton Birds but the best one is "A Thing Well Made". It's about a man who runs a sporting goods store. He's not getting on well with his wife. He opens his shop early so that men can come in on their way to work and "daydream around the rods and reels". He shows off a gun to a customer. "Look at the way this gun fills the crook of your arm. To make a thing like that you'd need to know what you were about."

Then what? The music gets more insistent, which invites us to wonder if he's taken the gun to the top of a water tower and done something terrible. There's nothing in the song that actually says so. That's one of the things I like about songs. They go in one ear and out the other. But then they come back long afterwards.

The Mutton Birds reformed earlier this year to play a tour of New Zealand wineries. I can't imagine anything much better than that. They're playing at the Shepherd's Bush Empire next Saturday. Here they are doing "A Thing Well Made" a few years back.

Why the drummer is the only unsackable member of the band

A few years back a musician friend said something that changed the way I think about rock bands. Traditionally we tend to accept that leadership of the band is in the hands of the member who writes the songs, usually the singer. What this musician said was "the drummer is the one who knows where the beat is". This made me think. It's not a matter of being the best drummer, whatever that is. It's a matter of finding the pulse of the band, the temperature at which this particular bunch of musicians functions best.

That's why there was never any chance of Led Zeppelin keeping going after John Bonham died. He was the one who dictated how the rest of them played. That's why the Who without Keith Moon were almost embarrassing. That's why the Ramones were never the same after Tommy Ramone stopped playing the drums. That's why nobody but Levon Helm could ever have been the drummer of the Band. These people weren't just good players. They decided how the band should walk. The other musicians may have complained about it but in the end they had to get in step.

The new documentary Hello Quo provides the perfect demonstration of this truth. The line-up that made their classic rock shuffles, which they admit were based on the Doors "Roadhouse Blues", was Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt on guitars, Alan Lancaster on bass and John Coghlan on drums. Lancaster left in 1985 and Coghlan in 1981. "They wanted to replace me with a drum machine," he recalls, probably inaccurately.

Quo soldiered on without Coghlan (and no group embodied the verb more perfectly) but as Lancaster points out, the albums were just no good anymore. They brought in other drummers, who were probably more technically adept, and they even had hits, but old time fans knew that something was missing. Lancaster started a new life in Australia and got some startling new teeth. Coghlan took his hangdog expression into a variety of bands. Until recently.

The last five minutes of Hello Quo are its best. The four original members are reunited on a Shepperton sound stage. They embrace as awkwardly as any other bunch of Brits in their sixties. You get the impression Rossi is the difficult one and Parfitt is the diplomat. Then they take up their instruments and play "In My Chair", one of those slow, loping shuffles which made their name in the early seventies. Suddenly Status Quo is back in the room. The swing has returned. It's not just another bunch of musicians doing their best to replicate a sound that the original four stumbled upon in 1970 but the sound itself. It's a sound that all rock bands think they can make, which is where all rock bands are wrong. When you hear the real thing you know how wrong they are. Here it is again, as if by magic, forty years later. Actually, it is by magic. How else do you describe the way a band just happens to lock together?

You can hear the original "In My Chair" here.

What would the Guardian - or anyone - gain from ditching ink and paper?

The Telegraph was presumably flying a kite when it ran today's story about the Guardian's alleged "plans" to dump the paper and go digital-only. Of all the bits that didn't make sense about the piece, this paragraph was the most  difficult to understand:

However, trustees of the Scott Trust, GNM’s ultimate owner, fear it does not have enough cash on its books to sustain the newspapers for that long, according to More About Advertising

 All businesses worry about cash, particularly at the moment. Therefore the last thing they would do is cut off one of the main sources of that cash, which is the income that they get from cover price. This may not be as much as it used to be but it's still there, in, as they say in the boardroom, off-line pounds rather than on-line pence. The cash isn't going on sustaining the newspapers. It's going on investing in the on-line offering until it can supply a revenue stream as serious as the one it may ultimately have to replace.

This is the self-same problem the record business faces. They know that the future is downloads but meanwhile the revenue that they get from that allegedly dying format CD is what keeps the lights on.

Funny thing is five years ago somebody rang me from Media Guardian wondering if I knew anything about NME's alleged plans to ditch the paper edition to go digital-only. I said then what they have no doubt been saying to the Telegraph today. Why would anyone in their right mind do that?

One of the best speeches I've ever heard

Last night I found myself at the Oldie British Artist Awards in Mayfair. The competition's open to artists over the age of 60. When they announced the winner of the £5,000 prize it turned out to be the small gentleman in the blazer who was sitting, surrounded by family, just in front of me.

He's Donald Zec, a retired showbiz journalist of ninety-three. There he is (left) in the early sixties with one of his illustrious subjects.

Richard Ingrams was making the presentation from an unstable dais eighteen inches from the floor. Donald was invited up and at first it seemed he might not be able to make it. Then I heard him mutter "I'll get there" and he slowly rose, made his way across the room, mounted the dais and then delivered one of the best acceptance speeches I've ever heard. He complimented the other competitors, thanked the magazine and dedicated his success to his wife whose death six years ago had spurred him into painting for the first time. I can't remember all the jokes but one of them involved the words "do not resuscitate" being written at the bottom of his script.

I'm sure Donald was thrilled with the prize. I bet he was a lot more delighted with the chance to make a speech. For a natural show-off like Donald a speech is a pleasure and never a chore at any time. This must be doubly the case when you're ninety-three.

Cocktails are a fundamentally bad idea

I wish only the best for Gaby Scanlon, the 18-year-old who has had to have her stomach removed following a misadventure with a birthday cocktail containing liquid nitrogen. I mean that seriously. That's the word the Royal Lancaster Infirmary uses to describe her condition. Mind you, she was tweeting at the same time, which is classic.

Once recovered, Gaby will be able to say that her ill-judged experiment with cocktail drinking went worse than most people's - but then she went further than most people. Everybody has a cocktail incident, usually when they're young. Feeling that they ought to drink alcohol but put off by how nasty it tastes, young people are instead drawn to drinks that looks more like the garish libations they had on birthdays as a child. For a 17-year-old anything that looks like a cross between Lucozade and Knickerbocker Glory is acceptable.

It always goes wrong. I have a slogan to lend to the next Drinkaware campaign. "If you don't like alcohol, don't drink it." To which I could add, if you're going to drink it, don't stir in another ingredient in the hope that it will make it more palatable or exciting. It won't.

This applies to all mixing. I've never had a "cocktail" that I would want to have again. Gin and tonic is acceptable. Every other "combo" is a taste abomination, a waste of good liquor and an excuse to part you from your money. I always thought James Bond's dry martini was a bum note. Imagine if you took him to the pub and he asked for one of those. The whole place would be thinking "what a tool". They'd be right.

Why are people so sure Mike Love is the bad guy in The Beach Boys?

Mike Love issues a long statement to the Los Angeles Times about how he didn't "fire" Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys and why he had to curtail their large venue tour in order to fulfil his obligation to tour smaller venues with "his" Beach Boys.

If you can read past the jarring self-justification and gushing over-statement it seems he's got a case, which is not what so-called "true" Beach Boys fans, many of whom have rushed to social media to libel the singer, want to hear.

Love has always had what Paul Weller called a kind face. The kind of face you wanted to punch. He's the person that rock history has decided is the snake in the Garden of Eden the Wilson family would otherwise be. But how do we know? All bands are families, particularly ones that start out as families, and if we know one thing about families it is that they're immensely complicated and there's   plenty of blame to go round.

With long-lasting rock bands we pick out the member we have decided is the baddie and stick with it for long periods. It was Paul McCartney in the Beatles, Robbie Robertson in The Band, Steve Stills in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Roger Waters in Pink Floyd. The reasoning may change but once a person is cast as the villain any action they take will be interpreted in that light. Once the villain is chosen the rest of the cast can relax because anything they do will be seen as an understandable reaction to the tyrant in their midst.

The classic case of this is Mick Jagger. Those close to the Stones don't share the orthodox view that Keith is the soul of the group while Jagger is merely its accounts department. Keith never feels an encounter with the press is finished unless he has loosed off one shot at his old friend. He knows we'll all share in the joke because we all know Mick, right?  He also knows Jagger won't respond. I bet Mick could issue quite a few Mike Love-style statements if he chose to. But he doesn't.

50 years ago this month two great archetypes were born

Was on Five Live just now talking about the 50th anniversary of the first Beatles single and the first Bond movie and why they both continue to fascinate us. After I'd hung up the phone I remembered what I meant to say.

In his excellent 1964 book Love Me Do the American journalist Michael Braun suggested that one of the reasons they made such an impact on the London media was that they were "new kind of people". They were bright, sardonic, sharp without being educated and apparently possessed of a special secret known only to the four of them. In a way they were a template for the way every group has sought to behave ever since.

 You could say that in playing James Bond Sean Connery also presented the world with a new kind of person. Proud, sensual, cruel, sardonic, upwardly mobile and good at games, his Bond was a world away from the hero figures who had stalked British films in the forties and fifties. In a way he's been a template for the way every action hero has tried to behave ever since.

Maybe that's another reason they both endure.

In the 21st century all groups will reform

The latest rumour is that The Smiths will reform for Glastonbury next year. I don't know whether this is true. I doubt whether anyone does. But I wouldn't be surprised. All groups eventually reform because:
1. It's almost unknown for an individual to achieve as much outside a group as he did within a group.
2. And even if he did (as was probably the case with Sting) his name doesn't resound like theirs does.
3. Because the group has been off the market for years the price they can command is far greater than they could command as individuals.
4. There are always a couple of members who really need the money and no matter how bitter the relationships within the band you'd be very cold-hearted not to want to help them out.
5. Band reunions always come along when the solo career of the most bankable member has stalled or become routine.
6. Great excitement surrounds reunions and bands crave excitement.
7. All musicians reach a stage where they realise the best is behind them and they're just as keen to revisit those glory days as their fans.
8. In the last twenty years the life expectancy of pop brands has changed radically. It used to be that bands were at their most popular at the beginning of their careers. They're now far more popular at the end of their careers. Their fanbase is swelled by each new generation. There are far more people who want to see The Rolling Stones now than wanted to see them when they were in their pomp because in those days only people between the ages of 18 and 30 were interested.  Take That are far bigger now than they were in the early 90s. Leonard Cohen is still touring in front of crowds that dwarf the crowds he played in front of when he first recorded the songs he's delighting them with.

It will be the same with The Smiths. If they do reform they'll get their original fans plus the people who've decided that they're now Classic Rock plus the youngsters who are drawn to anything that looks like a legend. And all those tens of thousands of people who are drawn to whatever everybody else appears to be drawn to.

I haven't been so cross with a Virgin product since Beefheart's "Bluejeans And Moonbeams"

I don't have cable but I do have one of these directly outside my house. This one (left) in fact. It belongs to Virgin Media. The engineers obviously have trouble shutting it properly so they took to using masking tape on it. I've reported it repeatedly but nothing's been done to clean it up. When I take it to Twitter, as I have done more than once, Virgin Media's people direct me to their site where I report it (they want to know if it's got any racist grafitti on it) and still nothing's done. It's typical modern customer relations. Lots of time and trouble devoted to trying to assure me they're taking the problem seriously followed by no indication that they are.

I've found this one round the corner as well. I pass this one regularly and as far as I can see it's been open for six months. How the good people of Redacted Road resist the temptation to just reach inside, grab a fistful of multi-coloured fibre optic cables and yank them out is a tribute to their neighbourliness. Virgin Media really don't deserve them.

David Sedaris doesn't apologise or explain - which is why I like him

I'm beginning to like going to see people I know nothing about. A friend of ours booked some tickets to see David Sedaris at the Cadogan Hall on Friday night. I went along knowing nothing about him except he was popular and I'd once heard him read a story on a NPR podcast. He came on at 7:35, read three stories about things that had happened to him, took a few questions and at 9:05 went out in the lobby to sign books. He was funny. I enjoyed it a lot.

What I really liked about him was that at no point did he do what so many people who are in the business of making us laugh do, which is position themselves. He didn't follow every description of an unworthy thought or action with an assurance that he wasn't that kind of person. In the three stories he read he talked about his fancy to own the skeleton of a pygmy, the fact that he simply can't relax if he knows there's an unmade bed in the house and his discovery that some people in a public lavatory defecate into their hands to avoid the sound of turds splashing into the water. To hear thoughts like this coming from a neat middle-aged American was relaxing in a way that most comedy isn't.

We don't remember Frank Wilson but his records are written on our hearts

This morning in a moment of serendipity I found this in a pile and put it on. I've always had a soft spot for the streak of hits The Supremes made after Diana Ross left. "Nathan Jones", "Stoned Love", "Floy Joy", "Bad Weather", "Automatically Sunshine" and "Up To The Ladder To The Roof": this would be a recognised as a major pop career if it didn't happen to live in the shadow of the hits made by the original line-up. I love their brisk sexiness, that sense of life in the projects recalled from the back of a limo in "Up The Ladder To The Roof", the arrangement of "Bad Weather" which anticipates what Stevie Wonder was about to unleash and a sound which is little more supper-club than classic Motown. Now I read that Frank Wilson, who produced these and lots more Motown records, died yesterday. He didn't even get his name on the cover of this compilation of his records.

So, farewell, Aasmah Mir

The departure of Aasmah Mir from BBC Five Live removes half of one of the BBC's great on-air partnerships.

Peter Allen, her Drivetime partner, is old school. If anything he's even less impressed with the modern world than John Humphreys. You can't help warming to a man who is so determined not to fall in with fashionable enthusiasms and has a memory that goes back further than Tony Blair.

Mir, a Pakistani by descent and Glaswegian by upbringing, is clearly of a different generation but, apart from being a really good broadcaster, she clearly had enough rapport with Allen to play the only niece who could josh him out of his sulks. And she has one of the greatest gifts a radio presenter can have, which is an attractive laugh. I'll miss the pair of them.

1971 was the annus mirabilis of the rock album - and here's the proof

I've written before about how the year 1971 was the annus mirabilis of the rock album. It wasn't until I sat down yesterday and compiled a Spotify list of tracks from albums released in that one calendar year that I realised just how true it is.

The first bit of the list writes itself. This is the year of Hunky Dory, Sticky Fingers, Every Picture Tells A Story, Pink Floyd's Meddle, Elton John's Madman Across the Water, Who's Next and Led Zeppelin IV. Those are just the British ones. Think about it. If there had been a Mercury Music Prize in 1971 these would have been on the shortlist. These would be the Arctic Monkeys and Pulps of their day. The shortlist would possibly have been rounded out by a few token left-field items like John Martyn's Bless The Weather, No Roses by Shirley Collins and the Albion Band or Steeleye Span's Ten Man Mop.

In California Joni Mitchell was putting out Blue, The Doors LA Woman, James Taylor Mud Slide Slim, David Crosby If I Could Only Remember My Name, Graham Nash Songs For Beginners and Carole King Tapestry. It was the year of California.

King was one of a number of artists to put out more than one album in 1971: she released Music later the same year, McCartney followed Ram with the first Wings album Wildlife while Yes followed The Yes Album with Fragile - all in the same twelve months. Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood had enough songs for The Move's Message From The Country and the first Electric Light Orchestra album. Rod Stewart recorded one solo album and two albums with the Faces in that same time.

The strength of the list is even more amazing when you consider the people who didn't put out a record of new material in 1971: Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Richard Thompson to name but three. The first version of this playlist was only forty-three tunes. It's now up to 106 tracks and it will probably grow further.

Most of the music on this list was made by people under the age of thirty-two. The exceptions are Leonard Cohen, Bill Withers, Isaac Hayes, Albert King, Elvis Presley, Tom T. Hall and, Freddie King. There's a huge preponderance of war babies. Most of them were twenty-six. I was listening to Who's Next yesterday and marvelling at how this bunch of yobs from Shepherd's Bush could possibly have become so good so quickly. Hardly anyone who made the music on this list spent any time in further education. They were on the road as teenagers.

They were almost all releasing the records that would come to define them. If any of them were on stage tonight - as quite a few of them will be - the songs the audience would want them to play are the songs on these albums that they released in 1971.

Like footballers yet to have their first serious injury, they were writing songs as if it never occurred to them that one day they might run out. And they were doing it while on a never-ending tour. Nobody was going off to an island to write some new material. They didn't look down. They just kept on pedalling.

They all seemed, in one way or another, to be original. Even those few who were reaching back to an old tradition, such as the New Riders of The Purple Sage, Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks, Steeleye Span or Ry Cooder seemed to be doing it for the first time. The music they were playing even they had never heard before. Some, like Doctor John, were to carry on making and re-making their 1971 album for the next forty years.

A few, such as The Band, had passed their peak. Some, like the Bee Gees, were about to go into a slump from which they would re-emerge bigger and better. Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Steve Goodman would die very young.

Most of the music on this list was made to be played on the same radio to the same people. Formatting hadn't yet driven people off into ghettoes where they only heard what they already liked. Even at the snobbier end, I would guess that John Peel would have played everything on this list.

I was surprised at the fact that the cult Californian acts of the 70s were already around as the last chords of the sixties faded away. Little Feat had released their first. Ry Cooder was on to his third. Randy Newman was marking time with a live album. Neil Young was trying out the songs for his 1972 album Harvest when he recorded Live At Massey Hall. I cheated here because this record only came out in 2007.

Live albums were coming into fashion. Most of these acts would have prepared new material on stage before trying to record it, just as Neil Young was doing. You could make a top ten of live albums made at the Fillmore that year, from the Allman Brothers top-of-the-world masterpiece to Humble Pie's impudent manifesto, recorded largely when they were a support act.

Whenever I trot out the argument that 1971 was the annus mirabilis of the rock album, just as 1965 was the annus mirabilis of the pop single, people say, well, we all do that with our youth. And we all do.

The difference is I'm right. This list proves it.

P.S. There's no Led Zeppelin on Spotify. Otherwise that list would be even more amazing.

For the benefit of people who can't get Spotify, here's the song titles and the artists,

The Who – Baba O'Riley - Original Version
Rod Stewart – Mandolin Wind
The Rolling Stones – Moonlight Mile - 2009 Re-Mastered Digital Version
Joni Mitchell – Little Green
David Bowie – The Bewlay Brothers - 1999 Digital Remaster
The Doors – Riders On The Storm - Remaster
Marvin Gaye – Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)
The Allman Brothers Band – Statesboro Blues - Live At The Fillmore East/1971
Carole King – It's Too Late
T. Rex – Life's A Gas
Yes – Roundabout
Sly & The Family Stone – Family Affair - Single Version
Paul McCartney – Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey
Janis Joplin – Mercedes Benz
Elton John – Tiny Dancer
Cat Stevens – Tuesday's Dead
John Prine – Illegal Smile
David Crosby – Laughing
The Beach Boys – 'Til I Die
Nilsson – Without You - Remastered 2004
Santana – Toussaint L'Overture
Graham Nash – Wounded Bird
Alice Cooper – Under My Wheels
Dolly Parton – Coat Of Many Colors
Van Morrison – Wild Night - 2007 Re-mastered
Bill Withers – Ain't No Sunshine
Don McLean – American Pie
James Taylor – Hey Mister, That's Me Up On The Jukebox
Emerson, Lake & Palmer – Pictures At An Exhibition: The Great Gates Of Kiev - Live At Newcastle City Hall, 1971
Kris Kristofferson – The Pilgrim - Chapter 33
Flamin' Groovies – Teenage Head
Todd Rundgren – We Gotta Get You A Woman
Aretha Franklin – Oh Me Oh My [I'm A Fool For You Baby] [Album Version]
J.J. Cale – Call Me The Breeze
Isaac Hayes – Theme From Shaft - Album - Remastered
Little Feat – Brides Of Jesus
Electric Light Orchestra (Elo) – 10538 Overture - 2001 - Remaster
John Martyn – Singin' In The Rain
Kevin Ayers – Stranger In Blue Suede Shoes - 1999 Digital Remaster
Jimi Hendrix – Angel
Gene Clark – For A Spanish Guitar
Randy Newman – Tickle Me
The Kinks – Muswell Hillbilly
Serge Gainsbourg – Ballade De Melody Nelson
Albion Country Band – Claudy Banks
Al Green – I Can't Get Next To You
Judee Sill – Jesus Was A Cross Maker
Barbra Streisand – Stoney End
The Move – Do Ya
Stevie Wonder – Never Dreamed You'd Leave In Summer
Colin Blunstone – Say You Don't Mind
Leonard Cohen – Dress Rehearsal Rag
Mountain – Nantucket Sleighride (To Owen Coffin)
Leon Russell – Stranger In A Strange Land
Michael Nesmith And The First National Band – Grand Ennui
Traffic – The Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys
The J. Geils Band – Floyd's Hotel
Lindisfarne – Fog On The Tyne - 2004 - Remaster
Boz Scaggs – Runnin' Blue
James Brown – Hot Pants (She Got To Use What She Got To Get What She Wants)
Neil Young – Helpless - Live At Massey Hall 1971
Family – Larf And Sing
The Staple Singers – Respect Yourself
Sandy Denny – Late November
Stephen Stills – Change Partners
Procol Harum – Broken Barricades
John Lennon – Jealous Guy
Tony Joe White – They Caught The Devil And Put Him In Jail In Eudora, Arkansas
Dr. John – Where Ya At Mule
Tom T. Hall – The Year That Clayton Delaney Died
Genesis – The Return Of The Giant Hogweed
Humble Pie – Four Day Creep
Bee Gees – How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?
Carly Simon – Anticipation
Jimmy Webb – Met Her On A Plane
Loudon Wainwright III – Motel Blues
Ry Cooder – On A Monday
Elvis Presley – Little Cabin On The Hill
Frank Zappa – Peaches En Regalia - Live At Fillmore East / 1971
Danny O'Keefe – Good Time Charlie's Got The Blues
Osibisa – Beautiful Seven - Digitally Remastered Version
King Curtis – A Whiter Shade Of Pale - Live @ Fillmore West
Don Nix – Living By The Days
Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks – Shorty Falls In Love - Live (1971 Troubadour)
The Chi-Lites – Have You Seen Her
Freddie King – Going Down
ZZ Top – Squank
Crazy Horse – Downtown
Faces – Had Me A Real Good Time
Hot Tuna – Keep Your Lamps Trimmed And Burning
The Band – Life Is A Carnival - 2000 Digital Remaster
The Isley Brothers – Ohio/Machine Gun
John Stewart – Little Road and a Stone to Roll
Steeleye Span – When I Was On Horseback
Grin – We All Sung Together
Steve Goodman – City Of New Orleans
Rory Gallagher – Laundromat - Remastered 2011
Neil Diamond – I Am...I Said
Can – Paperhouse
Jethro Tull – Aqualung
America – Ventura Highway
New Riders Of The Purple Sage – Glendale Train
Albert King – She Caught The Katy (And Left Me A Mule To Ride)
The Hollies – Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress)
Roberta Flack – Go Up Moses
Caetano Veloso – London London
Carpenters – Rainy Days And Mondays
Status Quo – Mean Girl
The Moody Blues – The Story In Your Eyes
Linda Ronstadt – Rock Me On The Water
Dory Previn – Mary C. Brown And The Hollywood Sign
The Temptations – Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)
Johnny Cash – Man In Black
Laura Nyro;LaBelle – I Met Him On A Sunday
Bridget St John – City-Crazy
Gilbert O'Sullivan – Nothing Rhymed
The Supremes – Nathan Jones
Ike & Tina Turner – Proud Mary
Todd Rundgren – Long Flowing Robe
Carole King – Brother, Brother
Yes – I've Seen All Good People: a. Your Move, b. All Good People

Musicians are just waking up when their audience is going to sleep

I found this in my notes. I'd been struck by how rock musicians and their audiences share ninety minutes of a kind of communion in the evening but have completely different ways of looking at the day. It makes me wonder whether the time might ever come when the live music industry recognises the fact that since most of the audience is over forty they might prefer their shows to start a little earlier.

6:00 a.m. 
Rock fan's alarm goes.
Rock musician turns over in his sleep.
7:30 a.m.
Rock fan begins tiring commute.
Rock musician sleeps on.
8:30 a.m.
Rock fans begins work.
Rock musician does more sleeping
12:30 p.m.
Rock fan has lunch and starts to worry about how he's getting home from tonight's gig.
Rock musician stirs and watches Loose Women in bed.
2:00 p.m.
Rock fan begins meeting.
Rock musician has leisurely shower.
3:00 p.m.
Rock fan buys chocolate bar to provide energy surge.
Rock musician meets in lobby to go to sound check.
5:00 p.m.
Rock fan wonders how he's going to pass three and a half hours between work and gig.
Rock musician begins sound check
6:00 p.m.
Rock fan finishes work and toys with the idea of going straight home and missing gig altogether.
Rock musician starts to wake up.
8:00 p.m.
Rock fan goes to venue and looks for place to stand and, being less than six foot three, actually see.
Rock musician has a nap backstage.
9:30 p.m.
Rock fan looks at watch for the hundredth time.
Rock musician take to stage.
11:00 p.m.
Rock fan misses encore and slopes off to catch last train home.
Fired up with adrenaline rock musician begins encore.
12:30 a.m.
Rock fans tramps home from station feeling tired and filthy.
Rock musician goes to bar.      

When London was a mystery and Time Out had the key

Time Out goes to free distribution this week. I wish them the best of luck. It might work. If it doesn't it's difficult to see where they go next. According to The Times, "circulation as a paid-for title had almost halved since its late-Nineties’ peak of 110,000". I suspect that if it really was selling 55,000 copies a week on the news stand they wouldn't be making this move.

I was talking about music and media at the Reeperbahn Conference in Hamburg last week. One of the things I tried to get through to a younger audience is just how the communications revolution of the last ten years has made it difficult for us to remember the world before that revolution, when there was still such a thing as scarcity.

No title benefited from that scarcity quite as much as Time Out. In the golden era of Time Out, which went from the mid-70s to the 90s, if you wanted to know what was on at your local cinema or whether that film you wanted to see was on somewhere else, you went to Time Out. If you needed the phone number of the Hammersmith Odeon box office, you went to Time Out. If you wanted to know who QPR were going to be playing at the weekend, whether you could get a ticket and where the nearest tube was, you went to Time Out. If you wanted a vegetarian restaurant in East London, you went to Time Out.

It pulled off lots of coups in terms of design and journalism but beneath the surface it operated as a sort of alternative telephone directory. That's what made it sell. I can't remember the last time I looked up a phone number on paper and called it.

The power of positive napping

This shot comes from a series of pictures of school classrooms all over the world taken by Julian Germain. It's shot in Taiwan. After the kids have had lunch they just put their heads down on the desks and have a half-hour nap.

I was in Japan once on a long coach journey with a load of teenagers and young adults. I turned round from staring out of the window to see that they were all asleep. I was very envious. Presumably this is a Far Eastern thing.

Alfred Hitchcock's dirty postcard from London

I never get tired of watching Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy because it's a precious memento of London before Style. It was made in 1972 when the old fruit market was still in Covent Garden and barristers in morning dress discuss "sex murders" with unseemly relish over pints of bitter and shepherd's pie in Nell Of Old Drury. Jon Finch plays a boozy ex-RAF officer whose estranged wife runs a dating agency in one of those little rookeries that used to lead off Oxford Street. She takes him to dinner at her club where middle-aged ladies in hats are served by other ladies in bombazine. The police drive Rover 2000s and tuck into full English breakfasts. When Finch takes Anna Massey to the Coburg Hotel they have to check in as Mr and Mrs Oscar Wilde and the hall porter asks if he wants "anything from the pharmacy". Nobody in the film seems young, which simply wouldn't be allowed nowadays.

It opens with a helicopter shot coming up the river from the east, ducking under Tower Bridge and then swooping through the smoke left by a tugboat crossing the Thames. Tugboats! Smoke! It climaxes with a struggle in the back of a lorryload of potatoes. Hitchcock never made a seedier film but then he never made a film that had a more precise sense of place. At the time he made it he hadn't lived or worked here for thirty years but he still had a vision of London. There isn't a glimpse of the swinging city that everybody else was busy putting on film round about the same time. Maybe he just ignored all that and made the film that was in his head. I'm very glad he did.

Re-reading Ragtime by the light of the web

I first read Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow in the late-70s, not long after it was published. It's set on the East Coast of the USA in the early days of the 20th century and many of its characters are real historical figures. There are internationally-known ones like Harry Houdini and Sigmund Freud. Then there are people like Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit (pictured), best known to students of American history.

I've been reading it again, only this time there is one huge difference. This time I know that every person, place, event, device, fashion, city, district, mode of transport, incident, meeting, style, advertisement, invention, fad, gimmick, building or work of art mentioned in the text is available on the web on just a couple of clicks.

This has two interesting effects. It makes me wonder how much I bothered looking things up in reference books when I read the novel first time round. Did I just treat it all as an invention embroidered on top of fact and just read round the bits I couldn't decipher? Did I accept that finding out things was quite an onerous task? (I've just read a passage where J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford dine on Chincoteagues, which I now learn are ponies.)

Just as it was onerous for me back then I assumed it took an equally special effort on the part of the novelist to build this whole world for me. Reading it today with an iPad at hand is to realise to what extent Doctorow must have written his book by looking at a lot of old pictures and simply describing them. At that time this probably meant a lot of time spent at the New York Public Library going through their collections of news photographs, which seemed impressive in itself.

I'm sure that when Doctorow is no longer around to object Ragtime will be published in a pictorial version so that you won't even have to go to the trouble of firing up a web browser. What price fiction when that happens?

Avoid famous people doing you a favour

Clint Eastwood says that before he gave his speech at the Republican Convention the organisers wanted to know what he was going to say.

"They vet most of the people, but I told them, 'You can't do that with me, because I don't know what I'm going to say,'"

He says he got the idea for his bizarre dialogue with an empty stool as he was waiting to go on.

Think about that. How fragile must your hold on reality be if  you think that the idea which occurred to you a few seconds ago will enthral an entire nation?

He was supposed to do five minutes. He did twelve. Usually when things over-run it's because the speech is going over well. Not even a huge movie star who spends their lives in a warm bath of acclaim can possibly have thought that was the case here.

Here's what I've learned about public speaking. The only good public speakers are the nervous ones. I've found this to be true on big platforms and in tiny rooms above pubs.

Anyone who tells you they're nervous will be fine. Anyone who tells you they're not nervous will be a disaster. And, what's more, they'll be so lacking in awareness that afterwards they won't know how badly it's gone.

This applies with humans but even more with celebrities. There's something in the make-up of famous people that leads them to believe they can get on their feet and compose something funny and inspiring with no preparation.

I once took part in a high-profile debate which involved a rock star. I've done lots of public speaking which is why I sweated on my preparation. He'd done none which is why he thought he could just stand up and do it. He couldn't. Oh boy, he couldn't. And I bet, like Clint Eastwood, he still doesn't know how badly he did.

Mark Ellen and I have discussed this many times over the years in planning events. Through bitter experience we learned that you should particularly beware a star who thinks they're doing you a favour. If they think they're doing you a favour they will have been inadequately briefed about the nature of the event by their representatives, will do no preparation before the event and then at the last minute will be so paralysed with nerves and self-consciousness that they'll launch into a riff which has no ending, usually one that disparages the event in a clumsy effort to look above it all. Avoid them.

It's a recording contract, not a marriage

Some resourceful plugger managed to get the story of Bill Fay on the Today programme this morning. Fay made a couple of albums in the early 70s and then there was nothing until recently when he was swept up in the 21st century campaign to rediscover just about every singer-songwriter from that golden era. Best of luck to him.

The key phrase that made the narrative work for a news programme was that Fay was "dropped by his record company" in 1971. You can hear that being pitched to the producer, repeated to the editor, briefed to the presenter and then said feelingly during the item.

"Dropped by his record company" is a recent expression. Before that people would say "his popularity declined". "Dropped by his record company" comes from the era of boy bands and it implies a complete withdrawal of the only source of funding. It is taken to mean "cast into the outer darkness". It means "going home with your tail between your legs". It means "game over".

In fact record companies rarely "drop" anyone. They simply decline to renew the contract, double their initial bet and throw good money after bad.

When Bill Fay made those two records for Decca subsidiary Deram in 1970-71 a record deal would probably be for just one album with an option for another. Round about the same time East Of Eden made just two albums for Deram and they had a hit single. Most acts on Deram, like most acts on most labels, never got to make an album at all.

Fay made his two, the market shrugged, the radio passed and the press weren't bothered and so Deram decided they didn't want any more. This was the right decision, not an act of cultural vandalism.

 I'm always amazed that the same people who want record companies to stick with unsuccessful acts for longer are the same people who want the record companies to spend all their time looking for fresh new talent. If they do one they can't do the other.

At last I can name the mystery band who came to stand for ROCK

Sorting stuff out this weekend I came upon this copy of the NME Encyclopedia of Rock. This came out in 1976 and was edited by Nick Logan, who taught me to proof-read and Bob Woffinden, who gave me the invaluable advice "don't ever use the word 'feel' as a noun". (Amazing what you remember.)

Before the internet this was the place you went if you wanted to check how many records Paul Kossoff had made or Joni Mitchell's date of birth. I tweeted about it and I clearly wasn't the only one who remembered it with great affection. Some had committed whole sections to memory. David Quantick said he taught himself to write reviews by reading it. One person could only afford the unillustrated version and used to borrow the pictorial version from the library.

Looking at it I remembered the many hours we used to spend trying to work out the identity of the group on the front. Again I wasn't the only one. Even Nick Logan didn't know. It had been the publisher's choice. The guesses came in. Budgie? Mountain? Wishbone Ash? Mahogany Rush? Rush? Can? Steve Hillage and Gong? Iron Butterfly?

I have to thank Mark Blake for giving me the correct answer. It's Quiver, an excellent group who subsequently merged with the Sutherland Brothers and had Tim Renwick and Bruce Thomas among their number.

The person who took the photograph was Robert Ellis, who also supplied the picture of Pink Floyd on the back. "It was deliberately chosen to be obscure," he told me. "They were first band on at the first show at the newly opened Rainbow Theatre, Finsbury Park London, supporting the Who, in November 1971. The cover of the book deceives the eye. My original photo, which I still have, shows the four members of the band."

What do you do with old magazines?

Just that. What do you do with the buggers? I just opened a box which has been gathering dust in my office for ten years and was amazed what I found. Impenetrably dense issues of ZigZag from the days of punk rock, thirty-year-old copies of Rolling Stone, cultish Anglophile music magazines like Bomp! and Trouser Press from the mid-70s, editions of The Face from the days when you'd forgotten it was still going and lots of things I've worked on myself. For years I used to have the magazines I'd worked on myself put in bound volumes. This means they're in good condition but I hardly ever look at them.

But why did I keep these magazines in the boxes? Often because they cost money, were hard to track down at the time and would be impossible to replace. At the time in the mid-70s when I was originally enthralled by John Tobler's interviews with Mike Nesmith or Nick Kent's look back at the Beach Boys I suppose I thought I would never get that kind of treat again. Little did anyone suspect that in forty years time people would still be twining out glossier versions of the same thing. Nostalgia would prove to have a future that nobody could have predicted.

I look at these magazines now and I wonder what to do with them. Once I put them back in this box I'll never get them out again. They're not sufficiently organised for me to ever use them as a form of reference. If I wanted to find particular pieces I could probably Google them or I could easily email somebody who would have them. They're not worth any money on the secondhand market. And they're dust magnets. When I first packed them away I was a young bloke trying to hang on to my youth. Why the hell am I hanging on to them now?

The kind of David Bowie exhibition I'd like to see

At today's press launch for the exhibition David Bowie Is, which is coming up next March at the V&A, they had three of his costumes on display. There was the Ashes To Ashes pierrot suit, the Union flag frock coat designed by Alexander McQueen and one of the Ziggy Stardust outfits, for which the brief was droog via Laura Ashley.

The people talking about the exhibition were keen to stress that it was more than a display of costumes, which suggests that it will be a display of costumes. Seeing famous outfits on mannequins always leaves me somewhat underwhelmed. What they should really do is let you try them on.

I was trying to think of the kind of memorabilia exhibition I would really like to see. I guess mine would be less spectacular, more suited to the detailed displays you could pore over in glass cases than the high-impact items around which most exhibitions are built. When we go round art galleries my wife looks at the pictures first and then at the captions. I look at the captions first and then the pictures. I've decided I'm a narrative person.

That's why I'd like to see his childhood bedroom recreated, displays of Bromley town centre through the years, old school books, cheap guitars, bassdrum pedals, a chronology of his haircuts, marked-up tape boxes, old contracts, personal letters, sketches, false starts, crossings-out, studio logs, mixing consoles, bits of kit, clipping from FAB 208, preposterous film scripts, storyboards for videos, things thrown on stage by fans and, most of all, a royalty statement for Tin Machine.

A little light music in the morning

Last night Danny Baker was wondering how come Harry Nilsson never got the respect he deserved. Maybe it's because he played light music. The music we take seriously is the music that seems to take itself seriously. On Harry, which was made in 1969, he even sings about puppies at one point, which was never going to get the rock critics stroking their goatees in approval. Where's the dark and edgy in that?

I don't know who Mike Viola is. I looked him up a  couple of months ago but I've forgotten what I learned and the more I enjoy Acousto De Perfecto the less interested I am in finding out. I'm sure it would only prejudice me. His voice reminds me a bit of Harry Nilsson, particularly on Primary Care Giver. Most of the record is just him on acoustic guitar plus two people playing violas.

Like Nilsson's records, Viola's sound a little like doodles. There's a line in Secret Radio about songwriting that I like. "Not all of them are worth finishing/But you've got to finish them to see".

You can find them both on Spotify.

Sympathy for the devil (or Frankie Boyle)

I don't go seeking after Frankie Boyle but I sympathise with the position he's in. Channel 4, like the BBC before them, hire him because he's outrageous and then fire him because he's outrageous. It's as if they're gleefully egging him on to let fly with the barbs but as soon as one of them lands on a group they perceive as "vulnerable" (one of the weasel words of our time) they hastily compose their features to indicate disapproval and ask him to step into the office.

It was the same with Russell Brand during his time on Radio Two. You hire him because he goes a notch further than Jonathan Ross and then fire him because he's gone two notches further. That's the nature of the beast. If you tell somebody that their appeal lies in their outrageousness you must expect them to aspire to outrageousness, which can be quite easily measured by the number of times they cross the line, rather than humour, which is a lot more subjective. And harder.