Does Time Inc's change of mind spell the end of "synergy"?

Time Inc has abruptly pulled out of merger negotiations with publisher Meredith and decided to put its magazines into a separate company from its film and TV assets. This is presumably for valuation reasons. You can't blame them for that.

What will probably pass without notice is that this may mark the point at which major media companies stopped talking about "synergy", when the biggest one of all admitted that there was nothing to be said for having their magazines under the same umbrella as their TV company.

"Synergy" used to be a key buzz word for TV companies buying print publishers or vice versa. It was the plausible sounding element in the attempt to make two and two add up to five which is at the root of most corporate moves.

In the fantasies of media moguls your magazine journalists feed stories into your radio stations and create stars who then sign book deals with your book division which are then adapted into block busting movies by your studio.

I'm sure there were cases where it worked out like that but I know there were many thousands when it didn't. The people who create intellectual property work for their own satisfaction, glory and profit rather than for the greater good of the company, no matter how well-disposed they might be towards that company.

All the different media disciplines have very different cultures. The people who work within them are not sharers. They resent the people sitting just the other side of the partition badly enough, let alone the ones across town with the better offices and different job titles.

When a full cinema rose to applaud a *film* of Alvin Lee

Woodstock was big but "Woodstock" was bigger. The many millions in London and Leeds and Lyon and everywhere else in the world who bought tickets to see the subsequent film got a better, drier, more visible and audible entertainment experience than had been available to most of the people who were in Bethel when the festival took place.

Alvin Lee died today. Lee led the Nottingham blues band Ten Years After who (unlike The Band and Creedence Clearwater Revival) were bright enough to sign the contract with the makers of the film. "Woodstock" made them. No act has been more identified with one performance of one song on one day than Ten Years After were with their 11-minute performance of "Going Home". It was as fast as rock and roll can get while still being rhythmic. In the film it was shot close up with Lee's Roman profile occupying the greater part of the mile-wide screen while the other members of Ten Years After were consigned to the splits. It was a young man's fantasy come to life. I bet the boys who were to go on to form the Ramones were watching.

I went to see the film repeatedly. One Saturday afternoon at the Odeon Leicester Square the whole cinema applauded at the end of "Going Home". Actually applauded a band who weren't there. I do believe some people may even have stood.

A press release from Planet Alt

I just got a PR email that went like this:

"Painting a layered and hazy, John Fahey-indebted landscape, the Lambchop and Silver Jews associate comes across as travel-weary cartographer and six-string virtuoso all at once." —SPIN
Recorded and mixed at Beech House in Nashville and co-produced by Tyler and Mark Nevers, Impossible Truth features guest appearances from Chris Scruggs, Luke Schneider, Roy Agee, and Lambchop compatriot Scott Martin. 2010’s Behold the Spirit, William Tyler’s first album under his own name, was celebrated by Pitchfork as “the most vital, energized album by an American solo guitarist in a decade or more” and established him as a critical favorite, the picker who, according to his friend and tour mate M.C. Taylor from Hiss Golden Messenger, “connects the dots between Sandy Bull, Richard Thompson, Bruce Langhorne, and Reggie Young.”
Of the album, Uncut raves: “This terrific record feels less like an exploratory folk session, more like a virtuoso guitarist and arranger using the tools of a folk musician to reconsider and deconstruct rock music.” And Pitchfork writes: “Without pandering in the slightest, Tyler wields his staggering fingerpicking technique as a means of presenting something accessible and lyrical.” Popmatters included the album in their "Listening Ahead" feature, while Spin chose William as one of their "5 Artists to Watch" in February. 

It struck me that this may be one of the most pseudy unsolicited communications I've received from a PR. Nowadays they have more namechecks than a stud book. The line "connects the dots between Sandy Bull, Richard Thompson, Bruce Langhorne and Reggie Young", which is borrowed from M.C. Taylor from Hiss Golden Messenger (with whom we are all obviously familiar) is a particular beaut.

I know far too much about music and even I would have to go and look up most of those names.

It's a classic of its kind: quotes within quotes, references within references, reviews within reviews, talk of reconsidering and deconstructing and all, one suspects, pointing you towards music which is essentially about other and probably better music. It makes you wonder whether so much of the music produced by the "alt" industry aspires only to be a footnote to music made long ago.

What happens after the great retail clear-out?

Not long ago Oxford Street had ten book shops. Now it has none - unless you count WH Smith.

Not long ago it also had half a dozen places you could buy records. It now has just one - and a sorry, understocked specimen it is at the moment.

Records and books are fast disappearing from our retail environment. You no longer encounter them on the way to get a sandwich. They enter most people's lives as noughts and ones or via the sturdy cardboard Amazon package.

I wonder whether they'll come back. Obviously not on the same level but maybe at a level enough to sustain some manufacture, distribution and retail, many notches below the mad over-supply of ten years ago.

We always cherish things just as they're about to slip away altogether. People had been gaily chucking away vinyl for years before they realised that this redundant, fragile format was about to be reborn as a soulful antique. When I did a programme for Radio Four about bootlegs a few years back there was reputedly only one record deck in the whole of the BBC. Now they're ordering them up like there's no tomorrow. Even CDs are now starting to feel just a little bit precious, which never happened before.

This is bound to be more the case as new CDs and books become less visible and more expensive, as they're surely bound to do as the number of retail outlets shrinks and Amazon, having taken control of the market, decides to push the price.

I was in Waterstone's in Piccadilly on Saturday, which is a pretty civilised place to buy books. I saw a book I was interested in. It was £9.99. I looked it up on the Amazon app on my phone. They had it for £6.89.

On two occasions recently I've walked out of independent book shops which didn't have what I asked for and hadn't heard of it either, stood on the pavement outside and ordered from Amazon from my phone. Both times I was thinking "I hope they're watching."

In Waterstone's I bought the copy in the shop. It's a nice environment, easy to navigate and the staff were pleasant. But more important than they, they had it. That's the clincher.

I don't expect to be able to find comprehensive book stores on every corner. A handful in the centre of London would probably do me fine. I would be perfectly happy with that.

So Star Wars has replaced literature. That was a good swap, wasn't it?

Barack Obama made a remark the other day which referred to Star Wars. The tendency to draw analogies between real life and Star Wars is a marker of one of the great chasms between the generations.

When I saw the film all those years ago I was already too old to find it much more than noisy and confusing.

I didn't go on about it. I felt that if I did the decent thing and forgot it, everyone else would do the same.

It didn't work out like that. People now liken things to Star Wars as earlier generations likened things to characters in literature. I smile knowingly but I don't know what they're going on about.

And now Barack Obama makes some comment about a "Jedi mind meld" which turns out to be a conflation of Star Wars and Star Trek and I find it vaguely depressing that the most powerful man in the world has the room in his brain for anything quite as tiresome.

Thinking of this it struck me that I may have crossed another generational rubicon. You spend the first part of your life thinking the world is in trouble because it's run by the older generation. Then you wake up to find that the world is in trouble because it's run by the younger generation.

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."

Who remembers smoking on the tube?

I used to measure the passing of time by the proportion of the population who could remember the First World War. Then it was the Second World War. Now it's this.

Who remembers smoking on the tube?

The tube's 150 years old today.  When I first came to London in the late 60s you could smoke on every carriage of a train apart from the carriage one from the front and the carriage one from the back. I can no longer quite remember just how unpleasant that must have been. Discarded cigarette ends would gather in the slats of the carriage's wooden floors. Passengers who found the fug too unpleasant could reach over and open the windows. Non-smokers were inured to smoke. It was a fact of life.

At some point in the 70s things were reorganised so that most carriages were non-smoking, again apart from the penultimate carriages at the front and back. The ban came in by degrees after a series of fires. Smoking was banned on the actual trains in 1984 but still people lit up as they left the platform. The build-up of discarded smoking materials under the escalators contributed to the catastrophic fire at King's Cross in 1987, which killed 31 people. The smoking ban had been extended to all stations below ground two years earlier but the detritus of ages was still there.  In the wake of the King's Cross disaster the ban became total, covering all stations on the network.

You tell the kids of today that and they won't believe you.

Rock magazines sell the past because that's what people buy

Killing time at Stansted last night I wandered into WH Smith and looked at the music magazines, something I haven't done for a while. Johnny Marr was on the cover of Mojo. A 1969 image of Gram Parsons was on the cover of Uncut. Q was a composite cover featuring Robbie Williams, Noel Gallagher and others.

People ask why the cover stars of monthly music magazines are so often stars whose fame is rooted in an earlier age, as much as ten, twenty, thirty, even forty years before. Surely these titles should be celebrating newness?

It's not because the editors of these titles are in love with the past. It's because it works. It doesn't work perfectly but it works better than the alternative, an act who are either unrecognisable or have a polarising effect which will rebound at the expense of your circulation figures.

There was a time when the best thing you could put on the cover was the Hot New Thing. Nowadays it's possibly the worst thing you can do. Why should that be? Too many Sigue Sigue Sputniks and not enough Radioheads? Too many acts who were set to take the world by storm and then didn't? Novelty fatigue? A multitude of new ways of accessing information about the Hot New Thing? It's probably a combination of all these.

The fact that new acts are box office poison is particularly bad news for PRs. The thing they are paid to achieve will remove a few thousand pounds from the revenue line of the publication they must achieve it through.

I see that last week's cover of the NME featured Haim and Parma Violets. That's two new bands, albeit photographed in a sixties pose and a cover line referencing a fifty-year-old Who single. But that came after three consecutive covers which were essentially backward-looking.

With the new issue normal service has been resumed.

The cup of coffee that says 'do you know how busy I am?'

A friend recently went to a school carol service in a church. It was late afternoon. Some parents, who had obviously come directly from work, arrived clutching their Starbucks coffee. He was surprised to see this in a church, as I would be.

Certain personality types increasingly feel the need to turn up everywhere - for work, play and now apparently worship - absently clasping a waxed bucket of hot milk with corporate branding on its side. Motion picture actors are never seen out in public without one.

This may be partly a question of thirst but it is more often a question of show. The brandished beaker is a way of saying "do you know how busy I am?" without having to show people your diary. People's need for the milky sustenance in the cup is nothing compared to the signal their sporting of the cup sends out about just how busy they are and how fortunate the rest of us are that they've managed to insert this trifling appointment into a day otherwise devoted to deciding the fate of empires, furiously pedalling to keep the economy afloat or saving the lives of small children.

Busyness is the pose de nos jours. Bah.

P.S. Some of them left their empty cups behind in the pew.

The grubby business of exchanging actual words for actual money

"We believe this is the right price point for our newspaper at this time," said the Guardian's marketing director at the end of 2011 to explain why the price was about to rise from a pound to £1.20. Just over a year later it's going up again, this time to £1.40. "We believe this is the correct current price point," says another statement.

Inevitably the same people will be saying something similar to justify the next price hike in a year's time. What they won't say is what they're bound to be thinking - isn't there something perverse about putting a tax on the declining number of people who support you in order to subsidise giving your content away to people who don't?

I sympathise with the people who have to make these decisions. They're in an impossible position. As demand shrinks the basic product ought to be cheaper, as it is in the record business. In press it works the other way. Cover price revenue is one of the few levers a hard-pressed publisher can pull. They ask themselves whether the rump they're left with will stop buying if they put up the price. They guess a percentage, then close their eyes and jump.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, I've been saying for years that some of the people who make airy predictions about new digital business models should leave the security of their banker-funded old media empires and try to walk the walk they've been talking for so long. Andrew Sullivan, probably the biggest political blogger in the English-speaking world, has announced that this is what he's doing. From February 1st his full output will only be available for the payment of a $20 annual subscription.

I'm sure Sullivan's people know all the tricks to ensure that as many as possible of his millions of followers pay the sub. If an old magazine hand may offer an observation to someone entering the real world of trying to part private citizens from the actual cash money in their pocket (in which of course the proprietor of your local car wash knows more than the cleverest person in the Groucho club) it would be this.

Many of your followers will disappear with a wooshing sound the moment you even hint at charging.  A noisy minority will fall over themselves to give you their money and will make sure everyone knows they are doing it. An argumentative minority will hang around to complain that what you're doing is a) morally wrong and b) bad business practice.

Don't worry about any of these groups. The people you have to worry about are the ones who fully intend to subscribe, in some cases think they already do subscribe, but never actually get round to it. They're the ones.

Who still lives the long-playing life?

In the fifties and sixties pictures like this one were staples of the greetings card trade. The teen couple whiling away their time with a limitless supply of long-playing records was a dream of the age.

The figures reported by the music business yesterday weren't altogether bad. People are buying downloads in greater numbers than ever (at this stage in the game it would be surprising if they weren't) but they're buying the tracks they want and leaving the rest at the side of their plate. It's a singles market, the singles often elected by the buyer at the point of purchase, not by the industry. Volume sales of both digital and physical albums declined by 11% in a year. People spend less time listening to one artist for a sustained period. The record industry is heavily invested - financially, creatively, nostalgically and emotionally - in a format, the 45-minute album, which the first business consultant off the rank could tell you appears to be an obsolete medium.

One of the reasons it's obsolete is because the grandchildren of the couple in the picture above don't set aside the time for the sustained listen which the long playing record demands. One of the things that helped the long playing record flourish was that there was such a thing as not much else to do. Entire days of it. Rushing into that vacuum came all those huge selling records of the 70s. You'd come back to your student flat every evening and play the same fifty albums again and again, not least because there was no radio in the place and certainly no TV. There were great albums, of course, which is one prerequisite for an albums boom, but there were also plenty of time, which begged to be whiled away in album-shaped denominations.

That's the thing that strikes me about all those end of the year lists of ten (ten!) albums of 2012. Who's actually listening to all these albums all the way through more than once and where are they getting the time? If they've elected ten then presumably they must have listened to fifty all the way through more than once.  How? With more TV and radio than ever before and the advent of the Great Time Waster the internet? I can only conclude that it must be their job or they don't have a job. How else could they clear the time? And do they still sprawl on the carpet just like the couple above?

Sometimes the kindest thing you can do is discourage people

Nice little piece in Paris Review about a young novelist who slips Philip Roth a copy of his first book while serving him coffee. Without reading the book Roth advises him to give up before it's too late. "I would say just stop now." He knows what heartbreak awaits the young novelist. Given the state of graduate unemployment nowadays Roth must get a box-fresh novel every time he goes into Costa. I'm sure he's not meaning to be hurtful. He may be trying to avoid being recruited to the young writer's team.

Even at my footling level I run a mile to avoid anyone who wants to give me their CD. I do that because I can't win. If I like it people expect me to somehow help them make it a success. If I don't like it I'm clearly a bastard. Furthermore there is no middle way between those positions. No matter what they say musicians do not want anyone's advice about how they might make their music better. They don't want it anymore than a mother wishes to learn how to make her children more appealing.

Back to Roth. Presumably he also reasons that anyone who is serious about being a writer isn't going to be put off by any discouraging advice he might offer. As Laurence Olivier told the young would-be actor, "if you're not an actor then you simply didn't want it badly enough."

I sometimes find myself facing classes of journalism students and having to mutter variations on "it was competitive when I got in this game but it's far more competitive now." People say to me I shouldn't be discouraging. But maybe a little discouragement isn't actually fatal. Furthermore, in weeding out the more easily discouraged I may be making things easier for the more deserving ones. Let's face it. For the last thirty years there's been an awful lot of encouragement around.

The only thing to do today is watch this film about David Geffen

The rain's lashing the windows. It will continue all day. The best thing you can do if you're interested in show business is watch "Inventing David Geffen" via the PBS site. That's him second from right in the picture with Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and Cass Elliott.

In many ways it's what you'd expect. Lots of famous faces (many of them lifted) popping up to trot out their polished observations about the only man to have been an enormous success as both a music and a film mogul. In editing these films producers tend to favour the pithy untruth over the insight that takes a while to get out. Thus the A&R man gets away with saying that when Guns N' Roses were first played on MTV at four in the morning "it blew up the switchboard". On the other hand I liked Mike Nichols talking about how Geffen sabotaged Hilary Clinton's presidential bid by saying that "everybody in politics lies but they do it with such ease, it's troubling". "It was like a tiny pin dopped at a very silent moment and everybody said 'that's true'."

I liked the section about his trip to Paris with Joni Mitchell which resulted in her writing "Free Man In Paris", one of very her best songs, about him. I liked Jackson Browne talking about what it was like to overhear Geffen's phone conversations with promoters. You never quite know whether to trust the actuality. Is that really him talking on the phone to Clive Davis about trying to get the reformed Byrds on his label? Did he really get in early at the William Morris Agency for six months to intercept the letter from UCLA which would have torpedoed his made-up CV? And is that the actual letter? And are we so prudish that even the word "bullshit" has to be bleeped?

Still, there should be more films about impresarios because I don't think they get the respect they deserve. The narrative of the entertainment business is loaded so heavily in the artist's favour that we can't see that the guy on the phone can be every bit as creative as the bloke with the guitar.  I sympathise with Elliot Roberts, the man who's managed Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and many other people who can't be easy, when he says "Sometimes you just want a thank-you. You move mountains and all the act says is 'OK, that's where the mountain should be.'"

Michael Nesmith is 70 today and this is what he did best

Michael Nesmith's 70 today. He's done lots of things in his career. Because he inherited a fortune from his mother, who invented liquid correction paper, he could pick and choose. When the Monkees reform sometimes he's there and sometimes he isn't. He's the boss of a think tank. He pioneered long-form video. He's been a quite successful movie producer. He put out a record which was accompanied by a book you were meant to read at the same time.

In the seventies he released a series of albums on RCA that I still love. They had the kind of titles like "Tantamount To Treason" and "Loose Salute" that made you love them long before you got to hear them. They're impressionistic. On one hand he was making Nashville pop. On the other he seemed to be fashioning little movies. He scattered sound effects and spoken passages throughout. I've put three of the best ones on a Spotify playlist here.

The best writers tell you what they see, not what they think

I bought Up in the Old Hotel in Foyle's just before Christmas. I was attracted by the cover, the testimonials from Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie and the fact that the author, Joseph Mitchell, wrote for the New Yorker for fifty years. He died in 1996. For the last thirty years he clocked in at the office daily and wrote but didn't come up with anything he considered worth publishing.


If you read his collected works you can see why. If his portraits of New York characters from the thirties, forties and fifties are notable for anything it's the density of information and observation he packs into each one. Mitchell would hang out with his subjects for years before he'd filled his notebooks with enough detail to justify writing them up.

He was probably one of those writers who regarded his job as a trade rather than a profession. At no stage in the 700 pages does he appear to acknowledge the fact that he is going to places and meeting people that we, gentle readers might find a little too real. This applies whether he's detailing the money-making scams of New York's gypsy tribes, describing the rituals of the beefsteak dinners put on by the city's Tammany societies, telling the story of how the Mohawks recovered their warrior prestige by working in "high steel" or levelly reminiscing about the nocturnal activities of the Ku Klux Klan during his Southern boyhood.

There are good writers around today but generally they've read about things before actually encountering them. They're graduates. They come at life book-first. They delight in measuring how far experience exceeds or falls short of how they feel things ought to be. They need to tell you what they think about everything. Their stories are peopled by goodies and baddies. Their prose is peppered with hooray words and boo words.

Mitchell is from a very different school and was fortunate the world of print could support him. In the introduction he says that the only people he doesn't care to listen to are "society women, industrial leaders, distinguished authors, ministers, explorers, moving picture actors and any actress under the age of thirty-five." Journalists will recognise that these are the very people that editors are most interested in. Mitchell says experience has taught him that the best talk actually comes from "anthropologists, farmers, prostitutes and the occasional bartender."

I've been sitting in front of the fire all Christmas, reading his book. As a result I don't know how he might have voted, what his attitude to religion might have been or what he thought on any of the issues of the day. I do not know "where he was coming from", which is the first thing people expect these days.  In 700 pages Joseph Mitchell doesn't let slip as many clues about himself as most people do in the average night on Twitter.

However I do feel I've learned a lot about people by reading his collected works. One of his most trusted sources is a middle-aged policeman called Captain Campion. Mitchell reports that he was promoted from beat cop because his seniors noticed that he was "unusually intelligent and that he had a remarkably accurate memory for faces, names, conversations, and sequences of actions and that he was deeply curious about human behaviour". I like to think that when he wrote those lines Mitchell might have been describing himself.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, if the fates allow

The best Christmas songs are the sad ones: "Fairytale Of New York", "It's A Big Country", "Blue Christmas" and "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas", which is probably the best actual Christmas song of all.

The lyrics were written by Hugh Martin and the music by Ralph Blane. It was unveiled in the 1944 film "Meet Me In St Louis". Judy Garland sings it to comfort her young sister, who's upset at the news that the family are moving to New York.

The lyric has changed through the years. The film's director thought it was too sad and persuaded Martin to change "it may be your last" to "let your heart be light". When Sinatra came to record a version on an album called "A Jolly Christmas" he asked him to change it again. This time "until then we'll have to muddle through somehow" became "hang a shining star upon the highest bough". Sinatra's got form when it comes to making clunky changes to lyrics - see his altering of Jesus to "Jilly" in his version of "Mrs Robinson".

In later life Martin, who was a Seventh Day Adventist, re-wrote his song as "Have Yourself A Blessed Little Christmas" and performed it as "we will all be together, if the Lord allows", a form of words he claimed were in the original but were swapped for "if the fates allow" to make the song less religious.

Last night I caught Larry Lamb and the cast of "Gavin And Stacey" doing it at the end of a repeated Christmas special. I think "if the fates allow" is actually the best line in the whole song. As we re-group for Christmas and think about who's here, who's not and what's changed, that's the line that strokes the heart strings. Have yourself a merry little Christmas.

The harmless TV fun of today may produce the scandals of tomorrow

Toyah Willcox said an interesting thing on this week's programme on Radio Four about Smash Hits when talking about the relatively benign world of 80s pop stardom. "Nowadays," she said, "I think of fame as something dark and abusive."

I know what she meant. However, the majority of people seem to associate seediness exclusively with the past. I overheard some thirtyish blokes in the pub talking about the police investigation of Jimmy Savile. They seem to have arrived at the view that anyone who had been on Radio One in the seventies was, to use the great contemporary smear-all, "dodgy". This seemed to apply particularly if they'd worn a tank top. People like things to look the way they do in their prejudices.

Scandal's no respecter of eras. I don't have any evidence but I can't help suspecting that when our 21st century world of reality TV and searches-for-a-star finally lands in a ditch at the side of the road, a lot of victims will crawl from the wreckage and some of them may have very "dark and abusive" stories to tell. Since so many of those swept up in this gold rush have been wide eyed innocents or people with fragile self-esteem, there's bound to be fall-out. At which point a lot of the same people currently celebrating it all as harmless fun may abruptly change their tunes.

Paul Thompson *is* Roxy Music

Last night I walked through the rain in Islington listening to early Roxy Music (I do recommend this) and realised that when developing my theory that drummers are the truly irreplaceable heart of all great bands I hadn't taken Paul Thompson into consideration.

I think of Thompson's style as being somehow on the military wing of funk. He's the one who kept Love Is The Drug and Do The Strand rattling along but he also sounded as if he would be completely comfortable supplying the percussion noises that accompany court martial scenes in movies. There's something round, hard and stirring about the way he plays, something dry and stern about his fills. If you were going to be led out to be hanged you'd like to think Paul Thompson would be playing.

Thompson was working on a building site when Roxy Music went in to do their first sessions for John Peel and he never fitted comfortably into the group's visual scheme.

In fact this picture of the early line-up shows how much of a sore thumb he could be. He's the one far left looking like a "before" picture in a body building ad. This particular shot is a "do I have to wear this, boss?" classic.

Thompson was edged out when the group made their early 80s albums, to be replaced, not entirely satisfactorily, by session players and drum machines. He then played with everyone from Blondie to the Angelic Upstarts. He was called back to the line-up in 2001. It was like an errant footballer going back to the wife who had borne his children. While he was away Roxy Music had a few hits but did nothing that was great. That could be because Paul Thompson is Roxy Music.

The strange economics of pantomime

A few years ago I was talking to the artistic director of one of Britain's most prominent provincial theatres. It was after a charity performance of a Shakespeare play featuring a few very starry names. I asked him how easy it was to fill his theatre. He told me that if it wasn't for the annual pantomime season they probably wouldn't be able to keep the doors open.

I find it surprising that in this day and age you can still fill a theatre for two shows a day for over a month with this form of entertainment, charging (I've just had a quick look) up to £35 in Milton Keynes and up to £29.50 in Glasgow and no discounts for children.

I'm sure that the annual influx of American stars who increasingly top the bill at these shows (David Hasselhof is in Manchester this year, I see) genuinely love performing to full houses but I wonder how much money it takes to get somebody like Priscilla Presley to spend Christmas at the New Wimbledon Theatre.

A piece in the Independent in 2010 suggested that it could be as much as £250,000 for a five-week run with further bonuses tied to the total box-office  take. Last year the Telegraph ran a piece alleging that the Wolverhampton production of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs would henceforth use children instead of dwarf actors. Presumably the money saved is spent on the thing that puts bums on seats, which probably means former TV stars.

It's the strangest deal in the entertainment business: people who were big names thirty years earlier paid top dollar to dress up and perform in front of small children who would presumably be far more impressed with Jedward or a children's TV presenter.

In this I suppose it has something in common with rock festival economics. It's the line-up of big names that persuades people to sign the cheques when the line-up is announced. It's the small act on the fringes of the festival that actually justifies the investment when the weekend comes around.

John Lennon, Smash Hits and the lost art of putting pen to paper

I've been looking at The John Lennon Letters app on the iPad. It's quite charming. Most of the time he's a lot warmer with a pen in his hand, apologising to a chauffeur he's had to let go, writing to Ringo from Rishikesh enthusing about the number of new songs he's written, keeping in touch with his many relations and even (left) his mates in the press.

I don't expect the march of musical history to turn up any similar treasures. The kind of sentiments that could be scribbled on a postcard are now likely to be sent as a text. Their tone will be entirely different.

Contributing to a Radio 4 programme about Smash Hits which is broadcast on Thursday I was reflecting once again on the thing that most amazes me about that whole phenomenon. It's the fact that every night in the eighties thousands of 14-year-olds sat down with their Friends Forever notepaper and their multi-coloured pens to scratch out letters to us at Smash Hits and, they hoped, to the fabulous pop world beyond. That's another world.

Will Amazon be the Last Record Store?

I was walking up Oxford Street yesterday and thinking about the record and book shops that used to be there. Two HMVs, two Virgins, at least one Our Price, Borders, Books Etc, Waterstone's and some other chains whose names I've forgotten.

Now there's just HMV and yesterday they reported that they were likely to breach their banking covenants in the New Year.

The theory of Last Man Standing goes that when a market is cleared out it remains possible for one large operator to make money. If HMV were the last music retailer on the High Street it could do OK. It doesn't look as though it's going to work out as neatly as that.

While I was thinking about that I learned that Amazon aim to get a margin of just 1% across its business. I'm no business analyst but surely that kind of strategy can only work if you get mind-boggling scale.

The way your way cool new internet is panning out makes me yearn for the ways of the old-fashioned retailers. Like Tesco and Sainsbury.

What Paul McCartney can do. What Mick Jagger can't

So Paul McCartney fronts a band featuring the remaining members of Nirvana, makes a decent fist of it and the people who are most surprised are the citizens of Indie Nation, where versatility is despised and people only feel they can properly trust those who've spent years ploughing the narrowest of furrows.

McCartney, whether you like him or not, has worked in more musical idioms over a longer period of time than anyone else and therefore he's the last person about whom you should ever say "but I never realised he could do that". Every shade of pop and rock and roll, dance music, sound collages, show tunes, classical, film scores, kids songs and "Give Ireland Back To The Irish". He's done the lot. Nobody would claim it's all been uniformly brilliant but he's always been equal to the job and very often he's shown mastery.

Plus, if one living performer could be said to have invented the art of screaming in front of a rock band it was Paul McCartney. He did that with "I'm Down", "She's A Woman", "Helter Skelter" and plenty of other recordings and he did it long before anybody even thought of putting up the discredited polytechnic that is indie rock.

 Meanwhile, by contrast, Mick Jagger turned up on Letterman this week to deliver the Top Ten Things He's Learned and proves that it's possible to have spent 50 years at the top of your profession and still trample all over the punch-lines of the writers. This is so bad I have to watch it again and again.

Pictures from last week's Word In Your Ear show

Bobby Goulding's pictures from last week's Word In Your Ear show at the Lexington capture something of the evening's madcap spirit. Here Dan Heptinstall and Lorna Thomas demonstrate Skinny Lister's two-fisted approach to folk.

Special guest Danny Baker, with occasional prompts from me, regaled the room with incidents from a life teeming with same, many of which are in his book Going To Sea In A Sieve.

Following the show the usual bacchanal ensued in the luxurious star dressing rooms backstage.

Ten acts who made brilliant trilogies without meaning to

Front Row asked me to say something about trilogies - prompted by The Hobbit, 50 Shades Of Grey and the slightly less enthralling news that we're in the midst of a Green Day trilogy.

The best rock trilogies were never designed as such. They're the after-the-fact trilogies, made because standard record contract used to be for three albums, three years seemed to be as long as you could hold a particular line-up of a band together and, as Louis Menand pointed out, the iron law of stardom is that the public can't maintain its enthusiasm for a particular artist much longer than three years. It's interesting to go back and look at record-making not as a steady string of albums but as a blind stumble towards a three-album purple patch. Like these.

Scott Walker's hit trilogy - 1967-1969

Purists disagree but most of us think Scott Walker hit his peak with these three LPs, each of which combined throbbing versions of Jacques Brel with a sprinkling of his own songs. Scott 4 was all his own songs. It was deleted within the year.

The Beatles psychedelic trilogy -1965-1967

Of all the Beatles albums these are the three that feel most like a series. Menand argues that the Beatles are one of the few exceptions to his three-year rule because they had a three-year career as lovable mop-tops immediately followed by another three-year career as moustachioed adventurers.

Bowie's Berlin trilogy - 1977-79

The fans call it his "Berlin Trilogy". In fact, the third one wasn't recorded in Berlin. It would be more accurate to call it his "Eno trilogy". Know what they mean though.

Neil Young's ditch trilogy - 1973-75

"Heart Of Gold put me in the middle of the road," he said. "Travelling there became a bore so I headed for the ditch."

Stevie Wonder's pop/soul trilogy - 1972-74

He'd had hits before and he had lots after but wherever he is tonight he's playing Superstition, You Are The Sunshine Of My Life, Living For The City, Boogie On Reggae Woman and lots of other songs from these three records which were written, recorded and released in a dizzying two years.

The Nick Drake trilogy - 1969-72

When writers talk about not sticking around to mess up their own legacy it's usually because it sounds like a mordant thing to say. Well, it certainly worked for Nick Drake who was dead just two years after the last of this trio came out.

The Cure's dark trilogy - 1980-82

Rock bands hardly ever set out to do trilogies but they often turn round to find that they've done one, which is what happened to the Cure.

The Steely Dan band trilogy - 1973-75

The singer on the first Steely Dan album was David Palmer. He'd left by Countdown To Ecstasy and so Fagen took over. By the time of Katy Lied the band had been replaced by session players but they still sounded like a group, which they never did again.

Bob Dylan's geezer trilogy 1997-2006

Bob Dylan's often done some of his best stuff while marking time. In the late 60s he made three records in Nashville that showcased his new, post-accident voice. In the 90s he re-launched himself as a wheezy old gimmer doing retreads of old r&b tunes which he'd picked up while doing his radio show.

Nick Lowe's Brentford trilogy - 1994 to the present time

Nick Lowe's recent records have all featured the same musicians and the songs all illustrate the life of man in late middle-age who's sorry for a lot he's done. These three were christened "the Brentford trilogy" after Robert Rankin's books and the area where Lowe lives. They've been so well-received that he's made another couple since. Which is bending the rules.

Now's as good a time as any to realise that Randy Newman is unique

While the nation was watching The X Factor on Saturday night, Ian Penman, Danny Baker and I were each playing Randy Newman's Good Old Boys and marvelling about it via Twitter.

Every time I listen to Randy Newman I come away even more impressed by him. This time it struck me he's one of the few pop artists with no forerunners and no successors. Nobody came before and there's no sign of anybody coming after. You can detect the influences - Fats Domino, Ray Charles, the soundtrack music that his uncle Alfred wrote, probably even Schubert if you're cleverer than I am - but you can't draw a direct line from any of them.

As for successors, any songwriter who isn't influenced by Newman's own songs simply hasn't twigged how good he is. You can find traces of him in the songs of people like Neil Hannon, but that's probably because they both sit at the piano. But does anybody else strike the same notes? I don't think so.

Nobody else seems to have his remarkable ability to make the unloveable our friends. The father who wants his children to hurt like he did, the Southerner who gets fed up of seeing Lester Maddox being guyed by "some smart-ass New York Jew" and goes to the park "and takes some paper along", the drunk who confesses "it takes a whole lot of medicine for me to pretend that I'm someone else", the impresario who prods Davy The Fat Boy into performing his agonisingly pretty fat-boy dance, the God who explains that he loves mankind only because we are so pathetic and needy, smiling down at the hands which are tracing out New Orleans-style piano: only Dickens has come up with a comparable range of characters.

Which reminds me of the account Dostoevsky gave of meeting Dickens. According to him, all Dickens' virtuous characters were what he wanted to be and all his evil characters were what he actually thought he was. I doubt that Randy Newman thinks like that. They're not evil characters but they do entertain unworthy thoughts. The fact that he's prepared to give those unworthy thoughts such wicked tunes is more than enough.

I've put eight Randy Newman tunes here.

Why would a band not play their hits? *Any* hit

I was talking to a musician recently. He was in a band that had reformed for a last tour. They had a following but the nearest they'd come to an actual hit was a cover version of a well-known song that they'd recorded years before for a film soundtrack. Reasoning that even the tiniest regional hit was a calling card that reached beyond their tiny fan constituency he suggested they should put it in the set. It was vetoed by the drummer who thought it was somehow "embarrassing". It never occurs to bands that any of their own songs might be "embarrassing" but they are apt to think that by doing other people's songs they are somehow reneging on their deal with the God of authenticity.

In every other area of show business it's pretty much inconceivable that an act facing a crowd who needed entertaining wouldn't reach for every weapon as their disposal. Even an ornery old soul like Bob Dylan does his biggest hits. Clive James told me that his anecdote about the dunny man from the first volume of his memoirs is the "bit" that still makes people buy tickets to hear him read. James Taylor sings about the people who "pay good money to hear Fire And Rain again and again and again" in a song called, with refreshing honesty, That's Why I'm Here.

If I were climbing on stage and had any reason to believe that there was anything the audience wanted to hear for me, I'd make damn sure I played it, probably near the beginning. I'd do that because any kind of performance is a battle for survival. How come bands are the only people who don't know this?

The obsolete box in the corner

Downstairs in our sitting room is a piece of furniture I have recently come to regard as obsolete. It's a television.

Since we had it connected to a Freeview box my wife complains she can't easily tune it to the channels she wants and so she doesn't turn it on much. She catches up on the few things she wants to watch on the iPlayer via an iPad. Most of our kids have grown and, in the words of Randy Newman, "they have TVs of their own". The one who's studying at home no longer bothers with a TV in her bedroom. She watches whatever she watches on a laptop. Most of the TV I watch isn't live. When it's football or rugby I go to the pub to watch.  The family hardly ever gather to watch the same thing.

The upshot of this is there's never an occasion in our house when somebody asks what time something's on and then settles down accordingly. Which means we must be beyond the reach of the TV schedulers. Scheduling is ultimately what TV's about. TV plays lip service to the idea of creating exciting programming but mostly they just trundle their output into slots where experience has taught them a given group of people will be on the sofa waiting to watch.

The traditional power of TV and radio has derived from their power to make large numbers of people do the same thing at the same time. This is changing. Already more teenagers follow pop music on You Tube than on radio. My children are growing up with little of no awareness of channels or broadcasters. They already resent the idea that units of entertainment can be held back in order to help an organisation sell advertising or boost ratings.

I'm already seriously considering life without a landline. The next thing to go will be that big box in the corner.

"It's before my time" - the four most infuriating words in the language

None of the three contestants on a trivia quiz on Danny Baker's Saturday morning show just now could tell us which member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young was called Graham.

You just knew what they were going to say. "It's before my time."

I hate "it's before my time".  I loathe "it's before my time". It makes my blood boil.

These four words are the wholly inadequate sick note offered up by all those who think that knowledge is something exclusively acquired through direct experience, who have such a distorted sense of the lens of their own life that everything which is outside their immediate field of vision falls sharply away into the gloom of total ignorance (they haven't even got enough of a framework to attempt a guess), who regard learning as something that stopped at the end of their learning years, who must be making an effort to ensure that nothing lodges in the windy vacancy of their mind that they haven't made a definite effort to put there, who, most infuriatingly of all, can never quite hide the fact that they are, if anything, quite proud that they don't know because this somehow makes them young and vital. It doesn't.

When I was young, nobody said "it's before my time". You were expected to know lots of things that were before your time. That's what civilisation is. Yes, even with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.