The conformity of footballers

Staying with Ken Sharp in St Andrews. Dundee United train on the university's fields. You know they're here, says Ken, when there's a line of white BMWs parked down the road.

Why white BMWs, I wondered.

It's just the fashion, he said.

I thought he was exaggerating. Then I went round the corner and was confronted by this.

You choose your furniture but the best furniture chooses you

An upholsterer has just been to look at this chair, which was bought in 1967 by my late father-in-law.

He said "they used to advertise this as 'the world's most comfortable chair'." I'm not surprised. Being new traditionalists by inclination we used to turn up our noses at the look of it but we had to concede it was comfortable to sit in.

When we were clearing their old house we were going to get rid of it because it didn't seem to fit in our Edwardian place. Our youngest stopped us. She wanted to keep it, not least because she remembered how much Grandma liked sitting in it. We hauled it up from the south coast and somehow got it to the top of the house in the workroom. Here it proved ideal for TV viewing and even for sleeping in when you have one of those throat irritations that mean you can't lie down.

Now the upholsterer tell us it's a design classic and his son has a nice sideline knocking out replicas. The Management want to re-cover it in something less jarringly sixties. I've got so used to it that it no longer jars.

We've got a house full of furniture. The kids satirically call it The Museum Of Chairs. We've got a load of infants school wooden chairs which are ideal for perching on to put your shoes on. Our most comfortable sofa is one we inherited, for nothing, from the divorcing couple we were buying our previous house from. I have an office chair which came from a place my father took over in 1966, which had probably been in place since before the First World War.

We're not particularly interested in antiques. We never set out to acquire any of this stuff. Aristocrats used to identify the nouveau riche as people "who bought their own furniture". We've bought plenty of our own as well over the years but it's odd how
the furniture we cherish the most is the stuff we didn't buy.

My kind of history teacher

Saw this in Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt.

The profound joy of getting rid of stuff

We've been in this house twenty-five years this summer. Most of that time has been devoted to raising a family. We didn't pay much attention to the rising tide of stuff we were surrounding ourselves with.

After a while even books, records, DVDs and magazines cease to be the things you work for. You get to a point where it's either you or the stuff. By that time you've had the melancholy experience of clearing the homes of your own parents, who didn't accumulate a fraction of the junk you've got yourself. You kid yourself you're going to pass on your records to your kids. Then they grow up and you realise that even if they were bothered there's no way their lives could also find room for the detritus of yours.

What do you get rid of and what do you keep? The reasons you once collected things no longer hold good. Spotify and iTunes have made a nonsense of all those compilations you hung on to because of one track. IMDB makes those fat film and TV reference books look ridiculous. Those launch issues of classic magazines you squirrelled away are never going to make you rich but they will attract dust and mildew. You no longer believe that if you pass up this CD you will never be able to replace it.

In the past few months I've taken what seems like tons of books down to the charity shop. I'm such a good supplier they've given me a Gift Aid card.

Chucking stuff away is a learning experience. You realise nobody is remotely bothered about the thousand-pound computer you take down the tip. They just point you to the pile in the corner. On the other hand they don't know what to make of the old tea chests because they've never seen one before and you wonder whether you should take them home and hang on to them. You visit the second-hand book store so often that you start to develop an attraction for old paperbacks and find yourself picking up the odd one as you drop off the odd box of fifty.

The process of sifting is slowed down by the occasional piece of paper that flutters out of an old book. A child's hand-drawn birthday card, a note of apology for some long-forgotten breakage, a rejection letter from a job you don't remember applying for, all put away nowhere in particular because somebody thought it would be a shame to lose them. Maybe this was the occasion that you were saving them for. Is anyone really going to pause in the middle of cleaning up to look at them again? Anything that's not been disturbed in the last twenty-five years is, for obvious reasons, unlikely to be disturbed in the next quarter of a century.

Your reward for having got rid of all this stuff is the liberation of the space you need to be able to enjoy the stuff. The records you can suddenly put your hand on, the newly-cleared window seat which you can use as a place to read, the profound calm that steals over you when your desk is finally cleared. This is every bit as spiritual as the impulse that led you to acquire the stuff in the first place.

A perfect record

I know what they say about snowflakes/How there ain't no two the same/Well all them flakes look alike to me/And every one is a dirty shame.

Watching the workmen this week erecting a shed at the bottom of our garden in a blizzard made me think of that song from the first Jesse Winchester album from 1970.

Winchester was from Louisiana, which is hot and wet. He fled to Canada, which is cold and snowy, to avoid being drafted into the military to fight in Vietnam.

The songs on the record - songs like Yankee Lady,  Biloxi and Brand New Tennessee Waltz - yearn for Winchester's vanished world of lost content. Snow complains specifically about the weather, which is always understandable.

The handful of people who bought it were either snobs like me, attracted by the fact that it was produced by Robbie Robertson, engineered by Todd Rundgren and appeared on the mysterious Ampex label, or they were people like Elvis Costello and James Taylor, who would in years to come cover the songs.

But nobody has ever improved on the originals. Winchester made good records after this one but his first is one of the handful of rock records I would call perfect. They say that when he'd done the original sessions for Nashville Skyline, Bob Dylan played the tracks to Robbie Robertson and asked him to overdub guitar on them. Robertson said "why would I do that?"

The Jesse Winchester album was graced by a similar restraint. Robertson produced it in the same year The Band did Stage Fright and he must have wondered whether Winchester had stumbled on something just as the Band had begun to lose it.

You can get it as an import or you can find it more easily in a "twofer" with the follow-up Third Down 110 To Go. Which is good but it's not perfect.

If you're interested, I post the vinyl that I often play on Saturdays here.

Can a band have two leaders?

Richard Williams' music blog The Blue Moment is full of excellent stuff, some of it grounded in his time as an a&r man for Island in the 70s.

Writing about Television he says "no band can last long with two leaders".

This made me wonder if there are any exceptions. The big exception is the biggest band of all, the Beatles, but you might say that by modern standards they didn't last all that long. It's clear that no decisions can be made within the Rolling Stones without Mick and Keith. However the former proposes, the latter disposes and they both know that they're useless without each other. Robert Plant and Jimmy Page wrote Led Zeppelin's songs and formed their front line together. When Cream were together both Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton seemed to take the weight of public attention equally.

The leadership of REM seems to be a triumvirate. All their songs are credited equally, as are U2's and Coldplay's. This means that all the members share in the really rich source of revenue, though not necessarily equally. This is certainly why they're all still together.

I can think of one prominent exception to Richard's Law. The career of the Eagles is interesting in that when they did split up it was nothing to do with warring between their two leaders, Don Henley and Glenn Frey. When hell froze over and they reformed they slipped back into their old roles. But watching their official documentary the other day I got the clear impression that all the other members of the band, whether past or present, were very aware that they served at the pleasure of their two leaders.

Obviously there are always exceptions to any rule but the rarity of these makes you think.

Come and hear Brit pop in its anecdotage

Gary Kemp & Tim Arnold, Miss Giddy Heights,
Math Priest, Andy Lewis and Katy Carr.

We've added Math Priest, Andy Lewis and Dan Thompson to our Word In Your Ear show at the Lexington on April 22nd.

It's twenty years since Oasis versus Blur, since TFI Friday and Select magazine, and finally a few of Britpop's muddied and bloodied foot soldiers feel ready to talk about it.

That's what Math Priest, Dodgy drummer and man about town, Andy Lewis, bass player with Paul Weller and DJ on the Parklife tour, will be doing on the 22nd with Dan Thompson, DJ and pioneer of inner city regeneration.

Math promises:

• The one about Damon drunkenly giving us career advice 
• The one about Brett Anderson so mashed off his face he thought Starry Starry Night was a Xmas song 
• The one about The Bluetones lived in our garage 
• The one about what it was really like backstage on the Parklife tour 
• The one about us coming off stage to find the guitarist from Space getting a blowjob in our dressing room from a girl with a Dodgy T shirt on. Yes, you can see I still haven't got over that one :-)

Tickets for the evening, which also features The Soho Hobo revue plus Gary Kemp and Miss Giddy Heights, plus Katy Carr are on sale here now for £15.

David Ford uses everything but the squeak at the Scala

David Ford at the Scala last night - new album called Charge here - was an object lesson in maximising what you've got.

The evening began with Emily Grove, who comes from Asbury Park, supported by Jarrod Dickenson, David Ford and drummer Joey Love.

Then it was Jarrod Dickenson, who comes from Texas, supported by Grove, Ford and Love.

Finally it was David Ford, who comes from Eastbourne, supported by Dickenson, Grove and Love.

That's what they used to say about raising pigs. Everything gets used but the squeak.

At one stage in the last set Ford said thank you for the privilege of being a touring musician, for being able to fill up a van with as many instruments as possible, being able to set off and see who they can persuade to listen to them and also spend time with each other. And he played this.

Joss Stone and the ultimate downside of pop fame

By any measure the four members of the Beatles made more people happy than most of us manage to do. In return two of them were the victims of attacks by homicidal maniacs. In one case it was fatal. In the other it may have contributed to an untimely death.

Bob Marley was the victim of a drive-by shooting. Bjork was targeted by a "fan" who mailed a letter bomb to her home and then killed himself on camera. Those are just the cases I can call to mind right now. There are no doubt hundreds of similar incidents that were intercepted by security and never got as far as the media.

And now Joss Stone has to live with the thought that a pair of murderous misanthropes set off from the other end of the country with the intention of killing her and were only apprehended because they were more than ordinarily stupid. I'm not being facetious when I say that this really is the ultimate downside of pop fame.

"You can have any record you like as long as it's on this list"

Radio Two asked its listeners to choose which of its 100 most-played albums it liked best. This is a curious form of polling. It's like asking Dagenham and Redbridge supporters to name their favourite Chelsea player.

It's the only way radio can work. Radio can't actually respond to people's requests because that might mean going off-message and then where would they be?

They used to run a Sunday night request show on Capital. Listeners would call in and banter with Dr Fox, he'd say "what do you want to hear?", they'd name a record and he'd have it lined up to play straight away.

That's slick, I thought. It's also, coincidentally, on the playlist.

It was then explained to me that although that show was being broadcast live, everything you were hearing had been recorded a few minutes earlier. This gave them the space to tell the caller which of three records they could choose, stage the fake conversation and then tidy up any loose ends in time for broadcast a few minutes later. At which point they would be doing the same with somebody else.

The radio man looked at me as if to say "what did you think happened, you poor child?"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/vote/top-albums/

The Great Gatsby

Took a walk on Friday listening to the Radio 360 podcast about The Great Gatsby. It's pegged to the imminent release of a new film. From the podcast I learned that the book still sells 20,000 copies every few week, that Fitzgerald hated the title, that Ralph Lauren's real name is Lipschitz and his real life career echoed Gatsby's rise from poverty and anonymity and that every American novelist is allowed one official hometown. Extracts were read by the actor Scott Shepherd, who can recite the entire book from memory.

I came home and tried, for the umpteenth time, to read it. This time I succeeded. I still don't like the dialogue and there are whole scenes that I can't really visualise but I loved Nick Carraway's narration and I was determined to finish to get to the last couple of paras, which are as good an ending as I've ever read.

Found this old press clipping - made my day

Doctor Beeching got his way because of my dad

It's been fifty years since the Beeching Report proposed scrapping a huge proportion of the railway network.

I'm a big user of public transport and I can get as sentimental as the next Englishman about the passing of the Slow Train.

I'm also old enough to remember the world the Beeching Report was published into and it was a world which believed profoundly, passionately that the future was all about the motor car.

We hardly ever travelled by train as kids, partly because they were dirty and had a reputation for not running on time but also, I suspect, because our parents associated them with wartime.

In the sixties the family car went from being an unimaginable luxury to a basic right. It was the mobile phone of its day but its consequences were much more far-reaching. My father's preferred family entertainment was taking us all "for a run", which meant going for a drive. Driving was something he only ever associated with pleasure and freedom.

If it did enter anyone's head that even the massive number of motorways being built in the 60s and 70s would never be enough to accommodate the exploding number of vehicles in private hands or that petrol would ever be as costly as it is now, they didn't say anything about it. Had they done so I suspect they would have been shouted down.

That's the problem with planning for the future. People can only ever imagine a slightly better version of the present.

The best records are the ones in your head

In the summer of 1972 I had to go home to Yorkshire to help out at my father's business. He was laid up with a back problem and I had to keep his small textile firm ticking over.

The work was dull, dirty and repetitive. There was no stimulation from the outside world. I dreamed my way from one break to another. The only possible distraction came from a transistor radio over at the other end of the warehouse. It had a crackly medium-wave signal and I didn't control the volume.

That was the year the Eagles "Take It Easy" came out. For some reason it was impossible to buy. On the basis of a handful of radio plays, I developed an obsession with it. That obsession grew in inverse proportion to the number of times I heard it, which was very few.

I'd listen particularly intently during the couple of Radio One programmes that I thought might play it. I'd concentrate hard when they were throwing to the records they intended to play in the next hour. Whole days went past without my hearing it.

In the absence of the actual record I recreated the sound of the intro in my head. There was an acoustic bit, overlaid with a chord from an electric guitar, following which it folded swiftly into a brisk groove which seemed to tumble towards the opening line. "Well I'm a-running down the road trying to loosen my load...."

It was quite thrilling to replay the record in my head. When it actually came on I almost blushed with excitement. I wanted to hear the whole of the record but it was that beginning that I really yearned to hear. On one occasion I came back into the warehouse and it was already playing, which was somehow worse than it not being on at all. It was like missing the opening of a film.

Last night I went to a preview of a new documentary about the Eagles, which comes out in a month's time. "Take It Easy" is used a few times. That intro still does it to me every time. It's partly for now and partly for 1972.

"Lose the arms next time, Danny love"

Danny Welbeck probably was clipped by the Montenegro defender. He probably should have had a penalty.

The mistake he made was in going down like a second-rate actor, arms away from his body, flailing at the empty air. It's the same mistake that got Gareth Bale booked for simulation more than once this season. It makes even a genuine case look like a con. It's got "is he watching?" written all over it.

If you trip over in the street your hands shoot out in front of you to try to break your fall. They don't imitate a dying swan.

The secret of taking perfect pictures of your kids

I found this last night. It must have been taken fifteen years ago. I obviously said, "all right, if you will insist on pulling those bored expressions, just turn round and look at the view."

I think it's my favourite.

But she doesn't have a lot to say

The measure of true celebrity is you always learn something you never knew before. The one thing I learned from ITV's documentary Our Queen was that it's not her habit to say either hello or goodbye when meeting people.

It makes sense. People are always lined up waiting for her and so it would clearly be ridiculous to expect her to explain herself. Similarly when she withdraws she can't say "well, it's been wonderful but one must dash" or any similarly pat line.

It also saves time and breath.

Don't miss the next Word In Your Ear

The Word In Your Ear thing seems to be quietly growing. We used to do them almost every month when the magazine was publishing.

Alex Gold organised them and it was he who nagged me into starting them up again. We did one in November with Skinny Lister, Danny Baker and the Dunwells and we had the second one on Monday of this week with Chris Difford and Boo Hewerdine playing, Tracey Thorn talking about her book and me and Mark Ellen telling some whiskery stories.

We did it at the Old Queens Head this time because there's more seating available and there's a projector set-up that we could use. It worked quite well. People seemed to have a good time.

I'd like to think that in our unbelievably modest way we're trying to do something that's a bit more than the average music gig where you get, in my opinion, too much music and not enough variety. Using a bit of the True Stories Told Live experience and a bit of what we learned when doing the Word podcasts we'd like to think that there may be ways to skin the music magazine cat in a live event kind of way.

Anyway, a step at a time. The next Word In Your Ear is at the Lexington on April 22nd. The acts we've announced so far include Katy Carr. Her mother's family came from Poland and her music and stories explore that side of her heritage with particular emphasis on that country's experiences in the middle of the last century. Katy's made four albums, the latest of which, Paszport, has been nominated for an award by the world music magazine Songlines.



We've also got The Soho Hobo, otherwise known as singer/songwriter and man about Dean Street Tim Arnold plus his crack band, singing songs inspired by London's square mile of sin. They will be joined on the evening by special guest stars Gary Kemp and fan dancer Miss Giddy Heights. How often do you see either of those things? Let me refresh your memory.


Further additions to the bill will be announced in due course but if you want to make sure of your place by booking an Early Bird ticket you'll have to do it before Monday. Here.

If you want to be kept informed about other Word In Your Ear shows, email wiye.london@gmail.com to be put on the list. You can follow Word In Your Ear on Twitter @WIYELondon.

It's fifty years today since The Beatles became icons

The Beatles first LP was released fifty years ago today. The cover was shot by Angus McBean, a celebrated theatrical photographer of the time, known for his surrealist style.

He didn't do anything weird with "the boys". They met him in reception at EMI's HQ in Manchester Square, he looked up at the stairwell and said "why don't you go up there and look over?"

They did. McBean lay on his back in reception and shot a few frames. Job done. An image was created in those brief moments that resounds down the years.

The Beatles restaged the shot themselves for the cover of their Red and Blue hits albums at the end of the decade. The Sex Pistols posed in the same place for the same picture. When EMI left Manchester Square it took the staircase with it and installed it in new offices in Hammersmith.

I can live without the album, which is weedy compared to what was to come. But the cover of that record is the first thing The Beatles did that you could call "iconic".

It wasn't the last.

Why I still don't think the Kindle will replace the book

It's been drawn to my attention that in 2008 I wrote a column claiming that Kindles wouldn't happen. I think my key point was that half the point of reading a book in public was so that other people could see what you were reading.

Leaving aside the fact that it would be a pretty poor column if I filled it with verifiable fact, I was clearly wrong, as many millions of Kindle sales will attest.

And yet.

I've got a Kindle and would recommend one to anyone who does a lot of reading for the simple reason that they speed up your reading. If I've got to read something in a hurry, they're the only way to go. They don't lose your place and - don't laugh - they don't require both hands to support them. You can read one standing up in a crowded carriage on the Tube or while eating cereal.

On the debit side they're shoddily produced, inadequately proof-read and often very hard to navigate. A friend the other day was arguing it was impossible to read Hilary Mantel on the Kindle because you needed to be consulting the cast of characters at the front of the book. (I read Wolf Hall as a book and Bring Up The Bodies via reading machine and I found the second one easier because I was reading it more often and therefore keeping to the thread.)

As far as authors are concerned e-books are a mixed blessing. They may increase your pool of readers but those readers won't be paying you very much money. That's why they'd rather sell you this nice autographed hardback.

In recent months when I haven't been commuting daily I've gone backwards, buying and reading more paper books than I did in the couple of years before that when I was first smitten with the Kindle.

I'm already operating a three-tier system. Some things I want as books. Other things I'm happy to read on Kindle. Some very special things I need to have on both.

I'm doing the same with music. Most things I'm happy going to Spotify for. If I really like them I want the CD. If I love them I have to search out a version on vinyl. It's like the difference between dating, going steady and marriage.

Really useful things we learned without understanding

Education's a political football. The arguments around it are always depressingly binary. Today it's about promoting the value of rote learning. The counter-argument is that committing facts or words to memory without understanding; a) is without value; b) somehow gets in the way of so-called creative thinking.

I'm a sample of one but many of the most useful things I know I learned by rote, often without understanding. These include:

• Multiplication tables
• The alphabet
• The words of William Blake's "Jerusalem" (and subsequently a million pop records)
• Wilfred Owen's "Strange Meeting", TS Eliot's "Journey Of The Magi", the beginning of Macaulay's "Lays Of Ancient Rome" and half a dozen speeches from Shakespeare
• The words of at least twenty hymns
• The capital cities of the countries considered significant when I went to school
• "I before e except after c when the sound is ee"
• "Thirty days hath November etc"
• "Willie willie harry stee etc"

Have I, er, forgotten anything?

Here's something the internet can't do that a magazine can

There was a piece in the Guardian Weekend called "they don't make them like that anymore" which was made up of a number of layouts showing the historical development of various different products, in this case women's swimwear from the 1900s to today.

Contrast is the whole point of the piece so you have to see them all together. You edit between the big picture and the close-up by simply moving the magazine closer to you.

This story couldn't be done anything like as effectively on a screen. It serves as a reminder that it will be a long time before they come up with an interface as sophisticated as the one between hands, eyes and paper.

Good news! I've discovered what's wrong with TV

As Cyril Fletcher used to say, I am indebted to Ian Penman (@pawboy2) for the discovery of SoLost*, a series of short films dedicated to "getting lost in the American south". It answers the need I wrote about a couple of days ago for a source of documentaries short enough to watch on the iPad while preparing breakfast.

I was talking to an independent producer this week who told me that commissioning editors on TV and radio nowadays expect the pitch for a programme to be in the first five minutes. Then it struck me that that's what's wrong with so many TV and radio programmes. They're not programmes. They're pitches.

 * Advice for home workers. Don't start. You'll be there all day.

A Pom condescends to sympathise with the Australian cricket captain

Four members of the Australian cricket squad have been sent home from their tour of India. The team lost the last test match in embarrassing circumstances and were all asked by the captain Michael Clarke and coach Micky Arthur to come up with a few points explaining what they thought could be improved in time for the next one. Four members failed to come forward with anything, presumably after nudging, and were therefore sent home.

Somebody used the unfortunate word "presentation", which summons visions of Powerpoint, flip charts and Ricky Gervais.This has resulted in jibes about "homework" from sportsmen, who like to see themselves as above this sort of thing, despite the fact that they live in a far more institutionalised world than we adults.

I can see why Clarke and Arthur asked the members of the team to come up with the points. It wouldn't be because they thought they would include any piercing insights they hadn't thought of themselves. They would have asked each of them to come up with some points to make it clear that each of them "owned the problem", as management speak might infelicitously put it. If you don't own the problem you can never own the solution.

It's easy to lampoon the techniques and language of modern management, particularly if it helps get you off the hook. People are doing it in offices all the time. But what underpins the overwhelming bulk of modern management is simple common sense which has been to university. If Clarke and Arthur find themselves in the same situation in the future they should simply bark "because I bloody say so". Then they'll get their way. Mind you, after this week they may not have to.

Memo to TV: if you've got something to say, spit it out

There was only one "creative" decision taken on The Word podcast. I took it and I'm very proud of it. I decided that we wouldn't have the conventional beginning or ending. Instead it would just fade in on the sound of people talking and end pretty much the same way.

At the time it appealed to us because it meant we didn't have to prepare an intro. Then we found that listeners liked it because it helped bolster the idea that the conversation was continuing in perpetuity. Which, in a sense it was, in the office.

One of the reasons I like podcasts so much is that, unlike conventional radio and TV, they get to the point. This morning I was looking on the iPlayer for something to watch for ten minutes. Everything seemed to begin with a prolonged intro section which was dedicated to suggesting that you were going to see or learn something in the ensuing half an hour which would be worth the sacrifice in terms of time. I wasn't convinced.

I watched a few YouTube clips instead. I find I increasingly do that. I like long-form TV. I like short-form TV. I've got no time for the inbetween kind. That's the kind they make the most of.

Is Ron Sexsmith the politest man in rock?

In the same week Justin Bieber committed the unpardonable sin of going on stage at an hour which was more convenient for him than it was for his young fans it was interesting to go and see Ron Sexsmith, who appears to be at least a contender for the title as the politest man in rock.

Last night at the Albert Hall he repeatedly thanked the audience for coming. He thanked his parents, who had come from Canada to be in the audience. He thanked the fans who had travelled from different parts of the world. There was a special mention for an Irish fan who was too ill to travel. He thanked his band and said "my name is on the marquee but they've worked just as hard as I have for just as long". Finally he thanked the soundman and the crew, who don't get thanked nearly enough.

There's not enough of this kind of thing.

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.