An encounter with Mick Farren thirty years ago this month

Thirty years ago this month I was the editorial director of the company that published Smash Hits. This was experiencing such dramatic success in the UK that publishers overseas wanted to see if they could replicate it in their territories.

One of them was Felix Dennis, who wanted to launch it in the USA, using the money made from a dazzlingly successful magazine called Computer Shopper and another one called Club International, which was published by the most charming pornographer I've ever met.

Felix insisted that the art director Steve Bush and I flew over to New York to discuss the feasibility of a 

licensing deal. It was a hot summer, we were very busy, it meant giving up our weekend and so I booked business class flights. When we got to the Pan Am terminal we were told there were no business class flights and so we were being upgraded to first class at no extra charge. 

Steve had never been to the States before. He was wearing shorts. He brought sandwiches. When we arrived at the Gramercy Park Hotel we were confronted by two hookers who asked if we wanted to "party". We made our excuses.

That weekend Felix, who was paying the hotel bills, had me moved into a suite so that we could meet there the following day. On the Saturday night we were joined by Neil Tennant from Smash Hits who was fresh from lunch with his hero Bobby O, with the news that he had agreed to make a record with him. We drank beer, ate crisps and laughed like loons.

The following day Felix turned up. He brought along Mick Farren, who he'd known since Oz days, to make sure that I wasn't pulling the wool over his eyes when it came to the music business.

We had lunch in the deserted hotel dining room, attended by many waiters. Everybody smoked through the meal.  Mick Farren ordered a Jack Daniels.

I often think about that meal. The magazine was launched in the USA but never took. Felix went on to make further fortunes. Neil's deal with Bobby O proved to be onerous but it eventually led to mammoth success with Pet Shop Boys. Steve Bush went on to be a magazine mogul in Australia. Mick Farren went back to writing pulp fiction, reformed the Deviants and eventually died on stage in London this week.

Thirty years ago this week.

Thinking about J.J. Cale

The news of the death of J.J. Cale reaches me in rural France, where I have very little music to listen to. It doesn't matter because his is the kind of music I hold every detail of in my memory.

We went to see him the first time he came to London. The curtain rose on a bunch of musicians sitting in a semi-circle, looking at their feet and playing an instrumental. "Which one's him?" asked my wife. "He hasn't come on yet," I assured her. As soon as the words were out of my mouth the figure second from the right started to sing "Call Me The Breeze".

It's funny how people talk about him as the heir to the old tradition of sitting and picking on the back porch. Although there are elements in his music that remind you of Slim Harpo and even Hoagy Carmichael nobody had previously put things together in the way he put them together. In that sense he wasn't a traditionalist so much as the originator of one beautiful new trick, a trick he had the good sense to never try to surpass.

Lots of the best music writing is free

There's not much point hanging around waiting for somebody to pay you to write about music. And if they do, they'll probably ask you to write about something you don't have much interest in.

Why not just write what you want for the love of it? Lots of people do it and some of them are big names.

In The Blue Moment Richard Williams writes about some of the musicians whose paths he has crossed throughout a long career as journalist and a&r man, touching upon areas of music beyond the well-trodden paths. It's thanks to him I'm listening to a record Burt Bacharach made with Ronald Isley in 2003. I'd never heard of it before.

Andrew Collins won't mind me saying he's a very methodical sort and therefore it's not surprising to find his music blog aims to pick "the 143 best songs in the world". It's more light-hearted than it sounds.

Finally Paul Burke writes short entries about something that's just happened to him - he saw Paul Weller in the street, he watched a test match, he noted American Independence Day - and comes up with a song it brings to mind.

In the old days of paid work nobody ever asked them to write material like this, which is why we didn't get to read it.

The Inconvenient Truth About The Recorded Music Business

While I've been away I see the "Spotify don't pay enough" debate has been re-ignited by Thom Yorke, who even says that if they don't raise their rates "new music producers should be brave and vote with their feet". (Seems to me that would be as effective as League Division Two threatening to walk out on the Premier League. "I'm leaving home, mum. I say I'm leaving home.")

This has attracted a "grow up" post from Tim Worstall at Forbes, which finishes by saying that if you're not making enough money on Spotify that may be because not enough people like you, and a similarly robust slap from music industry controversialist Bob Lefsetz who offers this piece of advice from marketing boffin Seth Godin:

"Send your stuff to ten friends. And if they don't tell others, if nothing happens, the problem is you."

Here's the inconvenient truth about the music business. It used to be you could only get music by buying it in units of 12 songs, only two of which you really liked. Bands did very well out of that system. Now that the album's unbundled you can buy the albums you truly love (which is why Adele sells in such huge quantities), buy the single-track downloads that reflect the moment (which is why sales of the big singles are as big as ever) and then taste and try a couple of songs from scores of other albums, most of which don't impress you enough to persuade you to buy the whole album.

If you think the gatekeepers of the music industry aren't fair then take it up with the general public. They're even less fair than the man with the big cigar.

No books programme on the TV. Am I bothered?

Sky Arts are dropping their books programme. As you'd expect, the book trade isn't happy. Book PRs wonder where they're going to get their new publications reviewed. Novelists, who all look like librarians, wonder how they're going to get famous. Tweeters tweet.

I used to watch Read All About It when Melvyn Bragg fronted it. That was 1977 and books, often quite serious ones, were suddenly being marketed in the way that albums had been and their authors were being encouraged to style themselves like rock stars. It must have been quite rigorous. I was just listening to an old exchange between Martin Amis and John Pilger on the programme. It achieved Newsnight-levels of testiness.

I haven't watched a book programme in years. I've never read more books, never bought more books and probably never read more reviews of books, but I don't have the patience to watch a bunch of authors being interviewed or some critics comparing notes. What information or opinion value such programmes may once have had I can now obtain somewhere else.

(In fact I no longer watch the kind of TV that features people discussing things at all. I've realised in the last couple of weeks how little TV I watch when I've been introduced to a couple of people who were, to judge from other people's reactions, quite famous. It's not entirely true to say I had no idea who they were but an idea was all I had. I'd never seen them.)

We'll probably get by without a books programme on the TV. We managed without Barry Norman's film programme. It's apparently still on but presented by somebody else. 

The promoter's prerogative

I've spent my gig-going life standing around thinking "why don't they get on with it?" and so it's good to be in a position to do something about it. Last night at the Duckworth Lewis show at Lord's we found ourselves ready to start the second half earlier than anticipated. It was the same at the Daniel Tashian show the week before.

As one of the promoters I was able to say "let's get started then". That way the band aren't racing against the clock to fit their set in, the audience aren't hanging around bored, they don't have to race for the tubes at the end and the band and crew either get to see more of their hotel beds or make tracks to the next show. Everybody looked at me with that expression that says "can we really do that then?"

It could be that the best things happen late at night but since I'm unlikely to be awake to experience them I don't much care.

Stanley's has gone - have my old home movies gone with it?

Stanley's in Wardour Street went into liquidation last week.

It was one of those places in the heart of London's film district that you didn't take much notice of unless you were in the business. I went there a year ago on the advice of a friend in television. I needed to get some old VHS-C tapes transferred to DVD. He said, Stanley's is the place. They did it without batting an eyelid. They obviously had every kind of machine in the back and could transfer from any format to any other format. It wasn't cheap but it was done and I was thrilled.

And now they've gone, driven out of business by the expense of replacing and maintaining the machinery and the steady march of digital. Great pity. Now looking at my drawer-full of old tapes of the kids as toddlers makes me really melancholy.

That's why they're playing the game

The British and Irish Lions won the test series against Australia without captain Sam Warburton, genius Brian O'Driscoll or second row stalwart Paul O'Connell. The player that the coach singled out as his man of the match was Alex Corbisiero (left), who wasn't even picked in the original squad and had to join them halfway through from an England tour of Argentina.

Reminds me of the one about Danny Blanchflower's short-lived career as a football pundit. Following a discussion of the players' qualities he was asked to predict who was going to win. "Oh, I don't know that," he said. "That's why they're playing the game."

Why MPs really should lay off rock

In The Independent MP Karen Buck contributes to a list of the most overrated bands of the 60s. As follows:

5. Fairport Convention "Liege and Leaf got five stars but no one actually played it. Or if they did, they were too stoned to remember." Karen Buck, Labour MP.

I know the MP hasn't been born who can resist expressing an opinion about music but you would have thought that if she actually had heard the record she would know:

1. How to spell the record's name;
2. "Liege And Lief" didn't get five stars because in those days star ratings were unknown;
3. Fairport fans were never particularly big stoners, tending to prefer woolly ale;
4. It came out a few weeks before 1970 so it's barely a 60s record at all;
5. It was and remains one of the most-played records of its era.

Apart from that, all correct.

The reverse spin of Michael Franks

Danny Baker told me to listen to Time Together by Michael Franks. I've got some of Franks's albums but not this one. There's a song here called "Charlie Chan In Egypt". It's gentle, like all his songs, but with a sting in the lyrics. "These kids we're sending out to quote defend our nation," he sings. I prefer the effect of that word "quote" to the windy rhetoric of most protest songs. It seems to be a perfect rejoinder to political spin. Reverse spin, you might call it. You can listen to it below.

Australia 16 Lions 41 - the score isn't the only number that's changed

I was lucky enough to be there the last time the British and Irish Lions played Australia (or, as it said on the ticket "The Vodafone Wallabies") in Sydney. We lost on that occasion but we had fun in that throng of people from these islands belting out "Cwm Rhondda", "Danny Boy" and "Swing Low Sweet Chariot". The Australians don't seem to go in for the kind of singing that's such an important part of sport in northern Europe.

We went to the stadium by boat, which was different. On the way back, by bus this time, the Lions fans were understandably subdued. Then somebody struck up, to the tune of "She'll Be Coming Round The Mountain", the jubilant refrain "we get three Aussie dollars to the pound, we get three Aussie dollars to the pound".

That was in 2001, before events. I'm sure the Lions fans are having a high old time in Sydney tonight but they won't be singing that old song. For a start A$1.64 refuses to scan.

Genius is in the details. Mass media has no time for details. Could be why it's losing.

I met a bloke about five years ago who was a TV producer with an interest in music. He said something which made an impression. "All the macro stuff's done. The future is micro, if only you could find a way to pay for it."

There were a couple of moments in last night's Quiet Word evening, which we put on at the Slaughtered Lamb with Daniel Tashian (right, above) of the Silver Seas and author/magazine editor Dylan Jones, when I saw what he meant.

When I was interviewing Daniel he said that the big change he went through between his first solo album in 1996 and the first Silver Seas album was his discovery of the major seventh. He played a few chords with a major seventh to demonstrate. That, he said, is in all my songs. Once the major seventh is there it doesn't matter what you're singing about, the world ain't so bad.

This is the kind of tiny but hugely telling detail 99% of so-called music journalism passes over because it's difficult to communicate it on the page. Music broadcasting doesn't even notice it. This refusal to deal with the micro story is an issue way beyond the tiny world of music magazines.

Editors and producers want a big story that's already been told which they can put their own spin on. They don't have much patience with things that don't hit you over the head. Yet Daniel talking about the major seventh and playing it in front of an audience of dedicated fans in a cellar in Clerkenwell does more to communicate what makes the Silver Seas's new album Alaska so great than any amount of overheated prose in the papers or intemperate ravings on the airwaves. It's the tiny detail which suffuses everything they do.

Genius is in the details. I was talking to Dylan about his book The Eighties: One Day, One Decade, which is centred on Live Aid. The centre of Live Aid was Queen's performance. The centre of that was the crowd's choreographed hand clapping during "Radio Gaga". Those handclaps weren't on the original recording. They were put there at the behest of video director David Mallet because they fitted with the image in the promo clip. How about that? Live Aid became a great TV show because the audience spontaneously imitated an action which had been put on the record to reflect a video image.

I'm fascinated by things like that. The problem is mass media doesn't have time for small stories, which is one of the reasons it's losing out to the internet and the personal appearance. I told the audience last night that what we're trying to do with these Word In Your Ear evenings is provide something which combines performance with some of the things music journalism used to provide. In fact they're the kind of things music journalism didn't provide because it had trained itself to believe they were boring.

Live Aid: yes, I remember it well - which is more than can be said for most people

Tomorrow night I'm talking to Dylan Jones about his excellent book The Eighties: One Day, One Decade at our Quiet Word with Daniel Tashian evening at the Slaughtered Lamb in Clerkenwell. Love to see you there if you can make it. Details here.

Dylan's book focuses on Live Aid and he talks to lots of the people involved. I've never watched any of the footage of Live Aid since the day and I haven't read much about it either. I think this makes me almost unique in that I know what I saw and not much more. What's amazing about Live Aid is what people think happened. Dylan provides an example:
 (I hope you can read that. I did it with my Genius scan on my phone.)

Anyway, Dylan interviews Harvey Goldsmith for the book, who explains that the reason Springsteen didn't stay for Live Aid is his daughter was just beginning to compete as a showjumper and he didn't want to miss her first competition. The only thing wrong with that is that Springsteen's only daughter wasn't born until 1991.

If you're coming along tomorrow night I might explain why I didn't write the official memoir of one of the event's key protagonists. If people so close to the action can mis-remember on that scale it's not surprising that every cab driver in the world remains convinced that Bob Geldof said "give us your fucking money".

Two fingers good, one finger rather pretentious

Incorrect.

Car A overtakes car B on the inside this morning. The driver of car B honks. The driver of car A, male, 20s, extends an arm out of the window and gives the middle finger. The driver of car B, female, 40s, gives him the traditional British two fingers in return.

Correct.

I don't know why we bother borrowing American forms of abuse when our own culture is such a rich storehouse of disrespect. That single finger seems so pretentious somehow, like a DJ with a phoney American accent.

The best bit of parenthood

For the benefit of any parents currently enduring "the sleep-over years"  - when your kids have a high time staying over with their mates and are delivered back to you, grey-faced with fatigue and wired on computer games, ready to unload their newly foul mood on you - or the "under the duvet years" - when the only clue to their presence in your house is a trail of cereal bowls leading to an old Postman Pat quilt covering a snoring hulk who is unlikely to rise until the early evening - I feel I should hold out the promise of a better day.

In my thirty-year experience of parenthood the best bit of parenthood comes when they're young adults and they start bringing home boyfriends or girlfriends. These people are very often just like your own sons or daughters with one important difference - they're required by their upbringing and the peculiar etiquette of their situation to go out of their way to be nice to you. After years of having your every utterance greeted with a heavenwards look and a heavy sigh, or ignored altogether, this comes as a pleasant surprise. The sunniness of the guests has a lightening effect on the mood of the household. At the same time your own child, suddenly finding themselves in the unfamiliar position of host, has to raise their game to make sure it all goes as swimmingly as possible. This day, when it arrives, is one of the few moments in the child-rearing process when you feel like you might be getting your reward in this world rather than the next.

Metroland is the best listen in the history of television

Good news. Metroland, John Betjeman's 1973 film about the creation of London's north-western suburbs in the early part of the 20th century, is on the iPlayer.

When it first appeared Clive James predicted it would be repeated until the millennium. Miles Kington wrote to the producer and said it was "the most satisfying TV programme, on all levels, that I've ever seen". (These are both from its very good Wikipedia page.)

I watched it again last night and I think Miles Kington was right. It's remarkable what it gets from a combination of archive footage of the railways, commercial artists' illustrations of the suburban dream, old estate agents' adverts and shots of Betjeman wandering about, looking at contemporary suburbia and, very occasionally, addressing the camera.

In the end it's his script, intoned in a style unsuccessfully imitated scores of times since, which makes Metroland the best listen in the history of TV. That's what you get with a poet. Betjeman says "Hertfordshire" without the T. Instead of "golf" he says "gowf". As the camera looks up at the grandeur of the Victorian villas of St John's Wood his voice, down below, points out they were often used to house the mistresses of city men and wonders "what Puritan arms have stretched within these rooms to touch what tender breasts?" Another house belonged to a prominent clergyman "whose congregation declared him to be Christ, a compliment he accepted".

I'm going to listen to it again.

I cannot tell a lie - but I've got lots of stories that aren't strictly true

Inspired by the late True Stories Told Live, advertising man Mark Waites has started a project called Supposed Histories in which people are encouraged to tell stories about themselves that aren't true. They do it on video here.

He asked me if I could do one. I don't think I could. I could never do those story-writing projects at school where you were encouraged to "let your imagination run wild". This results in the sort of writing that starts with an elaborate set-up, wanders a bit and then lurches to an end with "and then I woke up".

One of the advantages of True Stories being true is that people have taken them to heart and can tell them clearly and directly. They may well have been finessed or condensed in order to make them work better as stories but they are essentially true and what matters even more is the person telling them believes they are true. According to Garry Wills's Ronald Reagan biography the great communicator had spent so much of the war making propaganda films that he had come to believe that he had taken part in some of the events they depicted.

One of our True Stories turns, a journalist, said "if they're stories they're not true and if they're true they're not stories". I knew what he was getting at but I disagree. Just because something isn't strictly true doesn't make it a lie.

In fact if I was asked to tell a story that wasn't true I would be trying so hard to avoid anything that had ever formed part of my experience that I would end up with a hollow fantasy and it would probably end with "and then I woke up".

Is factual TV made for people who don't know any facts?

Channel 4 ran a programme recently called "Spying On Hitler's Army". I watched it because it was about the bugging of high-ranking German prisoners of war at Trent Park, Cockfosters, in an old stately home where I spent four happy years at college at the end of the sixties.

I turned off the programme before it was finished, frustrated by the things that increasingly irritate me about factual TV - the way it's presented like fiction, the artistically blurry reconstructions, the way the producer has to lay out all his cards in the first few minutes, the way it reminds you of the plot after each ad break as if even your short-term memory couldn't possibly have survived a few minutes of commercials, and, most of all, the implicit assumption that the viewer's knowledge of the subject of World War II couldn't extend much further than watching "Saving Private Ryan" and having done a project about Anne Frank at school.

In the weeks since turning it off I've read a few pieces which indicate I'm not alone in no longer expecting factual TV to tell me very much. There's Brian Sewell, who's even older and crustier than me, daring to suggest that even the sainted Michael Palin's travelogues no longer pack much in the way of content. (I watched some of the latter's "Brazil" while our son was living there, hoping to get some picture of what normal life looked like and felt like for people who weren't footballers, carnival queens, picturesque German exiles or favela dwellers. I didn't get one. In "Scoop" Evelyn Waugh describes news as "what a chap who doesn't care about anything wants to read." Factual TV doesn't even require the chap to read.)

Then Tom Archer, a former senior BBC programming executive, made a speech in which he pointed out that all the power in television now is in the hands of the commissioners, who understand audiences, rather than the people who make programmes, who understand the subject.

And in case you think this is the predictable sourness of old men whose time has passed, I also read an excellent column in which Howard Jacobson, in the course of making the fair point that grumpy old men are right at least as often as any other segment of the population, posed the following question:

Why is dissatisfaction taken to be a mark of failing powers and patience, when it might just as easily be understood as a proper judgment on a foolish world?

In long-form TV there aren't any bad actors

Actually, there aren't many bad actors anywhere, in spite of what we all say when we think we're being clever. There are plenty of things which make actors look bad, which is a different thing.

The Sopranos provided James Gandolfini with the opportunity to look great. It's an opportunity that wasn't open to actors of earlier generations, no matter how talented they might have been. Long form TV takes actors who are vaguely familiar rather than recognisably famous, provides them with characters whose back story probably isn't even known to the writers at the time the show starts and then allows them the time and space to create - and for once create is the right word.

I can't think of any film performance of the last ten years which lives on in the back of our heads the way Gandolfini's turn as Tony Soprano does. That could be because most films are dumber than The Sopranos. It's also because films don't unfold the way The Sopranos did. We can close our eyes and see Tony. We can't remember a particular line. There's no "do I feel lucky?" We just see him mooching about, looking, hesitating, rubbing his nose, smiling, covering up his feelings, being a person, behaving

James Gandolfini was obviously very good. But long form TV gave him the hours, days and even weeks of screen time it took to be great. His life was cut short and that's something we should leave to his family and friends. In purely professional terms very few people get the chance in life to do one thing which is both big and clever. In that sense he was lucky.

The greatest picture ever painted of the greatest record ever made

This giant painting of Chuck Berry's "You Never Can Tell" is the work of Morgan Howell. Morgan paints 45s. Actually, he does a bit more than that. He paints them on canvases tweaked and treated to reproduce all the creases, dedications, cigarette burns and abstruse love marks a black vinyl seven-inch picks up in the course of the kind of full life much-loved records tended to live. He sculpts them to look as three-dimensional as the original one, which might have been picked up for pocket money decades before and is now beyond price.

The original paintings are immense and sit on the office walls of moguls or above the fireplaces of successful entertainers. He's just finished Blondie's "Heart Of Glass" for Chrysalis Records founder Chris Wright. Al Murray has a reproduction of the original Charisma single of "I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)" by Genesis on his wall. A couple of Morgan's paintings of classic singles have gone for sums in the region of twenty thousand pounds at charity auctions. His operation is called Super Size Art and in August he's exhibiting his work at Snap Galleries in Piccadilly.

It's a labour of love which he'd like to make a living from. "When you take a single and make it huge you do justice to its significance," he says. He never does any record twice. His next big task in this labour of love is "She Loves You", which he intends to begin on the 50th anniversary of its release.

I don't know "You Never Can Tell" as other men know it. I'm the only person in the world who hasn't seen the scene in Pulp Fiction in which it features. I don't want to either. Films colonise your imagination and ever since I was 14 my head has been so content with the pictures the record evokes that I don't want anything to get in the way of the coolerator filled with TV dinners and ginger ale or the souped-up Jitney, the cherry red 53. And what space there is left is taken up by that red and yellow Pye International R&B series label, surely the most beautiful of record labels. We forget this. Before pop was on TV the label was the visual focus of the pop experience. There was just that perfect circle revolving its way into your heart. That's why nobody cares about labels anymore. Because records don't have them anymore.

You really love the records you really love because they appeal to your prejudices. I love "You Never Can Tell" because it doesn't fit into any of the established orthodoxies of pop. Chuck Berry wrote plenty of great songs. This was his greatest record. A record captures what happens on a particular day when a set of musicians gather round a certain song. If they'd reconvened the following day it wouldn't have been the same. Records are accidents which take place in air. "You Never Can Tell" is a sublime example.

It doesn't belong to a movement. It was separated from Berry's golden period by a jail term. It doesn't anticipate anything that came next. It's probably not even his in the way the writing credit claims. Although nobody else could have come up with the lyric, which is so well-chiselled it sings itself, the pianist Johnnie Johnson, whose band Berry had hijacked back in St Louis, probably came up with the tune. Certainly it's Johnson's honky-tonk piano that makes this also Berry's poppiest record.

Finally it belongs in that select bunch of records celebrating young marriage, which is amazing when you consider it was the work of such a misanthrope. "C'est la vie, say the old folks. It goes to show you never can tell." And you never can. When I did a radio programme I would play it for anyone who was getting married. My daughter had it played at her wedding last year. A couple of seconds of that pealing guitar figure at the beginning and no matter how old you were, for the next two minutes and thirty seconds you were gone, solid gone.

Chuck Berry – You Never Can Tell