Here is the news - Bob Dylan can put across a song

I got up early this morning and ordered Another Self Portrait (1969-1971): The Bootleg Series Vol. 10 by Bob Dylan from Amazon. I have Prime so it will arrive tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, I can rip the CD straightaway and listen to it with the first cup of tea, quietly so as not to wake the sleeping house.

All this seems a hilariously digital way to listen to a record made more than forty years ago, when I was a teenager, a record that even at the time seemed to be tapping into an even earlier world. One of the lines in the first song "I went to see the gypsy" goes "I went down to the lobby/To make a small call out", which strikes me as black and white somehow.

I remember "Self Portrait" coming out. It was met with puzzlement, partly because it was a double and, thanks to its inclusion of live tracks from the Isle of Wight, seemed neither one thing nor the other. Critics complained that he wasn't writing those acid, wordy songs any more. They were comparatively delighted with the follow-up "New Morning" because it seemed less straightforward. They couldn't abide the sound of apparent content. But critics think that the world sees and hears things the way that they do, which they don't. A few people liked it. Most people shrugged and bought Elton John instead.

I'm enjoying listening to it. I'm not a student of Dylan bootlegs and therefore my enjoyment isn't ruined by thinking "why didn't they release the other version of this?" I just like the way Bob Dylan sings.  I always have. Forget the stuff about being an artist, let alone a visionary. He's never had much of a voice but he's a singer of genius. As the guitarist David Bromberg says in this promotional clip, "the man could put across a song like no-one else can - it just comes through". In the end that may be the truest thing you can say about Bob Dylan. He can put across a song. It's no small thing.
 

What I Read On My Holidays

I didn't set out to spend the summer reading unfashionable books. It was a New Yorker podcast with Jonathan Franzen that nudged me into reading two Edith Wharton books, The House of Mirth and then The Age Of Innocence. Some of the time her style's as long-winded as a nineteenth century proposal of marriage but then she socks you on the jaw with the kind of reality most novelists don't deal in:

The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it. 

Edith had a great deal so she knew. She wasn't pretty, though, and I fancy she'd have exchanged some of the money for looks. I've since taken one step further back into American writers with Henry James and The Portrait of A Lady. This is a journey to a time when the American upper class measured themselves against the English upper class. Most odd.

On holiday in a friend's house in France I picked up Canada, which was the first book I'd ever read by Richard Ford. This is a real page-turner, written like a movie, about two kids out on the prairie whose parents decide to rob a bank to pay their debts. This led me to buy Ford's The Sportswriter when I got back. Published in 1986 it's about a middle-aged man derailed by a bereavement. Because he used to be a sports writer Ford is good on athletes:

Years of athletic training teach this: the necessity of relinquishing doubt and ambiguity and self-inquiry in favour of a pleasant, self-championing one-dimensionality which has instant rewards in sports. 

That reminds me of something I read in Chad Harbach's The Art Of Fielding. Then my sister gave me an Amazon voucher for my birthday and I bought the Charles Moore biography of Margaret Thatcher. I don't know if Craig Brown was pitching it a bit high when he said it might be "the greatest political biography ever" but it's an extraordinary account of times that I remember, genuinely worth reading for the footnotes alone and a salutary reminder of a time before instant feedback. There are plenty of references to whisky and not a single mention of a focus group.

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What football needs is a theatre critic

Brian Case once wrote a piece about Ian Dury, which said something like "rock and roll is notable for two things - the beat, which isn't very interesting, and the gestural arts, which are."

As the Premier League returned this weekend, I thought you could say something similar about big football. It's the gestural arts that drive it rather than the results: Rooney's pointedly not celebrating with the rest of his team, Mourinho's dewy-eyed welcome back to Stamford Bridge, Suarez turning up at Anfield clutching his tiny daughter as if to deflect any aggravation his behaviour may have stored up, the Arsenal fans holding up banners telling Wenger to spend.

BT Sport should find room in their army of pundits for a theatre critic.

No more big TV recommendations, thanks. I'm full

Yes, I know Breaking Bad's really good. Yes, I know Deadwood is as well. As are Broadchurch, Top of The Lake, The Americans, Arrested Development and another half-dozen longform TV series I've never watched. You can't watch one episode of programmes like these so I don't watch any at all.

Society hasn't caught up with the fact that there is now more great telly than there is life. The traditional process of word of mouth recommendation, in which people at parties get that shiny look in their eyes and then say "you must watch" so-and-so, doesn't take into account the fact that these days programmes like the above demand almost as much of your time as a fat novel.

Furthermore, in order to find the brainspace for a new one you have to stop watching an old one. Which, since they seem to go on for ever, is not possible. So, I'm not saying I don't believe you. I'm just saying that I'm full, thanks.

Unrecouped

In the course of this really excellent discussion about how musicians are to make a living nowadays Dave Allen of the Gang Of Four says that after thirty-five years he's still not recouped from EMI Records.

That's what happens, or at least what used to happen. The record companies, which operated to all intents and purposes like banks, advanced a band a certain amount of money out of which they had to make a record and live.

If the record didn't sell enough to earn back the advance (and even in the rare cases where it did), they borrowed another advance to make the next one, piling new debt on old, in the (usually vain) hope that they would make it big with the third or fourth album, clear the debt and advance into the broad sunlit uplands of solvency.

For the overwhelming majority of acts - as many as 90%, I'm guessing - it never happened. When the megastores would mount those mammoth "3 for £10" CD sales ten years ago all those albums were made by acts who had no prospect of ever earning back what they owed to the record companies.  Their CDs were sitting around cluttering up warehouses and at the normal rate of sales they would be there for ever. So why not knock them out cheap?

And it doesn't make any difference whether the acts were well-known or had lots of hits. They'd kept on getting advances to make albums that people didn't buy and therefore the money would be recouped out of the revenues of the ones that did.

At the time their first album came out the Gang Of Four were quite celebrated. They were on the cover of music papers. Their views were sought. Their name was dropped. They got into the chart. It doesn't mean that you break the advance. Wonder if they'd have believed it if you'd told them at the time.

Sometimes it's best not to have the human touch

We were delayed by a few hours in turning up at Calais for our booked journey on Le Shuttle.

We didn't call ahead. We just thought we'd see what happened. I pulled up at the unmanned ticket office. A camera read my number plate and the following message appeared on the screen. "You can depart on the next available train, Mr Hepworth. This is in forty minutes. There will be no extra charge."

So we did. That's the beauty of a completely automated system. It doesn't want to punish you. It just wants to get you out of its hair as soon as possible.

Seriously, are managers actually allowed to talk to players any more?

Luis Suarez says Brendan Rodgers promised him he could leave if Liverpool didn't get into the Champions League.

Footballers are always referring to conversations about their future that allegedly took place months or years earlier. I find it hard to picture these heart to hearts. Where do they take place? Behind closed doors in the manager's office? In front of witnesses in the boardroom? Are they whispered in the player's ear and accompanied by a pat on the backside as they're brought on with fifteen minutes to go? Are they on the phone? What language - or broken language - are they in?

I was thinking of this while previewing the Radio Four adaptation of David Peace's novel about Bill Shankly Red or Dead. In the old days of football I can easily imagine managers taking players aside and using the full arsenal of their man-management techniques on them. In today's litigious era I would be surprised if the clubs let managers say anything to players which didn't directly pertain to what was expected of them in the next ninety minutes. They simply couldn't take the risk.

Soft adjectives are the sign of the reviewer who doesn't mean what he's writing

A data analyst called Gavin Potter has examined hundreds of reviews of wine and found that while the use of very specific words like pencil, graphite, cherry and smoky often indicates wine of high quality, the pursuit of soft, inexact words like rounded, fruity and well-balanced will tend to lead you to the mediocre ones.

I'm sure he could do the same with music reviews. Unspecific expressions of mild approval such as tuneful, lively or well-produced mean that the reviewer isn't particularly enthusiastic but neither does he feel like saying anything downright negative, either because he's got something to lose or, more likely, he doesn't have a great deal of confidence in his own opinion.

This must also be how the wine business works, with the additional complication that here price is a quite good indicator of quality. The reviewer can't say what he really thinks of the wine the supermarket chain is offering at a moderate price and so he restricts himself to moderate adjectives.

People like to think that reviewers err on the side of negativity. The opposite is actually the truth.

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.