Van Dyke Parks and the lost art of talking between songs

I wouldn't be surprised if Van Dyke Parks has forgotten this record. He made it in 1996. I've only just bought it. These days I'm crazy about Van Dyke Parks. "Moonlighting" is him and a full band with singers and a string section playing - and playing wonderfully - songs from throughout his career, songs like Orange Crate Art, FDR in Trinidad and Sailin' Shoes.

VDP is a man who understands, as 99.9% of performing musicians don't, that since its's deuced hard to get people's attention it's a bloody crime to waste it. (I wasn't there when he came in to do the Word podcast but according to those who were he came in like a whirlwind, talked a blue streak, did everything but kissed the hands of the women and, most tellingly, left this business card.)

On this album, recorded at the Ash Grove in Hollywood, he's similarly busy. He starts talking as the applause fades at the end of the first number, and then introduces the next and the next and the next by way of anecdote, quotation, historical analogy, political rant, geography lesson, Robert Frost poem or reminiscence about the circumstances in which he wrote or heard it. He doesn't say "this next song's called" or "I want to tell you a story". He understands, like Bruce Springsteen understands, that a stage act is a story. There's not a second of deviation, repetition or hesitation in the whole set. It makes the performance seem so full. It says "keep up, keep up".

Obviously most musicians don't have the conversational gifts of a VDP. Nonetheless listening to "Moonlighting" reminds me that if there's one thing I'm consistently disappointed by when watching live rock bands it's their failure to give the impression that they've even thought about what they might say between songs. It's their apparent willingness to build excitement and then just let it fall away as they tune up, swap instruments or wait for another member of the band to say something. It's as if they're just there to play the songs and the person whose job it is to entertain the audience, introduce the songs and just generally play host has unaccountably failed to turn up.

You don't have to talk a lot. I don't think the Ramones ever did. But the people who've bought a ticket are paying for every moment of the experience and if a lot of those moments are filled with nothing but agonising pauses and the shuffling of feet they're entitled to ask why.

The view from the end of Mark Lewisohn's massive Beatles book

It was always in the same order: John, Paul, George and then the drummer, first Pete and then Ringo. That order didn't only sound right. It also reflected the way the power structure worked. It was John's group. He brought in Paul, who brought in George, who later on argued for Ringo. And they never forgot it. They all sought John's approval, partly because he could be a bully if he didn't approve. Then again, so could all of them.

Not long after their first record came out Brian Epstein took John and Paul aside and made them register as a songwriting partnership, despite the fact that they hadn't written many songs. The first royalty payment for "Love Me Do", which was obviously more of a hit than I remember, had the people who played on the record earning £27 each while the people who got the composing credit made £157 each. Very quickly this must have begun to rankle with George, particularly because he would know that in most cases only one of those names had actually written the song.

Lewisohn's very good on the puzzled reaction of the British music business to that first record. The Beatles were almost unique in already having a fan following when they put out their first record so they couldn't be completely ignored. "Love Me Do" sold well in the North West, even with literally no radio play and minimal publicity.  Brian Epstein ordered a lot of copies because his shop could sell them, not in order to hype the chart. Everyone else they met thought the name was risible and wanted to know who was the leader. Publicists would have to explain that this was a different animal, a group that played its own instruments and did its own singing. Even George Martin, who recognised that they had a special chemistry as people, wanted to know who was the leader. When they did auditions they would do three songs, each featuring a different lead singer.

The most perceptive single line about the Beatles comes in Michael Braun's early book about them "Love Me Do! The Beatles' Progress", in which he said that when they arrived in America they were representatives of "a new kind of people". In Lewisohn's book some of the adults that they come into contact with like them but only the teenagers got them and responded to the way they dressed and carried themselves. Pete Waterman was a young DJ when they played Coventry and remembers John Lennon wearing the first pair of Levi's he'd ever seen. Norman Jopling, the 18 year old writer on Record Mirror, wrote at the time about their "long flat hair" and remembers that in those days "music hadn't caught up with fashion and film. When I saw The Beatles I knew things were changing."

I can remember that feeling. I'm bound to love The Beatles - All These Years: Volume One: Tune In because it's not just the story of their lives. It's a little bit the story of anyone who lived through it. I write all this about it and still people get in touch and say "should I read it?" as if it's a major life decision. Look. If you haven't read all the other books about the Beatles then bully for you because here's the definitive one. If you have read all the other ones then it would be silly not to read this one as well. And don't forget, I'm talking to Mark Lewisohn about the book as well as Bob Stanley, the author of Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop on October 9th at the Old Queen's Head. Full details here.

The view from page 780 of The Beatles book

This is the kind of utterly inconsequential story that I love. October 23rd and 24th were the only days the Beatles had off in 1962. They were earning good money from live shows. Nevertheless, when McCartney decided to use the two days taking his girlfriend Celia down to London, they hitch-hiked. A series of lorries picked them up, they ate at the Blue Boar at Watford Gap and they arrived in the West End after midnight. "It was a wild, arty thing to do," recalls Celia.

They went straight to Peter Cook's club The Establishment, where Liverpool friend Ivan Vaughan, the boy who introduced John to Paul, was working as a doorman. Paul bought Celia a bitter lemon, he had a Scotch and Coke, and they danced late into the night. They slept on the floor of Ivan's tiny flat in Great Portland Street. The following morning they went for a walk in Fitzroy Square and Celia helped him with the lines to a song he was writing at the time called I Saw Her Standing There, in which, you may recall, they danced through the night and they held each other tight.

The view from page 680 of the Beatles book

In the process of truth tidying itself up into myth a lot of condensing goes on. Memory does something similar. The story of the Beatles being signed to EMI is a classic case. They're rejected by cloth-eared Decca and go down the road into the open arms and ears of George Martin and Parlophone. Anything you don't like? I don't like your tie. Let's change the world.

Over many pages Tune In makes clear it wasn't like that at all. Since Brian Epstein ran one of the biggest record retailers in the north of England EMI had to listen to him when he said he had a group. They weren't impressed and were trying to let him down gently. He went to see the manager of HMV in Oxford Street, who he'd met on a junket. The manager suggested that he should use the facility they had in the shop to make an acetate from his tape. While hanging around the building (in the old address that HMV are about to move back to) he got to play it to the blokes at Ardmore & Beechwood, the EMI-owned music publisher that shared the same building. One of the guys there quite liked the Lennon-McCartney song Like Dreamers Do and suggested to his boss that it would be a worthwhile copyright to acquire. His boss put pressure on the label boys to make a record with them. Nobody at the company wanted to. They were busy. They had other priorities. George Martin and the staff at Abbey Road went along with it very reluctantly, which must have been apparent to the group. There was no eureka moment. It took months.

(In the light of the above the fact that EMI didn't end up with the publishing rights to the most lucrative catalogue in popular music is pretty amazing.)

At the same time they were manoeuvring to get rid of Pete Best, who clearly wasn't remotely good enough. It's the one musical point that everyone who had anything to do with them musically agrees on. This was made worse by the fact that he didn't speak, which in this gregarious company must have been a withering reproach in itself. Brian was irritated by the fact that he would have to get rid of somebody he'd just signed to a management deal and so he went as far as corresponding with his solicitor about the best way to do it. He also looked into making Best the drummer with the Merseybeats and then signing them to management, thus ensuring he didn't break his contract. All this without letting Best get wind of it or triggering the departure of Best's close friend, Neil Aspinall, who was the Beatles' tour manager. Oh, and also the father of the baby that Best's mother Mona (fifteen years his senior) was about to have in July 1962.

As that Rodney Crowell song puts it, life is messy.

The view from page 540 of volume one of Mark Lewisohn's massive Beatles book

I'm 540 pages into Tune In, first volume of Mark Lewisohn's three-part biography of The Beatles. In case you think that's a lot, bear in mind it's just over halfway through volume one. There's another three hundred pages to go and that will only bring me up to 1962.

There have been hundreds of books about the Beatles but nothing as comprehensive as this. I've read quite a few of those books. I'm not a Beatles completist or even much of an anorak. I've met enough anoraks to know nothing satisfies them. It could be that some of the details in this book have already been published before in somebody's memoirs. I wouldn't know that. Nor would you, in all likelihood.

I know more about this subject than most people and yet I can open this book on almost any page and find something I didn't know, have never had confirmed or have never realised the full significance of before. Because you know some of what's going to happen later on in the as yet unwritten Volumes Two and Three, then every tiny detail, every little decision, every road not taken, is pregnant with significance.

A few examples: on page 493 I learn that Richie Starkey, already quite a successful working musician with Rory Storm and The Hurricanes, wrote to the Chamber of Commerce in Houston, Texas, enquiring about the opportunity of factory work. (Throughout this book people write actual letters to each other.) He picked Houston because of its association with Lightnin' Hopkins, whose music he had heard on an LP brought back from Hamburg by Gerry Marsden.

On page 314 I learn that the Silver Beetles were offered the chance to tour Scotland with Johnny Gentle provided they could be in Alloa in two days. They got the offer on Wednesday, persuaded a 28-year-old drummer they had never used before to go sick from his job and join them, rehearsed on the Thursday and were on-stage at Alloa Town Hall on Friday night. It goes without saying that this was without mobile phones, probably without fixed line phones.

On page 396 I read about how Astrid Kirchherr and Stuart Sutcliffe took the seventeen year-old George Harrison to the railway station in Hamburg when he was deported. They gave him some sweets. He hugged the pair of them. "This was the sort of demonstrative thing they never did."

On page 505 I learn that John and Paul were given their distinctive haircuts by their German friend Jurgen Vollmer in the Hotel De Beaune in Paris. They were trying to emulate the appearance of Parisian youth, put some distance between The Beatles and all the Brylcreem bands back in Liverpool and establish a group look which the rest of the band would have to adopt. George did.  Continuing his policy of sullen non-cooperation, Pete Best didn't.

Because the story unfolds at such a leisurely pace, pretty much a week at a time - unlike previous books, which are in a hurry to get to Beatlemania and the hits  - it reminds you of some of the things that were exceptional about the way The Beatles developed and some of the things that make them even more exceptional today. Here are a few:

The most musically accomplished member of the band ended up playing the bass. He didn't want to. He considered it "the fat man's instrument" and preferred guitar or piano. When Stuart Sutcliffe left it was clear that Lennon wasn't going to take it up and so McCartney did, for the good of the group, at a stroke making them twice as musical as any band in Britain.

After they'd played their second Hamburg residency they were the most performance-hardened band in Europe. Tony Sheridan says "they were the best rhythm and blues band I've ever heard". Lewisohn estimates their total stage time in Hamburg at 918 hours. Most bands today spend the majority of their time waiting to play. The Beatles spent more time on-stage than off. They didn't practise. They performed.

One of the reasons they were so good was that they were forever learning new material. When a hot new song came out they would cover both sides, which meant that they spent years deconstructing how big hits were written before doing their own. They didn't quickly graduate to writing their own songs. In fact, at the point that Brian Epstein signed them they had stopped.

Bob Dylan says that he doesn't remember the 60s but he does remember the 50s. This book's a bit like that. It's difficult to imagine how the subsequent volumes can be as good because they will be dealing with the world after Beatlemania, which we all like to feel we either lived through or recognise. Tune-In is different. It's set in the pre-deodorant, pre-central heating, pre-Radio One, pre-credit card, pre-car ownership world of cigarette smoke, smog, hire purchase, greasy overalls, bare wires held in the socket with matchsticks, National Service, rubber johnnies, suspender belts, Scotch and Coke and standing for the national anthem. Nothing was convenient.

Furthermore there was no road map for where this group could go. Before the Beatles there weren't even that many groups in Liverpool and Liverpool had more than most. They couldn't look at an established act and think they'd like to be a bit like them. They couldn't aim at a niche. There were no niches. Before them there was nobody like them. After them it was difficult to imagine things being any other way.

They had a unique combination of single-minded ambition and sod-this impulsiveness. Time and again they were on the point of breaking up when something came up: a tour of Scotland, some gigs in Hamburg, the money to buy an amp, Brian Epstein.  Probably the only thing that ensured they would keep going was John Lennon's lack of an alternative.

What you get from this book is that sense of possibility, the world as they experienced it, through a succession of instants, rather than as the recapitulation of a time-honoured legend.

I shall keep reading. In a way I don't really know how it's going to turn out.

I'll be talking to Mark Lewisohn as part of our Word In Your Ear evening at the Old Queen's Head on October 9th, We'll also have Bob Stanley talking about his book Yeah Yeah Yeah and music from Mr B The Gentleman Rhymer. Tickets on sale here. Hope to see you there, by which time I will have finished the book.

The elephant in the art gallery

To Tate Modern to see Grayson Perry give the first of his Reith Lectures about how to appreciate contemporary art. It goes out on Radio 4 on October 15th.

He wore a zany print tee-shirt dress, sea green tights, pale orange platform heels and Yootha Joyce make-up. 

What he said was interesting. The kind of art we get to see is chosen by a shadowy jury of collectors, critics, curators and sundry tastemakers, many of whom were in the room. When he made a joke they laughed just slightly louder than they would have laughed if he'd been wearing men's clothes.

That was the multi-hued elephant in the room. Surely the thing that makes art valuable today is the celebrity of the artist. I'm visually illiterate but even I've noticed that ever since artists became celebrities their art has moved from the arts section to centre stage and the prices have followed.

Talking about music is the new writing about music

Somebody came up to me at Monday night's Word In Your Ear show at the Betsey Trotwood, which was billed as A Night Playing Records And Talking With Richard Williams and Kate Mossman, and asked if there was any chance of The Word coming back. I think I surprised him with the certainty with which I said "over my dead body".

I might miss the working environment but I don't miss the work involved in putting together a monthly magazine. Richard Williams said that one of the pleasures of doing his blog The Blue Moment was that he wrote what he felt like and nobody told him it was 200 words too long or spoiled it with an inappropriate headline.

I value lots of the things the magazine provided but a lot of the time I think it may work better through conversation. This is what I like about the Word In Your Ear format. This stuff's best dealt with by talking about rather than reading about.

I don't mean dry discussions about what ought to be in the shortlist for the Mercury Music Prize or whatever happened to the protest song. Life's too short for all of that. There were a few things touched on in Monday night which nobody's ever going to write 3,000 words about that I find a lot more interesting than the things people do write 3,000 words about.

Things such as: why you get so few pop songs about Saturday night nowadays; how come the best disco singers have a hint of sadness in their voices; how Spitting Image used to make current affairs intelligible to a five year-old; why 1965 was the annus mirabilis of the pop single; what the inside of your head sounded like when you were fifteen; how pop singers might still function with Alzheimer's and why the greatest dance records by-pass your defences and speak to your true self.

I love all this stuff. It's the kind of stuff I used to love talking about on the Word podcast. It's something I hope we can keep alive through Word In Your Ear.

The next one, which is on October 9th at the Old Queens Head in Essex Road, features Mark Lewisohn, the world's foremost expert on The Beatles, talking about Tune In, the first volume of his mammoth trilogy about the band. We've also got Bob Stanley who's publishing Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story Of Modern Pop. That's in addition to the genuinely inimitable chap hop sounds of Mr B The Gentlemen Rhymer. Tickets are on sale here.  If you liked the Word Podcast or True Stories Told Live you might like this too. In fact if you go to this page and put the word "banjolele" where it says "enter promotional code" you can get tickets for just £10.

And don't forget our motto: it starts early; it finishes soon afterwards.

Without record companies acts like My Bloody Valentine just disappear

My Bloody Valentine complain that they weren't on the Mercury Music Prize shortlist because their self-released album isn't available on the iTunes store or Amazon. People who don't win prizes often think they're being conspired against but MBV's problem with the Mercury Music Prize is only one symptom of the problems faced by the bands who go it alone.

It's never been easier to make and release your own record without the need for a record company or a publisher. You'll keep a far greater share of what you make than you would ever have done in the past. The problem is you'll have great difficulty extending your reach beyond the people already on your mailing list. You don't need a record company to make records any more but you do need it to make you feel important, to bang the drum at radio and generally "stoke the star maker machinery behind the popular song", as Joni Mitchell put it forty years ago.

Without all the soft skills of a record company you can just disappear from public consciousness leaving barely a trace. As my old friend Brent Hansen likes to say, "it's never been easier to play; it's never been harder to win".

Why Tina Brown may be better off without a magazine or a website

The tweet said "the future of media is jazz hands".

It linked to a story about Tina Brown leaving the Daily Beast, the Barry Diller-funded cash hoover that has gone through God-knows-how-much money over the last few years, and starting Tina Brown Live Media, which is described as a home for "theatrical journalism".

There will be a lot of glee in the New York media over Brown's latest reverse, just as there was when her magazine Talk closed, having burned through Hearst money and Weinstein money. I wouldn't mind betting that now that he no longer has to worry about saving her face, Diller will quietly sell The Daily Beast to somebody else and it will slide from view just as Newsweek did a few months ago.

Because she writes her own press releases Tina Brown will present this reverse as an advance.

The funny thing is it may turn out to be just that. There are two reasons:

1. If you look at the growth of live music and the decline in the recorded variety, the increasing popularity of literary festivals and the decline in the sales of books and the growing amount we spend nowadays on fleeting occasions, you can see that people are more interested in experiences than things and "theatrical journalism" may just fit right in.

2. While in the past Tina Brown's greatest value was her ability to get famous people to write about other famous people and then sell the resulting, highly-wrought package to thousands of people who aren't famous, in the future her greatest value may be in using some of the same skills - and a few, such as jazz hands, that most magazine editors don't have - to put on and then coordinate live events featuring some of the same people.

"The future of media is jazz hands" isn't far off. Except it probably isn't media at all.

If they'd had a Mercury Music Prize in 1971

The shortlist could have been:

Every Picture Tells A Story
Hunky Dory
Meddle
Led Zep IV
Ram
Imagine
The Yes Album
Message From The Country
Electric Warrior
Sticky Fingers
Aqualung
Fog On The Tyne
Teaser & The Firecat
Madman Across The Water
Who's Next.

Winner? I'm giving it to Who's Next with Hunky Dory as hon. mention.

Longer post here. Spotify playlist of 1971 classics here.

Why would anyone volunteer to direct a film?

I've seen a million "the making of" films but I've never seen one as candid as the one that comes with Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady [DVD]. Mrs Touchett is a key character in the book. In the film she's not as prominent. That must be because she was played by Shelley Winters, who was seventy-six at the time and, as "the making of" makes clear, a nightmare to work with. She can't or won't remember lines, snaps at everyone around her, messes up take after take and has to be quietly bollocked by Campion in front of everyone. "Shelley, listen to your director." The other actors, hanging around for hours in agonisingly uncomfortable Victorian costumes in the heat of an Italian summer, just walk away. You can see that they want to scream. You come away from it wondering why anyone would ever want to direct a film.

When Wimpy bars ruled the land

They've closed down the Wimpy Bar at Southgate Circus. Sounds like a line from a Springsteen song.

We've lived round here for forty years and while we didn't go in the Wimpy any more we would point it out to the kids and say "that's where we went on one of our first dates". If I remember right we'd been to see 10 Rillington Place at the Odeon. That's not there any more either.

In the days before McDonalds Wimpy bars were all across the land. They were named after a character in Popeye who used to say "if you buy me a hamburger I will gladly repay you Tuesday". Wimpy was a place you ended up in the days when you wanted something quick, when it wasn't really an option to go for a pizza and there were no gastropubs.

Wimpy is twinned in my mind with memories of gigs. We went to see the J. Geils Band play the Lyceum at a "midnight court" show in 1972. Afterwards we ended up in a Wimpy Bar in Coventry Street. Then we walked to Kings Cross and waited for the morning and the first overground train back to Palmers Green. The following day I bought Randy Newman's "Sail Away" at a shop called Harum. When we came home from seeing Van Morrison at the Rainbow we stopped at the Wimpy Bar in Green Lanes partly because it actually had an alcohol licence.

If you ordered a tea and a Wimpy - never a burger, always a Wimpy - they would bring you the tea first. This was always lukewarm so you drank it quickly. By the time your Wimpy arrived you wanted another tea. Cunning.

The Clash and the things retired rock stars really miss

There's a box set of remastered Clash material coming out soon. Yesterday I went to the BBC in Maida Vale for a recording of an interview show with Mick Jones, Topper Headon and Paul Simonon, talking to Cerys Matthews. It's being broadcast in early October.

They were very good. When musicians get to this age they've usually had a near-death experience which has knocked some of the pomposity out of them. Jones was particularly ready to laugh at himself. Couldn't stop, in fact.

Two hundred fans from all over the country, most of them I would guess fifteen years younger than the band, had come up in the ballot and taken the day off work to come. They were told not to take pictures. They complied. Nobody called out. When they had questions they waited until the microphone reached them. It was the least punk rock experience you can imagine.

Topper said something I've never heard a musician say before.  He said they'd been staying in a hotel all week, doing media. He'd loved it. After what he called his "descent" he thought he'd never do that again. Just being with the band. Calling room service. Joshing around. Showing off. Re-entering the extended adolescence of a business class musician in work mode. He was boyishly excited. He's fifty-eight.

After it was over I went out into the street and there, parked down the middle of Adelaide Road, their drivers waiting, were three highly-polished black Mercs and one highly-polished black people carrier.

It must be very easy to get used to that kind of thing. It must be awfully hard to leave it behind.

The gob-smacking "sales" figures of Rolling Stone

Nobody else has remarked on this so I've got to. Rolling Stone's decision to put the Boston bombing suspect on their cover was judged a success because they sold twice as many copies on the news stand as they usually do.

Twice as many. That's quite something. Magazines *never* double their sale issue-on-issue. How many copies was that?

13,232.

That's the number of copies they sold in the whole of the United States on the back of immense publicity. 13,232. I've worked on magazines in the UK that have lost that many copies down the back of the sofa.

The really interesting thing was this was twice as many as usual, which means that the average issue of Rolling Stone, no matter what superstar, nymphet or American icon is on its cover, no matter how fabulous the cover concept, no matter how expensive the photographer, actually manages to motivate just six and a half thousand Americans to go to the news stand. That is considerably less than the average home gate of Yeovil Town.

Presumably Rolling Stone sold more than that ten years ago but it still can't have been all that many. It must mean that UK magazines, which traditionally have a terrible chip on their shoulders when it comes to their American cousins, regularly outsell them, even in a market that's only a fraction the size.

All circulation figures involve a certain amount of smoke and mirrors but American figures are more opaque than ours. The overwhelming majority of copies are on subscription and most of those are sold at a risibly low price in order to secure the number of readers the publishers need to deliver to the advertisers. There's an interesting piece here on an American site that explains why they've recently stopped bothering.

Rolling Stone's current rate base is 1,450,000.

Mark Ellen and I take a trip to the isles

Six months ago the people at Wordplay, a literary festival in the Shetland Islands, invited me to come and speak at their event in late August. I suggested Mark Ellen was, if anything, even keener on Scottish islands than I was and so he was invited too. A couple of months ago they asked what we were going to talk about. We came up with a title - 50 Years Of Rock And Roll In 60 minutes - which they seemed pleased with.

A week ago we sorted out enough pictures and captions to make a presentation. On Wednesday we flew, with our wives, to Shetland. Big plane to Glasgow. Little prop plane to Sumburgh on Shetland. At Glasgow airport we met Quentin Cooper, who was on his way to speak in Benbecula where the plane lands on the beach. Next to that landing at Sumburgh, where they have to stop the traffic so the planes can land, was a breeze.

Shetland is fascinating. It combines the characteristics of Scottish islands - peace, natural beauty, wildlife - with the characteristics of, well, almost nowhere else in Europe. Thanks to the oil and gas business off-shore Shetland's unemployment is only 1%. There are no ostentatious shows of wealth but there are some nice cars and a powerful amount of Farrow and Ball paint. Total are fitting the gas plant at Sullom Voe, a job so big they've had to build their own hotel, which doesn't have a vacancy for ten years. Some of the men are accommodated in a "floatel" (below), a giant waterborne barracks which was towed from Gdansk and was formerly used as a prison.

We rented a car and got around the islands, all the way up to the northernmost tip of Unst to Muckle Flugga, which is as far north as the UK goes, and roughly on the same latitude as Bergen. We saw thousands of gannets plunging into the waters off Norwick. When we flew back via Aberdeen we also saw plenty of Super Puma helicopters, grounded in the wake of the tragedy of the week before. If they can't resolve that problem soon then presumably the consequences for the economy will be serious.

We did our show on Saturday night in the big hall at Mareel (right). There was a gratifying turn-out. Lots of locals, some Word readers, a few Whistle Test diehards, and a contingent of poets and musicians who were also taking part in the festival. Everybody seemed to enjoy it. Somebody said "you must have done this lots of times before". In one sense we had and in another we hadn't. Somebody else said "you obviously know each other well." You could say that.

Afterwards in the bar a lady came up and asked to take our picture. She must have been in her 70s.

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.

.

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.

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

You only truly look up to your first idol

Paul McCartney's seventy-one today. I was looking at this clip of him playing a couple of numbers with Bruce Springsteen at the end of the latter's show in Hyde Park last year.

What I was really looking at was the grin all over Springsteen's face, a grin which clearly announces "Look! I know I'm an immense star in my own right but this is different because I'm singing with a Beatle!"

If you're under fifty all rock stars who made their name before you were born probably merge into the same pantheon. If you're from Springsteen's generation, who sat as teenagers and gawped at the The Beatles on Sunday Night At The London Palladium or The Ed Sullivan Show, then whatever stardom you happen to achieve in your life will always be nothing more than a base camp compared to the Everest that is Beatles fame.

This doesn't just apply to rock stars, who instinctively defer whenever a Beatle or a Stone heave into view. We all feel versions of the same thing. You can never be truly, knocked-sideways impressed by meeting people unless they were big stars when you were young. That's the point, when you were a child and they were just a few years ahead, at which you establish a way of looking at the world which never really changes.

The best day's work I ever did

"All families have a secret. The secret is that they're not like other families." Alan Bennett.

Yesterday I found the interview I did with my elderly Auntie Lily in 1989 and spent hours capturing it digitally. It's done now so I can email it to any relatives who are interested. I'll be relieved not to have the sole responsibility of hanging on to it. I half-feared I might have lost it. It's the best day's work I ever did.

Lily was the doyenne of the family. The oldest of six and the longest-lived, she was also the company secretary of her father's business and a pillar of the local chapel so there wasn't anything she didn't know. (She also worked as a nanny in Germany in the 30s. We got round to that in a later chat.) She went through all the generations and talked about stuff that in my experience families only ever talk about when somebody has died and it's time to open the tin trunk full of documents. I suspect even my parents didn't fully know some of the things she told me about them.

Afterwards she would proudly tell other members of the family, "David's been to record me". She knew I was recording her because she was getting on ("I don't want to be in my nineties - when you're in your nineties you're just under t' feet") and she wasn't remotely squeamish about it. She was delighted that anyone was bothered about her experience. In our more pretentious times we would say it validated her contribution.

When I tell people I did this they say they'd love to do the same but they don't dare broach the subject in case it seems in bad taste. Everything important in life is. My advice is get on with it. Ring up the most reliable witness in your family and set a date.

Reading a 19th century novel on a 21st century phone

When I first got a Kindle I used it a lot. I was on the tube every day and it was a convenient way to read on a crowded train.

Then I stopped using it except when I was travelling. Just wasn't inspired. At the same time I was discovering the joys of secondhand book shopping.

Now I've bought the Eucalyptus e-reading app. It uses a more readable font than the Kindle and the appealing way it turns pages has been described by Nicholson Baker as "voluptuous". None of the jerkiness of the Kindle.

You have to buy the app but then you get access to 20,000 copyright-free works for nothing. So it's Dickens, Austen, Trollope and so on but not Dan Brown. It downloads them to your phone in a second.

I'm finding shortcomings. Unlike the Kindle it doesn't sync across devices so that you can pick up on your iPad at the same place that you left off on your iPhone. Not all the books listed by the Gutenberg Project are actually available to UK users, thanks to the usual copyright jiggery-pokery.

Nevertheless it's a small joy to use and it's been a great help as I plough through Middlemarch while waiting for the bus. Worth a look.

P.S. I'd tried Middlemarch years ago and given up. Shamed by a Brazilian friend of my son who'd read it at the age of eighteen - in a foreign language - I took it up again recently and enjoyed it. Talented bloke, George.

I think I'm blogged out

I've been doing this since 2007, which means that sometimes when I'm writing in it I stop and think 'hang on - haven't I written this before?'

Prompted by Spielberg's admission in an interview that Lincoln was almost on HBO I was going to write something arguing that it would have been better that way. Then I realised I already had done.

With Father's Day coming up I felt moved to argue that people should stop patronising Dad, before I realised I already had done.

Then I was suddenly excited about the fact that we'll have been in our house twenty-five years this weekend, something that seemed worth marking. Of course I did that when we'd been here a mere twenty-one years.

I think I'm blogged out.

There's nobody as star-struck as a star

Intrigued by The Bling Ring, a new film based on the case of the star-struck Californian kids who burgled the Hollywood homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and others, making away with designer clothes and jewellery.

Although the victims felt as invaded as any of us would, certainly according to their original grand jury testimony reproduced in the Daily Beast, that didn't stop some of them taking part in the film. Paris even let them film in her house. Attention's attention after all and the fact that these people chose to burgle your house rather than your neighbours must give you additional cachet in the members-only clubs of Hollywood.

You can see why the film was made - rich kids burgle the cool apartments of rich and famous kids - and you can also see how the people who made it will justify it to Jonathan Ross's sofa - exposé of the hollowness of celebrity culture etc.

It stars Emma Watson, the face of Lancome, and is directed by Sofia Coppola, formerly the face of Marc Jacobs. Young movie people are so beholden to the luxury brands who subsidise them that any moralising about "celebrity culture" ought to embarrass them. The opportunity to pretend to be the people who dream of being them is the ultimate confirmation of their own place at the top of the mountain.

First rule of being interviewed: ignore the question

Rhys Ifans gives the interview from hell to Janice Turner in The Times in the same week the nation's football hacks form a guard of honour to welcome Jose Mourinho back to English football. Compare and contrast.

The former complains about the questions before tortuously trying to turn them to his advantage in a way that makes him look like a pillock. The latter cheerfully ignores the questions and just takes the opportunity to ventilate some riff that he's had in his head for a while.

Like him or not Mourinho understands the first rule of being interviewed. All the interviewer wants you to do is SAY SOMETHING NOTABLE.

Etiquette demands the interviewer starts with a question, as if this were about a job or a crime. It's not. It's a process which is supposed to result in quotes. If the "subject" doesn't volunteer anything then the writer has to write about how difficult they are.

And of course all the really agonising interviews happen because their subjects have paid PRs to arrange those interviews. It's not as if The Times are sitting there thinking "if only we could get Rhys Ifans".

One of these days an interviewer will have the nerve to turn up for one of these encounters, get out their recorder, say "now, how can I help you?" and then sit back.