In praise of Barbra Streisand's "Stoney End"

I'm recording a programme with Johnnie Walker this week and one of the records we're talking about is Barbra Streisand's "Stoney End". Yesterday morning when the sun was out I took a stroll with that one track playing again and again through my headphones. Boy, it's a jewel.

Sometimes proper singers can seem too good for pop music. I'm still haunted by memories of Ella Fitzgerald's baroque versions of Beatles songs. You can see why they do it. They think the songs are a bit beneath them. To my ears Laura Nyro's songs never seem to fly in her own versions.

But Streisand's "Stoney End" is a joy. In 1971 they made a lot of fuss about the fact that the album was produced by Richard Perry and included songs by all the hip young writers. That all helps but it's her genius as a singer that brings home the bacon. She goes into the chorus of "Stoney End" four times. Each time it's more  exhilarating than the time before.

The rugby director's fear of the wide shot

I watched a lot of rugby this weekend.

BT Sport’s coverage of the Aviva Premiership seems pretty good to me. On the other hand I find the BBC’s coverage of the Six Nations Championship increasingly irritating.

I understand that Wales v France in Cardiff and England v Ireland at Twickenham demand to be treated differently than London Irish against Leicester. The former are big national occasions. The latter’s just a sporting encounter.

I understand that you’ve got to go big on the build-up and the pyros and the anthems and the reaction shots. I understand that a lot of people tuning in are more interested in the occasion than the game.

Nonetheless the coverage of the other stuff shouldn’t be at the expense of the action. When you go to a big game you may be a long way from the action but at least you can see where the action is. It’s the single most important piece of information you need. There’s no point having a moody close-up of the scrum if you can’t see whereabouts on the pitch that scrum is taking place and how the two teams are lining up either side of it.

I tweeted about this during the Wales v France game and a TV director friend replied that the traditional watchword is “action is wide, replay is close”. This seems sensible. It wasn’t what the BBC seemed to be providing. When George North scored the first try he was out of shot because they were too busy focussing on the confusion of the French defenders. Later during this game and in the England match the following day the commentator had to tell us which line we were looking at because he knew that the shot was too tight for us to be able to work it out for ourselves. Then there are the penalties. In the post-Wilkinson era TV directors have become so enamoured of the curious rituals of goal kickers that they linger for whole minutes on their close-up of this process and leave us not knowing how difficult it is to score because we can’t see where they are on the pitch.

TV seems to believe that the closer it brings us to the action the more we understand. I don’t think so.

Was "Working Girl" a period film when it was made?

I rarely feel like watching any of the contemporary films in Netflix. I tend to choose TV series or old films. In the second category I watched "Broadcast News" the other day. I liked this in 1987 but now it seems ridiculous that you can have a plot revolving around the dangerous charisma of a man who reads the news. While watching it I estimated I haven't actually seen a news bulletin in five years.

The other thing that's almost more laughable is the fashion. Holly Hunter has shoulder pads which are out of all proportion to her size. And her hair looks as if it's had violence done to it by a drunken stylist.

But "Broadcast News" is nothing, let me tell you, to "Working Girl" (1988). In this Melanie Griffith plays a secretary from Staten Island who grabs her chance to climb the greasy pole of a Wall Street firm. This being a film her progress is clearly indicated by her hairstyles. She starts out needing to enter a room sideways in order to accommodate the same lacquer-spun high-rise headpiece as her friends. She ends up with something neat, manageable and expensive.

I'm trying to think back to 1988 when I first saw this film. Were the fashions worn by Griffith and her friends in the early scenes funny and grotesque then? Watching now it's impossible to see past them.

All families have a secret but not many have a book in them as good as as Ben Watt's

We never think our parents are entirely real.

We go from depending on them when we’re young to patronising them when we’re teenagers to depending on them again when we have kids of our own and then patronising them all over again when they’re getting properly old. At no stage do they ever quite emerge from our shadow. That’s the way we prefer it.

We also tend to assume that our horizons are broader than theirs and our experiences are somehow deeper and more profound than theirs. This must be particularly the case if you’re any kind of celebrity and have had the experience of being asked what you think and feel about just about everything.

Romany and Tom is Ben Watt’s book about his parents. Mother was an actress turned magazine journalist and rather grand. Father was an underemployed jazz musician and rather Scottish.

It starts in their later years, in retirement flats and care homes, and goes back through their individual stories and on into their strange romance. It’s not a comforting story. It’s got very few “aw, sweet” moments. That’s what I like about it. It’s closely observed, brilliantly written and unsparing in making Romany and Tom real, even at the cost of making them likeable.

I was enthusing to my wife about it, misquoting the old Alan Bennett line about all families having a secret and the secret being that they’re not like other families. I was speculating you could write a book as arresting as this one about any family. She didn’t think you could. Maybe she’s right. I still think all families are equally strange. Most of the time we’re on the inside. When you're on the inside you can't see it. It's afterwards that you see it.

The North isn't a place and Manchester certainly isn't its capital city

Amused by this story of the Yorkshireman who broke out of his prison near Preston because it was full of Lancashire and Liverpool people. It came not long after there had been suggestions that the country should counter the magnetic effect of London by moving the seat of government to Manchester.

As a Yorkshireman who has lived in London far longer than I ever lived in Yorkshire I feel I'm allowed to ask "WTF?"

Why is it always Manchester? Why do metro-centrics in the media-government complex always say Manchester when what they really mean is not London? Why not Peterborough or Norwich or Middlesbrough or Leeds? Or a million other places they never mention because they've never been there?

(You can always tell when letters are made up in magazines because they pretend to come from somebody in a large industrial city in the north. People who live in those places always identify precisely which town, village or suburb they're in. They never mention the metropolis.)

It's always Manchester. Let me tell you, when I was living in Yorkshire Manchester seemed like the dark side of the moon. We hardly ever went to Manchester. We were much more likely to go to London or Scotland.

I may be wrong but I don't get the feeling that people in the north-east felt much better about the BBC on learning it had ostentatiously moved everyone (well, everyone but its senior management and star presenters) from London to Salford. If you're in Barnsley or Derby it seems just as far away. This comes as a shock to metro-centric planners. They think the North is a place and Manchester is its capital city.  Wrong.

The importance of being top

Generally speaking foreign managers working in the Premier League speak better English than the British ones. It's only when they have to put their faith in just one word that you often find them picking the inappropriate one.

After they conceded a late goal to West Brom last night Jose Mourinho accused his team of having a "lack of personality". I think what he meant was lack of character. He was referring to a lack of what the dictionary calls "mental or moral constitution" rather than an absence of individuality.

The adjective I listen for is "important". Managers from overseas always talk about games being "important", players being "important", goals being "important". It's a furrowed brow word whose natural home is the boardroom. British managers, on the other hand, don't use important. Instead they use playground words like "big" and "massive" and, most frequently, "top".

To increase the impact of "top" they double up on it. Pundits and managers now use the expression "top, top player" as if it were a technical term and not just a way of filling a silence.

The love of Harry Nilsson's life

I know Harry Nilsson's records well but I didn't join the dots of his personal life until I saw Who Is Harry Nilsson (and why is everybody talkin' about him?).

The biggest surprise was the third wife, a 19-year-old Irish exchange student called Una he met in an ice cream parlour in New York. He was drunk on brandy. He'd shot his voice. His career was pretty much over. He told her she had the most beautiful eyes he'd ever seen. He wasn't a bad judge.

They got married in a fever. A cocaine fever. First he lost his money. Then he lost his health. And yet, unbelievably, he and Una had six children and were happy. As old friends like Jimmy Webb and Van Dyke Parks attest in the film, he faced his premature end without any rancour. His kids talk about him without any bitterness. Una still has beautiful eyes.

It's Valentine's Day next Friday.

I couldn't escape the news today, oh boy

We were having our Sunday meal just now when our son, who had been checking his phone, said "Philip Seymour Hoffman has died".

A week ago I was looking at the Melody Maker from July 1971. In the first week of the month they had a news story saying that a rumour has reached them that Jim Morrison has died in Paris. They put it to the record company, who'd denied it. A whole week elapsed before they could confirm, in their next issue, that it was true.

You once had to find the news. Now the news finds you.

Only teenagers envy rock stars' lives

Some music fans reckon they're not interested in the scandal of a musician's personal life. I'm not like that. Only 10% of my interest in Beware of Mr Baker was in what it revealed about the music - Cream was his idea, he invited himself into Blind Faith and nobody had the nerve to say they didn't want him, he earned five million out of that 2005 reunion and spent it.

The other 90% of the appeal is the opportunity to watch a man with a breathtaking lack of interpersonal skills. Baker sits smoking in a La-Z-Boy recliner on his farm in South Africa, moaning about the fact that he's bound to lose the place because he spent all the money that was supposed to see him through to retirement, bitching about most of the musicians who have played a part in his career and refusing to discuss most of his ex-wives.

When you first watch rock documentaries you're young enough and starry-eyed enough to envy everything about the people who star in them.  Because you admire their music everything they say about anything else seems so smart. Forty years later you might envy them their talent, but you no longer envy their lives. Not one little bit.

Publishers should stop promising things they can't deliver

Trinity Mirror have announced the closure of their People.co.uk website and the departure of Sue Douglas who oversaw it. That's sad for her and anyone who worked on it.

I don't care whether it was a good, bad or indifferent idea. The way they went about it was wrong in one key respect.

In November, which was when it launched, Sue Douglas was on The Media Show talking it up. The interview, which starts here at 2:56, reminded me of Siobhan Sharpe's flights of fingers-crossed positivity in the Olympic comedy Twenty Twelve. Steve Hewlett didn't have to be particularly tough to expose the fact that she seemed to be making it up as she went along.

And that shouldn't matter because in the world of the internet that's what people do - they start with a small idea, look at how people use it and then build it up from there. They literally make it up as they go along. What Sue Douglas was doing on the The Media Show was not demonstrating something, which might have been powerful. Instead she was promising something, which was what people used to do in the old media world.

The worst thing you can do nowadays is promise something. Nobody believes you. As my friends in the music business say, you can't hype people any more. You can't predict something is going to be the case. The only thing you can do is point out what is already the position and build from there. The only hype that matters is the hype the users provide themselves.

Large companies with web initiatives should rejoice in the fact that they don't have to get the permission of advertisers or distributors before they start. In the words of that well-known manufacturer of gym pumps, Just Do It.

Is this World War I or Photoshop?

Saw this on Twitter yesterday, captioned "World War One battlefield".

If you say so. To me it looks like a cross between War Picture Library and Photoshop.

You don't find a highly composed panoramic view of the battlefield from the second war and camera technology had moved on quite a lot by then. Back in 1915 cameras weren't exactly point-and-shoot. A lot of the most frequently used images were reconstructed, just like lots of the early action newsreels were re-enacted in quarries back in Blighty.

I  always think you can tell real war photography from the fact that the photographer is too terrified to hold the camera steady.

Like this (right). I believe in that.

The triumph of hope over experience in the competitive world of the gastropub

There used to be a pub at the end of Chapel Market called The Salmon and Compasses. Few ever ventured there.

About five years ago it was taken over by a guy who owned a successful gastropub in Clerkenwell. He got the builders and decorators in, gave it a facelift and re-opened it as The Compass. We did our True Stories Told Live evenings in the room upstairs, which worked very well.

The owner told me the problem with Chapel Market is you couldn't get people to pay much for lunch there. You could fill it in the evening but unless you were doing a certain amount of covers at lunch you couldn't afford the kind of chef you needed. That's why he sold it to somebody else.

After about a year the new owner sold it again, this time to a firm who run a very successful place about a quarter of a mile away. (In Islington that quarter of a mile may as well take you to the dark side of the moon.) Anyway, the new owners got the decorators in, changed the name of the place again and ran it under the new name for about a year.

Now it's closed again, it's changed hands again and the decorators are in again. That's three times in five years.

I've noticed the same pattern all over London. Pubs, clubs and restaurants change hands all the time. Whenever they do they close, call in the interior decorators, change the name and then re-open, by which time it seems to me that only the decorators have profited.

I'm sure decor and name do make some difference. I don't think they make all that much difference. Surely what determines the success of any catering business has to be location, location, location. If I can see that, why can't the people who run them?

Inside Llewyn Davis and the most important six words in the music business

I have to pick a few nits about the historical background.

It opens with a shot of a microphone. It's 1961. Would a folk cellar like The Gaslight have had one? Or had need of one?

He goes round to his girlfriend's apartment and she has what looks like a hundred albums. In 1961 young people didn't have a hundred albums.

Somebody sings "The Last Thing On My Mind", which Tom Paxton didn't record until 1964.

The language is completely 21st century. In 1961 nobody came out with a torrent of profanity and if they did it certainly wasn't in front of women and children.

All that said, this is a haunting film. I'd happily watch it again tomorrow.

Would-be folk star Llewyn Davis is so consumed by the needs of his own career that the needs of the people around him simply don't seem real to him; plus he's so convinced of his own talent that he can't understand why anybody else should have the tiniest share of the spotlight. He thinks it's the managers and agents preventing him from being successful. He doesn't understand his real problem is people don't like him.

He gets to play a song for the Albert Grossman figure. The man listens to the whole song (every song throughout the film is given a complete performance), then looks at him and says the six words which everybody in the music business thinks and hardly anybody ever says: "I don't see any money here".

Why real life is never good enough for glossy magazines

Jezebel claim to have the unretouched pictures of Annie Leibowitz's shoot with Lena Dunham for American Vogue.

If they're to be believed the powers that be have rearranged Dunham, whose whole thing is she doesn't look like a model, so that she looks, well, like a model.

It's very interesting stuff. Head from one shot added to torso from other shot etc. Flesh excised from anywhere the A.D. doesn't wish flesh to be.

I know this kind of thing goes on. In my experience it generally goes on with the enthusiastic approval of the subject.

That's as maybe. Jezebel is puzzled by all this. It says "men are generally allowed to have pores and wrinkles; women are supposed to be perfect". That's true, I suppose, but I can guarantee you that any men who have made it through to the pages of Vogue have had a similar amount of post-production work done on their images. Photoshopping is like the cast of Friends. Once one character got thinner, the others had to get thinner for fear of appearing fat.

But more than that. If you want to know why art directors and photographers do this kind of thing, let me refer you to that old TV programme where the Comic Strip did the Miner's Strike. You may remember they had Al Pacino playing Arthur Scargill.

Anyway, the most telling scene in that film, one of the most telling scenes in all TV, came when the director and art director stood in the middle of a proposed location, which was a genuine mining town somewhere in South Yorkshire.

They looked sceptically up and down, scanning the video store, the Indian takeaway and Spar grocer. Eventually the art director, clearly dissatisfied, turned away.

As he went he uttered the line which tells you everything you need to know about the image-monger's trade. "It doesn't say 'mining town' to me."

What Evelyn Waugh (might have) said about rock band reunions

Christine McVie is rejoining Fleetwood Mac, forty four years after she first joined them and sixteen years after she left. This must be some kind of record. I'm reminded of the Father Brown line that Evelyn Waugh uses in "Brideshead Revisited".

Father Brown said something like 'I caught him' (the thief) 'with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.'

Think he was talking about the Catholic church. It applies to rock bands too.

50 years ago today the Rolling Stones accidentally make a masterpiece

Fifty years ago today the Rolling Stones recorded "Not Fade Away" at Regent Sound in Denmark Street, or Tin Pan Alley as they called it in those days. According to Keith Richards it was a tiny room at the back of a shop, with a two-track Revox mounted on the wall and sound-proofed with egg boxes. According to this it wasn't much different when Black Sabbath came there in 1970 and recorded "Paranoid".

Andrew Loog Oldham was the Stones producer though he didn't have much more experience than they did. They later did their first album in the same place. I still think it's the best first album ever made by anyone. According to Keith the tiny room made it easier to make those first albums "but hard to make a better one".

Why did nobody tell Bruce Springsteen he looks like Shakin' Stevens on his new album cover?

That's the cover of the new Bruce Springsteen album. It looks like a Shakin' Stevens reissue on a CBS budget label.  It won't come as a surprise to people who've seen the covers of his last few, all of which looked as if they'd emerged at the end of a long lunch with the Top Gear production team.

It wasn't always like this. I know Springsteen album covers are never going to be the first thing talked about when art directors gather but back in the day there were a few that were excellent and one that was definitive, both of the genre and of him. That one.

Obviously he's never going to have the same glow at 64 he had when he was 24 but whereas the young man looks as if he has his tongue in his cheek, the old man wears the heavy self-consciousness of someone about to take the stage at an advertising agency Christmas party. I know he looks better than most men his age but most men his age have grown-up children who see it as their duty in life to make sure Dad never wears a Levi jacket. You'd have thought they could have told him.

Neil Young stops the crowd at Carnegie Hall from clapping and he's got a point

During the first of four shows he's playing at Carnegie Hall this week Neil Young stopped a song because the audience was clapping in the wrong time. According to the New York Times review "Mr Young seemed rattled by the precarious balance of worship and familiarity exhibited by the capacity crowd".

There are times when Neil Young seems a bit up himself, as the young people might say. This doesn't sound like one of them. I know exactly what the writer means by the worship and familiarity. It happens all the time these days when you go and see icons. The audience are so keyed up for the experience that they get ahead of themselves. They're not reacting to what's going on in the hall. They're celebrating the fact that they're in the same room as a legend.

When I went to see Bob Dylan recently I sat near a middle-aged woman who stretched her arms towards him in supplication throughout every song. If this had been a church service you would have moved away from her. At that gig we were close enough for Dylan himself to be able to see her. He must have found it disturbing as well. Then again I'm sure he's used to it by now.

I'm writing this while listening to Live At The Cellar Door, a collection of live recordings of Neil Young made in 1970 when he had just written the songs that made his name. There's no untoward audience reaction here, no cack-handed clapping along to songs that really don't call for any sort of percussion and he can even sing the line in After The Gold Rush about "I felt like getting high" without anyone answering with an approving whoop. It's a relief.

Johann Johannsson and the sound of peace and quiet

Johann Johannsson is an Icelandic composer whose music is approvingly described as "haunting". That's the word critics always reach for when they can't hang their hat on the beat or the lyrics. "Haunting" is what people who've got university degrees use to describe music that's easy to listen to, which I suppose is different from easy listening. I play quite a bit of music in this category. I reach for it when I'm looking for a change from music that has a lot going on in it. If that sounds like a slight, I don't mean it to be.

Fordlandia is a piece inspired by an industrial community Henry Ford tried to establish in the Brazilian Rain forest in the 1920s. He did it in the hope it would supply enough rubber to reduce his company's dependence on the products of Malaya. It didn't work. The local pests killed the rubber plants. The workers didn't like Ford's regime. The Brazilian government didn't cooperate. It's been a ghost town since the thirties. 

Once a composer like Johannsson has chosen to tell us that his music's about Fordlandia then something magic happens in our heads; we can instantly see the boats coming upstream with their crew of sweating, fly-swatting petrol heads. We can smell the decay. We can snigger at this triumph of nature over petty, striving, greedy man. Had he chosen to call it something different we would be seeing something different again. At school Mr Grimshaw used to herd us all into the lecture hall, get out the old wood-panelled record player, some classical recordings and then ask us if we could see the sea or trees moving in the wind or war of whatever it was that the piece of music was supposed to be inspired by. We would nod and say we could. I think what we were mainly enjoying was the peace and quiet.



 Johannsson is in the UK in March. Dates here.

Sad about Phil Everly, but the great rock'n'roll quartet are still with us

There's no way you can say this without appearing to be tempting fate but the death of Phil Everly is another reminder of the fact that the great quartet of rock'n'roll front men - Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino - are all still with us.

Chuck Berry, who's 87, is due to play his next gig in ten days time at Blueberry Hill, Missouri.

Jerry Lee Lewis, who claims to be only 78, is doing the Sams Town Casino on February 1st.

81-year-old Little Richard claims that he played his last gig at the Howard Theatre in Washington on September 1st after he experienced trouble breathing. He's probably just waiting for the right offer.

Fats Domino, 85, has just been announced as an Honorary Grand Marshall at March's Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans, although he isn't feeling up to riding on a float and has relinquished the duty of playing his hits to his son. 

Considering that he was thought dead in Hurricane Katrina, which washed away many of his possessions, it's amazing Domino's here at all. You could say the same for all four of them. In their different ways, none of them have been poster boys for living right.