No good expecting us English to beg the Scots to stay - let's make them a mixtape

I don't want Scotland to leave the union but I can see it happening. If it does you'll be able to blame England's twin traditions of superiority and reticence. Taken together these two qualities makes us incapable of pleading with anyone to stay, in any situation, ever. I'm profoundly English. This manifests itself in the fact that I would never want anyone to spend time in my company who didn't want to. I'd hate anyone to come to one of my parties (if I had parties) out of a sense of obligation. The thought of it makes my English soul shrivel. The expression "if that's the way you feel" comes to my lips all too readily. The accompanying shrug comes just as naturally to my shoulders.

There appear to be initiatives to encourage Englishers to band together to persuade the Scots not to do it. I can't see any of them getting much in the way of a following. The English are not going to campaign to persuade somebody else to do something. They're not going to make passionate declarations of their belief in the Union or their respect for the Scots. The English don't go in for big, public gestures. Instead I propose that we choose a Scottish friend who is thinking of voting "yes" and do what the English always do when called upon to express something too deep for words. Make them a mixtape.

You don't have to get sucked into the Fake Rarity Roadshow

Unhappy with the way his limited edition records were on sale on eBay before National Record Store Day 2014 was even over, Paul Weller says he won't be taking part in future. In his statement he contrasts "greedy touts" with "genuine fans". 

Fair enough, if that's what he wants to do, but surely the simple act of producing an edition of a record for which the demand is bound to exceed the supply guarantees this kind of thing is going to happen. If you make something rare you increase the value of it and somebody is bound to try to realise that value.

When he refers to "greedy touts" I suppose we're meant to conjure up visions of fat blokes in knock-off Burberry smoking five cigarettes while peeling off fifties from a bundle big enough to choke a donkey.

When he refers to "genuine fans" we're supposed to picture Tiny Tim lookalikes pressing their noses against record shop windows while clutching their carefully pinched pennies in their hands.

I'm not sure I buy any of this. I don't believe there's any way of judging the "genuineness" of fans. What does that mean? Length of service? Degree of disengagement from normal society? Age? Wealth?

Plus I suspect some of these "greedy touts" are also the "genuine fans". They're doing a bit of the former in order to subsidise some of the latter.

There's only one way to avoid being exploited in the Fake Rarity Roadshow. Don't take part. Pass by on the other side. Go and do something else. There are plenty of other ways to support your local record shop. That applies whether you're a performer or a genuine fan. Or even a fair-weather fan like me.

The best first album ever made is fifty years old today

It's fifty years this week since the first Rolling Stones album was released.  It's still the best first album ever put out by anyone.

Most of the songs were rhythm and blues favourites, which would have been unfamiliar to their UK audience.  There wasn't much chance of Rufus Thomas's "Walking The Dog" or Jimmy Reed's "Honest I Do" being played on the Light Programme or Radio Luxemburg.

Blues purists, who like to spoil people's fun, said the Stones' versions of Bo Diddley's "Mona" and Chuck Berry's "Oh Carol" weren't as "authentic" as the originals. What they missed or deliberately ignored was the way their hopped up versions of Muddy Waters "I Just Wanna Make Love To You" or Slim Harpo's "I'mA King Bee" suddenly turned this middle-aged braggadocio into what the MC5 later called teenage lust.

It was the first great party album of the sixties. You simply had to put it on the Dansette and you unleashed something elemental into the most staid suburban sitting room.

It was produced by Andrew Loog Oldham who was making it up as he went along. And recorded in a tiny room on Denmark Street where, as they like to recall, the tape machine was attached to the wall and insulation provided by a bunch of egg cartons. It was, as Keith Richards later recalled, the ideal space in which to make that album and no use at all when it came to making anything else.

That doesn't matter to me. What they produced was perfect. They never made a record with quite the same buzz ever again. To borrow a line from Roy Carr's sleeve notes to a later Stones compilation, don't go looking for a better first album than this. It hasn't been made.

The Angel of Records watches over an old head like me

In the early 70s I used to buy records at Harum in Crouch End. It was opposite the church that Dave Stewart later turned into a recording studio. Later on there was another shop round the corner called Spanish Moon after the Little Feat record. Before fame, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart rented the flat  upstairs.

Harum kept a good cellar and they had a secondhand rack from which I picked up lots of ex-review promos. I've still got a white label of Ry Cooder's "Boomer's Story" I picked up there back in the day. It's possible that they might have also had a copy of Michael Hurley's Armchair Boogie but it would have been just that bit too obscure for even my snobbish Bearsville tastes.

Harum's long gone, along with thousands of similarly-named head shops.  I only recently heard "Armchair Boogie" via the miracle of Spotify. I was drawn to the fact that it came out in in 1971, which, as any fule no, was the annus mirabilis of the rock album.

Then, on the advice of Ian Penman, I took my amp to be fixed at Audio Gold, a shop dealing in vintage hifi not all that far from the old Harum. When I went to pick it up I saw on the counter a little rack containing half a dozen copies of "Armchair Boogie", which has been lovingly and no doubt unprofitably reissued  in a de luxe CD version by Light In The Attic Records (above). It cost me twelve quid but since the Angel of Records had gone to such trouble to place it in my path it seemed churlish to refuse.

I'm listening to it now. You know there's an Angel of Records who makes sure you get to hear everything you're supposed to hear. I really believe that.

Richard Hoggart's Lost City of Leeds

Today they announced the death of Richard Hoggart. He was ninety-six.  Hoggart was an academic who made a big splash in 1957 with the publication of The Uses of Literacy. In it he called upon his memories of growing up very poor in Leeds in the period between the wars.

When I was in the sixth form our English teacher recommended it because at the time there weren't any books dealing with working class life and popular culture, at least none that anyone would wish to read.

I found this copy a couple of years ago and read it again. I find the first half of it still an extraordinary reminder of the world of cobbled streets and back to backs - before TV, cars and the free movement of people changed things forever.

I've just been trying to find the bit where he describes how he used to see men pushing items of furniture across town in old prams. I can just about remember that myself.

Didn't find that but I did find a paragraph where he talks about the old sayings which, as he points out, "cluster most thickly around birth, copulation and death". One, which was apparently used to refer to the easy sexual habits of married women, goes: "A slice off a cut cake is never missed."

The hack's fear of the word count

I write a regular column about magazines for In Publishing. They're collected here, if you're interested.

Somebody just commented that the last one could have been shorter. Undoubtedly true. Pretty much anything could be shorter.

The reason it's long is it starts life in the magazine and James the editor asks for 1500 words. That way he knows it will fill the space he's set aside for it.

That's the way editors are. "Good idea. Can you do 3,000 words?" They pay you on the same basis. Weight. I suppose in the future the idea of asking for a certain amount of words will seem quaint.

I can write any amount of stuff for this blog because I don't have to. I'm not worried about whether I can produce enough words. If what I'm writing needs to be longer I keep going. If it doesn't I just stop. Like this.

Only New Yorker podcasts can do zis

The reason I bore on a lot about The New Yorker and its podcasts is they do things you simply won't find anywhere in British radio. This one, a  discussion of the books coming out of America's recent wars, involves war reporters George Packer and Dexter Filkins.


It does the thing podcasts do so well: lets people who know whereof they speak to do the talking. It doesn't come in with an editorial view that the journalists are expected to endorse. It wanders as good conversations wander. It has nuance. Not just the nuance of the well recollected detail but also the more valuable nuance of a tone of voice.

They also point out that war correspondents don't properly reflect war because they're always trying to superimpose a narrative on it. Bit like football journalists in that respect.

I seem to be in the most repeated music documentary of our times

A  couple of years ago a TV producer called and asked me to be a talking head on a clip show he was making for BBC-4. The hook was they'd compiled a list of the most lucrative songs in the history of music publishing. Since TV producers don't believe their audience understands the word "lucrative" it ended up being called "The Richest Songs In The World", which is of course ridiculous because a song can't be rich.

When they sent me the list I couldn't see how they'd done their working out. Nobody has an accounting for the full life of a relatively recent song like "Yesterday", let alone "Happy Birthday", and if they did they wouldn't be sharing it with anyone. But in TV the commissioning editor gets what the commissioning editor orders. Therefore I turned up on the appointed day, made my comments on camera, invoiced for the agreed fee - which, believe me, wasn't much - and thought no more about it.

The programme, fronted by Mark Radcliffe, was first shown in December 2012. Then again. Then again. Then people started contacting me saying they'd caught it in the middle of the night on BBC-4. This morning I was looking for something else on the iPlayer and I see that last night they were showing it once more. It must be in double figures by now.

It's obviously one of those programmes that somebody has decided is ideal for just running and running. It's ninety minutes long, hence it uses up plenty of schedule. It's not got anything in it that might make you switch off. It's got "hey, Doris" appeal; most people will be interested to learn "Happy Birthday" is still in copyright. It's not likely to be superseded by subsequent events. They must have made sure that there's nothing in it which qualifies for repeat fees. I certainly don't.

It looks destined to follow me into decrepitude.

"Game Of Thrones" is top of my must-not-watch TV chart

I've never watched "Game Of Thrones". That's nothing special. I've never watched "The Hunger Games" either. Nor "Breaking Bad", "Battlestar Galactica", "The Waking Dead", "Sherlock", "Lost", "True Detective", "Buffy The Vampire Slayer", "Arrested Development" and hundreds of other hot TV series everybody says are great.

And when I say I've never watched them I mean I've never watched so much as ten minutes of any of them. They're not designed for snacking. With this kind of densely-plotted high concept entertainment you can't stop while passing through the room and expect to be brought up to date by somebody sunk deep in the sofa. You're either there for the long haul or you're not there at all.

There are plenty of these shows I hear a bit about and decide to avoid because I suspect they're clever enough to keep me watching but not substantial enough to make me glad I did. And they're so long they can steal half your life away. It's a new category. Must-not-watch TV. If I had a chart of must-not-watch TV "Game Of Thrones" would be at the top of it.

Which is why it's so risky putting a show like that on the cover of a general interest magazine. Shows like this run in narrow channels and don't pique the interest of anyone outside those channels. They're intensely rather than widely popular.

It's not like when J.R. was shot in "Dallas" almost thirty-five years ago. Everybody had some attachment to that storyline. Either they watched it or they had watched enough of it to know which one was J.R. and to have an idea why somebody would wish to shoot him.

Interest in "Dallas" spilled over the sides of the channel which carried it. No longer.

They say it's the golden age of TV. They're probably right. In years to come we'll look back and say "Yes, I remember Game Of Thrones. Never watched it."

An open letter to the board of Tottenham Hotspur

Gentlemen,

Thank you for your patience in waiting so long to hear what I think of the club's current situation. It's only when I'm away on holiday that I have the leisure to turn my thoughts to such a serious matter. This post is being composed while keeping out of the afternoon sun.

You will be relieved to know I am not one of those supporters who believe that football nowadays is run too much like a business. I am more likely to side with those who think it is not run enough like a business.

The Chief Executive Daniel Levy will also be relieved to hear that I do not hold him responsible for the team's lacklustre, inconsistent performance on the field this season. Football is chaos and all narratives are written to justify the score at the end. As William Goldman said about Hollywood, nobody knows anything.

And yet. I suspect that, in seeking to maximise shareholder value, the board hires people experienced in the game, people such as the present Director of Football Signor Baldini. The hiring of such people should ensure that the club's player purchases are more sound than they would have been had they been made after consulting a random selection of supporters in my local. This, in case it helps to know, is the Dog & Duck in Winchmore Hill.

If we are to believe the back pages of the papers last summer Signor Baldini presided over the purchase of a number of players for a combined figure in excess of £80 million, the windfall that came in as a result of the once in a century sale of a genuine superstar. That, as PG Wodehouse would have observed, is a lot of lettuce.

I do not intend to criticise those players individually. I shall simply suggest that even they will have been disappointed at how they have failed individually to adapt to a new league and failed collectively to gel into a proper team. None of those players has enhanced his reputation and increased his value. But I would prefer to focus on what this has done to the balance sheet. The company's finance director must be dismayed at the fact that in less than a year that eighty million pounds of player value has been transformed, by a process of reverse alchemy, into about fifty million pounds. That is worrying for any company.

Here I would like to help. I think it would be unfair to put Signor Baldini under the pressure involved in going out on another buying spree this close-season. It seems only fair to let him have the summer off to recharge his batteries. Yet the work must go on. If you would care to send a list of the club's transfer targets together with their asking prices and an estimate of the funds available, then you will be pleased to hear that I have organised a sub-committee of Dog and Duck patrons who would be happy to do the actual choosing. Our services will cost the club nothing, not least because we have our own pin.

In passing, can you please mention to Signor Baldini that I have a four bedroom house for sale not far from the Dog & Duck? It is worth £25 million. I have a queue of eager buyers.

Yours in Spurs.

Is there a future in Marks and Spencer's dreaming?

My parents believed in a few key things: family, arithmetic, the benefits of fresh air, the enduring value of Marks & Spencer.

They would talk about M&S a lot. They praised the things it did right. They averted their eyes from the few things it did poorly in the belief the company should be left to mend its ways in private.

Growing up I absorbed the idea whatever else might change M&S would be here forever. In the last couple of years I've changed my mind.

There are many reasons to raise an eyebrow at the latest instalment of their "Leading Ladies" marketing campaign: from the idea that you spend money on a celebrity photographer like Annie Leibowitz ten years after the end of the era of the celebrity photographer through the painful over-thinking apparent in the casting of the women to the striving for a quality of nobility in the pictures.

But more dismaying than that is the belief that what they need to do is burnish their brand when they should be improving their offer. I was talking to a distinguished magazine editor the other day, somebody who's whole career has been spent in the world of prestige brands, and he said this: "As far as my kids are concerned, brands have had their day. They just want a quality product at the right price."

Last time I went shopping for an item of clothing in Marks and Spencer I went to their biggest store with the actual serial number of the thing I wanted. The assistant tried to be helpful but she couldn't find the thing in stock. The reason she couldn't find it is because she didn't know which sub-brand to look under. That problem was entirely of the company's own making. I left and ordered it on line. It took three days. I don't think you can do business like that any longer.

Bad behaviour's part of football because that's the way we like it

Writing in The Times today about the bad behaviour of parents at children's football matches Rick Broadbent says (£):

it remains a mystery why football managers believe the touchline is the place to be, while rugby’s elite are generally high up in the stadium where they can spot patterns of play and, thus, actually do their job.

It's not got a lot to do with the job. It's got a great deal to do with football fans' perception of the job. Does he look bothered? Is he shouting and pointing a finger? Does he celebrate when we score and look furious when the other lot get one back?

Top football isn't a sport anymore. It's a drama and the leading actors are the managers. The supporting characters, the players, are very often mild-mannered southern Europeans with limited English who are passing through on their way to a slightly better position in a warmer climate.

Only managers like Wenger, Moyes and Mourinho seem to have some skin in the game. Their pride's at stake. We see triumph and disaster written all over their faces. There's no way in the world TV would give that up and so the football authorities will keep on giving them it. Bad behaviour's part of the game, at every level. We wouldn't have it any other way.

If you watch just one interview about the Great War make it this

This is quite something. It's a 1964 interview with Katie Morter, a mill girl from Manchester who married Percy at the beginning of the First World War, saw him recruited by the music hall star Vesta Tilley and then, when she was seven months pregnant with their child, got the letter from his company sergeant saying Percy had been killed.

I use the word "interview" but in fact it's a perfectly-delivered monologue. She tells you details only when you need to know them. She doesn't need the prompting of an interviewer to clarify anything. Her voice quavers occasionally but she doesn't break down. It's like being there.

Can Kate Bush still be Kate Bush?

When Kate Bush last played live she was a commercial and artistic sensation. She was a hot ticket at the time but nothing like as hot a ticket as she will be when she starts the first of fifteen shows at Hammersmith in August.

Back then she was twenty-one. She will be fifty-five when she returns to the stage. She has hardly any experience of what she's setting out to do, which is perform live. Nowadays the big live acts are immensely accomplished, because they're playing all the time. They know what the modern audience acts like, smells like, what it expects and how far you can push it. They are masters of their craft. They wouldn't dream of starting by playing fifteen nights in the same place because they would fear that gives them no opportunity to regroup, to fix things that aren't quite right.

I worry about her but what I worry about most is the audience. I worry that nobody could possibly live up to what her fans expect of her. She may not have changed that much in the last thirty five years. What has changed is the climate of expectation, which has now reached hysterical levels. It's been inflated in direct proportion to the rise in ticket prices. People won't be going along to see what kind of performance Kate Bush is going to deliver.  They're going to see her. They're going to enter the presence. They're going because they couldn't bear to miss it. They will be going along to have their dreams either fulfilled or dashed. Nobody will come out saying "that was OK".

All this crazed expectation reminds me of the quote from Cary Grant. "We all wish we were Cary Grant. Sometimes I wish I was Cary Grant."

In praise of High Maintenance

High Maintenance is different. I would say revolutionary but that would probably put you off. It's sort of a TV show but since it's made for the web it can do a lot of things TV can't: episodes that are as long as the story needs them to be; everything shot on location so it never visits the same place twice; characters appear, play their part and then disappear, only to turn up in the background of later episodes. And of course the likelihood is that you'll watch one, then another and another, according to your enthusiasm. As drama or comedy or slice of life or whatever you want to call it, it's wry, humorous and sometimes as sudden as real life.

Each webisode is set in Brooklyn, in the home of somebody you've never met before; the only thing you know for sure is that the pot dealer (he who maintains the high) will turn up at some point. They're dependent on his supply, he's dependent on their discretion and he's inserted into their lives in a way that enables him to see how they live and relate to each other, a bit like a doctor or a priest.

You can watch the first season (or "cycle", as they call it) here.

Could this be the Last Time?

You can't call for a substitute in the world of big rock and roll tours. There's never a sign in the foyer saying "Mick Jagger is indisposed and his part will be sung by an understudy".

The Stones have not surprisingly postponed their Australian tour after the death of L'Wren Scott. That also changes the plans of maybe a hundred thousand people, quite a few of them professionally. The insurance implications must be staggering. Rescheduling it will mean they come up against sporting calendars, which can't be changed. This sort of thing just doesn't happen.

I don't pretend to know what gets Mick Jagger up in the morning but I looked at this picture of them posing by the plane in Perth, clowning as if they'd just come out of the pub and fancied playing a bit of rock and roll, doing their "What us worry?" act, and I thought, I don't know if he'll be able to do that anymore.

We shall see.

A liquid day with Reggie and Kingsley

I love the Internet. I read State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974 by Dominic Sandbrook. He quotes quite a lot from Reggie by Lewis Baston when writing about corruption in that era. This piqued my interest so I bought a copy - for £0.01 plus postage.

Apart from anything else I do like to read about the golden age of drinking. Maudling would sip a brandy and black coffee while reading his mail in the morning. Roy Hattersley, no prude when it comes to the good life himself, remembers a morning meeting with Reggie in the mid-70s when he worked his way through a jug filled with Dubonnet and gin. He's the man who famously declared "What a bloody awful country. Get me a large Scotch" as his plane was climbing away from Belfast. Baston points out that one of his famous neighbours was an even bigger drinker.

Saturday, 13 November 1971, when Reggie's engagements diary records 'Luncheon Mr and Mrs Kingsley Amis, dinner Mr and Mr Kingsley Amis' must have been quite a day.

The internet's twenty-five years old today, which is why I can't remember a damn thing

Somebody said the internet is twenty-five years old today. Funny that because tonight I'm taking part in a charity quiz and I was just listening to a New Yorker podcast in which Timothy Wu talks about how devices like smart phones have augmented our memory.

I'm also making a cup of tea and doing what I traditionally do on a quiz day, which is furrow my brow and think about what might come up. Clearly this is a stupid thing to do but, you know what they say, the harder you practise, the luckier you get.

What Wu has to say resonates with me because I've delegated the act of remembering things to digital devices. The only things I actually know are the things I learned before those devices came along, which was twenty-five years ago.

Beatles singles in order, speeches from Shakespeare, the England World Cup winning team, the registration numbers of cars I have owned. All these things can be instantly recalled. The big events of last year? I'm struggling, partly because I made no effort to commit them to memory and I've always known that it would be the work of seconds to look them up. This could be what we mean when we say things aren't very memorable.

Word podcast 218: Show Notes

Mark Ellen, Fraser Lewry and I got together yesterday at Fraser's place. We'd been talking about doing a podcast for ages. Largely because we enjoyed doing them and it was an excuse to get together and catch up. The beauty of a podcast is that you can just reactivate the old feed and in theory the people who used to get it can get it again. You can get it on iTunes here and not on iTunes here.

I don't know whether there'll be any more. It depends whether we feel like it. Or if somebody feels like paying us to do it. Over the last year a few people have suggested ways we could bring it back in a different form, maybe polish it up a bit and get a sponsor or sell it as a download. I've never seen a way you could do this without losing the soul of it. I'm not being precious about it and I'm certainly not saying that we wouldn't look at trying to make it a commercial concern but for the moment we can't see a way. So we'll do it if and when we feel like it and we won't take any notice of what anyone says about it, which is always a nice feeling.

On this one we talked about Mark's book, which comes out in May. We've got two Word In Your Ear events where I'll be talking to Mark about it. They've both sold out. We also talked about Ben Watt's brilliant Romany and Tom, which he'll be talking about at our next Word In Your Ear event, a week on Friday at the Slaughtered Lamb. This evening also features the country duets of My Darling Clementine and the vocal stylings of Vinny Peculiar. Last few tickets here.

What else? We also touched on Who Is Harry Nilsson? and Beware of Mr. Baker, rock docs that came out a long time ago, I know, but we can only talk about them when we get round to seeing them. Or when the subject comes up. Oh and apologies for suggesting Donna Godchaux is no longer with us. That's the problem with spontaneity.

People like me don't watch BBC Three - which is why they should keep it

The easiest things for the BBC to cut are the things the chattering classes don't rush to defend. This looks as if it's going to be BBC Three.

I would guess Tony Hall and his people have been weighing up whether tis better to take something away from their middle-aged, middle class core audience, which they already super serve, or to quietly withdraw something from younger consumers of broader entertainment, who don't pay the licence fee themselves and are less brand loyal than previous generations.

It's a hell of a choice and it's one that newspapers have responded to by putting up the prices of their products - thereby penalising the people who care about them - in order to give them away free to other people who aren't that bothered. The difference with the BBC is that the licence fee model means the cost to the user remains the same, no matter how much or how little they may use the service.

And the real problem they are storing up for the future is that the people they have to worry about most - the young people of today, who should be the licence fee payers of the future - use them less and less. Radio listening among young people is declining (so there ought to be less need to pay Radio One presenters so much money that they need to lose some of it in the motor trade) and their TV habits are completely different from yours or mine. The BBC's not a good thing because it provides lots of things you like. It's a good thing because it also provides lots of things that you don't like - one of those things may be BBC Three.

I don't buy the idea the BBC is at death's door. They're the only media organisation on earth that has a clue what its revenue is going to be next year and the year after that. I often feel that the people who are in the greatest hurry to "defend" the organisation put forward the least rational arguments for it. The real crisis for the BBC will be in ten years time when the generation who've grown up with You Tube have the licence fee explained to them. That's going to be a tough sell. Without BBC Three it may be just that bit tougher.

There's nobody in the magazine business called Janet or John anymore

Went to the PPA's New Talent Awards, which recognises young people working in the magazine business. Most of them would have been under thirty. Among the winners were: Lucy, Oliver, Farrah, Ciaran, Lizzie, Heather, James, Gemma. Sophie, Eva, Kirsty, Laura, Ellie and Andy. When I joined the business Janets and Johns were doing well. They must have slipped behind.

The Ukraine crisis reminds me of an old board game

I can remember being introduced to the board game Diplomacy in the early 70s. It was based on the map of Europe in the late 19th century; it had countries like Bosnia Herzegovina, Serbia and Ukraine on it. In those days you assumed these had all disappeared into the Soviet bloc, never to emerge again. The world seemed simpler then.

On May 12th I'm talking to Mark Ellen about rock stars and life. Come along

A friend found this picture of me and Mark Ellen in the BBC archive. It was taken in Golden Square. Mark says it was autumn 1982. That's one of the reasons he's written his memoir Rock Stars Stole My Life! He remembers things and, despite appearances, he's very organised when it comes to keeping a record.

The book comes out on May 12th and on that evening I'm going to be talking to him about it at a Word In Your Ear Event at the Slaughtered Lamb. Tickets are on sale here. You'd better hurry. They seem to be going quickly.

Old hacks keep asking me if I've read any of it. I haven't yet. I will of course.

P.S. In another Word In Your Ear event at the Slaughtered Lamb I'll be talking to Ben Watt about his sensational memoir Romany and Tom on Friday, March 28th. This will be an early evening show which also features music from Vinny Peculiar and the fabulous My Darling Clementine. Tickets for that one here.

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.

Phil Everly (1939 - 2014)

The Everly Brothers had their hits in that period at the end of the 50s and the beginning of the 60s when, if we're to believe conventional wisdom, nothing very interesting was happening.

They were soon to be put in the shade by The Beatles, who loved them as much as they loved anyone. George was a particularly big fan. Don and Phil were the third proper group he saw live and he would perform the obscure album track "So How Come (No One Loves Me)" in the Beatles stage act in 1961.

The Everlys always appealed to guitarists. Even in their tuxes on Sunday Night At The London Palladium there was always something rootsy about them.

I remember their red label Warner Brother singles sounding their best on the jukebox in the new coffee bars where you could get a cup of frothy instant in a Duralex glass cup. The best ones, like "Cathy's Clown" and "Price Of Love", were sad and slightly sour. They were just the thing when you were fourteen and feeling sorry for yourself, which was most of the time.

But the place they sounded best of all was at the fairground. In those pre-headphones days one of the few places where you could hear recorded music played loud was at the fairground. The records accompanied the dodgems or the waltzer and the combination of movement and music squared the intensity of the experience.

The song generally lasted as long as the ride. For me the Everlys will always summon the sadness and elation of the fairground. They had a song about it.

Why musicians are always bitter

Reviewing DUKE: A Life of Duke Ellington in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik recognises that Ellington took tunes invented by his famous sidemen and called them his own, but also makes the following good point about someone like Billy Strayhorn:

"Would he have had the energy and mastery to form a band, sustain it, recruit the right musicians, survive their eccentricities and addictions, give them music they could play, record it, and keep enough of a popular audience alive to justify the expense of the rest?"

He probably wouldn't. Ellington's genius was for getting the most out of other people and that will probably involve exploiting them. The tragedy is that music publishing is a winner-takes-all game that over-compensates the person who gets their name in the credits and under-compensates the Billy Strayhorns of this world.  It also explains why musicians over the age of forty are always bitter.

Eric Morecambe grabbed Andre Previn's lapels for a good reason

My daughter bought me The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase for Christmas. It's by Mark Forsyth. He's proud to call himself a pedant and blogs about his interests here.

Forsyth's book explains how the secret of effective communication is an understanding of the techniques that underpinned Greek and Roman rhetoric. This applies to the making of speeches, the fashioning of slogans and even the writing of pop songs. When Ian Fleming's character says "My name is Bond. James Bond" he's using diacope. When Mick Jagger sings "she blew my nose and then she blew my mind" he's employing syllepsis. Churchill said that all he had to offer was "blood, toil, tears and sweat" but his audience's ears were so primed for the tricolon they deleted the word toil and rearranged the sweat and the tears.

It's a witty little book. The funny thing is it will mainly be read by people who understand its lessons already. That doesn't mean that they know what hendiadys is exactly but they do understand that Shakespeare's "sound and fury" is way more powerful than "furious sound" could ever have been. How do they know this? Nobody ever taught them. It's just that people who spend a lot of time playing with words develop an ear for sentences that amount to more than simply the sum of the words involved.

Like most people who write about music from to time I often wonder how I can have a serviceable ear for organising words while having none at all for organising music. I'm not completely musically illiterate. I can read music. I even know a few chords on the guitar but it doesn't matter how long I spend noodling away I can never come up with anything which sounds like a musical idea worth revisiting. That may be because I haven't played three notes that were worth repeating. It's more likely to be because I wouldn't recognise them even if I did. Learning to write effectively, much as learning to speak effectively, is first of all a question of recognising patterns. With words I can see those patterns from miles away. With music I can't.

When Eric Morecambe grabs Andre Previn's lapels and insists he's playing the right notes but not necessarily in the right order, I laugh like everyone else laughs. It's a good joke. At the same time I can't help thinking he's making a serious point. The order is the only thing that matters.

What the world needs is Wikipedia TV

I’ve been watching ITV’s Lucan and the BBC’s The Great Train Robbery. They’re both fictionalised versions of real crimes that took place in Britain within living memory, though not, in all probability, within the memory of the people who made them.

From the two programmes we learn a few things. One magnificent actor, Rory Kinnear as Lucan and Jim Broadbent as Superintendent Tommy Butler, can’t help but make the rest of the cast look as though they’re, well, acting. All TV directors wish they had directed Mad Men and will grab any chance to do scenes featuring lounge singers, cocktails and cigarettes. Efforts the writers make to point out the prejudices of a bygone age will mainly reflect the prejudices of the present. We turn fact into fiction by giving it an ending which real life doesn’t provide.

Both dramas sent me back to the facts of the original cases. I remember them both happening. We were on holiday in north Wales in 1963. When Dad wanted to get us out of his hair he would tell us to keep digging in the sand until we found some of the mail train loot. I was working in HMV in 1973. One of my colleagues was the son of one of the senior Lucan detectives.

Neither story is the same as it was back then. Accounts change. People die. New details come out. New theories arise and are rebutted. I’m always interested in what happened to the offspring of the key people. Bruce Reynolds’ son is a member of Alabama 3, whose theme for The Sopranos will have made him more money than his father managed to retain from the train. One of Lucan’s daughters is now a barrister.

The best place to keep track of all this is Wikipedia. People say “you don’t trust Wikipedia, do you?”. I’d say it’s no more or less imperfect than any of the traditional history resources. And the stories it tells are, thanks to its open nature, never-ending. At a stroke this makes them less like stories and more like the truth.

What I’d really like to see is Wikipedia TV. I’d watch that.

Hims Ancient And Modern

"They were made of that sombre, youthful stuff, rich in ideals but poor in experience, that modern terrorist movements feed upon."

That's not somebody in the papers summing up the two murderers of Lee Rigby, who were convicted today. It's Christopher Clark, author of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. He's describing the teenagers who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo a hundred years ago.

A film unimaginable without Miles

Went to a screening of Lift To The Scaffold (Ascenseur pour L'échafaud) and it was sensational. The BFI are screening it in February. When they do, bunk off for the afternoon and see it.

It was made by Louis Malle in 1958 when he was 24. It's about a man who murders his lover's husband and gets trapped in the lift of the building over the weekend while a couple of tearaways go joyriding in his car and commit a crime of their own.

It struck me how some aspects of daily life in the Paris of that time might seem as puzzling as historical fiction to modern audiences. A nightwatchman clocks into the building during the night to check the premises. The killing is masked by the sound of an electric pencil sharpener. The newspaper which shows the murderer's picture is set in hot metal. The tearaways spend the night in a motel where you slept right next to your much-prized car. The girl lives in the 15th arrondissement in what the characters familiarly refer to as a "maid's room". And I suppose the over-arching question that any 18-year-old might ask is - how could you possibly not be able to get in touch with someone for twelve hours? 

The picture above shows the film's star Jeanne Moreau with Miles Davis, who improvised the soundtrack in one overnight session in Paris after having seen the film just twice. It's now pretty much unimaginable without him as you can see in this short clip.

Las Vegas? I'm just not that kind of guy

Went to a preview of Last Vegas last night. I'm not quite as old as its lead actors but I'm part of the demographic it's aimed at. As the entertainment business starts to realise that very soon most of the population will be over fifty it's belatedly responding with dramas thick with jokes about Viagra, old eight-track cartridges and the number of trips to the bathroom it takes to get through the average night.

This one's about four childhood friends who are still bosom buddies almost sixty years later and go to Las Vegas for a stag weekend prior to the wedding of one of them to his 32-year old cupcake. This isn't the Vegas of Sammy and Dean. It's the modern Las Vegas, where clubbing is more profitable than gambling and if you're prepared to go into a year's worth of debt you can pretend you're 50 Cent for a few hours. Thanks to a win at the tables our four geezers get to behave like the characters in The Hangover: their suite is comped and next thing you know they've got a hundred Maxim girls twerking round its indoor swimming pools.

I had a comfy chair in a preview theatre so I quite enjoyed it. It was best when Mary Steenburgen appeared as the only prom fresh lounge singer in town. "Are you good in bed?" "I don't remember." That kind of thing.

Couldn't help thinking while watching it how far and fast my oldest male friends would run to get away from the prospect of an actual weekend in Vegas. Their idea of perfect escape is to idle away a winter afternoon in a French restaurant far below the pavements of Soho, to mooch muddily around some war graves in Flanders, to watch any half-organised sporting encounter or - and this really remains the all-weather favourite - to sit around amusing each other by talking absolute bollocks.

As Jerry Seinfeld says, "Girls, you want to know what guys are thinking? You really want to know? I'll tell you. (Pause.) Nothing."

Stumbled over on Spotify: Jenny Scheinman

I don’t have much time for recommendation engines but I do like This Is My Jam. When you choose a tune it lists the other people who've chosen the same one. Then you can look at what else those people have chosen.

This is how I came to hear Jenny Scheinman. She’s best known for playing violin with people like Bill Frisell and arranging for people like Lucinda Williams, but I’ve been playing this 2008 solo album a lot over the last week. Her other records are mainly instrumental, but this one’s vocal. She’s got a proper voice, which doesn’t sound as glib and used as it might do if she vocalised for a living. She favours tunes in a folk/blues idiom like “I Was Young When I Left Home” and "Miss Collins" which is based on "Louis Collins" by Mississsippi John Hurt.

The record gets better towards the end, which is always a good sign, with “The Green”, which is the (presumably true) story of the singer’s aunt who just up and disappeared one day; an attractively rackety version of The Platters’ “Twilight Time”, her own “Skinny Man”, which owes something to Lucinda Williams and has got just the same catchy slur, and finally her versions of "Johnsburg, Illinois" by Tom Waits. I like it a lot. If I see a copy I'll buy it.

The view from seat J31 at Mark Lewisohn's first (and last?) Pepper lecture

Before he delivered his hour-long presentation about Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band tonight Mark Lewisohn told me it had taken him three weeks to prepare.

A lot of that must have gone into organising the studio out-takes, rare photographs, old TV clips and newspaper cuts with which it was illustrated. It's a lot of work to put into something which he was delivering for free for the benefit of Pepper, a charity which raises money for the home care of seriously ill children in the Chilterns, where he lives.

If he did it again it would have to come out of time he really ought to be spending on the second volume of his mammoth Beatles trilogy. From what I could gather this will start in 1962, where the first volume finishes, and go up to Sgt Pepper. He hasn't started writing it yet and he has lots more research to do so it looks as if it'll be seven years before it's published.

He started his lecture with a whizz-through their albums. Just standing there and revealing one sleeve at a time is a reminder that never gets old of just how much they did - and how much they changed - in such a short period of time. As he pointed out, they gave up playing live just four years after they were first filmed by Granada TV at the Cavern.

His Pepper lecture makes many points. These are a few of them.

• It's John and Paul's record. You can hear that in the nearness of their harmonies and the magical interplay which is "Day In The Life". 
• It's not so much psychedelic as English and not so much futuristic as deeply nostalgic. 
• The idea of Pepper's band was probably Mal Evans'. It was initially "Doctor Pepper" but that was changed for obvious reasons. 
• You simply can never ignore the extraordinary role that chance plays in the story of the Beatles. On Pepper it's exemplified by the story of Melanie Coe, whose real-life flit inspired the song "She's Leaving Home". As you'll find out if you search her name on You Tube, she and Paul had met before.

All albums should be surprise albums

Glad to see Beyonce has put out a new album on iTunes only. It's said to be "a surprise album".

All albums used to be surprise albums. In the 60s long players would just appear in the window of your local record shop. That's how I first saw Sgt Pepper. The first I saw of the new Bob Dylan or Rolling Stones sleeve wasn't on an advert in the NME. It was in my own High Street. You can probably imagine how thrilling that was.

By the time we'd reached the 90s the softening up process, the teaser campaign, the carefully choreographed series of "exclusives", had been developed into a fine art and the relationship between the music business and the media was so incestuous that you tired of hearing about the damned albums by the time they came out. I was always bothered about the idea of the BBC, particularly, playing records for months before we poor saps out there in radioland got the chance to buy them. Of course they always made sure to tell us when we would be able to buy them. Some people might call that advertising. In the case of the "U2=BBC" campaign of 2009 even the BBC thought it had gone too far. Afterwards.

Surprise albums are better in every respect. We'll be the ones to decide how nice a surprise they are. That way the media can get back to doing what they used to do, which was reflect public enthusiasm rather than trying to mould it.

Shut up. You're not really cross

The Danish Prime Minister's selfie at the Nelson Mandela funeral rally occasioned this week's outbreak of the 21st century disease - fake indignation.

Jeeves might have raised an eyebrow at this apparent breach of form but it really is no reason for newspapers, columnists and phone-in shows to pretend to be mortally offended - not for themselves, you understand, but on behalf of some unspecified group of people who apparently can't speak for themselves.

It's a binary world. People only stop being cross long enough to gush. Most of the things they're responding to don't warrant either.

What kind of world is it where Bob Dylan wears a tie and the weatherman doesn't?

The same day Tie Rack announced it was going into administration I went to see Bob Dylan at the Albert Hall. He was wearing a tie.

A few nights later I saw Dream Themes, Rhodri Marsden’s TV theme-tune band. They were all wearing ties. Even the guitarist, who threw himself to the ground during an emotionally wrenching version of the Panorama theme, was wearing one.

It’s funny that rock bands, who used to pride themselves on being morally above wearing ties, should now adopt them as a working uniform. There have been memorable rock ties. There was Bryan Ferry’s GI tie, which he would tuck into his shirt. Around the same time Bill Nelson had a nice line in bulky Rodney Bewes-style kippers. One of the things that made Doctor Feelgood stand out from other pub rock bands was they wore ties.

The wearing of a rock tie does two things: it helps distinguish the members of the band from the members of the audience and also makes them look as if they're going to work, like the gang at the beginning of Reservoir Dogs.

It's funny that this should happen just as ties are falling out of use in the real workplace. I don't have anything against informality.I simply feel that if you wear a suit without a tie, or without a collar that can said to be properly resolved, you look unfinished. That surely wasn't what you had in mind when you bought the suit.

At the end of last night's BBC news they had two weathermen, one wearing a tie and one not. I know which one I paid attention to.

Was ever a sitcom so funny for so long as Frasier?

I found a cache of complete episodes of Frasier on You Tube. Once I start I can't stop. One's too many and a hundred aren't enough. It gives new pleasure every time. A load of new things struck me this time around.

• In every respect but their sexual orientation and the fact they're brothers, Frasier and Niles are a gay couple.
• For all its fine talk British comedy has never come up with anything half as sophisticated as Frasier.
• I think it was Andrew Collins who told me that in situation comedy character serves plot whereas in literature plot serves character. That's true. Once you've bought the idea of Daphne acting as the saucy maid you're prepared to overlook the fact that she's introduced as "Dad's physical therapist". 
• The depiction of radio is ludicrous but you forgive it.
• The set was said to be the most expensive in television. It was worth it.
• Of course the script's good but what makes it brilliant is the acting. It's the energy and the precision of the business - a great deal of which, particularly in Niles's case, is physical - that makes it sing. The cast is even secure enough to let occasional guest turns like Bebe Neuwirth as Frasier's ex Lillith and Harriet Sansom Harris as his satanic agent Bebe Glazer (above) steal the show. ("Don't look her in the eyes, Roz!")

They did 11 seasons. That's a total of 264 episodes. It wasn't as funny at the end as it was in its purple patch but it was still funnier than most. Amazing.

A great record the out of touch are digging

The Mcgarrigle Hour's one of my favourite records. It came out in 1998. The idea was to reunite some of the team who made that first McGarrigle sisters record in 1975 (that's Kate and Anna plus producer Joe Boyd and engineer John Wood) and add musicians from the next generation of their family, such as Rufus and Martha Wainwright, and finally to conjure some of the spirit of the family musical evenings the sisters knew when they were young.

The songs range from familiar originals like Loudon Wainwright's "Schooldays" and Anna's "Cool Cool River" through their mother's parlour party piece "Alice Blue Gown" and "Baltimore Fire", the traditional song Kate and Anna used to sing on the Portobello Road in 1971, to Martha's perfect version of Cole Porter's "Allez-Vous En".

It ought to be precious. It isn't. All the songs pack some surprise. Great songs are always surprising. The most pleasant surprise of all is the power of family harmony, even when that's previously been confined to the recording studio or the concert stage. As Jane McGarrigle says in the sleeve notes, when Kate, Loudon, Rufus and Martha sing Irving Berlin's "What'll I Do", they've "never sat down to a Christmas turkey together, let along sung a song". Nevertheless, as she says "they come together as natural as breathing". And they do.

I pulled it out today. It's drinking well on these cold winter afternoons. When people ask me what new music I'm listening to I go blank. If it helps you could pretend this is new. After all, as Harry Truman said, "the only new thing in the world is the history you don't know".