The words "Oscar winner" tell us nothing

This headline from today's New York Times site seems to be the right way to memorialise somebody.

What they were, what they did and then what they won. In that order.

All too often nowadays, in its unseemly haste to have something to say before it's worked out what's worth saying, 24 hour rolling news leads its deaths stories with "Oscar winner" or "Grammy winner" as if that was the thing that made the person notable rather than the (usually belated) recognition of their being of note.

Why I'll never know if The Goldfinch has a good ending

I once walked out of a screening of Pearl Harbour ten minutes before the end. Considering at that point I'd put up with its shortcomings for over three hours you might have thought I would have stayed for that last bit of action. I didn't because it's long- windedness had made me so cross I wanted to strike back in the only way available to me. You may have had my money but I'm damned if you're going to waste another ten minutes of my life.

I've just bailed out of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch around page 700, which is a hundred pages from the end. I'd been reading it on holiday this week and for most of that time I enjoyed it: good premise, a few excellent characters and lots of educational material about the world of fake antiques. But I fell out with it for the same three reasons I fall out with so many books.

1. The hero goes through a major drugs phase. I'm sure drugs can be enormous fun to take but they're always tedious to read about.

2. It gets violent near the end. Violence has its place in fiction. I think it should be dealt with in a paragraph. If you're expecting me to keep track of who's got the deadliest weapon and which room in the house they're lurking in and expecting me to remember the name of more than one wrong un then frankly you're talking to the wrong reader.

3. In straining for a finish that justifies what's gone before, the book tired me out. It spends the last three hundred pages pumping itself up for a big finish. During that time I lost the thread, lost interest in finding out how it ended and eventually, somewhere under the Channel on Le Shuttle, gave up.

I learned a lot about the endings of stories when we were doing True Stories Told Live. Since having an ending is the thing which distinguishes fiction from real life, it's the bit that the storyteller agonises most about, often to the detriment of the story.

What storytellers fail to realise is that even if we're enjoying things we can't wait for them to end. Films, concerts, parties, novels, it's all the same.

I think it was Oscar Hammerstein who said, give them a good opening number and they'll forgive you anything.

I think it was me who said the best ending is always the one that comes along soonest.

What my grandparents wore to the beach

I guess this was taken on the beach at Filey in the late 1950s. Left to right: my maternal grandfather Leonard, me, my grandmother Lois (pronounced Loyce.)

That's how my grandparents dressed to go to the seaside. If they were going to be seen in public there was no question of not putting on their best. Leonard wore a shirt (possibly with a stiff collar), tie, stout sweater, equally substantial trousering, golfing socks, highly-polished shoes and his best cap. Lois appears to be wearing pearls and is certainly guarding her best handbag.

I never saw my grandad out in public in a shirt without a tie. The very notion of him owning a pair of shorts would have seemed disrespectful. You could say the same about granny and trousers.

Granny and grandad weren't in any way posh but they were profoundly respectable. The clothes they wore were the outward expression of that respectability. Particularly on the beach.

When Ralph Coates was traded across the Harry Fenton Line

It's the time of year football clubs shuffle their playing staffs, moving young stars on to bigger clubs, despatching yesterday's stars to Hull.

These days they'll tend to arrive all looking the same, stepping out of blacked-out SUVs in skinny jeans and expensively distressed tee shirts, accompanied by disreputable-looking agents, everyone nervously fondling their mobiles.

If they sign they will swiftly move into the local millionaires' enclave. Once installed behind the security gates with their wife, family and dependent relatives, they need only to establish the route to the training ground, golf club and beauty parlour to be able to pick up life precisely as it was at their previous club a few hundred miles away.

 It's an interesting time to be re-reading The Glory Game, Hunter Davies's definitive inside story of the 1971-72 season at Tottenham Hotspur. It begins with the arrival of Ralph Coates from Burnley for £190,000, at that time a cash record for a British player. When Ralph was first told of the deal he said "no player's worth that", which gives you some idea of his modesty.

He and his wife don't have a house and so the club put them in a first floor flat on Green Lanes in Palmers Green. There's no phone or TV. I've lived near Green Lanes for the last forty years and there's never been a time when you could have imagined it as a suitable place to put a top footballer.  Even though it was widely accepted back then that top footballers were wealthy men, earning in some cases more than £200 a week, the Coateses worry about being able to afford the £15,000 needed to buy a house in the South.

When they get changed for their first pre-season training session, the rest of the squad, who were predominantly Southerners, stare at Coates's pointed shoes and narrow trousers, still the mark of the Northerner who hadn't gone South. They congratulate him on his shirt. He says thanks, not realising they're joking.

1971 was the year the flared trouser began to arrive on every High Street via chains like Take Six and Harry Fenton. After that we were all just as in fashion or out of fashion as each other. Maybe Ralph was the last man to move from the old world to the new.

Was that the most men-against-boys football match of all time

Imagine you were managing an under-13 football team and their star striker got injured before a big cup tie. They might suggest to you that they wanted to take the shirt of the missing player out and hold it up  during the pre-match formalities. It's the kind of idea over-excited small boys have.

You would quietly tell them that you didn't think that was a good idea. You'd be thinking, I want the team concentrating on what they're going to do in the match, not indulging in this gesture of self-pity.

They lost 7-1. The Brazilians were playing a sentimental game in their heads. The Germans were playing an actual game on the pitch. I loved it. Half the fun of football is watching it go wrong for other people. What I liked about it most was the muted German celebrations after each goal. I think we need more of that kind of thing.

Fifty years ago this week I went to see "A Hard Day's Night". Last night I went to see it again

Fifty years ago this week I went to see "A Hard Day's Night" at the Pioneer cinema in Dewsbury. This was situated on the top floor of the Coop and was reachable via a very slow lift behind a metal grille. In those days nobody took any notice of a film's starting time. You might turn up halfway through, watch until the end and then stay to watch it from the beginning. I watched "A Hard Day's Night" three times that day. It was enthralling.

It was enthralling because it showed the Beatles on a screen yay high and brought them up this close. Nothing had done that before. TV still had end of the pier production values and so we had never seen them via a medium that matched their splendour. Cinema tickets, unlike records, were affordable. That's why the release of "A Hard Day's Night" was a moment of greater impact than the release of the two albums they put out before its soundtrack. Everybody shared it.

Last night I went to a screening of a new digital version of the film at the BFI. The director Dick Lester was interviewed by Mark Lewisohn. Lester pointed out that it was only made because the music division of United Artists saw it as a way to get a best-selling soundtrack album, it was shot in black and white because they didn't think Beatlemania would last long enough to justify the investment in colour and the brass at the company thought it was good but assumed the dialogue would be dubbed to make it more intelligible to an American audience. They were told this would not be possible, not least because there simply wasn't time. There's nothing in media and entertainment that can't be ruined by more money and more time. There's no better illustration of that principle than "A Hard Day's Night".

I find its comedy a bit leaden nowadays. There's one joke in the film and it goes like this. Don't grown-ups say some strange things? Whether it's Richard Vernon's "I fought the war for you" routine or Wilfred Brambell's Irish republican pub talk, Victor Spinetti's overwrought luvviespeak or Kenneth Haigh's assumption of the voice of "yoof", the message is this is a middle-aged world in which the young people are only occasionally allowed to feature. The fans in the crowd scenes are all wearing Famous Five clothes - pleated skirts, cardigans, winter coats and clumpy shoes - as if they've been decked out for a school concert. They're children.

However I now realise that the music is even better than I thought it was at the time. I also see that Lester's great achievement was in finding a way to deliver their performances to the screen and happening upon a template which still haunts anyone who tries to point a camera at a pop group. "If I Fell" and "I'm Happy Just To Dance With You" are the original and most powerful pop videos because they depict the Beatles ostensibly rehearsing for their TV appearance. That means they're playing but also working  and just enjoying being together. They exchange looks that say, right now we're the luckiest people in the world. It's that feeling that they're playing for their own delight that laid down the way that all bands would seek to behave even to this day. Lester talked about how they had an indivisible solidarity that saw them through. They're the Beatles and you're not. "I hope I managed to communicate how I felt about them," says Lester. He did.

There was such outrageous vitality in their music at the time that it didn't need overselling. The vibrancy of the 1964 sound would never be surpassed. It's amazing that they could do it. In the midst of the madness of Beatlemania they wrote and recorded thirteen absolutely brilliant songs for the film. That's seven to go on the soundtrack and another six you can put on side two. Nobody had ever done that before. Nobody's done it since.

The uncanny perfection of "If I Fell" and "I Should Have Known Better" endures after everything else has gone. It filled that luxurious cinema last night as surely as it warmed the Pioneer in Dewsbury fifty years ago this week. We sat there rapt. When the cowbell came in on the middle eight of the title song I felt the screen was about to burst with joy.

Mis-remembering Bobby Womack

It's good that BBC TV News acknowledge the deaths of artists like Bobby Womack but I'm increasingly irritated by the way they feel they have to misrepresent history in order to justify doing it.

He had hits with "It's All Over Now" and "Across 110th Street", they said. Well, of course, it's the Rolling Stones who had the hit with the first song and when "Across 110th Street" came out in 1972 it got to number 19 in the black singles chart in the USA, which even in those days was hardly a smash. It was only in 1997 when Quentin Tarantino put it on the soundtrack of Jackie Brown that it came to wider attention, or at least to the attention of those people who end up putting together news bulletins in 2014.

The bulletin went on to say that he'd played Glastonbury a while back in front of an audience including everyone from small children to grandparents. The implication was that Bobby had drawn all those people there, which I don't think he would have claimed. Then there was a brief interview with an old bloke in this year's crowd who remembered seeing him and said he liked him because he was, well, old.

I suppose people like Womack are a problem for the news machine. Not obscure enough to be regarded as underrated (indeed he was always being talked up by people like Keith Richards) and not famous enough to able to depend on the people at home having actually heard of him.

Pythons and privilege

Finished The Python Years: Diaries 1969-1979 by Michael Palin. Really interesting. You get the impression Cleese was living beyond his means from early on and that Idle always saw himself as a member of the jet set, which probably helps explain this year's reunion. These people have lifestyles that have to be maintained.

But even modest Michael doesn't really appreciate how privileged he is; or if he does he doesn't let on. In 1979 he's asked to open a fete at the local boys secondary school. He does it in the hope that his own boys will be able to get in to the school when they're old enough. Don't think that was ever in doubt. If you're famous enough to open the fete, you're famous enough to open lots of other doors. It's the kind of power celebrities prefer to play down.

The Premier League and England. It's a lose-lose situation.

England's top footballers won't get any better until they play overseas.

That means that some overseas team has to want to buy them. Since our top players are over-priced they don't.

The English players also have to want to go overseas. Since our top players are frightened of abroad, they don't.

Most of the overseas players who play in the UK are better for the experience. They're exposed to a different way of doing things. They improve their language skills. They get out of their comfort zone. They meet and mix with players from all over the world.

Meanwhile the Premier League is doubly bad for the England team. The amount of money washing about in it ensures that our best players never go overseas to get better while guaranteeing that the best overseas players come here to get better.

It's a lose-lose.

Graeme Swann is commentary gold

I've enjoyed listening to Graeme Swann on Test Match Special over the last few days.

For the benefit of those who neither know nor care about sport or cricket, Graeme Swann was a spin bowler who was one of England's few world-class players until time caught up with him and his body broke down during this winter's nightmare tour of Australia.

Swann's a really good talker. Not an intellectual but an easy conversationalist, a talented mimic and smart enough to be able to convey the nuances of what it's like out there in the middle.

During his stints at the microphone over the last few days the professional commentators have taken every opportunity to tap into his recent experience of being in the team to get him to talk about what he thought would be going on in the dressing room or out in the middle at various points in the contest. It's been fascinating.

From the fragments that emerged you could assemble an impression of a modern professional sporting outfit, an impression that you could probably apply to the England football, rugby or hockey team.

It's a set-up in which a majority of senior players have their place by a kind of divine right, a handful of young players are trying to claw their way to the same position and there's a tacit agreement that highly developed "banter" has taken the place of actually talking about the job.

Throughout the match summariser Geoff Boycott kept pointing out that England's top bowler Jimmy Anderson was bowling a length which was inappropriate for the ground. Swann was forced to agree but said that in Jimmy's head he was doing the right thing.

This was really interesting. That's the thing they say about sporting performance. You have to concentrate without thinking. Thinking might mean looking down and that could mean falling. So you keep on executing, "putting the ball in the right areas", as they invariably say, and just keep hoping against hope that something is going to happen. Hoping that the game will change rather than directly seeking to change the game.

Fresh from the fray Graeme Swann is briefly allowed the rare privilege of seeing the things the fray would have prevented him from seeing. He can no longer change anything, of course, and within a year his actual recall of being on the pitch will have been replaced by a number of picturesque "memories" to be endlessly rehearsed in commentary boxes all over the world. For the moment he's commentary gold.

How many media academics does it take to work out what's going on?

Media Show interview with Matthew Gentzkow, "a pioneer in the field of media economics" in which he concludes that internet advertising wouldn't turn off-line pounds into on-line pennies if people spent as long looking at news content on screen as they used to do on paper.

This makes sense in academe but it's not much help in the outside world because it's simply never going to happen.

The professor points out that newspapers were in decline long before the internet, which is true. However the habit of newspaper reading was inseparable from the habit of newspaper buying. Once you'd paid for a newspaper you had an investment in getting some value out of it. You read a few regulars, a couple of things you'd never read before and thanks to the happy serendipity of the interface between hand, eye and paper, you were exposed to a lot of things you happened to pass by on the way, some of which were adverts. When you'd finished it you passed it on to somebody else who would do the same in their own way.

Those habits have gone and they're never going to come back. Neither are they going to be replicated in accelerated form via the internet.  It's no longer anything to do with the news the papers happen to provide, which is what the world of media academics spends its time fretting about. It's entirely a question of how users behave. Tech understands this, which is why it changes its products all the time in response to the way they're used. No wonder it's stolen the media's lunch.

We're not a great football country. We're a great football market.

During the match a voice in the pub piped up with "does anybody remember when England were any good?"

I remember watching England win the 1966 World Cup. I was perched on my suitcase in the lobby of a hotel in the Loire valley where we'd travelled on a school trip. But I don't really remember what it felt like. The very fact tha you could arrange to take a load of 16 year old boys on a tour of France as the competition reached its climax gives you an idea of the status of football in those days.

I remember England going out in Mexico in 1970. I remember Norman Hunter losing control of that ball on the halfway line at Wembley in 1973 and the previously unimaginable pain and indignity of England not qualifying. Nothing has hurt as much as that since, no matter how agonising the penalty shootout or abject the performance.

That's why it jarred when Clive Tyldesley, with his infallible knack for saying what nobody is thinking, climaxed his commentary by saying "there will be millions of Englishmen in tears tonight".

No there won't, Clive. This didn't hurt at all. They were beaten by a side who took advantage of the fact that the England football team, no matter how it's comprised, has a fatal lack of cunning, which is always exposed at major tournaments.

The media try to be disappointed on our behalf. We're not disappointed at all. Deep down it's what we expected.

We're not a great football country. We're a great football market.

Michael Palin's invaluable diaries of the 70s

I'm working on a book about 1971 and so I'm picking up any diaries that cover that time. Found this unopened hardback copy of Michael Palin's 1969-1979 diaries for three quid. Very glad I did.

Without meaning to it perfectly evokes the small irritations of daily life in the days when things didn't work. He and his wife and small child set off to France on holiday in an Austin Countryman. They drive to a tiny airport on the south coast where they board one of those front-loading planes, car and all, to make the short hop over the Channel. On their journey through France the car's exhaust breaks in two and he has to find a garage that can weld it back together.

When his wife goes into labour with their second child he has to take her to the hospital, then drop Child One off with a neighbour, then go home and ring the production office on the set of the Python film and hope they can rearrange the shooting schedule so that they can do without him for a day. Then back to the hospital where she's already given birth. Nobody expects anything to be easy or convenient. Python record a talk show on the West Coast in 1973 without stopping because the tape has to be flown to the next timezone to enable it to be broadcast simultaneously.

He's excellent on the morale-sapping reverses which are the showman's lot. They show the Holy Grail to the investors, who include members of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and it's only then that they realise it's not all that funny and in fact it's a bit depressing.

He's good on the politics of being in a band, which is what Monty Python were. Some members need the band more than others but none of them ever entirely escape it. He's the one who's always brought in when somebody's drinking gets out of hand, the BBC need stroking or some press chores need handling.

His diary reveals the difference between the person he thinks himself to be and the person he's become, as diaries often do. He frets about inequality while taking the £5,000 he's offered for one day on a commercial. He wanders around London wondering how long it will be before this or that much-loved old area surrenders to the wrecking ball. The funny thing is he's wrong about that. It's all still there. And of course nowhere in the diaries does he entertain the idea that they might all reform in their seventies in order to boost their pension pots.

That's the great thing about diaries. The hindsight is all ours.

Protect your personal information with my amazing "keep your voice down" method

In the doctor's waiting room this morning I was once again amazed by how much information people will volunteer about themselves in public space.

Two women who hadn't seen each other in a while vouchsafed the following in less than two minutes. Their kids used to go to school together. One of them's grown up and fathered a child, though he doesn't live with the mother, who doesn't often call the baby's grandmother and ask her help although yesterday she did. The young father is a difficult sort and she doesn't know where he gets it from because his dad's very steady and considerate. The other mother's daughter has got two A stars at A Level and fancies training to teach, primary you know, not secondary. The other daughter missed some school work because of illness and now she's doing a nail course.

At that point the conversation was interrupted because the first woman's full name came up on the screen which announces that the doctor will see you now. I could probably have found her address within minutes.

I took part in a government survey last week. At every stage the researcher went to great pains to assure me that my data would be anonymized. I believe her. People are quite rightly concerned about their privacy being invaded on-line. I'm not sure they're sufficiently concerned about how much information they broadcast about themselves in the real world.

Last Of The Summer Whine about digital music

Obviously, I should talk, but I was interested to see three old gimmers weighing in this week on the subject of the harmful effects of free content.

The splendid Van Dyke Parks started with a piece in the Daily Beast about how he'd recently written a song with Ringo Starr. In the past, he argues, this would have bought him a house and a pool. These days the streaming revenues would barely buy lunch.

This led to a piece by David Carr, venerable media editor of the New York Times, noting that digital downloads, which had been growing steadily for the last few years, are now declining and therefore the future of music appears to be in having access to music rather than owning it, which is unlikely to increase its market value.

This in turn led to a rant by music business opinion-monger Bob Lefsetz which pointed out, among other things, that the only people who seemed to be bothered about this state of affairs were old farts who wished things could go back to the way they were.

With the greatest of respect to all three, I would like to make three points. To Van Dyke Parks I would say, don't you think it's remarkable that a musician like yourself has maintained a profile and a career for almost fifty years - and have you ever checked which of your school friends can say the same?

To David Carr I would say, if you value certain music that much and appreciate Spotify for giving you access to it, do you not think it's worth paying for the premium service in order to help those people make it?

To Bob Lefsetz I would say, I think you're more right than wrong.

All acts have one song that's bigger than all the rest put together

I interviewed Gary Kemp and Tim Arnold at Ronnie Scott's this morning as part of the Sohocreate Festival. Gary confirmed the theory I'd proposed in the past, namely that if you're a successful songwriter then it's likely that one of your copyrights will be more valuable than all the others put together.

In Spandau Ballet's case, of course, it's "True". Gary said that other songs may be more popular in concert but this is the one that gets the lions share of the airplay, most of the sync money and it's the one that ends up getting sampled on the hip hop hit.

Since nobody's going to show me their PRS statements, I like to look at the play counts on Spotify, which are another measure of the relative popularity of an artist's different songs. Here are a few interesting cases.

Paul Simon - "You Can Call Me Al" has had 17,000,000 plays, which is 10,000,000 more than the next Paul Simon record, "Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard".

Yes - "Owner Of A Lonely Heart" has had more than twice as many plays as "Roundabout", which may mean that Trevor Rabin and Trevor Horn are doing better out of the Yes catalogue than the members you more readily associate with the band.

Simple Minds - "Don't You Forget About Me" is far and away their most popular record. It was written by their producer and a bloke from the Nina Hagen band.

Randy Newman - you might think it's "Short People" but actually that's a distant second to "You've Got A Friend In Me" from "Toy Story" and both of them are way ahead of "Sail Away" or any of the critic's favourites.

Dexy's Midnight Runners - "Come On Eileen" is eight times more popular than the next one "Geno".

Otis Redding - "Sitting On The Dock of The Bay" has over 21,000,000 Spotify plays, which puts it way ahead of "Try A Little Tenderness". Otis never lived to see what a hit it was. Steve Cropper co-wrote it and he must give thanks every day for the fact that he did.

Blondie - I was surprised to see their most played song is "One Way Or Another", which is slightly ahead of "Heart Of Glass". It was co-written by Debbie Harry and former bass player Nigel Harrison who, not surprisingly, asked to be recognised when the group were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Tom Waits - "I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You" from his uncelebrated 1973 debut album is his most popular song on Spotify.

It's a random sample, of course, but I note they're all singalongs.

Another way of looking at D-Day

It's the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landings tomorrow and already the BBC is getting itself in Greatest Generation mode, as is the style nowadays.

I wonder what my dad would say if he heard the awed tone today's broadcasters adopt when they get to touch the hem of some veteran's garment. Not that my dad exactly went ashore with the first wave. He was a lowly private in the R.E.M.E. and as such was probably changing a fuse somewhere in Catterick on June 6th 1944. My mother was catching rats in Lincolnshire with the Women's Land Army. My uncle Joe was in his second year in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, having been swept up in the fall of Singapore. The rest of my aunts and uncles were in reserved occupations, teaching or farming their way through the war, in most cases far away from the bombs. One aunt had a short period in the Wrens but suffered from sea sickness. At least that's what she would say.

None of them talked about it as I was growing up and nobody talked about anyone being a hero, not even when they were talking about Ernest, who worked for my dad and had been in the Desert Rats. This wasn't because they had seen things so terrible they didn't wish to be reminded of them. It was because they had a variant of survivor's guilt. You might call it survivor's embarrassment. They'd never fired a shot in anger. They wouldn't have known how to. Even my uncle Joe, who was taken prisoner, was in the Signals.

I was talking to Mark Ellen recently about his dad, a young paratrooper who lost a leg thanks to an enemy mortar in Normandy.  Even brave young men like him were acutely aware that they spent most of the war safely in their barracks before making a brief contribution to what we would nowadays call "defeating fascism", the value of which is impossible to weigh and the impact of which was entirely personal. Again, survivor's mild embarrassment.

Most people who served in the war, on whatever side, didn't crack codes or storm cliffs or fly Spitfires. They just served. It was boring and entirely inglorious but it was service. That should be enough to deserve our respect.

I just heard an interviewer poke a microphone at a veteran and ask him what it was like on the landing crafts. "My generation can't imagine that, " she gushed. Actually, I think maybe we can. What we really can't imagine is the service.

Patti Boyd's misery memoir from Planet Henley

Read Wonderful Today: The Autobiography of Pattie Boyd yesterday.

She grows up in Kenya in one of those upper middle class families who find they don't quite have the means to sustain their status. Grandparents who smell of pink gin, parents rarely there, educated at a series of boarding schools.

She leaves school in 1961 at seventeen, gets a job as a trainee beautician in Bond Street and is immediately living in a flat in Knightsbridge. Somebody comes into the salon and tells her she should model, she gets some test shots done, she's featured in Honey which leads to advertising work and then a small part as a schoolgirl in "A Hard Day's Night".

George Harrison asks her out. Their first date is at the Garrick Club where their chaperone is Brian Epstein. After that she is lost to any kind of normal life.

Instead she has a thirty year career as the plus one of a rock superstar, first Harrison and then Clapton, thirty years spent in the numbing twilight world of country houses where the gravel drive is littered with the relics of the occupants' last craze, where the old school friend lives in the gatehouse and there's a recording studio in the basement in which barely a worthwhile note will be played.

The downside of being a Beatle girlfriend, she discovers, is that fans will try to do her physical harm. The drawback of being Clapton's wife, she learns, is that the only way he can keep a lid on his anger is by medicating with heroin or a pint mug of brandy and lemonade.

I find there are two ways to read rock memoirs. One is to take them in the chipper "well, that's what it was like with creative types back in the 70s" spirit in which so many of them seem to be written. The other is to set them down at regular intervals, shake your head and thank the almighty that none of it ever happened to you. Looked at in a certain light they're broad comedy. Looked at in another they're misery memoirs.

When I read stories like this I'm again surprised that nobody's got round to making a proper documentary about the lives of the dolly birds of the sixties. That's something I'd love to see.

It happened one summer

I'm told the annual occasions which sell most books are Christmas and Father's Day.

Makes sense, I suppose. Doesn't matter how much of a book lover mother is, you probably don't buy her a book for Mother's Day.

Father's Day is coming up in a couple of weeks and you can obtain One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson for the price of a pair of socks. I can't see why the recipient wouldn't thank you.

What happened in summer 1927?  Babe Ruth redefined baseball. Charles Lindbergh redefined celebrity. The Mississippi flooded. The Jazz Singer was filmed (with sound). Radio became enormous. TV was invented. Al Capone and the Federal Reserve made the mistake of thinking they could go on forever. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. Work began on Mount Rushmore. Above all, as Bryson says, the USA, which had up to then been used to all the biggest advances coming from Europe, began to realise it was the most powerful country in the world.

Was there ever a memoir as po-faced as Patti's?

Read the Patti Smith memoir Just Kids, which is candid, well-observed and well-written, as the reviews said, but did any of the reviews point out that it's completely lacking humour?

I don't expect a laugh riot but surely you shouldn't be able to look back at your formative years without either snapping into the foetal position under the duvet out of mortified embarrassment or dealing with the same feeling by having a bit of a rueful laugh at yourself. On the evidence of this book that never ever happened with Patti.

I remember seeing a TV interview with Ken Campbell back in the 70s where he said "anything that isn't in some way funny isn't true". I'd buy that.

If Led Zeppelin reformed they'd be playing for people who don't "remember" them

Interesting piece by Michael Hann about the chances of Led Zeppelin getting back together again. He think they're slim. I think he's right. Robert Plant doesn't need to risk being called mutton dressed as lamb. It's different for the blokes in the band. They're operating machinery. They're not advancing towards the microphone and singing "you need cooling, I'm not fooling, I'm gonna send you back to schooling'". The singer is the one who's most exposed. Here the line between worship and ridicule is a thin one.

This must be made more difficult by the fact that in rock, unlike in almost every other branch of human endeavour, the audience for what you're doing continues to grow as your ability to do that thing diminishes. It is amazing that all those years after Led Zeppelin gave up you can still write pieces in serious newspapers about them getting back together again. In fact the level of interest in Led Zeppelin is higher now than at any time since they started in 1968. That's not because of anything they've done. It's because of the relentlessly retrospective nature of popular music. Let that be the new law of rock. Most of it's in the past.

Bands may stop but their music stays there in the canon to be taken up and championed by successive waves of fans. The remorseless march of demographics mean that those latter-day fans soon outnumber the originals. If Led Zeppelin reformed and played Wembley Stadium this year I would guess no more than 5% of the people who went would have seen them first time around.  Most of them wouldn't have been born when they broke up. Even a 50 year old fan probably wouldn't have been old enough to have gone to Knebworth in 1979 without a chaperone.

This flies in the face of all the theories about rock - that you live it, that it reflects the moment and when the moment's over people throw it away. All around us is the evidence that they don't. What's more the audience is boosted by millions of people who aren't even aware what that moment was like because they weren't around. It's a truism to point out that people like to hear old music because it reminds them of their youth. What's interesting is that most of the time it's not their youth they're reliving.

Terry Reid and the incurable disease of being a musician

In the sixties everybody thought it was only a matter of time before Terry Reid made it.

He'd left school at fifteen to go on tour with the Rolling Stones. He was managed and produced by Mickie Most, who'd made Donovan and the Animals into hit acts. He could sing, play guitar and was considered the best looking front man around. Others took this quality more seriously than he did. The story goes Jimmy Page wanted him to be the lead singer of Led Zeppelin. Terry decided it wasn't for him and suggested Page should talk to another young singer called Robert Plant. Page asked "what does he look like?" Reid wondered why he asked.

Ever since then he's had to put up with people telling him how unlucky he was. He doesn't see it that way. Funny how we see the people who didn't make it as the victims of cruel misfortune. It's more useful to reflect upon the one in a million stroke of luck accounting for the tiny handful who did.

Terry Reid has his own idea what he wanted to do and a few years later he did it, putting out two albums, "River" and "Seed Of Memory", which, while leaving the charts unbothered, were widely admired. Ahmet Ertegun, who got him out of his contract with Most, paid for the first one, which was produced by Tom Dowd and came out in 1973. When Ahmet heard it he said "you've given me a jazz album". Both records are notable for their grooves rather than songs. Reid's theory was that if you could get the right musicians they would lean together and magic up the loose-limbed, Brazil-inflected music he heard in his head. He was right.

He moved to America in 1971 and has been there ever since. There were a few major label tries but nothing that took. He still plays. He was at the Jazz Cafe on Wednesday with a band of high calibre musicians who were clearly playing for the love of it as much as anything else. Where else would they get the opportunity to play this kind of thing? The voice doesn't have the silvery highs but the people who turn up don't care much about that. That's the funny thing about the expansion of rock cults. More people than ever like to tell everyone how underrated their favourites are, thereby making them no longer underrated.

I talked to him on Thursday at his lawyer's house. Amazingly he's had the same British legal representative since the late sixties. I know what Hunter Thompson said about the music business being "a cruel and shallow money trench" but it's surprising what pockets of sentiment and loyalty you still come across. Rob Dickins, who used to book him in the late sixties when he was a university social sec, signed Reid to Warners in 1991 for an album called "The Driver". Robert Plant is still in touch. Jack White's group The Raconteurs have recorded his "Rich Kid Blues". Admiring young musicians turn up backstage, aware that what he does they can't really do.

I dropped him off at the station in the rain. He was going off to Southend to stay with a friend. He's here for a month but it's not the kind of visit that stretches to a hotel. That's the music business in 2014. More people than ever playing for less money. What sustains live music is not so much the audience's hunger to hear as the musicians' hunger to play.

Talking of which, Alex Gold and I were on the tube yesterday when we bumped into Carl Hunter from the Farm. He joked that the group were getting together for "another of our Saga holidays". They had a few big hits in the early 90s, enough to ensure they still get a few down the bill bookings at festivals. They enjoy it and presumably just about show a profit. In any other business it wouldn't be enough. But this isn't any business.

Alex has just got back from touring Germany with a ukulele orchestra. The musicians were all ages and backgrounds. The oldest one, who used to be Lulu's bassist in the 60s, flew over from Alicante to join them. He passed on to Alex the best definition of being a musician I've ever heard. "It's not a profession," he said. "It's an incurable disease".

Terry Reid's UK dates are here.

Listen to Mark Ellen talk bollocks: on the new Word podcast and live

Obviously it pains me to admit it but this morning  I couldn't get through just a paragraph of the chapter on the Weeley Festival in Mark Ellen's book Rock Stars Stole My Life!: A Big Bad Love Affair with Music without entirely losing my composure.

You can hear what ensued if you listen to the new Word Podcast that we recorded this morning Chez Fraser (above).

We're putting on a special Word In Your Ear evening at the Deaf Institute in Manchester tomorrow. There I'll be talking to Mark about his book and to Stuart Maconie about his new one The People's Songs: The Story of Modern Britain in 50 Records. If you're quick you might be able to score a ticket here.  Hope to see you there if you're within reach of Manchester.

Mark and I are talking at Word In Your Ear events in London on May 12th and 19th but I'm afraid both of those are already sold out.

Remembering Ray Gosling

If you're near a radio tomorrow night you might listen to "Sum Total", a Radio Four Archive Hour programme about Ray Gosling. It's presented by Mark Hodkinson, who used to write things for The Word and also published some of Gosling's writing.

Gosling died in 2013 in rather reduced circumstances both materially and professionally but in the 70s and 80s he was one of the most distinctive voices in broadcasting.  He was, as Mark says, "a complicated man with his life divided into different compartments". Gay when the term was unknown. A lot of a drinker. Fiercely working class but sent for ballet and elocution lessons as a child. Maybe the latter took, maybe they didn't. He never lost his wheedling Midlands tone.

His personal touch made him a brilliant interviewer. Somebody in the programme calls it "deceptive diffidence". There's a clip from an interview with Barbara Castle which illustrates how his willingness to allow himself to look foolish often conjured tiny slivers of interpersonal gold.

Worth hearing.

Aren't hand-written lyrics as reliable as fragments of the true cross?

Obviously Sotheby's wouldn't be lending their good name to the sale of the original hand-written lyrics for "Like A Rolling Stone" if they hadn't checked the provenance. They apparently come from somebody in California who was given them by Dylan many years ago and is now looking to cash in. The auction is on June 24th if you're interested. They expect it to fetch half a million dollars.

Just imagine for a second you're a sixties legend and somebody asks if you've got the original piece of paper where you first scribbled the words to your legendary hit. I'd be tempted to say nothing for a few months and then say "you'll never guess what fluttered out of an old book the other day - there it is on the actual hotel stationery with authentic Maxwell House coffee mug mark in the corner. What about that then? Do you think it's worth anything?"

Rock heirlooms seem to multiply according to demand. When I spent some time filming in Memphis many years ago I found that there were as many original recording consoles on which Booker T & The MGs allegedly recorded "Green Onions" as you might find fragments of the true cross in a Tuscan hill town.

Wouldn't mind betting a lot of hit songs never had the words written down properly, not in a form that you or I could read. In the days of Smash Hits you'd often negotiate a fee with the publishers to reproduce the lyrics and then find that they expected you to get the words from the record because they didn't have an official copy of them.

I was amused to see that when they asked McCartney to contribute a hand-written lyric to a charity auction in 2010 he came up with this.

Was this the greatest hot streak in the history of pop?

Been thinking about what Ray Davies said when I interviewed him last night at the Stratford Upon Avon Literary Festival, about how he wrote all those great Kinks songs in the sixties to order.

They needed a new hit single every three months and he was the one who supplied them: You Really Got Me, All Day And All Of The Night, Tired Of Waiting For You, Everybody's Gonna Be Happy, Set Me Free, See My Friends, Till The End Of The Day, Dedicated Follower Of Fashion, Sunny Afternoon, Dandy, Dead End Street, Waterloo Sunset, Autumn Almanac and Days.

That's fourteen smash hits in four years. Mark Ellen's fond of describing it as the greatest hot streak in the history of pop. Even more amazing when you consider they were all written and sung by one person. That's what you call pressure. Pressure appears to be every bit as effective as inspiration.

There's one further single which sometimes gets forgotten in that sequence and it was raised by somebody in the audience last night. Wonderboy came out at the beginning of 1968 and stalled at number thirty-six, which was disappointing by Kinks' standards.

Davies draws comfort from the fact that somebody told him that John Lennon loved it, demanding it was played three times in a row by a DJ in a club because he liked the middle eight so much. That may be an apocryphal tale but if it was my song I too would do my best to keep it alive.

 

The Pearlfishers and the cheap music that doesn't sound cheap anymore

There was a time when it was possible to hear how much had been spent on a record. The records with big budgets, those that had been paid for with an advance from major record companies, sounded more polished, deeper, more resonant than the record that had been done in the cheap studio, let alone in the garage. They might not always have been inspired but they were usually more congenial to listen to than their low budget competitors. You knew the difference, much as you might have done if you'd slipped into the passenger seat of an expensive German car immediately after a cheap Japanese one.

Listening to Open Up Your Colouring Book by the Pearlfishers it strikes me you can't make that distinction anymore.

The Pearlfishers' records are the work of David Scott, a writer, musician and lecturer, who made "Up With The Larks", which is one of my favourite records of the last five years. It was the kind of record which sounds like a hit to people who don't have the first idea of what actually makes a record a hit. People like me.

Unlike most music made by indies (if that term still has any meaning) Scott's abjures rough manners, aspiring to polish rather than grit. If you were going to try to plot him on an taste map you might show him in the vicinity of Prefab Sprout and Jim Webb. His music can sound a bit precious, as if it's been inspired by an afternoon visit to an arts cinema rather than real life, but that's the risk involved in reaching for a certain delicacy. Also that might just be a prejudice I've placed there because I know he's a lecturer.

Colouring Book is his new one and, given Scott's circumstances, which are the same as the overwhelming majority of musicians, it seems reasonable to assume it was made on a budget which wouldn't stretch to unlimited studio time, the services of legions of session musicians, the input of top mixers and mastering engineers flown in from America in order to increase the chances of radio play.

In 2014 major record companies still spend sums of money they don't have to spend because they can't bear to think they left anything un-done. But the truth is that nowadays anybody can layer backing vocals, get instruments in tune, edit precisely, erase tracks that aren't working and add some strings; you don't need to have Universal paying the bills.

I'm guessing Open Up Your Colouring Book was a fairly cheap record to make. But here's the thing. It doesn't sound like one. I think you might like it. If you don't, I'll buy it off you.

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.