I'd rather take musical recommendations from a machine than a DJ

If I hit the Discover tab on my Spotify page it lists "Top Recommendations" for me.

On the top line at the moment (above) are Mice Parade, Markley, Yusuf Lateef, Can, Bill Frisell, ESKA, Wizz Jones, James Yorkston, Les Ambassadeurs Du Motel De Bamako, David Lang, Quentin Sirjacq, Greg Foat, M. Ward, John Fahey and Land Of Kush.

I've heard of only seven of those names and of those I have consciously listened to just four.

Further down the same page Spotify lists albums by artists it thinks I might like based, more specifically, on my listening to Max Richter, Judee Sill, Jamie X, Led Zeppelin and the English Chamber Orchestra.

Then there are some people I might like based on my listening to people I'm not aware of having listened to at all, artists such as Tsegue-Maryam Guebro and Akira Kosemura. 

If I scroll down the entire page, which contains over 300 recommendations, I would guess I have heard about twenty of them. And I've heard a lot of music.

I'm assuming that somewhere in Spotify is a digital genie, tracking the things I listen to, noting the ones that I switch away from as well as the ones I return to, until it builds up some cloud-like picture of my tolerance. In which case it seems to be doing quite a good job.

Previous experience with recommendation engines has tended to result in a menu of records either so obviously in my taste cloud that I could have thought of them myself or so popular that the only explanation for why I hadn't chosen them myself was prejudice (which is, let's not forget, always a huge part of what people do and don't listen to.) The introduction of science into the serendipitous business of musical taste has tended in the past to come up with results too broad to tempt anyone. I might like Joni Mitchell. No kidding. These Spotify results have avoided that by proffering stuff I haven't heard and taking cues from the things I listen to on Spotify, as opposed to the far broader church of things I happen to like.

Apple's competing foray into the world of streaming, announced last week, makes much of their investment in "curation" by real DJs like Zane Lowe. I'm not sure about this. Disc jockeys are the very last people I would seek recommendations from. That's because they are required by their professional code and inclined by their temperaments to pretend that there's lots of new and exciting music coming along every single week. There isn't.

The music business, together with that part of the music media that aligns itself so closely with the business that it may as well be part of it, spends all of its energies on the new, new thing. The public, on the other hand, doesn't.

The Ron Moody I didn't know

The death of Ron Moody has been announced. He was ninety-one.

Ron lived at the bottom of my road and I used to see him from time to time, returning from the shops or ferrying his kids around.

I always wanted to say something to him. I'm quite good at casual interactions with legends. Pick your place and time, don't do it when people are watching, shake the hand, say a few well-chosen words and make it clear that you'll be gone in less than a minute. In my experience the legend never minds and is every bit as much in need of bucking up as anyone else.

The problem with talking to Ron is that I knew I could never get my tribute beyond Fagin in "Oliver!", which was one of the greatest turns in the history of show business in these islands. Obviously I'd seen him in other things over the years but the memory of them would be bound to be over-shadowed by that one great role.  If you had one minute with Geoff Hurst you'd be talking to him about that hat-trick, wouldn't you?

But then Geoff is probably quite happy to be remembered for his exploits on that one particular sunny afternoon. Actors, in my experience, are a bit less happy to be defined by their performance in one part. But then, most of them never get to be this good and have cameras around to record the fact.

A few things worth reading

The most important story I read recently was The Economist's "Men Adrift", which is about the fact that nobody has much use for badly-educated males in advanced industrial societies these days. It seems of a piece with the most frightening story I read recently, the New Yorker's account of how a Belgian teenager ran off to join ISIS. This one paragraph captures his chilling combination of cluelessness and determination.

On the music front Steve Albini is interesting as ever on copyright and the foolishness of trying to restore the old certainties of the music business.

Then there's this short Adam Gopnik item about the right and wrong way to appreciate Frank Sinatra.

Five things War and Peace taught me about football

Inspired by the BBC's radio version of "War and Peace", I bought a copy of Tolstoy's book, which is almost fourteen hundred pages long. I finished it the other day. It made me think. It made me think about football.

1. Much as sports journalists might wish it so, the outcome of football matches isn't as a result of the managers' planning any more than the outcome of history is decided by the generals. Wise leaders simply find a parade and march in front of it. 
2. There is no guarantee that what worked in the past will continue to work in the future. Napoleon did the same things at Borodino as he did at Austerlitz, "yet the terrible stroke of his arm had supernaturally become impotent".
3. If anyone makes history it's the supporters. They are the life-force of a club. "Kings are the slaves of history. History, that is, the unconscious swarm-like life of mankind, uses every moment of a king's life as an instrument for its purposes."
4. Players, like soldiers, do nothing most of the time, which is irritating but it's the way things have to be. "The chief attraction of military service lies in compulsory and irreproachable idleness." 
5. For the overwhelming majority of clubs each new season will be much like the last one. "Every action, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in a historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity. This particularly applies to Spurs."

Brian Case's lovely little book about jazz, film and crime fiction

On the Snap: Three Decades of Snapshots from the World of Jazz, Film & Crime Fiction is a slim volume of reflections from Brian Case, whose speciality is writing about jazz, crime fiction and anything else he finds stirring. You could read it in an hour. Then you could read it again.

Whenever I sent a hack to interview somebody I used to ask them to make sure they included the little details they told  everyone in the office the minute they got back. A lot of the time they didn't. The transcript takes over and you lose some of that gossipy human interest. This has got lots of those details, the kind you tell the family. Jack Nicholson has got short legs. Dexter Gordon was six foot five. Michael Caine had liposuction to lose weight for "Shirley Valentine". I'm not sure I'd take all of it as gospel but that doesn't matter.

And at the back it's got three lists of things he likes. There are some films, some crime novels and twenty jazz albums. He's not trying to be definitive, not saying "these are the ones you've got to hear before you die" or anything similarly bombastic. He's honest about the fact that by the time he got to encounter the likes of Duke Ellington they were past their best. He stopped liking Miles Davis when he went electronic. He only likes Tom Waits because of one line. Case reminds me of Joe Bussard, the man who collects 78s of early jazz and blues. Both know when to say "there's nothing for me here". I find that liberating. It's Case's impatience with the commonplace that awakens you to his ear for the remarkable.

When Duke Ellington tore it up and grandad just applauded politely

On November 7th 1940 the Duke Ellington Band played a ballroom in Fargo, North Dakota. Two young radio engineers got permission to record the shows on condition that they didn't issue them commercially. (The full story of how they eventually came to be issued is here.)

The shows were recorded direct to a disc cutter using sixteen-inch discs revolving at thirty-three and a third RPM. It was a novelty for the band to be able to hear themselves playing for as long as fifteen minutes. Studio recordings were generally no longer than three minutes.

This was the heyday of the Blanton-Webster line-up of Ellington's band, with the young bassist Jimmy Blanton, who would die of T.B. not long after, and the saxophonist Ben Webster, who soon left to become famous in his own right.

It doesn't matter what you think of jazz or of Ellington; this is exceptional music performed in a way were find difficult to imagine today. No individual microphones, no amplification, just an announcer who occasionally comes to the front and tells the people what the next number is - and no post-production jiggery-pokery. This is the unvarnished sound of one of the greatest bands who ever drew breath having an on night.

Which makes the ripple of applause at the end of the number even more amazing. The kids in this dancehall in the middle of nowhere have just been exposed to one of the richest musical experiences of the 20th century and yet their reaction is no more than polite and approving. In time their great-grandchildren would be trained like Pavlov's dogs, to over-enthuse, often before a note has been played.

Remember when radio DJs were famous enough for sitcoms to make gags about them?

When Mark Ellen and I had our chat with Johnnie Walker at Word In Your Ear the other week - now available as a podcast - I teased him with the fact that he was always the housewife's favourite. He shrugged it off.

This weekend I was watching some old episodes of "Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads", including their most famous show in which they try to avoid accidentally hearing the result of England's game against Bulgaria.

They visit Terry's long-suffering housewife sister Audrey, played by the lovely Sheila Fearn. The first thing they do is switch off her radio. "One day without Johnnie Walker won't do anyone any harm," says Terry. Big laugh.

That's a kind of immortality. Back in the day when sitcom writers would make gags about DJs. Back in the days when audiences knew who they were.

It's amazing how well Sinatra sang when you consider how much sex he got

"You won't make much money but you'll get more pussy than Frank Sinatra."

With those words Ronnie Hawkins convinced Robbie Robertson and his fellow teenagers to sign up as his backing band the Hawks.

I often think about this line and whether Frank did indeed get more women than Elvis Presley or Steve McQueen or, well, name your contender.

And then I was listening to this tremendous playlist somebody's put together of Sinatra's performances of the songs that Bob Dylan did on "Shadows In The Night".

A lot of the recordings that built Sinatra's reputation were of songs where the woman leaves him. This is a situation of which he had so little real-life experience to call upon that it can only increase your admiration for his artistry.

There can only be one reason Russian oligarchs haven't had The Sopranos treatment

Seriously, what do Russian oligarchs have to do to get their own TV series? I'm thinking something like The Sopranos or House Of Cards or Mad Men. I keep waiting for it to arrive and it never does.

You can't say the raw material isn't there. These people have more money than God. They spend like drunken sailors. They have gorgeous girlfriends dripping with jewels. They own football clubs. Newspapers. Yachts. Submarines. Art. Governments. They can get any pop star in the world to sing "Happy Birthday" at their party. And because they have more feuds than the Labour Party a remarkable proportion of them come to sticky ends. Honestly, could they *be* any more long-form TV?

So why isn't Showtime or HBO or Channel Four announcing the imminent launch of "Oligarch!" Obviously this can't be because they haven't thought of the idea. And clearly it can't be because these fearless seekers after truth are frightened of the consequences which might befall them....

(Thinks.)

Isis is the very model of a modern media organisation

On this morning's Today Programme Matthew Glanville and Muhannad Haimour were talking about ISIS taking the Iraqi city of Ramadi. They said ISIS isn't an army. It's a brand.

True enough. It doesn't have an HQ or command structure. It crosses borders with impunity. It's got young people talking about it. Out of nowhere it suddenly has a big voice in international affairs.

How has it done all this?

Through the manipulation of our imagination.

And social media.

This is what the would-be Citizen Kanes of 2015 dream of.

The busman's life of B.B. King

B.B. King has died at the age of 89. For most of the last sixty years he's been on the road, playing as many as 250 gigs a year. He retired more than once. Each time he came back. He spent his life on a bus.

"Being a musician is not a job; it's an incurable disease," said one of the senior musicians my young friend Alex Gold was playing with in his ukulele orchestra. That's a very good line. Sadly this very musician died earlier this year. He was on the road at the time.

If I managed a young rock band these are the seven things I'd tell them

I've never been in a rock band but I've stood and watched enough up and coming bands perform to have realised a few things the people in those bands still don't appear to have realised. The other night I saw another lot of up and comers and found myself thinking the same things I've thought for years.

1. The most precious resource is not your music, it's the audience's attention. Don't let it drop for so much as a second.

2. Introduce yourself or be introduced. Bob Dylan has a man whose job it is to list his achievements and remind the audience who he is. And he's Bob Bloody Dylan.

3. Get on stage and start at least two minutes before your agreed time. And start, don't faff. In the early days Elvis Costello and The Attractions would *run* on clutching the tools of their trade, which was a signal. Any band who didn't want to waste their own time weren't going to waste yours either.

4. Audiences only really like two parts of a show - the beginning and the end.  Prolong the former by rolling directly through your first three numbers without pausing. End suddenly and unexpectedly. Audiences reward bands who stop early and punish those who stay late.

5. Between songs never approach the microphone and say the first thing that comes into your head. The chat is as important as the music.

6. In his excellent book The Ten Rules Of Rock and Roll, Robert Forster says "no band does anything new on stage after the first twenty minutes". Try to prove him wrong by doing one thing they're not expecting you to do. That's what the people will talk about on the way home.

7. Finally, there's nothing an audience enjoys more than hearing something familiar. If you think your songwriting and all-round musical excellence are enough to entertain a bunch of strangers for an hour with songs they have never heard before, bully for you. The Beatles didn't, but what the hell did they know?

The inescapable parallels between political parties and magazines

Eavesdropping on the vicious in-fighting that always comes in the wake of a major political defeat I can't help thinking about the parallels with what we used to say about magazine publishing.

There are two ways to launch a magazine. Either:

1. You look around at how the mass of people are behaving (which is always different from how they *say* they're behaving) and produce a magazine that goes with that grain.
Or;
2. You produce the kind of magazine you would like to read yourself and hope that a lot of other people will like it as well.

Guess which one works.

What's happening in Word podcast land

The interview with Johnny Rogan about his book Ray Davies: A Complicated Life that Mark Ellen and I recorded a couple of weeks ago is now available as a podcast.

If you go to wordpodcast.co.uk you can stream it and subscribe so that you get future podcasts, including the one we're recording next week with Johnnie Walker and Michael Watts, also in the salubrious but intimate surroundings of The Islington. Tickets.

When rock was rock, selfies were rare and something inevitably went wrong

When Mick Watts (he's the one on the right) sent me this pic, he apologised for the quality. Along with Johnnie Walker, Mick's our guest at Monday's Word In Your Ear, talking about his time working for Melody Maker in the 1970s. Tickets here.

Back in the 70s if you did manage to get a picture of yourself with the star you were interviewing, it was inevitably either out of focus or one of you would be partially obscured. Nobody carried photo-taking apparatus in their pocket. And if you did have a picture taken it was imperative that both you and the subject posed in such a way that sent up the very idea that you were having your picture taken. Even then it probably wouldn't "come out".

If you were lucky what you ended up with was a prototype selfie like the one above. While the subject wasn't actually operating the mechanism it was a selfie in that the only person really interested in the picture was the less famous one in the picture. The rarity of the "me with very famous person" snap has been devalued by mobile phone cameras and the increasingly military organisation of the meet-and-greet. Taylor Swift must already have had her picture taken with far more people than Frank Sinatra ever managed in his long career. Nowadays I don't know anybody who hasn't had their picture taken with Bruce Springsteen. It wasn't always so.

The Riddle of the Sands Adventure Club is a beautiful, pointless thing

I've never read Erskine Childers' Edwardian spy thriller The Riddle Of The Sands but I'm delighted that two blokes have developed such an obsession with it that they've started a website all about it and are now doing a podcast describing their plan to re-enact the events of the story in their original location.

When Jude Rogers and Keith Drummond and I were all working in the same office and reading the novels of Patrick Hamilton, which are set in a similarly alluring vanished world, we spent a fair bit of spare time investigating old Fitzrovia pubs which were supposed to be the inspiration for the Midnight Bell, trying to work out the location of the last Lyons Corner House in London or looking at pictures of the spivs hanging about outside motor dealers in Warren Street in the 50s. Sometimes there's nothing like losing yourself in the background world of a book.

That's what these guys have done. They start by visiting the last ship's chandler in London, then try to source some Raven Mixture pipe tobacco, look into a prismatic compass, unravel the Schleswig Holstein question, drink grog and just do the kind of harmless, nourishing things that middle-aged men prefer to do when they probably should be reading to children or insulating the loft.

What they find at every turn is this strange remedy or that arcane perquisite which once formed part of a clubman's daily life in the later days of the reign of Queen Victoria is actually still available in some form if you know where to look. Furthermore, if you find it you'll also find people only too happy to talk about it. It would take a very hard heart not to share some of the their innocent delight in each tiny discovery.

Bill Bryson said the thing he loved most about England was the way its people could get so thrilled about something as tiny as a biscuit. This project, I like to feel, could only have happened in England.

When did school mottos become 'mission statements'?

"We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly," said Mr Levy, "School is pretty bad...” 

There's a good adaptation of that book, Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, on Radio Four at the moment.  Waugh was a cynic about most things, but schools in particular. It doesn't matter what the masters at Llanabba Castle do, in Waugh's world it's all about the boys and the boys will put any amount of energy into avoiding work.

That's obviously one extreme. Yesterday, on passing a school minibus, I got a glimpse of the other extreme. Beneath the name of the school was this motto:

"Igniting the spark of genius in every child."

I know no organisation every outperforms their aspirations and all that but, as Waugh would have said, WTF? The above sentence is not a coherent thought. It's a bunch of words put in a line and nudged in the direction of a sentiment. And because it's a pious sentiment, one of the kind we all theoretically buy into, everybody sits back and applauds when really they should pelt it with fruit.

Honestly, why is everyone from school governors to the people who provide dry cleaning services trying to tug our heart-strings by using emotive words like "genius" and "passion" when any rational being knows they have no part in what these organisations do?

Think back to your school days. However good, bad or indifferent your school was, there probably wasn't a lot of genius ignition going on. Where's the school whose motto is "teaching kids things"?

If there's one thing I thank my school for teaching me it was how to take a sentence apart and examine how it works or doesn't. I use that every day. In fact my old school should change its motto to "calling people on their shit since 1591." In Latin.

In praise of the Health app and Instapaper

It was Matthew Parris in the Times who alerted me to the fact that the iPhone in my pocket has an app which is measuring how far I walk every day. As soon as I discovered this I became, like him, obsessed with trying to maintain my average. At the moment this is 9,257 steps a day, in case you're interested. On the days when I don't have any reason to leave the house I go on long circuitous walks round the neighbourhood to try to keep up.

I've been using another gismo a lot recently. Instapaper is a site and app where you can store long reads from magazines and newspapers to read at your leisure. Since I never read anything longer than 300 words on a screen that's a fair bit of stuff. I've just added Kate Mossman's piece about Bruce Hornsby where it sits alongside an Esquire story about the early days of Silicon Valley, another about the ownership of the copyright of "Happy Birthday" and David Simon's interview with Richard Price.

I read these stories on my phone on the tube. Most of them will last as long as it takes to travel from Oxford Circus to my home. If it weren't for Instapaper I wouldn't read them at all.

Leaving a record collection in your will is like bequeathing a minor stately home

When I made my first will, thirty years ago, I asked an old friend to be an executor. I had a lot of records. He had a lot of records. I figured that if it came to it he'd either take them or know what to do. A lot's changed since then. CD made vinyl seem passé. Then CD turned out to be even more passé. The world turned digital, fewer people had space for lots of stuff and my friend moved to Australia.

The other day my son asked me what I was planning to do with it all and I didn't have an answer.
He's far-sighted enough to know that it's going to be a problem. None of the kids are going to want more than the odd souvenir. They're all moving house at the moment and it's clear they don't have the same attachment to stuff we had at that age. No reason why they should. On the other hand they're sensitive enough to know that several thousand vinyl LPs and as many CDs can't just be chucked on to the council tip.

In the light of all the vinyl fetishism around Record Store Day I asked on Twitter whether anyone had made arrangements for their record collection in their wills. A few said they'd said that friends could have their pick. Some had specified that particular records should be left to particular people. That's probably OK if you don't have a massive quantity. The problem with a large collection is it's simultaneously precious and a pain in the arse. Bequeathing it is like leaving somebody a dog or a minor stately home. Not everyone wants the responsibility.

Whenever I buy fast food I feel like Peter Mandelson in that chip shop

On the way back from Laugharne on Sunday I was seized by one of those hungers only a hamburger could answer. We found one in a spookily quiet service area in South Wales.

I was glad it was quiet because the queue in a fast food outlet is one of those everyday situations in which I'm never quite sure how to behave.

I find myself in a queue at Macdonald's or Burger King or Nando's about once every eighteen months and every time I suffer the same anxieties.

How will I ask for the right thing? These brands offer such a bewildering range of exotically-named options that I can never find the simple, unplugged version, which is usually the thing I actually want.

How will I make sure I don't get too much? If I stagger back to the car carrying a bucket of coffee and a free child's toy my wife will tick me off.

Are the other customers sniggering at how strange I clearly find it all? Do I look like Peter Mandelson in that Hartlepool fish and chip shop, pointing at the mushy peas and asking for "some of that delicious guacamole"?

Of course the fast food outlet is full of traps for the electioneering politician. The menu is made up of stuff you spend your time telling people not to eat. It's staffed by people who get paid next to nothing and probably don't vote. It's usually foreign-owned. As Ed Miliband found, it's difficult to eat cheap food in an elegant manner. And finally and most crucially, your behaviour in a fast food outlet marks you out as slightly posh. Which, being a career politician, you most definitely are.

I see Hillary Clinton (above) dropped in on a fast food place this week. There's a funny piece here speculating how she might have tried to bridge the great divide.

Farewell to Percy Sledge, singer of the most inappropriate wedding song of all

Soul songs used to be just like country songs. They were about something. They had plots, moments of jeopardy, shattering climaxes as a result of which the singer learned important lessons. Usually too late to do anything but write a song about it.

Percy Sledge, who has just died at the age of seventy-three, played the part of the cuckold. His signature hit, "When A Man Loves A Woman", is about a man who is so blinded by love that he can't see what a bad lot he's just married. Given that, it beggars belief that people still regularly ask for this record as the first dance of a newly-married couple.

Percy repeated the trick with "Take Time To Know Her". In this song he takes his new love to see his mama. She tells him not to rush into things. To take time to know her, in fact. Does he listen? What do you think?

The romance in a sitcom like "Veep" proves we're not as cynical as we like to pretend

Great New York Times thing about the highly-charged but platonic love affair at the centre of the brilliant "Veep". Short clip here.

Julia-Louis Dreyfus plays vice-President Selina Mayer. Tony Hale is Gary Walsh, her "body man", whose job is to be no more than a pace behind her at all times, carrying her professional and personal necessities and steering her round the thousand hazards littering the path of her every day. He's the only person in the world she can trust. It's no exaggeration to say he worships the ground she walks upon, and paces out every bit of it to make sure she doesn't come to any harm.

Funny that romance only seems to get on the TV under the guise of comedy. It was the affair between Jim and Pam that kept "The Office" going so long. The love between Homer and Marge is what gives "The Simpsons" its heart.

The more cynical the world in which the comedy is set - and the characters in "Veep" make the people in Armando Iannucci's "The Thick Of It" look like the folk in "The Vicar Of Dibley" - the more our need to believe they're capable of something better.

I remember when fitness wasn't a thing

Passing a small car park near my home on Saturday I found it full of people in their thirties exercising under the eye of a couple of military-looking fitness instructors. This was taking place within yards of a couple of gyms, which were also full to bursting.

In my lifetime no change has taken place which is more dramatic and far-reaching than the renewed emphasis on fitness. I cannot tell you just how uninterested people used to be in exercise and diet. When I was in my twenties I didn't know anybody who ran, swam, cycled or went the gym. The only gyms were sinister-looking places above shops from which came the sound of boxing glove landing on punch bag. Nobody had trainers, either the footwear or human variety. It was not, to use a modern expression, a thing. Anybody seen indulging in any exercise for the simple reason that it might improve their appearance or prolong their life would have been thought conceited.

Since then a behavioural wave has swept the country which can only be compared to the temperance movement of the early 19th century. Our local swimming pool, which used to be somewhat down at heel, has been transformed into a fitness centre and is now thrumming with activity even at 6:30 in the morning. Visitors from the early 70s or even the 80s would not be able to believe their eyes.

Changes like this always make me wonder the same thing. What's going to change in the next forty years that will render the world we now live in just as unrecognisable to us on our hundredth birthdays?

Got a spare million to bid on the song that invented pop nostalgia?

I'm not surprised Don McLean's putting the hand-written lyrics of "American Pie" up for auction tomorrow. I am however amazed that he knew where they were in the first place. 1971's a long time ago. If I had to put my hand on anything important from that year, such as my degree, I'd be in trouble.

I don't know how they establish the provenance of hand-written lyrics. Apparently this was in a file at his home along with various other working drafts he's stored over the years. Since I shan't be bidding I don't have to decide whether to believe it or not.

What's interesting about "American Pie" in the light of 1971 is it's one of the very first shoots of a force which was about to become very powerful in pop music - nostalgia. From the point of view of the Sixties the Fifties were yesterday and therefore not all that interesting. As soon as the Seventies began the Fifties were far enough away to seem like the vanished world of Lost Content. McLean's song mined that seam very profitably. Nobody knew what the song meant but they liked the way it felt.

There were a few other straws in the wind that year. 1971 was also the year of the first workshop production of "Grease" in Chicago. Originally this was hard-hitting and gritty. By the time it was on Broadway it provided the same cosy look back as you would have found by then in "Happy Days", "American Graffiti", the Carpenters doing "Yesterday Once More" and Ringo Starr in "That'll Be The Day".

What nobody in 1971 suspected was that anyone in the future would be interested in holding on to anything from the year 1971. That must have been doubly the case with the lyrics of a song that dealt with the past. In 1971 it was only just beginning to dawn on the music industry that the past might be more interesting and hence more valuable than the present. If I was working for the "American Pie" auctioneer I wouldn't be building it up on the grounds that everybody's fascinated by the song's meaning. I'd be pointing out that "American Pie" marked the beginning of pop nostalgia. That's very significant.

Comedy is all casting

The casting of "The Office" is more than half the value of the series. They're all just slightly off-centre, which probably helps explain why they've ended up in this dead-end paper company. For instance, I think Ricky Gervais pointed out that Steve Carell is perfect as Michael Scott because he's "almost handsome".

I've just been reading a profile of the casting director of this and many other comedies and it helps explains why Andy Buckley is so good as Dunder-Mifflin's CFO David Wallace. Wallace doesn't have any funny lines. His job is to turn up at moments of corporate jeopardy and play the heavy father. He tries to be stern but he can't quite bring himself to do it. He is completely believable.

It turns out that Buckley was a jobbing actor who gave it up to work in the finance industry. The casting director Allison Jones bumped into him after he had switched careers, took his card and this led to him getting the part, which he did alongside his day job. The reason he looks like a serious businessman is because that's what he is.

Tidal: the streaming service fronted by music's 1%

I've no idea whether Tidal, the paid-for music streaming service that's being fronted by Jay-Z, will turn out to be a winner or will quietly fade away like so many other digital music initiatives before it, but one thing I do know.

There's a fundamental problem with using performers as the public face of this kind of enterprise. The musicians who are famous enough to front such a launch are more famous for their wealth than their music. Many seem to have spent the last few years flaunting it.

There they all were lining up in New York yesterday: Rihanna, Madonna, Kanye West, Jack White, Usher, Beyonce, Daft Punk, Arcade Fire and similar. All of these people have been huge winners in their particular areas of the market. The key lesson of the internet is the Google lesson. The winner takes it all. There's very little left for anyone else.

Most people looking at that line-up of millionaires will find it hard to take them seriously as poster boys for starving artists. The people who are really suffering in the new digital dispensation are the ones not famous enough to be on that stage.

No point hiring image consultants if your own receptionist is letting you down

Piece in FT by Lucy Kellaway about how much you can tell about a visitor from the way they deal with a receptionist. All true. By the same token that visitor can also tell a lot about a company by the way the receptionist behaves.

I regularly sit in reception in a building used by one very high-profile public body and never fail to be amazed by the gossip and parochial whinging the staff seem content to let me overhear.

Kellaway talks about a company who have a spy among their reception staff whose job it is to report on the behaviour of waiting job candidates. Some managements should have a spy among the people waiting. They might find out a few things about their public image that would horrify them.

I've had it with social kissing - I'm going back to shaking hands

Interesting Marsha Shandur should make a little video advising women how to take evasive action when a male colleague moves in for a peck on the cheek in a business or social situation. Interesting because I suspect the man moving in was only doing it from a mistaken sense of gentlemanly obligation.

Ideally we'd restrict the hugging to the female colleagues who are clearly friends but it's never easy to draw that line, particularly in a group situation. If the two other men at the gathering have "gone in" it would be ungallant not to follow.

Since the whole world turned luvvie and it became impolite not to pretend that everyone is our best friend, there's a growing tendency to view formality as coldness. It's got to the point where men would rather be accused of being too familiar than of being too distant or - ridiculous as it may sound - somehow "anti-women. The men are just trying to be au courant. That's why women are having to do so much fending-off.

I don't have any solution to this problem other than standing back, looking ill-at-ease and proferring a firm hand to shake. If she wants more than that, it's Ladies Choice.

No man but a blockhead ever blogged, except for the remote chance of an award

This week I was talking about blogging to people on a writing course run by The Oldie. I asked if any of them had ever considered blogging. Only one had and it turned out she'd given up after a few entries. I told the rest that if they'd got this far without it they probably didn't need to start now. Only those with a need to say their piece so intense it almost qualifies as an illness should even think about blogging.

Somebody asked if you could make any money from it. I said no. He then came back with a blogging spin on the old Samuel Johnson line about none but a blockhead ever having written except for money. He was quite militant about it. It's odd how people can get so concerned about other people doing things for no other reason than they feel like it. The people I've met who are most vehement in their condemnation of Twitter tend to be people who don't use it and therefore don't see why anybody else should. This seems short-sighted. I don't much like Facebook but I understand why it's popular.

I started this blog in 2007 out of curiosity and vanity. I've just looked at the first post, which was about how redundant the singles chart is. Funnily enough, I've just written a variant on the same theme for The Guardian. I came to the conclusion years ago that it was a complete waste of time trying to get commissioning editors interested in ideas and you're better off getting them off your chest by just making them blog posts.

Blogging is my self-indulgence. It's easier than a diary and cheaper than therapy. And sometimes people read it. Some posts are more popular than others, which is when my publisher's instincts kick in and I think "I should do more of that kind of thing", which is obviously a snare and a delusion. If people like it, that's because they like the self-indulgence of it.

And now it's even more hilarious because I'm on the shortlist for the Blogger of the Year at the London Press Club Awards. So maybe that's why I started doing it. I knew there'd be the outside chance of glory in it some day.

In Publishing column: keep those awards entries short and don't be luvvie about it

http://www.inpublishing.co.uk/kb/articles/off_the_page_ma15_1484.aspx

Fifty years late, here's my review of "Highway 61 Revisited"

It's all about the fear of falling. By 1965 Bob Dylan had become famous and celebrated more quickly than anyone else. Like anyone suddenly famous and celebrated, he had a secret fear of being found out.

Most of us just have dreams about having to go for job interviews without clothes. Songwriters put the same fear into songs.

I realised this last night listening to a pristine mono copy through a top-of-the-range hi-fi in the library at the Barbican.

Side one starts with "Like A Rolling Stone", pop's best take on what it must be like to fall from grace. Side two starts with "Queen Jane Approximately", which is about being shunned by those on whom you previously depended. Both songs are supposedly about other people. But Dylan knew their falls might foreshadow his own. The failings we point out in others are often the same ones we don't like to recognise in ourselves.

In 1965 only disgraced cabinet ministers seemed to care about prestige and shame. In the age of social media we all do. That's one of the reasons these songs are even more powerful now.

At the same time the music feels as if it's on the verge of falling apart. The musicians are never comfortable and on top of things. You can almost hear their eyes swivelling from side to side as they try to keep track of the chord shapes, wonder whether each verse is the last and whether what they're doing is what's required.

Somebody pointed out that until last night he'd never heard the tambourine part on "Like  A Rolling Stone" and how strange and haphazard it seemed to be. It's that very uncertainty that keeps the music so alive. "Highway 61 Revisited" isn't perfect, which is one of the reasons why it's still brilliant.

I don't know about the future of the music press but its past gets better all the time

A questionnaire about the future of the music press was doing the rounds online this weekend. "Do you get most of your information about music from press or from blogs?" That kind of thing. I stopped filling those in a while ago. They're mostly sent by journalism students hoping they can turn their dissertation into a gig. I tell them the gig's gone but they want to believe that's not true so badly that they try to reason the music press back into rude health.

They'd be better off reading a couple of new memoirs about rock journalism from the days when the living was easy and the cotton was high. Shake It Up Baby! is by Norman Jopling and it's sub-titled "notes from a pop music reporter 1961-1972".

For instance, in the week of May 15th 1965 Norman's in the Savoy with The Beatles who've come to see Bob Dylan. They go to the restaurant and order porridge and pea sandwiches. Paul sings their new single "Help!" to him and says "I think John and I are writing different sorts of songs now....I can't say whether they're better or worse but they're certainly different."

The other book is Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the '60s by Richard Goldstein, who was the man who wrote the "Pop Eye" column in the Village Voice and therefore has a claim to be the world's first rock critic. By the late sixties the chummy tone of Norman Jopling's articles in the Record Mirror had given way to something altogether more knowing.

For instance, Goldstein remembers talking to Jimi Hendrix in New York in 1970. "Hendrix was stupefied, his shirt stained with what looked like caked puke. There was no publicist to make excuses or even wipe him up."

There's nothing quite as seedy as the Hendrix encounter or as epochal as dinner with the Beatles in Mark Ellen's Rock Stars Stole My Life!: A Big Bad Love Affair with Music, which has just come out in paperback, but there is a vivid and some say quite amusing account of what it was like to work for NME, Smash Hits, Q and the rest when the business was exploding in every direction. In some senses that was the best era of all. I would say that, wouldn't I?

Mark and I are talking to Richard Goldstein and Norman Jopling at next Tuesday's Word In Your Ear at the Islington. Anybody with even a passing interest in what it was like when the going was good really ought to be there.

Meanwhile, here's Richard interviewing Jim Morrison in 1969.

How Lambert and Stamp and the Who made it up as they went along

Chris Stamp was the brother of Terence, the film star. Kit Lambert was the son of Constant, the celebrated classical musician.

They met in the film business of the early sixties. They got into music to further their film careers. They reckoned that the only way they could get a seat at the table when movie deals were made was by coming along with their own pop group who wrote their own material. That's how they found The Who.

They signed the group by promising to pay them a weekly wage. The Who's parents were very impressed by the weekly wage. Lambert and Stamp didn't know much about the music business but they managed to keep the weekly wage coming long enough to inspire the group. Lambert encouraged Townshend to write long-form pieces that could be performed in concert halls. Stamp showed the group how to carry themselves.

By the time they came to record "Who's Next" in 1971 Lambert and Stamp were so deep in drink and drugs that the group had to take care of themselves. Lambert never quite sobered up and died in 1981. Stamp eventually got straight and has made his peace with The Who, peace enough for them to be featured in a fascinating little documentary about their unique relationship with the group.

Because they were film guys the footage of the group they shot back in the days is surprisingly beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that it looks almost artificial. The best bit is Townshend and Daltrey sitting together doing what they never did back in the day, which is actually discuss the tensions within the group. Like all the survivors of the sixties they look back in amazement at the things you could get away with in those days just before everybody learned how to be professional.

My favourite Andy Fraser band wasn't Free

When I heard Andy Fraser had died I got out this album, "First Water" by Sharks.  It didn't disappoint.

Sometimes it seems every band from the 70s has some kind of cult following. But not Sharks.

There's been no loving reissue programme for Sharks, no retrospective in Uncut, no young movie actor has stepped forward to claim them as his own. They're not on Spotify and there's barely anything on You Tube. It seems the only people who know anything about them are the people who saw them.

In the wake of the death of Fraser people are rightly talking about Free, the band he was in before forming Sharks. They're the band with all the hits. Sharks were a slightly less ingratiating, slightly more "indie" (to use a word that nobody used at the time) outlet for Fraser's still teenage instincts.

Fraser formed Sharks in 1972 with Marty Simon, a drummer from Canada, recruited Britain's most versatile session guitarist Chris Spedding and probably thought he'd have a shot at being his own front man. But the record company didn't rate his voice and brought in Snips as singer.

That probably explains why he left when their first album "First Water" came out in 1973 and failed to set the world on fire. They made another one which isn't anything like as good and then split up.

I saw Sharks three times before Fraser left and they made one of the best rackets I've ever heard in my life. They made music which had some of the more appealing characteristics of the jam - that sense of a groove being mined to see what might be inside it and the feeling of edges which nobody could be bothered to polish  - allied to that catchiness which hints at further layers of catchiness to come.

Like most great rock and roll bands they were led from the rear by the rhythm section, nobody in the band was actually playing what you were hearing and the guitar solos were largely implied.

Everything worthwhile I know I learned by heart

Every week there's a story on the news agenda which is so stupid you just know it's not worth finding out about. Last week there was something about a kitchen. Don't go any further. I don't wish to know.

This week there are poets arguing about the value of kids learning things by heart. I'm sure poets aren't stupid enough to say that this is ever a bad idea. I'm equally sure there are hacks capable or twisting their words to make it look as though they did. And I'm certain the BBC will have staged one of those sham debates where somebody who's in favour of fresh air has been put up against somebody who thinks it's bad for you.

I took a little notice of this because recently I've tried to teach myself to learn a few bits of Shakespeare off by heart. I used to be able to do this when I was young and I was interested to see if I still could, particularly now that Google's causing my mental muscles to atrophy.

I also did it as an alternative to reading while on the tube or listening to music while out walking. I'm enjoying the process. I'll be the one sitting opposite you staring into space with lips barely moving, stopping occasionally to check the lines on my phone.

Everything worthwhile I know I learned by heart.

Did Marvin Gaye actually write "Got To Give It Up"? Up to a point.

Lots of interesting things came out of the Marvin Gaye/Pharrell Williams court case.

There's the $32 million the track is said to have earned, which indicates that today's big hits are bigger than ever.

There's Robin Thicke's admission that he had no part in writing the song, despite having his name among the composer credits. (All the big hits today are written by teams. The artist's name is generally included, though it's impossible to know how much part they play in coming up with it. One very famous superstar is known as "add a word, take a third".)

There's a good piece here from today's New York Times which argues that the whole case is based on a way of looking at the world that no longer applies. One of the point it makes is as follows: "Implicit in the premise of the case is that Mr Gaye's version of songwriting is somehow more serious than what Mr Williams does, since it is the one that the law is designed to protect".

I'll go further. "Mr Gaye's version of songwriting" was probably nothing like we think it was.  For a start "Got To Give It Up", the song that was allegedly copied, was never actually written. It was recorded from various jams, often surreptitiously, by Marvin Gaye's engineer Art Stewart, who is quoted in David Ritz's Marvin Gaye biography "Divided Soul" saying "Marvin wasn't sure of what I was doing but he left me alone to piece the song together. On Christmas Day, 1976, after working on it for months, I ran it over to his house. He liked it but still wasn't sure - a typical Marvin reaction."

We'll never know how true that recollection is but it certainly chimes with other accounts of how Marvin Gaye made records. He had to work through other musicians and producers because he didn't have the know-how to make a track on his own and in those days the technology still required specialist operators. And he could never make up his mind about anything.

He used to complain that Motown never paid him properly for his efforts. The musicians he worked with used to mutter the same thing about him. God knows what they think of all this money going to his children, who certainly had nothing to do with it.

The three lots of people who will miss Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear

If this proves to be the end of the road for Jeremy Clarkson and Top Gear then it will leave a hole in the lives of three distinct sets of people.

First of all, there are the people who love him and the programme and never miss it.

Then there are the people like me who miss it all the time but rather enjoy it when we happen to catch it.

But the people who will miss him most of all are the ones who hate him and seem to use him as a handy instrument to calculate their position on the attitudinal spectrum.

The first set of people will follow him to whichever broadcaster puts most money in his pocket.

The second set will catch him even less frequently and will be dimly aware that it isn't quite the same on another channel.

The third lot will be desolated and will have to go hunting for somebody else to disapprove of, which is getting harder and harder in a BBC gelded by Compliance Culture.

Clarkson's a proper TV personality but what made his shtick work was that he was doing it on the BBC.

Not only did that give him access to the biggest audiences and, thanks to BBC Worldwide's success in selling the brand, the biggest budgets, it also gave his stunts a legitimacy they wouldn't have had anywhere else and at the same time made it seem that he was just about, by the skin of his teeth, getting away with something he shouldn't be getting away with.

Guys like Clarkson are always on the points of being fired. That's their standard operating position. Wherever you paint the line, they go and stand just six inches the other side of it. It's a way of proving to themselves that they are who everybody seems to think they are. The downside is they get fired from time to time. It's the cost of doing business.

In the case of Clarkson and Top Gear that firing would be very costly and messy for both parties because they've built the brand around him. Stories of actual or threatened punch-ups suggest that the relationship was reaching its natural end anyway. The problem is that people no longer do the natural thing, which is just walk away. TV shows nowadays can make so much money in syndication that they're kept going long after their energy has run out.

Much like rock bands.

Celebrating the sixties at Word In Your Ear

Me, Ashley Hutchings, Mick Houghton, Simon Nicol and Mark.

I've been a fan of Fairport Convention since 1968, so it was a genuine honour to be able to welcome founder members Ashley Hutchings and Simon Nicol to last night's Word In Your Ear at the Slaughtered Lamb.

They were there to talk about Sandy Denny, who's the subject of Mick Houghton's excellent new book I've Always Kept a Unicorn: The Biography of Sandy Denny. The person who emerged from their recollections and Mick's researches was absurdly talented, confident but insecure, occasionally exasperating but not a diva.

If you want to make sure you hear the podcast, which will be published later this week, go to www.wordpodcast.co.uk and sign up.

Our next Word In Your Ear is back at the Islington on March 31st and it's a Sixties Special with Richard Goldstein and Norman Jopling.

Richard Goldstein was the rock critic of the Village Voice back in 1966 and has a claim to be the world's first rock critic. His memoirs, Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the '60s, record his wild times, hanging out with the Doors and Grateful Dead and going on the road with Janis Joplin.

Norman was the young hot-shot reporter on the Record Mirror back in the 60s, reporting on the Beatles and Stones when London was swinging and from the front line of the soul-inspired mod movement. His book's called Shake It Up Baby!. Mark Ellen has reviewed it (below) in The Oldie.

Go here to book tickets.

The Carole King musical Beautiful has one trick but it's a damned good one

The script of Beautiful, the musical based in the songs of Carole King, her first husband Gerry Goffin and their friends and rivals Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, reminded me of the tongue in cheek captions Mark Ellen and I once wrote to accompany the stories of the Human League and Shakin Stevens in the Smash Hits Yearbooks, so relentless is its commitment to exposition.

"This guy Dylan is making us seem so dated."
"There's this band called the Monkees".
"The dance crazes are still going strong. Couldn't you write a dance song?"

However if you want a jukebox musical then you'd best pick one where the jukebox is stocked with quality and nothing but quality. As a drama Beautiful relies on only one trick but it's a damned good one. Every song is introduced as a work in progress. The lead sheet is set out on the top of the piano, a couple of chords are picked out and there then follows an opening line which is written on everybody's soul.

"Tonight you're mine, completely..."

"What should I write? What can I say? How can I tell you how much I miss you?"

"You never close your eyes any more when I kiss your lips...."

"When you're down and troubled and you need a helping hand...."

"Everybody's doing a brand new dance now."

You can feel the same thought rippling down the row of seats. What, this one as well? I went with my daughter who simply couldn't believe that all these songs, which, of course, are every bit as familiar to her as they are to the people who lived through them, had come from this handful of people.

Is it corny? Yes, of course it is, but it's also true to King's story between the 50s and early 70s; there are points at which they must have been tempted to bend the facts to fit the requirements of drama but they've resisted, for which they should be given points.

The script is Gerry Goffin complaining that you can't possibly say anything meaningful in three minutes.

The music is Carole King proving again and again that you can.

Reality stands out like a sore thumb in the middle of something as fake as a football match

Swansea's Gomis collapsed during last night's game at Tottenham. There was no contact. He just went down as if poleaxed. Gomis has a history of similar fainting episodes. Following treatment, he was fine. He even wanted to carry on.

However you can see from Bentaleb's reaction in the picture how shocked the players were when Gomis went down and was suddenly surrounded by medical teams from both benches.

It always impresses me how quickly footballers know when something serious has happened on a football pitch and how instantly they drop all the play-acting. A genuine, potentially life threatening injury in the middle of a match is immediately apparent to all of them, no matter how far away they are from the action. They react with such shock that you'd think they were 12 year-old-boys rather than hardened athletes.

That's as it should be, of course. What's not as it should be is the pantomime of agony that takes up most of the average game and increases the nearer the top of the table the teams involved are placed. The intensity of faking in football has parted company with reality and can now only be compared to the death scenes in particularly overwrought operas. 

As in the opera, nobody's convinced about the injury being feigned but it's just sort of expected. As one former-pro pointed out recently, nobody's who's hurt rolls over three times. If the players who went down were hurt as much as they claim to be their team mates would be rushing to get them help, rather than rushing to get somebody else booked.

The sudden arrival of actual jeopardy, as happened last night at White Hart Lane and at the same place in 2012 in the far more serious case of Fabrice Muamba, only makes the fake variety look more fake.

When rock stars played Scrabble

The more I look at 1971 the more it seems like a vanished world. I've Always Kept a Unicorn: The Biography of Sandy Denny by Mick Houghton is an oral history made up of interviews with people who knew her and worked with her and it's full of telling details of that same old world.

I've just been stopped in my tracks by one such detail.

Sandy Denny and Trevor Lucas liked to play Monopoly and Scrabble.

There they were, a swinging young bohemian couple with famous friends and a Chelsea address, and they chose to spend their time playing Monopoly. (Bruce Springsteen and Steve Van Zandt were doing the same at the same time over in New Jersey.) And when there wasn't a board around they invented word games. That's where the title of Fairport Convention's third album  "Unhalfbricking" came from.

This tells you one thing about life at the time and probably how that era came to produce so much vital music.

There wasn't a lot else to do.

In those days young, hip, long-haired people never watched television. They couldn't afford a set and there wasn't much to watch on it if they did.

Of course they lived full lives - drinking, socialising, fornicating, playing, plotting and all the rest that you might expect - but they didn't live with the low level distractions which are an inevitable by-product of plenty and progress. That is what made them so productive.

Next Monday, March 9th, Mark Ellen and I will be talking to Mick Houghton, who wrote the book, as well as Simon Nicol and Ashley Hutchings, who started Fairport Convention in 1967.

It's at the Slaughtered Lamb in Clerkenwell. It starts at 7:30 and is over by 9:00. You can find out more and get tickets here.

In praise of Bluetooth headphones

It was Johnnie Walker who got me interested in Bluetooth headphones. I bought the same Sony MDR-10RBT model as he did and I'm pretty pleased with them.

I have to listen to a lot of radio previews in a week to write about them for The Guardian. I can pair these headphones with phone, tablet, laptop or iMac and can then wander fairly freely while still listening closely. The signal starts to break up if you move too far away from the source but within reason the connection works very well.

If you've got them paired with your phone and you get a call while listening you can press a button on one headphone and immediately you're through. Not sure I'd use them if I was working in an office (might feel too much like a minicab driver) but at home they do the job.

Great advice for writers and editors from The New Yorker

I've no idea by what act of creative accountancy The New Yorker manages to keep going but I'm delighted it does. To mark the magazine's 90th anniversary they've published this podcast which features lots of the magazine's key people talking about how the magazine is written and edited.

It's full of good thoughts. The secret of editing is not to come up with the best article but to come up with the best article the writer can write.

I like the one about the editor who told James Thurber not to bother improving his drawing because "if you get any better, you'd be mediocre".

I also like the other one about the editor who when she wanted to be abusive would scrawl the word "poetry" on a proof.

I think she was also the one who said "if you can't say it clearly it doesn't exist".

Sometimes the kids aren't alright

I heard the head teacher of Bethnal Green Academy talking on the radio. This is the school attended by the three girls who've run off to join Islamic State.

He was at pains to assure everyone his school promoted values of fairness and tolerance. I don't doubt it. However I wonder whether some of his pupils were listening any more than we were back in the sixties when an earlier generation of head teachers lectured us about the value of self discipline and being smartly turned-out.

The Bethnal Green head's voice was the voice teenagers hear so often nowadays that they must imitate it behind their hands. It's the voice of the prevailing wisdom, the voice they hear on the radio all the time, the voice of public statements, the voice of everyone from vicars to pop stars, the voice of adults promoting peace and togetherness so insistently that a few of the people listening inevitably start to crave the opposite.

It was always the way. As Marlon Brando's character in the "The Wild One" said, "What am I rebelling against? What have you got?"

When advertisers in newspapers knew where to draw the line

Looking through 1971 numbers of The New York Times, I'm struck by three things:

How much page real estate was taken up by ads in those days.

How much of the ad space was bought by the major department stores, the retailers, rather than the brands themselves.

How most of the ads were illustrated rather than photographic.

What Shakespeare thought about Twitter

Jon Ronson's piece about Justine Sacco, the woman whose life and career were destroyed by a tweet, is unsettling reading.

She's the PR who posted what was supposed to be a dry joke about AIDS while on a trip to South Africa. She got off the plane at the other end to find she had lost her job, broken her family's heart and was the number one target of a digital lynch mob, none of whom had heard of her a few hours earlier.

In tracing how a little local difficulty turned into an international mob in full cry, Ronson turns up the guy you might call the First Shamer. Sam Biddle ran a technology blog and had 15,000 followers so when he re-tweeted the item and pointed out that Justine was a PR, it was bound to get some traction. But he can't possibly have predicted the catastrophe that befell her.

Key line in the piece for me is "social media is so perfectly designed to manipulate our desire for approval". Justine thought she might be doing that with her first tweet. Sam knew he was doing that by re-posting the item.

It's funny, really. All these modern young media people with their carefully cultivated "take me as you find me" facades and underneath they're all like kids desperately trying to buy their way into the cool corner of the playground by knocking somebody else's cap off. (I went to school a long time ago.)

The language people use on-line to express their approval or disapproval of things people write is full of the language of the playground: they talk of  "take-downs", of "nailing it", of skewering and burning and otherwise having the last word.

What they're really trying to do is make a name for themselves by rubbishing somebody else's.

Shakespeare described that sport this way.

"Who steals my purse steals trash...but he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him but makes me poor indeed".

How many characters is that?

Why Google may not be here for ever

Piece about Google in The New York Times suggests that they won't be able to dominate the market for brand advertising the way they have done the market for search advertising and finishes with this quote from Ben Thompson who blogs at Stratechery:

“This is the price of being so successful — what you’re seeing is that when a company becomes dominant, its dominance precludes it from dominating the next thing. It’s almost like a natural law of business.”

That's certainly true in my experience.

It's not that the incumbent market leader doesn't see the next big thing coming along. It's just that they have prospered by developing such a particular view of the world that they can't deal with people who see it differently.

At first the new thing doesn't appear to be in quite the same business.

Then it doesn't appear to be operating at a profit and therefore surely cannot last long.

Then your lunch has gone.

More thoughts on Bob Dylan from last night's Word In Your Ear

We gathered at the Islington last night for a Word In Your Ear evening to mark the release of Bob Dylan's new album "Shadows In The Night.

Our guests were Sid Griffin and Barb Jungr. Sid writes books as well as plays music. His new one's Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, the Band, and the Basement Tapes. Barb has made a specialty of interpreting Dylan's songs. Her new one's Hard Rain - The Songs of Bob Dylan & Leonard Cohen.

It was fifty years since "Subterranean Homesick Blues", forty since "Blood On The Tracks", thirty since he put his vocal on USA For Africa's "We Are The World", twenty since "MTV Unplugged" and ten since the release of "No Direction Home".

Woke up this morning with a few new thoughts about Bob Dylan to add to the pile I've accumulated over the last fifty plus years. Such as? Such as the fact that Dylan is above all an American musician gives him something in common with Frank Sinatra that we tend to underestimate. He wears the same jacket on the covers of "Blonde On Blonde", "John Wesley Harding" and "Nashville Skyline". Because he only gives as much of himself as he wants to give, even people who have worked with him for years don't really know him. He has adapted his singing and playing style over the years like a pitcher who can no longer throw the ball the same way he did when he was younger. In the summer that everyone else in popular music was producing extravagant records like "Sgt Pepper", "Disraeli Gears", "Axis: Bold As Love" and "The Who Sell Out", albums that prided themselves on throwing in entire consignments of kitchen sinks, he went to Nashville and in three sessions recorded "John Wesley Harding", probably the most austere album of the decade.

Anyway, we enjoyed it and the audience seemed to. We finished with a strictly light-hearted picture quiz featuring real-life characters who are referenced in Bob Dylan's songs. The last one was Paul Revere's horse. It was all over by nine fifteen. I'm thinking of getting that translated into Latin and made into a motto.

A podcast will be out there in due course. If you want to make sure you don't miss it, sign up here.

An amazing evening for Gavaid

London never stops amazing you. It's like a huge desk with hundreds of drawers, most of which you never get round to opening.

 Last night at six I got on the overground heading east from Highbury & Islington. I didn't know until last night they call it the Orange Line. All the hundreds of people flooding on to that train on their way home were young. It was different from the mix you would have found if you were travelling north or south.

I got off at Shadwell, which is in the heart of what I used to think of as Jack The Ripper territory. In the past nobody I knew ever went there, lived there or had any business reason to be there. Nowadays I'm increasingly pulled there as my own children live in that direction, in areas I've never even visited, areas which not long ago were post-industrial wastelands but are now full of all sorts of surprises.

One of them is a rather fabulous former cinema on the Commercial Road called The Troxy, which was reopened a couple of years ago and is now being developed as a groovy events venue. (You can take a virtual tour here.)

Last night it was full of almost 900 journalists, advertising people and PRs, many of whom had known or worked with Gavin Reeve. Gavin died last year at no age at all. He was a victim of pancreatic cancer. I worked with him briefly many years ago. My daughter worked with him more recently. He was a charmer, engaging everyone who crossed his path.

The gathering was a showbiz quiz in aid of Pancreatic Cancer Action. Denise Van Outen presented the quiz, which quickly exhausted my store of knowledge about characters in Brookside or the obscurer reality TV contestants. (Although it has to be said Mark Ellen impressed me by knowing how many line-ups of the Sugababes there had been.)

A visitor from the 1980s might have been shocked by the tawdriness of some of the subjects that some people knew about - breast reductions, people selling the media rights to the birth of their child, the lyrics of Peter Andre songs - but they might also have been struck by the decency of everyone's behaviour, which is not always a given at media business bunfights.

Before it got under way there were speeches by Ali Stunt from the charity and Gavin's wife Leesa Daniels, speeches which were listened to with close attention. They showed a clip of him speaking at last year's Gavaid event, which I didn't attend. At that stage he was still well enough to stand up and crack jokes in front of a crowd. None of us are promised tomorrow.

We gentleman of a certain age still live in Hancock's world

I had to smile this morning when someone tweeted the old Tony Hancock line "have they forgotten Magna Carta? Did she die in vain?"

In the early seventies I shared a flat with a load of blokes. Between us we had three budget Hancock LPs on Pye's Golden Guinea label. We played them on Sunday afternoons when nothing was open and there was nothing else to do.

Thus we committed every word of The Blood Donor, The Radio Ham, The Missing Page, The Reunion  and the others to memory. There are a few comedy series that stand up to repeated viewing and listening but I don't know another where the individual lines linger quite as much.

Not a week goes by I don't quote one either out loud or just in my head. Handing around the wine gums at the theatre the other day I found myself saying "don't take the black one", which then led to "they do tubes of all black ones nowadays" and then "I know, but you can't always get 'em".

Galton and Simpson were great writers, they were coming up with lines for great comic actors and most of them were tried first on the radio, which may account for their peculiar savour, for the way they only lend themselves to being said in the way the actor in the original production said them.

I know them like other people know poetry. 

"Given, no. Spilt, yes."

"We're not all Rob Roys, you know."

"Last one in the Reichstag's a sissy."

"We're going to Margate this year, if any of you young nurses fancy it. No funny business."

I walked in on my youngest Skyping mates all over the world the other day and couldn't stop myself saying "send a bread pudding to Kuala Lumpur".

"Subterranean Homesick Blues" and the days when records came to us in dreams

Richard Williams' piece about the anniversary of Subterranean Homesick Blues got me thinking back to the first time I heard it. In those days the Light Programme hardly played any records. Thanks to the BBC's agreements with the Musicians Union, they were only allowed a handful. Most of their output was light orchestral. A pop record, any pop record, coming on the radio was exciting. If it was a record like "Subterranean Homesick Blues", which seemed to have no precedent, that was doubly the case.

I think I remember hearing it first on the TV. I dimly remember a minute of it was played on "Juke Box Jury", probably over shots of students and shorthand typists uncertainly trying to tap their foot along to the beat. It literally sent shivers up my spine. I had a presentiment that when I finally got to hear this record properly it would thrill me beyond measure.

I knew that I might not hear it again for weeks and if I did it would come without warning. I might turn on the radio just as it was finishing, which would be like arriving at the youth club dance to find the girl you fancied laughing at somebody else's jokes. Furthermore, when it actually came out you might not be able to afford to buy it and you'd have to hope somebody would bring their copy to school and you would be able to persuade the music teacher to let you use the gramophone at lunchtime.

In the gap between hearing something and being able to hear it again in those days a strange and rather beautiful feeling blossomed. You re-ran the memory of your hearing the record in your head and tried to uncover further details of it, as if you were the witness to a crime, going over your recollections again and again trying to come up with another line or a sound you had forgotten.

This meant that music came to you as if in a dream. This is interesting because that's often the way a song first occurs to the musician. Before it's something they play it's something they hear in their head. The dream analogy applies particularly well to "Subterranean Homesick Blues", a performance that still sounds today as if it's tumbling forth faster than the recording machine can handle it and that if it hadn't managed to capture it on that occasion the moment would have been lost to memory entirely, much the way most dreams are.


 

Buying more books saves you something more important than money

Discussions about digital migration are often ham-strung by a version of the either/or fallacy. I'm sure the boss of Waterstone's would love to believe that Kindle sales have all but disappeared and the paper book is making a comeback. I'm sure it's not as simple as that.

The habit matters more than the product and the Kindle may have re-awakened the habit of reading books among some people. If I'm reading something major nowadays, the kind of thing that I'm going to want to have in my pocket to read at the bus stop, I'll tend to buy a cheap paperback and also get it on Kindle. Generally speaking, books are cheap. The major investment is the time devoted to reading them. If I buy both forms I'll read more quickly, which is a more satisfactory way to read. I'll then get through more books, which will make me feel better and also look for more books.

I think that's what they call win-win.

Just one amazing detail from Gyles Brandreth's Westminster Diaries

2015 is going well. I'm in front of a fire with Breaking The Code: Westminster Diaries by Gyles Brandreth, which is the most candid parliamentary memoir you're ever going to read.

I'm not one of those people who believe MPs are up to their necks in bribery and corruption but the entry for February 3rd 1993 contains a wonderful illustration of how people in institutions - all institutions - design things to make live easier for themselves.

Brandreth was a member of the Heritage Select Committee, which was chaired by Gerald Kaufman. He writes:

"Gerald and the Select Committee are off to the U.S. at the weekend, gathering evidence for our enquiry into the cost of CDs. Gerald explained to us that if we all went, the Budget wouldn't stretch to us travelling Business Class. He felt that those going would want to travel Business Class (murmurs of assent), so was anyone ready to volunteer not to go? I put my hand up."

Was there ever a time when rational human beings thought that Parliament could make the slightest difference to the price of compact discs? And in that time was it really felt that a bunch of Parliamentarians could rock up in New York and be given access to some information about CD pricing that they couldn't have got back in Westminster? And how did Gerald Kaufman manage to keep a straight face while asking that question about Business Class?