The Lottery Winners know something most bands refuse to learn

Watching The Lottery Winners, the self-described "mediocre indie pop band" from Leigh, Lancs at the Water Rats last night, it struck me that people who climb on stage have one of two motivations.

They're either looking for attention or they're looking for validation.

If they're looking for attention they understand that the most precious prize is an engaged audience and this is something that can't be commanded. It must be won. People who are keen for attention will be attuned to the mood of the room and will pull back the audience's attention if they feel it wandering.

On the other hand people who are keen for validation think they've done the job just by securing the gig. They won't talk to the audience any more than they have to and if they do it will be just to tell them what the next song is. If the audience aren't paying attention they don't really mind because they're quite happy playing their music. They're not prepared to change that in any way just to win the audience's favour. If people don't happen to like it that's because they're wrong.

It goes without saying that the Lottery Winners belong in the first category. As does anybody whose career last more than a couple of years.

Alan Simpson deserved a medal for writing Tony Hancock's best stuff. But no badge.

Alan Simpson has died. He and Ray Galton wrote the great Hancock radio shows. That's him on the left.

I don't really remember those shows being on the radio. I picked them up later on, from gramophone records played on the radio in the 60s. People would request snippets of them on "Two Way Family Favourites".

When I was living in a flat in north London at the beginning of the 70s a bunch of us had some of those records on the Pye Golden Guinea label. We played them so often that I can recite entire pages of the scripts.

There's never been better broadcast comedy. There's never been more poignant broadcast comedy. There's been better delivered comedy.

Hardly a week goes by without one of Galton and Simpson's lines as spoken by Tony Hancock unaccountably welling up from my subconscious.

"Given, no. Spilt, yes."

"There's more water out there then there is in your beer."

"Send a bread pudding to Kuala Lumpur."

"We're going to Margate this year, if any of you nurses fancy..."

"But no badge...."

Respect.

A thought about the next President

Keep turning over in my mind something I just heard on the excellent NPR Politics podcast.

If you'd suggested in the first year of George W. Bush's second term that the next President would be Barack Obama you would have been laughed at.

And if you had suggested in the first year of Obama's second term that the next President was going to be Donald Trump the laughs would have been even louder.

I don't know exactly what it proves other than the enduring truth of Harold Macmillan's line about  the thing politicians most fear.

"Events, dear boy, events."

This is what's happening with Word In Your Ear

Paul Gambaccini was our guest in a particularly riveting Word In Your Ear evening at the Islington last week. He was talking about everything from his time as a writer on Rolling Stone through his time at Radio One to his harrowing year under the shadow of the Metropolitan police Yewtree investigation. This is all detailed in his extraordinary book Love, Paul Gambaccini. You can hear the conversation here. You can also sign up to get further Word In Your Ear podcasts.

Next Wednesday our guests are Tony Fletcher and Barney Hoskyns. Tony, who's the former editor of Jamming magazine, will be talking about his various music biographies, including his new one In The Midnight Hour, which is the story of Wilson Pickett. Barney is with us, talking about and signing copies of his book Small Town Talk, which is all about the extraordinary musical background of Woodstock. There's a few tickets available here, where you can also sign up for the mailing list and make sure you get notice of upcoming events. We're hatching plans for spring right now.

A President with nothing to hide

For years now I've been thinking, why would anyone run for high office in this day and age?

Some of the most effective leaders – Churchill,  Roosevelt, Mitterand  – had clanking great skeletons in their closet. But since the media took on the job of exposing everything about candidates that they might not want to have exposed, we've had leaders like Obama and Cameron and Merkel who are above all things careful and don't appear to have any secrets to cover up.

That's led us to people who don't have their fingers in the cookie jar, haven't changed their positions all that much and have a dull domestic life.

And now we have the opposite. A President who is largely motivated by money, has run as the candidate of a party who don't agree with him and has a domestic life like something out of a Tom Wolfe novel.

But here's the thing.

Donald Trump doesn't really have anything to hide.

He's exactly the blowhard his opponents say he is and precisely the bull in a china shop his supporters ordered. They didn't vote for him because they listened to his plans and thought, that seems sound. They voted for him because they wanted to roll a grenade under the door of the status quo. They wanted action. And they've got hyperactivity.

But is there anything, apart from the slow unravelling of plans entered into in his haste, that could derail him?

Certainly not the normal stuff. If his tax returns were to come out and to say that he'd been involved in massive tax avoidance it wouldn't particularly hurt him. If it were to suggest he wasn't quite as rich as he makes out that would annoy him but it wouldn't really damage him. If he were to be found in the outer office with an intern, like Bill Clinton was, would even the Evangelical right do anything more than shrug? I don't think so. This is not a man that anybody looks at and thinks, he represents my values or my country. Nobody would lend him their lawnmower.

He's a television personality. To twist an old Tom Stoppard line, he's the opposite of a person.

What he's doing at the moment is "Larping". Live Action Role Playing.

He has no principles. Therefore he has nothing to hide.

TV has a lot of answer for. This is the person the TV industry has been building towards since the middle 1950s. Nothing on the surface and nothing underneath either.

So is this why Americans drink before meals

These are just four of the scores of different covers that Frederick Allen's "Only Yesterday" has had since it was first published in 1931, which gives you an idea of how it's maintained its popularity.

It was a massive best-seller back then, and that was richly deserved. It's a brilliantly written account of the America of prohibition, red scares, irrational economic boom, dramatic changes in the relationships within the family, the transforming power of the motor car and the advent of radio, all written while the decade's paint was still wet.

Now I understand why Americans would still rather have two or three strong cocktails before a meal than wine with it. This habit dates from Prohibition, when people would meet their friends in a hotel room where they could serve each other a few illicit drinks in seclusion before going down to eat in the hotel dining room.

Can't recommend this book too highly.

Books have replaced records under the Christmas tree

I was in a few West End bookshops in the week before Christmas and they were busy, as busy as I remember record shops used to be in the week before Christmas.

Albums were formerly the ideal Christmas present. They were the right price and they were always appreciated. Tens of thousands of people would buy albums at Christmas who hardly bought them the rest of the year.

Now all that's gone. The people who used to give albums now give books.

The record business's loss seems to have been the book business's gain.

Why acts might tout their own tickets

I've no idea whether Robbie Williams' management really did sell marked-up tickets to his shows via resale sites as the BBC are claiming.

This I do know. If you're managing a hot act you know that there's a big difference between the price your artist is comfortable with charging and the amount the market will pay. It might be twice as much.

If people are going to pay double the standard price for tickets you can either watch that money go to wicked scalpers (or averagely shrewd members of the public who buy two lots and sell one in order to pay for their evening out); or you can get some of it for your artist.

I'm not saying it's right or desirable but I can understand it.

The reason pop star deaths always make the news

We were out at lunch with old friends yesterday when we got the news Peter Sarstedt had died.

I asked my friends whether the news of his death would make the BBC Six o'clock News. The consensus of the table was it was unlikely. One hit and such a long time ago. It wouldn't be enough.

I said I thought he would be.

We were driving back when I got a text from one of the friends from the lunch. They had the radio on and, sure enough, the news of Peter Sarstedt's death was on the Six O'Clock.

With pop star deaths the question of news values becomes muddied by the desire of a radio producer to interrupt their diet of hard news with a little bit of music.

The one hasn't been born who can resist.

The Mariah Carey cock-up was my favourite TV of the year.

I didn't watch any TV on New Year's Eve but I can't get enough of the Mariah Carey story that emerged the following day.

There's nothing I like more than seeing a self important pop star and an over-inflated TV show caught at it. The only thing more fun than watching the disaster unfold is following the fall out as everybody in earpiece land tries to pin the blame on everyone else.

Mariah Carey was supposed to do three songs for Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve With Ryan Seacrest, which sounds like a heartwarmingly modest little do, doesn't it?

Something went wrong in the second one. Either the wrong track played or the right track played but she couldn't hear it. So she ambled around looking tight-lipped while her dancers carried on like the troupers they no doubt are.
.

There's a round-up of the latest state of the blame game here. On one side you've got the TV producers. On the other you've got Carey's manager. These things are usually six of one and half a dozen of the other so I'm not taking sides.

However it does cause you to reflect on the panic of the traditional gatekeepers of entertainment - the TV networks and the record companies - when confronted with the challenges of the wild world of today. Certain aspects are particularly interesting to me.

* By the look and sound of things she was going to sing most of the song live with only the difficult bits flown in from a hard drive. This is presumably how these things are increasingly done. Technology is now flexible enough to provide lots of such halfway house solutions, which would lead you to suspect that anything which sounds incredible is precisely that.
* The dancers don't appear to be thrown by not being able to hear the track because they're dancing by numbers. As long as they all start together they're likely to finish together.
* Is it possible that the producers were more interested in seeing it go wrong than seeing it go right because three days of speculation on the web is worth more than a massive audience on the night?
* If that's not true, isn't it interesting that Mariah Carey thinks it is?

You can't make your children happy - particularly at Christmas

This is the only thing I learned from my experience of bringing up our kids, all of whom are adults now.

You can't make your children happy.

You can't force it upon them.

And Christmas is the time of year when you try hardest to do just that.

It's at its worst when they're little. That's when you want them to be excited but not too excited. This is an emotional state they're not equipped for. All that pent-up anticipation all too easily spills over into tantrums, even tears, which then upsets the adults.

This didn't happen all the time but I well remember the times that it did. It was always when we were trying to make it perfect.

So, have yourself the kind of Christmas you want.

All famous people think they know each other

Vanity Fair have tried to find out the truth about Donald Trump's claim that he and Kanye West are "old friends". 

One of the first things that fame teaches the newly famous is to treat everybody as though they've already met. This always works because once they're famous everybody they do meet will mention the time they met before. The famous person won't remember this because the famous person meets hundreds of new people every day and if it makes these people happy to have them believe that you remember meeting them before then why mess up something that makes them happy? The famous person will have forgotten all about the civilian within minutes of meeting them so it's no skin off their famous nose.

If you're major league famous, like, say, Madonna or David Beckham, all social interactions will be instigated by somebody else. You never have to go "hello, I'm Madonna". It's a given that you're Madonna and therefore everybody is naturally drawn to you and will defer to you. You never have to explain your presence.

The best bit in the first series of "Episodes" is when Matt Le Blanc has lunch with writers Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan. His opening line is "I'm here....why?" He simply can't be caught admitting he's there because he wanted to be. Somebody else must have made this happen.

I'm told the Queen never says hello or goodbye. This makes perfect sense to me. For everybody she deals with life begins when she arrives and ceases when she departs. The only scene that matters is the one featuring the Queen and by definition this is over when she leaves.

And here we have Kanye West and Donald Trump. At the time they met they were the two most famous and controversial figures in the New York area. Therefore it stood to reason that they should meet and have their picture taken.

Do they know each other? They're famous. That's all they need to know about each other.

The Neil Cowley Trio have very nearly got a hit

I went to see the Neil Cowley Trio play a short gig in an underground garage this week. They did some tunes from their new album "Spacebound Apes". These days the words "new album" only cause excitement among the people who have made said new album. It's like back in the old days people used to come round and make you look at their holiday snaps. You paid attention largely to be polite.

Nowadays the precious currency is not the recorded music. It's the audience's undivided attention. That's a fact. You can waste your time mourning the world that's gone and is never coming back or you can take notice of the fact that new opportunities may arise from time to time in this new dispensation. People's attention can no longer be demanded but it can be piqued.

Neil talked about a tune called "Grace". A few weeks ago he noticed that it had been streamed 30,000 times on Spotify. He was quite gratified about that but he knew it wasn't going to amount to much. But then next time he looked it had gone up a lot. Then it went up even more. Next thing he knew it had been streamed over a million times, which is a lot for a barely-known British act operating in the space dangerously adjacent to jazz.

The reason it had been streamed this many times is Spotify had included that one tune in one of their playlists of new material. It had popped up on people's playlists and since they hadn't skipped it it appeared to have met with their approval. I've just looked again and the total number of times it's been streamed is over four million. That's not going to keep Adele up at night but it's not nothing.

Leon Russell was at the height of his powers in 1971

I was never a fan of Leon Russell's voice but as an arranger/producer/ringmaster he made a lot of great things happen. Quite a few of them happened in 1971.

He produced and played piano on "Watching The River Flow", which was one of Bob Dylan's great singles. He was the musical director of the Concert For Bangla Dash.

And he was instrumental in one of the very few blues/rock crossovers that worked and still works, Freddie King's 1971 album, "Getting Ready".

 It's got all Russell's signature touches: barrelhouse piano, swelling female choruses, the ear for a good song and driving rhythm. Best track is this one, which, I note, still sounded fresh enough to make the sig tune of the U.S. comedy show "Southbound And Down" a few years back. Take it away.

How a cheap marketing gimmick made Leonard Cohen a star

Seemed like my whole generation of college students bought "Songs of Leonard Cohen" in 1968.

Actually first of all they bought "The Rock Machine Turns You On". This was a cheap sampler album of all CBS's new "alternative" acts. Leonard Cohen's "Sisters Of Mercy" was at the end of side one. This was a time when Bob Dylan was writing happy songs and so there was an untapped market for a bit of dark. Leonard fitted the bill, particularly because he was an actual published poet. When Dylan was awarded the Nobel recently I couldn't help thinking it ought to have gone to Leonard Cohen. His songs had the discipline of poems.

I met him once, in the 80s at a party in New York, thrown by his record company to mark how many records he'd sold outside the United States. He wasn't a rock star; he was too polished, too comfortable with formality for that. Somebody from the record company made a speech. Standards aren't high when it comes to record company speeches. What I do remember is Leonard responding with one courtly-sounding sentence: "I'd like to thank you all for the modesty of your interest in my work."

Every time I saw him he always seem to be surrounded by a phalanx a beautiful young women, who clearly admired him greatly. That's one of the reasons I always got irritated with the jokes about "songs for swinging suicides" and the like. Far as I can see Leonard lived a full life and he always saw the funny side.

Thanks to the embezzlement of his retirement fund, he went back on tour late in life and got to enjoy a lap of honour such as no other artist has known. He died surrounded by his family, his affairs settled and his reputation higher than it had ever been.

I don't know if he knew the outcome of the U.S. election. This morning I heard him sing the line "There's a mighty judgement coming", which gave me a shiver. Then he adds "but I may be wrong." Cheers, old boy.

Has Billy Joel appointed his successor?

Nice story here about Michael DelGuidice, a musician who went from being in a Billy Joel tribute band to being hired by Joel to play in his band and help him out with the vocals.

The best tribute bands are better than the bands they're based on because they work harder at it and as soon as one member can't do the job they replace him.

The best backing singers are better than the singers they back because they're younger.

A few years back I saw the bus carrying "The Glenn Miller Orchestra". Obviously none of the original musicians and clearly no Glenn. They're licensed by Glenn Miller Productions. They keep the sound alive and cater for the audience that wants to hear that sound.

Maybe Billy Joel Productions will be doing the same thing in the future.

"Hillbilly Elegy" is a reminder just how foreign a lot of America is

Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how J.D. Vance made it from a very unpromising background - born into family of suspicious hillbilly folk transplanted from Kentucky to post-industrial Ohio, growing up amid domestic chaos with an addict mother and a succession of father figures - to an entirely new life as a successful lawyer and writer. It's been cited as a useful guide to what's persuading many Americans that Trump's the solution to what ails them.

He serves as an officer in the U.S. Marines, which helps pay for him to go to university and he gets into the law school at Yale, by which time you'd assume that he would have seen enough of the world outside Middletown, Ohio to be able to handle most social situations. It almost comes apart when at a dinner thrown by one of the big law firms who come to recruit at Yale he tastes sparkling water for the first time and is so unused to the taste that he spits it out in disgust.

No nation has a monopoly of insularity but one of the things about growing up in the UK is you're aware that there is a world out there bigger than the world of home. For a start there's the the other world you see every time you switch on the TV, which is usually America. You quickly learn the world is full of unfamiliar things, some of which you might encounter at some point, and you tend to be ready for them.

You couldn't make up the Jeremy Thorpe affair

Maybe A Very English Scandal is as good as it is is because John Preston couldn't publish it until Jeremy Thorpe died in 2014.

I like to think he used that time polishing his account of the Norman Scott affair until it gleams like a truly superior airport novel.

It couldn't be an actual airport novel. The story it tells is too tawdry. Instead of a climax it has a misfire. It's a misfire that fits perfectly with all the bungling that led to it. The two main protagonists both act as though the world owes them a living. Everybody else in the story is just used.

It's a story replete with English types no airport novelist would dare invent: Thorpe's cigar-smoking, monocle-wearing mother who lived on boiled eggs; the eccentric peer of the realm who played a saintly role in homosexual law reform and had badgers roaming free in his home; the chancer Peter Bessell who had to atone for his role as Thorpe's consigliere by living out his days in a one-room shack on a California beach; the extraordinary George Carman QC who could be mortally drunk at two in the morning and then rise in the morning to twist a jury round his little finger; the almost inevitable appearance in the narrative of Jimmy Saville.

I read it in a couple of sittings. It would make a great film. That'll never happen because no American could possibly begin to understand how weird England can be. Shame.

Farewell to the rock reference book

Before the internet I had to have rock reference books to do my job. If I wanted to know what year a record came out I had to look it up in a book. Ditto the spelling of the surname of a producer or the age some star was claiming to be. There was nowhere else you could go.

Some of these books, like Nick Logan and Bob Woffinden's "Encyclopaedia Of Rock", and the "Rolling Stone Record Guide", lived at the office because I needed them all the time. And in those days the market for rock books was quite small and so they had a habit of going out of print for years. If you lost one it was the devil's own job to replace it.

Today I put all my music books in one room so that at least I know where they are. I don't want to be searching for hours for a book about Black Sabbath, like I did yesterday. At first I was giving pride of place to the reference books in my sort but now I realise they're the ones I no longer need to have to hand. I literally never open them. Wonder if we'll ever see a rock reference book again.

This week's radio

My column about this week's radio from the Guardian Guide.