Why are people so sure Mike Love is the bad guy in The Beach Boys?

Mike Love issues a long statement to the Los Angeles Times about how he didn't "fire" Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys and why he had to curtail their large venue tour in order to fulfil his obligation to tour smaller venues with "his" Beach Boys.

If you can read past the jarring self-justification and gushing over-statement it seems he's got a case, which is not what so-called "true" Beach Boys fans, many of whom have rushed to social media to libel the singer, want to hear.

Love has always had what Paul Weller called a kind face. The kind of face you wanted to punch. He's the person that rock history has decided is the snake in the Garden of Eden the Wilson family would otherwise be. But how do we know? All bands are families, particularly ones that start out as families, and if we know one thing about families it is that they're immensely complicated and there's   plenty of blame to go round.

With long-lasting rock bands we pick out the member we have decided is the baddie and stick with it for long periods. It was Paul McCartney in the Beatles, Robbie Robertson in The Band, Steve Stills in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Roger Waters in Pink Floyd. The reasoning may change but once a person is cast as the villain any action they take will be interpreted in that light. Once the villain is chosen the rest of the cast can relax because anything they do will be seen as an understandable reaction to the tyrant in their midst.

The classic case of this is Mick Jagger. Those close to the Stones don't share the orthodox view that Keith is the soul of the group while Jagger is merely its accounts department. Keith never feels an encounter with the press is finished unless he has loosed off one shot at his old friend. He knows we'll all share in the joke because we all know Mick, right?  He also knows Jagger won't respond. I bet Mick could issue quite a few Mike Love-style statements if he chose to. But he doesn't.

50 years ago this month two great archetypes were born

Was on Five Live just now talking about the 50th anniversary of the first Beatles single and the first Bond movie and why they both continue to fascinate us. After I'd hung up the phone I remembered what I meant to say.

In his excellent 1964 book Love Me Do the American journalist Michael Braun suggested that one of the reasons they made such an impact on the London media was that they were "new kind of people". They were bright, sardonic, sharp without being educated and apparently possessed of a special secret known only to the four of them. In a way they were a template for the way every group has sought to behave ever since.

 You could say that in playing James Bond Sean Connery also presented the world with a new kind of person. Proud, sensual, cruel, sardonic, upwardly mobile and good at games, his Bond was a world away from the hero figures who had stalked British films in the forties and fifties. In a way he's been a template for the way every action hero has tried to behave ever since.

Maybe that's another reason they both endure.

In the 21st century all groups will reform

The latest rumour is that The Smiths will reform for Glastonbury next year. I don't know whether this is true. I doubt whether anyone does. But I wouldn't be surprised. All groups eventually reform because:
1. It's almost unknown for an individual to achieve as much outside a group as he did within a group.
2. And even if he did (as was probably the case with Sting) his name doesn't resound like theirs does.
3. Because the group has been off the market for years the price they can command is far greater than they could command as individuals.
4. There are always a couple of members who really need the money and no matter how bitter the relationships within the band you'd be very cold-hearted not to want to help them out.
5. Band reunions always come along when the solo career of the most bankable member has stalled or become routine.
6. Great excitement surrounds reunions and bands crave excitement.
7. All musicians reach a stage where they realise the best is behind them and they're just as keen to revisit those glory days as their fans.
8. In the last twenty years the life expectancy of pop brands has changed radically. It used to be that bands were at their most popular at the beginning of their careers. They're now far more popular at the end of their careers. Their fanbase is swelled by each new generation. There are far more people who want to see The Rolling Stones now than wanted to see them when they were in their pomp because in those days only people between the ages of 18 and 30 were interested.  Take That are far bigger now than they were in the early 90s. Leonard Cohen is still touring in front of crowds that dwarf the crowds he played in front of when he first recorded the songs he's delighting them with.

It will be the same with The Smiths. If they do reform they'll get their original fans plus the people who've decided that they're now Classic Rock plus the youngsters who are drawn to anything that looks like a legend. And all those tens of thousands of people who are drawn to whatever everybody else appears to be drawn to.

I haven't been so cross with a Virgin product since Beefheart's "Bluejeans And Moonbeams"

I don't have cable but I do have one of these directly outside my house. This one (left) in fact. It belongs to Virgin Media. The engineers obviously have trouble shutting it properly so they took to using masking tape on it. I've reported it repeatedly but nothing's been done to clean it up. When I take it to Twitter, as I have done more than once, Virgin Media's people direct me to their site where I report it (they want to know if it's got any racist grafitti on it) and still nothing's done. It's typical modern customer relations. Lots of time and trouble devoted to trying to assure me they're taking the problem seriously followed by no indication that they are.

I've found this one round the corner as well. I pass this one regularly and as far as I can see it's been open for six months. How the good people of Redacted Road resist the temptation to just reach inside, grab a fistful of multi-coloured fibre optic cables and yank them out is a tribute to their neighbourliness. Virgin Media really don't deserve them.

David Sedaris doesn't apologise or explain - which is why I like him

I'm beginning to like going to see people I know nothing about. A friend of ours booked some tickets to see David Sedaris at the Cadogan Hall on Friday night. I went along knowing nothing about him except he was popular and I'd once heard him read a story on a NPR podcast. He came on at 7:35, read three stories about things that had happened to him, took a few questions and at 9:05 went out in the lobby to sign books. He was funny. I enjoyed it a lot.

What I really liked about him was that at no point did he do what so many people who are in the business of making us laugh do, which is position themselves. He didn't follow every description of an unworthy thought or action with an assurance that he wasn't that kind of person. In the three stories he read he talked about his fancy to own the skeleton of a pygmy, the fact that he simply can't relax if he knows there's an unmade bed in the house and his discovery that some people in a public lavatory defecate into their hands to avoid the sound of turds splashing into the water. To hear thoughts like this coming from a neat middle-aged American was relaxing in a way that most comedy isn't.

We don't remember Frank Wilson but his records are written on our hearts

This morning in a moment of serendipity I found this in a pile and put it on. I've always had a soft spot for the streak of hits The Supremes made after Diana Ross left. "Nathan Jones", "Stoned Love", "Floy Joy", "Bad Weather", "Automatically Sunshine" and "Up To The Ladder To The Roof": this would be a recognised as a major pop career if it didn't happen to live in the shadow of the hits made by the original line-up. I love their brisk sexiness, that sense of life in the projects recalled from the back of a limo in "Up The Ladder To The Roof", the arrangement of "Bad Weather" which anticipates what Stevie Wonder was about to unleash and a sound which is little more supper-club than classic Motown. Now I read that Frank Wilson, who produced these and lots more Motown records, died yesterday. He didn't even get his name on the cover of this compilation of his records.

So, farewell, Aasmah Mir

The departure of Aasmah Mir from BBC Five Live removes half of one of the BBC's great on-air partnerships.

Peter Allen, her Drivetime partner, is old school. If anything he's even less impressed with the modern world than John Humphreys. You can't help warming to a man who is so determined not to fall in with fashionable enthusiasms and has a memory that goes back further than Tony Blair.

Mir, a Pakistani by descent and Glaswegian by upbringing, is clearly of a different generation but, apart from being a really good broadcaster, she clearly had enough rapport with Allen to play the only niece who could josh him out of his sulks. And she has one of the greatest gifts a radio presenter can have, which is an attractive laugh. I'll miss the pair of them.

1971 was the annus mirabilis of the rock album - and here's the proof

I've written before about how the year 1971 was the annus mirabilis of the rock album. It wasn't until I sat down yesterday and compiled a Spotify list of tracks from albums released in that one calendar year that I realised just how true it is.

The first bit of the list writes itself. This is the year of Hunky Dory, Sticky Fingers, Every Picture Tells A Story, Pink Floyd's Meddle, Elton John's Madman Across the Water, Who's Next and Led Zeppelin IV. Those are just the British ones. Think about it. If there had been a Mercury Music Prize in 1971 these would have been on the shortlist. These would be the Arctic Monkeys and Pulps of their day. The shortlist would possibly have been rounded out by a few token left-field items like John Martyn's Bless The Weather, No Roses by Shirley Collins and the Albion Band or Steeleye Span's Ten Man Mop.

In California Joni Mitchell was putting out Blue, The Doors LA Woman, James Taylor Mud Slide Slim, David Crosby If I Could Only Remember My Name, Graham Nash Songs For Beginners and Carole King Tapestry. It was the year of California.

King was one of a number of artists to put out more than one album in 1971: she released Music later the same year, McCartney followed Ram with the first Wings album Wildlife while Yes followed The Yes Album with Fragile - all in the same twelve months. Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood had enough songs for The Move's Message From The Country and the first Electric Light Orchestra album. Rod Stewart recorded one solo album and two albums with the Faces in that same time.

The strength of the list is even more amazing when you consider the people who didn't put out a record of new material in 1971: Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Richard Thompson to name but three. The first version of this playlist was only forty-three tunes. It's now up to 106 tracks and it will probably grow further.

Most of the music on this list was made by people under the age of thirty-two. The exceptions are Leonard Cohen, Bill Withers, Isaac Hayes, Albert King, Elvis Presley, Tom T. Hall and, Freddie King. There's a huge preponderance of war babies. Most of them were twenty-six. I was listening to Who's Next yesterday and marvelling at how this bunch of yobs from Shepherd's Bush could possibly have become so good so quickly. Hardly anyone who made the music on this list spent any time in further education. They were on the road as teenagers.

They were almost all releasing the records that would come to define them. If any of them were on stage tonight - as quite a few of them will be - the songs the audience would want them to play are the songs on these albums that they released in 1971.

Like footballers yet to have their first serious injury, they were writing songs as if it never occurred to them that one day they might run out. And they were doing it while on a never-ending tour. Nobody was going off to an island to write some new material. They didn't look down. They just kept on pedalling.

They all seemed, in one way or another, to be original. Even those few who were reaching back to an old tradition, such as the New Riders of The Purple Sage, Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks, Steeleye Span or Ry Cooder seemed to be doing it for the first time. The music they were playing even they had never heard before. Some, like Doctor John, were to carry on making and re-making their 1971 album for the next forty years.

A few, such as The Band, had passed their peak. Some, like the Bee Gees, were about to go into a slump from which they would re-emerge bigger and better. Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Steve Goodman would die very young.

Most of the music on this list was made to be played on the same radio to the same people. Formatting hadn't yet driven people off into ghettoes where they only heard what they already liked. Even at the snobbier end, I would guess that John Peel would have played everything on this list.

I was surprised at the fact that the cult Californian acts of the 70s were already around as the last chords of the sixties faded away. Little Feat had released their first. Ry Cooder was on to his third. Randy Newman was marking time with a live album. Neil Young was trying out the songs for his 1972 album Harvest when he recorded Live At Massey Hall. I cheated here because this record only came out in 2007.

Live albums were coming into fashion. Most of these acts would have prepared new material on stage before trying to record it, just as Neil Young was doing. You could make a top ten of live albums made at the Fillmore that year, from the Allman Brothers top-of-the-world masterpiece to Humble Pie's impudent manifesto, recorded largely when they were a support act.

Whenever I trot out the argument that 1971 was the annus mirabilis of the rock album, just as 1965 was the annus mirabilis of the pop single, people say, well, we all do that with our youth. And we all do.

The difference is I'm right. This list proves it.

P.S. There's no Led Zeppelin on Spotify. Otherwise that list would be even more amazing.

For the benefit of people who can't get Spotify, here's the song titles and the artists,

The Who – Baba O'Riley - Original Version
Rod Stewart – Mandolin Wind
The Rolling Stones – Moonlight Mile - 2009 Re-Mastered Digital Version
Joni Mitchell – Little Green
David Bowie – The Bewlay Brothers - 1999 Digital Remaster
The Doors – Riders On The Storm - Remaster
Marvin Gaye – Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)
The Allman Brothers Band – Statesboro Blues - Live At The Fillmore East/1971
Carole King – It's Too Late
T. Rex – Life's A Gas
Yes – Roundabout
Sly & The Family Stone – Family Affair - Single Version
Paul McCartney – Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey
Janis Joplin – Mercedes Benz
Elton John – Tiny Dancer
Cat Stevens – Tuesday's Dead
John Prine – Illegal Smile
David Crosby – Laughing
The Beach Boys – 'Til I Die
Nilsson – Without You - Remastered 2004
Santana – Toussaint L'Overture
Graham Nash – Wounded Bird
Alice Cooper – Under My Wheels
Dolly Parton – Coat Of Many Colors
Van Morrison – Wild Night - 2007 Re-mastered
Bill Withers – Ain't No Sunshine
Don McLean – American Pie
James Taylor – Hey Mister, That's Me Up On The Jukebox
Emerson, Lake & Palmer – Pictures At An Exhibition: The Great Gates Of Kiev - Live At Newcastle City Hall, 1971
Kris Kristofferson – The Pilgrim - Chapter 33
Flamin' Groovies – Teenage Head
Todd Rundgren – We Gotta Get You A Woman
Aretha Franklin – Oh Me Oh My [I'm A Fool For You Baby] [Album Version]
J.J. Cale – Call Me The Breeze
Isaac Hayes – Theme From Shaft - Album - Remastered
Little Feat – Brides Of Jesus
Electric Light Orchestra (Elo) – 10538 Overture - 2001 - Remaster
John Martyn – Singin' In The Rain
Kevin Ayers – Stranger In Blue Suede Shoes - 1999 Digital Remaster
Jimi Hendrix – Angel
Gene Clark – For A Spanish Guitar
Randy Newman – Tickle Me
The Kinks – Muswell Hillbilly
Serge Gainsbourg – Ballade De Melody Nelson
Albion Country Band – Claudy Banks
Al Green – I Can't Get Next To You
Judee Sill – Jesus Was A Cross Maker
Barbra Streisand – Stoney End
The Move – Do Ya
Stevie Wonder – Never Dreamed You'd Leave In Summer
Colin Blunstone – Say You Don't Mind
Leonard Cohen – Dress Rehearsal Rag
Mountain – Nantucket Sleighride (To Owen Coffin)
Leon Russell – Stranger In A Strange Land
Michael Nesmith And The First National Band – Grand Ennui
Traffic – The Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys
The J. Geils Band – Floyd's Hotel
Lindisfarne – Fog On The Tyne - 2004 - Remaster
Boz Scaggs – Runnin' Blue
James Brown – Hot Pants (She Got To Use What She Got To Get What She Wants)
Neil Young – Helpless - Live At Massey Hall 1971
Family – Larf And Sing
The Staple Singers – Respect Yourself
Sandy Denny – Late November
Stephen Stills – Change Partners
Procol Harum – Broken Barricades
John Lennon – Jealous Guy
Tony Joe White – They Caught The Devil And Put Him In Jail In Eudora, Arkansas
Dr. John – Where Ya At Mule
Tom T. Hall – The Year That Clayton Delaney Died
Genesis – The Return Of The Giant Hogweed
Humble Pie – Four Day Creep
Bee Gees – How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?
Carly Simon – Anticipation
Jimmy Webb – Met Her On A Plane
Loudon Wainwright III – Motel Blues
Ry Cooder – On A Monday
Elvis Presley – Little Cabin On The Hill
Frank Zappa – Peaches En Regalia - Live At Fillmore East / 1971
Danny O'Keefe – Good Time Charlie's Got The Blues
Osibisa – Beautiful Seven - Digitally Remastered Version
King Curtis – A Whiter Shade Of Pale - Live @ Fillmore West
Don Nix – Living By The Days
Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks – Shorty Falls In Love - Live (1971 Troubadour)
The Chi-Lites – Have You Seen Her
Freddie King – Going Down
ZZ Top – Squank
Crazy Horse – Downtown
Faces – Had Me A Real Good Time
Hot Tuna – Keep Your Lamps Trimmed And Burning
The Band – Life Is A Carnival - 2000 Digital Remaster
The Isley Brothers – Ohio/Machine Gun
John Stewart – Little Road and a Stone to Roll
Steeleye Span – When I Was On Horseback
Grin – We All Sung Together
Steve Goodman – City Of New Orleans
Rory Gallagher – Laundromat - Remastered 2011
Neil Diamond – I Am...I Said
Can – Paperhouse
Jethro Tull – Aqualung
America – Ventura Highway
New Riders Of The Purple Sage – Glendale Train
Albert King – She Caught The Katy (And Left Me A Mule To Ride)
The Hollies – Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress)
Roberta Flack – Go Up Moses
Caetano Veloso – London London
Carpenters – Rainy Days And Mondays
Status Quo – Mean Girl
The Moody Blues – The Story In Your Eyes
Linda Ronstadt – Rock Me On The Water
Dory Previn – Mary C. Brown And The Hollywood Sign
The Temptations – Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)
Johnny Cash – Man In Black
Laura Nyro;LaBelle – I Met Him On A Sunday
Bridget St John – City-Crazy
Gilbert O'Sullivan – Nothing Rhymed
The Supremes – Nathan Jones
Ike & Tina Turner – Proud Mary
Todd Rundgren – Long Flowing Robe
Carole King – Brother, Brother
Yes – I've Seen All Good People: a. Your Move, b. All Good People

Musicians are just waking up when their audience is going to sleep

I found this in my notes. I'd been struck by how rock musicians and their audiences share ninety minutes of a kind of communion in the evening but have completely different ways of looking at the day. It makes me wonder whether the time might ever come when the live music industry recognises the fact that since most of the audience is over forty they might prefer their shows to start a little earlier.

6:00 a.m. 
Rock fan's alarm goes.
Rock musician turns over in his sleep.
7:30 a.m.
Rock fan begins tiring commute.
Rock musician sleeps on.
8:30 a.m.
Rock fans begins work.
Rock musician does more sleeping
12:30 p.m.
Rock fan has lunch and starts to worry about how he's getting home from tonight's gig.
Rock musician stirs and watches Loose Women in bed.
2:00 p.m.
Rock fan begins meeting.
Rock musician has leisurely shower.
3:00 p.m.
Rock fan buys chocolate bar to provide energy surge.
Rock musician meets in lobby to go to sound check.
5:00 p.m.
Rock fan wonders how he's going to pass three and a half hours between work and gig.
Rock musician begins sound check
6:00 p.m.
Rock fan finishes work and toys with the idea of going straight home and missing gig altogether.
Rock musician starts to wake up.
8:00 p.m.
Rock fan goes to venue and looks for place to stand and, being less than six foot three, actually see.
Rock musician has a nap backstage.
9:30 p.m.
Rock fan looks at watch for the hundredth time.
Rock musician take to stage.
11:00 p.m.
Rock fan misses encore and slopes off to catch last train home.
Fired up with adrenaline rock musician begins encore.
12:30 a.m.
Rock fans tramps home from station feeling tired and filthy.
Rock musician goes to bar.      

When London was a mystery and Time Out had the key

Time Out goes to free distribution this week. I wish them the best of luck. It might work. If it doesn't it's difficult to see where they go next. According to The Times, "circulation as a paid-for title had almost halved since its late-Nineties’ peak of 110,000". I suspect that if it really was selling 55,000 copies a week on the news stand they wouldn't be making this move.

I was talking about music and media at the Reeperbahn Conference in Hamburg last week. One of the things I tried to get through to a younger audience is just how the communications revolution of the last ten years has made it difficult for us to remember the world before that revolution, when there was still such a thing as scarcity.

No title benefited from that scarcity quite as much as Time Out. In the golden era of Time Out, which went from the mid-70s to the 90s, if you wanted to know what was on at your local cinema or whether that film you wanted to see was on somewhere else, you went to Time Out. If you needed the phone number of the Hammersmith Odeon box office, you went to Time Out. If you wanted to know who QPR were going to be playing at the weekend, whether you could get a ticket and where the nearest tube was, you went to Time Out. If you wanted a vegetarian restaurant in East London, you went to Time Out.

It pulled off lots of coups in terms of design and journalism but beneath the surface it operated as a sort of alternative telephone directory. That's what made it sell. I can't remember the last time I looked up a phone number on paper and called it.

The power of positive napping

This shot comes from a series of pictures of school classrooms all over the world taken by Julian Germain. It's shot in Taiwan. After the kids have had lunch they just put their heads down on the desks and have a half-hour nap.

I was in Japan once on a long coach journey with a load of teenagers and young adults. I turned round from staring out of the window to see that they were all asleep. I was very envious. Presumably this is a Far Eastern thing.

Alfred Hitchcock's dirty postcard from London

I never get tired of watching Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy because it's a precious memento of London before Style. It was made in 1972 when the old fruit market was still in Covent Garden and barristers in morning dress discuss "sex murders" with unseemly relish over pints of bitter and shepherd's pie in Nell Of Old Drury. Jon Finch plays a boozy ex-RAF officer whose estranged wife runs a dating agency in one of those little rookeries that used to lead off Oxford Street. She takes him to dinner at her club where middle-aged ladies in hats are served by other ladies in bombazine. The police drive Rover 2000s and tuck into full English breakfasts. When Finch takes Anna Massey to the Coburg Hotel they have to check in as Mr and Mrs Oscar Wilde and the hall porter asks if he wants "anything from the pharmacy". Nobody in the film seems young, which simply wouldn't be allowed nowadays.

It opens with a helicopter shot coming up the river from the east, ducking under Tower Bridge and then swooping through the smoke left by a tugboat crossing the Thames. Tugboats! Smoke! It climaxes with a struggle in the back of a lorryload of potatoes. Hitchcock never made a seedier film but then he never made a film that had a more precise sense of place. At the time he made it he hadn't lived or worked here for thirty years but he still had a vision of London. There isn't a glimpse of the swinging city that everybody else was busy putting on film round about the same time. Maybe he just ignored all that and made the film that was in his head. I'm very glad he did.

Re-reading Ragtime by the light of the web

I first read Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow in the late-70s, not long after it was published. It's set on the East Coast of the USA in the early days of the 20th century and many of its characters are real historical figures. There are internationally-known ones like Harry Houdini and Sigmund Freud. Then there are people like Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit (pictured), best known to students of American history.

I've been reading it again, only this time there is one huge difference. This time I know that every person, place, event, device, fashion, city, district, mode of transport, incident, meeting, style, advertisement, invention, fad, gimmick, building or work of art mentioned in the text is available on the web on just a couple of clicks.

This has two interesting effects. It makes me wonder how much I bothered looking things up in reference books when I read the novel first time round. Did I just treat it all as an invention embroidered on top of fact and just read round the bits I couldn't decipher? Did I accept that finding out things was quite an onerous task? (I've just read a passage where J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford dine on Chincoteagues, which I now learn are ponies.)

Just as it was onerous for me back then I assumed it took an equally special effort on the part of the novelist to build this whole world for me. Reading it today with an iPad at hand is to realise to what extent Doctorow must have written his book by looking at a lot of old pictures and simply describing them. At that time this probably meant a lot of time spent at the New York Public Library going through their collections of news photographs, which seemed impressive in itself.

I'm sure that when Doctorow is no longer around to object Ragtime will be published in a pictorial version so that you won't even have to go to the trouble of firing up a web browser. What price fiction when that happens?

Avoid famous people doing you a favour

Clint Eastwood says that before he gave his speech at the Republican Convention the organisers wanted to know what he was going to say.

"They vet most of the people, but I told them, 'You can't do that with me, because I don't know what I'm going to say,'"

He says he got the idea for his bizarre dialogue with an empty stool as he was waiting to go on.

Think about that. How fragile must your hold on reality be if  you think that the idea which occurred to you a few seconds ago will enthral an entire nation?

He was supposed to do five minutes. He did twelve. Usually when things over-run it's because the speech is going over well. Not even a huge movie star who spends their lives in a warm bath of acclaim can possibly have thought that was the case here.

Here's what I've learned about public speaking. The only good public speakers are the nervous ones. I've found this to be true on big platforms and in tiny rooms above pubs.

Anyone who tells you they're nervous will be fine. Anyone who tells you they're not nervous will be a disaster. And, what's more, they'll be so lacking in awareness that afterwards they won't know how badly it's gone.

This applies with humans but even more with celebrities. There's something in the make-up of famous people that leads them to believe they can get on their feet and compose something funny and inspiring with no preparation.

I once took part in a high-profile debate which involved a rock star. I've done lots of public speaking which is why I sweated on my preparation. He'd done none which is why he thought he could just stand up and do it. He couldn't. Oh boy, he couldn't. And I bet, like Clint Eastwood, he still doesn't know how badly he did.

Mark Ellen and I have discussed this many times over the years in planning events. Through bitter experience we learned that you should particularly beware a star who thinks they're doing you a favour. If they think they're doing you a favour they will have been inadequately briefed about the nature of the event by their representatives, will do no preparation before the event and then at the last minute will be so paralysed with nerves and self-consciousness that they'll launch into a riff which has no ending, usually one that disparages the event in a clumsy effort to look above it all. Avoid them.

It's a recording contract, not a marriage

Some resourceful plugger managed to get the story of Bill Fay on the Today programme this morning. Fay made a couple of albums in the early 70s and then there was nothing until recently when he was swept up in the 21st century campaign to rediscover just about every singer-songwriter from that golden era. Best of luck to him.

The key phrase that made the narrative work for a news programme was that Fay was "dropped by his record company" in 1971. You can hear that being pitched to the producer, repeated to the editor, briefed to the presenter and then said feelingly during the item.

"Dropped by his record company" is a recent expression. Before that people would say "his popularity declined". "Dropped by his record company" comes from the era of boy bands and it implies a complete withdrawal of the only source of funding. It is taken to mean "cast into the outer darkness". It means "going home with your tail between your legs". It means "game over".

In fact record companies rarely "drop" anyone. They simply decline to renew the contract, double their initial bet and throw good money after bad.

When Bill Fay made those two records for Decca subsidiary Deram in 1970-71 a record deal would probably be for just one album with an option for another. Round about the same time East Of Eden made just two albums for Deram and they had a hit single. Most acts on Deram, like most acts on most labels, never got to make an album at all.

Fay made his two, the market shrugged, the radio passed and the press weren't bothered and so Deram decided they didn't want any more. This was the right decision, not an act of cultural vandalism.

 I'm always amazed that the same people who want record companies to stick with unsuccessful acts for longer are the same people who want the record companies to spend all their time looking for fresh new talent. If they do one they can't do the other.

At last I can name the mystery band who came to stand for ROCK

Sorting stuff out this weekend I came upon this copy of the NME Encyclopedia of Rock. This came out in 1976 and was edited by Nick Logan, who taught me to proof-read and Bob Woffinden, who gave me the invaluable advice "don't ever use the word 'feel' as a noun". (Amazing what you remember.)

Before the internet this was the place you went if you wanted to check how many records Paul Kossoff had made or Joni Mitchell's date of birth. I tweeted about it and I clearly wasn't the only one who remembered it with great affection. Some had committed whole sections to memory. David Quantick said he taught himself to write reviews by reading it. One person could only afford the unillustrated version and used to borrow the pictorial version from the library.

Looking at it I remembered the many hours we used to spend trying to work out the identity of the group on the front. Again I wasn't the only one. Even Nick Logan didn't know. It had been the publisher's choice. The guesses came in. Budgie? Mountain? Wishbone Ash? Mahogany Rush? Rush? Can? Steve Hillage and Gong? Iron Butterfly?

I have to thank Mark Blake for giving me the correct answer. It's Quiver, an excellent group who subsequently merged with the Sutherland Brothers and had Tim Renwick and Bruce Thomas among their number.

The person who took the photograph was Robert Ellis, who also supplied the picture of Pink Floyd on the back. "It was deliberately chosen to be obscure," he told me. "They were first band on at the first show at the newly opened Rainbow Theatre, Finsbury Park London, supporting the Who, in November 1971. The cover of the book deceives the eye. My original photo, which I still have, shows the four members of the band."

What do you do with old magazines?

Just that. What do you do with the buggers? I just opened a box which has been gathering dust in my office for ten years and was amazed what I found. Impenetrably dense issues of ZigZag from the days of punk rock, thirty-year-old copies of Rolling Stone, cultish Anglophile music magazines like Bomp! and Trouser Press from the mid-70s, editions of The Face from the days when you'd forgotten it was still going and lots of things I've worked on myself. For years I used to have the magazines I'd worked on myself put in bound volumes. This means they're in good condition but I hardly ever look at them.

But why did I keep these magazines in the boxes? Often because they cost money, were hard to track down at the time and would be impossible to replace. At the time in the mid-70s when I was originally enthralled by John Tobler's interviews with Mike Nesmith or Nick Kent's look back at the Beach Boys I suppose I thought I would never get that kind of treat again. Little did anyone suspect that in forty years time people would still be twining out glossier versions of the same thing. Nostalgia would prove to have a future that nobody could have predicted.

I look at these magazines now and I wonder what to do with them. Once I put them back in this box I'll never get them out again. They're not sufficiently organised for me to ever use them as a form of reference. If I wanted to find particular pieces I could probably Google them or I could easily email somebody who would have them. They're not worth any money on the secondhand market. And they're dust magnets. When I first packed them away I was a young bloke trying to hang on to my youth. Why the hell am I hanging on to them now?

The kind of David Bowie exhibition I'd like to see

At today's press launch for the exhibition David Bowie Is, which is coming up next March at the V&A, they had three of his costumes on display. There was the Ashes To Ashes pierrot suit, the Union flag frock coat designed by Alexander McQueen and one of the Ziggy Stardust outfits, for which the brief was droog via Laura Ashley.

The people talking about the exhibition were keen to stress that it was more than a display of costumes, which suggests that it will be a display of costumes. Seeing famous outfits on mannequins always leaves me somewhat underwhelmed. What they should really do is let you try them on.

I was trying to think of the kind of memorabilia exhibition I would really like to see. I guess mine would be less spectacular, more suited to the detailed displays you could pore over in glass cases than the high-impact items around which most exhibitions are built. When we go round art galleries my wife looks at the pictures first and then at the captions. I look at the captions first and then the pictures. I've decided I'm a narrative person.

That's why I'd like to see his childhood bedroom recreated, displays of Bromley town centre through the years, old school books, cheap guitars, bassdrum pedals, a chronology of his haircuts, marked-up tape boxes, old contracts, personal letters, sketches, false starts, crossings-out, studio logs, mixing consoles, bits of kit, clipping from FAB 208, preposterous film scripts, storyboards for videos, things thrown on stage by fans and, most of all, a royalty statement for Tin Machine.

A little light music in the morning

Last night Danny Baker was wondering how come Harry Nilsson never got the respect he deserved. Maybe it's because he played light music. The music we take seriously is the music that seems to take itself seriously. On Harry, which was made in 1969, he even sings about puppies at one point, which was never going to get the rock critics stroking their goatees in approval. Where's the dark and edgy in that?

I don't know who Mike Viola is. I looked him up a  couple of months ago but I've forgotten what I learned and the more I enjoy Acousto De Perfecto the less interested I am in finding out. I'm sure it would only prejudice me. His voice reminds me a bit of Harry Nilsson, particularly on Primary Care Giver. Most of the record is just him on acoustic guitar plus two people playing violas.

Like Nilsson's records, Viola's sound a little like doodles. There's a line in Secret Radio about songwriting that I like. "Not all of them are worth finishing/But you've got to finish them to see".

You can find them both on Spotify.

Sympathy for the devil (or Frankie Boyle)

I don't go seeking after Frankie Boyle but I sympathise with the position he's in. Channel 4, like the BBC before them, hire him because he's outrageous and then fire him because he's outrageous. It's as if they're gleefully egging him on to let fly with the barbs but as soon as one of them lands on a group they perceive as "vulnerable" (one of the weasel words of our time) they hastily compose their features to indicate disapproval and ask him to step into the office.

It was the same with Russell Brand during his time on Radio Two. You hire him because he goes a notch further than Jonathan Ross and then fire him because he's gone two notches further. That's the nature of the beast. If you tell somebody that their appeal lies in their outrageousness you must expect them to aspire to outrageousness, which can be quite easily measured by the number of times they cross the line, rather than humour, which is a lot more subjective. And harder.

Why would The Economist cut its best writing?

I know all the pieces in the Economist are unsigned but from time to time they produce passages of prose that you want to read more than once. A few days ago they published on their website an obituary of Neil Armstrong, which contained this paragraph:

Perhaps the most unexpected consequence of the moon flights was a transformation of attitudes towards Earth itself. Space was indeed beautiful, but it was beauty of a severe, geometrical sort. Planets and stars swept through the cosmos in obedience to Isaac Newton’s mathematical clockwork, a spectacle more likely to inspire awe than love. Earth was a magnificent contrast, a jewel hung in utter darkness, an exuberant riot of chaos and life in a haunting, abyssal emptiness. The sight had a profound effect on the astronauts, and photos of the whole Earth, which had never been seen before, nourished the nascent green movement.

I found the thought really striking and the image of the jewel hung in utter darkness particularly memorable. I tweeted about it. Quite a few people agreed and re-tweeted it.

This morning I was reading the print edition and there's the obituary. It's been cut, partly for fit, but also presumably to dampen down its lyricism. The above paragraph now reads:

Yet the flights had one huge unintended consequence: they transformed attitiudes towards Earth itself. He too had been astonished to see his own planet "quite beautiful", remote and very blue, covered with a white lace of clouds. 

I know Samuel Johnson said you should read your work back, find the bit you like best and strike it out, but this is ridiculous.

What Mick Jagger knows that Obama doesn't

Interesting short piece here saying that Obama isn't very good at schmoozing wealthy donors, which you have to do when running in a Presidential election. He particularly finds it tiresome to pose for photographs with them, which is basically what they want. Clinton didn't find it tiresome.

The grip-and-grin on the wall of the office, den or lavatory says more about the person who put it there than cash ever can. It costs the gripper no more than a few seconds. For the grinner it's beyond price. The grip is firm, practised and over before it's begun. The grin makes the junior partner in the pairing look vaguely foolish, as if they've been goosed and quite enjoyed it.

As Obama's disbelieving fundraisers say “They just want a picture of themselves with the President that they can hang on the bathroom wall, so that their friends can see it when they take a piss.”

Obama could learn here from Mick Jagger, who has had a slightly longer career. There's a sequence in the film about the Rolling Stones playing Copacabana Beach in 2006 in which they lurch from room to room before the gig purely to have their pictures taken with groups of clearly thrilled corporate sponsors. Each interaction takes about a minute. The Stones know it could be worth a zero on the cheque on some future tour. Not for nothing do Mick and Keith call themselves the Glimmer Twins. They know the power of giving people just a glimmer of stardust.

Even Bruce Springsteen, who used to avoid this kind of thing, appreciates glimmer power. When he turned up at the BFI to launch The Promise a couple of years ago he was installed at a stool in the bar afterwards as a queue of hacks, media powerbrokers and even Rob Brydon lined up to have their thirty seconds of joshing conversation before getting what they'd come for, a souvenir of having occupied the same actual physical space as him.

Earlier this year our son was involved in organising an event at which Bill Clinton was speaking. Make sure you get a picture taken with him, we joked and then never thought any more of it. Then it arrived. In focus. Everybody smiling. Bill knows.

Who remembers actual pay packets?

The man from the BBC was interviewing Martin Sorrell this morning about his "pay packet". Considering this is almost seven million pounds a year I assume he was being flip.

But then I hear about Premier League footballers "putting in a shift", busy midfielders described as "grafters" and Adebayor's £150,000 a week referred to as "wages" and I wonder how long that whole world of factory work and weekly wages will have to be dead before people stop reaching back to it as a source of metaphor. It's as if we can only deal with silly money by comparing it to the dimly-remembered serious sort.

 Sorrell is probably old enough to have done a holiday job where he was paid in a brown envelope. I doubt the same thing could be said of his interrogator.

When I worked "on the bins" in the early 70s the Securicor van would draw up in the yard on Friday morning. We would queue at the van's window to be handed our money in sealed envelopes. These had a cellophane panel through which you could count the carefully folded notes. There were also tiny holes through which you could check the coins, all without breaking the seal. I can remember the heavy breathing of the men as they counted.

50 years ago this week the Fifties ended and the Sixties began

Fifty years ago this week, in the last week of August 1962, the last summer of the old world was drawing to a close. Nobody knew it at the time. Nobody knew that the following year, 1963, was going to see Beatlemania, Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech and Bob Dylan singing “Blowing In The Wind”.

During the summer of 1962, in Liverpool, Chelsea, Jamaica, Los Angeles and New York, a handful of odd young people were plotting their careers, although they wouldn't have called them that. They didn’t dream that anyone would care the following year, let alone fifty years later.

On August 16th 1962 The Beatles sacked their drummer Pete Best. EMI said he wasn't good enough. Ringo Starr was in bed at home when his mother announced Brian Epstein was outside. In 1962 not everyone had a phone.

On July 12th 1962 the Rollin' Stones played their first show at the Marquee Club. Their eighteen-song set featured six tunes by Jimmy Reed. Ian Stewart said at the time Mick, Keith and Brian were literally the only people in the UK at all familiar with this music. It’s difficult to convey today just how far underground Chess rhythm and blues was in America at that time, let along in the UK.

Peter Stringfellow started the Black Cat Club in summer 1962, in St Aiden’s Church Hall in Sheffield. 15-year old David Jones was in a group called The Kon-Rads, who played a few shows around Bromley in Kent. They made a single at Decca's studios in West Hampstead on August 30th 1962. He left soon after because he wanted to play rhythm and blues and changed his name to David Bowie.

Mick Jagger moved into a flat in Chelsea where he was joined by Keith Richards and Brian Jones. Jagger was still a student at the LSE at the time, though he wouldn’t go back in September. He wasn't the only young person that summer trying to choose between higher education – just 4% of 18-year-olds went to university in 1962 – and a future for which there was no template. In California Al Jardine left the Beach Boys, who had already had a local hit with Surfin', to go to college and study dentistry. In New York Paul Simon was studying English Literature at Queens College while making demos for music publishers in his spare time.

In August 1962 Robert Zimmerman, who had already made a whole long player, changed his name legally to Bob Dylan. There was no way he was going home to Hibbing with that name.

In July 1962 Andy Warhol unveiled his first one-man exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. The exhibition consisted of thirty-two individual canvases of cans for different flavours of Campbell's soup. A young actor called Dennis Hopper bought one for $100.

In the summer of 1962 Joe Orton was serving his six-month sentence for defacing library books. Wilfred Brambell, star of the BBC’s comedy hit of the year Steptoe and Son, was arrested in a gentlemen’s lavatory on Shepherd’s Bush Green, not far from where his fictional character collected rags and bones.

In Jamaica, which became independent on August 6th 1962, the 16-year old Bob Marley released his first record, a cover of a US country and western hit called One Cup Of Coffee, under the name Bobby Martell.

The communications satellite Telstar was launched on July 10th 1962. Within days producer Joe Meek had his Holloway Road studio working on the instrumental of the same name, which came out on August 17th. This was just two weeks after Marilyn Monroe had been found dead at the age of thirty-six.

Edward and Florence, the honeymoon couple in Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach dined in their hotel room in July 1962, possibly even on the same night the Rollin’ Stones were playing Jimmy Reed at the Marquee, in “an era when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.”

In the summer of 1962 nobody guessed youth was something you could prolong. The events of the coming winter, a cold one, would change all that. Not all the people who shivered through that winter, hatching plans for their own little careers, became as famous as The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Andy Warhol, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson. Not all of them had a name which still resounds into the following century. Obviously there had to be a time when the rest of us hadn’t heard of them. What’s more amazing, given the way they and the sixties remain yoked together in the public imagination all these years later, is that there was ever a time when they hadn’t heard of each other.

My ten laws of record collecting

I've spent the weekend trying to tidy up my vinyl. This exercise forced me to admit to myself that I've got too much. I don't mean too much in the sense of "you can't possibly listen to it all", as my mother used to say. I mean too many records that I'm not all that bothered about and quite a few that I don't think I'll ever listen to. To give you an idea, a flick through the F's yields albums by Floy Joy, The Family Stand and Friends Again plus a solo album by Andy Fraser.

Of course, you just accumulate records over the years. You buy some. In my job you get given others. Then you start hanging on to the third album because you quite liked the first one, which is no way to carry on. If you were born in a certain era you never shake off the feeling that records are precious even when they're clearly not.

If I was starting again now, this is what I'd do:

1. I would have fewer records by more people. There are a couple of dozen rock acts who have made more than two great LPs. In most cases two is plenty.
2. Buy more singles and fewer LPs. Anybody worth their salt can condense their talent into a hit single. As a genre rock albums get far too much reverence and pop singles don't get nearly enough.
3. Don't worry about formats. They're all provisional. They go in and out of favour. Look at all the people who "let their vinyl go" and have kicked themselves ever since.
4. Don't bother with Greatest Hits albums. Nobody ever fell in love with a Greatest Hits album. Now that everything is going to be in the Cloud for ever there's really no reason for them at all.
5. Don't bother "keeping up" with music. In general the best music is the oldest. As you get older you appreciate music that once seemed merely quaint. Louis Armstrong's been dead since 1971 but he'll never be as dead as [insert name of overrated contemporary artist here].
6. Don't say "I like all kinds of things". Everybody thinks they've got broad taste. The more music you listen to the more you're aware of how much you've yet to hear.
7. Buy more records by black musicians. Records made by black musicians are usually better than records made by white musicians. Most record collections have too much of the latter and not enough of the former.
8. Don't bother alphabetising your records. Now that any tune you want to hear is a couple of clicks away you should approach your shelves in search of inspiration rather than enquiry.
9. Don't worry if you let a record go. There is an angel watching over record lovers to ensure that you never ditch anything you are intended to hang on to. 
10. Don't waste time trying to like things you don't like because you think you ought to. It's supposed to be popular music, for God's sake.

So I went to the Proms at the Albert Hall

I went to the Proms on Tuesday night, to hear the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra play Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony. It's the first time in my life I'd been to a classical concert. I've been to the opera and the ballet quite a few times but this is the first time I've seen and heard a full-blown 100-piece orchestra playing in front of devotees.

The quality of the silence is different. During the quiet passages - which achieve a quietness which would be impossible at even the most sympathetic acoustic rock show - the only noises that six thousand people make are the involuntary ones: a cough, a shifting buttock, a stomach gurgling.

There are almost a hundred players on the stage but only rarely are they all playing, even in a piece as kitchen sink-inclusive as the Shostakovich. The idea that whole sections of a band can be held in reserve for such long periods of time would be anathema to the average rock outfit, which uses all its instruments all the time for fear of upsetting anyone who's left out.

And finally, the audience is so motley it would be impossible to not fit in.

The shop window is the only place to be in the digital high street

Here's a funny thing. When we launched The Word iPad app back in spring of this year Apple got in touch and asked us to supply some material. The app had been well-received in the press, there was no comparable music publication on the "shelves" of Apple's Newsstand and we thought we had a chance of having it featured in the tiny shop window through which the outside world makes its choices. While Apple obviously couldn't guarantee they were going to feature it on the front page we took the request as a very good sign. We waited a few weeks. Nothing happened. Yesterday, two months after we announced that we were closing the magazine, this appeared on the App Store under "What's Hot".

I'm not saying that if we'd had this prominence back in May it would have saved the magazine. It might however have helped indicate whether we could have reached a new, potentially international readership with a digital version that we could have never reached with a physical product. As it was we were largely appealing to people who already knew the magazine and wanted another way to access it. The sales figures were good but they weren't good enough to justify pinning everything on an app future.

This is the crowning irony of the digital distribution of anything. Unless you can get in the front window of iTunes, of Amazon, of Spotify, of whatever comes next, you are condemned to spend your days in the stygian gloom at The Back Of The Shop, where few shoppers venture, where everything is available and nothing actually moves.

In the old days of Borders, book publishers would pay large sums of money to have their paperbacks stacked on those tables near the door because they knew that only by creating the illusion that something was already selling could they get it to sell in quantities big enough to pay for the stacking.

In theory people want limitless choice. In practice they want as little choice as possible.

Does anybody have this much fun in the media nowadays?

In 1992 I was doing a weekly music show on Friday evenings on GLR, as the BBC's London station was called at the time. When the host of the morning show went on holiday they asked me to sit in.

The producer was the late Chris Whatmough. Chris said to me, if you're interested in guests, I'll get you guests. In the two weeks I hosted the programme he delivered Michael Palin, Julie Burchill, Roy Jenkins, Anthony Burgess, Michael Winner, Nick Hornby, Malcolm Bradbury, Brian Eno, General Sir Peter de la Billiere, Imran Khan and the two fat ladies, Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jennifer Paterson. There were others but those are the names that stick in my mind.

He didn't have to go out of his way to get those people, some of whom seem almost historical figures twenty years later. They were all on the publicity circuit, plugging new books or TV programmes. All the interviews followed the same form. Twenty minutes of chat, interrupted by a couple of pop records. As I look back it's the combination of serious chat with pop records that amazes me most. I'd go from asking Roy Jenkins about representing the British government at JFK's funeral to playing some record by Crowded House and then come back to ask him about wine. Many of them were people not used to hearing pop records. Anthony Burgess winced and said to me off-air "how can you listen to this kind of thing?"

Nonetheless it worked. Nobody came in with minders. Nobody tried to lay down "ground rules" for the interview. Nobody asked whether the guests were relevant to the audience or what the London angle was. Obviously it couldn't last and it didn't. All these things - radio formats, magazines, ways of doing things in different areas of the media - pass, which is as it should be. However what I can't help but mourn is the fact that there seems to be a determination nowadays, in every area of the media, that nothing quite as freewheeling as this should ever happen again. If things similarly freewheeling and odd are going, I must have missed them. If they aren't, well, I was even more privileged to have had the GLR experience.

Could millionaire footballers end up poor?

Interesting piece about Michael Owen in today's Guardian. The Premier League kicks off today and he doesn't have a club. Manchester United let him go after having hardly played him. Was that because of fitness or has he lost his appetite for the game? I was interested in this line:

...there are people within Owen's circle who freely admit he wants to work because he needs money for his horse racing empire at Manor House Stables.

Before the days of the Premier League it was quite common for top footballers to have money problems after retirement. It's always been assumed that since millionaire footballers became relatively common this would no longer happen. As long as they invested some of their peak earnings they need never work again. They used to run pubs and sports shops. These days they play for higher stakes. It's all fashion labels and football schools. And there's always the divorce court, which is the reason so many rock stars stay on the road.

 If Michael Jackson could spend his vast pile of loot then Michael Owen could certainly spend his.

What the magazine business learned from Elvis Presley's death

When Elvis Presley died, thirty-five years ago today, People was already America's most popular magazine. Amazingly, they didn't put him on the cover. The issue that was on the stands when he died featured an interview with actor Tom Bosley, which gave them an excuse to go with a picture of the new Charlie's Angels

A week after, when Presley records were topping charts all over the world, it was Sissy Spacek and a story about Keith Jarrett. The week after that they actually had his former girlfriend Ann-Margret in a two-shot with Marty Feldman but still, amazingly, they restrained themselves.

It wasn't until the September 5th issue that they allowed themselves the small panel top-left saying "Elvis - his last live-in lover raps".

The people running People aren't fools and they weren't fools then. However the things that seem clear with hindsight were not clear at the time. People had a number of guidelines. It preferred to lead with females. It tended to avoid sleaze. It had found musicians as cover subjects to be divisive. Elvis was more popular in the south than the north. In what we now realise were his later years he didn't matter to many people beyond his shrinking constituency of original fans. And celebrity death wasn't the guaranteed seller of copies that it is today. When John Lennon died, a mere three years later, everybody in the media had learned the lesson of Elvis Presley, that dead celebrities are actually more popular than living ones, and the magazine covers poured forth in an unending flow.

Why it's a good thing your children won't be rock stars

In his New Yorker profile of Bruce Springsteen, David Remnick suggests that Springsteen's father Doug, the shadowy figure at the end of the kitchen table in so many of his songs and stage monologues, may actually have been bipolar. Springsteen confirms that his own disinclination to take drugs was because of a deep-seated fear of turning out like his father and adds that his parents' struggles are "the subject of my life".

Such looking over your shoulder is not what we expect from a young rock and roll star, which may be why rock stars actually become more interesting as people as they get older, by which time their music tends to be less interesting. It's only in late middle-age that people realise how much of themselves has been inherited from their parents and grandparents and how little is their own invention. When you're the same age as your rock star heroes you accept them on their own estimation. That airy way they describe themselves into the microphones of journalists and DJs is the way you would  describe your own life if only anybody was bothered to ask about it. More to the point you don't have enough experience of life to be able to wonder about the little gaps in the narrative or the incidents which may have grown in the telling. For instance, you don't question the surprising number of rock stars who claim to have been expelled from school.

When you're old enough to have children of rock star age and you look at life through the prism of family rather than the prism of self, you become more sceptical about the claims they make for themselves and start to get more interested in the circumstances of their upbringing. You realise that people are shaped more by their childhood experiences than by anything that came later. Elvis Presley's still-born twin, Lennon and McCartney's lost mothers, Joni Mitchell's months in the polio ward, David Bowie's disturbed half-brother, Brian Wilson's martinet of a father - these are the things that were driving them long before they were aware of having drives. These were the wounds and sensitivities that shaped their families and in turn shaped them. It's this that makes them run and keep on running.

I read a story about a tennis agent who said that when he was seeking fresh talent he kept a lookout for crazy parents. He wasn't looking to avoid crazy parents. He found it helped to have them. Think of that next time they cut away to the players' box during TV coverage of Wimbledon.

The Olympics won't make us better because we're not like that

I'm not sure you can learn a lot from the Olympics other than the fact that, having invented sport, the British seem to love it more than anyone else.

In the run-up to the Games the nation seemed to be full of Private Frazers. Since it started we've all suddenly become Pollyanna. The papers today are full of portentous pieces about how we can use the experience to bring about some change in the national character.

I came across this extract from a speech made in the House of Lords by the late Lord Longford:

I asked Sir William Beveridge to come to lunch. I was meeting with Evelyn Waugh, an old friend and famous writer. They did not get on at all well. Evelyn Waugh said to him at the end, "How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William?" He paused and said, "I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it". Evelyn Waugh said, "I get mine spreading alarm and despondency" — this was in the height of the war — "and I get more satisfaction than you do".

Beveridge invented the welfare state. Waugh wrote some great books. I like to think of Longford sitting there listening to the pair of them, admiring the mischief of the latter almost as much as nobility of the former. That's the national character. And if it isn't, it ought to be.

What these Olympics need is John Arlott

If I was a commentator at the Olympics I would avoid saying "what can I say?" for fear someone might ask, isn't that your job?

Maybe the reason they can't think of anything new to say is that they don't try, preferring to flail around for superlatives when a little description is what's really called for.

All the commentators agreed that David Rudisha, who won last night's 800 metre gold, was a beautiful runner but none of them tried to tell you why or how.

John Arlott, the great cricket commentator of my youth, would have done. Arlott likened a Clive Lloyd shot to "a man knocking a thistle top with a walking stick". He described Ian Botham running in to bowl as being "like a shire horse cresting the breeze". Asif Mamood approached the wicket "like Groucho Marx chasing a pretty waitress".

He was good at describing cricket because he hadn't wasted time playing the game. He was a policeman. He was also the only commentating genius we've ever produced.

Two brilliant magazine profiles from the archives

I've just read two genuinely great magazine profiles. One is Gay Talese's story about Frank Sinatra which appeared in Esquire in 1965. The other is Janet Flanner's three-part piece about Adolf Hitler which The New Yorker published in 1936.

Both men disappeared into myth in the years that followed. The profiles probably mark the last point at which it was possible to see them as human beings. Frank wasn't yet the man devoted to acting out his own legend. Hitler was clearly a bad lot but in 1936 he was far from the incarnation of the brand evil.

Both profilers get a lot of mileage out of the things we are always interested in: what they eat, how they organise their wardrobes, their taste in cars, the nervousness of the immediate entourage, the difference they make to a place when they arrive. The profiler hangs around so that we don't have to, recording the details we would be too flustered to notice.

We learn that Hitler didn't take a salary and walks in "a hurried dogtrot" and that Sinatra is followed around by an inconspicuous grey-haired lady holding a tiny satchel containing his sixty hair-pieces.

Neither of them contain an actual interview with the subject. It wouldn't add any illumination if they did.

Interestingly, they both appeared under the kind of unpretentious headlines that wouldn't be considered big enough for a profile of even a run of the mill celebrity today. The Esquire piece is called "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold". The New Yorker piece is called "Führer".

I don't know how Olympic parents do it

P&G have been running a campaign around the Olympics celebrating the mothers of athletes. This was very shrewd. It's a way-in to the subject for people who aren't bothered about sports and it doesn't depend on picking winners.

The TV coverage has briefly made stars of a handful of proud mums and dads, from the South African Burt Le Clos through the twitchy parents of American gymnast Ali Raisman (watch how he has to lift himself out of his seat so great is his suffering) to Chris Hoy's mum and dad who are so nervous they only get out their home-made banner (above) when it's clear he's won.

Most of us who are parents have had a very distant taste of what it must be like to watch the whole world watching your child try to do something unbelievably difficult. I've stood on touchlines in earlier years watching some of mine take part in team games. They're the most intense experiences of my sporting and parenting life because on top of the usual team loyalties you have the ties of flesh and blood. There are few sterner tests of your unconditional love than an own goal or an intercepted pass that lets the whole side down.

I genuinely don't know how the parents of top athletes stand it. How they can contain the joy when it goes right. How they can disguise their disappointment when it goes wrong. I can certainly understand why Jonny Wilkinson's mother was in the supermarket at the moment her son slotted that drop-kick.

Why the Olympics on TV is making us cry

The truest thing I ever heard about TV came from a senior broadcasting executive. TV, he told me, is all about the human face going through a moment of disclosure.

It's obviously the case with the traditional TV favourites. From Mastermind to The X-Factor, the camera is ravenous for the face of a person undergoing triumph or disaster. All successful TV formats revolve around a basic money shot like this.

The interesting thing is it's also the case with televised sport. Match Of The Day is nothing without the close-ups of the player who's either scored or missed. The action is great in its own way but the drama comes from the narrative and the narrative depends on the close-up.

Jude Rogers has been at the rowing today and she reports it was exciting. I've been watching it on the telly box and the temptation to cry has been almost irresistible. That's what telly wants you to do.

The Victorians didn't just invent sport - they finished it

In The New Yorker this week:

Twenty-six sports will be played in London this summer, with medals awarded in three hundred and two events. The majority of those medals will be given in sports that originated, in their modern form, in Britain: archery, athletics (track and field), boxing, badminton, field hockey, football (soccer), rowing, sailing, swimming, water polo, table tennis, and tennis. Britain is also the birthplace of curling, cross-country, cricket, croquet, golf, squash, and rugby—which is scheduled to become an Olympic sport in 2016. No other country comes close. Three Olympic sports originated in the United States: basketball, volleyball, and the triathlon, which was invented in 1974. Two originated in Germany: handball and gymnastics.

This causes me to once again reflect on the fact that most of the world's sports were invented or codified by British people in a quite brief period of the 19th century. And since then, what? Nothing that's had even the slightest effect on the dial of public enthusiasm. It's a staggering achievement. Nobody ever invented anything as completely as the Victorians invented sport.

And given all this evidence, how come we dare to characterise them as people unfamiliar with the concept of fun? Didn't they actually invent it?

It's happened. The Olympics have made London quieter than usual

In the months leading up to the Olympics Londoners divided into two groups: the first thought it was bound to make the city unbearably busy; the second thought London couldn't get much busier and that it might well get quieter.

I've been back in the country 24 hours and it seems clear to me the second lot have won the argument.

The gardens of Camberley are probably resounding to the noise of sit-upon lawnmowers driven by civil servants "working from home" at the moment. Well, if any of them feel like popping into the office they could probably drive that lawnmower into town, so little traffic is there.

We arrived back at Folkestone at six o'clock on Monday evening and breezed round the M25. I have literally never seen the road so quiet, not even in the middle of the night.

This evening we went into town to see Eugene Onegin at the Holland Park Opera. (Fantastic. Go. Oh. Too late.) There were fewer people on the tube than usual.

Of course, large numbers were on the move. 70,000 people were on their way to Wembley to see football. This is 10,000 fewer than usually go.

The waiters in restaurants on High Street Kensington were looking dolefully out of the windows in the hopes of tempting customers in. You could hunt buffalo inside most dining establishments.

On the way home we changed at King's Cross and the extra LT staff were massing around the barriers looking for any exotically dressed visitor they could help.

Don't listen to those people on the radio, warning you to stay at home. They've all gone to work, haven't they? And if you're thinking of going into town for any reason, give the whole "London's impossible" crowd two fingers and go. Those restaurants and theatres will be glad to see you.