Think about it. If Francois Hollande has a round- the-clock hairdresser, so does your rock hero

Mark Ellen, Paul Du Noyer, Zoe Howe and I were in Harrogate last week, plugging our books at the local literary festival (and, as you can see, admiring the display in the local Waterstone’s).

Over dinner the evening before we debated that greatest of all rock & roll mysteries, greater even than the unanswered question of who wrote the Book Of Love; how come all the senior superstars of rock still have hair?

There are exceptions. Pete Townshend. James Taylor. A few others. But they are exceptions.

The Rolling Stones, McCartney, Roger Waters, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Rod Stewart all appear to still have tons of the stuff and some of them won’t see seventy again.

It only makes sense if you recognise the fact that hanging on to their hair is not a question of preference; it's a professional imperative. Mark remembered asking Rod Stewart how long he would keep on doing it and he said “as long as I have the barnet”.

This wasn't just a flip comment. This was Rod speaking from the heart. You cannot sing “Maggie May” with a receding hairline. It simply can’t be done. The audience will take one look at you and know that both you and they are fooling themselves.

We were thinking about our experience backstage at big shows, how every last detail of the performance is the responsibility of somebody, how it’s planned better than a military operation (whereas no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, a rock show is a nightly battle where the outcome is guaranteed); is it possible, we thought, that there aren’t people back there whose job it is to make sure that the hair of the stars is not seen to its very best advantage, even if that means outright fakery?

We decided that was unlikely, particularly since we’ve been watching the hairlines of the stars of the sixties and seventies recede, halt and then mysteriously advance again.

And now that I’ve just read that Francois Hollande, the French President, put his ownhairdresser on staff, at a cost to the taxpayer of ten thousand Euros a month, I’m even more convinced that there has to be an entire army of colorists, camouflage experts, blow driers and titivators employed to keep us from seeing the uncovered domes of those we are pleased to call rock heroes.

After all rock, like football management, is a business that’s about one thing above all. Hair.

There is no such thing as a piece of entertainment that's too short

Good line from Alec Baldwin's "Here's The Thing" interview with former Disney boss Michael Eisner. Now that Eisner doesn't run a studio any more he can be a lot franker than he would have been back in the day. Talking about one former boss, he recalls hearing that he'd died and his partner saying "I hope it was painful". Pressed to name one of the movies he produced that he's particularly proud of, he can't get past the feelings he had at the time. "The first time you see a movie and it starts well, all you're hoping is it's going to end quickly."

Boy, I sympathise with that point of view. If something's going well, my instinct is to wrap it up as soon as possible, before it overstays its welcome. The minute you think, this is going OK, it's about to be not OK. If only rock stars and film directors were capable of recognising this feeling.

The recent death of Michael Cimino reminded me that his original cut of "Heaven't Gate" was five and a half hours long. He apologised, saying he could take fifteen minutes out of it. What was he thinking?

I was talking to an old friend last week and we agreed that as you get older you're more inclined to find that everything goes on too long and we decided there is literally no piece of entertainment about which you would say, "I could have done with another half an hour of that."

This is why Jeremy Deller's We Are Here project was so powerful

Remembrance isn't a competitive sport, obviously, but yesterday the news media gave too much play to the Thiepval ceremony to mark 100 years since the first day of the Somme and not enough to the astounding Jeremy Deller initiative We are here in which thousands of volunteers, dressed as members of Kitchener's Army, stood around in stations and public places up and down the country as though it were a hundred years earlier and they were waiting to embark.

If anyone asked what they were doing there they silently handed out a card bearing the name of the soldier they were, as the kids would say, "representing", all of whom died on July 1st 1916.

It wasn't just a dazzling piece of theatre and a great logistical feat. It was also a powerful reminder of the thing that strikes me every time I go to one of those cemeteries in northern France and Belgium and read the little books of remembrance in which are listed the home addresses of the dead.

The Vicarage.

Gasworks Street.

Glebe Cottage.

The Old Kent Road.

They were us.

The reporter on the spot seems to know slightly less than we do

I have the 24 hour news channels on in the background at the moment. I have Twitter on in the foreground.

It feels to me as if the old news standby, the man on the spot, knows less and less. That's mainly because he's the man on the spot.

If he's the man on the spot, struggling for a place to set up his cameras, putting all his effort into getting people to agree to being interviewed, haggling with his masters back in the studio about when they're going to come to him, fiddling with his earpiece and straightening his tie, he misses the story, which is off and running on social media like a glinting fish and will have scarpered by the time he's found the next place to park his van and unpack his equipment.

Yesterday morning I felt more informed than the man on the spot. Robert Peston had tweeted mid-morning that Boris Johnson may have been putting back his press conference, which suggested something was up. Then Matthew Parris was on Five Live. When asked what he thought Boris was going to announce he said, with the assurance of an old pol, "oh, this Gove announcement has finished him."

 As soon as he'd said that the press conference started. Ten minutes later we found out how right he had been. The man on the spot looked shocked. I felt quite smug.

Seven thoughts on the morning of yet another England football failure

1. All this talk about "humiliation" is no help to anyone. England lost a football match. As the young Boris Becker pointed out all those years ago, "nobody died."
2. I don't buy the idea that England footballers don't try. Very often they try too hard. What matters is trying effectively
3. And it's nothing to do with how much they're paid either.
4. Our best players play at a the top level, but generally alongside players from overseas who are technically better and can deal with pressure for them. As soon as things go wrong for an England team you can see the fear in their eyes.
5. When the England rugby team won the World Cup in 2003 Martin Johnson was the captain but they had another four "officers" on the field who could have done his job. That's what you need to win in any team sport.
6. Iceland are a good team unencumbered by expectation whereas England are a fragile team saddled with mad levels of expectation.
7. The next England manager should do just one press conference a year. 

Big stars no longer need media because they *are* media

Talking to Sylvia Patterson last night at Word In Your Ear about her book "I'm Not With The Band", which traces her experience in the music press from the halcyon days of Smash Hits through NME and The Face to the dog days of today.

Sylvia thought it was a shame that the likes of Beyonce and the Beckhams no longer feel the need to meet journalists except in circumstances where they have complete control.

This made me think that the really big names of today - the likes of Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Jay Z, the Kardashians and the Beckhams - don't need media any longer for the simple reason that they are media.

If you've got more Twitter followers than a newspaper then it's easy to see who's the needy one in that relationship.

Ties in with this piece "How Is Donald Trump Going To Quit?", which says that Trump doesn't seriously want to get bogged down in power with responsibility, which is the lot of the President, when he can start his own TV station and have power without responsibility, which is of course the prerogative of the harlot.

I agree.

Never mind Top Gear - here's the Earl Grey Whistle Test

The other day Mark Ellen and I returned to the bench in Golden Square where BBC publicity took our picture in 1982 for Old Grey Whistle Test. We've put the two pictures together to mark the fact that we've taken over next week's essay slot on Radio Three (10:45 every evening from Monday) for  something called The Earl Grey Whistle Test.

Back in the eighties Mark would joke that we would end up as two old dodderers presenting a programme under that title so we wanted to make good on the gag. Our essays, one joint and four solo, cover such topics as drummers in rock, why rock stars never give up and the unusual sensation of being part of a duo most people can't tell apart.

While we're plugging things, Mark and I are appearing at the Harrogate Literary Festival on July 9th with Zoe Howe and Paul Du Noyer. Details here. We're also hosting Word In Your Ear tomorrow night in Islington with Sylvia Patterson and Derek Ridgers. Details here.

When shopping goes semi-automatic

I asked about a book in The Strand in New York. I didn't know the author but I had the title. The assistant was very helpful and found a number of titles with the same name. We agreed which one it was. "We have one copy," he said and, without my asking, handed me a small ticket with the details of the book. "Hand it to anybody downstairs and they'll find it." I took it downstairs, handed it to an assistant and she set off down the stacks at such a pace I almost had to break into a trot to keep up. She went straight to a shelf, handed me the copy, I took it to the desk and paid for it.

The following day we decided to see a Broadway show. The New Yorkers we'd had dinner with the night before had advised us to use TodayTix. This turned out to be an app through which you can book and buy tickets for shows that day. You get the tickets by turning up at the theatre half an hour before curtain up where you rendezvous with a rep wearing the TodayTix uniform who hands you your tickets.

I was impressed with both these experiences because they combined technology with the personal touch. Neither of them could have happened satisfactorily without the human element, neither of them would have been possible without the mechanical element. It made me wonder whether this might be the next stage of the retail revolution.

An Englishmen in New York goes to see An American In Paris and finds not all is as it seems

Went to see An American In Paris on Broadway last night.

It was one of the greatest things I've ever seen.

I've seen good productions of American musicals in London but you always feel the cast are putting so much effort into the business of being American that it can never look or sound quite as effortless as you'd like it to be.

Not so this, which just glided by. When the dancers did flying leaps here you never heard them land on the stage. The transitions occurred so seamlessly that you didn't even notice they were happening.

Obviously the cast could all dance, sing and act but they also did the million and one tiny things that don't really fit into one of those categories. There seemed to be an ease about them which you don't find on the London stage.

We went out enthusing about how wonderful it was to see such an American form being done by the Americans.

Only this morning did we find out that the star, Leanne Cope, comes from Bath.

Furthermore, it was directed and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, who's from Yeovil.

"1971: Never A Dull Moment" published in the USA.

Here's the cover of the American edition of 1971: Never A Dull Moment, which comes out in the U.S. next week.

I'm delighted to say it's been chosen as one of Amazon.com's best books for June.

Pass it on.

Allow me to introduce you to one of the greatest records ever made

Guy Clark died  today.

He wrote some great songs and made two strong albums in the seventies.

You can get both of them for £2.99, which is plain ridiculous.

My favourite song of his was "Desperados Waiting For A Train".

 My favourite version of that was by Mallard, the group formed by former members of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band.


Here it is.

The year is 2016 and Jimmy Webb's at number one in the States.

Jimmy Webb played a showcase at his publishers tonight. A few score people gathered around his piano as he did half a dozen songs, which included obscure requests as well as the ones that made him famous.

I liked his patter. "People associate me with the 60s or the 70s if I'm lucky. But what you people don't know is I'm still relevant because one of my songs is at number one in the USA this week."

He was talking about the use of his song "Do What You Gotta Do" in Kanye's hit "Famous".

"It seems this record's about some beef that Kanye has against Taylor Swift. I didn't think that was very gentlemanly so I wanted to have it out with him, Okie to Okie. Then somebody said 'you know you're getting 35% of this record?' and I thought 'Taylor's a big girl - she can look after herself.'"

Two thoughts about Colin Hanks' Tower Records documentary

Two things struck me after last night's screening of the Tower Records documentary All Things Must Pass and the Q&A with its director Colin Hanks.

The first was just how sentimental the younger people in the audience were about the idea of record shop culture and how desperately some of them persuade themselves that the current fashion for pristine, newly-pressed Stooges albums at twenty quid a pop indicates anything more than the desire of a tiny handful of people to have something that makes them look both soulful and affluent. 

Hanks asserted that record shops would continue to hang on but was forced to admit that only this week Other Music, the New York store which was the hold-outs' last best hope, announced it was closing in June.

The second thing that struck me was how amazing it was that Tower Records hadn't closed years earlier than it did. I hadn't realised it had expanded in such an uncontrolled, haphazard way. The stores in Japan were opened before the one in New York, for instance. All this worldwide expansion was reliant on borrowed money, which meant that the company couldn't withstand the slightest downturn, let alone the one that arrived.

When the banks finally put their people in one of the first things they did was close down the Tower magazine Pulse! This was very upsetting for the people in the company. I  couldn't help being amazed that they had employed more people to do their free magazine than most British publishers would hire to do a paid one.

P.S. A third thing struck me. People say Hanks looks like his father. I think he looks more like Woody.

If only you could put tweets on the covers of books

Lots of people have tweeted about my book. I couldn't bear to let them all go by.

As Father's Day approaches and the weather starts to suit reading in the great outdoors I look forward to seeing interesting pictures of people enjoying it.

The first email I got from somebody who'd read it was from a blind man whose Kindle had read it to him. "I listened when I was supposed to be working," he confessed. That aside, this one gets an award for speed reading.

Finished @davidhepworth 1971: his brilliant new book in one sitting. Best book on music so far this year. pic.twitter.com/WaZIwhYxil

— John Gray (@JohnJosephGray) April 9, 2016

Then there was this...

Well, that's just made my day. Total stranger just came up and said "I bought your book today."

— David Hepworth (@davidhepworth) April 27, 2016

...and this...

@davidhepworth bedreading in Sweden! pic.twitter.com/j4tc3IpaYv

— Dag Ståhl (@DSthl) April 20, 2016

...and then you see inside people's lives...

Weekend away - GLW is shopping so I can catch up on my reading. Thanks @davidhepworth for such a rollicking read. pic.twitter.com/IIOFyL49UO

— Alan.Wallis (@AlWallis) April 10, 2016

...and meet their loved ones.

Bedtime reading courtesy of the postman. And @davidhepworth. pic.twitter.com/7tRyOIbGob

— mj (@melanie_jane) April 7, 2016

Some of them are well-known.

@davidhepworth Can't wait to read this!!!! pic.twitter.com/gOYSMuPWGg

— David Morrissey (@davemorrissey64) April 9, 2016

Some are miffed.

'1971 never a dull moment' brilliant book.Thanks @davidhepworth for writing it,ruining my sightseeing in Skye though pic.twitter.com/KVaJegbal7

— Ray Dexter (@Ray_Dexter) April 13, 2016

Some are in a hurry.

Powered through this in 2 days and probably broke Spotify in the process. Bravo @davidhepworth pic.twitter.com/6ANbedyRky

— An Absolute Shower (@Jolly_Good_Show) May 4, 2016

I like this one.

When you finish a book do you kiss the cover? I do. The looks I've just got on the Northern Line after finishing 1971 by @davidhepworth

— Simon Love MBE (@simonloverules) May 6, 2016

It doesn't matter whether or not you were there in 1971.

@davidhepworth what a great book. A must read for any popular music fan even if they were born after 1971. pic.twitter.com/VBSjY2ozjO

— Matt Selby (@mallie1972) May 4, 2016

As we were reminded only this morning.

Pleased to see @IvoGraham took some reading matter with him on @bbc5live #fightingtalk. pic.twitter.com/dMSErmqfEg

— David Hepworth (@davidhepworth) May 7, 2016

And did I mention this?

How about a little fanfare? My 1971 book's in the Sunday Times bestsellers. pic.twitter.com/QSSgPyr9xV

— David Hepworth (@davidhepworth) April 17, 2016

New Day failed because people don't try things any more

Trinity Mirror is canning its cheap newspaper New Day just two months after it launched. This is probably the right thing to do. You can lose fortunes and spend years of people's lives trying to prove that a hunch was right. Believe me. I know.

You can say it didn't live up to expectations, but that rather assumes that people are bothered enough to have expectations. You only have to see how the newspaper kiosks that used to be a feature of all London tube stations are now either closing or turning themselves over to selling confectionery to note that most people are not in a position to turn to a new newspaper because they long ago stopped buying an old one.

I noticed this in the world of magazines more than ten years ago. People stopped trying new things and they certainly stopped paying for new things. I bet New Day didn't fail because the publishers were disappointed how few people stuck with it. I bet it failed because not enough people tried it in the first place.

I used to work for British Home Stores

In the early 70s I had a job as a courier at British Home Stores' head office. My job was to accompany Jim, who drove a van that ferried material between their main office on Marleybone Road and their smaller office in Dorset Square. In the afternoons, when Jim had been to the pub for his standard three pints, I took over the driving.

BHS were a slightly sleepy, old-fashioned company even then. My family had never shopped there and I couldn't really work out why people did. And now they seem to be joining HMV, C&A, Woolworths, Borders, Comet and many others that were formerly a part of somebody's regular routine and now aren't anymore. The papers are full of Monday Morning Quarterbacks talking about what they should have done to save it. I don't pretend to have a plan. I know how little I miss the ones that have already gone.

Who's next? Marks & Spencer?

Victoria Wood

Ken Sharp took this picture of me and Victoria Wood. It was in the late 80s and we were talking in the garden of a pub in Salisbury after she'd played a show at the City Hall.

I often mess up the "having a picture taken with the star" moment. It's not altogether surprising. You have one person who's utterly at home with having their picture taken. Then there's you, flushed and over-excited, your professional facade entirely lost.

It wasn't a bit like that with Victoria Wood. She was happy to share whatever limelight was going. Lovely person.

Whatever Emitt Rhodes's been doing for the last forty-three years, it clearly hasn't all been fun

I didn’t mention Emitt Rhodes in my book, though he’s on my extended 1971 playlist.

 Rhodes was one of those people who was being lined up as a Beatles substitute in 1971. He could write good tunes, he played all the instruments on his albums himself and - bonus ball - he was pretty.

His albums attracted support from everybody except the record-buying public and he was locked into a contract that required him to deliver two albums a year, which was hard enough for your standard road-hardened band but was nigh on impossible for an artist who had to over-dub every part himself.

He withdrew from making his own albums in the early seventies. Now he’s back, with a rather good record called Rainbow Ends. Whereas the early records glistened with the optimism of youth, his new one starts with a song about a woman who takes the car, the house and the kids. It’s called “Dog On A Chain”.

He looks different too.

Nobody knows anything. Didn't then. Still don't.

Finishing Doris Kearns Goodwin's "No Ordinary Time" I was interested to see that at the end of the war the American proposal to turn Germany into an agrarian economy that could no longer threaten Europe and the Russian proposal to exclude the French from the post-war settlement on the grounds that they didn't have an army were both resisted and pushed back by Churchill.

On mornings like this, when the airwaves are alive with politicians talking about what will or will not happen in Europe in some unspecified future it's a good idea to ponder close run things like the above and remember the wise words of William Goldman.

Nobody knows anything.

Links to the 1971: Never A Dull Moment playlists in one place

Here they are:

A link to the full 1971: Never A Dull Moment playlist, which is made up of 265 songs, one from every significant album that came out that year.

Then links to a Spotify version of each of the monthly playlists that come at the end of each chapter. If the odd track's missing that's because it wasn't on Spotify when I looked.

January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December

The cheap and cheerful charm of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

We were watching "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" on Netflix the other day.

In the 70s this was the acme of high end film making. The whole nation stopped and watched when it was finally shown on BBC TV.

You watch it now and the first thing that strikes you is how cheap it was. The modesty of the whole enterprise makes it seem as far distant as the silent era. There are no big set pieces or special effects. All the money must have gone to Newman and Redford, who are, it's fair to say, almost hurtfully beautiful.

When the action moves from the West to South America it's done via a montage of stills. And we don't see the big ending. They come out shooting and the frame freezes. They would never do that now, I said to a young person. No, he said, because for a start they would already be shooting a sequel.

I went to see Batman v Superman. Here's my one-sentence review

I know nothing about comics but I've seen enough action films to know that two and a half hours in which you have not been made to feel: a few moments of genuine curiosity about what's going to happen; that familiar tightening in the pit of the stomach when the hero is about to encounter a danger we can see but he can't; the satisfying feeling when a puzzle planted early in the film is solved; the welcome expulsion of nervous laughter when the jeopardy turns out to be harmless and the growl of assent in the back of the throat when the baddie gets his just desserts, then it either means that the film maker has stumbled on a new way of doing things or he simply doesn't realise just how much he has failed to do.

Would any radio station in Britain allow me to play these ten records?

Music Selection (These can be of any genre as long as they mean something to you).
1. High Wide And Handsome by Loudon Wainwright III
2. Slow Train by Flanders and Swann 

3. If I Fell by The Beatles
4. Family Affair by Sly and the Family Stone
5. Vine Street by Harry Nilsson
6. Trenchtown Rock by Bob Marley (must be from Bob Marley live at the Lyceum)
7. You Never Can Tell by Chuck Berry
8. My Foolish Heart by Bill Evans
9. Will You Love Me Tomorrow by Carole King (from Tapestry)
10. Hills Of The North Rejoice by the Huddersfield Choral Society

The above questionnaire I completed for Martin Kelner's "One On One" feature on BBC Radio Leeds asked me to come up with ten records. Those are the ones I named. 

I was due to do Martin's show in a couple of weeks. Then BBC Radio Leeds decided they could do without him. They asked me if I still wanted to go ahead. I said no. These down-the-line interviews are OK if you've got some rapport with the person you're talking to. They're difficult if you don't.

In his explanation of how he came to leave his job Martin mentioned that an affinity with popular music is dangerous in local radio. I know what he meant.  BBC Local Radio managers are easily frightened by any selection that isn't thuddingly obvious. 

So now Martin's got no programme, which is very bad for him, and I'm left to put one question - is there any radio station in Britain that is not yet so heavily formatted or ham-strung by the need to be seen as hip and edgy that it would a actually allow those records to go out on its airwaves?  I know Desert Island Discs, but apart from that where?

Another thing about George Martin that's often, er, overlooked

He was a tall man in an era where it was quite unusual. Furthermore he worked in a business where it was even more unusual. It went with the accent he'd taught himself during the war and the upper middle class manners. His height helped him pull rank without seeming to.

Think about all the great groups of the sixties. Beatles, Stones, the Who and obviously the Small Faces. Most would be considered almost diminutive by modern standards.

Go to a standing gig nowadays and you'll have trouble seeing the stage though the forest of young men and women in their twenties. Compared to the beat generation they're like giant redwoods.

Calm down, Leo, you're only running the jokes

On the day when we're supposed to take actors and film directors as seriously as some of them take themselves it's good to be reminded of how Alfred Hitchcock looked at his trade.

I was watching a doc about the making of "Frenzy" in 1971. Jon Finch remembers that Hitchcock had an old-fashioned way of asking if he wanted to rehearse.

"Do you want to run the jokes?"

What if free media isn't the future? What if it's a dead end?

Two interesting pieces of media futurology. The fact that they're both written by people who used to be in senior positions at the Guardian makes them even more interesting.

Emily Bell, who used to be in charge of the Guardian's digital assets, wonders if the days of newspaper websites might be numbered.  As she says, there may not be much room for them in a media market that increasingly "tolerates the micro, favours the mega and rolls over most entities inbetween."

At the same time Peter Preston, who used to be the Guardian's editor, is sceptical of The Independent's claim that their move to digital-only means they'll be "as focussed and uncompromised as any start-up but with all the authority and trust of an established news brand." As he points out, the start-ups don't try to do all the stuff that the newspapers have traditionally had to do to justify the costs of the package.

When those papers moved online they brought the elements of the package with them. Sections devoted to opinion, sport, music, films and think pieces about Breaking Bad expanded to fill the space available to them, which was suddenly limitless. The BBC did something similar, albeit their commitment to even-handedness meant they weren't much good at the comment. At the same time the borderless world of the internet meant that the fluff being done by the U.S. papers and websites was suddenly just as accessible as the home-grown fluff. We now live in a world where if you want to know what columnists thinks about what Lena Dunham said about what Kesha said about Dr Luke then you could spend your every waking hour reading that and nothing but that.

This century's fluff explosion was bankrolled by newspapers in the belief that it would be followed by advertising. Now they've realised it won't be. Paywalls are going up everywhere. Newspapers are closing. At the same time even the BBC is having to cut back on some of its fluffier website content.

I wonder if in a few years time this Niagara of free stuff will have been turned off and we'll realise that it only came to pass during a brief window when the people who produced it thought there was some benefit in giving it away. Free wasn't the inevitable way of the future. It was a dead end.

This is what you could shop for in Green Lanes in 1948

This is an extract from a 1948 directory of businesses on Green Lanes in Haringey, north London.

It's a reminder of a world that was starting to slip away when I was a kid, a world where most people worked for small firms and most of those small firms were specialists in one very particular area. They sold yeast or knitting wool. They loaned money or fried fish. They manufactured shoe trimmings or fireplaces. They advertised trades like mantle maker-up and hem stitcher that are entirely mysterious to us now.

If you drive down Green Lanes now the shops are overwhelmingly owned by members of immigrant groups who arrived after 1948 and seem to offer food, phone cards or hairdressing. Presumably in another twenty years it will have changed out of recognition all over again. Makes you wonder why anybody talks about "planning".

The political magazines are benefiting from the misfortunes of the newspapers

Another strong set of circulation figures for the political and current affairs magazines like The Spectator, Private Eye, Economist and the New Statesman in the year just gone. People say it was because there was an election. People say it's because there's a European referendum coming up.

I'm not convinced. Seems to me they've been the direct beneficiaries of the decline of the daily papers. People stop buying the papers but still feel a need to read something on paper they can hold in their hands.

Daily is too frequent. Monthly is not frequent enough. Once a week is just perfect. I think this market will grow.

"Disappointed" is the weasel's weasel word

When FT columnist Lucy Kellaway was less than respectful about some airy fairy remarks made by Hewlett Packard boss Meg Whitman at Davos, a wise head of marketing and communications would have told his boss to just suck it up as the price you pay for speaking in public.

Instead he did the single most disastrous thing you can do, which is pen a formal letter saying how "disappointed" the company was with Kellaway's column. Of all the weasel words in the contemporary lexicon of passive-aggressiveness, where the objective is always to cast yourself in the role of the victim, "disappointed" is the one I loathe the most.

And now the story is about him, which is never a good look. He's now made his boss look like somebody who can't fight her own battles. He looks like somebody who runs round trying to anticipate her wishes by kicking the nearest arse available. And he's made this publicly-quoted company look as if they make marketing and advertising decisions based on what side of bed they happen to have got out in the morning.

Nice "communications" work.

If footballers won't leave London the clubs might have to move south

You don't often get lateral thinking from footballers but Stan Collymore made an interesting suggestion on Talk Sport last night. Talking about the fact that northern clubs find it difficult to recruit overseas players because they all want to be based in London, he wondered why Liverpool, for instance, didn't invest in a training ground near the M-25. That way their players could live in London and just travel to Liverpool once a fortnight to play a home game.

It's not without precedent. FC Anzhi Makhachkala are based in Dagestan on the Caspian Sea. Because Dagestan is an unlovely spot with a terrible reputation for violence the players live in Moscow, which is almost two thousand kilometres away. The club's owner has suffered some financial reverses of late so Anzhi is running on a smaller budget right now but only a few years ago they could afford to make Samuel Eto'o the highest paid player in the world.

Every couple of weeks the players would board a chartered jet in Moscow, take the long flight down to Makhachkala, be conveyed to the stadium under armed guard, play the match and then be on the plane back to their Moscow penthouses before their fans had got home. And did those fans complain that the men wearing their shirt weren't rooted to the local area - or at least in some luxurious gated community an hour away - or did they just figure that as long as they were winning it was fine?  What do you think?

The people who fail try just as hard

Henry Worsley's last message is a rare episode in the narrative of human accomplishment. It's not often we get to hear the sound of somebody failing. But, as he says, the same thing happened to Ernest Shackleton. He shot his bolt. He came up short.

The same thing happens to most people who try difficult things. They fail. All political careers end in failure. The team trudging off the pitch disconsolate and empty-handed at the end of the big final tried just as hard as the team dancing with joy for the cameras.

Because we can't face this truth we always tell ourselves that the winners - whether explorers, athletes, politicians, actors or scientists - won through because they tried harder and longer than anyone else. They didn't. The only difference between the winners and the losers is this. They won.

The Eagles and the only truth about pop music

The first album by The Eagles in 1972 took a long time to finish because David Geffen, who managed them and was their record company boss, wanted another song by Jackson Browne with a lead vocal by Don Henley to follow up the first single "Take It Easy" and to bolster their album.

Browne supplied another song called "Nightingale" but the producer Glyn Johns didn't think it was as good as "Take It Easy". They recorded it a few times but it was never strong enough to walk on its own. Geffen insisted on Johns coming back to the United States from Britain to have another go at recording it. They tried again but it never worked.

Both songs are on the first album. Both songs are tuneful. Both are the same tempo. One lifts off and the other one doesn't. Geffen couldn't believe it was as simple as that but it is.

In the present melancholy season I keep getting rung up by radio producers and asked to explain why certain careers happened in the way they happened. Was this person a genius? Was this person a hack? The truth is underneath it all it's a business about hits and hits are all about catchiness.

These two records had the exact same inputs. One flies. The other doesn't. All the work in the world wouldn't change that. In the words of Carol Kaye, one "pops", the other doesn't. It's the only thing that matters.

It's not cool, it's not clever, it's not the kind of thinking they encourage on the arts shows; nevertheless, it's the only true thing you can say about pop music.
 

In praise of Radio 4 Extra and the joy of repeats

If you're the kind of person who complains about too many repeats on TV, you're watching too much TV. Anything worth repeating was a success first time around, which has to be a good thing.

I'm one of those people whose staple diet is increasingly Radio 4 Extra, which is nothing but repeats. It provides a reliable supply of the kind of programmes I prefer - which are either factual, comic or literary - and now that I use the phone or the iPad as the main way of accessing audio, it's becoming second nature to just scroll back through the schedule on the BBC iPlayer Radio until I find something I want to hear. Most of the time I don't want to hear what's being broadcast at the time but I can easily find an alternative.

In the last few days I've loved Julian Barnes and Hermione Lee looking at Rudyard Kipling's motoring holidays in France, John Hurt as E.M. Forster narrating a dramatisation of Howards End, a whole lot of the glory that is Ed Reardon's Week and Julian Fellowes' history of the Dorset theatre company who first performed the stories of Thomas Hardy.

When the BBC big themselves up they tend to do it through their big programmes, which I neither watch nor hear. It's the little things like Radio Four Extra, which presumably costs nothing, that make the difference for me.

The difference between "War and Peace" on the telly and "The Archers" on the radio

 War and Peace debuted on BBC TV the other night in a standard Andrew Davies adaptation. All the characters had to be introduced right at the beginning. All the bases had to be covered. All the budget had to be on the screen. There was even the standard tacked-on, not in the book sex scene that looked like it had wandered in from a pre-Christmas ad for a men's fragrance. The one actor who remained still enough to register his character was Stephen Rea (above) as the sinister, manipulative Kuragin. 

Meanwhile, in the land of radio soaps, Timothy Watson (left) just shifted up a gear as the sinister, manipulative Rob Titchener in The Archers.

They're obviously both good actors, doing different jobs in different productions.

What's interesting is the differing reactions. The performance of the TV actor is met with detached admiration. The performance of the radio actor, on the other hand, is met with demands that the BBC move him and his plotline out of the series because, frankly, it's just too damned disturbing.

TV always provides you with an escape clause. Radio gets inside your head.

Is the movie business just the R&D arm of the toys business?

In 1989 I interviewed Jeffrey Katzenberg. At the time he was a senior executive at Disney where he was spearheading their move back into animated features with films like "The Little Mermaid".

"My job," he told me, "is to make sure the parks have got characters."

I was surprised by that line. Now I know what he meant. As Michael Hiltzik puts it in his scorching reduction of the new Star Wars film, this is not a movie so much as "the anchoring element of a vast commercial program, painstakingly factory-made for maximal audience appeal, which means maximal inoffensiveness."

The Star Wars franchise in now owned by Disney. In their boardroom they must smile at the lengths the media go to to pretend that this is a film. They know that it's nothing more than a launch vehicle for a marketing campaign, the endgame of which is the selling of plastic toys and tickets to their theme parks. Unlike most marketing campaigns, this one can depend on airtime donated free by broadcasters.

One of the interesting things I learned from Mark Kermode's The Business of Film is that franchise films don't make their money back until the sequels. Since few people go to the sequels who didn't go to the first one the launch of the first has more in common with the launch of a subscription offer or a partwork than a piece of popular art.

All that's required is to persuade men that they would be foolish to miss out. It clearly works. Over Christmas I've spoken to blokes in their thirties who went to the first screenings, which started at midnight, five-year-old boys playing with their Star Wars Christmas presents and blokes in their sixties who are planning to see the film even though they don't have all that much interest.

I didn't get the impression of genuine excitement from any of them. It was as if a ticket for Star Wars was like some kind of tax on being male. You felt better for having paid it.

It's been a back to mono Christmas

I got a Bose ® SoundLink Bluetooth Speaker III for Christmas, with which I am well pleased. Since my phone is the player most of the time - either for music, radio or the recordings I preview for the Guardian Guide - it suits me to be able to pair it with a speaker that's easy to take around the house.

Yesterday I was talking to two younger blokes, who'd also got expensive items of audio equipment for Christmas. One was a Harman/Kardon Onyx Studio Wireless Bluetooth Speaker; the other was Sonos PLAY:1 Black - The Wireless Hi-Fi.

It's interesting how the things that were once important - things such as lots of speakers - are no longer an issue. I was talking to Alan Parsons recently about the amount of investment in quadrophonic in the mid-70s. It was just assumed that people would want a more sophisticated of what they had already. If you think two speakers are great, try four. It wasn't what they wanted at all.

I dimly remember a comedy sketch from the 70s where the gag was, "why not get rid of all these speakers and just have the music all coming from one place?"

Looks like it's happened.

Five things I've enjoyed this year

I finally understand Nancy Sinatra's kinky masterpiece

Reading a novel set in the American Civil War the other day I belatedly realised the significance of the lyric of Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'".

Most cowboy boots had a cutaway heel which made them ideal for placing in stirrups but not so good for walking. Any boots which were good for walking would advertise the fact.

Amazing how long it can take a penny to drop.

P.S. Lee Hazlewood must have made a fortune out of this one song.

Thirty five years ago today pop music stopped being "alternative"

Thirty-five years ago today I was woken by the news John Lennon had been murdered.

It's difficult to think back to that time when he was just another former rock star living in effective retirement in New York. However I have a feeling that he wasn't all that famous. Obviously he was famous but he wasn't as famous as he would become in death.

I was editing Smash Hits at the time. I wasn't surprised that people like me, who'd grown up with the Beatles, were deeply affected by his death but what amazed me is how keen the readers of Smash Hits, who had been infants at the time they broke up, were to join in the mourning and celebration.

In the days following his death everybody else piled in. The greybeards of the arts, the men of the cloth, the politicians, the soothsayers of the media, every last man jack who had ever been on a TV programme with him, everybody who had ever sung a pop song, been to the pictures to see "Help!" or combed their fringe forward. They all wanted to make it clear how much they approved of pop music.

Some of it was delayed reaction to Elvis Presley's death three years before. The editor of "People" didn't put Elvis on the cover because he wasn't sure it was a big enough story, which tells you a lot about the moment. His career had faded, much as Lennon's had, and it was assumed that the lustre would diminish along with it.

Of course, as we know now, it didn't. It grew. The process of mourning made both men bigger figures in death than they had ever been in life. In Lennon's case it also triggered the rekindling of the love affair with the Beatles, an affair which continues to this day.

It was the day pop music stopped being the alternative and became the mainstream.

How to make the British love you - a guide for show folk

The Media Show interviews the TV producer Natalka Znak about how come "I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here" continues to appeal to British TV audiences and yet two different attempts to launch it in the USA have failed.

She explains that whereas Americans like to celebrate the success of their celebrities, the British only feel affection for them when they've confessed their sins and asked forgiveness.

That chimes with my experience. It was this that made Q's big interviews work. Elton John or Phil Collins or Mick Hucknall would outline the full extent of their trespasses in eye-watering detail and then tell the interviewer that after a while even the greatest excess made them feel hollow.

The reader could nod sagely, secure in the knowledge that they had somehow dodged a bullet by never having gone to bed with three strippers and a mountain of cocaine.

The story told in these interviews always followed the same line: I struggled, I triumphed, I fucked up and now I'm sorry.

In this country it never fails.

Boxing: are the BBC part of the hype or part of the coverage?

I don't follow boxing but couldn't escape knowing there was a big fight last night between Klitschko and Fury. The hype was all over BBC Five Live all day Friday and Saturday, pointing listeners to their Saturday night coverage.

Fury won the fight, which was unexpected. On Sportsweek this morning Garry Richardson spoke to the boxer David Haye about Fury's habit of saying outrageous things in the build-up to a fight. Haye said it was all about selling tickets. But surely, said Richardson, there's more to life than selling tickets. Well, said Haye, this is pay-per-view and there are lots of boxers who suffered brain damage and didn't even get compensated for it. The more that people like you talk about it the more tickets they sell and the better they do.

Haye's got a point. It's one the BBC should think about. Their beating of the drum before a fight drives more people to sign up for pay-per-view than it does to listen to their coverage on the radio. I would guess the BBC coverage is an important part of the hype for the people selling pay-per-view.

It's not just about boxing. The BBC face the same dilemma around the release of the Adele album or the latest James Bond movie. They could cover it after it's happened but that never seems to be enough; they also seem to want to make it happen. They need to decide whether they're providing coverage or playing their part in the marketing mix.

Terrorism: what I think

ISIS will eventually be subdued by some combination of carrot and stick. They won't be the last of the new super bogeymen. 

 All the "why us? and "what do these people want?" talk is beside the point. There will always be some deviant group seeking to get their way. Furthermore, as long as fame is our key currency, there will be a ready supply of hopeless young man to do their bidding.

 They might not all come from the Middle East and their targets may not be the same ones but they'll be there. The damage they will cause and the pain they inflict will get steadily worse. There have always been homicidal maniacs. Now we have suicidal maniacs, which is worse. 

The availability of cheap communications technology means the terrorist will always be just slightly ahead of the authorities. That's another thing you can depend on. As Stanley Baldwin said long before the last war, "the bomber will always get through". 

 In the light of this our talk of destroying the threat is as empty as their carefully blood-curdling rhetoric. The best we can hope is that this is contained rather than extinguished. 

The price of that containment will be some curtailing of the things to which we have only recently grown accustomed. Easy movement across borders is one. Unlicensed communications platforms is another.

The music is another good reason to watch Aziz Ansari's "Master Of None"

Enjoying Aziz Ansari's new Netflix series "Master of None", which couldn't be more contemporary. The choice of music – Beach House, Kurt Vile, The War On Drugs, Father John Misty, Michael Kiwanuka and so on – literally and metaphorically underscores this. Last night I watched the episode where he hooks up (it's the world of hooking up) with Claire Danes. I'd never heard the play-out music before. I couldn't date it but the voice sounded familiar. Surely it couldn't be Eric Burdon. It was.

"Cheating" by the Animals didn't even get on their 1966 album "Animalisms" but it was a bonus track on a recent reissue. Now, like Chris Stainton's riff from "Woman To Woman" which lay in obscurity until Tupac's "California Love", and Badfinger's " Baby Blue" which had its moment in the sun over forty years after release as the last tune in "Breaking Bad", "Cheating" comes blinking into the light thanks to the patronage of a young actor who doesn't have a clue who the Animals were and doesn't need to.

Why are television and film producers so much better at picking something because of the vibe, as Ansari explains here, than radio people are?