You choose your furniture but the best furniture chooses you

An upholsterer has just been to look at this chair, which was bought in 1967 by my late father-in-law.

He said "they used to advertise this as 'the world's most comfortable chair'." I'm not surprised. Being new traditionalists by inclination we used to turn up our noses at the look of it but we had to concede it was comfortable to sit in.

When we were clearing their old house we were going to get rid of it because it didn't seem to fit in our Edwardian place. Our youngest stopped us. She wanted to keep it, not least because she remembered how much Grandma liked sitting in it. We hauled it up from the south coast and somehow got it to the top of the house in the workroom. Here it proved ideal for TV viewing and even for sleeping in when you have one of those throat irritations that mean you can't lie down.

Now the upholsterer tell us it's a design classic and his son has a nice sideline knocking out replicas. The Management want to re-cover it in something less jarringly sixties. I've got so used to it that it no longer jars.

We've got a house full of furniture. The kids satirically call it The Museum Of Chairs. We've got a load of infants school wooden chairs which are ideal for perching on to put your shoes on. Our most comfortable sofa is one we inherited, for nothing, from the divorcing couple we were buying our previous house from. I have an office chair which came from a place my father took over in 1966, which had probably been in place since before the First World War.

We're not particularly interested in antiques. We never set out to acquire any of this stuff. Aristocrats used to identify the nouveau riche as people "who bought their own furniture". We've bought plenty of our own as well over the years but it's odd how
the furniture we cherish the most is the stuff we didn't buy.

My kind of history teacher

Saw this in Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt.

The profound joy of getting rid of stuff

We've been in this house twenty-five years this summer. Most of that time has been devoted to raising a family. We didn't pay much attention to the rising tide of stuff we were surrounding ourselves with.

After a while even books, records, DVDs and magazines cease to be the things you work for. You get to a point where it's either you or the stuff. By that time you've had the melancholy experience of clearing the homes of your own parents, who didn't accumulate a fraction of the junk you've got yourself. You kid yourself you're going to pass on your records to your kids. Then they grow up and you realise that even if they were bothered there's no way their lives could also find room for the detritus of yours.

What do you get rid of and what do you keep? The reasons you once collected things no longer hold good. Spotify and iTunes have made a nonsense of all those compilations you hung on to because of one track. IMDB makes those fat film and TV reference books look ridiculous. Those launch issues of classic magazines you squirrelled away are never going to make you rich but they will attract dust and mildew. You no longer believe that if you pass up this CD you will never be able to replace it.

In the past few months I've taken what seems like tons of books down to the charity shop. I'm such a good supplier they've given me a Gift Aid card.

Chucking stuff away is a learning experience. You realise nobody is remotely bothered about the thousand-pound computer you take down the tip. They just point you to the pile in the corner. On the other hand they don't know what to make of the old tea chests because they've never seen one before and you wonder whether you should take them home and hang on to them. You visit the second-hand book store so often that you start to develop an attraction for old paperbacks and find yourself picking up the odd one as you drop off the odd box of fifty.

The process of sifting is slowed down by the occasional piece of paper that flutters out of an old book. A child's hand-drawn birthday card, a note of apology for some long-forgotten breakage, a rejection letter from a job you don't remember applying for, all put away nowhere in particular because somebody thought it would be a shame to lose them. Maybe this was the occasion that you were saving them for. Is anyone really going to pause in the middle of cleaning up to look at them again? Anything that's not been disturbed in the last twenty-five years is, for obvious reasons, unlikely to be disturbed in the next quarter of a century.

Your reward for having got rid of all this stuff is the liberation of the space you need to be able to enjoy the stuff. The records you can suddenly put your hand on, the newly-cleared window seat which you can use as a place to read, the profound calm that steals over you when your desk is finally cleared. This is every bit as spiritual as the impulse that led you to acquire the stuff in the first place.

A perfect record

I know what they say about snowflakes/How there ain't no two the same/Well all them flakes look alike to me/And every one is a dirty shame.

Watching the workmen this week erecting a shed at the bottom of our garden in a blizzard made me think of that song from the first Jesse Winchester album from 1970.

Winchester was from Louisiana, which is hot and wet. He fled to Canada, which is cold and snowy, to avoid being drafted into the military to fight in Vietnam.

The songs on the record - songs like Yankee Lady,  Biloxi and Brand New Tennessee Waltz - yearn for Winchester's vanished world of lost content. Snow complains specifically about the weather, which is always understandable.

The handful of people who bought it were either snobs like me, attracted by the fact that it was produced by Robbie Robertson, engineered by Todd Rundgren and appeared on the mysterious Ampex label, or they were people like Elvis Costello and James Taylor, who would in years to come cover the songs.

But nobody has ever improved on the originals. Winchester made good records after this one but his first is one of the handful of rock records I would call perfect. They say that when he'd done the original sessions for Nashville Skyline, Bob Dylan played the tracks to Robbie Robertson and asked him to overdub guitar on them. Robertson said "why would I do that?"

The Jesse Winchester album was graced by a similar restraint. Robertson produced it in the same year The Band did Stage Fright and he must have wondered whether Winchester had stumbled on something just as the Band had begun to lose it.

You can get it as an import or you can find it more easily in a "twofer" with the follow-up Third Down 110 To Go. Which is good but it's not perfect.

If you're interested, I post the vinyl that I often play on Saturdays here.

Can a band have two leaders?

Richard Williams' music blog The Blue Moment is full of excellent stuff, some of it grounded in his time as an a&r man for Island in the 70s.

Writing about Television he says "no band can last long with two leaders".

This made me wonder if there are any exceptions. The big exception is the biggest band of all, the Beatles, but you might say that by modern standards they didn't last all that long. It's clear that no decisions can be made within the Rolling Stones without Mick and Keith. However the former proposes, the latter disposes and they both know that they're useless without each other. Robert Plant and Jimmy Page wrote Led Zeppelin's songs and formed their front line together. When Cream were together both Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton seemed to take the weight of public attention equally.

The leadership of REM seems to be a triumvirate. All their songs are credited equally, as are U2's and Coldplay's. This means that all the members share in the really rich source of revenue, though not necessarily equally. This is certainly why they're all still together.

I can think of one prominent exception to Richard's Law. The career of the Eagles is interesting in that when they did split up it was nothing to do with warring between their two leaders, Don Henley and Glenn Frey. When hell froze over and they reformed they slipped back into their old roles. But watching their official documentary the other day I got the clear impression that all the other members of the band, whether past or present, were very aware that they served at the pleasure of their two leaders.

Obviously there are always exceptions to any rule but the rarity of these makes you think.

Come and hear Brit pop in its anecdotage

Gary Kemp & Tim Arnold, Miss Giddy Heights,
Math Priest, Andy Lewis and Katy Carr.

We've added Math Priest, Andy Lewis and Dan Thompson to our Word In Your Ear show at the Lexington on April 22nd.

It's twenty years since Oasis versus Blur, since TFI Friday and Select magazine, and finally a few of Britpop's muddied and bloodied foot soldiers feel ready to talk about it.

That's what Math Priest, Dodgy drummer and man about town, Andy Lewis, bass player with Paul Weller and DJ on the Parklife tour, will be doing on the 22nd with Dan Thompson, DJ and pioneer of inner city regeneration.

Math promises:

• The one about Damon drunkenly giving us career advice 
• The one about Brett Anderson so mashed off his face he thought Starry Starry Night was a Xmas song 
• The one about The Bluetones lived in our garage 
• The one about what it was really like backstage on the Parklife tour 
• The one about us coming off stage to find the guitarist from Space getting a blowjob in our dressing room from a girl with a Dodgy T shirt on. Yes, you can see I still haven't got over that one :-)

Tickets for the evening, which also features The Soho Hobo revue plus Gary Kemp and Miss Giddy Heights, plus Katy Carr are on sale here now for £15.

David Ford uses everything but the squeak at the Scala

David Ford at the Scala last night - new album called Charge here - was an object lesson in maximising what you've got.

The evening began with Emily Grove, who comes from Asbury Park, supported by Jarrod Dickenson, David Ford and drummer Joey Love.

Then it was Jarrod Dickenson, who comes from Texas, supported by Grove, Ford and Love.

Finally it was David Ford, who comes from Eastbourne, supported by Dickenson, Grove and Love.

That's what they used to say about raising pigs. Everything gets used but the squeak.

At one stage in the last set Ford said thank you for the privilege of being a touring musician, for being able to fill up a van with as many instruments as possible, being able to set off and see who they can persuade to listen to them and also spend time with each other. And he played this.

Joss Stone and the ultimate downside of pop fame

By any measure the four members of the Beatles made more people happy than most of us manage to do. In return two of them were the victims of attacks by homicidal maniacs. In one case it was fatal. In the other it may have contributed to an untimely death.

Bob Marley was the victim of a drive-by shooting. Bjork was targeted by a "fan" who mailed a letter bomb to her home and then killed himself on camera. Those are just the cases I can call to mind right now. There are no doubt hundreds of similar incidents that were intercepted by security and never got as far as the media.

And now Joss Stone has to live with the thought that a pair of murderous misanthropes set off from the other end of the country with the intention of killing her and were only apprehended because they were more than ordinarily stupid. I'm not being facetious when I say that this really is the ultimate downside of pop fame.

"You can have any record you like as long as it's on this list"

Radio Two asked its listeners to choose which of its 100 most-played albums it liked best. This is a curious form of polling. It's like asking Dagenham and Redbridge supporters to name their favourite Chelsea player.

It's the only way radio can work. Radio can't actually respond to people's requests because that might mean going off-message and then where would they be?

They used to run a Sunday night request show on Capital. Listeners would call in and banter with Dr Fox, he'd say "what do you want to hear?", they'd name a record and he'd have it lined up to play straight away.

That's slick, I thought. It's also, coincidentally, on the playlist.

It was then explained to me that although that show was being broadcast live, everything you were hearing had been recorded a few minutes earlier. This gave them the space to tell the caller which of three records they could choose, stage the fake conversation and then tidy up any loose ends in time for broadcast a few minutes later. At which point they would be doing the same with somebody else.

The radio man looked at me as if to say "what did you think happened, you poor child?"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/vote/top-albums/

The Great Gatsby

Took a walk on Friday listening to the Radio 360 podcast about The Great Gatsby. It's pegged to the imminent release of a new film. From the podcast I learned that the book still sells 20,000 copies every few week, that Fitzgerald hated the title, that Ralph Lauren's real name is Lipschitz and his real life career echoed Gatsby's rise from poverty and anonymity and that every American novelist is allowed one official hometown. Extracts were read by the actor Scott Shepherd, who can recite the entire book from memory.

I came home and tried, for the umpteenth time, to read it. This time I succeeded. I still don't like the dialogue and there are whole scenes that I can't really visualise but I loved Nick Carraway's narration and I was determined to finish to get to the last couple of paras, which are as good an ending as I've ever read.

Found this old press clipping - made my day

Doctor Beeching got his way because of my dad

It's been fifty years since the Beeching Report proposed scrapping a huge proportion of the railway network.

I'm a big user of public transport and I can get as sentimental as the next Englishman about the passing of the Slow Train.

I'm also old enough to remember the world the Beeching Report was published into and it was a world which believed profoundly, passionately that the future was all about the motor car.

We hardly ever travelled by train as kids, partly because they were dirty and had a reputation for not running on time but also, I suspect, because our parents associated them with wartime.

In the sixties the family car went from being an unimaginable luxury to a basic right. It was the mobile phone of its day but its consequences were much more far-reaching. My father's preferred family entertainment was taking us all "for a run", which meant going for a drive. Driving was something he only ever associated with pleasure and freedom.

If it did enter anyone's head that even the massive number of motorways being built in the 60s and 70s would never be enough to accommodate the exploding number of vehicles in private hands or that petrol would ever be as costly as it is now, they didn't say anything about it. Had they done so I suspect they would have been shouted down.

That's the problem with planning for the future. People can only ever imagine a slightly better version of the present.

The best records are the ones in your head

In the summer of 1972 I had to go home to Yorkshire to help out at my father's business. He was laid up with a back problem and I had to keep his small textile firm ticking over.

The work was dull, dirty and repetitive. There was no stimulation from the outside world. I dreamed my way from one break to another. The only possible distraction came from a transistor radio over at the other end of the warehouse. It had a crackly medium-wave signal and I didn't control the volume.

That was the year the Eagles "Take It Easy" came out. For some reason it was impossible to buy. On the basis of a handful of radio plays, I developed an obsession with it. That obsession grew in inverse proportion to the number of times I heard it, which was very few.

I'd listen particularly intently during the couple of Radio One programmes that I thought might play it. I'd concentrate hard when they were throwing to the records they intended to play in the next hour. Whole days went past without my hearing it.

In the absence of the actual record I recreated the sound of the intro in my head. There was an acoustic bit, overlaid with a chord from an electric guitar, following which it folded swiftly into a brisk groove which seemed to tumble towards the opening line. "Well I'm a-running down the road trying to loosen my load...."

It was quite thrilling to replay the record in my head. When it actually came on I almost blushed with excitement. I wanted to hear the whole of the record but it was that beginning that I really yearned to hear. On one occasion I came back into the warehouse and it was already playing, which was somehow worse than it not being on at all. It was like missing the opening of a film.

Last night I went to a preview of a new documentary about the Eagles, which comes out in a month's time. "Take It Easy" is used a few times. That intro still does it to me every time. It's partly for now and partly for 1972.

"Lose the arms next time, Danny love"

Danny Welbeck probably was clipped by the Montenegro defender. He probably should have had a penalty.

The mistake he made was in going down like a second-rate actor, arms away from his body, flailing at the empty air. It's the same mistake that got Gareth Bale booked for simulation more than once this season. It makes even a genuine case look like a con. It's got "is he watching?" written all over it.

If you trip over in the street your hands shoot out in front of you to try to break your fall. They don't imitate a dying swan.

The secret of taking perfect pictures of your kids

I found this last night. It must have been taken fifteen years ago. I obviously said, "all right, if you will insist on pulling those bored expressions, just turn round and look at the view."

I think it's my favourite.

But she doesn't have a lot to say

The measure of true celebrity is you always learn something you never knew before. The one thing I learned from ITV's documentary Our Queen was that it's not her habit to say either hello or goodbye when meeting people.

It makes sense. People are always lined up waiting for her and so it would clearly be ridiculous to expect her to explain herself. Similarly when she withdraws she can't say "well, it's been wonderful but one must dash" or any similarly pat line.

It also saves time and breath.

Don't miss the next Word In Your Ear

The Word In Your Ear thing seems to be quietly growing. We used to do them almost every month when the magazine was publishing.

Alex Gold organised them and it was he who nagged me into starting them up again. We did one in November with Skinny Lister, Danny Baker and the Dunwells and we had the second one on Monday of this week with Chris Difford and Boo Hewerdine playing, Tracey Thorn talking about her book and me and Mark Ellen telling some whiskery stories.

We did it at the Old Queens Head this time because there's more seating available and there's a projector set-up that we could use. It worked quite well. People seemed to have a good time.

I'd like to think that in our unbelievably modest way we're trying to do something that's a bit more than the average music gig where you get, in my opinion, too much music and not enough variety. Using a bit of the True Stories Told Live experience and a bit of what we learned when doing the Word podcasts we'd like to think that there may be ways to skin the music magazine cat in a live event kind of way.

Anyway, a step at a time. The next Word In Your Ear is at the Lexington on April 22nd. The acts we've announced so far include Katy Carr. Her mother's family came from Poland and her music and stories explore that side of her heritage with particular emphasis on that country's experiences in the middle of the last century. Katy's made four albums, the latest of which, Paszport, has been nominated for an award by the world music magazine Songlines.



We've also got The Soho Hobo, otherwise known as singer/songwriter and man about Dean Street Tim Arnold plus his crack band, singing songs inspired by London's square mile of sin. They will be joined on the evening by special guest stars Gary Kemp and fan dancer Miss Giddy Heights. How often do you see either of those things? Let me refresh your memory.


Further additions to the bill will be announced in due course but if you want to make sure of your place by booking an Early Bird ticket you'll have to do it before Monday. Here.

If you want to be kept informed about other Word In Your Ear shows, email wiye.london@gmail.com to be put on the list. You can follow Word In Your Ear on Twitter @WIYELondon.

It's fifty years today since The Beatles became icons

The Beatles first LP was released fifty years ago today. The cover was shot by Angus McBean, a celebrated theatrical photographer of the time, known for his surrealist style.

He didn't do anything weird with "the boys". They met him in reception at EMI's HQ in Manchester Square, he looked up at the stairwell and said "why don't you go up there and look over?"

They did. McBean lay on his back in reception and shot a few frames. Job done. An image was created in those brief moments that resounds down the years.

The Beatles restaged the shot themselves for the cover of their Red and Blue hits albums at the end of the decade. The Sex Pistols posed in the same place for the same picture. When EMI left Manchester Square it took the staircase with it and installed it in new offices in Hammersmith.

I can live without the album, which is weedy compared to what was to come. But the cover of that record is the first thing The Beatles did that you could call "iconic".

It wasn't the last.

Why I still don't think the Kindle will replace the book

It's been drawn to my attention that in 2008 I wrote a column claiming that Kindles wouldn't happen. I think my key point was that half the point of reading a book in public was so that other people could see what you were reading.

Leaving aside the fact that it would be a pretty poor column if I filled it with verifiable fact, I was clearly wrong, as many millions of Kindle sales will attest.

And yet.

I've got a Kindle and would recommend one to anyone who does a lot of reading for the simple reason that they speed up your reading. If I've got to read something in a hurry, they're the only way to go. They don't lose your place and - don't laugh - they don't require both hands to support them. You can read one standing up in a crowded carriage on the Tube or while eating cereal.

On the debit side they're shoddily produced, inadequately proof-read and often very hard to navigate. A friend the other day was arguing it was impossible to read Hilary Mantel on the Kindle because you needed to be consulting the cast of characters at the front of the book. (I read Wolf Hall as a book and Bring Up The Bodies via reading machine and I found the second one easier because I was reading it more often and therefore keeping to the thread.)

As far as authors are concerned e-books are a mixed blessing. They may increase your pool of readers but those readers won't be paying you very much money. That's why they'd rather sell you this nice autographed hardback.

In recent months when I haven't been commuting daily I've gone backwards, buying and reading more paper books than I did in the couple of years before that when I was first smitten with the Kindle.

I'm already operating a three-tier system. Some things I want as books. Other things I'm happy to read on Kindle. Some very special things I need to have on both.

I'm doing the same with music. Most things I'm happy going to Spotify for. If I really like them I want the CD. If I love them I have to search out a version on vinyl. It's like the difference between dating, going steady and marriage.

Really useful things we learned without understanding

Education's a political football. The arguments around it are always depressingly binary. Today it's about promoting the value of rote learning. The counter-argument is that committing facts or words to memory without understanding; a) is without value; b) somehow gets in the way of so-called creative thinking.

I'm a sample of one but many of the most useful things I know I learned by rote, often without understanding. These include:

• Multiplication tables
• The alphabet
• The words of William Blake's "Jerusalem" (and subsequently a million pop records)
• Wilfred Owen's "Strange Meeting", TS Eliot's "Journey Of The Magi", the beginning of Macaulay's "Lays Of Ancient Rome" and half a dozen speeches from Shakespeare
• The words of at least twenty hymns
• The capital cities of the countries considered significant when I went to school
• "I before e except after c when the sound is ee"
• "Thirty days hath November etc"
• "Willie willie harry stee etc"

Have I, er, forgotten anything?