Waitresses, Top Forty radio and the illusion of diversity

When I wrote about something I heard on Planet Rock, somebody who didn't wish to be named took me to task for slating the station having only listened to it for five minutes. In fact it was a bit longer than that but no matter.

All the people I know in radio accept that the very most of a new listener's attention they're going to get is a few minutes. That's why they design playlists in the way they do so that they hear something familiar, something hot and something new but familiar-sounding.

I was reading John Seabrook's piece about the songwriters behind Rihanna in an old copy of The New Yorker. Here he quotes from Marc Fisher's excellent book Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation. Fisher credits Todd Storz with the invention of Top Forty radio. When Storz was in the army during the war he watched how customers in diners tended to pick the same records again and again on the jukebox. When the customers left the waitresses took their own coins, put them in the jukebox and punched up the same records. They didn't want change. They wanted familiarity.

It was this concept he took into radio - in an era when it was considered bad form to play the same song twice in a twenty-four hour period. It's this principle of heavy rotation which still underpins all music radio, whether it professes to provide all the hits and more or pretends to follow a higher agenda. Behind the scenes programmers, producers and algorithms are working very hard to make sure you're never too far from something warm and familiar.

It's the same thing when you do research around people's preferences in music magazines. When asked everybody will describe themselves as having very eclectic tastes. In practice very few of them do. They all say they want informative pieces about new bands. In practice they all read the old one about Oasis.

Meet Mr Gig

Nige Tassell, who used to write for The Word, has published a book called Mr Gig, which details his quest to discover what live music means nowadays. This takes him from a package tour of former Smash Hits cover stars through Glastonbury and Cornbury to All Tomorrow's Parties in Butlin's, Minehead and a festival on the remote Hebridean island of Eigg.

Stuart Maconie has described it as "a sweet and tender paean to a very particular lost love, the live gig". Nige is joining us at next Monday's Word In Your Ear show, which also features My Darling Clementine and David Ford, where I'll be talking to him about the live experience past and present. Come one, come all. Tickets here.

An Othello review for short attention spans

We went to see Othello at the National Theatre.

With modern dress productions I always feel that for everything you gain (this is set in a Bastion-style military encampment on Cyprus) you sacrifice just as much in lost appreciation of just how deeply sunk in his times Shakespeare was (the play starts with Iago complaining about missing a preferment, which simply wouldn't come again in his lifetime.)

Brought up on a diet of "wot me guv?" wide boys, modern audiences sneakily prefer Iago to Othello whose nobility we're expected to take his own word for. The audience yesterday snickered nervously at Rory Kinnear's asides. But by the time the bed was piled with bodies, some of whom had expired at great length, one even confirming the fact with the words "I die", you could have heard a pin drop in the full house.

No intelligent life on Planet Rock

It's always a delight to hear someone mangling a really rotten idea for a listener competition on the radio.

I was listening to Planet Rock the other day. A listener had proposed the following list of artists as a competition: George Harrison, Peter Frampton, Rolling Stones and Weezer. The thing they had in common was that they'd all once covered Buddy Holly songs. All except Weezer who had recorded a song called Buddy Holly.

It's the kind of "so what?" question that makes you want to lynch the inquisitor. The answer should always be more interesting than the question and this really isn't.

But it was made worse by the fact that the presenter hit the wrong button on the play out machine (nobody has actual CDs in the studio any more) and played Wheatus instead of Weezer. He didn't notice and ploughed blithely on with the competition, far too busy to listen to the music.

The only thing I ask of any DJ is that they be enjoying the same experience they're providing. Most of them aren't.

I see from their site they're asking "want to be a Planet Rock presenter?" Tempting.

Why modern vinyl sounds better than old vinyl

Chris Topham flies jumbos for Virgin Atlantic for a living,  runs the vinyl label Plane Groovy for a hobby and is spinning the records at our next Word In Your Ear show on May 20th for nothing.

Plane Groovy has put out records by Chris Difford, My Darling Clementine, Henry Priestman and Francis Dunnery plus lots of progressive rock, which is Chris's particular taste.

These are proper records. Hefty things, often doubles, packaged in thick card covers and tightly shrink-wrapped so that they feel special and worth £19.99. To unpeel one is to be re-acquainted with the feeling of anticipation that vanished from recorded music thirty years ago.

They sound strangely good as well. Chris says the reason the vinyl records of the 70s and 80s popped and clicked was because in those post-fuel crisis days they had to be pressed on some recycled materials. "Modern vinyl," he reckons "sounds much better."

So few pressing plants are still open that it costs £3,000 to produce 500 copies of one of Plane Groovy's vinyl double albums. He does deals with artists on a handshake. Once the records, most of which are sold mail order, have earned back their manufacturing costs he splits things 50/50 with the act.

It's not a business that would provide anyone with a living but it takes more time than a standard hobby. He's trying to do a bit less flying so that he can spend more time with his records.

Chris will be spinning all kinds of vinyl inbetween the acts at our next Word In Your Ear gig at the Old Queen's Head on May 20th, a show which features My Darling Clementine and David Ford. You can book tickets here.

The knees are the mirror of the soul - which is why rock stars can't go on stage in shorts

I was talking to David Ford about our upcoming Word In Your Ear show on May 20th.

He'd recently compiled a list of dos and don't's for live performance and his first one was Don't Wear Shorts.

Soon as he said it my mind performed a Google image search of rock stars in shorts. Here they came, a cavalcade of charismatic heads and distinctive upper bodies mounted on the same strangers-to-sunlight pipe cleaner legs. The Beatles filming Help in Bermuda. Bob Dylan diving into a hotel pool in the 60s. Keith Richards in the basement at Nellecote during those Exile sessions. There was even some long forgotten snap of the otherwise muscular Bruce Springsteen torso perched on legs that wouldn't keep Peter Crouch off the ground.

Ford concedes that there are exceptions. Angus Young of AC/DC is clearly one. Sir Freddie Mercury of Live Aid is obviously another - but gay shorts are another variety altogether.

Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys could wear shorts with pride because he looked like a beach boy before he was a Beach Boy. And obviously this advice does not apply to women with good legs.

I've been thinking about this ever since. There is something about rock stars wearing shorts that is so profoundly wrong that it makes you wonder if contained within it are the secret codes defining rock star mystique as a different species from movie star mystique or any other form of mystique.

Maybe it's because legs don't lie and they remain there as a repudiation of every other form of re-invention. You can cover your face with hair, place a hat on your baldness, even make a feature of your pigeon chest but your knees are the true mirror of your soul.

Are "the greatest rock and roll band in the world" any good?

There's only one way that the Rolling Stones are going to restore their lustre now that we know the market for tickets to see them on their valedictory tour is soft. They're going to have to do something which they haven't really had to worry about since the 80s, which is to play really brilliant shows.

Round about Live Aid, when outdoor gig going became just another branch of the international leisure industry, audiences decided that they would give the biggest bands slack on the musical front as long as they made up for it in sense of occasion. We won't say that your playing is ropey as long as you persuade us we're seeing "the greatest rock and roll band in the world". It was a confidence trick.

The last time I saw them was around that time in the 100 Club on Oxford Street. They were doing one of their "back to the clubs" column inch grabbers. There were just a few hundred people in the place. Sight lines weren't a problem. The audience weren't distracted by threatening weather or jets going into Heathrow.

And you know what? They weren't all that good. They had grown so used to playing on a certain scale that they could no longer rein in the gestures to suit the fact that the audience were under their noses and not in a different postal code. Keith Richards and Ron Wood played like men watching each other's moves but not listening to the noise coming out of each other's amps.

I've caught live recordings since then and it doesn't seem to have got much better.  Since Bill Wyman left it's gone the other way. This is their official YouTube channel's view of their opening in L.A. this week.  Jagger's urge to sell the song has got in the way of his just singing it. Gwen Stefani does "Wild Horses" as if she's in the West End in some musical based on their old hits. They play "The Last Time" as if they're the only people in the world who don't know that it's all about that echoey old guitar lick and the clanging tambourine and not just another "will this'll do?" boogie vamp.

(This is where McCartney scored. He got younger guys in his band, people who'd grown up listening to his records. They knew how to reproduce them live better than he did.)

And it's all too fast. All of it.

Go back and listen to their great records, from their very earliest ones to "Start Me Up", and the magnificence comes from the slur, the implied threat of the drums, the tail dragging whip of the rhythm section, the feeling of something being reined in in case it got out of control, the sound of something being played slightly slower than other bands would dare.

Jagger at his best was not manically patrolling the apron of the stage as if terrified of losing your attention. He was standing there and commanding it. Maybe he's running up and down working like crazy nowadays because he knows that they don't sound right.

Whether or not Glastonbury turns out to be their last hurrah it'll be treated  as such. They'll be in your living room where they won't be able to retreat behind their mystique. Between now and then they should see if they can rediscover how to rock. I'm actually not interested in "the greatest rock and roll band in the world". I'd just like them to be, as the kids say, any good.

I hate picky eaters. It's the way I was raised.

I was in a caff near Oxford Circus this lunchtime. Not a restaurant but more than a greasy spoon. A caff.

 A woman came in, evidently undecided whether to sit at a table, get something to take away or leave empty handed.

The east European waitresses attempted to help her, pointing at the array of sandwich fillings in the display cabinet and the chalk boards full of hot meal options. She stood there looking studiously unimpressed, much like I imagine Maris Crane might look.

This, don't forget, is in the middle of one of the most cosmopolitan cities on God's earth. The customers represented every type and many ethnicities. The food is nobody's idea of gourmet fare but the place is clean, the service is good and they've been running in that location for over twenty-five years, which means their menu features everything they're likely to be asked for by the thousands of different people who will drop in during the average week.

The woman stood there. She looked at one menu. Then she looked at another. She looked in the cabinet. Then at the chalk board, which must have had fifty options on it. Then she turned and left.

I felt affronted on the staff's behalf. I'll forgive most things but there's something about a picky eater that can make my blood boil.

Is this really only the second British country record?

Mark Ellen reckons the album by My Darling Clementine, who are performing at our next Word In Your Ear gig on May 20th with David Ford, is only the second example of what you could call a British country record.

The first, he reckons, was Elvis Costello's Almost Blue. That was recorded in Nashville with Billy Sherrill. My Darling Clementine's was recorded in London with Nick Lowe's producer Neil Brockbank.

Of course he's wrong in all sorts of ways but you only say things like that to get a response. Without resorting to hair splitting you could mention Albert Lee, Meal Ticket, The Rockingbirds and any number of acts from what you might call the Eddie Grundy wing of country. But it's still not that many.

It's certainly not so many as there are British practitioners of other forms of American vernacular music. We've had hundreds of pretend Dixieland jazz bands, legions of supposedly Southside Chicago blues acts and rockabilly and soul revues by the score. But country acts, not so many.

It's not that there isn't affection for the music. Being the last redoubt of songs that mean something country is one of those strains that Brits return to when the latest hip thing turns out to be meretricious. As the likes of George Jones shuffle of this mortal coil people realise how good they were. And for all its slavish adherence to formula the Nashville pop industry still turns out some brilliant records, which are all the better for being passed over by smart opinion.

You should come along to the Old Queens Head on the 20th. They promise a George Jones tribute. Tickets here.

The blog post that became a presentation - you read it here first

From time to time magazines or papers get in touch and ask me to expand on something I've written about on this blog in a column for them, which I'm only too happy to do.

In June last year I wrote one about what I learned about modern media in the act of announcing the closure of The Word.

Twitter asked me to talk about it at an advertiser event.

Interviewers can't win when the interview's down the line

Listening to the radio these days I'm increasingly aware I'm hearing conversations between people who aren't in the same physical space.

They used to proudly announce these exchanges as being "down the line from" as if that proved how far their mighty arm extended. These days not so much, maybe because an increasing number of people aren't prepared to disrupt their entire day just to help fill a two-minute gap in a programme.

I could be wrong but I think BBC 5Live are particularly reluctant to flag up up how many interviewees are in London, which is of course where they used to be.

The remote interview is popular with company chairmen spinning their annual results on the Today Programme. They get an ISDN line installed in the office and then they can field the questions while surrounded by PR men holding up flash cards with key points on them.

Radio engineers hate Skype because of the quality. Interviewers don't like it because on a remote call it's difficult for them to butt in. Listening to Skype interviews you realise how much of the exchanges in an intervieware signalled physically.

One former Cabinet minister would always plead a packed calendar as his excuse for not being able to come to the Today studios. He knew that if they sent the radio car round he was in command. He was on his own turf rather than theirs, they couldn't intimidate him with so much as a raised eyebrow and once he was embarked on an answer he could talk as long as he liked.

Fifty years ago today The Rolling Stones signed their first management deal

The men who signed them were Eric Easton, an agent, and Andrew Oldham, a PR man.

On the same day Oldham, who was only 19, took pianist Ian Stewart aside and told him he was no longer in the group and would henceforth have to settle for being their road manager. Oldham had decided that Stewart's prominent jaw spoiled the perfect picture made by the other five. Stewart wasn't the first and he wouldn't be the last to be fired because his face didn't fit. Oldham's decision may have been callous but it was the right one.

Oldham told me that he only met the Rolling Stones because of a train. It was the early sixties. On Sundays London was closed. His custom was to go and see his mother in Hampstead for lunch and then while away the afternoon much as Tony Hancock had done. Somebody had told him that this interesting new group played sessions at the Railway Hotel in Richmond on Sunday afternoon. He looked at the north London line and worked out that he could get the train directly from Hampstead Heath to Richmond.

So he did. The rest is a blog entry. Fifty years later they're still gigging.

Eagles documentary celebrates a very hard-nosed operation

The History of The Eagles doesn't packs any dramatic revelations. In fact it steers clear of any mention of their personal lives apart from their intervention in Joe Walsh's drinking and drugging.

On the other hand it doesn't hold back when it comes to slipping the knife into people who've spent some time inside the tent.

Producer Glyn Johns, who oversaw their first three records, is derided for thinking they were all about close harmonies and believing they should forget trying to prove themselves as a rock band. I've heard James Dean. I think Johns had a point.

Johns remembers being called in to work with them and being wholly unimpressed until he heard them amusing themselves with a campfire singalong. As so often it's not what you recognise in yourselves. It's what other people recognise in you.

David Geffen, who signed them to his record label and made them huge stars, is castigated for making more money than they did.

Erstwhile guitarist Don Felder is tried, sentenced and executed for getting in Glenn Frey's light, being a bit of pain and for having the temerity to have written the lick that gave birth to Hotel California.

It's clear that Frey and Henley, the two singers, run the show, along with their manager Irving Azoff. Walsh and Timothy B. Schmidt are just delighted to be along for the ride. I was recently wondering whether a band could have two leaders.  The Eagles seem to have managed it. It probably helps if you've got compliant staff.

Listening to radio Betty Blue

My radio preview column in today's Guardian Guide is about Building Bridges, this morning's Radio Four programme about middle-eights, and Collar The Lot, the Tom Conti-fronted documentary about Italian internees in Britain during the war.

Mainly it's about FIP, the French radio station I often spend spring Saturdays listening to. Ecouter en direct ici. I conjure up visions of the lady on FIP broadcasting from one of those beach houses on stilts that you see at the beginning of Betty Blue.

It says here you can find the originals at Gruissan on the Mediterranean coast.

A quick reader survey

People occasionally ask how they can subscribe to this blog. Since it's not something I do myself I'm not sure what to tell them. I've put the "posts" and "all comments" links above but I've not a clue whether they're any use to anybody. I'd be grateful for any feedback or advice.

Thirty-seven years ago this week the Ramones became A Thing

Thirty-seven years ago this week I first handled a copy of the first Ramones album. I was standing by an import van in South Molton Street in the West end of London.

It looked funny. They looked funny. That look wasn't yet A Thing, as we say nowadays.

We played it in the shop and didn't know whether to be excited by the headlong swing or amused by the comical conciseness. We settled for being both excited and amused.

There they were, already fully formed and, as it turned out, fully developed. It only took one play to get the whole idea, whether you thought that idea was a life-changing manifesto, a brilliant conceptual wheeze or a giant full stop. There was no mystery, nothing to be gained by digging deeper, nothing that grew on you.

Some people loved them. In a way, even though I've got lots of their records, they left me a bit cold. I once spent an afternoon with them in a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge and they were your average, slightly whiny American rock band.

It doesn't matter what I think of their music. Here's the thing I'm thinking thirty-seven years later.

The day before we heard The Ramones we couldn't have imagined them. The day after we heard the Ramones we could no longer imagine the world without them.

Thirty-seven years ago I found a new way of describing things. A bit like the Ramones.

The Soho Hobo puts on the best little show in London - if you can find him

They say that even when you're starting out you've got to behave as if you're playing Wembley stadium.

That's what Tim Arnold, who performs under the name of The Soho Hobo, was doing last night in front of a hundred people in an Islington pub at our latest Word In Your Ear show. He's made a record which is all about Soho - its history, vice, glamour, deprivation and gents tailoring - and he's still looking for a record company to put it out.

Meanwhile he performs intermittently but with a professionalism and determination to entertain most performers don't achieve until they're on a headline tour in support of their third album. He fronts a band who look like members of the team who pulled off the Italian Job - apart from saxophonist Kit Mlynar, who dresses like a lady accustomed to men drinking from her shoe.

He has his own MC, Jud Charlton, and brings on famous guest singers including Gary Kemp and Jessie Wallace. (Phil Daniels would have been there, but he was recovering from playing Coachella with Blur.) For one song, The Windmill Girls, which is dedicated to his mother who worked as a showgirl, he's accompanied by Miss Giddy Heights, a fan dancer, who finishes the song with one of the stationary nudes that were The Windmill's trademark. He finishes the act with a headstand that lasts fully thirty seconds.

The music comes from that place in British pop which has one foot in the theatre. He made me think of Ian Dury, the Divine Comedy, even Deaf School. I asked him when his next show was. He said he didn't know. Amazing.

Going round to someone's house to listen to their records while staying at home

We used to go round to people's houses and listen to their records. I sometimes feel a pang that we don't do that anymore but then I remember that it's often an uncomfortable experience and I think better of it.

But last night I discovered that the internet gives you the chance to enjoy the ancient ceremony of the laying of tone arm on vinyl without any of the attendant social discomfort. I discovered, for the first time, that particularly hi-fi aware people have taken to posting clips on YouTube of entire classic long players actually playing all the way through. Rig it up to your sound system and you get the whole experience, pops, clicks, dust bugs and all. It's very restful, particularly when it's an old jazz album like this one.


This guy - and it has to be a guy - has even mixed the clip so that you see the crease marks on the sleeve, the original price sticker, cuttings from reviews and, during Take Five, his cats watching the record going round. It's rather blissful.

Everybody likes recommending. Nobody likes being recommended to.

Twitter has launched #music, a music recommendation service that recommends tracks based on who you follow.

The paradox at the heart of all music recommendation engines is that as soon as a recommendation process is blunt enough to be performed by a machine it's no longer sharp enough to be much use to a human being. Similarly, as soon as a process is mass enough to make money for a company it's too mass to be of much benefit to an individual. As soon is it's insistent and mechanical enough for somebody to claim it as a success it's so insistent and mechanical that you want to turn it off.

In theory everybody likes the idea of recommendations. In practice there's no pain in the arse quite like the person who's always telling you what you should be listening to or reading or watching. Anyone who's really full of recommendations probably has poor judgement. I know scores of people who listen to music for a living and there are only three of them who recommend things that I like. Other people may well recommend stuff I'd like but I simply don't warm to their recommendations.

Music is a thing you pull towards you when you're in the mood. As soon as it's pushed towards you it loses all its charm.

The conformity of footballers

Staying with Ken Sharp in St Andrews. Dundee United train on the university's fields. You know they're here, says Ken, when there's a line of white BMWs parked down the road.

Why white BMWs, I wondered.

It's just the fashion, he said.

I thought he was exaggerating. Then I went round the corner and was confronted by this.