A book that might actually change your life, if you dared read it

If any book qualifies for the "could change your life" treatment, it's Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande. His argument is that for the last thirty years the combination of advancing technology and prosperity have made it possible to prolong human life in ways that would have been thought pointless not long ago. Instead of asking how people ought to die, his book asks how people ought to have the best life they can, given the lottery of longevity.

I'll be honest. I screwed up my eyes and skimmed during the passages when he was describing the awful conditions that had been endured by patients he'd come into contact with, ranging from people who came into his hospital to his own father; on the other hand I was paying maximum attention when he got to the bit where he described the moments when the treatment paused and he had The Conversation.

That's the main thing I took away from "Being Mortal". What matters is what a person wants out of life. Once you've got that from their own lips you can work out how long they can have it for and how it might best be provided.

Ten years ago, I took our then ailing cat to the vet. I said "is there anything you can do?" As soon as the words were out I realised that was a ridiculous thing to ask. There's always something they can do, as long as somebody's prepared to foot the bill.

Read it. If you dare.

Never knew the pre-performance yawn was such a thing

Mark Ellen and I are doing one of our Word In Your Ear evenings tonight. It's a standing joke that half an hour before we begin Mark will start yawning. He's done it for years. Since the yawning will often coincide with a period of frantic preparation on my part it can give the impression that one party's trying and the other one isn't.

Yesterday I was listening to the commentary from the World Athletics Championship and a number of retired runners and jumpers were saying that when they know they're about to perform "your body withdraws to conserve its strength and you start yawning".

I passed this on to Mark and he sent me this clip of the Beatles getting ready to perform at Shea Stadium, just over fifty years ago. I never knew the pre-performance yawn had such a rich history.

The interviewer's fear of the playback

These Alec Baldwin podcasts are a treasury of advice for anybody who ever has to do anything you might call performing. I was just listening to his chat with Dick Cavett, who recalls a time when he was suffering from chronic depression and had to interview Laurence Olivier. He felt so bad he seriously considered just walking out on the recording. When they began Cavett felt that Olivier sensed that his interviewer had a problem and, being the professional, upped his game accordingly. Cavett got through the taping but was convinced it had been a disaster.. Obviously he never watched the playback. Years later he was telling Marlon Brando about this experience. Brando said "do yourself a favour - go and watch it." Cavett did, and it wasn't anything like as bad as he thought it was. What did he take from this experience? "You can never look as bad as you feel."

How did students get so easy to offend?

Profile of former Greek finance minister of Yanis Varoufakis in the New Yorker has two brilliant items of trivia.

The first is that his partner may have been the girl who came to Greece with a thirst for knowledge and studied at St Martin's College in Pulp's "Common People".

The second is that when he was a student at Essex University in 1978 he was the spokesman for the Black Students Alliance. He remembers that everyone would laugh when he got up at meetings and said "we blacks believe...."

Add this to the thousand and one things you couldn't do at a university today. How did students get so easy to offend?

Good news about the past, present and future of the Word podcast

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For years now I've been hearing from people who say "where can I get all the long versions of the old Word podcasts?" Now, thanks to Chris Rand, you can. They're archived here.

Pick the bones out of that lot. And no, I'm afraid I don't know what was the number of the one where Andrew told the story of Van Morrison and the harmonica. You'll just have to take your dog for a very long walk.

Mark Ellen, Alex Gold and I keep the spirit of the old podcast going in our Word In Your Ear events, the recordings of which you can subscribe to for nothing at all here. These happen at the Islington, which is a great pub with a brilliant small concert room at the back which is ideal for putting on and recording these shows. Since we've been here we've hosted Danny Baker, Johnnie Walker, Ben Watt, Mark Billingham, Clare Grogan and many more.

We usually do these as audio/visual shows with the conversation steered by pictures on a screen and to help get the idea over we put some of them on You Tube. Our most recent one with the lovely Clare Grogan is here.

You can still get a ticket for our next one which is next Tuesday and features music writers Mick Wall and Peter Doggett.

"Kolymsky Heights" is the coolest thriller I've read in years

Lionel Davidson's Kolymsky Heights is a very cool thriller. Not in the sense that it might appeal to fashion-conscious readers but in the sense it's so brilliantly restrained. For instance, near the end Davidson tells us some startling information about what just happened to the hero and does it in brackets, which takes some nerve. It's also cool because it's set in Siberia, a part of the world I know nothing about other than it's cold. How factual is it? As Philip Pullman says in his excellent introduction, it doesn't matter whether Davidson went there to research the place, read all about it in a library or just sat there and made it all up. "The point at which the author's affection for the background exceeds the reader's interest in the foreground is the point at which the book is put down and the TV is switched on." Davidson, an English writer who died in 2009, never reaches that stage because, like The Day Of The Jackal, the action of his book is moving relentlessly forward all the time. I haven't been so impressed with a thriller since Thomas Harris's Red Dragon.

Alec Baldwin's podcast is the best, wisest thing I've heard in years

I've spent the last few days listening to Alec Baldwin's "Here's The Thing" podcast. It's the best thing I've heard in years.

I've heard him talking to David Letterman, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Lawrence Wright, Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, Chris Rock and Lorne Michaels and others. In the course of that I feel I've had more genuine insight into how people operate and are motivated at the very top of the show business tree than I would have picked up in years of listening to the standard celebrity interview. That's the one where the interviewee condescends to the interviewer who in turn condescends to the listener.

Instead here you get Jerry Seinfeld actually saying the great truth that nobody ever says:

"My life in comedy is a life of sacrifice that I am only too happy to make. All my relationships were as disposable as a dixie cup next to my career."

Here you get Gay Talese, who wrote the classic story "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold", talking about why people at the top of the tree are so often unhappy.

"If you're extraordinarily talented you're living up to expectations that can not long be met."

Here you get David Remnick talking about meeting Bob Dylan:

"He looks like Vincent Price playing a cowboy."

I really haven't got time to tell you any more. Here's the archive. Dive in.

What I read on my holidays

Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper is the story of a under-funded toff who at the age of 19 in 1933 set off to walk from London to Istanbul.

The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Germany from Conquest to Disaster is the third volume of Richard J. Evans's history of the great enormity, a project that's every bit as long as it needs to be.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald told me more about the relationship between hawk and handler than I thought there was the remotest chance of me wishing to know.

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel starts off with an interesting premise but ends up reminding me that I prefer the way Stephen King did this kind of apocalyptic thing in The Stand.

The best thing I read on holiday was A Spy Among Friends: Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre. As a yarn it gets more amazing every time it's told. As a moral tale it makes you think even more as you get older. When you get older you understand the meaning of loyalty.

Frank Sinatra was good enough to sing off-key just to make a point

In 1959 Frank Sinatra played two shows in Australia. To try something different, and presumably to keep costs down, he decided he was going to be accompanied by a quintet led by the vibes player Red Norvo.

Sinatra liked to think he naturally belonged to the brotherhood of jazz musicians. Norvo opens the show with a number and then introduces "a new boy singer we've added". This is clearly a gag but it's also a recognition that Norvo and his musicians aren't just there to provide a foil for Sinatra's celebrity.

What ensues is both a band gig and also one of those performances where the musicians don't seem to be troubled by the worry of who might be listening. It's not just the way Sinatra plays with the lyrics or the inclusion of on-tour gags like "On The Road To Mandalay" (lyrics by Kipling). It's the serene, carefree bounce of the way he leans on the drummer's roll underpinning the line "when I get you up there" in "Come Fly With Me".

The performance, which is frictionless throughout, is beguiling enough to make you forgive the tape hiss. The show was only recorded because somebody in the venue's sound booth decided to press "record" just as it got under way and it wasn't released until the late 90s.

As Adam Gopnik points out, the downside of Sinatra's perfectionism could be a tendency to chide musicians to the point of bullying. When the pianist gets the wrong chord at the beginning of "All The Way" Sinatra sings deliberately off-key. I'm trying to imagine the rock singer who'd have the nerve to do that.

The people at Gawker don't seem to like the world they've built

There’s a big to-do at the U.S. website Gawker over a story being withdrawn, apparently in order to placate advertisers.

A number of senior people have noisily resigned, claiming the independence of editorial has been fatally undermined. 

The new generation of digital journalists working in U.S. media don’t stop at giving themselves the rather inflated job titles favoured by their eyeshade-wearing predecessors; they also seem to think they can hold the same line between “church and state” once so dear to Time magazine and the New York Times.

But that was in the days when news media was a two-revenue stream business. The old position wasn't a principled stand - it was just common sense. Some of the money came from advertisers; the rest came from readers. The job of the editor was to hold the line between the two streams. You couldn’t lean too far in the direction of one for fear of making the other, to use one of the most popular weasel words in the contemporary lexicon, uncomfortable.

If on the other hand you’re an internet media business like Gawker (where readers don’t pay) you only have one revenue stream. That’s the advertiser. Or sponsor or commercial partner or whatever you call them. In this new dispensation, where the advertising is the only source of cash, the advertising will always win. A child could tell you that.

This is the new Jerusalem the Gawker people eagerly built. Now they’ve got it, they don’t seem to like it.

Let's help James Hyman preserve a vital part of our pop history

A few weeks ago I was shown round the archive of old magazines and newspapers in the basement of Time UK's offices. There were old copies of everything from NME to Woman's Own to TV Times and Horse and Hound.

I've seen this kind of treasure house before. If you've never worked in the magazine business you probably think all that stuff must be a really valuable resource. If you have worked in magazines you know it isn't, because it's never kept in a form that makes material easy to retrieve and it's difficult to re-publish because nobody knows who has the rights. From time to time publishers have plans but they always back down as soon as there's the threat of a copyright claim. I've seen it happen lots of times.

That's why I'm interested in the James Hyman Archive. This is the world's largest private collection of magazines and it just so happens that it's heavy on the music and lifestyle titles I've always had a personal and professional interest in. James (above with collection) has got backers and the support of industry body the PPA who are keen to see this collection digitised and turned into an archive which could be useful to all sorts of people in the advertising and media industries.

James explains more about it here. I've written a column about it for In Publishing. I'd like to see it happen, not because I might make a few pounds from it. I really don't care about the money. I care about the work and the people who did it.

What do I remember about Live Aid? The weather and a Billy Connolly joke.

People ask what I remember about Live Aid, thirty years ago today.

I remember it was hot. The sky was blue. The sun was fierce, particularly in that immense tupperware box slung from inside the roof of Wembley Stadium that we broadcast from. To get to it you had to climb ladders and go across gantries. Once you were up there you couldn't get away in a hurry. You just stayed there and baked. The heat from the crowd rose to the roof and hung there.

And I remember Billy Connolly, who was sitting alongside me as the Pretenders came on stage, leaning over and saying "I wouldn't join that group." This was not long after both James Honeyman-Scott and Pete Farndon of the group had died. "Why not?" I asked.

He looked at me. "Nobody leaves."

Mark Ellen and I have been talking about the day with fellow survivors Dylan Jones and Janice Long. You can hear it here.

In praise of the Criminal podcast

There's this podcast called Criminal. Each episode is devoted to a true-life first-person account of some brush with criminality or the law. They're the kind of odd tales that would cause a hush to descend if they were personal stories being shared at a dinner party.

I listened to three this afternoon while on various errands. There was one about romance scams, in which Nigerian fraudsters pose as retired English professors in order to work their way into the confidence (and then the bank account) of recently widowed women. Another concerned a young woman of twenty-five who had wanted to be a coroner ever since she was a kid. The last one was all about a guy who scammed most of the antiquarian book stores on the West Coast in order to build up a collection that might advertise him as a man of quality.

None of these stories would have quite made a radio programme. Radio programmes need a neat moral or an obvious twist. Instead these stories have the strange, unfinished quality that announces them as profoundly true. Nothing's more human than crime. You might like it.

Two pages from July music papers dramatise the staggering speed of change in the 60s

Ten years separate these layouts from editions of two British music papers published in July in years past. This (left) is the inaugural issue of Bill Harry's "Mersey Beat" from July 1961. The Beatles haven't yet become famous enough to be on the front page of even a local publication. The ads are for a local music shop or for charity. It's as modest as a parish magazine.

Just ten years later, almost to the day, this (above) is Richard Williams' review of Rod Stewart's "Every Picture Tells A Story" from "Melody Maker", which was Britain's leading music title in July 1971.

"Every Picture Tells A Story" is  a record that would have been entirely inconceivable in the world in which "Mersey Beat" had been launched. It was reviewed in a way that pop records never would have been reviewed ten years earlier. Rod Stewart even looks like a human being from a world that would have been difficult to imagine in 1961. The changes that took place between 1961 and 1971 boggle the mind.

Will we ever see things change quite so much so quickly again?

Who needs a new album by 71-year-old Boz Scaggs? Me.

I've always seen Boz Scaggs as the guy coming home with the milk, black silk-tie loosened, feet still feeling the last samba, heart slightly regretting the heiress who got away.

I go back to 1971 with Boz. I saw him do one of the nullest shows I've ever witnessed, when he visited here in the wake of "Silk Degrees", and also one of the best about ten years ago at the Jazz Cafe.

He's seventy-one now and has no right to be still making records as good as this one. He reckons he finds it quite easy because he doesn't write the songs. This has tunes associated with Al Green ("Full Of Fire"), Huey Smith ("High Blood Pressure"), The Band ("Whispering Pines"), The Impressions ("I'm So Proud") and Bobby Charles ("Small Town Talk").

I've written about that last masterpiece before. Only sold a few thousand copies but I've met everyone who bought it.

Does anybody need another album of rhythm and blues covers, particularly now that it's never been easier to access the originals? Probably not but he's got his own very special flavour and sometimes a little bit of what you fancy does you all the good in the world.

If only you could un-see 80s videos like Bruce Springsteen's "I'm On Fire"

"At night I woke up with the sheets soaking wet/And a freight train running through the middle of my head."

I was thinking of that line yesterday, on the hottest July day in London since records began.

It came into my mind the way lots of pop lyrics do. Detached from the song, Bruce Springsteen's "I'm On Fire", which came out thirty years ago this year, ready to mean whatever I wanted it to mean, which is the way I like it.

Keen to hear it, I looked on You Tube and found myself watching the promo video in which Springsteen plays a mechanic flirting with a dame with an expensive car. Like almost all videos, it's kitsch and absurd, demeaning the song by making everything explicit. 

I interviewed him around this time. In those days videos were still novel and you always asked artists about them. I rememember he said that he struggled with them because you either had to illustrate the story of the lyrics, which seemed a bit obvious, or impose an entirely different narrative on that song, which seemed unsatisfactory.

Of course, nobody really minded because they were a way you could reach audiences. They were adverts. Thirty years later I wonder if that's the reason why so much music from the 80s gets no respect. Once you see these videos again, even after a gap of thirty years, you can't un-see them.

Old pop music gains something over time. Old videos just sit there and look ridiculous.

If you must, it's here.

There's no privacy in the ice cream business, is there?

The other day we were walking along the sea front of a small town on the Northumbrian coast. My brother-in-law, an inveterate taker of photographs, snapped one of an ice cream van. "Did you just take a photograph?" demanded a woman's voice from inside the van. He went over and spoke to her. It turned out that she objected to having her picture taken. "This is my place of work. You wouldn't like it if I came into your place of work and took a photograph of you, would you?" My brother in law walked away, shaking his head.

People are, of course, entitled to a reasonable degree of privacy but every aspect of daily life involves some sort of trade-off between publicity and confidentaility. People in ice cream vans should know this better than most. After all, they occupy an almost unique place in British life. if you carry your produce into a public place in an attractively-painted vehicle covered in slogans describing that product and imploring any passer-by to stop you and try it, and furthermore if you equip said vehicle with electronic chimes to ensure that nobody in the immediate area can remain unaware of your presence, you could fairly be said to be not so much a privacy-seeking citizen as the occupant of an actual advertisement on wheels and you are therefore entitled to the same freedom from public scrutiny as a bloke wandering up and down Oxford Street carrying a placard pointing out that the end of the world is nigh. Or a town crier.  None.

Now give me a ninety-nine. Unless, that is, you don't wish to be disturbed.

Father's Day

The second of Richard Ford's Rules For Writers is "don't have children". This is interesting since so many of his books turn on the subject of father-son relationships.

I've never written any fiction. If I did I think I'd have difficulty writing about anything but my children. Well, not them in particular so much as the the experience of having them, of watching them turn into adults and realising that nature is an awful lot stronger than nurture.

The thought of what they could write but dare not for fear of being misunderstood by their nearest and dearest must torture the writers of fiction.

There's nothing new; just old stuff you weren't previously familiar with

Catching up with David Kynaston's history of Britain since the war with Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957-1959I was struck that politicians were just as concerned about the likely impact of TV on the outcome of the 1959 election as today's politicians were about the possible impact of social media on the last one. "Don't let the telly keep you from the poll," said Hugh Gaitskell in a speech immediately before polling day. "Leave the kids at home to watch Rawhide. They can tell you what's happened when you get back."

Re-reading The Leopard, which I first read years ago when on holiday in Italy. We don't get much sun, which tends to make us glorify it. For the Sicilian, on the other hand, it's an everyday curse and here it's described brilliantly.

Can't stop playing "My Foolish Heart" by the Bill Evans Trio, a live recording which is, if anything, enhanced by the fact you can also hear the hum of conversation and the occasional sound of coffee spoon, smokers' cough or swizzle stick from the back bar of the Village Vanguard in 1961. Matter of fact, this very weekend in 1961.

The white rhythm and blues star who "self-identified as black" sixty years ago

The story of Rachel Dolezal, who "self-identifies" as black, made me think of the bandleader Johnny Otis.

He did something similar back in the 1950s. This is how it's explained in his biography Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story:

In those days if a white man was going to play music with black musicians, work in black clubs and stay in "coloured" motels it would be easier to pass himself off as black.

Sometimes it was temporary. When drummer Louie Bellson joined the Duke Ellington band in 1951 he was told "we're going down South so we're making you a Haitian."