First law of Twitter – it takes careful planning to look spontaneous

I was talking to Joanna Cohen about the picture on the left when I was in Gateshead recently for the Radio Three Festival Of Free Thinking. Joanna lectures on American History at Queen Mary and was giving a talk about how Abraham Lincoln used photography to project his image to the American public in the 1860s (which you can hear here) so she knows a bit more about the subject than I do.

We were talking about the tweet which Bill Clinton posted after his daughter Chelsea gave birth to her first child. I found it interesting in all kinds of ways: simple human interest value in looking at new grandparents; nosey curiosity about the amount of weight he's lost; speculation about the state of the relationship between the two adults; wondering whether in years to come the child might look back at that snap and be amazed at how it went round the world so quickly.

Bill's tweet followed Hillary's. Even I realised this story was mainly about Hillary and the next Presidential election. And why not? This seemed to be the action of a proud grandmother hoping people would momentarily overlook the fact that she's also an ambitious politician. Joanna had a different view. Look, she said, I'm sure she is a proud grandmother but there's no way plans have not been in place for the posting of this picture on Twitter from the moment Chelsea Clinton first announced she was pregnant. There are people on her team who know exactly where Hillary stands in the eyes of the American people and understand that the opportunities to short circuit voter's rational defences and appeal to their emotional side are too precious to be passed-up. This picture and the tweeting of it will have been as carefully choreographed as a major press conference. 

I suppose she's right. The power of this picture is it looks spontaneous, which is obviously not the same thing as being spontaneous. Things that are spontaneous invariably look a mess. Only things that are carefully planned look spontaneous.

An exclusive look inside the mind of Mauricio Pochettino

Imagine you're an ambitious young manager/fitness coach/scout and you're approached by Tottenham. You might be mildly flattered by the attention, particularly if you'd come from a club which doesn't spend so much time proclaiming its ambitions. But at the same time you would know - and if you didn't know, your agent, your friends and your wife would impress it upon you - that you only had to look at the record of the club's chairman to realise that the most likely outcome of your tenure is that you will be booted out before your contract is up.

Therefore you will spend less of your time thinking of the unlikely eventuality of success and more of your time thinking of the near-certainty of failure and how you might insure yourself against the personal consequences of same. Think about it. It's bound to be the mindset. You're going to get fired. You would have to be Pollyanna to think otherwise. This changes the way you look at life.  It's like going into a fancy restaurant thinking not about the nice meal you might have but instead about the pay-off you will get when you contract food poisoning.

Spurs fans wasted a lot of energy trying to work out what AVB or Redknapp or Sherwood were thinking and now they're doing the same with Pochettino. I'll tell you what he's thinking. He's thinking, when is it going to happen, how bad will it make me look and how much will I walk away with? And if he isn't his agent certainly is. None of these people are thinking of the future with the club because the overwhelming likelihood is that there won't be one. It's the one certainty of life at Spurs. Levy will fire you. Just look at the stats.

And the same thing applies to everyone below the manager on the pyramid. If they go, you will go too. Therefore why should you demonstrate loyalty to anyone?

I've got nothing against heavy management. People pay a lot of money in order not to feel bad about firing people. It happens in every walk of life. But in football the downside is so profitable that it changes the relationship between the employer and the employed. Samuel Johnson said that if a man knows he's going to be hanged in the morning it concentrates his mind admirably. If a man knows he's going to be fired at some point in the near future and he's going to walk away with a significant pay-off it does the opposite.

Is "Serial" going to do for podcasts what "The Wire" did for TV?

I knew Serial would be good before I actually heard it because word reached me from the right places. I knew I'd hear it eventually so I didn't try to find out more about it. I didn't want to know any more. I still don't.

I knew it was by the same people as This American Life, which was good enough for me. They've got a style you don't find on British radio. In the case of Serial - and this is all you need to know - they've presented a whodunnit as a series of one-hour podcasts.

You encounter the story through the thoughts of a reporter who's puzzling over a fifteen year-old murder case. You hear her interview tapes, eavesdrop on her phone conversations. I don't know if the voices belong to actors, civilians or a mix of the two. It really doesn't matter. The beauty of Serial is there's nothing to compare it to.

I may not stay to the end. I don't know how many episodes there are and, where whodunits are concerned, I'm more interested in the journey than the destination.

All I know is this. Radio couldn't begin to do what Serial is doing.

Los Angeles, December, 1970, when Leon Russell was king of the world

It says this is from 1971, but I actually think it was recorded in December 1970 at KCET in Los Angeles as part of what's known as the Homewood Sessions. They say it was the first live stereo FM broadcast. Not sure how true that is but what's certain is this captures the Leon Russell caravan at their very best, including such key walk-ons as Don Nix, Claudia Linnear and Furry Lewis (of whom Joni Mitchell wrote "Furry Sings The Blues").

I find his solo albums a bit strained but at the time this was taped he was a brilliant producer/svengali. This was around the time he produced Freddie King's brilliant "Going Down". The woman with the rolling pin is Emily Smith who was part of Russell's retinue and the inspiration for his song "Sweet Emily". In this clip the sound and pictures are out of sync but I don't think that changes the remarkable fact that they could play this well live and these days you'd probably get arrested for having this much fun on camera.

What do TV producers talk about if not new faces?

Olenka Frenkiel is forthright about why she left BBC Current Affairs. When they decide you're too old, she says, they starve you of work.

TV believes in youth the way Roman Catholics believe in sin. They're always thinking "can we get a younger presenter?"

In fact there are only two "creative" thoughts in TV.

The first is "change the look of the programme", which means "new sofa".

The second is "refresh the team", which means "get somebody younger and more pleasant to look at".

If they can no longer say that openly I can't imagine what they find to talk about.

Have U2 reached the un-Tipping Point?

“About 100 million people checked us out, one or two or three tracks, but about 30 million people liked the whole album. That took us 30 years with The Joshua Tree. So we did in three weeks with Songs of Innocence what took us 30 years with The Joshua Tree.”

That's Bono talking about U2's iTunes giveaway. He can't really believe that, can he? That it's possible to deduce from a load of clicks that 100 million people "checked us out" or that 30 million people "liked the whole album".

It reminds me of that ad where the Encyclopaedia factory goes back into mass production because a baby somewhere is stabbing at an iPad.

This is an attention economy. Being exposed to something means nothing. Hearing something means nothing. Now even "owning" something doesn't tell you a whole lot.

The only currency that counts is people's active engagement, as measured, in the case of music, in repeat plays.

If you look at The Joshua Tree comparison another way, in that case the enthusiasm grew and spread, like one of Malcolm Gladwell's benign infections. This campaign seems to have gone in the other direction. This time they started by giving people the infection. Now those people seem to be saying "I had the U2 album but I'm better now." Call it the un-Tipping Point.

Carly Simon's torrid summer of 1971 and the invention of celebrity culture

Carly Simon wrote "Anticipation" in 1971 while waiting for Cat Stevens to arrive for their first date, if date's the word you use. During their brief affair Cat also inspired her to write "Legend In Your Own Time".

This was the era of the singer-songwriters. If you slept with one it was expected they would write a song about you. If they didn't it was tantamount to saying you weren't important enough. "Songs are like tattoos," as Joni Mitchell sang the same year. She wrote "Willy" about Graham Nash. He wrote "Our House" about her. Leonard Cohen wrote "Chelsea Hotel No 2" about Janis Joplin. That's the way it went.

Carly only saw Cat for a couple of months. She was in London making an album with his producer Paul Samwell-Smith, another lover. (That cover picture was shot in Regent's Park's inner circle.) In spring Cat introduced her to future husband James Taylor. In summer she supported Kris Kristofferson who took her back to the Gramercy Park Hotel and sang "I've Got To Have You" for her, in case she didn't get the idea.

They were all young, beautiful and would never be better. Being immortalised on somebody's next album simply heightened the romance. You could guarantee a song that featured your favourite subject - you. And of course as this branch of celebrity culture was being born that torrid summer the funny thing is the media neither knew nor cared.

What Taylor Swift says. What Taylor Swift means.

"Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. "

This is what Taylor Swift says in interviews because it sounds as if she's on the side of the angels and not just speaking for herself.

But what does it mean? Some pop music may be art but most of it is just pop music and is neither important nor rare.

We don't pay for things because they're valuable. We pay for things according to how much we value them, which is a different thing.

What she's really saying is,"right now I can get away with charging a premium for my services and I intend to do it while I can."

Nothing wrong with that. Rembrandt would have done the same.

We need a national debate about the problem of suitcases on wheels

Sometimes cases on wheels are necessary; more often they're pulled by people who seem to think they're too fabulous to carry anything.

They've got a skinny latte in one hand and with the little finger of the other they're wheeling a case that makes them TWICE AS WIDE.

Two business people walking along the platform wheeling their individual laptops takes up more space than the Temptations.

There are people on the Tube today with pull-along suitcases bigger than wardrobes. What can they possibly have left at home?

Kids follow, wheeling *their* mini trollies containing Buzz Lightyear & a bag of sweets. Everyone's taking up twice the room they need.

Family groups are convoys of human articulated lorries, zig-zagging, tail-gating & jack-knifing all over the public thoroughfares.

And if they suddenly stop, it's never their problem. It's the poor sod behind them who comes to grief.

Don't talk to me about caravans. The pull-along suitcase is the real issue when it comes to traffic congestion.

The 1971 music of Smoke Dawson finally arrives

This is the story of George "Smoke" Dawson. He first appeared in the very early sixties playing banjo in a trio with fiddler Peter Stampfel and Rob Hunter. He's like a minor character in "Inside Llewyn Davis". Then, according to Stampfel, he "took a fuck ton of speed and came back playing fiddle better than I ever did."

In 1971 somebody got Smoke Dawson in a small studio at Sea Lake, California and recorded him playing seventeen tunes. They pressed 750 copies. God knows what happened to them. They certainly didn't sell. Smoke never became any better known and went off to pursue a number of jobs, including fisherman, computer programmer and wrestler. He's in his late seventies now and has had his share of misfortune.

Anyway, Josh Rosenthal of the Tompkins Square label stumbled upon the 1971 Smoke recording and has put it out. The whole thing runs for less than half an hour. He plays so quick the tunes are over before you know it. It's insanely good. I've played it five times today.

They say that Big Star were a letter sent in 1972 that didn't arrive until the late 80s. Smoke has taken even longer to get here.

I didn't hear a single at the Mercury Music Prize

Went to the Mercury Music Prize last night. It's an enterprise dedicated to promoting the virtues of the long playing record, which is understandable. Inbetween the acts we were shown clips of DJs and musicians enthusing about their qualities as albums as if that would somehow convince us to set aside a portion of our time in forty-minute increments to listen to them.

I don't think there's ever been a time when there's been such a disconnect between the way the public listen to music and the way the record companies, broadcasters and tastemakers do the same thing. They have to be committed to the records, either because their pay cheque depends on them or they have to think of something to say or write about them. On the other hand we the public, now that we can listen free of the encumbrances of ownership, float across the surface of a limitless sea of music, occasionally finding one song we like and then playing it again and again and then, only then, dipping further into the album that it might have come from.

There's no longer any point in telling us to persevere, to finish our vegetables, to clean our plates before we're allowed to go out and play. That's a behaviour that belongs back in the days when you bought a record on the basis of a review and struggled with it until you convinced yourself that you liked it. That's gone. These professionals have to decide whether the new album by Royal Blood or Jungle is really good or not. Because they're forced to come to a conclusion they generally end up saying it's better than it is. We don't have to decide and so we don't. We just try it and move on.

There were some performances last night I enjoyed more than others, as is always the case, but here's the curious thing. It's now over twelve hours ago and I can't remember a single song any of them played. I've been going through the shortlisted albums on Spotify and even with that prompt I can't be sure I've found the songs that they played. The only exception is the one by Jungle, which I've heard a lot.

This is surely a big problem because in the end it's hit songs that make us listen to albums. We hear one tune we fall for and we go looking to see if there are any more where it came from.

I've written about this before but let's imagine that there had been a Mercury Music Prize in 1971 and the shortlist had been "Every Picture Tells A Story", "Hunky Dory", "Led Zeppelin 4", "Sticky Fingers", "Bless The Weather", "Ram", "Imagine", "Who's Next" and others. I don't have to remind you what the stand-out tracks were from those records because they stood out. It's always been that way and there's no getting away from it - memorable singles make memorable albums. Unmemorable singles just make up the numbers.

Variety's back - from the frozen north to the Thames and the Tyne

Alex Gold messaged me last night from Skagway, Alaska. As you can see it looks like a frontier town out of a Bob Hope comedy.

Skagway's the latest stop on his current tour with the United Kingdom Ukulele Orchestra. He joined them last year for a tour of Germany. Since we were organising Word In Your Ear gigs at the same time we were in regular contact and I could never get enough of his reflections on finding himself in a musical comedy act. Everybody gets to do a party piece. His is Viva La Vida. This clip was recorded on their German tour. Makes a change from the thankless life of the indie musician, doing your own songs. "People turn up," he said to me once. "And they really enjoy it. I'm not used to this."

That's another sign that Variety's back, obviously, and not a moment too soon. On November 11th at the Islington we're presenting country duo My Darling Clementine and best-selling crime novelist Mark Billingham in The Other Half, a specially-written marriage of words and music. They'll also be playing a few bar-room weepies favoured by Mark's hero from the Tom Thorne Playlist. Tickets and details here.

This Saturday afternoon I'll be at the Sage in Gateshead playing classical records for Radio Three's Saturday Classics. This promises to be an unusual way to spend the day. I'll be in the foyer, I think, disturbing the peace of people who've innocently wandered in to have a cup of coffee and look at the Tyne. It's all part of their Festival of Free Thinking and you're more than welcome to turn up if you're in the area. On the Sunday I'm taking part in a discussion about how digital distribution may or may not have changed people's tastes and habits. It's all free. Further details here.

I don't miss mainstream entertainment at all.

"Look, mush, you asked to be on this TV programme. Don't get coy about it."

During his interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy on Channel 4 News Richard Ayoade referred to an earlier interview with Quentin Tarantino and said the elephant in the room was the film-maker's insistence that he had a right to have his film plugged on the TV in return for turning up.

He was right, of course, but he'd have been even more right if he'd said that the real elephant in the room during his own appearance before the C4 cameras was the PR who was presumably watching a few feet away. It was the PR who had called the producer at C4 News and said "I can deliver Richard Ayoade". It was the producer who thought "whoopee, that would be just the ticket between Syria and UKIP". It was Krishnan Guru-Murthy who thought, "Oh, that would be fun". It was Richard Ayoade who thought, "Oh, well, I've got to plug my book and there are worse places to do it than this". And it was Richard Ayoade who had signed the deal with the publisher which required him to make his best efforts to promote it on the TV.

I've endured sticky times interviewing people on radio and TV, people who made it clear that they didn't want to be there. The temptation to say, "Look, mush, you have paid a PR to have got you on this programme and would presumably feel no compunction about bollocking them if they hadn't been able to make it happen, therefore it seems only right that you should stop acting like a member of the public unaccountably harassed while going about their daily business and just do something to make the next few minutes entertaining and interesting for the people who have tuned in."

If what we read about the atomising of broadcast news is true then this won't be a problem for Richard or anyone else much longer. Authors get on magazine programmes because they're free filler. When the programmes are gone there'll be nothing to pretend not to cooperate with.

Alfred Wertheimer is dead. He invented rock photography

Alfred Wertheimer has died at the age of 85. If you don't know who he was put his name into Google Images and you'll see a unique series of pictures of the young Elvis Presley.

Wertheimer took them during a train journey with Elvis between New York and Memphis in 1956. The pictures show Elvis canoodling with girlfriends, waiting for his meal at a segregated lunch counter, staring out of a train window and hanging about with his extended family at North Audubon Drive.

They are the best set of pictures ever taken of a rock star. That's not just because Elvis was the best subject or because Wertheimer was the best photographer. They're the best set of pictures ever taken of a rock star because Colonel Tom Parker didn't have the presence of mind to cut off the thing that made them great - access.

All the iconic pictures taken of rock stars - early Presley, Dylan, Beatles, Stones, Sex Pistols, Smiths etc - were taken in the days when they were so keen on publicity that they gave access to just about everybody. As soon as they could pick and choose they sought to control their own images and in the process made themselves profoundly dull. That's why there hasn't been a picture of a rock star taken in the last thirty years that packs a fraction of the power and information contained in the one above.

Honestly, who chooses friends according to their musical tastes?

Dan Brooks in the New York Times argues that since streaming music has made the same music available to everybody it's no longer possible to identify kindred spirits by the fact that they like the same as you do.

He says that in the old days "the bands you listened to conveyed not just the particular elements of culture you liked but also how much you cared about culture itself".

It's very well-argued. It's also wrong.

If there's one thing I've learned in the course of a life spent listening to music it's that liking the same music is no more an indicator of your likelihood of getting on with people than you both happening to have bought the same sweater.

I've met raging bores who like the same things I like. I've got bosom pals whose choice of music I wouldn't be paid to listen to. And I also strongly suspect that anyone who sets that much store on what music you listen to is the kind of person who knows the sub-genre of everything and the value of nothing.

It's not music that bonds people. It's the attitude to music.

Dear public figures, you don't have to apologise to me

It's Friday, as good a day as any to think of the people who will offend us next week. Right now they're not aware that they will be offending us. They're happily thinking about their book tour or the after-dinner speech they're about to give. They're blissfully unaware of the fact that this time next week they'll have to issue a formal apology for something which they've said, something which seemed sensible and moderate at the time but once strained through the medium of Twitter and condensed into another headline to feed the raging appetite of rolling news, which now demands one apology a day, it suddenly reads like a paragraph from Mein Kampf.

Not that I've read Mein Kampf, just as most of the people demanding the apology won't have read the article or speech or exchange from which the offence will have apparently arisen. They will simply be basking in that warm feeling of self-righteousness that comes from assuring everyone that they're on the side of the angels, as if the angels didn't change sides every bit as much as everyone else. The sign of a mature society is it can live with the idea that the public discourse will be full of things that might not get general agreement. It's a sign of the other kind that people feel such a need to shout other people down.

With a full week to go, I'd just like to say that if in a week's time you're called upon to apologise for something you said in the first half of the week, you don't have to apologise to me, nor do I insist that you apologise to anybody else. Hope that helps a bit.

I heart Rod Stewart 1970-71

Why am I always going on about old records? Somebody asked me that the other day. Don't I like music made today? Don't I check out "nubandz"?

Well,  the reason I go on about 1971 is because I'm writing a book about it. I do like music made today but it tends to be hip hop or pop music. Most of today's rock sounds tired to me. No, I don't check out "nubandz".

Tell you why I go on about the music of 1971. I'd never heard this track until today. It's The Faces recorded at the Fillmore East at the end of 1970. They're doing "Love In Vain", which they've clearly heard for the first time via the Stones. That is one reason to love it. The idea that an up and coming band wasn't embarrassed to borrow an idea from their elders and betters. And though Rod Stewart clearly hasn't learned the words properly he gives a performance which is simultaneously bravura and  nonchalant.

Now you may tell me that there are up and coming rock bands today who have singers who have this kind of presence and power. I reserve the right not to believe you.

In the music business, "suits" often have ears

People who talk about "the suits" in the music business (or any other business come to that) usually don't know what they're talking about. I met up with Rob Dickins yesterday. I suppose many people would call Rob a suit. He used to be Chairman of Warner Music UK, which is the kind of job people lazily associate with boardroom politics and a complete disengagement from the products which the business deals in.

There's no point trying to rattle your rock and roll medals in Rob's direction because he's got more and bigger ones than you have. He went to see Jimi Hendrix when he was sixteen, was booking the Faces as Social Sec at Loughborough University when he was twenty, and was plugging Neil Young's "Heart Of Gold" to Radio One when he was twenty-two.

We were talking about 1971 and Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On". I pointed out that Gaye took it to the West Coast and secretly remixed it to bring the congas up in the mix and to make it sound more ethereal. Rob pointed out that the really extraordinary thing about "What's Going On" is the sound of the triangle.

I've just been playing it and he's right. Not bad for a suit.

Interviews with the reluctantly retired from Palm Springs

The Download's a good podcast if you're interested in vintage soft rock. 

It comes from a weekly radio show done by  Chris May and Elli Tourjé in Palm Springs, California and features straight, informative interviews with people such as James Taylor bassist Leland Sklar, Beach Boy Al Jardine, trumpeter turned mogul Herb Alpert, Wrecking Crew bassist Joe Osborn and Richard Carpenter.

I was just listening to the episode with Sklar. He still works, which makes him happy. He'd just been talking to Linda Ronstadt whose health prevents her from doing the same thing.

Force yourself to watch a proper film this weekend

Ever since I was a teenager people have been telling me to see the French gangster film "Rififi", made in 1955. I've been so convinced by their argument that it's a classic I've probably told people that I've seen it when I hadn't. This week I finally got round to actually seeing it on Netflix.

Of course it's brilliant. Now that I'm older I can appreciate things about it that I wouldn't have quite got when I was a kid: the look of post-war Paris, the shiny old cars, the glistening pavements, the cruel glitter in the eyes of the leading man, the extraordinary look of the jazz clubs, the half-hour robbery sequence which is done without words, the difficulty of making a phone call and the way that feeds into the drama.

Amazing how often when you've got a choice between the old thing that you know will be great and the flashy new thing which you know will disappoint you choose the latter and end up wasting your time and money. Henceforth I shall try not to do that.