It's been a back to mono Christmas

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

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

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

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

Looks like it's happened.

Five things I've enjoyed this year

I finally understand Nancy Sinatra's kinky masterpiece

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

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

Amazing how long it can take a penny to drop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this country it never fails.

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

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

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

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

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

Terrorism: what I think

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sir, you need to get back".

There is an item on the New York Times about a demonstration taking place at the University of Missouri. In the clip a student journalist is surrounded and jostled by members of the crowd who try to stop him taking pictures.

What interests me is the form of words that they used to do this. They don't say "get back". They say,  "you need to get back". They say it repeatedly. They seem to like the "you need to" formulation. It seems to suggest that this is somehow a universal imperative the man should obey rather than the instructions of a gang with their particular agenda. I find it pretty ugly. The weasel pretence at politeness makes it more so.

Even uglier at the end of the clip is an assistant professor of mass media, no less, calling for "some muscle" to help remove a troublesome journalist. I sincerely hope she's embarrassed.

Steely Dan: the band you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite

Now that music's out there in the cloud, rather than over there on your shelf, it's harder than ever to decide what you feel like hearing.

Now that we have unlimited supply behind a tiny display window, we are more reliant than ever on the names that our memory just happens to shuffle to the front of mind.

I wouldn't describe Steely Dan as my favourite band but they are the act whose music I reach for – or maybe that should be click for – more than any other.

Why should that be?

The sound of the records they made in the 1970s doesn't date.

They have a pop catchiness that falls just short of being ingratiating. It helps that their singles weren't big hits so they're passed over by the algorithms responsible for programming most radio.

The performances are detached enough to match whatever mood I happen to be in. None of their songs seem conspicuously happy or sad. They're all just faintly amused.

And since they kept their own pictures off their covers, giving them over instead to cryptic illustrations and curious archive photographs, there's no personality to get in the way.

They're the band that fills the time when I don't know what I want to hear, the band I can eat between meals without spoiling my appetite.

How did anyone survive bonfire night in the 1950s?

Our house was on an unmade road that finished in a farmer's field.

Every year we built a bonfire in that field.

For a few Saturdays beforehand we would go "chumping".

This meant finding anything combustible we could beg or steal and dragging it to the site where our fathers would build it into some kind of structure.

Parental supervision was patchy. We kids would wander up there with a bag full of fireworks and a box of matches long before the adults appeared with the parkin and brandy snaps.

I can see the kid now. He was ten years old and he carried his stash of fireworks in a leather school satchel strapped across his chest, evacuee-style.

Somehow a spark must have got in there because there was a commotion and I turned to see this lad desperately trying to divest himself of the bag, from which flame was now shooting in every direction.

Somebody's dad got to him, pulled the strap over his head, threw the sorry-looking satchel to the ground and stamped on it.

He was OK. It didn't interrupt proceedings.

His gabardine school mac was ruined, though.

Bet he caught hell from his mother.

Past, present and future on the Piccadilly Line

There were two girls on the tube this afternoon.

17 or 18 years old, I would guess. Sisters, I would hazard. They were both fully occupied with their iPhones, their heads presumably full of whatever is going through a teenager's mind when riding the tube. The standard modern scene.

The only thing that made it non-standard was they were both wearing the hijab plus black coats, ankle-length black skirts and black shoes. Not a lock of hair or a inch of wrist was visible.

It made me wonder whether their mother or grandmother would have dressed in the same way, regardless of whether they grew up overseas or in the UK. And assuming they hadn't, what was the journey that had resulted in their dressing that way in 2015?

It also made me reflect that what nobody bears in mind when trying to predict the future is the amount of the past it's bound to contain.

Want to know what the BBC's real problem is? My son.

Went to the recording of the Media Show's debate on the future of the BBC, chaired in exemplary fashion by Steve Hewlett. It's here.

I came away thinking these things are a ritual dance.  James Purnell, the Corporation's director of strategy, makes exaggerated claims for the unique quality of BBC output; Trevor Kavanagh, leader writer for The Sun, makes equally exaggerated claims for the damage the BBC supposedly does to the rest of the media landscape. All the panellists are asked what will happen in twenty years time. None of them really know.

The people who will ultimately decide about the licence fee are not the people on stage or the politicians or the loyalists in the audience in the BBC Radio Theatre. They will be people like my son.

He's just moved into his own flat, has no intention of getting a TV and gets his TV pictures from Netflix, You Tube and various time-shift platforms, watching them on a laptop. If he has a preference it's for American drama and comedy, which the BBC seems to have cleansed from its output, and big sport, which has all gone to Sky or BT.

I'm sure he's not the only one. This is a different generation which has grown up in a radically different climate. (As Greg Dyke said in the debate, last time the BBC's Charter was discussed, back in 1990, there was not a single mention of the internet.) The BBC doesn't figure in the life of this generation as much as it likes to think it does.

The Americans will never understand our sport because they're not pessimists like we are

American publisher wants to know what I mean by "digging out an away point". Fair cop. It's a book about music after all.

American journalist on New Yorker podcast says it wasn't until he lived in Britain that he heard and understood the expression "a result"

In "Fever Pitch" Nick Hornby says something like "the natural state of a football supporter is disappointment, no matter what the score".

There's something in all three thoughts that points up the role sport performs in this rainy little country. We are pessimists by culture and disposition. The best we can hope for in sporting encounters is they don't make us feel worse.

This is nothing to do with whether the team's any good or not. I have a New Zealander friend who simply can't bear to follow the All-Blacks in the Rugby World Cup because so much of himself is bound up in their winning that he couldn't bear the idea of them losing.

This may be coincidence but it rains a lot in New Zealand too.

After almost fifty years of trying I found a Grateful Dead album I really like

Always preferred the concept of the Grateful Dead to the sound of them. I tried their albums over the years and could never get past the bloodless voices and the lack of whomp in the rhythm section. "You have to see them live," said people. I did that a few times but always felt like an unbeliever at a revival meeting.

That's all changed now. In the spirit of Alan Bennett's parents who delightedly announced "we've finally found an alcoholic drink we like"  – it was bitter lemon –  I've found a Grateful Dead album I can listen to all the way through. Well, apart from the drum solo.

The band wanted to call it "Skull Fuck". The official name is "Grateful Dead". The fans call it "Skull & Roses". It's live, of course. Most of the songs are standard blues band warhorses like "Not Fade Away", "Going Down The Road Feeling Bad", "Johnny B. Goode" and "Big Boss Man". It's a delight to find that here they finally achieve that benign shuffling sound I've read about so much and never heard.

When was it made? 1971, of course.

Cold weather tips for the house-bound scribbler

Spring and summer are easy for those who write at home. Put on a pair of shorts and a tee shirt and you're ready.

When there's a cold snap in the morning it gets more challenging. I read Janice Turner's column in the Times today where she mentions a fellow writer who can't work unless she's in full fig, earrings, heels and all. I'm sure Peter Robinson wrote that you can't do proper work unless you're wearing shoes and socks, which is an interesting point.

I'm always alert to hints about how other hacks work. Mark Ellen and I compare notes all the time. Mind you, he put the central heating on the other morning, which won't be happening here for quite a while.

I got through last winter without having the central heating on after nine o'clock. In the last couple of years I've been following a personal central heating plan which is best described as "head to toe in Uniqlo" involving gilets, wooly hats and the kind of underwear people wear on skiing holidays.

When the weather's in a transitional phase I follow The Beatles plan, otherwise know as "I'll Follow The Sun". This means I take my laptop to whichever part of the house is getting the most natural warmth at any part of the day.

Because I need physical movement to have any kind of original thought, I go for walks in the park a couple of times a day. Sometimes I sit on a bench writing on my phone. Sometimes I go to a cafe. It's amazing how the proximity of other people can help you concentrate.

I'd be interested to hear about other people's regimes.

Why do American magazines never have actual editors?

The New York Times piece about Playboy dropping pictorials of naked women starts with "a top editor" at the magazine going to see 89-year-old Hugh Hefner to check that it's OK.

In British magazine culture there's only one top editor. That's the editor.

I've never understood how American magazines can have so many people called editor, particularly when the staffs are as shrunken as they must be now.

You generally find the actual the editor is called Managing Editor or Editor-in-chief.

You also find they have no power.

How The Song Machine overwhelmed the Old Way of making pop

John Seabrook writes for The New Yorker about the frontier between music, commerce and technology. In his fascinating new book The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory he describes the changes that have occured in the last twenty years in the way the hits are made and played.

If they could only clear the rights to the music, it would make a great movie. It's got characters: the fiercely-driven young mouseketeer Britney Spears who started off assuming  anything she was told by an adult was the law and wound up checking out of a rehab clinic after one day and shaving off all her hair in public; Clive Calder, the parsimonious, publicity-shy, allergy-suffering South African who sold his company Jive Records at the top of the boom for almost $3 billion dollars; Lou Pearlman, who made a fortune out of managing the Backstreet Boys, spent it propping up a bunch of fraudulent ventures and is in prison as a consequence; a long-haired Swedish metalhead called Karl Martin Sandberg whose genius for grafting the chord progressions of European pop music to the brutal cookie cutter rhythms of American hip hop would transform him into Max Martin, the most successful songwriter and producer of the 21st century.

Seabrook calls it the "track-and-hook" business. It starts with some kind of rhythm bed, engineered for maximum dance appeal by a specialist in the art. The track may then be sent to numerous specialists in coming up with the "top line". Everybody competes to see who can fashion the most compelling one. The weirder and more arresting the effects the better – these people are endlessly ingenious – but it's an article of faith in the Song Machine that the listener should never be too far away from the comforting embrace of a chorus close enough to what they've heard before to render it naggingly familiar after three listens.

Next to the Song Machine's appliance of science and fierce creative competition, there doesn't seem to be a lot of hope for the traditional nice-words-and-music pop song. You just have to look at the charts. Next to this stuff everything else feels flaccid. Ryan Adams' recent decision to make his new album a cover of Taylor Swift's Max Martin-produced and written "1989" is less  a homage than a white flag raised over the ramparts of the Old Way.

No peace for the garrulous

Seem to be spending a lot of time talking for public consumption at the moment.

The Word In Your Ear evening that Mark Ellen and I recorded last week at the Islington is now available as two separate podcasts, the first featuring world’s leading lighting designer Patrick Woodroffe who’s worked with the Rolling Stones and lit the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics; the second featuring Paul Du Noyer and Laura Barton (above), talking about Paul McCartney.

I’m on Saturday Review tonight talking about Ai WeiWei’s exhibition at the RA, the new film 99 Homes, the new book by Margaret Atwood, the one-woman show Fake It Til You Make It and Music For Misfits, an upcoming BBC Four series about indie music.

Next weekend I’m at the Cheltenham Literature Festival anecdoting with Mark, Kate Mossman and Paul Du Noyer and talking to Will Hodgkinson about the famous “who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?” editorial in The Times at the time of Mick and Keith’s drug trial of 1967. On Monday October 5th I’m talking to Mark Lewisohn about his massive Beatles biography at King’s Place.

Future Word In Your Ear events include Dave Cavanagh talking about John Peel, Chris Salewicz on rock stars who died at the age of twenty-seven and Jon Savage on 1966. You can add your name to the mailing list here.

Audiences will eventually be paid to go and see unknown bands

Budweiser are running an ad at the moment featuring an unknown Canadian band The OBGMs playing a club gig. The twist of the ad is that when they go on stage they're amazed to find themselves playing to an enthusiastic full house rather than the usual mix of blood relations and unimpressed locals. The audience have been provided and bussed in by Budweiser.

This is an interesting inversion of the traditional "dreams come true" advert, which recognises the fact that the supply of middling bands is now far greater than the demand for them could ever match and it's therefore the band rather than the audience who need to have their wishes fulfilled.

I was talking to somebody recently who was launching a gigging-focussed social media site. I told him there was more chance of getting the bands to pay for access to the audience than vice versa.

I wrote a column a few years ago speculating that we would soon reach the point where audiences were paid to turn up at non-star gigs. This ad is another step closer.