tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4561004157812539172024-03-14T05:49:36.479+01:00What Would David Bowie Do?Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of any organisation with which the author is associated professionally.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.comBlogger420125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-84982963366686389952016-01-09T12:51:00.003+01:002016-01-11T11:50:43.085+01:00Just the Bowie album I needed - David Bowie's Blackstar<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The question I've been asked more than any other about this blog since starting it five and a half years ago is what my obsession is with <b>David Bowie</b> as, clearly, I must have one<b> </b>to want to name a blog after him.<br />
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The honest answer is that I'm not, actually, obsessed. But that's not the point. As cultural references go, the suggestion "What would David Bowie do?" (a phrase that surfaced a long time ago in a conversation, and didn't even have anything to do with music) connects to one of the most intriguing cultural icons of the last 50 years.<br />
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Bowie's appeal has always been spread across different interests. The music, obviously, but also the characters he has adopted as theatrical manifestations of that music, and then the side projects - the acting, the art, poetry.<br />
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Much of this hasn't been the result of restlesness, but his enduring curiosity for finding artistic expression in different forms. Music has clearly been the main outlet, triggered as a teenager - like many other contemporaries - by Elvis Presley (with whom he shares a birthday - yesterday, January 8) - and evolving as a performer through his early obsession with Jacques Brel, Anthony Newley poetry and beat art, to his flirtations with glam rock, American soul, Berlin gloom, drum and bass...the list goes on.<br />
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People forever talk about Bowie's reinventions, with journalists lazily describing him as "chameleonlike", but none of his guises have ever been about rebirth or renewal, and certainly not about blending in. In fact the chameleon is probably the last creature you could compare Bowie to. I mean, what kind of background could Ziggy Stardust blend into?<br />
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If anything, Bowie has been more of a magpie, collecting scraps of influence from wherever they fall. As a suburban teenager, hanging out in the mod scene of London's Soho with his bestie Marc Bolan, Bowie would indulge the fashions, the institutions and the freedom with which the young and socially liberated of the time could explore without judgement.<br />
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Bowie is still acquiring influences from any quarter that appeals to him. And that is where we start with <i><b>Blackstar</b></i> (or, simply, ★, to willingly perpetuate the marketing meme), his 26th studio album, released yesterday on his 69th birthday.<br />
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That there is a 26th album (28 if you include the Tin Machine records) is still something to contemplate, seeing as we never expected to see a 25th. And yet, here he is, still not quite dead, three years to the day since the world was awoken to a tweet from his filmmaker son, Duncan Jones, alerting us to news that there was something new to listen to (I've lost count of the number of times I listened to <i>Where Are We Now?</i> that day, not only revelling in the joy of a beautiful piece of music, but also getting wrapped up in the questions everyone else had: Why now? Is he back for good? Is this just a one-off? Will there be an album? Will he tour again?).<br />
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After a decade's recording hiatus, some would have listened to an album of Bowie opening beer cans, but what we got in <i>The Next Day</i>, the album that followed in March 2013, was confirmation that Bowie was indeed properly back, that dystopian themes were on his mind, and that to ease him back into recording, he was staffed (in utter secret) by stalwarts such as Gerry Leonard, Gail Ann Dorsey, Tony Levin, Earl Slick and producer Tony Visconti. <i>The Next Day</i> was as reassuring as it was brilliant.<br />
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But if there's one thing we know about Bowie, he has never done albums - or indeed anything - by numbers, ticking boxes according to audience approval. This is a brief that ★ fits perfectly. It's elevator pitch (I'm assuming) of a "41-minute collection of seven songs born from a New York jazz workshop" might throw arms up in horror, as if someone has finally followed through with Spinal Tap's plan to do <i>Jazz Odyssey</i>, but here, be careful.<br />
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It wasn't long after <i>The Next Day</i> came out that Visconti dropped the hint that the ink was continuing to flow. But it wasn't until the <i>Nothing Has Changed </i>compilation in 2014, containing the wonderfully eccentric jazz/drum'n'bass mashup <i>Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)</i>, that suggested he was already taking yet another direction. But with Bowie, you can never tell what direction he is going to actually take, and whether he is led there or goes of his own volition.<br />
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<i>Sue</i> might have suggested jazz, but Bowie has always been a consumate magpie, acquiring influences as he goes. "We were listening to a lot of Kendrick Lamar," Tony Visconti told <i>Rolling Stone</i> recently."We wound up with nothing like that, but we loved the fact Kendrick was so open-minded and he didn't do a straight-up hip-hop record. He threw everything on there, and that's exactly what we wanted to do. The goal, in many, many ways, was to avoid rock & roll."<br />
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★ is, then, the result of a series of "workshops" in New York, not far from Bowie's SoHo home, in which he worked with a quintet of local jazz musicians: acclaimed saxophonist and flautist Donny McCaslin, guitarist Ben Monder, pianist Jason Lindner, Mark Guiliana on drums, and bassist Tim Lefebvre, who also tours in the exceptional Tedeschi-Trucks Band. Notably, none (apart from McCaslin, who'd also played on the orginal version of <i>Sue</i>)<i> </i>had been part of a Bowie album before. And yet, in a short space of time, with Bowie turning up at The Magic Shop studio at 10am and going home at 4, recording a couple of tracks a day, the collective would soon have a complete new David Bowie album.<br />
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Tracks were honed, recorded and re-recorded, but this was no torturous, over-rotating <i>Born To Run</i> saga. Running, indeed, at just over 40 minutes, it feels like a project. But, then, Bowie has previous here - the Berlin trilogy all ran to similar lengths (<i>Low </i>- 38 minutes, <i>Heroes</i> - 40, <i>Lodger</i> 35) and <i>Station To Station</i> clocked in at 41 - proof that you can certainly do more with less.<br />
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★ certainly maintains that maxim. The choice of musicicans notwithstanding, ★ is not, though, a jazz album <i>per se</i>. <i>Blackstar</i>, the lead-in single released in November, flits eccentrically through a topography of many styles throughout its near-10 minutes, an erratic concept in principle, but in execution, recalls and condenses the multi-part epics in the prog rock era.<br />
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Like a washing line of mixed socks, <i>Blackstar </i>gaffer tapes together free-form jazz, Middle Eastern influences and even an intersection of crooning mixed with dad dancing soul. Separated from the baffling narrative of the video and its story of fallen angels (yep, that man who fell to Earth again) and the possibility that Major Tom is still with us, just - <i>Blackstar </i>is confounding and absolutely brilliant at every turn. And, yes, it is almost a deliberate statement: "I'm doing things on my own terms. Still."<br />
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<i>'Tis A Pity She Was A Whore </i>- which appeared in demo form as a B-side to the original release of <i>Sue - </i>continues the experiment of its A-side, opening with a manic storm of drums, sax honks and piano that, to the casual ear, sound like a school band tuning up. But that's before Bowie comes out with the line "Man, she punched me like a dude", and the entire crazed fusion warms into a swinging cabaret of back-alley illicitness. McCaslin's sax work carries overtones of Bowie's soundtrack to <i>Absolute Beginners</i>, Julien Temple's underated interpretation of Colin MacInnes' coming-of-age-in-Soho novel, and in which The Dame put in a brilliant turn as the Don Draper-like Vendice Partners.<br />
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Little in Bowie's history has happened at random. Well, perhaps, the cardiovascular episode that brought about the hiatus in 2004. The secrecy surrounding <i>The Next Day</i>, and the spectacular reveal of <i>Where Are We Now?</i> underscored how Bowie has always been a master of the theatrical entrance. This has made the creation of a Broadway stage show, <i>Lazarus</i>, with Bowie's songs forming the backbone of a story based on <i>The Man Who Fell To Earth</i>, an indication of just how he is still "multimedia" in the strictest sense of that overused expression. The song, <i>Lazarus</i>, from that show, is a menacing space-jazz workout, but with a vocal melody very similar to <i>Heathen</i>'s beautiful <i>Slip Away</i>, giving way to a somnolent fadeout featuring manic stabs of guitar and Lefebre reaching into the upper reaches of his bass.<br />
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And then we get to <i>Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)</i>: somewhere between its original release two years ago, and its arrival on this album, Bowie has re-recorded it, removing the bonkers New York improv and replacing it with a jarring, mechanical anger, hooked by Monder's bouncing guitar, and one that reflects the song's somewhat bleak narrative of the death of a loved one. The drum'n'bass/funk mashup is still there, but further into the background, with Bowie's vocals - at their most Scott Walker-like - holding their own, almost as a completely different song to that being played by the band, with the mournful refrain "I kissed your face, I touched your face - Sue, good-bye".<br />
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<i>Girl Loves Me</i> will no doubt alienate some, but it is one of the strongest examples on ★ of that magpie tendency, drawing on Bowie's insatiable appetite for new music. If there was any outright influence of Kendrick Lamar on the album, this is the track that it appears on, marrying jazz, funk and hip-hop senisibilities into a recursive Anthony Burgess metre (and rhythmic repetition of the F-word) in lyrics that hardly seem to go anywhere. It will confound and even infuriate. But then a good Bowie song should do.<br />
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Over the seven tracks on ★, it is hard to pick out an absolute highlight, but that's simply because there is something enthralling in all of them. <i>Dollar Days</i>, however, might edge the other six. With its beautiful, smoky introduction, Bowie's acoustic guitar strumming and more terrific work by McCaslin, it has an elegant dolefulness that harks back to the Berlin albums, but with a warmth lacking in those cold recordings. The song itself suggests Bowie getting wistful for his the "English evergreens" of his homeland, but this is actually more of a rejection than pining, delivered via an intimate vocal and that rich Bowie voice that lends itself more to a Sinatra croon than anything else. It is magnificent.<br />
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<i>The Next Day </i>and, now, ★ shed light on David Bowie's current take on the world. In his private life, from what we can tell, he is wildly satisfied, enjoying the amazing near-anonymity of life in New York's Lower West Side, walking his daughter to school, and embracing to the full the cultural tapestry on offer in the condensed concrete village of Manhattan. But despite this, in his music, Bowie still expresses a gloomy view of societal decline, of a world under threat and an uncertain future.<br />
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On the closing track, <i>I Can't Give Everything Away</i>, Bowie perhaps guards against expectations of his own longevity: "I know something is very wrong," it opens with, "The pulse returns for prodigal sons", although this narrative may have more to do with self-reference to the world's fixation with Bowie's constant use of characters and whether they simply serve as a vessel, like an alien invading a host body, or whether they are actually all actor's masks, cleverly protecting the soul behind them. It is, though, another emotive performance from the entire ensemble, with each of the guns-for-hire adding delicate coats of paint to the song's enveloping warmth.<br />
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★is simply stunning. You might have expected me to say that but, trust me, I don't out of slavish sycophanticism. Because, creatively, conceptually and, most of all, musically, it has exceeded expectations. It is the Bowie album I wanted, and we needed.<br />
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While most of his contemporaries, if they're either still alive or still producing, are barely altering the canvass on which their careers were built, Bowie is still shape shifting. For a 69-year-old, he is still challenging conventions of what contemporary music should sound like. It's what he has always done, for almost 50 years, but the fact that he's not resting on his laurels and putting out more of what we're used to, is incredibly, wonderfully, brilliantly refreshing.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-21925627642971723082016-01-04T14:40:00.001+01:002016-01-04T14:40:12.646+01:00Over the top? We haven't yet started!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"Do not go over the top". A typically Dutch thing to say. They are a pragmatic people, immune to hyperbole and the superlative. Thus, Guus Hiddink's first words yesterday when pressed for comment on Chelsea's emphatic 3-0 win over Crystal Palace were predictably understated.<br />
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Under the veteran Dutchman, Chelsea have now played three matches. Two were draws, and not particularly convincing of an immediate return to good times. But, then, they were both Christmas fixtures, one against a feisty, high-flying Watford on Boxing Day, the second, a lethargic away game against a maudlin Manchester United 48 hours later.<br />
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However, Guus, forgive us for going a little nuts after Chelsea's performance at Selhurst Park. Because it was everything the last two weren't. Actually, it was everything the last four months haven't been.<br />
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This could have been another banana skin for Chelsea: Alan Pardew's Palace - and his credentials for possible greatness elsewhere - are not contending for a European place by fluke. And given that, on the morning of the fixture, this was seventh playing 16th, it would have been perfectly reasonable for Chelsea to have run into trouble at their south London rivals, a team which has given them plenty of resistance over the years in league and cup ties.<br />
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Instead, we had a Chelsea revived, restored even. Diego Costa and, for the most part, Cesc Fàbregas, were once again working as a machine, with the combustible forward applying the discipline to remain where he could (and did) score, while the ever-industrious Willian - easily the only consistent performer over the last four dark months - along with Oscar giving the leggy Palace defenders too much to contend with.<br />
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Defensively, Chelsea were back to their rock solid-best, the only notable weakness being Branislav Ivanovic's yard-short pace. Most surprising was John Obi Mikel. For the ten years he has been with the club, Mikel has been a frustration. Once bizarrely hailed as the 'new Makelele', he has scuffed and bruised his way through successive managers without fully justifying why he remained such a club fixture. But yesterday he was a different player, replacing Matic in the holding position with a solidity and class rarely demonstrated before. And only once coming close to a booking, a rarity for Mikel in itself.<br />
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This was the Chelsea of the first half last season - imperious in attack, resolute in defence. It is understandable, then, for Hiddink to call for modesty. One game does never a recovery make. But what has been noticeable over these last three games of the Dutchman's "interim" tenure is that Chelsea's players have applied themselves once more with confidence and swagger. Whatever it was under José Mourinho that inhibited their creative movement appears to have disappeared.<br />
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Strange, then, that so many commentators are talking about the players' mindset. Going back over consecutive posts since August 8, this blog had been saying that Chelsea's problems were psychological, not physical. Now, players that had looked out of ideas since pre-season have, in just 270 minutes of football done much to restore their professional reputations, reputations that had been battered by a combination of their own mental weakness and, clearly, the exulted regime they had laboured under.<br />
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It would be fair to say that Chelsea's malaise since the summer has been a case of six-of-one, half-dozen-of-the other. Mourinho can't be blamed for all that saw them plummet so far so quickly - the players and indeed the club itself must shoulder equal amounts of responsibility for that. But the spoonful of medicine that Hiddink's interim management is meant to apply, yet again, does look like it is working.<br />
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Positivity is Hiddink's key. Although it may not have worked for him in his most recent roles - since his last interim period in charge at Chelsea, he had a miserable time in charge of Russia and Turkey, and left the Dutch national side in the summer when it was clear they wouldn't qualify for Euro 2016 - it's clear how different his philosophy is to Mourinho's glowering and increasingly paranoid mood.<br />
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"I don’t like to see a team drop back very far and seek false security," Hiddink said yesterday, in stark contrast to the 'defend at all costs' approach of his predecessor. Tellingly, he added: "They should look forward and get the ball as soon as possible because when they do, they know how to play." That may sound a tad <i>laissez-faire</i>, but it perhaps indicates a belief that his players don't need a meticulous playbook methodology, but a guiding belief in themselves.<br />
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But, indeed as the avuncular Dutchman says, it would be wrong to get too carried away. Next weekend the Blues face Scunthorpe in the FA Cup, a third-round tie, but one with the still-fresh scars of their fourth-round exit last season to Bradford City, a result that left Mourinho "ashamed" and "embarassed". As it should have been for the whole team. After that, it will be a midweek Premier League visit from West Brom, followed by meetings with Everton, Arsenal, Watford and Manchester United. A relentlessly wet afternoon in Croydon may have provided Hiddink's players with a certain mental challenge - which they impressively overcame - but there are clearly many more hills to climb yet. But as starts go, yesterday's will do very nicely.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-44644806692863806512015-12-31T17:03:00.001+01:002015-12-31T17:03:22.844+01:002015: a year in music<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Let's start with some good news: there's a new Bowie album on the way. Let's improve on that with more good news: as it's not out until next week, I don't have to worry about it - as far as this review is concerned - for a whole 12 months.<br />
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For that I must thank the Jones family, once of Brixton, South London, who saw to it that the boy David was born on January 8, 1947, thus affording the latterday Dame the hook of his 66th birthday for the brilliant subterfuge of releasing <i>Where Are We Now?</i> without warning. Without anywhere near the same secrecy, his next - NEXT! - album, <i>Blackstar</i>, which will appear next Friday on the occasion of his 69th year mostly on this planet. And of what I've heard so far, I'm fairly confident that it will be a shoe-in for <i>WWDBD?</i>'s 2016 hall of fame. But that is, clearly, for another year.<br />
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And, so, 2015 - a year in which music, unwittingly, became a focal point for all the wrong reasons. It would, perhaps, be somewhat disproportionate to place the events of November 13 as the fulcrum of the last 12 months in music. After all, this has been a year, like many and in my case, most, in which gigs have been part of my normal routine.<br />
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In Paris, my adopted home for the past five years, it's part of everyone's social routine, which is what makes the attack on the Eagles Of Death Metal gig as well as the environs of Le Bataclan an act that continues to cast a pall over 2015's <i>joie de vivre</i>. Because as corny as it might sound to invoke "rock and roll forever" defiance, it had never been more correct. <br />
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But let's not overdwell. To do so only panders to the medieval deviants who made such defiance necessary to begin with. Instead, let's celebrate a year in which new music has come thick and fast. So thick and so fast that to do justice to a list of the year' best releases really should be more exhaustive than the 15 you see below. And while this list is more a representation of the new albums I've probably listened to more than any other, it inevitably lacks those which deserve an honorable mention - such as Keith Richards' <i>Crosseyed Heart </i>and Gary Clark Jr's long-awaited <i>The Story Of Sonny Boy Slim</i>.<br />
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But, a line must be drawn somewhere, and so, in Miss World order, here are <i>What Would David Bowie Do?</i>'s 2015 platters-that-matter.<br />
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I hope some, at least, have made your musical year as much as they have done mine.<br />
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<b>15. Laura Marling - <i>Short Movie</i></b>: The minute someone is compared with John Martyn, I have a tendency to reel in my expectations. Because no one was and, I strongly suspect, will ever be anything like him. Laura Marling has, though, come pretty close, especially from a technical perspective. For this, her fifth album, she made the leap many folkies have done, by migrating from acoustic to electric. In so doing, she didn't look back, resulting in a superbly accomplished album, which ruminates on myriad themes with a varying topography of rock-pop styles.<br />
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<b>14. The Church - <i>Further Deeper</i></b>: With a recent history of trouble and strife (band discord, drug abuse - usual rock'n'roll perils, TBH) the 80s Oz rockers returned with an album that both reflected their travails as well as reminded the world of what a brilliantly charismatic band they still are. Singer and principal songwriter Steve Kilbey's melifluous baritone may have lost some its rigidity, the result of well publicised demons, but it has taken on a Syd Barrett quality that fits perfectly with the band's trademark layers of chorused guitars. A comfortingly familiar album which manages to be far from predictable.<br />
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<b>13. Courtney Barnett - <i>Sometimes I Sit And Think And Sometimes I Just Sit</i></b>: Remaining in the southern hemisphere, we have 2015's debutant of the year. Strumming a Telecaster with the thumb of her left hand, the Sydney-born, Melbourne-based 28-year-old caught the eye and the ear with the stripped-down honesty of the EPs with which she made her recorded debut. With this first album, proper, Barnett drew together her gift for bedsit storytelling and festival-friendly grunge-lite, drawing valid comparisons to Lou Reed in the process.<br />
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<b>12. Paul Weller - <i>Saturns Pattern</i></b>: It would be far too easy to compare Paul Weller and Bruce Springsteen through their shared blue collar backgrounds, but there is a stronger [solid] bond between them in terms of work ethic. Both seem incapable of slowing down. Weller, in particular, appears as restlessly creative as ever, finding yet another new direction to go down, with many more previously untapped influences from his youth to work into an album every bit as consistent as any in his impressive near-40 year recording career.<br />
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<b>11. Blur - <i>The Magic Whip</i></b>: Partly written on tour and recorded on the fly in Hong Kong, Damon Albarn, OBE - another intensely restless creative force - together with Messrs Coxon, James and Roundtree delivered as their first collective effort in 13 years an album of subtle reflection on modern life, which still appears to be rubbish, and apparently dominated by technology. For those of us impartial to English melancholy, Blur gave us in <i>The Magic Whip </i>the sort of cold, autumnal evening of music we can't get enough of.<br />
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<b>10. Tame Impala - <i>Currents</i></b>: While on a brief late-Spring trip to Devon I heard 6 Music's Radcliffe and Maconie play <i>'Cause I'm A Man</i> and, much like Daft Punk's <i>Get Lucky</i>, I became hooked on a feel-good summer radio hit which made me impatient for the album it would appear on to be released. I wasn't disappointed. Kevin Parker's studio project had hitherto been more of a prog rock band in my view, and yet here was a gloriously bright piece of 80s pop, serving as a reminder that not all influences from that decade are necessarily bad, and in the right hands can actually be good. In Parker's hands, they're exceptional.<br />
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<b>9. Foals - <i>What Went Down</i></b>: If, like me, you took up the guitar as a teenager, one of the first immensely gratifying experiences is playing your maiden power chord. So when your clumsy acoustic guitar gives way to your debut electric-and-amp combo, the power chord becomes the ultimate expression of teenage angst. Rock and roll is reborn. You become Paul Kossoff or Pete Townshend or Angus Young. Foals are hardly teenagers, and theirs is certainly not the music of a previous generation, but the thudding, rifftastic electricity of <i>What Went Down</i> took me back to the first time I heard the likes of Free and The Who. If I had a car, this would be the album I would have willingly spent 2015 driving to, with the volume up as high as it would go.<br />
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<b>8. Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds - <i>Chasing Yesterday</i></b>: Face facts, British pop stars, there are few amongst you who can hold a candle to Gallagher for being downright funny. Most pop stars are dour, self-regarding and so driven by angst that humour is unnecessary baggage. Not that Gallagher is merely the class clown: his second album with the High Flying Birds continued to hold him aloft as a supreme songwriter, naturally gifted in melodic ease and retaining just enough reverence for heritage to avoid being the tribute act so many detractors still moronically maintain he is.<br />
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<b>7. Alabama Shakes - <i>Sound And Colour</i></b>: You all know that thing about second albums and difficulty, right? Well nobody informed the cavernously-voiced Brittany Howard and her bandmates, who followed up their truly remarkable debut <i>Boys & Girls</i> with an overwhelmingly good package of understated R&B. Live, they are a force of nature, and the combined material from their first and sophomore releases fuelled one of the gigs of, not only the year, but the decade when I saw them at July's Lucca Summer Festival in Tuscany, on a double-bill with Paolo Nutini.<br />
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<b>6. Guy Garvey - <i>Courting The Squall</i></b>: Ask anyone - people who know him, people who've met him, and then everyone else - and no one has a bad thing to say about Guy Garvey. Not that we should have to find fault all the time, of course. But in any written or recorded interaction with the younger-than-he-looks Elbow frontman, two words crop up consistently: "loveable" and "bear". This does paint him as a hybrid of Phil Collins and Yogi, but if you reluctantly put Garvey's patent likeability to one side for a second, and consider the work he has put in with Elbow over, incredibly, the last 20 years, even the most cold-hearted cynic would have to concede, that theirs is a brand of intelligent pop that transcends festivals, bedsits and middle class dinner parties with delight and lack of offence in equal measure. On <i>Courting The Squall</i>, Garvey gathered up song ideas that had been gathering dust, brought in a few of his Salford muso mates and, with the application of a jazz sensibility, went experimental. And did so with wonderous effect.<br />
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<b>5. Richard Hawley - <i>Hollow Meadows</i></b>: After the extravagant splurge of mesmerising psych-rock that was 2012's <i>Standing On The Sky's Edge</i>, Sheffield's bequiffed bard returned with something of a throwback to his earlier, loving recreation of '50s ballroom balladry. The result is a truly luscious collection of guitar-driven twang with a conscience, immediately accessible, but which draws you inexorably into Hawley's romantic take on the modern world, its ills and thrills included, and it does so more with honey than the vinegar of its predecessor.<br />
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<b>4. Sufjan Stevens - <i>Carrie & Lowell</i></b>: Going right back to when I first started buying the <i>NME</i> as a callow youth, I have both embraced what the music press has encouraged me to like and rejected it out of hand. Because that's how it should work. Music may be less of a subjective art as, say, comedy, but it can abruptly split opinion. Yes, I own early Coldplay albums, and I've even paid money to see Adele in concert, but nothing the former produces now interest me, and as for the latter, even my love of the gloomy won't stretch to joining the billions now in posession of <i>25</i>. All of this is to say that Sufjan Stevens' <i>Carrie & Lowell</i> is an album the music press implored us to buy and, instead of repulsing it, on the stubborn grounds that <i>I</i> make my own taste, I took a punt. And I couldn't have been enamoured mor by the beauty Stevens created from apparent pain, charm from sadness, respect from raw honesty. An absolutely brilliant piece of work.<br />
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<b>3. Steven Wilson - <i>Hand Cannot Erase</i></b>: It maddens me that with the consistent quality of songwriting and collective musicianship that the prolific, workaholic Wilson brings to his albums that he isn't a bigger star. Sure, it must be good to be regularly fêted by the prog world and his peers therein, but when the standard is as high as it was on this, his fourth solo album, it is bordering on the criminal that his reward wasn't more than the high chart placings and glowing reviews <i>Hand Cannot Erase</i>. And, as Wilson knows himself, he gets points from me just for the Dead Can Dance reference. A brilliant album combining a dark, somewhat macabre concept with 80s-influenced rock-pop sensibilities. His best yet.<br />
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<b>2. Wilco - <i>Star Wars</i></b>: Just when you thought mainstream rock couldn't turn out something different and interesting, Wilco sneak out an album that makes you realise why you got into music to begin with. Here is the contrarianism that made me appreciate The Beatles' white album, Bowie and prog rock as a teenager: convention and quirkiness combined in constant experimentation, pushing boundaries without busting them wide open. In a year in which the new <i>Star Wars</i> film seems to have been arriving forever, Wilco released its namesake by surprise online, stunningly underpinning its joyously capricious nature.<br />
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ALBUM OF THE YEAR</h3>
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<b>1. New Order - <i>Music Complete</i></b>: Rarely does a band return to whatever it was that made them great to begin with. That's life. Groups with the sort of history, longevity and endurance as New Order, not to mention the musical core that has sustained that reputation, will always end up, to varying degrees of severity, parodying the thing that heralded their arrival. Don't get me wrong - in many respects it's what we want, what we willingly hand over our hard-earned for. The Rolling Stones, I'll wager, are still the greatest rock and roll band in the world, and their latterday output - while obviously not to the same par as their heyday - is still as good, if not better, than most rivals. What made New Order's <i>Music Complete</i> so good, apart from a title that said it all, was how they had not forgotten, or tried to forget, their early essence, that careful balance of rock and dance that made them cool to frug to as cool to listen taking notes to. Here was some knowing reinvention. Actually, the word I'd use is "rejuvinated", reflecting the zest for the craft that they applied in an album that, with familiarity as only a foundation, set about reconnecting the audience with a band that is probably genuiney alone - and therefore unique - in doing what it does.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-12039687747854569522015-12-17T19:28:00.002+01:002015-12-17T19:41:42.978+01:00Special, but up to a point<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The vaults of most news organisations contain the obituaries of public figures that are far from dead and, apart from all the normal odds about expiring through random bus/lightning/shark encounters, are unlikely to leave us any time soon.<br />
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Seeing as anyone of us could go at any time, these "obits" are written or recorded just in case, and updated as and when there is something notable. For the journalists preparing them for newspapers, television or radio, it is a fairly morbid task, countered by typical journalistic black humour (head over to YouTube and watch the entire episode of <i>Drop The Dead Donkey</i> devoted to GlobeLink updating their obituary library with inevitable calamity).<br />
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The reason I bring all this up is that it feels like I've been preparing for José Mourinho's second departure from Chelsea for months. Given the ease with which Roman Abramovich has dispensed with managerial staff for even looking at him the wrong way, Chelsea's relentless descent since the start of the season - from defending Premier League champions to relegation-threatened deadbeats - has carried an inevitability about Mourinho's firing that has gone almost frustratingly unfulfilled.<br />
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Amazingly, the Russian has shown restraint, and despite media gossip about how Abramovich couldn't afford to pay Mourinho off, or was too scared, the simple reality is that he has genuinely tried to give Mourinho every opportunity to turn it around. Monday's performance at Leicester City showed that it is beyond repair. If the dressing room relationship hadn't been broken before, it was now. If a moribund set of expensively compensated players were not going to reach deep and perform like they did in the first half of last season, and more pertinently, like they did against the most extraordinary of odds to win in Munich in May 2012, they weren't likely to do so anytime soon under Mourinho.<br />
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God knows who they will do it for now. Hiddink, Ramos, Ancelotti - all the usual suspects are being reeled off for an opening that seems all-too familiar: interim coach at Chelsea.<br />
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Journalists love a good car crash, and for all those pundits saying that Mourinho is good for business, with his soundbites and sometimes strangled-English quotes, Chelsea's season has been a 20-car pile-up in thick fog with the chief constable declaring it the worst he's ever seen in 30 years as a police officer.<br />
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Any motorway disaster needs its 'Patient Zero' - its initial moment of madness, the white van driver changing lanes without looking in his side mirror or the tailgating Belgian trucker behaving as if the rules of the local road don't apply to him. In the case of Chelsea's season, its hard to identify the trigger.<br />
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Was it the shattered bodies that returned from an all-too brief summer break? Was it the failure of the club to do any meaningful business in the summer transfer market? Was it the dismal pre-season tour? Was it Mourinho losing it unnecessarily over the medical staff on August 8, and then losing the dressing room with his treatment of Eva Carneiro, an event said to have weighed heavily on Eden Hazard, for one?<br />
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Perhaps it was all of these, with each calamity solidifying its predecessor, building up a toxic sediment around the club. It has been a disaster: the Carneiro incident should have been resolved on the spot and the pre-season lethargy should have been mitigated with a better use of the youth on offer (the under-18s beat Huddersfield 6-1 last night - don't tell me there is no hunger at Chelsea Football Club...!). These are things Mourinho himself could have fixed. But he didn't.<br />
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Earlier this week I wrote how managers carry the can too often for their players' failings. That is still true. But, as I've also written - <i>ad nauseum - </i>the malaise at Chelsea has been in the players' heads, not in their legs, even if those legs are still shattered from last season. If Chelsea's stars have been toiling, there has been no shortage of fresh young blood on the bench to relieve them with ambition. Mourinho, however, kept them on the bench, instead sticking with the failing Fàbregas, Hazard, Matic, Ivanovich and Costa, even adding to their woes by doing so.<br />
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Mourinho was a special one, and still is. He could, now, move to Manchester United and relieve them of that pompous clown van Gaal. We all wish José well. He was an extraordinary manager at Chelsea...when he was being extraordinary. When that expired, and his God complex kicked in, there was never a Plan B, just a rapidly unravelling Plan A. Which may not have been that special at all.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-68083258469002618602015-12-15T17:28:00.000+01:002015-12-15T22:32:21.425+01:00It's beginning to look a lot like the nightmare before Christmas<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Given the December temperatures, there was something decidedly incongruous about the three thousand or so visiting Chelsea supporters in the King Power Stadium last night invoking Bob Marley's <i>Three Little Birds</i> by singing "Baby, don't worry about a thing". The home crowd responded with "Championship, gonna be alright".<br>
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Leicester City's fans can more than afford to be cocky, and Chelsea fans should appreciate the gallows humour, if nothing else. Claudio Ranieri's team earned it: their unlikely reverse - relegation threatened at the end of last season - is every bit as remarkable as the position Chelsea now find themselves in. 16th place on the back of nine league defeats is relegation form, and from a team many pundits were expertly predicting back in August would retain the Barclays Premier League title as favourites.<br>
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Less than a week ago we were celebrating, sort of, Chelsea's comfortable win over Porto and their progression into the last 16 of the Champions League. Yesterday morning I was bemoaning the fact that UEFA's sticky balls had paired the Blues again with PSG. But, frankly, these are minor irritations.<br>
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The modest relief of being in the knockout stages of the Champions League - which, believe it or not, Chelsea's Jeckyll & Hyde act could go on to win - was severely undermined by not only the way they lost to Leicester (the remarkable Jamie Vardy and Riyad Mahrez not withstanding) but by the abject, rancid mood that <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 18px;">José Mourinho brought on his team in the aftermath, publicly berating </span>Oscar, Eden Hazard and Diego Costa and talking of being "betrayed" that all his hard preparation had been ignored.<br>
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If Costa, in particular, had an issue with Mourinho, or if Hazard - whose early "injury" was another bizarre episode involving the Belgian (remember Swansea City on the first day of the season?) - is to be tempted to Paris or Madrid, then such managerial pychology will only add more risk to Mourinho's already precarious state.<br>
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I've now lost count of the times since August 8 that I've written how something in the minds of Chelsea's manager and players has to change. It still hasn't. When the fixture list came out in July, you would have put decent money on Chelsea winning at home to Norwich and Bournemouth, or away to Leicester. In fact, you should have put money on those being defeats - I shudder to think what odds you'd have received.<br>
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When a manager gets sacked, it's always too easy for the players to bleat about letting him down and "we should have done more". In Mourinho's case, I just wonder whether he's had the capability in that big, brilliant footballing brain of his to process his team's obvious physical and mental declines. Why hasn't he made more use of the youthful exuberence of players like Kenedy and Loftus-Cheek, along with the myriad others out on loan? Why has he laboured on with Fàbregas when anyone with resonable vision has been able to see that his passes don't connect anymore...and that was his main mission in life.<br>
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You could say that Leicester's win last night was simply in the script, that somehow the Gods of Football decreed that the team managed by the man Chelsea sacked in favour of the man Chelsea now have in charge again should win. Because that, like dodgy Champions League draws, makes for better headlines, better banter and better studio conversations.<br>
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The reality is that Ranieri has found the formula and the players. Mourinho has just lost it. It may be misfortune, or it maybe the result of poor choices made by the club, but despite my belief that managers often unfairly carry the blame, the only logical conclusion you can reach from Chelsea's inexplicable - and very real - drop into relegation danger is that it is down to one man, a man who last night said "all last season I did phenomenal work and brought them to a level more than they really are", who wanted to single out his defenders for their movement around Vardy, and even had the temerity to have a pop at Leicester's ball-boys as "a disgrace to the Premier League".<br>
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With the exception of notable efforts against Spurs away and Porto at home Chelsea have just not been good enough in almost every department. Asmir Begovic has made a fine stand-in for Thibaut Courtois in goal, but both have been let down by their defenders too many times; in the midfield, Matic has been half the holding player he was last season, and Fàbregas lacking in pace, passing and perserverence; up front, Costa has been out of position and often out of order, while Hazard and the permanently Bambi-like Oscar have clearly been wanting for confidence. Only Willian has at least shown, to quote Harold Shand, "a little bit more than an 'ot dog, know what I mean?".<br>
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Football today is too quick to point to the manager. Chelsea has, in its recent past, been too quick to fire theirs. José Mourinho, and his three-year plan, was intended to establish a "dynasty". Where is that now? After one season as "the little horse", the second as the front-runner, for the third Chelsea are now looking more like a lame donkey giving out-of-season rides on Blackpool beach.<br>
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Even I have been amazed by Roman Abramovich's restraint, and as much as I loathe football's propensity for sacking managers after only the slightest of dips, I don't see the Chelsea owner having any alternative now.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-52371313780805856842015-12-14T14:46:00.000+01:002015-12-14T14:46:01.794+01:00Yawn... Would it kill UEFA to have a bit of variety?<img alt="Barcelona meet Arsenal: round of 16 draw in full" class="article-img img-responsive" height="250" src="http://www.uefa.com/MultimediaFiles/Photo/competitions/Draws/02/31/86/57/2318657_UltraWide.jpg" width="640" /><br />
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So, midway through December and <i>What Would David Bowie Do?</i> has been abruptly woken from its pre-Crimbo slumber by, of all things, the draw for the last 16 of Champions League.<br />
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For, amongst the pairings - with Arsenal-v-Barcelona standing out as the tie of the round - Chelsea are once again matched with Paris Saint-Germain. Yup, couldn't make it up. Obviously there was always a one-in-eight chance of Chelsea drawing PSG, the team who knocked them out of last season's competition in a grumpy encounter at Stamford Bridge, in which PSG came from behind twice to win on away goals, one of them scored by former defender David Luiz.<br />
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Some suggest that Chelsea's malaise this season can be traced back to that match on March 11 - even though they went on to win the Premier League quite comprehensively two months later. Luiz had, of course, been part of the Chelsea team that had beaten PSG 2-0 at the Bridge in the quarter-final the season previously.<br />
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Playing PSG for a third consecutive season could, of course, be simply a mathematical inevitability when you're down to the last 16 and in Pot 1 of the draw. But at risk of 'doing a José', there's something suspicious about it, not helped by the stinking climate of mistrust that currently pervades football at its highest levels.<br />
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I've had a similar view of Chelsea's endless encounters with Liverpool in the Champions League over the last decade or so, especially in seasons where there have been FA Cup and League Cup ties, on top of the Premier League, pairing them like the Harlem Globetrotters and the Washington Generals (the Blues and the Reds met eight times in the 2004-2005 season alone).<br />
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No doubt elsewhere in the blogosphere there is now a similar post from an Arsenal fan complaining about being drawn against reigning European Cup holders, Barcelona, who are currently in imperious form and 5/2 favourites to win the trophy again, and who beat Arsenal in the 2006 Final and again in the 2010 quarter-final (6-3 on aggregate...).<br />
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Of course, both Chelsea and Arsenal should be grateful not to be continuing their European adventures this season in unpronouncable Nordic climes on Thursday nights, and Chelsea fans, in particular, should be grateful that it is 'only' PSG.<br />
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Privately, I'm sure the clubs are looking forward to repeat business, and the obvious spice hasn't been lost on the clubs' respective social media teams. But as a fan, I'm not. Tempting as it is to think the Champions League draw is rigged, I do think there should be a better method of ensuring that the odds don't work in favour of predictability.<br />
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Arsenal-Barca and Chelsea-PSG, not to mention Roma-Real Madrid, Juventus-Bayern Munich, and Dynamo Kiev-Manchester City amongst the other highlights, might be good for TV ratings and UEFA's sponsors, but I'm sure that many fans would have preferred to see the last 16 mixed up much better. Why couldn't Chelsea face Juve, who are currently rolling back into the <i>Serie A</i> title race after an indifferent start to their fourth consecutive defence of the <i>Scudetto</i>. Why couldn't Arsenal encounter Roma, last-season's domestic runners-up in Italy and who've been showing the Milan teams a thing or two in recent seasons?<br />
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Something truly suggests that the drawing process for the Champions League is quite literally a load of balls.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-2719236753306537252015-11-30T08:28:00.001+01:002015-11-30T08:36:18.684+01:00COP 21: the bear necessities of life<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It's a sobering, eye-swiveling thought when you consider that, out of the 3.5 billion years there has been life on our planet, the human race - in its anatomically modern form - has only been around for 200,000 years.<br />
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More sobering is that mankind's industrial interaction with the planet has only taken place over the last 250 years or so. Even more sobering still, then, when you consider the damage it has done in that relative blink of the eye of Earth's 4.5 billion-year existence.<br />
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Remarkably, as many as 99% of all the lifeforms believed to have existed have become extinct, the consequence, I suppose of natural events and natural selection over the last 3.5 billion years. So, as one tiny percentage of the one percent that has survived, our responsibility is huge. Or perhaps we are destined for extinction too?<br />
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Human development can be directly blamed for the loss of habit of thousands of species of animals, forcing some into extinction, while others have been pushed closer to inevitable encounters with mankind that they weren't designed for - be it the poor brown bear who, fatally, found himself in a Russian shopping mall last month, or the mountain lions of the American West which invariably come off worse as urban sprawl continues.<br />
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And then there is the secondary effect of human development: climate change. Deniers and ardent contrarians like to believe that climate change is a natural phenomena, that it has happened before, and that global warming is a cyclical event. We are, they say, currently in "upcycle".<br />
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Tell that, then, to the polar bear. The bear family evolved out of other mammalian species 38 million years ago, with divisions between the black and the polar breeds occurring more than four million years ago. And yet recent, measurable climate change and the erosion of the Arctic ice pack polar bears rely on for food outside hibernation months, could see these magnificent animals - the planet's largest land mammals - disappear for good in a matter of decades.<br />
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I know this sounds like tree hugging, hair-shirted environmentalist (with the emphasis on mentalist...) dogma, but the facts and the truth speak for themselves. For example, an exhaustive, five-year study by the US Geological Survey found that Alaska's Arctic shoreline has eroded at average rate of 1.4 meters per year since the mid-20th century, with the thawing permafrost and gradually warming waters believed to be the likely cause...and both animal and human life the likely victim.<br />
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Sea ice is disappearing from Arctic waters at an unprecedented rate — more rapidly than predicted by the most extreme projections in the most recent assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Indeed, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, with the ice that reflects 60% of the sun's rays disappearing, a vicious circle of rising sea levels and even less sea ice, adding further to global warming. The thickness of the Arctic icecap halved in the 30 years between 1980 and 2010, as well as shrunk by 30% in terms of area. That is not a change over the course of millennia - that's a disappearance measurable in terms of a portion of <i>my </i>lifetime.<br />
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"Boo-hoo", snark the likes of Jeremy Clarkson, sarcastically, as they make throwaway japes about how brer <i>ursidae </i>is not in the least bit their concern when arguing the benefits of diesel over petrol, or how quickly the latest Ferrari will get from 0-60. However, the Clarkson school of cynicism - that's his media persona, and it sells newspapers, magazines and television shows - is not the issue. We are, collectively. Our behaviour, and our tolerance of our governments' behaviour.<br />
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It's the proprietary interests that prevent natural, renewable energy sources from being invested in; it's the refusal to see energy efficiency as a meaningful condition to reverse climate change; it's about politicians putting money where their often sizeable mouths are.<br />
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It's about the staggering arrogance that any human has to assume its warped interpretation of "survival of the fittest" superiority over a species that has been around for millions of years longer than our own. A species with every right to stay around longer without human ignorance and all the things climate change can be blamed on being the cause of its demise.<br />
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Apex predators are magnificent beasts. The Great White Shark looks like a fighter jet, the lion and tiger are some of nature's most beautiful creations, and bears are, well just brilliant animals. None of these I would want to encounter close up, of course, but that doesn't mean that they should be denied their right to exist because of the inability, or unwillingness, or just plain stupidity of the planet's most intelligent species to do something about it. When clearly we can.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-4968877666784931502015-11-27T13:48:00.002+01:002015-11-27T14:10:03.488+01:00Rock and roll returns to Paris: Richard Hawley at the Alhambra<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">© Simon Poulter 2015</td></tr>
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My God, this is what Paris needed. Screw that, this is what <i>I</i> needed. Not to get too overwrought, but the events of November 13 - and in particular, the slaughter at Le Bataclan - meant that any return to the normality Paris has sought in the last two weeks had to include getting back into the city's concert halls.<span id="goog_337058258"></span><br />
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Although U2, Prince and the Foo Fighters, amongst others, cancelled scheduled gigs following the attacks, the defiance this city has shown from the beginning of the aftermath brought an unspoken poignancy to the Alhambra on Wednesday night.<br />
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And if Paris was still nervous, the 600 inside the former French railway workers' fun house, a 15-minute walk from Le Bataclan, didn't show it.<br />
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Indeed, the Alhambra may have been within reach of the now-fêted new bohemian districts and their youthful on-mode residents, but the Paris which came out to experience Hawley and his subtle brand of rock and roll, not to mention his gentle, dry South Yorkshire humour, represented a cross section of a city still in pain. This was a city looking for enjoyment, from children to elegantly-clad seniors. And it wasn't to be disappointed, either.<br />
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From the moment Hawley strode on stage to the tune of Jerry Reed's <i>Guitar Man </i>and bedecked in double-denim (probably the only man in the Western world in his late 40s able to get away with such a look), the Alhambra was held in the comforting embrace of his trademark glitterball ballads, swoonsome slow dances, chugging rockers and psychedelic tripouts.<br />
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It is seemingly impossible for anyone to write about Hawley without mentioning, in no specific order, quiffs, crooning, Sheffield and the 1950s. And while there is an obvious tread of retro through some of what he does, contemporary social commentary runs deep through his music, as well as the questions about life that all 48-year-olds - myself being one of them - ask.<br />
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From the outset, the storming <i>Which Way</i> set the tone. One of the more raucous tracks on this year's <i>Hollow Meadows</i>, which marked a return to the more late night fare of Hawley's earlier solo albums, the descending chords of Hawley and rhythm player Shez Sheridan's guitars warmed up the November-chilled crowd.<br />
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There was more of this grittier material to come with <i>Standing At The Sky's Edge</i>, drenched in Ennio Morricone-like forboding of the kind Johnny Cash would have made a brilliant cover out of on his latterday American Recordings releases. Here, though, Hawley and band built it up, providing mesmerising theatre to a song about Sheffield's urban blight, with a tribal drum segment added by Dean Beresford and bass player Colin Elliott on a side snare to enhances the dramatic tension.<br />
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<i>Standing At The Sky's Edge</i> was a stunning album, and the tracks taken from it in this set shone for their warmth and their anger. <i>Leave Your Body Behind You</i> exemplified the album's psych rock direction, and <i>Don't Stare At The Sun</i> provided a dreamier outlook on the world. On <i>Down In The Woods</i>, with its barely concealed contempt for the ruling political elite in Britain, the fire was channelled through Hawley and Sheridan's myriad effects pedals, not to mention the song's industrial rhythm, one which sounds like a slower version of Motorhead's <i>Ace Of Spades</i>. Playing an absolutely vibrant, fireglow-hued Rickenbacker on <i>Time </i><i>Will Bring You Winter</i>, Hawley took things into Beatle territory - Colin Elliott even played a Hofner violin bass - an undercurrent of <i>Tomorrow Never Knows</i> giving the song a hypnotic feel.<br />
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The dark romance of Hawley's slower, old-style songs, which showcased both the rich timbre of his baritone as well as his gift as a uniquely melodic guitarist, provided the soothing blanket that this disturbed and, now, cold city desired. The luscious ballad<i> I Still Want You </i>draped a caring arm around the audience, while <i>Open Up Your Door </i>- which met with an almighty cheer - brought out the glitterball spirit of old fashioned entertainment. Ballads like these can, it must be said, sound schmaltzy on record, but in the expanse of a room like the Alhambra's, a fullsome energy came to the fore. On <i>Sometimes I Feel</i>, there was a Western tone, which bridged into a jangly segment driven by Sheridan's exquisite electric 12-string sound.<br />
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Parisian audiences can be annoyingly yappy, I've noticed, but when Hawley almost encouraged crowd chatter in his introduction to <i>Tuesday PM</i> - "the most miserable fucking song I've ever written" - the audience went respectfully quiet. "Let's play some rock and roll," Hawley then declared, defiantly, after some awkward audience banter, as the band launched into <i>Heart Of Oak</i>, which thundered on at a snappy clip.<br />
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As they headed into the encore, <i>There's A Storm Comin'</i> bound the crowd even closer. Given what happened just across the 10th arrondissement two weeks ago, the song's refrain "there's a storm comin', you'd better run,,," painted emotion onto the faces of couples who, as the song built to a grinding, thudding crescendo, held themselves even tighter.<br />
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After the briefest of exits, the Hawley and his band returned clutching glasses of red wine which they held aloft in tribute to Paris, and the Paris that had come out tonight to see them. It was a nice touch, a genuine and lovingly reciprocated gesture that set up <i>Coles Corner</i>, the near-ten year-old song here transformed into a Parisian lullaby, but with the weighted poignancy of lyrics such as "Cherish the light for us, don't let the shadows hold back the dawn", and the even more poignant, "I'm going downtown where there's music, I'm going downtown where there's people."<br />
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Well, here they were. And, with the shimmering finale of <i>The Ocean</i>, Hawley barely singing above a throaty drawl, an evening that Paris needed, an evening that Paris deserved, came to an end.<br />
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Paris didn't need the tragedy of the November 13th attrocities to enjoy Richard Hawley. Having seen him in 2012 at Le Cigale, I knew what a complete and hugely satisfying experience it would be. On Wednesday at the Alhambra, that satisfaction came back stronger than ever. Hail, hail, rock and roll.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-61918215774800618392015-11-25T11:55:00.000+01:002015-11-25T13:24:07.347+01:00It's going to take Diego Costa more than a few kisses and cuddles<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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To anyone else, a 4-0 away win in the Champions League would be met with yelps of satisfaction and cup-runneth-over delight. But this is Chelsea. In this season.<br />
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Inevitably, then, the verdict of this result over Macabi Tel Aviv - which, on a comparable basis, was only one goal shy of Barcelona's 6-1 thumping of Roma on the same night - was branded by the press this morning as "unconvincing". A tad unfair? Well, maybe, but not a lot.<br />
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Former Chelsea defender Tal Ben Haim's sending off before half time, for a ludicrous kick at Diego Costa, should have tipped the balance in the Blues' favour, especially with them up 1-0 after Gary Cahill's 20th minute goal. But as so often is the case, losing a man can galvanise a team, and as happened with Stoke City, Tel Aviv came out of the traps in the second half.<br />
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It wasn't until the 72nd minute - and another superb Willian goal struck from a free kick - that Chelsea were able to make the game safe. This spoke further volumes about Chelsea's enduring inability to kill off games against stubborn opponents.<br />
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That strikes from Oscar and Zouma followed in the following 15 minutes were, perhaps, not a surprise, given that Tel Aviv were tiring with a man less and growing increasingly ill-disciplined. But the weaknesses that have plagued Chelsea since the start of the season were still there, despite José Mourinho's maintenance that confidence is returning to the side.<br />
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In fairness, overall it wasn't a bad performance by Chelsea, and a welcome back-to-back win after their result on Saturday over Norwich. In Hazard and Fabregas, something of their best is returning. But whatever improvements are in store throughout the team must still be to come. The defence still looks stretched at times - Peretz was a regular terror last night - with Terry and Cahill still straining more sinews than you would have expected were needed to keep danger away from the impressive Begovic in goal.<br />
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However, the area of greatest concern remains in front of the opposition goal. Apart from one thwarted bicycle kick that was almost on target, Diego Costa is still frustratingly profligate. A lack of confidence may seem an odd diagnosis for a player so seemingly ready for a scrap that he makes Dennis Wise look like Henry Kissinger. But what energy he has, he seems to channel all-too easily into niggly flair-ups that detract from his striking prowess.<br />
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It's a frustration that is shared by Mourinho, who was clearly agitated in the technical area during the first half with Costa apparently not following orders. For the rest of us watching, it is Costa's lack of real movement off the ball and positioning to slam passes into the net that is the most frustrating.</div>
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Something has ailed Costa all season. Despite discounting summer rumours that he was homesick in London, and then confessing that he'd returned from the summer break overweight due to a little too much home cooking in Brazil, there has been a discernable air of ill-ease around him since the start of the season.</div>
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Whether he is overthinking everything, or not thinking at all, Costa is still a problem for Mourinho, and in turn that creates other headaches, seeing as Falcao is out injured (and wasn't doing much beforehand, to be honest), and Loïc Remy is still not regarded as the first-choice target man.<br />
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"I was disappointed. I reacted and he reacted too," Mourinho said of Costa in the first half. "At half-time in the dressing room there were a few kisses and a few cuddles." Well I'm sure some TLC was appreciated by the Brazilian, but that still doesn't fix the underlying problem.<br />
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Costa can't be blamed for carrying all of Chelsea's weaknesses this season but he is obviously toiling. The solution, isn't, either, to buy in the January window. The Torres saga, not to mention the shotgun purchases of Mohammed Saleh and Juan Cuadrado, should warn them off that route.<br />
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It goes without saying that any striker worth their salt will not be on sale in the middle of the season. Which means that, unless Lionel Messi decides that London is where he wants to be for the second half of 2015-16, Mourinho needs to make use of what he's got. Specifically, Diego da Silva Costa. Because there won't be anything new coming along until next summer.</div>
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Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-34512257092704838722015-11-21T12:13:00.003+01:002015-11-23T00:41:03.926+01:00The week when FOBO stopped being an irrational fear<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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We all do it and we’ve all been victims of it. By now we must all know someone seemingly unable to go out for dinner without frantically checking their phones between mouthfuls.<br />
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Likewise, we've all been joined in the office lift by someone who, on entering, immediately starts thumbing through their e-mail, probably barely seconds since last doing so. And there are suburban railway stations where, every morning and like herds of animals at a water hole, massed ranks of commuters crane their necks over glowing LCD screens.<br />
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It has become the go-to reflex action when avoiding eye contact or, indeed, any kind of social interaction. Once, this was known as “phubbing” - a crude portmanteau of ‘phone’ and ‘snubbing’ - the habit of ignoring family members and friends through an unhealthy obsession with a smartphone. It has, however, been identified as more than just a bad habit, but an impact to relationships and even mental wellbeing, especially for those being phubbed, who see it as a sign of rejection and disinterest. And, yes, bloody rude.<br />
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But phubbing has now mutated into a syndrome of far greater import: FOBO - the fear of being offline, and its most damaging manifestation, the anxiety caused by disconnection from information, the compulsive checking of a phone even if an important communication isn’t expected.<br />
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If that’s you, then you’ll be prone to panic if you can’t remember where you last put your phone down, that you must have it in front of you at all times, that you switch it on the minute you’re allowed to on a plane, or that you even sneak a look halfway through a film - much to the dismay of those around you in the cinema, as the bright LCD glow gives you away.<br />
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A British study last year revealed that, on average, we look at our smarphones 221 times a day, which someone has worked out adds up to more than <i>three </i>hours each day hunched over these devices. Last year, the Iowa State University of Science and Technology found how "worried and nervous" people are if they are disconnected, or that their friends and family are unresponsive to digital messages. This even extended to the fear of a phone running out of battery power.<br />
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Another study found that 78% of French people spend more than 15 minutes before going to bed looking at their phones, and a similar percentage going straight back to them on waking. In the US, a Gallup stufy found that as many as 63% of smartphone owners kept theirs near them when they were asleep. No wonder phones have been attributed to sleeping disruption disorders.<br />
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Some places have resorted to extreme measures: restaurant customers now play the 'phone stacking' game, whereby in a group, everyone places their phones at the center of the table and the first who looks at it lands the bill. One Los Angeles restaurant even offers a 5% discount if phones are left at the entrance. Here in France, President Hollande is understood to have installed lockers outside his cabinet meeting room to, apparently deal with the "addictive behavior" of his ultra-connected ministers. That, though, may be amended in light of this last week’s events.<br />
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Most of us wouldn’t know how we coped before mobile devices came along, but when it comes to news, we are now light years away from relying only on neighbourhood gossip, daily newspapers, <i>News At Ten</i> or hourly bulletins on the radio. We’re also living busier lives.<br />
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In an interview in June with <i>The Times</i>, Dr. Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University, told Barbara McMahon: "Everybody is attempting to do more things at the same time and everybody is checking in more often. From a psychological viewpoint, it looks like we all have a touch of OCD." The fact that one of our principle sources of information is now the smartphone, is, he says, a further example of our obsession. "The way we act out this obsession, which is the way people usually act out anxiety-based obsessions, is that we have to constantly check in to reassure ourselves."<br />
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Until this last week, I must admit, I've been as guilty as anyone of succumbing to FOBO. My justification has always been that working in corporate PR means being across the news as well as ensuring that I know what's going on around the world within my company. But I recognise that such behaviour is not that far removed from those constantly checking their phones in case World War Three has broken out or One Direction have broken up/reformed/gone to live on a kibbutz.<br />
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Events here in Paris in the last week have, more than ever, tested everyone's irrational concern of disconnectivity to the extreme. The attacks just over a week ago, and the continuous newscycle since, has made the need to be connected - for information and even comfort - understandably essential. <span style="text-align: center;">News services, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and all the rest have, in various ways, provided vital lifelines to developments.</span><br />
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<span style="text-align: center;">On the night of the 13th, Facebook’s Safety Check provided those of us in Paris with some means of reassurance that our local friends were OK. But not all: </span><span style="text-align: center;">it was a WhatsApp message, from a phone down to its last few bars of battery power, that informed me that two of my Facebook friends, who’d been been inside Le Bataclan, were safe. </span><br />
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<span style="text-align: center;">The Paris attacks have occurred in a very different era of media consumption and digital social connectivity. 9/11, by comparison, occurred at a time when "the Internet" was a thing you did on a PC. </span>The few ‘smartish’ phones available at the time were crude and clunky.<br />
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Still, it became hard to focus on anything else in the days and weeks after the hijackings, not knowing whether they were one-offs...or that there were further onslaughts to come. On the 11th itself, television was the primary information source. Stations abandoned their schedules to provide blanket coverage, for the first time introducing the ‘zip strip’ at the bottom of the screen to keep viewers up to date in realtime. In the process, television news stopped being just a newsreader, but a source of simultaneous, multiple points of information.<br />
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14 years on, near-ubiquitous mobile connectivity has had its upside - and its downside. In a blog post entitled "The truths, the half truths and the lies", Gregoire Lemarchand, the head of social media for the French news agency AFP, chronicled how the November 13 attacks in Paris unfolded as a digital timeline, unleashing “an unprecedented storm of rumour and speculation” on social media that even surpassed “the tidal wave that accompanied the <i>Charlie Hebdo </i>assaults in and around the French capital in January.”<br />
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But, Lemarchand pointed out, the multiple attacks in numerous locations meant that social media played a bigger part in accelerating the speed of misinformation. Significantly, though he made the following observation: "...there was less irresponsible content and less conspiracy theories than ten months earlier. It was as if lessons had been learned."<br />
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Still, though, the 'fog of war' principle applied. As the first tweets appeared, Lemarchand noted: "Some of the early information - like that there had been a shooting at the Bataclan - would end up being true. Other tweets much less so. People were tweeting that there had been shootings and explosions in the Halles neighbourhood - these never happened. But in those early hours it was impossible to separate the truths, the half truths and the lies."<br />
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As the Paris newscycle has continued, so the need to be connected has grown ever more obsessive and compulsive, feeding the beast in the process. The attacks - and the subsequent Saint-Denis raid - have generated so many minute-by-minute revelations, that increasingly hyper-competitive news organisations have been constantly trying trump each other with new information, new angles, new opinions, using social media relentlessly and even ruthlessly to build their audiences and even crow about their exclusives.<br />
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Television, my iPhone and iPad have conspired to feed the beast, but perhaps on this occasion, the obsessive, compulsive behaviour of needing to keep up in real time is justifiable. To be fair, though, when the city around you is under attack, no amount of obsession will be enough to know that people you care about are safe.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-7502193149979025172015-11-20T14:32:00.001+01:002015-11-20T14:32:38.509+01:00You never call, you never write...Bowie is back. Again.<div>
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So, nothing in ten years, and then, in the space of three, two new albums come along. Welcome, then, to the bonkers, enigmatic world of David Bowie, the changeling, cultural icon, artistic innovator, and many other things <i>The Guardian</i> will no doubt pour over at length in the weeks to come before <i>Blackstar</i>, the second of the two new - yes, I've used that word - albums is released.</div>
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The last one, <i>The Next Day</i>, was recorded with such stealth that even when Bowie was photographed outside New York's The Magic Shop studio, no one twigged that he was actually working on the record inside. This time, though, we've had fair warning. Three weeks ago came confirmation from Camp Dame that the album <i>Blackstar </i>would be released on January 8, Bowie's 69th birthday, copying the stupendously surprising appearance on the same day in 2013 of <i>Where Are We Now?</i>, the haunting prelude to <i>The Next Day</i>'s eventual release that March.<br />
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Last night, Bowie released a ten-minute video single for <i>Blackstar</i>'s<i> </i>title track<i>, </i>setting in train an outbreak of chin-stroking and head-scratching at both the song and the video's meaning, which appears to be one of death and decay.<br />
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<i>Where Are We Now?</i> did much the same, especially as it was the first, proper, new Bowie material after a decade of musical silence, and its mournful, reflective mood immediately became interpreted as some form of denuement. As we now know, the album that followed represented anything but - a vibrant, reinvigorated Bowie with plenty to say.</div>
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<i>Blackstar</i>'s meaning is yet to be revealed, leaving us all open to speculation. Personally, I doubt there's a particularly profound meaning to it all, and that Bowie is just messing with us. But the single - an edited version of which is being used for the Sky series <i>The Last Panthers </i>– will certainly instigate more bafflement, and confirm earlier media speculation that "<i>Blackstar</i> may be [Bowie's] oddest work yet".<br />
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But, first, let's get Johan Renck's <i>Blackstar</i> video out of the way: a gaunt Bowie, appearing first as a blind man, with facial bandages and David Lynch hair, a women with some sort of animal's tail, a seemingly permanently eclipsed sun, screaming scarecrows, a couple of half-naked young men with jerking bodies, and then a healthier, sighted Bowie, frugging to the song's funky mid-section in a manner similar to his <i>Dancing In The Street </i>dad-dancing horror with Mick Jagger.<br />
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Ending with Bowie holding up a battered book, the <i>Blackstar </i>motif on its cover (not exactly a design stretch - ★ ), it could all be about the Day of Judgement. Or it may have not been a promo at all, but the downloaded dream of someone who'd overdone the cheese during a particularly vigorous fondue evening.<br />
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<i>Listening</i>, however, to <i>Blackstar</i>, <i>sans</i> the visual madness, the real Bowie comes through. Sectioned into three parts, with the first and the third comprised of a Gregorian-like ambience, and an eliptical refrain (the Kings Of Leon's lyrical stock in trade) laid over an abrubt electronic drum pattern of the kind Bowie flirted with on the <i>Earthling</i> album. Out of and into these seemingly disjointed sections, the mood changes, like full daylight in between the dawn and twilight, melodically warming up with flourishes of saxophone, synths and jazz-funk experimentation.<br />
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In a way, it is essential Bowie, but whereas in the past the topography of his styles has varied over entire albums, or even entire eras of albums, <i>Blackstar </i>skillfully compresses this variety into one long song. In principle that sounds like an unworkable mess, but truly it isn't. Nor, does this melange of tempo and tone mean that Bowie has gone prog (he always was, in any case, but his version of the theatrical and avant garde has traditionally been accepted as higher art). </div>
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It does, however, provide a fascinating taster for what the album <i>Blackstar </i>will bring in January. P<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue light" , , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;">roducer Tony Visconti has already suggested that it will be far less conventional than <i>The Next Day </i>(adding how that had been intended to be "something new, but something old kept creeping in").</span></div>
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This bodes well for fans uncomfortable with - or just wary of - Bowie the pop star, hoping for a return or at least a reflection of the experiemental nature of the Berling trilogy, <i>Low</i>, <i>Heroes</i> and <i>Lodger</i>. More importantly, it demonstrates that Bowie is not only back, but as determined as ever to confound audiences, something he's done at every turn.<br />
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I'm constantly asked what it is that fascinates me about David Bowie, and - I promise - this blog's title isn't any sign of obsession (it was simply a throwaway comment that stuck in my head). Surprisingly, singalong hits and a canon of memorable pop-rock aren't my the primary focus.<br />
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What intrigues and excites me about Bowie's near-50 year recording career is that at every turn he has dared to be different every time, risking change for the sake of it. Few - if any - artists of his peer and age groups have been so varied and experimental, encompassing styles as diverse as vaudeville theatre, space rock, drum'n'bass, funk, metal, jazz...<br />
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In fact, is there any style he hasn't tried? On January 8, we will find out what else he has up his sleeve.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kszLwBaC4Sw" width="560"></iframe>Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-63656875245471195732015-11-18T17:18:00.001+01:002015-11-18T17:18:03.927+01:00A moment of solidarité, but it may take more than that next summer<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
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Football has had much to answer for over the years. In the aftermath of Heysel and Hillsborough it became a dirty word. Some might say that today, in the era of petulant millionaires playing it, and blatantly corrupt figures running it, it's not exactly fragrant.<br />
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But football is also a uniting force. This may be lost on my American friends, but after all, it is - by far - the world's most popular sport.<br />
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Last night at Wembley Stadium, the sight of the England and France teams, their managers, national administrators, an heir to the throne, and 71,000 fans, standing together, put some much-needed polish on the beautiful game.<br />
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Against the backdrop of Friday's terrorist attacks - which included three attempted suicide bombings during the France-Germany friendly at the Stade De France - yesterday evening's demonstration of <i>la solidarité </i>showed that could suspend the petty rivalries that make for semi-amusing in-game banter, and come together for something more altruistic.<br />
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The camaraderie of internationals and club teammates alike, the joint singing of <i>Le Marseillaise </i>by both sets of fans, and the impeccable observance of the minute's silence, will live on in the memory for years to come. And there was more poignancy in the game's 57th minute when France's Antoine Griezmann and Lassana Diarra came on as subsitutes. Diarra's cousin Asta Diakite was killed in the attacks, Griezmann's sister was caught up in the carnage, but escaped unharmed.<br />
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However, while <i>liberté</i>, <i>egalité </i>and <i>fraternité </i>flowed freely through north-west London last night, 500 miles away in Hannover there had been a stark reminder of the dangers ahead for football: a "concrete" - though now discounted - security threat at the HDI Arena forced the Germany-Netherlands friendly to be abandoned less than two hours before kickoff.<br />
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For the organisers of next summer's European championships in France, the country's status as a target for home-grown terrorists, not just imported from Belgium and Syria, will be now become an even bigger headache than previously imagined.<br />
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France has very publicly declared itself "at war" with those behind Friday's attacks, and the country remains under a state of emergency. Not surprisingly, however, UEFA and the French football authorities have been at pains to point out that security preparations for Euro 2016 have been ongoing for some time, with the kick-off just seven months away.<br />
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Already on Saturday, the president of the Euro 2016 organising committee, Jacques Lambert, said the tournament was now at "tangible risk", but added that the <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> attacks in January had upgraded the risk from being simply "theoretical".<br />
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"It doesn't probably change much for the security professionals regarding preparations of the event," he told French radio station RTL, "but you see that for everyone, public opinion, media, teams, it adds a special intensity."<br />
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No kidding. The fact that at least one of last Friday's bombers at the Stade de France had a ticket will be even more worrying. At the very least, it demonstrates the extent of the terrorists' planning and thinking, but at least investigators will have 79,000 ticket sales that could be useful.<br />
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Scanning the hundreds of thousands of tickets that will be sold for next summer's tournament will not be so easy. Indeed the provisions for security at all ten Euro 2016 stadia will come under increasing public scrutiny given the spread of arrests being made in France of terror suspects and their supporters.<br />
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Questions will be raised about the level of police and military presence in the host cities, security in the fanzones and the team hotels and training camps, how public transport is made safer without it grinding to a halt, and the issue which is already raging about border controls throughout the European Shengen Area.<br />
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Of course, this climate of fear is exactly what the jihadists will want: "Wondering whether Euro 2016 must be cancelled is playing the game of the terrorists," Lambert told RTL. "We will make the decisions we need to make so that the Euro finals can be held in the best security conditions." France, he said, had included the terror risk in their original bid to host the tournament, submitted in 2009. That, though, had obviously been in the context of a general threat. Since Friday, the threat has mutated to one in which extremists have deliberately targeted a football match on French soil.<br />
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Noël Le Graët, president of the French Football Federation, has admitted that Euro 2016 is now looking far more high-risk than it did before Friday. "You can see very clearly the terrorists can strike at any moment,” he said at the weekend. "There was already a concern. As of now, it is clearly even stronger."</div>
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Almost imediately after Friday night's attack, UEFA issued a statement - quite correctly - that Euro 2016 will go ahead as planned. More than 1.5 billion Euros have been invested in the stadia - the Stade de France and Parc des Princes in Paris, the Stade Vélodrome in Marseille, Stade des Lumières in Lyon, Stade Pierre-Mauroy in Lille, Matmut Atlantique in Bordeaux, Stadium Municipal in Toulouse, Stade Bollaert-Delelis in Lens, Allianz Riviera in Nice, and Stade Geoffroy-Guichard in Saint-Étienne. But, of course, you can't put a price on human safety.<br />
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During the London 2012 Olympics, much was made beforehand of mitigating the terror threat by installing anti-aircraft missile batteries on East End tower blocks, deploying Typhoon jets at Northholt Aerodrome, and placing a SAS team on alert within the British capital. And that was just for one main stadium and a handful of satellite venues.</div>
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Even with the French police and military, with battle-proven, state-of-the-art intelligence-gathering technology, being applied to combat ever-evolving and sophisticated terrorists, the risk heightening far beyond "significant" will weigh on the minds of the teams and fans already planning their summer of football in France.</div>
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Football fans are a resilient bunch, if a little rough around the edges. Without being flippant, they endure the ups and downs of their clubs and national teams, usually with good humour. The Portsmouth fans seen singing "Stand up if you hate ISIS" on Saturday were well meaning, if in possession of somewhat misplaced irony. However, dealing with the very real threat next summer will take more than shaven-headed bovver boys in Kappa rollnecks chanting "come and have a go if you think you're hard enough!".<br />
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It's going to take an unprecedented effort by governments, the intelligence services and the police to ensure that terrorists, to recall the IRA's chilling statement after the 1994 Brighton bomb, do not get "lucky" a second time. As they said, "You will have to be lucky always."<br />
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Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-43367778744362162922015-11-17T19:13:00.002+01:002015-11-17T19:13:36.416+01:00The need to see for myself<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A colleague of mine, who has been following my posts over the last three days, asked me yesterday why, on Saturday afternoon, I felt the need to break the unofficial curfew in Paris and visit the sites of the terror attacks the night before.<br />
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My honest answer was that I just didn't know. I just knew that I had to get out of the house and face up to whatever fear - real or perceived - the attackers had forced on this city. I had to defy their attempt to impose their murderous, backward doctrine on MY freedom. But that, I recognised afterwards, only partially answered her question: why <i>did </i>I need to visit some of the sites along that corridor of killing on the borders of the 10th and 11th arrondissements?<br />
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This triggered my memory of visiting New York in October 2001. October 10th, to be precise - almost a month to the day that terrorists murdered 2,606 people at the World Trade Center. Flying from San Francisco to New York on what was, effectively, the reverse route of United's Flight 93, the plane was so empty you couldn't just choose your seat, but the entire row for the five-hour duration.<br />
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From the taxi as I approached Manhattan, I became aware of what was missing on the city skyline: the Twin Towers. Obscurely, it reminded me of an old man minus his two front teeth. New York was understandably edgy, but one thing stood out: waiting to cross 6th Avenue, a fire engine raced by. New Yorkers - that most self-enclosed creature when out in public - stopped and rigorously applauded the passing fire crew. It was the first time I'd been genuinely close to tears throughout the entire awful saga.<br />
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By that time, Ground Zero had already become a shrine to the fallen. Some foreign colleagues visiting a trade show suggested going down to Church Street to pay our respects. I declined. It felt too much like rubbernecking, gawping at what felt like a mass grave. But a month later - returning to New York for Thanksgiving in a somewhat guileless attempt, admittedly, to 'give' something back to the greatest city in the world, I felt compelled to go down there.<br />
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I was still trying to process the attrocity, to empathise with the victims, even trying to get into the heads of those whose purest of evil had driven them to commit such an unimagineable act. I had to see for myself, partially to satisfy a morbid interest, where so much tragedy had been concentrated in the space of one, sunny Tuesday morning, 12 weeks previously.<br />
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Then, New York's Ground Zero encompassed a space of about 14 acres. On Friday night, the jihadists inside Paris itself murdered their way along a ribbon of just 2.2km long, more or less the stops of Oberkampf, Saint-Ambroise, Voltaire and Charonne on Line 9 of the Métro, a compressed itinerary that only occurred to me this morning when I looked up at the line map on my train to work.<br />
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On Saturday I had to trace these steps. I didn't need - or want - to see bullet holes and sawdust masking drying blood. I just needed some inside-out understanding of where it happened as much as what. <i>Why</i> it happened is another line of thinking altogether.<br />
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Of course, I wasn't alone. The pavements covered in flowers and candles in front of Le Petit Cambodge and Le Carillon, Café Bonne Bierre and Casa Nostra, and outside Le Bataclan and the Belle Equipe in Rue de Charonne, drew those wishing to pay their respects, to mourn and, perhaps, seek further comfort, that they, too, could have been in and outside these places in this fun, trendy and yet refreshingly unpretentious district of Paris.<br />
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It is easy to see this as rubbernecking, I know, but I'm certain that the vast majority were there to furnish affinity with their fellow Parisians, who died doing what Parisians - indeed residents of any city - do on a Friday night.<br />
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"It's my family who have been touched by this, musicians," violinist Anne Gouverneur told <i>The Guardian</i> outside Le Bataclan<i>. </i>"It’s a small group of people. Everyone has friends who were among the injured and the dead. I feel very close to the victims." And she spoke for us all. Her family were musicians, my 'family' are music fans, restaurant patrons and bar regulars.<br />
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Four days on, Paris is starting to shift, delicately, from shock and mourning. Normality - which was, after all, what was happening on Friday night - recovers quicker than we might think in these situations, no matter how horrific.<br />
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A social media campaign is encouraging Parisians to return to how things were (before they became things that will never be the same again), by going to their restaurants, bistros and cafes, to not cower in fear. Unsurprisingly, it's a campaign that doesn't need much encouragement to flourish.<br />
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Paris is many things, but its culture and lifestyle are two things which define it the most. Paris IS its cafes and concert halls. "Culture is our biggest shield," the minister for culture, Fleur Pellerin, said yesterday. Getting back behind that shield will be easy, I'm sure. But it surely helped to see, up close, what it was that caused the shield to be raised to begin with.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-26238278821558558372015-11-16T11:50:00.002+01:002015-11-16T11:50:13.505+01:00In Paris it's not another manic Monday<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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Monday morning. Paris has woken for another working week. The difference, this time, is that it follows a weekend no one will ever forget.<br />
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The bars, cafes and shops that closed on Saturday, and remained so yesterday, will reopen, slowly and gingerly. People will take the Métro, gather around office coffee machines, go out to lunch, and later go home, picking up bread and wine for the evening meal along the way. All the things Paris will have done on countless Mondays before. Except on this Monday, with a tangible solemnity.<br />
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Yesterday, unseasonably warm sunshine proved irresistable to locals and tourists alike. They came out of their homes and hotels to sit in the parks, a celebration of life in its own right.<br />
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As I walked through the Jardins du Trocadéro, across Pont d'Iéna in front of the Eiffel Tower and then along Port de la Bourdonnais, there was no obvious dimming of the crowds, or their mood.<br />
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This, I'm sure, would have been part relief, part compensation, and part determination to not let a weekend in Paris be ruined completely. No one had to say it, but people weren't going to let the bad guys achieve exactly what defines "terrorism".<br />
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Eventually circling back up the Champs-Élysées, there was, though, a decidedly more muted tone. As one of the few areas of Paris to allow shops to be open on a Sunday, many - if not most - were shut. Threading their way through the tourists, police with shotguns and sub-machine guns augmented the trios of soldiers who've patrolled this gaudy, over-commercialised avenue for some time now.<br />
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Inevitably, one felt comfort, but up to a point. Friday's attacks - well organised, well orchestrated and clearly well equipped - came without warning and with a force that would even question the effectivenes of armed officers posted in every doorway in the city.<br />
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Paris <i>will </i>heal. The mental scars of those drenched in the blood of others will not. It would be crass, stupid and bloody obvious to suggest, for journalistic effect, that the attacks have changed Paris irreparably. And, anyway, people said just that in January. Paris got back on with being Paris, which was exactly what Paris was doing on Friday night.<br />
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The French ambassador to London yesterday described Friday night's bloodshed as "France's 9/11". Thus the 7/7 attacks were London's 9/11, the Madrid rail bombings Spain's. These are worthy sentiments, projecting a sense of solidarity and membership of an ignominious club. But they are also just soundbites, soundbites which don't relieve the pain of losing loved ones simply enjoying a Friday night out. And they don't extinguish the fear that the nihlistic, narcisstic death cult responsible for sending eight young, brainwashed men to Paris will strike again. On another Friday night, on a Monday morning, at any time.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-5465007774050244352015-11-15T13:11:00.003+01:002015-11-15T22:48:06.950+01:00The danger's over, so let the danger begin<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">© Simon Poulter 2015</td></tr>
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It is been the kind of Sunday morning that people who live in Paris feel better for, and visitors come to experience. The sky above the city has been cloudless and smogless, allowing the sun to shine from a panorama so consistently blue it could have been painted according to a Pantone colour reference.<br>
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If you hadn't been aware of Friday's news, you'd be looking out on this city with a self-satisfied "Yes!" in blindingly obvious recognition that you were in one of the most beautiful, vibrant and exciting cities in the world, one which intoxicates with its very brickwork.<br>
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But that's if you <i>hadn't </i>been aware of what happened on Friday. Yesterday, after being cooped up at home since getting in from work on Friday evening, and then being glued to the TV until mid-afternoon, I went out to get some perspective.<br>
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I took the Métro to Boulevard Voltaire and worked my way back towards Republique, past Le Bataclan, and then on up Boulevard Jules Ferry in the direction of the restaurants Le Carillon and Le Cambodge. At every grim waypoint in Friday night's slaughter, there were packs of television crews, their anchors reporting live to the world, over-rotating on every new scrap of information, pulling in locals and witnesses to fill in the blanks on what happened.<br>
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Outside Le Bataclan - and within the enormous perimeter established by the police - the Eagles Of Death Metal's tour bus was still parked there. It is still there this morning. A strange, solemn reminder of what happened on a Friday night at a rock concert.<br>
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In the streets around the venue, the paraphernalia of tragedy are still visible: disgarded surgical gloves, tubing from plasma drips and, inevitably, the smeared traces of blood left behind by the walking wounded and those dragged from what has been likened to a battlefield, suvivors stepping over the dead and dying to get away from the massacre.<br>
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A 15-minute walk away, on the corner of Rue du Faubourg du Temple and Rue de la Fontaine au Roi, flowers lay in front of the Café Bonne Bière. A piece of A4 paper has been placed under flickering candles, displaying - simply - the word "INNOCENT".<br>
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As you look up from the floor, you then see - with stark visibility - bullet holes in the restaurant's windows. They are at waist height, consistent with shots fired from a car window. Just up the street, La Casa Nostra, a pizza restaurant that had been packed when the killers drove further, firing their Kalishnikovs from a black Seat which has since been found abandoned in Montreuil...with even more Kalishnikovs stashed inside.<br>
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Paris, yesterday, was a city transformed. For what should have been a normal Saturday afternoon, shops, restaurants and bars all over the city were closed. At-risk places where tourists and expatriates regularly gather were shut. For a city normally so belligerent towards authority, where red traffic lights and no-parking instructions are considered mere suggestions, the call to stay barricaded indoors was being heeded.<br>
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But, now, the mood is already shifting to how France should itself stay barricaded indoors. Discourse is turning to how the attacks could have been prevented, and how they must be stopped from ever happing again. As details emerge of the attackers' identities - two are now known to have come from Syria via Greece, while another was a petty criminal from the Paris suburbs where resentment and radicalism run hand in hand - a predictable kneejerk reaction is building.<br>
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The intelligence services are being asked how they were caught unaware of attacks of this scale being planned. How could three groups of terrorists carry out coordinated attacks of near-military organisation without generating digital chatter? Was the date, Friday the 13th, the intention? Was the fact that the Eagles Of Death Metal, playing at Le Bataclan on Friday, are American no coincidence, either?<br>
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At first, people wondered whether the attacks were a jhadist reaction to the drone strike confirmed earlier on Friday and believed to have taken out Mohammed Emwazi, the so-called British-born 'Jihadi John'. But the fact that one of the suicide bombers at the Stade De France had a ticket for the France-Germany friendly inside the stadium is enough to suggest an attack long in the making.<br>
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Now, though, the debate will also expand to the topic of borders. François Hollande immediately and quite rightly closed France on Friday night, but surely the notion of a borderless Europe and the 'Schengen Area' must be now under threat.<br>
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A car with Belgian number plates is reported to have been involved in the attrocities, and yesterday police made arrests in Molenbeek, a western suburb of Brussels just a three-hour drive from Paris. A terror cell in Belgium was linked to the <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> attacks in January; the attempted attack in August on the Thalys train between Amsterdam and Paris occured after Ayoub El-Khazzani boarded at Brussels with an AK47 and magazines containing 270 rounds, plus a bottle of petrol; more people from Belgium have travelled to Syria to take part in the jihadist conflict than from any other European country.<br>
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I could, right now, leave my Paris apartment and drive anywhere within an area of 4,312,099 square kilometres - and a population of 400 million people - and not have my passport checked once. The right-wing agenda on immigration will, sadly, be fuelled further by Friday's events, as evidence appears that two of the attackers may have arrived in Europe via Greece in the waves of immigrants escaping Syria.<br>
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And here is where the danger truly begins, before the blood has even been sponged from the streets of the 10th and 11th arrondissements and the bullet hole-ridden bar windows repaired. Europe has been pushed closer to a paranoid, siege mentality. We shouldn't forget that the overwhelming majority of refugees are escaping the very brand of carnage that came to Paris on Friday night. The hundreds of thousands of now stateless individuals are more interested in finding shelter, food and clothing than wreaking bloodshed.<br>
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Those now struggling in refugee camps can only dream of the normality of a Friday evening out in a restaurant, a cafe, a concert or a football match. Wherever they now find themselves huddled, they're a world away from the boulevards of Paris. But they share the same expeirence as those caught up in Friday's senseless bloodshed, victims of a barbaric ideology.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-17435586571303078522015-11-14T12:45:00.004+01:002015-11-14T16:20:10.515+01:00Defiance<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> © Simon Poulter 2015</td></tr>
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I had every intention of getting up early this morning to go and see <i>Spectre </i>again. But, apart from the sheer insensitivity of indulgent entertainment, it just seemed plain wrong to be immersed in James Bond's latest fictional dual with a villainous, murderous global organisation. But, then, the numbness I and the rest of Paris is feeling this morning also cuts off the means to make rational choices about anything.</div>
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Paris is, instead, this morning curled up on its sofas, huddled under its duvets and gathered with its loved ones, just holding them. My street is empty. Usually on a Saturday morning it is bustling and busy, locals out buying their bread, groceries and flowers, collecting their dry cleaning. But not today. </div>
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Almost exactly ten months ago I was out in a Paris street that was full to brimming. In a show of solidarity to the victims of attacks on a magazine and a supermarket, more than a million people walked from Place de la République to Nation in an enormous, slow-moving carpet of humanity. It took more than three hours just to walk from one end of Avenue de la République to the other.</div>
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The march was so huge, so insanely over-subscribed, that even one of the widest boulevards of Paris couldn't handle the volume. A splinter march broke off and went up Boulevard Voltaire before rejoining the main march near Père Lachaise Cemetery. On the way, it walked past Le Bataclan.</div>
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No one on that march was under any illusion that mass protest would do anything to stop more bloodshed in Paris, or any other city for that matter. But that wasn't the point. The <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> attack on January 7, and the attack and siege on the Hypercacher supermarket two days later, engendered a profound need for Parisians to come together, to protest - yes - but to also seek the comfort of collective expression. And, in the greatest of French traditions, show defiance.</div>
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In the wake of <i>Hebdo</i>, Paris locked itself down. Patrols of heavily armed soldiers would be seen all over the city. They'd been visible at major tourist attractions for years, but now they were outside Jewish schools and other institutions deemed potential follow-up targets. This show of strength - in which you would walk past an apparently anonymous doorway and a police sentry with an assault rifle would appear out of seemingly nowhere - was also meant to show defiance.</div>
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<br></div>
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Clearly, though, Paris wasn't defiant enough. Because last night, eight young, apparently French-speaking men, brought even greater carnage to the city. But, this time, not to a magazine that had provocatively trodden on cultural sensitivities, but to 120 people in restaurants, cafes and bars of the 10th and 11th arrondissements, at Le Bataclan for a gig, and at the Stade De France for a football match. 120 people, slaughtered by radicalised young men who had been brainwashed by people of even greater evil.</div>
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There will be - and has been already - recriminations. Were France's open borders to blame? Well, of course: it is said you can buy an AK47 in France as easily as a copy of <i>Le Figaro</i>. I can't remember the last time I passed through any port of entry and had my passport looked at properly. Was French intelligence to blame for not picking up on the planning of last night's concerted attacks? Was an earlier bomb threat towards the German football team not heeded? Well, of course: but when guns, ammunition and, apparently, suicide vests, and those willing to pull the trigger, are in ready supply, what happened last night could have happened anywhere, and could, and even will, happen again.</div>
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Next summer France will host the 2016 European Football Championships, a tournament expected to attract more than a million fans to stadia throughout the country. Never has the phrase 'What if?' been more chilling.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">© Simon Poulter 2015</td></tr>
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<div>
A repeat of last night's attack doesn't bear thinking about. "It could have been you, it could have been me," said an eyewitness at Le Bataclan on French TV. </div>
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I've spent many happy evenings in that venue - gigs by the likes of Paul Weller, Steven Wilson, Robert Plant, Manic Street Preachers, Kaiser Chiefs, Seasick Steve, Bombay Bicycle Club. It could have been me. Two very good friends of mine were there last night. Thank God they got out.</div>
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But this is the fear gripping Paris the most today. It could have been <i>any</i> one of us, doing what we do on a Friday evening out - a meal in a restaurant, a drink in a bar, a rock gig, a football match. </div>
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We are the softest of targets. We are blameless in the warped agenda of those carrying out these attacks, and yet we bear the brunt of their brainwashed belief that life is cheap, and cold-bloodedly extinguishing people via AK47s and explosive belts will change the policies of the governments those doing the brainwashing want to impact.</div>
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So what's my point? I guess I don't have one. It is still too difficult to make any sense out of last night's bloodshed. It wasn't crime. It wasn't religion. It wasn't politics. And I won't accept anyone telling me that it happens every day in parts of the Middle East so why not in Paris on a Friday night. </div>
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As I posted on Facebook, and I have no shame in saying again here, it shouldn't happen in Iraq. It shouldn't happen in Tunisia. It shouldn't happen in Beirut. It shouldn't happen in the sky over Egypt. And it shouldn't happen in Paris. </div>
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It shouldn't happen.</div>
Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-60650377800889732152015-11-08T12:15:00.003+01:002015-11-08T12:15:58.986+01:00Mourinho: behind the mask of failure<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Seven defeats out of 12 Premier League games. Just ponder on that for a second. That's relegation form, surely? Certainly not what you'd expect to see, three months to the day after the 2015-16 season began for the 2014-15 champions.<br />
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And, so, what next for Chelsea? José Mourinho has tried everything, including getting himself banned from being in the same stadium as his players in the hope that reverse psychology may be of benefit.<br />
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Yesterday's match against Stoke City did at least show glimpses of the Chelsea of last season: Eden Hazard <i>almost </i>back to his best - marauding, turning on a sixpence, confusing defenders. In front of defence, Nemanja Matic was <i>almost</i> back to his imperious control - stopping, gathering, delivering. And between the two, Willian didn't stop running, rushing, driving.<br />
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The trouble was, it was always <i>almost</i>. Lighting counter attacks failed to result in goals - Costa always just a yard short of a pass, Pedro hitting the post, sometimes no one at all being where they should have been to take advantage.<br />
<br />
Stoke deserve all the credit for this. Mark Hughes had, typically, set his side up to frustrate - Jack Butland, who replaced Asmir Begovic when he moved to Chelsea, was, for the second time in two weeks, the difference between the two sides, stretching brilliantly to tip a shot from Ramires over the bar, and blocking a somewhat toothless Diego Costa. The thuggish Charlie Adam and his captain Ryan Shawcross kept Chelsea out with their shear physical belligerence.<br />
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At the other end, Chelsea's defence were undone by a familiar weakness: failure to close down their opponent. Marko Arnautovic's precision scissor-strike was taken as five blue shirts were on the other side of their goalkeeper.<br />
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At that, heads dropped. Chelsea's malaise this season has been typified by an apparent lack of confidence. In front of goal - theirs and their opponents'. Arnautovic's goal brought that confidence lower still. Even the arrival of Remy, Oscar and Fabregas failed to refresh the attack, with Chelsea making all the right approaches, but each time coming up against a wall of Stoke players. Only Remy came close to creating an equaliser, almost winning a late penalty when he hurdled Jack Butland's legs rather than allowed them to trip him. Again, <i>almost</i>.<br />
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Experienced football fans can be easily resigned to the fact that in some games, luck just doesn't go your way. "It's just one of those games," we'll say. That, however, is usually mere self-comfort. True, luck can play its part, but at the Britannia Stadium yesterday luck was only one of the factors, the other being Stoke's excellent organisation, and Chelsea's lack of cunning to unpick it.<br />
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So that's the rational view of events. Week in, week out, I've been posting about the irrational - the impact of José Mourinho's appalling behaviour, the negativity it has bred, and how it has long exceeded the idea of him drawing attention away from his players. Three months to the day when he let rip at his club doctor for doing her job, Mourinho's constant state of victimhood, his belief that the world is out to get him and the club, and his clear inability to show any degree of professional restraint, have cast an increasingly blacker cloud over his players and the club.<br />
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Sport, and sports people, like to project an image of sturdiness. Frailty is rarely countenanced. And so no one is likely to admit that the psychology at Chelsea is all wrong. Because sports people won't do that. But if the absence of Mourinho on the touchline was a factor in his players dropping their heads yesterday at Stoke, he only has himself to blame if that phone call comes from Bruce Buck, the club chairman, or even Roman Abramovic himself. Everyone has their limit, and in Abramovic's case, we have to assume that has long been exceeded.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-74433551945501595882015-11-03T13:18:00.003+01:002015-11-03T13:18:54.102+01:00"Just when you thought it couldn't get worse"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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So there it is, right there at the top of this page: the inevitable title of the inevitable book that will be written about this season for Chelsea. A horror, a nightmare, an unrelenting disaster - and we're still only at the beginning of November. And it WILL get worse, trust me. It already has.<br />
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On Saturday morning I added to my already lengthy list of posts about this season’s travails by recounting the defeat to the New York Red Bulls in pre-season, defeat to Arsenal in the Community Shield on August 2, a draw with Swansea on the season’s opening day and that ridiculous Eva Carneiro episode, five more defeats in the league, exit from the League Cup, fines, referee baiting and José Mourinho's increasing volatility, and last season’s lions fading before our very eyes this term, all resulting in the 2014-15 Premier League champions tailspinning into relegation form.<br />
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So that was the state of affairs on Saturday morning. Pretty much plenty to consume any other club for a whole season, let alone its first three months. By Saturday afternoon, it became still worse. A 3-1 defeat at <i>home </i>to Liverpool, having taken the lead early and with convincing intent. Cue more Mourinho petulance - sarcastically guffawing at Mark Clattenburg's infuriating decision not to give Lucas a deserved second yellow card, his “Yes, No” interview with BT Sport’s Des Kelly, and that bizarre gathering of his coaches after the game, like Mafia capos taunting the FBI watching them through binoculars.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">London Evening Standard/Clive Rose/Getty Images</td></tr>
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But all of that wasn't clearly enough: 48 hours hence and the now farcical collapse of Chelsea’s fortunes has seen two further lumps of stone fall from its crumbling masonry, with Mourinho receiving a £40,000 FA fine and a one-match stadium ban for making comments to referee Jon Moss during the West Ham defeat on October 24. But wait, there’s EVEN more - Mourinho will now be the subject of individual legal action from Carneiro, following her apparent demotion and his “naive” comments during that opening day draw with Swansea.<br />
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‘House of cards’ doesn’t even cover it. It’s hard to even think of any equivalent situation anywhere else. Not even Manchester United under David Moyes. Well, maybe.<br />
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Moyes didn't so much inherit a poisoned chalice when he was handpicked by Sir Alex Ferguson to succeed him, as one tainted by a squad that may have, themselves, just romped to the Premier League title in May 2013, but was rapidly ageing, perhaps as a result. Reinforcements supplied by United's new executive vice-chairman and defacto chief executive Ed Woodward were unforthcoming, with only Marouane Fellaini arriving for £27.5 million. Hardly fresh blood.<br />
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Things started well for Moyes, winning the Community Shield at Wembley with a 2–0 win over Wigan. The opening game of the season proper saw Moyes' United beating Swansea 4-1 (oh, how things might be different now if Chelsea had beaten Swansea 4-1 on the opening day of this season!). Then things started to turn - an unpalatable 4-1 defeat to the noisy neighbours, Manchester City, a 2–1 defeat at home to West Brom, home defeats to Everton and Newcastle United in the space of four days, the spiral just didn't seem to stop.<br />
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After Christmas they exited the FA Cup in the third round, lost to Sunderland in the semi-final of the League Cup, and then lost 3-0 twice in a row, to Liverpool and, again, Manchester City. By the time Moyes was sacked in April, he'd overseen 11 losses - including six at home - and just 17 wins from 34 matches. Significantly, United were seventh in the table.<br />
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Today, Chelsea lie in 15th. On November 3. As football people like to trot out, it's a long season. Chelsea will turn it around. Mourinho will turn it around. Let's rephrase that: Mourinho <i>can </i>turn it around. Or Mourinho <i>could</i> turn it around.<br />
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The Chelsea faithful have no doubts that he will. He is just too good a manager not to, surely. But the problem with everything about Chelsea this season - on the field, off the field, in the tunnel... - has been accumalitive. Football players, and indeed managers, will say that, when a club is undergoing a change of ownership, that their focus is on the next game, and that they don't pay attention to what happens in the boardroom.<br />
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But there cannot be a single employee of Chelsea FC - the staff at Stamford Bridge or at the training ground in Cobham - that will be immune to or unaware of the negativity surrounding the club right now. As a result, I've been convinced that mysery loves company, and that this unrelenting chain of events has in some way been connected, with the team's problematic performances more the result of pyschology that physiology.<br />
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<br />
And then I read a brilliant piece by Martin Samuel, consistently Fleet Street's best football writer, in which he argued that, perhaps, we've been looking at Chelsea's struggles over the last 12 weeks through the wrong prism.<br />
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Rather than gawping at how last season's Premier League winners had, under one of football's greatest coaches (fact: eight domestic titles and three European trophies from four clubs), suddenly dropped like a stone, Samuel argued that Chelsea may not have been as good as we all thought. Last season, he surmised, may have just been the result of a hurculean effort that took them across the line early, but burned them out in the process.<br />
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That does explain Eden Hazard's lethargy this term. Last season, the on-fire forward and deserved winner of player-of-the-year awards and comparisons with Messi; this season? Careworn and with all the confidence of a nervous teenager buying his first packet of Durex at Boots.<br />
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And John Terry: whatever opinions people have of him as a person, he has been without doubt one of the greatest-ever English centrebacks, whose on-field leadership at the base of Mourinho's famous Cech-Terry-Lampard-Drogba spine provided structure for both scoring goals and preventing them.<br />
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But no more. Terry's effectiveness has visibly eroded. It happens to us all, but for most of us, not in the spotlight of 13 possible camera positions in a televised football match. Sadly, we must accept that the "Captain. Leader. Legend." will have to relinquish that role. Alongside him, Branislav Ivanovic. Last season as vital as ever on the right side, defending and creating. But before his injury this season, a liability. One doubts he will get back to his best.<br />
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On Terry's other side, Gary Cahill. Chelsea fans were delighted by the rare event of an English player being signed by the club, but he has become regularly exposed as a distinctly average central defender. And "Dave" - Cesar Azpiliqueta - a natural right back who moved into the left back slot vacated by Ashley Cole and never back-filled by his supposed heir, Ryan Bertrand. A decent defender, who had a good season last time, but as Liverpool cruelly exploited at the weekend, vulnerable.<br />
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Samuel also highlighted Cesc Fabregas' traditional mid-season retirement, one which occurred this season before the first leaves of Autumn had even fallen, along with Nemanja Matic who had a blinder of a 2014-15 in the holding position but, like his compatriot Ivanavoic, stunk the place out before being injured on international duty.<br />
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And, then, there is the Brazilian triumvirate of Oscar, Ramires and Willian, the former of which looks like a sulky teen reluctantly getting out of bed at Noon. Of the latter two, they have at least been box-to-box industrious, but Samuel argued that we have, perhaps, held too much reverance for these Brazilians. They may come from this planet's most naturally gifted footballing nation, but they were also a part of a national side ripped assunder on home turf by Germany. Could it be that they're not, really, all that?<br />
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Tomorrow night, the nightmare could very easily continue. A home Champions League tie with Dynamo Kiev, a team with a so-so story so far in this season's competition. A year ago, you'd have said Chelsea would have beaten them solidly. But now? Such is <i>our</i> lack of confidence in the team, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone with any real conviction to predict a home win.<br />
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If Chelsea lose that, and then struggle away to Stoke on Saturday afternoon, it will be impossible for Roman Abramovich not to dispense with his manager. It would be a tragedy - seriously. The fact that Mourinho hasn't been sacked so far seems to underline the widely held belief that Abramovich was serious about building a dynasty under the Portuguese.<br />
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There is no better manager for Chelsea Football Club. There is also no one else available or likely to be persuaded to available, who could pick this team up, with its clear physical frailties, and deliver a season to be proud of. Containment may be all that is left. Which means that Abramovich will could have a very big decision to make in the coming days. Does he stick, or twist?Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-35888931364606106652015-11-02T17:48:00.003+01:002015-11-02T18:48:46.903+01:00Heart meets sleeve: Guy Garvey's Courting The Squall<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Some people just can't catch a break. Take Phil Collins (and I already know the punchline to that proposition): last week he informed <i>Rolling Stone</i> that he will be coming out of retirement, prompting an instant spew of predictably ill-informed invective, much of it from people who, loving a bandwagon, have probably never stopped to think of why they dislike him so.<br>
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Of course, there was a time, in the mid-1980s, when his ubiquity was such that familiarity bred understandable contempt. Collins was everywhere - <i>Top Of The Pops</i>, your local arena, Live Aid (twice), your local cinema (both acting and singing), even an episode of <i>Miami Vice</i>. He even grew tired of himself, and it showed with the increasingly self-derivative nature of his solo musical output into the decade that followed.<br>
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To the mainstream media he was the rock star who'd forged his solo career out of one divorce, and fuelled it via the next two. The net effect is that he became regarded as a fey, middle-of-the-road Cliff Richard hate figure, loved by grannies and bland local radio stations in equal measure.<br>
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Which is a shame, as he is - or at least was, before a crippling spinal condition - one of rock’s most gifted drummers and stage performers, a highly underrated producer and, some of his schmaltz not withstanding, a brilliant pop songwriter. He has even been feted by the hip-hop community, which has often cited <i>Face Value</i> for its multiple influences on their sound.<br>
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I only attempt this defence of the near-indefensible because of Collins' predilection for intimate, heart-on-sleeve-honest lyrics, an attribute he shares with <b>Guy Garvey</b>. I'm not, by the way, making a direct musical comparison between the two, although at risk of being tenuous, they do have a common denominator in Peter Gabriel. Collins, of course, drummed behind Gabriel in Genesis, then took over as lead singer, worked with him on solo albums, and was even best man at his wedding. Garvey, on the other hand, has been a lifelong Gabriel fan, and even recorded with Elbow at Gabriel’s Real World Studios. As I said, no apologies for being tenuous.<br>
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There is, though, a more tangible link between Gabriel's idiosyncrasies and the way Garvey has gone about <b><i>Courting The Squall</i></b>, his brilliantly engaging new side project. Because it’s an album that weaves in and out of different textures in a varying topography of soundscaping and tempo. To one ear it's conventional pop, luxuriated by Garvey's vocals, sung in a register not that dissimilar to Gabriel's. To another, its a wonderful exploration of jazz-like avoidance of linear pop, all without signing up fully to the avant garde of music’s awkward squad.<br>
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Elbow have, on occasion, courted the same lighters-ahoy arena space that Coldplay still dominate, somewhat bafflingly, but here Garvey seems to be having the time of his life dipping into a much broader palette and being seemingly unrestrained as to what goes on the canvas. This may come from his collaborators, Pete Jobson from I Am Kloot and The Whip’s Nathan Sudders. As so often is the case with side projects - or even full-blown solo debuts - the protagonist will often appear refreshed from working with different faces.<br>
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As you will find on I Am Kloot and The Whip's records, and those of New Order, Doves, Johnny Marr - the list goes on - there is something about the music of Greater Manchester that is present here on Bury-born Garvey's record. It's a slight coldness, a grey-skied, slightly damp ambience. On <i>Courting The Squall</i> - Garvey, usually described by journalists as a lovable bear of a fella, adds the emotional warmth that has made Elbow so popular, amongst critics <i>and </i>the music-buying public, something lacking in Collins' relationship with his detractors.<br>
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The album’s lead-in single and first track, <i>Angela’s Eyes</i>, sets the quirky tone, bouncing like Tom Waits at his most vaudeville with retro guitars and a blasting synth solo, releasing a pent-up tension, perhaps from the ending of Garvey's relationship with writer Emma Jane Unsworth, which informs much of the album. "I'm a believer in a perfect girl in a world of brazen lies," he opines, later on concluding "In a house full of robbers and thieves, no sign from the zodiac. No. And I want my fucking money back - yeah!".<br>
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Two songs later, and <i>Harder Edges </i>continues this liberation, albeit with more bluesier brass. It's not quite the typical breakup album - far from it (but then again, Collins always maintains that <i>Face Value</i> had more to do with his new relationship that the first wife who'd run off with the decorator), as <i>Unwind</i> demonstrates with its delicate, smokey ambience and the plaintive question: "Can we find the trust we need just to unwind?".<br>
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English songwriters have often been accused of avoiding matters of the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, to quote WB Yeats. For Garvey, it's never been a problem. Thus, <i>Belly Of The Whale</i>, with its bonkers brass accompaniment, and narrative about a house, of all things, is as personal and as confessional as it is possible to be, but still doesn't resort to the maudlin and melancholic, like <i>Harder Edges</i>, using its funk-brass almost sub-consciously to make the personal nature of its words standout.<br>
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Further confession appears with <i>Yesterday</i> - a bold choice of song title for anyone coming out of the English north-west - in which Garvey's Bury accent coats a noirish Tom Waits-style of misbehaviour during the night before, followed by a hint of Catholic regret in the morning, a contemplation of the push and pull of romance.<br>
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There is little - if anything - to find wrong in <i>Courting The Squall. </i>If there is one misfire, it's <i>Electricity</i>. David Gilmour's recent <i>Rattle That Lock</i> album contained a cod lounge jazz number that, while earnest in its intention, just didn't seem right for the singer or the project. Similarly, <i>Electricity</i>- in which Garvey duets with American jazz/folk/blues singer Jolie Holland, faithfully recreates the bourbon-drenched atmosphere of a backstreet speakeasy, but doesn't seem to fit the rest of the album's enjoyable unevenness.<br>
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Where Garvey does venture successfully for the downbeat mood, it is <i>Juggernaut</i>, with its shimmering piano chords and the sense of a Sunday morning yet to fully come to life...perhaps before those windows are thrown wide. Moreover, it's a song, slap-bang in the middle of this ten-track album which anchors Garvey's emotion while providing flight from a relationship that just wasn't working.<br>
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We Brits aren't meant to wear our hearts on our sleeves, least of all big, burly Mancunians. Another burly Brit, my musical hero John Martyn, wore his to the extent that his ex-wife Beverley once said that he'd put so much emotion into his songwriting that there was nothing left for her.<br>
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Martyn and, yes, Phil Collins spent the denuement of their respective first marriages wallowing in drink and songwriting, leveraging emotional turmoil to produce some of their best work. Garvey, with <i>Courting The Squall</i>, has perhaps followed a similar course. The key difference is that this is an album that messes with your expectations. It is not one of whiney "I miss you ballads" or saxophone-encrusted slow dances. It is peculiarly English, particularly Mancunian, and a liberating joy.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-77796409389029626642015-10-31T11:43:00.001+01:002015-10-31T11:56:36.833+01:00Trick or treat - this could be the weekend I apologise to my F5 key<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Halloween is, historically, a frightening festival at Chelsea. In seasons past, it has heralded a dark few weeks of indifferent performances up to and over Christmas, with managers sacked in the process, to be replaced by Guus Hiddink or somesuch saviour, parachuted in to spare blushes come May.<br />
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It's a tradition that actually pre-dates Roman Abramovich, his fortunes and his itchy trigger finger, but has been accentuated by the oligarch's propensity to dispense with coaches at the slightest possibility of non-qualification for the following season's Champions League, the competition that bewitched him to begin with.<br />
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The Russian's truculence, however, was supposed to have been removed when José Mourinho returned to the club two summers ago. The Special One had become "the happy one", and having pursued Pep Guardiola like a teenager pining for the girl of his dreams, Abramovich appeared to accept serendipity and the fact that Mourinho was the only man who could deliver results and satisfy the fans. Mourinho, by reverse, appeared to accept that Chelsea was his destiny.<br />
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So, for the last two seasons, the Halloween tradition was avoided, but this season, however, it began a long time before this weekend. Some suggest it was August 8, when Mourinho blew a fuse that shouldn't have been exhausted on the opening day of the Premier League season, and publicly humiliated Dr. Eva Carneiro for doing her job.<br />
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But if you really want to get to the heart of the problem, go back further, to July 23, when Chelsea, on their traditional pre-season tour in the US, were beaten 4-2 by a New York Red Bulls team largely composed of junior players. Chelsea, by contrast, fielded, over the course of 90 minutes a team that included Courtois, Ivanovic, Terry, Cahill, Zouma, Azpilicueta, Fabregas, Mikel, Oscar, Remy, Azpilicueta, Ramires, Matic, Hazard and Costa.<br />
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Even allowing for the fact that no-one really cares about these pre-season friendlies, it apparently left Mourinho simmering, frustration that would manifest itself sporadically over the subsequent weeks. The Portuguese would talk elliptically about tiredness and that this term's pre-season not being as well prepared for as last term's. He was already releasing a thin vapour of obfuscation about why his team, who became Champions in May, were looking somewhat less so in August.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(C) Simon Poulter 2015</td></tr>
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Twelve weeks later and Chelsea are 15th in the league, have lost five times, drawn twice and won three. They've been dumped out of the League Cup, a title they were defending, and Mourinho has been fined £50,000 and given a suspended stadium ban for one disciplinary offence, and faces worse for allegedly telling referee John Moss: "Wenger was right. You are fucking soft" last weekend at West Ham.<br />
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On top of that, Eva Carneiro has apparently served papers on Chelsea for constructive dismissal, a matter which, if it goes to court, will drag Mourinho through an incident that could have been resolved instantly with an apology. And, who knows, a popular figure at the club could have continued with her job, potentially sparing the team of the original incident's clear role in its destabilisation over the last three months. <br />
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Even if you compare Chelsea's season so far with that of Manchester United under David Moyes, it gets worse with every turn. Weekend after weekend, I've been heard to trot out the "just when you think it can't get any worse, it does" line.<br />
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Crap has been followed by more crap. Mourinho has cranked his belligerence back up to 2007 levels. Negativity seems to have surrounded the Chelsea manager like the permanent cloud of dirt surrounding Pig Pen in the <i>Charlie Brown</i> cartoons.<br />
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And it gets even more worse. This lunchtime, Chelsea host Liverpool, an equally beleaguered team but one bathing in the glow of a new, media-friendly, impeccably-dentured manager in Jürgen Klopp.<br />
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When the fixtures are published in June, the appearance of Chelsea-Liverpool is always one to excite me, and has been since my childhood, when Liverpool were the <i>defacto </i>force to be reckoned with in European football. Apart from anything else, it is the perfect football confrontation - the quintessential Subbuteo fixture of the team in blue versus the team in red. Over the years it has taken on greater weight, spiced up further by the same teams seemingly inevitably matched in the Champions League, with rivalries and conspiracy claims between Mourinho and Rafa Benitez, and that calamitous slip by Steven Gerrard, just when it looked like Liverpool could even win something. I'll admit, all of this has, in the past, added to the appeal of a Chelsea-Liverpool game.<br />
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So, after the last decade of Chelsea's ascendancy, with the club supplanting Liverpool in many ways, it's an uncomfortable feeling this morning, knowing that Chelsea appear to be so spent and dysfunctional. True, there were moments of encouragement in last Saturday's defeat at West Ham, and again during the cup tie with Stoke on Tuesday, but - sorry to say - I'm lacking any hope that Mourinho will have been able to build on that in training before today.<br />
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Chelsea are lacking in too many places. Take Eden Hazard: his player of the year-winning confidence appeared to go missing when he muffed a scoring opportunity at Wembley in the Community Shield, confronted by former teammate Petr Čech for the first time. And, then, against Stoke on Tuesday and that ultimate, tie-losing penalty kick. Hazard had the look of a man trapped in a glass box.<br />
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Commentators and Mourinho himself have talked about being careful what you wish for. After Tim Sherwood was fired, Mourinho was automatically installed as the next Premier League manager likely to get sacked. The press has written of little else in the last two weeks. The hashtag #mourinhoout has even appeared on Twitter, a development as unprecedented as America turning on Jennifer Aniston as its national sweetheart.<br />
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But now, two hours before kick off, I can't help feeling that Mourinho, his psychology and the team's mindset, have been on a path of self-fulfilling prophecy. Only a spectacular, compelling, telephone number-scoreline of victory over Liverpool today can save Mourinho's job.<br />
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There, I said it, and I'm not happy to have done so. Few have defended Mourinho and Chelsea's tactics under him more than me. I've gladly accepted the 'win ugly' philosophy as I have revelled in the success it has delivered. I've argued with online trolls over their insistence that Mourinho's Chelsea has devalued football (a nonsense concept, given that it takes two committed teams to play a game of football). But.<br />
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Over the last three months I've tried to fathom why Chelsea have played so badly. I've tried to understand why the players have been so lethargic, uncoordinated in places, ineffective in others. Has it been physical or tactical? In the end, I've concluded that it can't be either. You can't go from rampant champions in May to knackered has-beens in August and beyond. Not in a club with state-of-the art, multi-million pound training and medical facilities, and a squad so huge that it can afford to loan out 36 players.<br />
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No, the <i>only</i> explanation is psychological. The malaise at Chelsea this season has been a mental one. That dust cloud of negativity that has followed Mourinho around since July 23 has tainted the club. And I really can't see what an improvement in performance, starting today, can do to Hoover it away.<br />
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And, so, I must apologies to the F5 function key on my computer keyboard. Because I can't help feeling that after this afternoon, and for the next 48 hours or so, it is going to get the hammering of a lifetime as I refresh my Twitter feed, the BBC Sport website, and any other online resource that is likely to deliver the increasingly inevitable headline: "CHELSEA SACK MOURINHO".<br />
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Because, surely, it is coming.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-20779094995490184202015-10-25T12:11:00.001+01:002015-10-25T16:39:30.203+01:00SPECTRE - the Bond between us<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Unless you are also champing at the bit for <i>Star Wars: The Force Gets Out Of Bed</i>, or whatever it it is called, the waiting is almost over for us mere mortals, anxiously pacing in our otherwise colourless lives, for <i>SPECTRE</i>.<br>
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In fact there are some of us who've been bereft of sleep, proper nutrition and fingernails since the 24th ‘official’ James Bond film was announced on December 4 last year, promising the return of Daniel Craig for his fourth outing as 007 and the second in the series to be directed by Sam Mendes, following the magnificence of <i>Skyfall</i>.<br>
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Expectation, of course, is one thing, and reality is something else, but from tomorrow, cinemagoers in the UK and Ireland will be the first to actually hand over coin to see if one of the most anticipated films ever made delivers on its promise.<br>
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Yes, that sounds like hyperbole, but considering how Craig has rebooted the Bond canon, and considering how, during last year's Sony e-mail hack, the rogues responsible allegedly revealed studio missives suggesting the <i>SPECTRE </i>script was, at the time, sub-par, the last 10 months of drip-feed publicity have built such presumption that the film really cannot afford to come up short.<br>
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Throughout its 52-year history, the Bond franchise has been honed into easily the slickest film-making (and money-making) operation in cinema. The <i>Star Wars</i> mini-industry may have set the bar in terms of multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, cereal packet tie-ins, video games and toys (at one point there were more <i>Star Wars </i>things on the market than American citizens), but even that universe can't hold a candle to the 007 empire.<br>
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Indeed, creating a Bond film is as slick an operation as Bond himself: the production cycle begins, publicly, with a perfectly executed press conference, roughly a year before opening night, introducing cast and crew, followed by a well-drilled filming schedule and a steady drip-feed via social media of trailers, clips and production images from exotic locations to ensure appetites are whetted in the 12-month run-up to release. And then, just before release, VERY carefully controlled access is provided to the critics...with a licence to kill if they give any plot details away.<br>
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And so, last week, the first <i>SPECTRE</i> reviews appeared, somewhat scant on real detail, of course, and mainly abundant of praise. "Bond is back – and at his best,” wrote <i>The Sun</i>’s critic, while Robbie Collin in the <i>Telegraph</i> praised “the grand old Fleming style” of <i>SPECTRE</i>’s darkness, a feature of all of the Bonds since Daniel Craig took on the role.<br>
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There were a few bum notes, however, though one suspects that those may have been from critics exercising their right to curmudgeon. One theme in particular - which does nod back to the supposed Sony e-mails - are observations of plot weaknesses. Others have picked up on brief and tokenistic screen time for Monica Bellucci, the 51-year-old 'Bond lady', whose casting was regarded as a step forward for acting diversity in a Bond film.<br>
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All these points may be fair and true, but let's be honest, is there really any point getting into the politics of Bond? That, I know, might sound casually dismissive of all the 'isms' Bond can be accused of, but for more than half a century Bond has existed in his own place in cinema, and done pretty well as a result without causing any real offence, unless you are of such political sensitivity that you shouldn't be bothering watching a Bond film to begin with.<br>
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Bond under Craig, and especially under Mendes' direction in <i>Skyfall</i>, has shown a greater degree of emotional depth than many of the white tuxedo's previous occupants. Sean Connery's bikini bottom-slapping, Roger Moore's ageing playboy, Timothy Dalton's intensity and Pierce Brosnan's continuance of his <i>Remington Steele</i> persona, all had their flaws - as well as their strengths, especially in comparison to the Bond of Ian Fleming's novels.<br>
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Oddly, the Bond who nailed it closest may have been George Lazenby, the Australian model who lasted for one film - <i>On Her Majesty's Secret Service</i>, one of the most underrated of all the films. In not being a natural actor, he ironically projected distance and hesitance. And yet that film could be pulled apart for all manner of reasons.<br>
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<i>Skyfall</i>, however, set the Bond bar higher than it had ever been before, which inevitably makes for comments such as those of Stephen Dalton in <i>The Hollywood Reporter</i>, who felt that <i>SPECTRE</i> feels "like a lesser film than <i>Skyfall</i>, falling back on cliché and convention" with a great first act "full of dark portent and bravura film-making flourishes" but a disappointing final hour "with too many off-the-peg plot twists and too many characters conforming to type".<br>
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Guy Lodge in<i> Variety</i> noted that <i>SPECTRE </i>delivers the globetrotting Bond of yore, a tradition that acted as a window on the world for those of us who'd never seen beyond the garden gate, but that the film lacks "the unexpected emotional urgency of <i>Skyfall</i>, as the film sustains its predecessor’s nostalgia kick with a less sentimental bent."<br>
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Whatever holes the critics have or haven't picked in <i>SPECTRE</i> - and don't forget that the majority of reviews have been nothing but praiseworthy - there won't be a single person who says they won't go to see it as a result.<br>
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A Bond film is a calling. It's tradition. If one is on television, you watch it, you embrace it, you absorb it, you love it. The arrival of a Bond film at the cinema has been one of those 'events' that film marketing people froth about. Only in the case of a Bond film, has such hype been truly warranted. Even if the whole thing sucks, it's still a Bond film, you've still experienced 'marquee cinema'.<br>
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Which is why <i>SPECTRE</i> has so much going for it: in Mendes, you have a film maker with a strong theatrical tradition who delivered spectacularly with <i>Skyfall</i>, and there's little reason for you to expect any less with its follow-up. We know he won't do a third, which would enticingly open the door to a director of similar vision and intellect, Christopher Nolan.<br>
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Plot and all that notwithstanding, <i>SPECTRE</i>'s casting provides another strong draw. Ralph Fiennes may not have the sardonic parentalism of either Bernard Lee's M or Judi Dench's, but he will inject something comparable to the political elite now running Whitehall for real. In Naomie Harris, we had an utterly refreshing Moneypenny in the last film, eschewing most of the simpering innuendo of her predecessors; and Ben Whishaw's Q was an ingenious act of casting, resetting the character as 21st century nerd - which is what spying needs these days - and comprehensively escaping the ageing eccentricity of Desmond Llewellyn and latterly John Cleese. And, given <i>SPECTRE</i>'s cyberterrorism theme, prescient character development too.<br>
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But for me the real prospect for <i>SPECTRE</i> is the principal villain, Franz Oberhauser (or is he Blofeld...?) played by Christoph Waltz. Even if Waltz simply rehashes the wickedly camp menace of Hans Landa in <i>Inglorious Basterds</i>, it would be no bad thing, and we would still get a cast-iron baddie that I expect will match the very best of Bond's antagonists <i>passim</i>. Throw in Andrew Scott - <i>Sherlock</i>'s truly terrifying Moriarty opposite the Cumberbatch on TV - and you have a mouthwatering prospect for villainy.<br>
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So what, then, about Bond himself, Daniel Craig? Recent jokes from the actor himself about slashing his wrists rather than play 007 again will have no doubt negatively influenced some of the critics at last week's <i>SPECTRE </i>press screenings, with one or two reviews suggesting that he is starting to look bored in the role.<br>
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Frankly, I doubt that will really be the case. Apart from him being contracted to do one more film, this is just journalistic licence.<br>
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Craig has been a revelation as Bond. And, if the debate as to who his eventual replacement will be does throw up more hoo-ha about a black Bond (why not Idris Elba?) or anyone or anything else for that matter, the rigidity of convention about Bond being tall and dark haired has been irreparably broken.<br>
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When he was announced as the sixth 'official' Bond for <i>Casino Royale</i>, there was plenty of wheezing within the Bonderati. Could a blond, blue-eyed, average height Liverpudlian carry off a screen character defined by a six-foot-two Scottish body builder in 1962? Could he portray the menace Fleming envisaged? Could he get away with being "a sexist, misogynist dinosaur", as Judy Dench's M branded him? And could he also handle the wink-wink humour Connery managed despite his Scottish dryness, which Moore overdid and which Brosnan had forced upon him?<br>
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The answer to all that was a resounding 'yes', to the extent that he is regularly beaten only by Connery in 'Who-is-the-best-Bond?' rankings. In <i>SPECTRE</i>, Craig continues to prove those early doubters wrong. "I hope he carries on," wrote Peter Bradshaw in <i>The Guardian</i> this week in his review of <i>SPECTRE</i>. "He is one of the best Bonds and an equal to Connery. That great big handsome-Shrek face with its sweetly bat ears has grown into the role."<br>
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There's probably no such thing as a perfect film, though plenty will have come close - <i>Cinema Paradiso</i>, <i>The Godfather</i>, <i>Laurence Of Arabia</i>, <i>Citizen Kane</i> and <i>Apocalypse Now </i>just a few that come to mind. All Bond films have their strengths and their failings, but that's not why we - and I mean all of you - will be queuing to get in to see <i>SPECTRE</i>. Bond films are of such high production values that even when they are bad - and we look to certain entries in the Moore and Brosnan eras for those - they are good. Because, twenty, thirty, forty even fifty years down the line, we will all still be watching them on TV on a bank holiday afternoon. And some of us may even remember going to see them 'for real' at the cinema.<br>
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For me, for <i>SPECTRE</i>, I can't wait.<br>
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<br>Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-56666327927836627212015-10-02T20:16:00.000+02:002015-10-24T11:46:36.336+02:00Walking on sunshine: Squeeze - Cradle To The Grave<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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One of the solid gold joys of my recent sojourn to the Med was the opportunity to devour the first two volumes of the riotously funny memoir by Danny Baker, whose abridged newspaper handle usually goes something like "DJ and <i>TFI Friday </i>writer", occasionally a reference to late night kebabs, Chris Evans and Gazza, or at their laziest, "that bloke off the DAZ ads" (though why never the tremendous mid-morning jewel that was <i>Win, Lose Or Draw</i>, I have no idea).<br />
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Baker is one of Britain's finest masters of the radio medium. His Saturday morning show on the BBC's 5Live is required listening, both for Baker's own non-stop banter, as well as the range of anecdote he elicits from Joe Public on topics as varied as "Don't Talk To Me About Combs!" and "Glove Compartment Archeology".<br />
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Baker is - if I may say so myself, and attempt to bask in a tiny bit of reflected glory - a kindred spirit. We share a love of Steely Dan, prog rock and football, and we both got a rung on the journalism ladder through the <i>NME</i>, though he went on to interview Michael Jackson, while I escalated the dizzy heights of reviewing Phil Collins and Sade concerts, though to this day I maintain that you've got to start somewhere, and at 16 years of age, that was plenty.<br />
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<i>Going To Sea In A Sieve</i>, the first installment of Baker's autobiography, charts the period from childhood to his arrival on national television, richly describing life in the bosom of his working class Bermondsey family and the rollicking wit and wisdom of his dad, Fred 'Spud' Baker (and the <i>Only Fools And Horses</i>-like greyness of the perks of being a dock union convener). And, through Deptford schooldays and his first job at the age of 15 in a fashionable West End record shop (encountering the likes of Marc Bolan, Elton John and members of Queen), Baker regails in his fortunes as punk fanzine scribe and his emergence at the <i>NME</i>, in the shadows of legends like Nick Kent, Charles Shaar-Murray, Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill.<br />
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Both <i>Going To Sea In A Sieve </i>and the equally hilarious follow-up, <i>Going Off Alarming</i> - which follows Baker through his television and soap-ad fame in the 80s and 90s - are warm and unapolagetically devoid of anything approaching the reality of an upbringing in one of London's less salubrious areas. Baker deliberately eschews the celebrity confessional, defying the convention of autobiographies exposing the grim episodes of youth. He had a ball, and it comes across as such. As he frequently says, without resorting to English modesty, he was a popular kid who became the life and soul. Even his 2010 announcement of throat cancer was delivered with whimsical good humour.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Father and son: Kay and Baker</td></tr>
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I mention all this because whimsical good humour is the stock in trade of <i>Cradle To Grave</i>, the BBC TV adaptation of <i>Going To Sea In A Sieve</i>, with Peter Kay cast as Pa Baker, and which provided the inspiration for <b><i>Cradle To The Grave</i></b>, the first album of new songs from <b>Squeeze</b>'s Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford in 17 years.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Picture: Rob O'Connor</td></tr>
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Coming from Greenwich, a few railway sidings away from the Deptford council estate Baker grew up in, the pair share a similar outlook on 1970s south-east London (Difford and Baker both attended West Greenwich Secondary Boys School).<br />
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In <i>Going To Sea In A Sieve </i>Tilbrook saw the prospect of new music celebrating this shared heritage and, having known Baker since his days on the <i>Sniffin' Glue </i>fanzine (which shared an office with Squeeze's first record label, Deptford Fun City), offered to provide the music for the series, which was duly accepted.<br />
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"I read Danny’s book [<i>Going To Sea In A Sieve </i>] four years ago," Tilbrook told <i>Uncut </i>magazine, "and thought for the first time that this might be a project Chris and I could work on." That, in itself, is quite an important statement. Tilbrook and Difford's relationship underwent considerable strain during a 'lost period' when personal problems - including substance addiction - came between them.<br />
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"We’ve grown up a lot in the last few years, musically," Difford says of their reformation of Squeeze in 2007. "We still love and own our past, but as musicians we needed to grow," resulting in the new material of <i>Cradle To The Grave</i>.<br />
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I doubt Tilbrook and Difford would warm to such a description as "national treasures": but given their place in the post-punk New Wave, and a catalogue of utter gems like <i>Take Me I’m Yours</i>, <i>Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)</i>, <i>Labelled With Love</i>, the quintessential student singalong <i>Cool For Cats</i>, and <i>Tempted</i>, featuring the vocals of Britain's greatest white soul singer, Paul Carrack, <i>Cradle To The Grave </i>is, in the words of Tilbrook himself, "the most cohesive Squeeze record we’ve made".<br />
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It is, certainly, one of the most effortlessly enjoyable records I have listened to this year, a comforting, autumnal blanket combining Difford's lyrical wit and Tilbrook's classic English pop melodicism - not to mention their familiar octave-separated vocal harmonies - with a magpie's pilfering of different styles from here and from there.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Picture: Rob O'Connor</td></tr>
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<i>Sunny</i>'s <i>Eleanor Rigby </i>string intro touches on the first flushes of teenage lust and emergence into young adulthood, with its swirling synths recreating the hormonal maelstrom of adolescence, while <i>Happy Days</i> is a country-twinged <i>Down To Margate</i> celebration of a lads holiday (before the notion became stained by the vomit of Shagaluf disgrace) out of London and down to the English south coast, a gospel choir chorus adding to the rays of sunshine that burst forth. <br />
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Though the album wasn't written as the TV show's defacto soundtrack, its compositions complement the narrative with perfection: <i>Top Of The Form</i> clearly gets into the Baker school years, setting the scene of confrontation with a <i>High Noon </i>twang, while <i>Nirvana</i>'s light nostalgia and hint of social commentary blends with the knowing irony of the song's sunny cod disco and its examination of Empty Nest Syndrome ("He quibbled with ambition, she fell into a rut").<br />
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The 'standard' version of <i>Cradle To The Grave </i>ends with <i>Snap, Crackle And Pop</i>, an unfailingly uplifting burst of energy that declares "God-willing I'm going to love this day!", emulating the relentless positivity of Baker's memoir, not to mention Baker himself.<br />
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But stick with the 'deluxe' edition: on four additional tracks, Squeeze open up with a rootsish, Wilco-esque country edge. The Nashville-noir <i>Hangin 'Round</i>, sung by Difford, a lively cover of the 1968 Jeannie C. Riley hit <i>Harper Valley PTA</i>, the delightfully woozy pysch-country vibe of <i>Strange Effect</i>, and the throwabout defiance of modernity that it is <i>I Don’t Wanna Grow Up</i>.<br />
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Perhaps because <i>Cool For Cats</i>, with its pop culture references, was seen as a bit of a novelty, or because <i>Up The Junction </i>was dismissed for its "<i>Smash Hits </i>soap opera" social commentary, Squeeze have never been given a fair crack of the whip. New Wave contemporaries, like Elvis Costello, Paul Weller and Ian Dury were lauded for their eclectism and their cool. But, along with another contemporary, XTC, Squeeze have contributed more to the roots and soul of Britpop than they get credit for.<br />
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Listen back to early Squeeze and then listen to <i>Parklife</i>, <i>Different Class</i> or <i>I Should Coco</i>, or more recently anything by Kaiser Chiefs. Difford and Tilbrook will be in there. Theirs is a songwriting enriched by their environment and its life.<br />
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There was something decidedly serendipitous about, first Danny Baker writing his memoirs (a third intalment will be out next year), and then Difford and Tilbrook deciding to get the Squeeze mojo going again. Because, forged in the chip shops and railway arches of London SE16, <i>Cradle To The Grave </i>marks a welcome return to one of Britain's finest groups, inspired by one of Britain's finest broadcasters. It's a pleasure to have you back chaps.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-53790642226067206682015-09-30T17:25:00.002+02:002015-09-30T19:31:57.888+02:00What did I miss at Chelsea? Nothing, apparently.<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Twitter/Chelsea FC</td></tr>
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The arrangement we had was this: I would go away on holiday for a couple of weeks, recharge the batteries, reconnect with reality and all that, and Chelsea would do something about their form. Thus, a 4-0 win over Maccabi Tel-Aviv, a 2-0 win over Arsenal, and a 4-1 win over Walsall were recorded.<br>
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And then the day before I get on the plane home, a 2-2 draw against Newcastle. OK, perhaps a warnng. And then last night, 48 hours after I'd returned to my adopted Parisian soil, Chelsea lost to Porto. Coincidence?<br>
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Well, right now, I'll take any explanation. Whatever confidence and mental strength returned to José's team while I was soaking up the Sicilian sunshine had evaporated by last night, and with much the same rapidity as my tan is fading. The most perturbing thing of all is that Mourinho, for all the sports press's conciliatory acknowledgement of his proven brilliance as a manager, currently appears to be moving in the opposite direction of the plot. Why else would he have moved on from blaming errant doctors for his team's ills, to singling out individual players...and not exactly the right ones?<br>
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Before last night's game there was talk him that no Chelsea player was 'untouchable', with up to six players at risk of being dropped for the Champions League group game against his old club. Noticeably, John Terry sat the entire game out on the substitutes' bench, with last season's PFA Players' Player of the Year and FWA Footballer of the Year, Eden Hazard, suffering a similar penance until 20 minutes from the end.<br>
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Granted, Terry's pace has increasingly been a question (face facts - he'll never be Esher's answer to Usain Bolt, which explains his choice of disabled bays to park outside chip shops...) when the faster, younger Kurt Zouma is available, but even then the 34-year-old's lionine spirit has carried Chelsea through many a European fixture.<br>
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Hazard's starting absence was more baffling: true, he hasn't been the player he was last season, but he's still one of the quickest and most inventive forwards in the game. Loic Remy, Oscar and Radamel Falcao didn't even get on the plane to Portugal, suggesting they were being made to atone for their lack of success in front of and around goal. But has Costa really been any better? Oscar does, it must be said, blow hot and cold, which might explain why Mourinho chose the on-fire Willian, plus Pedro and Ramires to start in the attacking midfield roles.<br>
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However, one of the real villains of the piece, Branislav Ivanovic, continues to play and, in Terry's absence, captains the side. He has consistently been the worst element in a chronically ineffective defence so far this season, and yet for apparently spurious reasons, Mourinho seems to prefer him over Azpiliqueta playing at right-back, with newboy Baba Rahman coming in on the left.<br>
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Even when it is obvious to the most comprehension-challenged individual like me that Ivanovic has gone missing too often - last night he lost Brahimi, which eventually lead to André André (so good they named him twice) scoring on the rebound just before half time - something seems to be perilously wrong about his apparently untouchable inclusion.<br>
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And if the answer to Matic undeperforming in the holding position is to bring in John Obi Mikel - whose ever-presence in the team for the last nine seasons has baffled everyone - you can be easily tempted to think that Mourinho is now writing his teamsheets in green crayon.<br>
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On the one hand he defends his selections as not being personal ("No punishment, just a decision" - an explanation not far from Michael Corleone's "its strictly business"...) and then in the same breath denounce the woeful defending ("It makes me really angry because the easiest thing to do is to defend set-pieces"), which may have been improved by not having the worst defender out on the pitch.<br>
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There is, too, some valid argument from Rio Ferdinand last night on BT Sport that Chelsea lack leadership on the pitch. Ivanovic - the club's vice-captain - is nowhere near Terry in this regard. In fact, despite Terry being regarded by most non-Chelsea fans to be as reprehensible an individual as it's possible to be, short of beng a practising pedarist or Donald Trump, he is by far one of the greatest leaders on the pitch English football has produced in a generation.<br>
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And, yet, when his leadership is needed most, he's on the bench, starting at the tracksuit stitching on the assistant coach sat in front of him.<br>
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There is something foul and ragged about Chelsea right now. As <i>WWDBD?</i> wrote a couple of weeks ago, the mentality of the side which so imperiously won the Premier League title last season has disappeared. It's down to the manager to fix it, but will he if players are being arbitrarily dropped?<br>
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Mourinho appears to have tried most tricks in his Special One playbook: in the course of the last six weeks of competitive play, Chelsea have suffered five defeats. During this time, he has attempted to deflect attention (casualty: Dr. E Carneiro), he has been beguilingly nice about his under-performing players, he has cranked up the criticism and maid veiled threats, and then gone and dropped players which, frankly, could have been useful.<br>
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Of the players that have responded, only Begovic (who had a mighty wobble during pre-season) has shone, with Willian and, as a sub, Ramires demonstrating any kind of fight of the kind Terry himself wouid and has exhibited in the past.<br>
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Fight is not a word you would readily choose to use with Diego Costa, and when he's not trying to start one, or suspended from causing one, is at least a threat. Still, he himself questioned the mentality of the players around him: "We are all united. It's not a good moment now. We must do more," he said, presumably through an interpreter on the club website. "We have a good squad with a great deal of quality. We have maybe lost some confidence in three or four games."<br>
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There is no maybe or some confidence about it. The mindset at Chelsea right now is all wrong. It's up to the manager to fix it. And maybe, just maybe, the application of tough love isn't the way to do it.Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-5912717977074585842015-09-28T14:02:00.000+02:002015-09-28T14:02:45.856+02:00Island Life - holidaying in Montalbano’s back yard<div>
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Let’s just agree on this, right away: there is no right or wrong when it comes to holidays. One person’s Andean hillwalking is another’s brass-rubbing in Norfolk. Equally, you are more than entitled to spend two weeks at some Mediterranean drum doing nothing more demanding than reading Grisham while turning a darker shade of mahogany. </div>
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Holidaymakers are welcome to their Maldive scuba-ing, their Andalusian basket-weaving, their Phuket beach bumming, their Cornish "chillaxing" or even their Disneyland/world adrenalin rushing and endless queuing. All these are fine by me. <span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">Because a holiday is what you make it, right? It’s your day off or long weekend or week or three-month sabbatical to do whatever makes you feel good, rested and better. </span></div>
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Me, I start out with good intentions. I’ll say to myself that this year I’ll satisfy myself just by loafing about poolside, with sleeping the primary meat in a sandwich of the outbound and return flights. <span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">However, it rarely - if ever - ends up that way. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">I have, previously, chosen a week at an ersatz boutique hotel in Los Angeles, under the false expectation of getting papped on the rooftop terrace amongst the enfamed and glamorous, in the hope of it leading to a career in film/television and impossible riches beyond. Alas, while my man boobs may have provided momentary interest to an idle and, frankly, myopic photographer, I soon realised just how far out of my league I was in the LA hotel narcissism stakes and spent the rest of that holiday stuck in traffic listening to classic rock radio.</span></div>
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This year, and from where I write, I’ve returned to Sicily. Again, with the sworn intention of doing nothing except alternating sleeping with dips in the pool, eating, and reducing my accumulation of rock and roll biographies. But, as Nostradamus himself could have predicted without so much as batting an eyelid, the hire car keys have proven too much of a temptation to simply leave in the hotel safe. Because, so it would seem, I am a restless soul when confronted by beauty.</div>
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This is my fourth visit to Sicily, the first being 1997 when I arrived on the day of Princess Diana’s funeral, in what turned out to be a blessed escape from hearing Elton John singing “Goodbye English rose…” for the billionth time that week. Some have politely “questioned” (i.e. made thinly-veiled criticism) my return to somewhere I’ve been to before: yes, I know there’s a world out there, and that Asia, Australia and New Zealand, South America, the Middle East and even parts of both my home country and [current] adopted nation offer destinations I could have seen for the very first time. There are even a few of Uncle Sam’s 50 states in which I’ve yet to breathe the local air, something that might come as a surprise to my kith and kin.</div>
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So sue me, then, if I’ve shown no ambition by coming back to this giant Dorito perched off Italy’s big toe. Quite why I love Sicily so, however, has only really occurred to me on this trip, and that is the realisation that it is a feast for all senses so gargantuan that you wish you could just ask for a doggy bag with which to consume more of it when you get back home. </div>
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There are plenty of places that deliver what Sicily does - perfect weather, pristine beaches, stunning scenery, fascinating history, dribblingly-good food and wonderful people - but few that deliver all of it so nonchalantly, almost to the point of lacking any ambition to do so. And that’s the part I like.</div>
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Sicily - as a land - isn’t knowingly pretty. It’s not one of those Gwyneth Paltrow-perfect places that, if it didn’t live and breathe, you would swear was a tourist authority construct. But nor is its beauty just skin-deep.</div>
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We Brits and our Yankee cousins, in particular, can bang on about Tuscany, for example, with contractually-obliged references to undulating hills, chianti, and your pick of Florence, Sienna or Lucca (and don’t get me wrong, but these are cities and a region I adore), but Sicily delivers graduated degrees of visual exhilaration and geographic intoxication in an enticingly different manner, and, in my view, in more substantial quantities.</div>
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First of all, Sicily isn’t Italy. It’s Sicily. An island fought over by X, Y, and Z and several more in between over the course of ancient and modern history. Today it might enjoy semi-autonomy from whichever government is this week running the country, but it is no more “Italy” than Russia is a part of either Europe or Asia. </div>
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It’s this individualism that makes Sicily such a perfect pace for the Italianophile to spend a couple of weeks: you get to enjoy the bits of Italy you like - mad driving, breathtaking architecture and insanely ornate places of worship, food and drink you would wallow in like Gina Lollobrigida in the Trevi fountain if you could - while consciously turning a blind eye towards the things you don’t like. That, ashamedly, are the obvious signs of poverty that remain in Italy’s less than prosperous <i>Mezzogiorno</i>, and the husks of suspiciously incomplete buildings that dot the countryside in the most incongruous manner - multi-story commercial buildings in the middle of nowhere and miles from any urban centre, that have been started and then abandoned. </div>
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Some will hint at criminal involvement, others corruption in both high and low places, while others will simply be resigned to it being what it is, much like the filth of fly-tipped rubbish that piles up uncollected alongside roads (as do prostitutes who ply their trade openly on bizarrely remote stretches of highway, like lay-by fruit sellers, so to speak).</div>
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Intense summer heat and the genetic makeup of myriad invading peoples have made Sicilians a hardy breed. In towns that cling to hills like limpet colonies, neighbours live on top of, underneath and right beside each other. Proximity is not a social drawback here as it is to us repressed Brits. Thus a Sicilian will stand on your heels in a queue, or attach themselves to your rear bumper without once considering the imposition it causes. Being close is just their way.</div>
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Speaking of Sicilian roads, they are worthy of their own guidebook alone [*makes note to call publisher next week*]. If you take the Italian reputation for cavalier driving and then crank it up past 11, you will come close to the motoring experience here. </div>
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Overtaking on stretches of highway where it is obviously unadvisable is as much a part of the way of life as the nuclear-strength coffee which, now I think of it, probably contributes to the driving culture. There’s no point in harrumphing when you see a car coming towards you on your side of the road here - it knows what it is doing, as does everyone else…even if a head-on collision of the most dramatic and calamitous kind is clearly about to happen. But never does.</div>
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In mitigation, there is a cause: apart from the three main <i>autostrada</i> - between Palermo and Catania, Messina and Syracusa, and Syracusa and Gela (except it doesn't get that far) - driving anywhere in Sicily can be an exercise in extreme patience as all the roads are single carriageway. Which means on weekdays you will get stuck behind a procession of tectonically slow trucks belching out acrid diesel smoke, while a hotshot in an Alfa impatiently sits on your tail waiting to accelerate past. In a no-passing zone, obviously. </div>
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Like other crazy car cultures - Paris and cities in south-east Asia spring immediately to mind - there is something intuitive about motoring in Sicily. It shouldn't work but it just does, like ant colonies. Miraculously, no-one ever seems to get in anyone else’s way, regardless of the obvious risks taken.</div>
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What Sicily lacks, quite deliberately it would seem, in major automotive infrastructure it makes up for in roads that edge their way around the magnificent Sicilian interior, hugging hillsides and coursing through hilltop towns high enough to feel like you're flying, before twisting and turning down into deep valleys</div>
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Sicily can be a driver’s paradise. While there are plenty of places where it is patently not - Palermo being one, trying to park in most of the other urban attractions being another - the island is criss-crossed with gloriously rolling roads where you can ivariably be the only human being for several kilometres in any which direction. </div>
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Some of these roads are awful, pothole-infested disasters, but many others allow the time to meander the breathtaking Sicilian interior, its seismic history having carved out in great, fertile valleys and mountains with towns nestling in them like something out of Mordor.<br />
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At its eastern end, it is impossible to go anywhere without seeing the enormous, classically conical outline of Mount Etna looming in the haze. No wonder it inspired Greek legends. With its ever-present puffs of sulphuric smoke, and occasional up-spits of lava and rock, it's an awe-inspiring sight that looms over Catania like an imperious guard. Indeed, Etna’s reoccurring prominence is such that you see it from everywhere and in everything - rather like Roy Neary, Richard Dreyfuss’s Devil’s Tower-obsessed telephone engineer in <i>Close Encounters of the Third Kind</i>.<br />
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Indeed so much of Sicily is cinematic, and, yes, as you travel through it, it’s hard not to have Nino Rota’s music from <i>that</i> Coppola epic in your head. Many a tourist will head for the very real Corleone, not just for its literary and cinematic connection (including being, ironically, birthplace of Al Pacino’s maternal grandparents), but because of its genuinely grim history. It is, though, a pretty, if functional town and, presumably, well used to tourists traipsing through it. </div>
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Pacino’s scenes in <i>The Godfather</i> as the young Michael Corleone, on the lam after shooting the murderous Sollozzo and his corrupt police ally McCluskey in New York, were filmed at the eastern end of the island, in and around Etna and Taormina. It is well worth the pilgrimage to the altitudinal town of Savoca to see Bar Vitelli, where he asks for the owner’s daughter’s hand in marriage, later leading to her death and his return to America. The current proprietors are not as accommodating, but they are extraordinarily nice people, the drinks are cold, the ice cream is exquisite, and it provides a very welcome refuge from the intense midday heat,</div>
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During my first visit to Sicily I was asked by a close relative, who will remain nameless, how conspicuous the Mafia were here, as if expecting to confirm men in black suited men on street corners <span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">flipping coins like George Raft</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">. They’re not, but that said, organised crime's presence here is well documented. </span></div>
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The Sicilian economy - indeed the economy of the entire 'Mezzogiorno' south of Italy - seems unable to escape the fingers of mafia groups, though Sicily’s Cosa Nostra has been eclipsed in recent years by the more powerful ‛Ndrangheta operating from across the Straits of Messina in Calabria, and by the Napoli-based Camorra. Barely a night goes by without television news reporting a <i>capo</i>'s arrest or a racket being broken up. Still, you have more chance of encountering a shark than a mafioso, and as we all know, the odds of bumping into Jaws himself is pretty slim to begin with.</div>
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But if there is one criminal influence that is bringing tourists to the island, it is the fictional police inspector Salvo Montalbano of Andrea Camilleri’s <i>Il Commissario Montalbano</i> novels and the 26 brilliantly engaging, feature-length TV films made by Italy’s RAI since 1999.<br />
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Camilleri set his books in the fictional southern Sicilian town of Vigàta, imagined to be in the area of south-western Sicily where he grew up. The TV films, however, were filmed around the historic south-eastern towns of Ragusa, Scicli, Modica and Noto, as well as the picturesque seaside resorts of Punta Secca (where you can find <i>la casa di Montalbano</i> - now a fully functioning B&B) and Donnalucata, the latter of which I have spent the last two weeks.</div>
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Quite rightly, the Montalbano films (and, more recently, the prequel series <i>Il Giovane Montalbano</i> - ‘The Young Montalbano’), have worked like no regional advertising campaign ever could. They have elevated the Baroque beauty and sleepy sandstone of these towns via complex and invariably surprising whodunnits, and their cast of regulars - Luca Zingaretti (with whom I share a birthday - I mention <i>apropos</i> of nothing) as the elder Montalbano, the preening deputy Mimi Augello, Fazio his loyal understudy, and the clownish Catarella, the station receptionist (played by Angelo Russo, a native of Ragusa itself). I implore you to buy the <i>Montalbano</i> box set. Clichéd as it sounds, each of the almost two-hour films have the magical ability to transport you to this sub-drenched corner of Sicily.<br />
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Getting here for real, however, has become somewhat easier. On my last visit, three years ago, the only option was to fly in to Catania’s Fontanarossa airport and then endure a lengthy drive through the baking countryside to the coast. In 2013, however, the former Cold War airbase at Comiso (the American nuclear cruise missile bunkers are still visible next to the runway…) was opened up to serve commercial airlines, with Ryanair - yes, I’m sorry - becoming the first to fly and out from various parts of Europe (though at least, for once, Comiso is actually close to where you might intend to stay...). Alitalia have since added a scheduled daily service, while charter carriers fly in during the main summer season. It should only be a matter of time before others cotton on to the appeal of this region of Sicily.</div>
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Because even if you only come here on a Montalbano pilgrimage, you will be rewarded and then some. Not for nothing has the Val di Noto been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site for the architectural glories of the seven towns within it, many the result of remarkable rebuilding work after an earthquake in 1693.</div>
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To return to my opening argument, you can, if you want, come to Sicily and plonk yourself down on one if its southern coast’s pristine beaches for two weeks and never even bother walking up the steps of a cathedral. But if, like me, you are possessed with a mildly inquisitive nature, or even a fully restless spirit, you can have both the beach time and the exploration time on this island and still feel rested and nourished. </div>
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You can live like a king for relatively little, dining out on all manner of aquatic fauna (the <i>pesce spada alla griglia</i> - grilled swordfish - is to be recommended) and indulging the deliciously zesty local wines. You can indulge history or simply soak up the sun. Holiday life, to borrow from Talk Talk, is truly what you make it.<br />
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Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-456100415781253917.post-25850362493049165482015-09-25T11:32:00.001+02:002015-09-25T12:14:02.977+02:00Some actual Bowie news!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>What Would David Bowie Do? </i>has never idled for too long on The Dame himself, as that was never its purpose. But today it enjoys no end of pleasure to declare that, being September 25, it is not only [KLAXON!] <span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">exactly</span> three months to Christmas Day, or that it is the day that New Order release their hugely anticipated new album <i>Music Complete</i>, but that it is also one of those hens teeth-rare days when there is some actual, proper <b>Bowie</b> news.<br>
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I say "some", but don't go off too half-cocked: the day didn't begin, as it did on Bowie's birthday in 2013, with - gasp! - a new single and - gasp again! - a new album forthcoming (although it is believed that there could be plenty more to come in the middle distance). </div>
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No, today's bounty is the release of <b><i>David Bowie:</i></b><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><b>Five Years - 1969-1973</b></i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">, the first of a series of career-spanning box sets, and which contains the first six original studio albums, </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">including newly remastered versions of <i>David Bowie AKA Space Oddity</i>, <i>The Man Who Sold The World</i>, <i>Hunky Dory</i> and <i>Pin Ups, </i>and a remix of <i>The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars </i>previously only available as part of that album's 40th anniversary package. On top of that there is <i>Re:Call 1</i>, a two-disc compilation of non-album singles, single versions and B-sides, and</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> two</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"> live albums - the brilliant (and once only available as a bootleg) </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">Live Santa Monica '72</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">, along with </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture Soundtrack. </i></div><div>
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Enough? No, there's <i>even</i> more: a previously unreleased single edit of <i>All The Madmen </i>that was never issued, as planned, for the US, and <i>Holy Holy</i>, a 1971 single for Mercury that has never been available since. Add to the package a "lavish" (aren't they always?) colour booklet featuring a considered introduction by head Kink, Ray Davies, and notes from long-time producer Tony Visconti. All of this is available in a choice of either a 12-CD package or a 13-disc vinyl set, all pressed in 180g, which could present a transportation challenge to Shoreditch hipsters on their vintage bicycles.<br>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Box sets of this kind are, of course, for prosperous completists and the wealthily curious (the CD package comes in at £98 while the vinyl set runs to an eye-watering £185), but there is enormous merit to such indulgence, as this particular collection charts the formation of the David Bowie character we have come to worship today.</span><br>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The <i>David Bowie</i> album, with <i>Space Oddity </i>at its outset, presents an artist moving on from anonymous flirtation with R&B and the theatricality of Anthony Newley and Jacques Briel, to grasp the zeitgeist of 1969's new toy, outer space, drafting in the talents of then-Strawb </span>Rick Wakeman, Mick Wayne, Visconti and Herbie Flowers, amongst others to construct this musical world that was neither in the psychedelic camp of the day, or the prog rock and folk rock camps that were to be set up in the subsequent years.<br>
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But even that album was just a sharpening of the stick for the incredible run that would follow, starting with <i>The Man Who Sold The World</i> - the dress rehearsal for Ziggy and the Spiders (with Bowie working with Mick Ronson and 'Woody' Woodmansey for the first time) - taking more familiar form with <i>Hunky Dory </i>(an assault of ready classics like <i>Changes</i>, <i>Oh! You Pretty Things</i>, the astonishing <i>Life on Mars</i>, <i>Andy Warhol</i> and <i>Queen Bitch</i>) followed by <i>Ziggy </i>and <i>Aladdin Sane </i>(which met a lukewarm response on release, but still contains giants like <i>Drive-In Saturday, Panic in Detroit </i>and <i>The Jean Genie</i>),<i> </i>and only wobbling slightly with the disappointingly executed covers album, <i>Pin Ups </i>(<i>Sorrow </i>being its only real highlight).<br>
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With <i>Diamond Dogs</i>, <i>Young Americans</i>, the 'drug years' <span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">and </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">the Berlin trilogy </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">to be chronicled in the next box sets or sets, </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">Five Years</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">, together with all the accessories that accompany the first six albums within it, establishes the artistic enormity and audaciousness of David Bowie's prolific first decade as a serious performer. Even if that art tailed off in the 1980s, the 13-year period from </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">Space Oddity </i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">to </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">Let's Dance</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"> is one unrivalled by any other musician I can think of. Its first act, chronicled here, can only be - and should be - marvelled at.</span></div><div>
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Simon Poulterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15273111741218607102noreply@blogger.com19