What Would David Bowie Do?

Don't believe the you-know-what

2012-02-22T18:09:00.003+01:00

hype - verb, hyped, hyp·ing, noun
1. to stimulate, excite, or agitate (usually followed by 'up' ): She was hyped up at the thought of owning her own car. 2. to create interest in by flamboyant or dramatic methods; promote or publicize showily: a promoter who knows how to hype a prizefight. 3. to intensify (advertising, promotion, or publicity) by ingenious or questionable claims, methods, etc. 4. to trick; gull.

Purchasing a car is, after property and a pint of Guinness in Paris, the third most expensive investment you are probably ever likely to make. We humble consumers can therefore be grateful for the conscientious zeal with which motoring journalists evaluate new cars on our behalf.

Here's how it works: a nervous-looking flunky turns up at the journalist's house with a low-loader bearing a shiny, new and staggeringly expensive car. The journalist then thrashes the car around Cumbria for a week before returning it, ideally intact, to the now ashen-faced flunky. Sometime in the weeks that follow you will read 2500 words of carefully considered copy that may - or may not - influence your decision to part with your hard-earned (and, let's face it, who hasn't been poised to write out a cheque for a Lamborghini Aventador only to read in What Car? that its iPod jack is inconveniently located and that would present daily annoyance during the school run? Well, exactly).

I would hardly place Lana Del Rey's Born To Die in the same category of outlay as the ludicrous but stunning Aventador, but if you're going to succumb to History's Most Hyped Album™, you may as well know what you're in for. Buying music on spec can be a fraught affair. Pity the Sting fan who owns everything since The Police's Fall Out and still rushed out to buy Songs From The Labrynth only to discover it features the tantric one doing German baroque. Because he's Sting.

Unlike motoring journalism, the march of digital progress has changed the way music reviewers do their job. In a recent blog post, The Word's David Hepworth noted how record company fears about advanced digital copies of albums being leaked onto the Internet makes it commonplace these days for music hacks to be summoned to a 'playback' session. Held in venues resembling Guantanamo Bay's Camp X-Ray, any form of recording device - not to mention shoelaces, belts and ties - are removed from the journalist, who is then given a priviledged spin or two of the anointed new album. Just last weekend, journalists were in Paris for a closed-door playback of Bruce Springsteen's Wrecking Ball.

There is another key test to a new album - how it fairs against The Law of Diminishing Listens. This principle is first encountered as a teenager: you buy the new Echo and The Bunnymen single on the day of its release and play it incessantly for the next 48 hours. By Days 3 to 5, plays have scaled down to two or three per day, dropping further to a single spin as you enter the second week of ownership. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the makings of a record collection which will eventually become the topic of a domestic argument.

So what about Born To Die, which I have now managed to avoid passing judgement on for the better part of a month? Does it stack up to the expectation and hype, the Brit award Del Rey won last night, the handbag Mulberry have named after her and the frankly baffling namecheck by David Cameron (who apparently "digs" the singer)?

Because with Del Rey comes a degree of suspicion. Just what is it about her arrival from nowhere (so it seems) that has had the entire music industry fawning over this doe-eyed and pouty 25-year-old from upstate New York, apart from her obvious photogenic qualities.

To some extent, and to her credit, Del Rey's rapid ascendancy, has a lot to do with her own endeavour. With fewer record companies to promote fewer acts because there's less money to make from selling fewer records, today you've got to do it yourself to get rich and famous, which is what Del Rey did. At the beginning of 2011, she was plain old Elizabeth Grant from Lake Placid, NY, with a sunk-without-a-trace debut album Lana Del Ray - A.K.A. Lizzie Grant, already gone and forgotten. Determined, Grant went back to her bedroom, and started messing about with the six or seven chords she says she knows, changed a vowel and became Lana Del Rey.

Midway through the year she released the song Video Games online and, with the help of a grainy self-made video, it went 'viral'. Now, of all the wild wackiness associated with the web, I'm least comfortable with the idea of anything 'going viral'. In my mind - that clutter of ephemera resembling Steptoe & Son's living room - going viral suggests a need for antibiotics, taking two days off work and drinking lots of Lucozade. Apparently, however, going viral is the crown of accomplishment in the virtual community.

Video Games - a polemic about a boyfriend who paid more attention to his Xbox than his better half - was one of two viral events of note in 2011. The other is the YouTube hit of a suburban Englishman losing it while attempting to bring his dog, Fenton, to heal in London's Richmond Park. Though little was initially known of the gentleman in question, comparisons have been subsequently made to Basil Fawlty memorably taking to his Morris 1100 with a tree branch in Fawlty Towers ("Right! I'm going to give you a damned good thrashing!!"), and it was therefore safely assumed that Fenton's owner was sired from the same solid block of English middle classness. Assumptions proved to be correct. After all, who else would call their dog Fenton?

OK, so no more procrastination - back to Lana and Born To Die. Is it any good? Yes, I suppose. But it's nowhere near the knock-your-socks-off breakthrough the hype created expectations of. Now I don't want to give the impression that it's a disappointment, because it's not. But with Del Rey branding herself the "gangsta Nancy Sinatra", you would have expected something a little more diverse. Not that it is bad. It just lacks true variety.

Tonally, Born To Die doesn't veer too far from being a noirish David Lynch soundtrack, positively soaked in reverb, big soundstages and the odd twanging bottom E string, reflecting, perhaps, smalltown normality with a Twin Peaks hint of something not right beneath. Del Rey herself adopts one of two vocal personas, either the smokey, low-register of the title track and the eerily aged voice of Video Games, or the squeaky, Britney-esque baby doll of This Is What Makes Us Girls.

Del Rey is certainly comfortable with the theatrical, such as Off To The Races, in which she adopts the skin of a double-crossing gangster's moll. Elsewhere she portrays herself as a somewhat knowing femme fatale, as if acting out the full Laura Palmer backstory (with a pinch of Audrey Horne thrown in for good measure). Carmen takes this bad girl theme further with a vignette of a 17-year-old Coney Island tease with a booze problem.

Diet Mountain Dew is one of the few attempts to take the tempo of Born To Die up to something that moves one's toe in a tapping motion; but for the rest there is a lot of big-haired, cinematic grandeur, awash with strings and cavernous echo like Summertime Sadness and its somewhat dour tale of relationship collapse. Much like Adele, you hope that Del Rey won't return to her failed romance on her next album. As cathartic as this well-trodden route might be (Phil Collins arguably fuelled his entire solo career on the demise of his three marriages), it can grate after a while.

Like any good pop record Born To Die grows with each listen, revealing additional layers every time. And that's a good thing. It's not an instant classic, despite that the hype might have suggested it was. I've never been one to be told who to like: I've probably come to bands long after their period of media adulation has faded and they're already on the chicken-and-chips-in-a-basket revival circuit. But with Lana Del Rey, for once, I think the cognoscenti is on to something...but it's not there yet.

It may not be obvious, and it may need that difficult second (OK, third) album to bring it out, but in a market where Adele has all but stamped her ownership on the Best Female category, Del Rey needs to work more at her craft - learn a few more chords, another key and maybe different time signatures. And then we'll have a very interesting rivalry on our hands: two torch singers - one from Tottenham, the other from rural New York State.

Woke up this morning with dem same ol' Blues blues

2012-02-19T12:03:00.000+01:00

It was a mad idea last summer and it has grown progressively madder. André Villas-Boas - at the age of 33 and after just 21 months in professional football management, taking over one of Europe's biggest sides, owned by one of sport's most impatient proprietors - was a preposterous idea on June 22 last year when Chelsea announced the precocious Portugeuse as its new manager.

Now, nine months later, and with Chelsea not only losing sight of the Barclays Premier League title, but automatic qualification for next season's Champions League, Villas-Boas is looking increasingly like he couldn't run a hot dog stand at Stamford Bridge, let alone a team of ageing superstars with egos to match.

Yesterday's 1-1 draw to a diminished Birmingham City in the FA Cup 5th Round merely highlighted a relatively poor season getting steadily worse, and a managerial position creeping close to becoming untenable. Which is unfortunate. Because it's not really his fault.

When Villas-Boas arrived at the Bridge last summer (well, returned to it), conventional wisdom was that this was - as high-risk appointments go - as risky as electing Charlie Sheen mayor of Las Vegas. Why, when a manager of Carlo Ancelotti's European pedigree and maiden season league-and-cup double achievement wasn't good enough, should a manager with such a patent lack of experience do any better?

One could be tempted to think that Roman Abramovich's decision to hire AVB was some cruel form of bloodsport. Not only was football's very own Charlie Bucket getting the keys to the entire chocolate factory, he was also inheriting a squad dominated by the politically-savvy John Terry, Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba, as well as the woefully disappointing and outrageously expensive Fernando Torres.

On paper Chelsea are one of the most exciting teams in world football. When you look at the talent throughout the squad you do wonder how this group of players should have been so poor yesterday to Birmingham at Stamford Bridge, a home venue which not so long ago was an impenetrable fortress.

And yet to see Villas-Boas looking isolated and seemingly out of his depth on the touchline, you wonder what this much-vaunted "project" is that he and his superiors keep talking about. To me "project" doesn't exactly sound like a firm commitment. In corporate life, a high-flying executive who gets put in charge of 'Special Projects' is usually on their way out because the CEO doesn't know what to do with them. Perhaps Villas-Boas is merely on a three-year internship. Either way, it hardly suggests a long-term appointment.

Little is really known of what Villas-Boas' project actually is, however. Is it to finally win the Champions League, the prize most coveted by Abramovich? Is it to modernise a squad still built around the nucleus of players assembled by Jose Mourinho more than five years ago? Or is it to try and help Fernando Torres understand what the three white sticks with a string bag attached to them are at each end of the pitch?

Villas-Boas has been defiant to the point of cockiness that his job is safe. Despite a noticeable uptick in the number of visits Abramovich has made to the team dressing room post-match and to the club's training ground in Cobham in recent days, Villas-Boas maintains that the Russian has demonstrated nothing but "empathy and motivation for next year's project".

However, it's this year's project that is the concern. With the club lying fifth in the Premier League, and on Tuesday night playing Napoli in the Champions League, facing an on-form team in a notoriously oppressive environment, Abramovich is in a difficult position. If he fires Villas-Boas now he will merely confirm what many critics of Chelsea have been saying, that the oligarch doesn't have the first clue about owning a football club. This view is supported by the ridiculous turnover of managers and the acquisition of crocked players like Torres for non-sensical sums of money. We might never know what Abramovich actually thinks: but if the sight of Chelsea's chief executive Ron Gourlay puffing out his cheeks in a despondent (or relieved) manner at the end of yesterday's cup tie was anything to go by, AVB's bosses are clearly concerned about their head coach.

If, on the other hand, Abramovich sticks with Villas-Boas, despite the team looking unlikely to claw their way back into the top four and a European place next season or, possibly, not winning a trophy at all this season, questions will be asked as to how much true progress has been made in Year 1 of the three-year project. On this, I suppose, you've got to start somewhere, and if that means being brave enough to drop the likes of Terry, Drogba and Lampard - despite their supposed power base within the club - then Villas-Boas is trying to get somewhere. But, maybe, not far enough. Or soon enough.

No thanks. Thank you.

2012-02-17T21:13:00.000+01:00

Being the nice, polite middle-class boy that I am, I was brought up on the principle that courtesy costs nothing, and that I should always mind my Ps and Qs.

Now I'm in my 40s, and mandated by gender predetermination to be in a semi-permanent state of curmudgeon, I have found that "Thanks!" is not always the catch-all of polite appreciation.

As an employee of a large company I have discovered that there is one situation where such gratitude expressed will actually have me pulling upon the red handle marked FOR USE ONLY IN MOMENTS OF MIDDLE-AGED RAGE. I refer to the practice of using the 'Reply All' e-mail button to say, to just a single person (but copied to a cast of millions - including me) "Thanks!".

Being cc'd on an e-mail from one person to another is rarely more than attempted indemnification: "I've copied him/her, therefore he/she can consider themselves informed/looped in/involved". However, when the e-mail only says "Thanks!", the copied recipient has merely become a spectator of the most irrelevant, inconsequential and pointless of declarations. In terms of likelihood to raise one's duster in the workplace, it is beaten only by having to listen to the loud end of someone else's phone conversation. Which is a rant to unleash another time.

E-mail has, however, replaced conversation in many working environments. Few of us office drones will have escaped receiving an e-mail from someone sitting just three feet away or on the other side of a very thin wall. And, worse, when you're on the periphery of a lengthy e-mail exchange between an entire group of people, you end up wondering why that those expensive meeting rooms with video conferencing facilities had been installed, as your inbox fills up with patience-sapping, life's too short-reminding back-and-forthery.

E-mail is too convenient, and in the era of the BlackBerry dispatches are tossed off with careless abandon, at all times of the day or night. How different from the days of "Take a letter, Miss Jones".

With this ease comes the volume: last year the Internet handled almost 110 trillion e-mails. Many of them ended up in my Inbox, it would appear.

Unlike the kitchen pedal bin, which only informs you it has reached capacity when you bother to investigate that unplaceable odor wafting through the house, the message “YOUR MAILBOX IS ALMOST FULL” is a more terrifying warning of impending doom for the desk warrior reliant on an active communications pipeline. But imagine, for a moment, what it would be like to have this digital umbilical removed. Imagine having to actually, you know, talk to people, face-to-face, in the same room...

A few years ago Scottish researchers found that over a third of workers had become stressed by the daily volume of incoming e-mail and, worse, by the obligation to respond to it.

They felt that e-mail had become a distraction, that they were checking their Inbox 30 or 40 times an hour for new arrivals. That study took place five years ago, when ownership of smartphones was miniscule. Now, when even teenagers are hunched over BlackBerrys, no-doubt co-ordinating the next inner-city riot, e-mail is everywhere. Soon it will be impossible to go anywhere without e-mail catching up with you. There are cars in development that will offer you in-car e-mail, Facebook and Twitter (which will make for some pretty interesting insurance claims) and even fridges which will be able to say "You've got mail!" while also reminding you of the fact you're out of milk and houmous. So it has to stop. Or at least be curtailed.

To their absolute credit, several companies and their CEOs have taken initiatives to introduce an alternative e-mail culture in their organizations. Nine years ago, John Cauldwell, owner of the mobile phone retailer Phones4U took the radical step of banning staff from using e-mail altogether, arguing that his 2,500 staff were spending too much time handling e-mail and not enough time dealing with customers. "I saw that email was insidiously invading Phones4U so I banned it immediately," he said at the time. "Management and staff were beginning to show signs of being constrained by email proliferation - the ban brought an instant, dramatic and positive effect."

It's an idea that was picked up last year by London-based fashion PR agency Push, which banned any e-mail activity on Tuesdays to encourage account executives to use the phone more. Push didn't ban electronic communications altogether: in establishing Tuesdays as "T-Days", the agency ruled that staff could use only the telephone and Twitter (geddit?) to speak to journalists, clients and colleagues. Still, not a bad idea.

Last year Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos - a company which runs IT services for large corporations - picked up the Phones4U mantle by launching an 18-month program to eradicate internal e-mail altogether in a bid to achieve "best management practices". Breton's rationale was that only 10% of the 200 e-mails employees received on average every day had any use, which meant that the reading time associated with the other 90%, plus the minute or so it takes to return to work after looking at an e-mail of no great value, was time lost from more important activities.

As with any technological advance, e-mail has it's place. But as a working tool, it has its drawbacks. When more and more people admit to checking their work e-mail while on holiday for no other reason than to reduce the pileup of unread messages when they return to the office, something is clearly amiss. 25 years ago would you have gone into the office every day during Christmas to check for unopened letters or faxes? Of course not.

Other tools are out there which do the job of e-mail just as well: Atos, for example, is replacing e-mail with a combination of a Facebook-style social network and the dear old telephone.

In other companies, Twitter-like applications have been developed, which have the added advantage of encouraging workers to be brief. Given that time is, arguably, the most precious commodity we all have, a carefully crafted 140-character message instead of a lengthy, stream-of-conscious braindump sent to one and cc'd to several hundred more would not only get to the point, but would be the kindest act of humanity one worker could do for another.

And speaking of humanity, let me leave you with this thought: a single e-mail has a carbon footprint of 0.04g, and an e-mail with a PowerPoint presentation attached to it weighs in at 0.4g of CO2. Worth remembering that, next time you e-mail the colleague sat opposite you...

Now is the winter of our discontent

2012-02-12T12:06:00.000+01:00

"He's a disgrace to Liverpool Football Club. Some players should not be allowed to play for Liverpool again. With the history that club's got and in a situation like today, he could have caused a riot."Sir Alex Ferguson on Luis Suárez, Saturday 11 February, 2012

Have we had enough rancor yet? Or do we need more? If so, we surely don't need two of the most famous football clubs in the world supplying it.

Fabio Capello's petulant flounce from the England job this week may have become expensive collateral damage in the Ferdinand-Terry race row, but there was no requirement for anyone - least of all Liverpool's Luis Suárez, Manchester United's Patrice Evra or their respective clubs and managers - to reopen football's other simmering feud, with it's distasteful undercurrent of open and implied as well as accidental racism.

Things were bad enough two weeks ago when Evra was booed by Liverpool fans every time he touched the ball during the clubs' FA Cup tie. Players get booed like this for the most petty of reasons: Ashley Cole, who still gets booed by Arsenal fans for accepting the Abramovich coin in 2006, added Newcastle supporters to his fan club when he cheated on his Geordie wife, Cheryl Cole (the apparent singer, talent show judge and national sweetheart once found guilty for assault in a racially-tinged incident involving a Surrey nightclub's toilet attendant).

It is a normal part of player baiting, one has to accept. But booing a black player for making a complaint about an opponent making a racistly malicious remark? Different league. Likewise, did my own fellow Chelsea supporters really need to boo Rio Ferdinand for being Anton's bigger brother? Nope.

With the memory of their toxic last encounter only two weeks cold, Liverpool and Manchester United needed to tread very carefully before their league meeting yesterday at Anfield, given that it was also the reverse fixture from the game in which Suarez made his original remark to Evra, and since he was banned for eight games for the offence. If you then ice the cake with this North-West derby being one of the most contentious rivalries in sport, everyone needed to be on their best behaviour.

So, the sight of Suarez refusing to shake Evra's hand during the increasingly pointless pre-match love-in was probably one of the most brainless things I've ever seen a footballer do (and let's face it, there are plenty of brainless acts from which to choose).

However, the thing that troubles me more than else is the lack of club management in this issue. Kenny Dalglish - one of the most hailed figures in the modern game - has been relentlessly criticised for his lack of condemnation of Suarez in the first place. You would have thought he'd have gone the extra distance yesterday to tell Suarez to just get on with playing football and not inflame things further.

If it was disappointing seeing the idiot Suarez blanking Evra's handshake - itself an offer of profound significance - it was as disappointing to, again, find Dalglish implicitly supporting his striker by his lack of guidance and his lack of admonishment after the game.

There was, for years, a whiff of unfounded racism around Liverpool, with suggestions that the club had a policy of not signing black players, despite signing Howard Gayle in 1977 at a time when there were still few black players anywhere else in the-then First Division. Dalglish has done his club no favours at all by standing by Suarez by not saying anything about his behaviour towards Evra.

Liverpool isn't a racist club, and Sir Alex Ferguson's barbed reference yesterday to "...the history that club's got" didn't help, not that anything the Manchester United manager says when on such viperous form ever does (although I go some way to agreeing with him that Suarez was a disgrace for not shaking Evra's hand - small gesture that would have travelled a thousand miles).

I don't believe that racism exists on any institutional level in football. It can't, surely? True, apart from the occasional Korean or Japanese player, there is a distinct lack of Asian players in the senior echelons of the game. But the idea of racism still being an ingrained problem, given the immensely black and white make-up of most professional teams (a fact that has hardly needed pointing out in recent years) is nonsense.

It would, though, be foolish to dismiss the signs of its lingering presence: the exit of Micah Richards from Twitter following the posting of racist comments against him, and the utterly vile comments posted yesterday against former Liverpool player and now talkSport presenter Stan Collymore show there is no shortage of morons out who are either racist, or stupid enough to think anonymously sending racist comments to black sportsmen and media personalities is clever.

British football is possibly teetering on a precipice when it comes to race: the next England manager will, potentially, have to deal with a team split between the anti-Terry lobby and those who can't care less. We don't need the remaining four months of the domestic game mired in a worsening atmosphere of poison.

When We Was Fabio

2012-02-09T01:11:00.000+01:00

A Ferdinand

Amongst the many things I struggle to comprehend, the origins of World War 1 have long been a fruitless source of bafflement.

The facts, as they stood, are that on 28 June, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand - heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire and inspiration for a Scottish art rock band - took a bullet from a cross young Bosnian and, within a month, most countries, it seems, were piling into France and Belgium for a punch-up that would leave more than nine million people dead over the course of the next four years. How we went from one event to another is a mystery to me.

Skip forward, if you will, to Sunday, October 23rd, 2011 and the Barclays Premier League encounter between Queens Park Rangers and Chelsea.

An exchange of words between another Ferdinand - the home team's Anton - and the visiting club's captain, John Terry, results in a conflagration that is continuing to take lives, proverbially speaking, almost four months on.

Last Saturday What Would David Bowie Do? remarked on what an utter mess the original incident at Loftus Road had left football in. If you missed it, here's a handy summary:

Terry is facing a criminal trial for his alleged "public order offence" towards Ferdinand (A) and had the England captaincy taken off him because of the impending court date
Terry and Ferdinand are now at the center of collapsing inter-team relationships
QPR captain Joey Barton rants about the affair and Terry's deferred court case on Twitter
Ferdinand's brother Rio gets booed by Chelsea fans after giving his public support for Anton in an ill-advised TV interview on the eve of the Blues meeting Manchester United
QPR captain Joey Barton is, apparently, threatened with jail for contempt of court by ranting about the affair and Terry's deferred court case on Twitter
Players threaten a toxic split in the England camp if Terry even turns up as a squad member for England's pre-Euro 2012 fixtures as well as the tournament itself
England are now without a captain four months before the start of a major tournament

And now, to that list, we can add "England seeks new manager". Again.

Fabio Capello's resignation tonight - bizarrely, scant hours after Harry Redknapp, widely tipped to be the next England manager, was acquitted of tax fraud charges - was coming. The Italian was incensed that the FA's senior executives didn't loop him into the decision to strip Terry of the England captain's armband.

Capello was known to be an enormous fan of Terry's on-pitch leadership skills, even if his off-pitch track record left something to be desired for the notoriously discipline-minded coach. Capello had, of course, been responsible for sacking Terry after his affair with Wayne Bridge's former girlfriend, but had also reinstated him in as bold a statement of his determination to have Terry lead the national side, come-what-may.

The FA's decision to sack Terry before English football's reputation got any further out of hand may have been a sensible (and unavoidable) action, all things considered, but in blanking Capello, the Italian's days in the post were numbered. Capello did little to hide his ire, giving an Italian TV interview in which he said: "They really insulted me and damaged my authority," and that he "...thought it was right that Terry should keep the captain's armband." Capello's strong conviction was that his captain had not been convicted of anything: "In my opinion one cannot be punished until it is official and the court - a non-sport court, a civil court - had made a decision to decide if John Terry has done what he is accused of."

As Harry Redknapp was walking away from Southwark Crown Court, Capello was walking in to Wembley Stadium to meet FA chairman David Bernstein and general secretary Alex Horne. The expectation was of a terse meeting. The expectation, too, was that this would also end in Fabio Capello's reign coming to an end.

When the digital jungle drums of Twitter sprung to life to report that Capello had indeed resigned, few people were all that surprised, any more than they'd be surprised that the odds on Redknapp replacing him were shortening with every second.

The official statement from Bernstein was the expected dull-as-dishwater affair, stressing how "...Fabio has conducted himself in an extremely professional manner." and that in accepting Capello's resignation they were "agreeing this is the right decision," followed by the obligatory platitudes about thanking Capello for his work with England and to "wish him every success in the future".

Most people will agree that the former Milan, Madrid, Roma and Juventus coach gave a mixed return on the £6 million a year the FA furnished him with for his expertise. Although the stats show Capello had a creditable 67% win rate as England manager there was consensus that England hadn't made much more progress under him than they'd done under Sven-Göran Eriksson. These stats must also be balanced with England's abject performance in the 2010 World Cup, including the ignominy of another tournament exit at the hands of bloody Germany.

Perhaps the timing of Capello's resignation wasn't too bad after all: four months is a long time for the new man - whether Redknapp or anyone else on the bookies' shortlists - to come in and get the squad prepared for Euro 2012.

Whoever does come in will be picking up one of sport's most poisoned chalices. I wouldn't mind betting, either, that come the start of the Euros the chalice will contain more than a drop of the taint still traceable from whatever stupid comment was uttered in the heat of battle, one autumnal Sunday afternoon in West London.

Like a pebble dropped onto a still pond, the Ferdinand-Terry affair has triggered a series of concentric ripples that, by the time they are reaching the shoreline, are becoming extremely choppy indeed. Choppy enough to leave casualties - and careers - starting to pile up.

And we thought the Dutch were self-destructive

2012-02-04T10:36:00.000+01:00

What a mess. What an absolute, utter mess. John Terry has the England captain's armband unceremoniously taken off him for a second time in his career because he is considered too much of a liability to team unity.

For once, you can't fault the Football Association. What else could they do? Having seen Terry reinstated by England coach Fabio Capello (after he lost the armband previously for having an affair with teammate Wayne Bridge's girlfriend), the FA was then confronted with the prospect of the national captain heading for a major summer football tournament with a criminal trial for allegedly making a racist remark on the other side of it.

Terry's sacking as skipper only addresses one part of the problem. Reading striker Jason Roberts claims that the England dressing room at Euro 2012 “could be toxic” if Terry is even involved in the tournament, even as a member of the squad. And he claims his view is based on comments from England players he knows.

Chelsea are standing by Terry as club captain in the whole debacle, which began on October 23 when the defender is alleged to have called QPR's Anton Ferdinand a "f****** black c***" in a heated off-ball moment during their clubs' Premier League encounter. Chelsea's backing of Terry is understandable at such a critical stage of the domestic season, but one can wonder whether this is the start of the 31-year-old player's footballing career unravelling.

It shouldn't be forgotten that Terry has not been found guilty of any offence - either a football disciplinary charge (the alleged incident between Terry and Ferdinand was not recorded by the match referee, so no charges could be brought by the FA) and the criminal prosecution - built from, apparently, lip readers and YouTube footage - is clearly sub-judice.

But with the footballing world around Terry looking increasingly divisive - with black professionals even asking critical questions of Chelsea's black teammates for either backing him or not publicly criticising him - whatever really happened in that fleeting exchange between two players, in the heat of an intense Sunday afternoon London derby, is casting a bigger stain on the career of a player who's ability on the pitch has been habitually undermined by events off it.

The FA's announcement yesterday - which, apparently, Fabio Capello knew nothing about in advance - has led to the inevitable stream of invective and counter-invective online.

Joey Barton, the QPR skipper and a player with hardly a spotless reputation (two criminal convictions for violent behaviour - a six-month prison sentence for assault and a suspended sentence for actual bodily harm to on teammate Ousmane Dabo) spent much of yesterday evening ranting on Twitter about the case involving his club colleague Ferdinand. This included a particularly ugly spat with TalkSport's Adrian Durham and the Daily Mirror's Darren Lewis, in which Barton branded them "spineless maggots".

Much of Barton's stream of bile was legally borderline, but in one tweet he was spot on: "Once the issue went out of the FA's control, it was always going to get messy. They should have dealt with it instantly. Now its a farce." Indeed, had the affair been investigated by the FA back in October, and a referral to the police made instantly, there is a chance that the legal proceedings could have been commenced earlier.

As much as I support John Terry as captain of my football club, and as much as I fully support the "innocent until proven guilty" principle, I wonder whether the lawyers who pushed for Terry's trial to be held after Euro 2012 were thinking about anyone else's interests than their own. All the time Terry - still, arguably, the best candidate for England captain (sorry Rio, we don't need your expert long-ball punting skills...), drags this affair behind him, there will be a foul smell surrounding English football itself.

Great preparation for the national side in the run-up to a tournament that is meant to restore the nation's pride after the ignominious embarrassment of the South Africa. I expect the Dutch, with their talent for self-destruction, must be laughing in their clogs.

When Two Tribes Go To War

2012-02-01T06:00:00.000+01:00

As anyone who regularly attends English Premier League football matches will attest, the idea that in this prawn sandwich-munching, bring-the-wife-and-kids-for-a-family-day-out, multi-million pound fan "experience" era of the game, its nefarious side has been completely extinguished would be regarded as foolish.

No doubt, things are vastly improved, certainly from the days of my own youth, when standing in 'The Shed' of Stamford Bridge made owls out of inquisitive boys, as we rotated our heads fully through 180 degrees to see the newest outbreak of mayhem on the terracing behind us.

There is no doubt, too, that the orchestrated warfare that erupted with grim regularity in the '70s and early '80s between entire armies of clubs' fans - Millwall and West Ham, Chelsea and Tottenham, Arsenal and Leeds - has disappeared from the neighbouring streets of these clubs' grounds (although it would be the height of naïveté to suggest that it has disappeared altogether).

There is also no doubt that in recent weeks the word "tribal" has crept back into the football writers' lexicon as the supposed 'race rows' between Liverpool's Luis Suarez and Manchester United's Patrice Evra, and Chelsea's John Terry and Queens Park Rangers' Anton Ferdinand have been ratcheted up.

Tribal is not just an unfortunate word in the racial context, but entirely inappropriate in the actual context of what it is to be a football fan. I don't consider Chelsea or my fellow Chelsea fans any more of a tribe as any other group with whom I claim association - be it England supporters, owners of the complete recordings of Nick Drake, or corpulent male professionals in their mid-forties from the south-west suburbs of London.

However, fate, irony, some perversion or a combination of all three contrived to bring Liverpool and Manchester United, QPR and Chelsea together last Saturday for the FA Cup 4th Round's lunchtime kickoffs. Sports hacks couldn't believe their luck with the column inches they were gifted to stoke up the tension - and risk creating self-fulfilled prophesy. For things easily evolved from being about four football players, to being entire sets of supporters pitched against each other.

For a start, the North-West derby just didn't need it. Liverpool-Manchester United was already one of the longest running team rivalries in professional sport; Suarez from one side was serving his suspension, while Evra from the other had returned to his football. Unfortunately The Kop didn't receive the memo, and spent much of the game's rancourous 90-plus minutes barracking the Frenchman for being "a lying bastard", amongst other choice suggestions, for reporting Suarez to the FA, the result of which being the Uruguayan receiving an eight-game ban.

The Ferdinand-Terry affair, on the other hand, was still an open goal. Ever since the QPR-Chelsea league match on October 23rd when Terry is alleged to have made a racist slur against Ferdinand, the Chelsea and England captain has been allowed to play on by the FA, as they maintained the position that he was facing a public prosecution, rather than an FA disciplinary charge, as Suarez had.

I am sure that some legal expert somewhere will explain the significance of the two, different situations, but to me, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan Police, in claiming to have sufficient evidence to charge Terry with a public order offense, did the FA a favour, as it allowed them to totally swerve the tricky issue of their national captain being accused of racism.

So, if Terry is found not guilty, he and the FA will simply go back to some form of normality, and if found guilty, his England career as captain and player would most probably be over. Responsibility well and truly offloaded.

Unfortunately, things were ballsed up - quite literally - by QPR drawing Chelsea in the FA Cup 4th round, in a tie to be played just days before Terry's case opens, today, at Westminster Magistrates Court. No doubt under the most hawkish of legal advice, nothing official had been heard from either player or club on the matter since Terry was charged - until it was revealed, on the eve of the cup tie, that Ferdinand had received in the post a "malicious communication" (which, according to different reports, contained either an air gun pellet, a bullet or a shotgun cartridge).

Naturally, the package lacked a return address, but the nods and winks were already heading the way of Chelsea fans amid suggestions that some form of highly misguided support for Terry had been enacted. Internet discussions sprang to life and Chelsea's historic - and unwanted association - with far-right groups became a convenient charcoal brick with which to warm up the barbecue further.

Thankfully the Ferdinand mailbag became a sideshow to the less injurious topic of "Will they? Won't they?" and whether Ferdinand would shake Terry's hand in the somewhat ridiculous pre-kickoff 'Respect' handshake ritual between the two teams.

In this the ever-reliable "friends close to the star" suggested that Ferdinand would blank Terry (which would not be a first for the defender - Wayne Bridge came close to the old thumb-to-nose finger waggle gag when he confronted Terry on the pitch for the first time after it was revealed he'd been enjoying relations with Bridge's then-fiancée).

Shortly before kickoff on Saturday it was reported that there would be no team handshake at all. It was explained that they didn't want to risk a handshake snub towards Terry prejudicing the court case about to open today. In truth, the QPR players had decided as a team on Friday to blank Terry, causing a cataclysmic humiliation for the Chelsea and England skipper, and the FA itself.

The only thing this messy piece of PR really prejudiced was the ability of football to stand up above racism itself. Whether Terry did call Ferdinand a "f****** black c***" or not is now for a court to decide. The fact is that Ferdinand and his teammates could have shown themselves to be bigger indivduals by accepting Terry's handshake and moving on. They may have believed it was supporting the cause, but instead it would only have prolonged and provoked things further.

And there lies the biggest issue of all. If you go looking for a rift you'll find one and make it larger, and racism and tribalism are two causes football could do without. If Terry did use such a slur, he's an idiot and should be punished. We all know that many players are blighted by a red mist that descends in the heat of battle. It is debatable as to whether Terry's alleged epithet, uttered in a high-pressure London derby his team were losing, makes him a congenital racist. Stupid, but not malevolently racist.

He is , however, a role model, a senior player and his club and country's captain. In both jobs, he works every day in multi-cultural squads, being a high-profile ambassador for the FA's Respect and the 'Racism - Kick It Out' campaigns. He needs to command the utmost respect from the players he spends most of his week in the company of. And he should have remembered that before opening his mouth in a game monitored by 13 high definition television cameras, unprecedented online scrutiny and the video pinboard that is YouTube.

In no way do I endorse racism or the use of language that draws malicious attention to someone's racial origin, physical appearance, sexual preference or any other tag.

Football is strange theatre. I doubt any, or at least many, of the fans who chant "Yiddo" towards Spurs supporters are card-carrying Nazis, or even know the significance of the slur. And while I've always baulked at the despicable song that refers to Auschwitz, one is wearily resigned to the fact that most members of this chorus line are morons braying with their fellow terrace sheep in complete ignorance of true anti-semitism, and certainly the full, sordid and abhorrent ugliness that was the Holocaust.

The Evra/Suarez and Ferdinand/Terry spats are no more than that - spats. What we have to avoid is the creeping return to English football of the Neanderthal monkey chants that are still projected towards black players from the terraces and stands of football grounds in Spain, Serbia, Poland and Germany. As it is, an eagle-eyed smartphone owner caught sight of an idiot at Anfield on Saturday impersonating King Louis. This shouldn't be allowed to be a return to the disgraceful banana-throwing days of the 70s, when the likes of Luther Blissett, the young John Barnes and Chelsea's heroic pioneering black debutant Paul Canoville ran a gauntlet of hate and ignorance from their own supporters.

I like to think that football has moved on and, for the most part, it has. Supporters might still mockingly draw attention to Liverpool fans' employment status, to Arséne Wenger apparently lacking both a plan and money, and to Ashley Cole having the temerity to cheat on the nation's unoffical sweetheart, Cheryl Cole (God help him if it was Susan Boyle), but this is no more than mild joshing, baiting to get a rise out of the opposition rather than any declaration of war.

Football really isn't a matter of life and death. It's a game. You scream your lungs out at your own midfield, the myopic referee or the small contingent of noisy away fans (who will give as good as they get), all in the name of giving a match some atmosphere. Within this pantomime will be some of the funniest songs, the sharpest wit and the most cutting of self-depreciation. Left to itself, it's harmless. It just doesn't need journalists to turn it into something else, as we all know that friendly abuse can quickly become something decidedly unfriendly.

'Tis the year of heroes and hobbits

2012-01-29T11:30:00.000+01:00

Last Tuesday's announcement of the 2012 Oscar nominations presented a formidable, if predictable, list of the worthy and the wise, with The Artist and George Clooney's The Descendants front runners, and Steven Spielberg's Warhorse, Woody Allen's return-to-form, Midnight In Paris, and another Parisian tale, Martin Scorcese's Hugo also in the hat for Best Picture.

Smart money is on The Artist, a silent movie. Smart money is also on Meryl Streep for her performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, which some of us might wish was a silent movie.

Anyway, enough of the anachronistic satire. Amongst the Best Actor nominees is Gary Oldman for his brilliantly understated performance as the brilliantly understated spycatcher George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Unfortunately with a real George - Clooney - hotly tipped for the Oscar, Oldman will probably leave the Kodak Theater on February 26 empty-handed. A shame as Oscar recognition for Oldman is long overdue.

Like his South-East London contemporary Tim Roth, Oldman has built a successful commercial career in Hollywood that has rarely veered from the edge of darkness. And without too much hoopla, either. His breakthrough as Sid Vicious in Sid And Nancy and Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears established a canon of edgy characters, from the wonderfully deranged DEA agent Stansfield in Luc Besson's Léon and the equally capricious Zorg in Besson's The Fifth Element, to Count Dracula, Sirius Black in the Harry Potter series, Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK, and the Russian baddie in Air Force One - a camped-up panto villain performance to rival Alan Rickman's Sherriff of Nottingham.

Sadly, when it comes to gongs like the Oscars, superhero franchises are rarely in the running. It becomes bread for an extinct cause to think that Oldman might be in with an Academy Award shout again next year for his third outing as trusty Gotham City cop Jim Gordon in The Dark Knight Rises, the final part of Christopher Nolan's rebooted Batman trilogy.

The Dark Knight Rises will be one of an army of superhero blockbusters due this year: assuming 2012 isn't cut short by the Four Horsemen wielding Mayan calendars we will be entertained by the return of Batman, Bond (James), Bourne (Jason - sort of) and Baggins (Bilbo). This might sound like four old prog rockers reforming for one last hurrah, but in fact they represent the sort of box office business that will have numerous residents of the 90210 zip code sizing up their next mansion.

Together with the return of Spider-Man, The Avengers, Judge Dredd and several more comic book characters brought to life, plus Ridley Scott's reacquaintance with sci-fi in Prometheus, we will not be short on fun with a capital F in 2012, even if the economic doom and gloom continues as it is.

There is a little doubt that any of these franchise additions will prove to be anything other than lucrative, but from a creative point of view, the weight of expectation on the shoulders of those making them will be huge. None more so than Nolan.

While sniffier critics - and awards ceremonies - have been indifferent towards such popcorn fodder as comic book characters, Nolan's channelling of Bob Kane's Caped Crusader through Christian Bale in Batman Begins uncompromisingly jettisoned the frivolous levity of previous screen incarnations to create a superhero of searing darkness, lurking in ambiguous shadows between vigilante and vengeful creature of the night. The Dark Knight raised that bar even higher - the late Heath Ledger transforming The Joker from the whoopee cushion-toting popinjays of Caesar Romano and Jack Nicholson's interpretations into the greatest screen psychopath since Hannibal Lecter. It was - and still is - a film which, even after repeated screenings, takes your breath away with its portrayal of anger, madness and murderous intent unleashed.

In stopping at three Batman movies, Nolan has set an enigmatic tone for his final instalment. Little is known of the closely-guarded plot, beyond the fact that we know Batman will meet his "ultimate match" in the shape of the bludgeoning supervillain Bane, and there is a cheeky suggestion in the pre-publicity that Batman might not survive. How refreshing an act of storytelling that would be if it turns out to be the case.

Given the sheer laziness of Hollywood's current propensity to remake anything that isn't screwed down, the 'reboot' has become a clever means to continue a maturing franchise with some degree of creative merit. Christopher Nolan has been rightfully hailed for adding detail to the shadows of Batman, and the likes of Superman Returns and the forthcoming The Amazing Spider-Man do much the same to their respective characters. But for all the added weight reboots have given such franchises, they are at the end of the day no more an exercise in rebranding that Ford relaunching its Mondeo as an upscale midsize car to compete with BMW and Audi. It may be a good car, it may look nice, but it's still a Ford.

Casino Royale - which, ironically enough (and thanks to the questionable wonders of product placement) featured Daniel Craig's new James Bond briefly driving a Ford Mondeo - did something delicate but definite to the 007 franchise. The girls and gadgets were there, along with the exotic locations, but there was something else; more than just the casting a blond Bond, there was the application of an actor capable of portraying Ian Fleming's Bond, a Bond with depth and a vulnerability painfully lacking in Pierce Brosnan's cocky execution and Roger Moore's ageing frivolity.

Sean Connery has cast a long shadow over the character, not helped by Fleming revising Bond's back-story in the later novels that followed Dr. No's cinematic success and describing Bond as a half-Scottish, half-Swiss orphan. Craig hardly fits that description, being a Scouser of average height, but he has evolved Bond into a believably cold, blue-eyed assassin.

After the preposterous CGI effects that blighted the later Brosnan movies, plot returned with Casino Royale and while its sequel Quantum of Solace was not universally popular, it at least continued a story-driven arc about the Quantum organization (itself a post-modern reboot of SPECTRE) and the loss and betrayal of Vesper Lynd. QoS baffled in equal measure as it delighted which, frankly, is the sign of good film-making. If you can continue a franchise by giving the punters what they want while bending things ever so slightly in a different direction, you're doing the right thing.

Filming on Skyfall, the 23rd Bond movie, finally began last November and while its plot has also been kept largely under wraps (the Fleming books now long exhausted of theatrical potential) the fact that 007 is returning at all is an escape from calamity that Bond himself would have been proud of. When the closing credits of Quantum of Solace issued the traditional prediction that "JAMES BOND WILL RETURN", no-one quite knew when, as MGM's finances were not enjoying the rudest of health.

Thus, the project known only as 'Bond 23' (until Internet chatter started turned the title Skyfall into the worst kept secret in the film world) looked like it was never going to get off the ground, potentially ending Bond's run at 22 'official' films. However, 2012 is a significant year in the Bond timeline, and indeed in the history of cinema. In October, the film world will celebrate the 50th anniversary of a film containing two of the greatest onscreen moments ever. The movie is Dr. No and the first of these moments involves just five words - Connery uttering "My name's Bond, James Bond", and the second is the emergence of Ursula Andress from the Caribbean singing. The song, in case you'd forgotten and was only concentrating on her legendary white bikini, was Underneath The Mango Tree.

With Dr. No's 50th anniversary coming up, it was almost inconceivable there wouldn't be a new Bond movie to acknowledge it. And so, on November 3, the media was assembled at London's lavish Corinthia Hotel to hear step-brother and sister producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, declare Skyfall the 23rd Bond movie - and that money would not be an issue.

"[The budget] in the same range as the last film," explained Wilson. "We really haven’t had to change anything in the script to get what we want. In fact we keep on adding." Broccoli was even more direct on the budget issue: "Does it look like we're cutting back?" she joked, as she pointed to the principles of the movie sat alongside her - Craig returning as Bond, Judi Dench again as M and Javier Bardem as the as-yet undefined villain. Albert Finney will also appear in a role rumoured to that of a Whitehall mandarin. As for the story, that is being kept strictly under wraps, although the blogosphere has been noisy with rumours of M's past catching up with her as the core of Skyfall's plot.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of Skyfall so far has been the choice of Sam Mendes as its director. An Oscar-winner, no doubt, his reputation is steeped in being a very theatre-minded, 'actor's director', rather than an automatic choice for the film world's longest-running action franchise.

Certainly we can expect a more 'actorly’ Bond movie in Skyfall, but with forebears like Terence Young, Guy Hamilton, Lewis Gilbert and John Glen, Mendes will be expected to maintain the franchise's sharp style and wry humour without descending into a downbeat melancholy yawn. With Skyfall's so-far unexplained title just a little too close to "awful", Mendes will not want to tempt critics and headline writers taking up such a God-given gift.

That the Daniel Craig-era James Bond has been deeper and a little more pragmatic may owe something to Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne. Craig's Casino Royale was preceded by the first two Jason Bourne movies, in which Matt Damon presented a spy for the post-9/11 world: darker, brooding and well versed in the realities of a troubled world, with his own government the source of much of the trouble.

This summer sees the release of a fourth film adaptation of Ludlum's novels, The Bourne Legacy, but one crucially lacking its title character. Another movie shrouded in plot secrecy, we know that Matt Damon won't be appearing (he allegedly declined to do another Bourne unless director Paul Greengrass was on board). Instead, Tony Gilroy - who wrote the first three Bourne screenplays - is directing Jeremy Renner as key character Aaron Cross. Renner's star has risen considerably following his outstanding performance in The Hurt Locker, and his turn in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol demonstrated how adept at the action genre he is.

What's not known is where Jason Bourne will fit into the story at all (sci-fi fans will recall that the BBC's wobbly-sets-and-orange-squash-bottles-for-guns series Blake's 7 managed to survive quite happily without the titular protagonist, Blake, so I suppose it's not a prerequisite). What is known is that Renner will be joined by the always bankable Edward Norton plus the new Mrs. Daniel Craig - Rachel Weisz, together with Joan Allen as the sympathetic Pam Landy, and Scott Glenn and David Straithairn as the stressed out CIA bosses who will no doubt spend much of the film saying "People - we have a situation...", which they spent most of the previous three Bournes doing a lot.

And finally, prepare your gluteus maximus for a return journey to Peter Jackson's imagination of Middle Earth. For the first three Christmases of the new millennium, the backsides of filmgoers the world over were put to the ultimate test by Jackson's epic eleven-hour, three-part interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings. This Christmas, competing multiplexes will be no doubt playing up the enhanced comfort of their seating for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first half of Jackson's two-part adaptation of Tolkien's prequel to Lord Of The Rings. It finds members of that trilogy's cast (including Sir Ian Mackellen, Andy Serkis and Sir Christopher Lee) joining up again, along with TV's latest Dr. Watson, Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins, along with his Sherlock Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch, whose sounds like a hobbit to begin with.

With the first part due on December 14, and the second, The Hobbit: There and Back Again, to open on December 13 next year, it's clear that Jackson has no intention of giving us an abbreviated version of Tolkien's entertaining novel, which was written in 1937 as a children's story. In fact I doubt there's a child known to mankind able to sit through six new hours of Tolkien mythology, but for us adults it will make a pleasant revival of a challenging but entertaining Christmas outing.

As with all custodians of major film franchises, Jackson knows the ticket-buying public will have high expectations for The Hobbit. After all, the Lord Of The Rings trilogy turned over almost $3 billion worldwide. Furthermore, the third chapter - Return of the King - demonstrated that populist, fantasy adventure franchises can be critically acclaimed, winning all eleven Academy Award categories in which it was nominated, including Best Picture – and that was the first time such a film had ever won the prize.

Welcome to the five-ring circus

2012-01-22T12:17:00.000+01:00

I'm in shock. Really. According to my Letts 2012 Diary - in which I have dutifully filled in all the Personal Details, updated the birthdays and anniversaries, and made careful note of religious holidays around the world - we are already more than two-thirds of the way through January.

This bombshell means we're closer to February, and with February a short month, we're almost into March and therefore getting ready for Easter. Which is in April. Based on this logic, then, it has taken me almost a third of the way through the year to commit fingertips to keyboard for the first What Would David Bowie Do? outing of 2012.

Here in France, however, it is still technically "the New Year": my indigenous colleagues continue to plant kisses on each other as if the clock got stuck at a minute past midnight on New Year's Day, and this will, apparently, continue until the very end of the month. Actually, there is a strong likelihood that it will continue long into February as the kissing becomes part of the national coping mechanism for France getting downgraded to AA+. I'm still not entirely sure what that means, but I suspect it means everyone here now can claim to be part of an exotic blood group.

As if France wasn't suffering enough, passengers on the Eurostar rail service between Paris and London are currently being invited to visit the buffet carriage where they can purchase badges commemorating the fact Eurostar is an "official partner" of the 2012 Olympic. The games, if you're not aware, will be taking place in London. Paris had offered its services but were turned down on the grounds that, with the streets paved with dog poo, the marathon might prove too risky for the athletes' welfare.

To compound the insensitivity, at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel on the French side, Eurostar trains pass under a large sign reminding, mainly, the driver and a few illegal immigrants wandering along the track that, in the famous declaration of Jacques Rogge, "The IOC has the honour of announcing the Games of the 30th Olympiad in 2012 will be in...[pauses for dramatic effect] - London."

I am, of course, proud for my home city, but you have to feel a little sorry for the French having it rubbed in like this. It reminds me of the late, great Bill Hicks, who observed in a typically acerbic routine: "If The Second Coming ever does happen will Jesus want to be confronted by people wearing crucifixes? It would be a bit like going up to Jackie Onassis with a rifle pendant". Perhaps the only way to worsen the insensitivity is by screening Henry V with French subtitles on giant screens in Paris shortly before the opening ceremony, while offering out 'How was Agincourt for you?' T-shirts.

France may, however, have the last laugh after all: not wishing to put a complete downer on the Games already, my advice to anyone hoping to watch the event is, I'm afraid, do so from the comfort of your own home.

It will be an unmitigated disaster. Should you be mad enough to consider flying to London, and have been booked on a flight by a sadistic travel agent who thinks Heathrow Airport would make the ideal gateway to your Olympic experience, you will face a nightmare.

Your plane - one of only 36 takeoffs and landings to be allowed each hour in order to reduce Heathrow air traffic by 20% in order to handle the 500,000 visitors expected in London for the games (yep, I couldn't work out that logic either) - will have spent the final hour of its journey (and fuel supply) circling over the Kent or Hertfordshire countryside, waiting for air traffic control to let your pilot land on the airport's single active landing runway.

Once you have landed you will probably wait until the first medals are being presented before your luggage arrives. This is because the second thing Heathrow fails miserably at - after allowing passenger airplanes to take off and land - is repatriating passengers and their luggage with anything approaching recognition that the regular passenger, once landed, might wish to subsequently go somewhere.

Heathrow is at pains to point out that it is backing Britain, or something like that. In a glossy 28-page brochure, Normand Boivin, the airport's Chief Operating Officer, says that "80 per cent of all Games visitors are expected to pass through Heathrow – including athletes, officials, Marketing Partners [note the capital letters...] and media, as well as spectators – the airport will be their first experience of London and the UK before the Games."

Oh dear. This is the very same airport which, in December 2010, had to cancel 4000 flights because it was underprepared for snow and couldn't cope with the backlogs or the volume of grounded passengers. Now, I know that even with the climate being as mad as it is, snow is highly unlikely in July, but the fact that the self-styled Gateway To Britain was unprepared for weather which shouldn't exactly be a shock in December doesn't bode well for the influx of half a million people in the space of a few weeks.

But let's imagine that all goes well, and the sixth and temporary terminal they are planning to build (I'm assuming this will be nothing more than a group of Portakabins), does manage to process all the athletes, managers, sponsors, corporate types, regular punters and their luggage (which will also include a total of 800 firearms belonging to 530 atheltes of both the Olympics and Paralympics), the next challenge will be traveling across London.

Heathrow Airport, for the uninitiated, was built to the west side of London. Britain, it should be pointed out, experiences a prevailing south-westerly wind, which means that Heathrow-bound aircraft usually land into the wind, requiring them to fly across a city of eight million people before touching down. Always something to think about when you're wondering about the rules of physics and the laws of average.

Getting from Heathrow in the west to Stratford, where the main Olympic events will take place, in the east is normally a voyage of endurance that would have made Captain Scott turn back.

This is because you have a limited number of transport choices: a taxi, which will cost you more than the Greek national debt; the Piccadilly Line of the London Underground, which will cost you more than the Greek national debt as well as your blood pressure; or the Heathrow Express, which which will cost you more than the Greek national debt, will only take you to Paddington, and then you will need to choose either a taxi or the London Underground to complete your journey

And then there's the hotels. I rarely have reason to stay in London hotels but when I have done so, I've found them to be appallingly bad - overpriced, poorly serviced and staffed by people who give the distinct impression that you are interrupting their day by asking for things.

Sure, there are staggeringly luxurious hotels in London, but the hotels you and I would stay in (i.e. those which aren't predominantly populated by semi-resident Russian mobsters and Middle Eastern arms dealers) mostly fail to understand the concept of service, 21st Century communications technology, or that a minibar should comprise of more than just a kettle, powdered milk and a solitary shortbread biscuit. Compared with the consistently high standards of comfort and service you get in Germany or even basic chain hotels in America, the British hotel experience is lousy.

Don't expect any improvement just for the Olympics. What you can expect is the loss of your children's inheritance: apparently, hotel prices in London will rocket by 400% during the games. This phenomena is commonplace in Las Vegas during major events like CES, the annual consumer electronics show. Several years ago, for the duration of CES I stayed at the sumptuous Bellagio Hotel (you know, the one with the amazing fountains which George Clooney knocked off in Ocean's 11). For the first two nights of CES, I was charged $318 a night, by the third night it had fallen to $240 and by the fourth and fifth nights I was paying just $130. Same hotel, same room, same me. And they said the Mafia was no longer operating in Las Vegas...

Once you're in London, you're going to have to get about. Taxi drivers I've spoken to all seem to be of the opinion that it would be better for them to go on holiday en masse during the Olympics than trying to get through traffic - even with fare-paying passengers on board. The consensus is that it simply won't be worth the hassle. So don't expect to find any taxis.

The Underground won't be any better: London's Tube trains are year-round sweat-boxes of a severity beaten only by the punishment received by Alec Guinness in The Bridge On The River Kwai. Coupled with chronic overcrowding, the inevitable strike by Bob Crow and his cronies, and your journey from inn keeper's hearth to trackside at the Olympic Stadium will be nothing short of torturous ardor.

Basically you'd be best off at home with your feet up watching several hundred honed athletes doing all the hard work. They've spent the last four years training so you won't have to lift anything more than another cold one. Yes, I'm sure it would be nice to be in the fabulous new stadium, juggling your eyes to watch the 4x400mm relay simultaneously with the high jump, the javelin and a mustachioed North Korean woman heaving a lead weight across the infield.

With everyone, surely, now owning a sharp-as-a-button High Definition TV, there really will only be one way to watch the 30th Olympiad and close-ups of sinews being stretched to their limits, Usain Bolt completing another unfeasible world record, or the somewhat preposterous notion that beach volleyball played in the middle of east London is authentic. It won't be, but it'll be a lot more entertaining than getting to the stadium.

Annus mirabilis or annus terribilis?

2011-12-31T16:53:00.002+01:00

It was no less a sage than Carrie Bradshaw who once mused in Sex And The City: "Maybe the past is like an anchor holding us back. Maybe, you have to let go of who you were to become who you will be." It is perfectly true that looking back, rather than the other direction, only relives troubling memories or revisits those we'd rather resign to the dark coffers of history. That said, the adage that knowing where you've come from helps where you're going also rings true.

The point of all this cod philosophy is that, this being New Year's Eve and all, I feel compelled to cast one final glance over the shoulder of a year which, on a personal level, could at the very least be described as 'odd', and on a global level, be described as relentless. I won't dwell here on the personal stuff, save to say that if 2011's emotional dips, peaks, twists and turns were to be turned into a theme park ride, Health & Safety would close it down in an instant.

The list of world events, however, warrants some reflection. Keeping pace with 'big' news this year has been the current affairs equivalent of running a long, punishing marathon with only a few stops for water and the odd embarrassing Paula Radcliffe roadside evacuation along the way.

In the year in which the world welcomed its seven billionth inhabitant, major news stories seemed to be bigger and more impactful: perhaps it was the way they were reported by the media that engorged them, but from the Arab Awakening and the Fukushima earthquake to Europe's economic disaster, the deaths of Steve Jobs and Osama Bin Laden to the deranged rampage of Anders Brevik, Charlie Sheen's very public meltdown and Amy Winehouse's somewhat inevitable demise to the bizarre case of Dominic Strauss-Kahn, England's summer riots and the Anglo-Saxon media's self-ingestion over phone hacking, there was a never-ending parade of news which just seemed that much bigger than usual.

Of all of them, it is the events that will continue into 2012 that deserve the most attention. Biggest of these is the revolution that swept the Middle East and North Africa. It actually began last December with the self-emoliation of a 26-year-old Tunisian fruit and vegetable seller, Mohammed Bouazizi. His act of fatal desperation lit the fuse of a conflagration that is burning still in Syria and smoldering elsewhere.

If the Vietnam War had been the first television war, the revolution that took hold in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Libya and other countries in the region was the first to be initiated by and spread via social networking. The smartphone, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook became more powerful than any pitchfork or Molatov cocktail in the history of popular uprising, channels for disobedience, for liberty and retribution, conveying both brutal injustice as well as the brutal dispatch of an insane monster like Muammar Gaddafi.

Social networking tools evolved from frivolous platforms for sharing pictures of drunken nights out, commencing and ending relationships and posting inconsequential videos of cats playing musical instruments to outlets for freedom and ingenuity. People found a voice they either didn't have before, or were denied their right to exercise it in the first place.

At the arrival of 2012 nothing is more certain than it was one year ago. Europe continues to heave and groan amid the seismic contractions of its politically complex economy, and the Middle East continues to be a source of social unrest and even the resurgence of the sort of nuclear tension that kept an entire generation awake at night not so long ago.

To add to the uncertainty we have Iran rattling its sabre over oil and its own atomic ambitions and a North Korea run by, it would appear, a pudgy video gamer who has swapped his Xbox controls for a large red button labelled Use only if you wish to hold south-east Asia to ransom. Given that the Mayan calendar doesn't have a lot planned for 2013, there is much to be nervous about as we send fireworks into the night sky tonight.

Happy New Year.

A high-definition Christmas

2011-12-22T19:21:00.002+01:00

By this time next week it will be all over. I’m not talking about the world, however, as that is not due to expire until next year.

No, by next Thursday Christmas will already be a fading memory and life will be returning to some semblance of normality after the annual orgy of food and wrapping paper.

I know it's all meant to be about the Nativity, but let’s face it, thanks to the consumer insurgency we all buy into, it has become a desperately anti-climactic festival of spending. Right now many of us are in a state of belligerent defiance mixed with blind panic, but in a few days from now, all that preparation and the weeks spent agonizing over the perfect gift which you then wrap with the precision of a master bomb maker, will have dissolved into a flurry of ripped paper amid fleeting hope passing rapidly into barely disguised disappointment.

In case any members of my family or diminishing circle of friends are reading this hokum (and apologies to regular WWDBD viewers for the apparent break in service – November appeared to have exhausted my writing mojo), all I want for Christmas this year is shiny, circular, measures about 12cm across, and can rightfully be described as the last physical media format I will ever own: Blu-ray Disc.

Despite having played a part in the launch of Blu-ray Disc in a former life - and the format itself being on the market since 2006 - I have hitherto resisted its charms. DVD, for the most part, has been a perfectly adequate format to enjoy movies and TV series in fantastic quality at home. The arrival of high-definition digital TV services and even the availability of HD movies via iTunes has also dented any urge to start building up more shelf-swamping content in a new physical form.

I know I’m not alone in this view – Blu-ray clearly has yet to become the true high-definition successor to DVD it was touted to be. I have happily embraced renting movies online as a means of ensuring my film collection doesn't end up occupuing another post code. In fact this time last year I was completing a significant rationalisation of both my CD and DVD collections, and I’ve maintained a notable abstinence this year in building the pile back up. Dangerously, perhaps, iTunes has made it easier to buy film and music on-spec that I probably wouldn't have bought had I gone to a shop. That said, in the process I’ve come across some gems.

So what tipped me over the edge and dragged me into my local FNAC to buy a Blu-ray Disc player? There were two factors: firstly, my ageing DVD/SACD player was suffering from wear-and-tear, and it was time to buy a replacement. The good people of a particular Japanese consumer electronics brand were helpfully put on the market a Blu-ray player that also played SACDs, so my investment in that format wouldn’t be forfeited. Secondly, the price of even a decent Blu-ray player has commoditised so sharply in the last five years that it was a steal.

There was a third factor: Mad Men. Walking through one of the few remaining HMV stores in London recently I saw a box set of the first four Mad Men seasons going for an absolute song. Knowing that amongst the many things Mad Men had been hailed for was its vivid, Technicolor art direction, it seemed a perfect match for the high-definition richness of Blu-ray Disc. I plunged in.

I wasn’t disappointed. It did, however, dawn on me, as I gorged on the glorious depiction of amorality in a 1960s Madison Avenue ad agency, that it created a paradox: here I was watching a TV show in pristine high-definition picture quality which is set in an era when television was a largely grey, fuzzy and intermittent affair. Then it didn’t have so much as an ‘interactive red button’, programmes didn’t communicate via Twitter, and changing channels involved getting off your arse and turning a dial.

The other irony about Mad Men is that I doubt if any of the characters would actually be alive today. For a start, no scene seems to be possible without everyone lighting up a cigarette, pouring a large measure of scotch or both, which means that most of the employees of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce would have dropped dead long ago from some variety of cancer – lung or oesophagal, take your pick. Mad Men’s Olympian levels of smoking was established early on. Indeed Page 1 of the script of the very first episode starts thus:

Alone in a red corner booth is DON DRAPER, early 30's, handsome, conservative, and despite his third old fashioned, he is apparently sober. He is doodling on a cocktail napkin.

He crosses something out, puts down his fountain pen, and taps a cigarette out of a pack of 'Lucky Strike'.

The BUSBOY, a middle-aged black man, too old for his tight uniform, approaches.

BUSBOY: Finished, sir?

DON: Yeah. Got a light?

The busboy pulls out a pack of matches from the back of his 'Old Gold’s' and lights Don's cigarette.

DON: Ah, an 'Old Gold' man.

(inhaling)

'Lucky Strike', here.

Man Men’s high consumption of tobacco and Johnny Walker’s is matched only by the number of notches on the bedposts of the principle characters. There is more shagging going on at SCDP than even the members of Fleetwood Mac entertained with each other during the 70s and 80s. Most – if not all – of the agency’s male staff would have succumbed to some unpleasant disease of the genital district long before AIDS came along.

But I digress. Blu-ray Disc is having to co-exist with television and the Internet unlike any other format before it. In principle, it wins hands-down on the quality front, something film director Ridley Scott recently put forward in a blog article he wrote for the Huffington Post.

"Technology will need to make many more huge leaps before one can ever view films with the level of picture and sound quality many film lovers demand without having to slide a disc into a player," Scott wrote. "The technically sophisticated Blu-ray Disc, of which I've been a supporter since its inception, is the closest we've come to replicating the best theatrical viewing experience.”

The director of Alien and Blade Runner maintains that, while iPads and smartphones have become as much a part of personal theater as the big screen TV, we must continue to maintain shelf space for Blu-ray Disc and DVD box sets.

“Physical media has years of life left," says Scott, "and must be preserved because there is no better alternative."

I’m not so sure: as Internet bandwidth improves all the time, and video technology continues to be refined further and further, it’s only a matter of time when the quality of Blu-ray Disc will be completely superceded by something which doesn’t require packaging and shelf space. And actually having to get off your fat arse to change discs when gorging on a whole season of Mad Men in one go, as that’s what WiFi is for.

Don't worry - rabbits, chickens and princes will save the planet

2011-12-05T10:13:00.001+01:00

As the European economy continues its irrevocable slide back to the Middle Ages, a seemingly lesser event crept in under radar last week and set up camp in South Africa: the 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Mercifully abbreviated to ‘COP17’ (which fits better on a T-shirt) the conference is the latest attempt by Planet Earth to save itself by limiting greenhouse gas emissions. If you've hitherto been unaware of this event, do not be embarassed. Global attention has been elsewhere.

However, as COP17 enters its second week, there is a chance that the start of what is traditionally known as the 'higher level talks' might draw a bit more attention to the conference, which draws together over 10,000 delegates from 194 countries, and includes the world's leading climate change experts, scientists and campaigners, as well as governments.

Despite the scant coverage in the media, this year's conference represents a critical moment in the effort to agree binding global targets for greenhouse gas emissions. It has been an exhaustive process, ever since COP3 in 1994 produced the treaty named after the conference's host city - the Kyoto Protocol On Climate Change. Then, 37 nations committed themselves to reducing their emissions of the four main greenhouse gases (which include the two we're all guilty of - carbon dioxide and methane...) by 5.2%, the benchmarked "potential" for future climate warming, by 2012. However, the United States (which contributes the world's second-largest output of CO2) - along with Australia - refused to ratify the treaty on the grounds that it didn't encourage the world's poorest polluters to step up as well (the Aussies have, however, since signed their ratification. The United States still hasn't). With the Kyoto Protocol due to expire next year, all subsequent UNFCCC events have concerned themselves with continued negotiations, arguments, posturing and brave attempts to come up with a successor.

In 2004 the climate change circus pitched up on the extremely agreeable island of Bali to map out the steps to a new agreement. The following year it was the somewhat less temperate environment of Poznan in Poland. With these two events meant to, respectively, prepare the roadmap and then fill in the blanks, COP15 in Copenhagen two years ago was supposed to have presented the new global agreement. Some felt it was a slam-dunk, requiring no more than the signatures of world leaders to make it happen.

Disastrously, it didn't. Despite the high-profile presence of presidents and prime ministers, it failed to produce any kind of binding agreement, merely producing a flimsy 'look-we've-come-all-this-way-so-we-need-to-sign-something' document which paid little more than lip service to getting anything done.
Not being a particular expert on climate change, the politics surrounding it, or the diplomacy required to get governments to do something about it, I have my own theory as to why COP15 in Copenhagen failed to deliver: crap logistics. I can offer this viewpoint from personal experience.
I arrived in Copenhagen in a blizzard. The first thing I noticed was that, unlike other some places I've lived in, where the merest hint of a snowflake sends people mad and preparing for a 1000-year nuclear winter, Danes have got it down to a fine art. An airport runway that had been covered in thick snow barely half an hour before my plane landed had been cleared and was operating with all the normality of a summer's day.

That was, however, the last time that day that I encountered anything resembling efficiency. Arriving at Copenhagen's Bella Center I encountered an already lengthy queue for accreditation. Being British, I was, initially, as happy as a clam to queue stoically and politely, while scanning the peripherery for any potential bad-mannered interlopers.

Unfortunately I hadn't banked on the UN's own imported police force who were administrating the accreditation process. For five-and-a-half hours I queued ankle-deep in freezing snow, weathering wind chill of -20. Climate change and global warming were two distant concepts as I stood there, shuffling from one foot to the other, cursing (the first sign of hypothermia) for being shod in officewear and not the pelts of two wolves.

Artist impression of the rabbit

Advancing at a pace only time-lapse photography could faithfully record, and with the only comfort coming from cups of coffee handed out by the Danish Army, I watched two grown human beings dressed, respectively, as a chicken and a rabbit embroiled in a punch-up.

Artist impression of the chicken

From what I could gather - and do bear in mind that I may have been hallucinating at this point - the contretemps between the bunny and the bird appeared to be a territorial dispute over the optimum spot from which to stage their protests against global warming. The morning had taken on a profoundly surreal element at this point.

By the third hour of queuing I was entertaining irrational fears of succumbing to frostbite and, like Ranulph Fiennes, having to saw off my own toes with a tool fashioned from of a reindeer's antler. By the fifth hour I'd had enough, having been up since 4.30am for my flight to Copenhagen (yes, I know, I should have chartered a more carbon-friendly pack of sled dogs). Just as I was planning to make a break for it I noticed that ahead of me in the queue was a representation from a Native American tribe. Oh, the irony that my eyes had been watering for most of the morning.

Their skills of endurance, hewn no doubt on the high plains, we're clearly more developed than mine. Annoyed, cold and resentful from having spent a long morning standing still in the actual land of ice and snow, I hobbled off on my frost-bitten, close-to-amputation feet in search of a hotel, several cold (but not too cold) beers and an open fire-heated bar.

Reanimated by the loving toastiness of the hotel, and by the fact a colleague had provided me with the pass I should have had in the first place, I returned to the Bella Center where, several hours after I’d left it, I discovered the Indian tribe to be still just in front of me. Twin Peaks had now been uprooted and moved to a Scandinavian exhibition centre.

As it transpired, the process to get into COP15 was almost as arduous as it was for the conference to get any agreement out of it. The Prince of Wales was addressing the opening session of what is called the "high-level talks". My presence was due to the fact that my then-employer was a significant member of the Corporate Leaders Group, an organisation set up by the Prince to bring enterprises together to apply more pressure on governments to do something about climate change.

Charles was there to apply his passion for the environment by imploring the great-and-the-good assembled to, effectively, pull their fingers out and reach an agreement. "The inescapable conclusion," he told delegates, "is that a partial solution to climate change is no solution at all. Crucially, it must be embraced by the public, private and NGO sectors, as well as by local communities and indigenous people, while also encouraging individual responsibility."

While many think of Charles as either a well-meaning eccentric or a do-gooder who should stay out of politics, his ability to command the attention of a large conference chamber was impressive, and his commitment to the cause can never be faulted. Alas, the failure of COP15 to reach any kind of conclusive agreement was more the result of everyone else in Copenhagen to make a commitment.

The following year the conference took to the blisteringly warm Mexican beach resort of Cançun, better known for American college students indulging in the drunken debauchery of Spring Break. COP16 was meant to be a more low-key affair, attended by a more functional profile of delegates who, according to the roadmap, would have been tasked with outlining the implementation of whatever Copenhagen the year before had agreed. The presidents and prime ministers stayed away, leaving their experts to pick up the baton. Apart from a few token pieces of legislation, and a lot of huffing and puffing about the critical need to do something, the outcome was limp.

So, what of this year? Despite the lack of media attention, COP17 is the last-chance saloon to replace Kyoto. Whatever your view on climate change, the planet's ice caps are thinning at an alarming rate, and the seas are heating up to the extent that America's hurricane season is growing longer and more intense. These can't be random developments.

Critics of the climate change discussions say that they are hampered by too much self interest. Surely, though, self-interest should be the reason for getting an agreement. After all, London, Paris and New York won't be much fun to live in when they're under water.

It's still here

2011-12-01T09:33:00.001+01:00

One Saturday, 24 years ago, a magazine editor, in his wisdom, dispatched me to the English market town of Hereford to ask locals about their sexual habits.

It was an assignment fraught with danger. Firstly, Hereford is the world-famous home of the SAS, Britain's elite special forces. They are not know for their openness to strangers asking questions. About anything.

Secondly, the objective of my mission was to test national attitudes towards HIV/AIDS which, in 1987, was seen almost exclusively as a "gay plague", helped no end by unenlightened newspaper headlines along those lines.

Dodging threatening looks and accusations ("You some sort of pervert?") and the inevitable and progressively unfunny 'jokes' ("Practice safe sex? Absolutely - last time we 'ad it off in the car we almost crashed." Ho and, can I add, ho), I waded through the crowded provincial town centre. This particular 'vox pop' required nerves of steel and, I discovered relatively early on, a decent pair of trainers.

At the beginning of 1987 the government had delivered a leaflet to every home in Britain inscribed "AIDS: Don't die of ignorance". It was a slogan born of the age of Katherine Hamnett's famous white FRANKIE SAYS... T-shirts, and formed part of a £20 million advertising campaign which also included two iconic TV commercials, in which a large iceberg in one, and a tombstone in the other, loomed into view to John Hurt's voiceover cheerily warning of "a deadly disease and there is no known cure".

Amid the inevitable hostility towards my questions, my afternoon in Hereford produced some interesting results. Firstly, it was clear that a large number of people under the age of 20 hadn't seen the government's leaflet at all. Of those that had, less than half had found it useful, only a similar number said that the advertising campaign had made them change their sexual habits, and even a sixth said they hadn't even thought about it.

There was plenty of indifference and, indeed, ignorance in Hereford that afternoon, reactions that replicated themselves across the country as the same investigation was carried out by my colleagues in London, Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds and other cities and towns. Things weren't helped by the positively Victorian thundering of James Anderton, who was then-Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, who talked about AIDS victims "...swirling in a human cesspit of their own making".

Today is World Aids Day. It is also 30 years since scientists at the United States' Centers for Disease Control first flagged up a new virus with an alarmingly high mortality rate. Although human infection by the HIV virus has since been traced back to the early 20th Century, and the origins of its development into a pandemic even now unclear, 'full blown' AIDS became the sort of bogeyman that communism and 'Reds under the bed' had been in the 1950s and 60s. Much of this had to do with the gay stigma attached to the disease. As I found in Hereford, few people understood, or were prepared to understand that HIV contamination could affect both heterosexuals as well as needle-sharing drug users.

As deaths soared - and the deaths of figures from the arts and entertainment world like Rock Hudson, previously regarded as the all-American hearthrob whose homosexuality had been kept an unusual secret in pre-Internet Hollywood - public opinion continued to focus on issues of morality surrounding the disease.

In 1985 the story of Indiana schoolboy Ryan White caught media and celebrity attention. White was a hemophiliac who, in 1984, was diagnosed with pneumonia and was subsequently discovered to have AIDS. When it was learned that he'd contracted the HIV virus from a contaminated batch of transfused blood, White and his family entered a protracted dispute with the local education authority who wanted to keep him away from school. White's case drew celebrity attention, with everyone from Elton John and Michael Jackson to Ronald and Nancy Reagan supporting his cause and, in the process, doing much to destigmatise AIDS and the real ignorance that existed around it.

When AIDS first reached the public consciousness there was much talk of it becoming a pandemic that could even impact world population numbers. Today its global death toll stands at 22 million with HIV infections at 60 million. Effective treatments have turned it into a manageable, chronic condition which has kept it off the front pages. While people still die from the disease, the fact that those dying aren't actors and rock stars has stopped it becoming news. There is also the complacent belief that HIV/AIDS is on the decline. Certainly in places like south-east Asia there has been a marked decline in new infections and deaths thanks to preventative education and treatment programmes in countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

In truth, however, HIV/AIDS is anything but disappeared. It is estimated that 33.4 million people live today with the HIV virus, and two-thirds of those are in sub-Saharan Africa. In Zimbabwe, Botswana and Swaziland around a third of the population lives with the virus. There have been significant signs of progress in Africa, but it is still a basket case by world standards.

Not that things are necessarily rosy in the developed world. New HIV infections in the UK, for example, have continued to grow over the last ten years as complacency towards practicing safe sex has crept in. In the United States HIV infection rates amongst African-Americans overtook those within the gay community in 2000, and today the disease continues to ravage parts of the country's southern states, where mortality rates are markedly the highest and the majority of people who have HIV or AIDS are black. Significantly, six of the ten American states with the highest number of women with AIDS are in the South.

Sexual health is still a topic of extreme sensitivity, and the stigma attached to AIDS in every part of the world - and every community where it resides - is still the biggest barrier to achieving a World Health Organisation target of zero new HIV infections and deaths from AIDS by 2015.

The second biggest barrier is, inevitably, money. Scientists claim they are achingly close to developing an HIV/AIDS vaccine, but cuts in funding are threatening to arrest that development. Still, World Aids Day today - and on December 1 for the next four years - will focus on the zero infections target.

The blight of AIDS has, in recent years at least, been blighted itself by a combination of indifference, ignorance and cynicsm. Being straight, I've been part of a community that regarded it as someone else's risk; being European, it was someone else's problem; not being a drug user, someone else's stupidity. Other causes have come along to claim attention for our charity and our lifestyles. But 24 or 25 years ago, while we were still more worried about the Russians turning our capital cities into irradiated wasteland, a new disease came along to wipe the post-Free Love Generation smiles off our faces. And it's still with us today.

When even having it all doesn't seem to help

2011-11-28T06:21:00.000+01:00

With frightening prescience, 24 hours before Gary Speed was found dead yesterday morning by his wife Louise, fellow footballer Stan Collymore wrote the following blog post:

"Suicidal thoughts.

Thankfully i've not got to that part yet,and in my last 10 years only once or twice has this practical reality entered my head,and practicality its is,unpalatable the thought may be to many.

Why a practicality? Well,if your mind is empty,your brain ceases to function,your body is pinned to the bed,the future is a dark room,with no light,and this is your reality,it takes a massive leap of faith to know that this time next week,life could be running again,smiling,my world big and my brain back as it should be.So what do some do? They don't take the leap of faith,they address a practical problem with a practical solution to them,and that is taking their own life.And sadly,too many take that route out of this hell."

Collymore - much pilloried for his sexual demons - had to endure even more mockery from his own manager when he announced, 12 years ago, that he suffered from depression: "How can you be depressed when you're on £20,000 a week?", was the apparent voice of support.

The trouble is depression is far too often dismissed in much the same way, especially for men. "Get a grip", they are told. It is a tragic fact in its own right that, while women are statistically more likely to seek treatment for depression, men are more than three times as likely to take their own lives, often for a condition only they know they are dealing with.

We may never know, nor should we want to know what it was that took Gary Speed to take his own life. What we can know was that, at 42 and with an exemplary playing career behind him, a promising managerial career unfolding before him, a beautiful wife, two healthy teenage sons, and the requisite footballer's comfortable lifestyle, he was - on the outside at least - an unlikely candidate to commit suicide.

Even on Saturday - shortly before he died - Speed had appeared on the BBC's Football Focus as a studio pundit, demonstrating his solid knowledgeability of the game alongside former Leeds United teammate Gary McAllister.

Dan Walker, the show's host, spent a few hours with Speed throughout the day and, amongst all the many comments posted online about the Welshman's suicide some hours later, had as much reason as any to be shocked by what happened.

"After Focus we recorded a 10-minute piece with Gary talking about Wales' qualifying campaign for the next World Cup," Walker wrote on his BBC blog. "He spoke with passion about the fixtures and desire to see success. His hope was that the upturn in form would see his team playing in front of full stadia again. He joked about Team GB and how Scotland would be an easy game, McAllister giggled. Those words and hopes for the future seem so poignant now. There was certainly no hint of any troubles or any indication of what was going to happen a few hours later."

As is the modern way when tragedy strikes, Twitter becomes, perhaps, an over-inflated barometer of grief. The avalanche of tributes tweeted yesterday came from across the worlds of sport, showbusiness stars and even politics.

Few of the posts reflected any deep personal relationship with Gary Speed, but the volume of largely unqualified sentiment reflected the utter shock of news that a young football manager, who seemingly had everything going for him, could choose to exit this world so suddenly.

The sight of Aston Villa goalkeeper Shay Given, a close friend and former teammate of Speed's, unable to compose himself before his match yesterday against Swansea City, summed up the genuine, wrenching disbelief that was felt across football.

In fact, not just football. The vast majority of tributes commented on Speed's professionalism and the bewilderment over what had happened, highlighting the apparent contentment of his life, his lifestyle and his career.

Stan Collymore's earlier post underlined the fact that depression is a prison cell with few visitors. In so many people, but especially men, it goes unspoken for the very fear of mockery, of loss of respect at work, even the risk of it undermining personal relationships.

Without wishing to trivialize the condition, many mental health professionals praised the depiction of fictional Mob boss Tony Soprano's depression in The Sopranos as a pivotal story arc in the show. Dr. Glen Gabbard of Baylor College of Medicine in Texas wrote in his book The Psychology of the Sopranos: "I can't tell you how many of my colleagues have told me, that a man has come to their office seeking therapy because if a big, tough guy like Tony Soprano can get something out of it, maybe he can." The fact is, yes you can.

The tragedy, however, of Gary Speed's death reminded me of the often misquoted comment by legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly - "Football's not a matter of life and death, it's more important than that". In reality, Shankly used the line in a TV interview when asked about his dedication to the game: "I regret [its impact on my family] very much. Somebody said: 'Football's a matter of life and death to you'. I said, 'Listen it's more important than that.' And my family's suffered. They've been neglected."

Yesterday we learned that football is not a matter of life and death at all.

Topping up the pension plan

2011-11-26T13:30:00.000+01:00

Frightening, as it may be, there is only a month to go until Christmas. However, take pity - if you can in these embittered, embattled, credit-downgraded, Wall Street-occupying times - on those who run any sort of enterprise, as they will be currently engaged in the annual freakout that is "Q4". If you are unfamiliar with - or simply don't care about - corporate jargon, this is the final 'quarter' of the financial year, in which Brer Loman and his kin pound the proverbial streets of commerce in a last-ditch push to load the corporate coffer before quill-and-ink monkeys close up the fiscal books on December 31.

Entertainment executives have traditionally pinned their hopes and, presumably, their following 12 months' narcotics budget on these final few weeks of the year. The 'holiday season' has traditionally been a bonanza opportunity to shift "units" (in English: CDs and DVDs), with record labels in particular banking on big releases from their most dependable acts to swell the cash flow.

To compensate for digital downloading cutting into profit margins, the music industry's suits have been increasingly turning to the 'mega package' to roll a coin. This has meant raiding the proverbial attics and basements of rock's dusty past to carton up classic albums replete with remastered CDs, vinyl LPs, Blu-ray Discs, DVDs, SACDs, live extras, outtakes, demos, bootlegs, postcards, badges, T-shirts and, probably, the pencil shavings from the original writing sessions. In the Champs-Élysées Virgin Megastore in Paris there is an entire island devoted to these box sets, each aiming to separate the nostalgic from their hard-earned Euros.

Along with U2's "über-deluxe" 20th anniversary package of Achtung Baby (a snip at 320 Euros!) I came across The Beach Boys' Smile Sessions. Though Brian Wilson only released a new version of the largely experimental Smile album three years ago, out comes a new and positively bulging box - as big as a board game - offering a cast array of CDs, different mixes and paraphernalia. There is even, in the US only, one suspects, a version available which includes a Beach Boys Smile-emblazoned surf board - for an eye-watering $5999.

For some artists, these repackages are exercises in loving detail. Jimmy Page personally oversaw the remastering of Led Zeppelin's back catalogue, and Pete Townshend - a feverish curator of The Who's archives - has now done the same with Quadrophenia, the band's legendary 1973 double-album.

It was, Townshend recently declared, the "last great album" the band produced. "I would say we only made three landmark records - Tommy, Who's Next and Quadrophenia," Townshend told fans at a recent question-and-answer session in London. "I've always felt Quadrophenia was the last definitive Who album. I've always regarded it as a very ambitious album, but what got away was the story."

That story, of course, was one of Townshend revisiting the Mod culture of early 60s Britain, and recalling many of the societal cues of his own youth in south-west London.

Unlike Tommy, which invariably got lost in the pretentiousness of trying to be a 'rock opera', Quadrophenia was indeed a tighter record, with a definite sense of The Who at their powerful peak, even despite the ever-present tensions between Townshend and Roger Daltrey, and drummer Keith Moon treading a thin line between eccentric lunacy and drug-addled rock casualty.

Now, in releasing Quadrophenia: The Director's Cut, Townshend has dived deeper into his art to package together the original double album remastered, along with two whole CDs of previously unreleased material.

While not cheap, the complete set puts into a wider context the Quadrophenia story as well as a band channeling its own individual personalities through their self-styled brand of "maximum R'n'B". The extras - especially the demos and rough cuts - demonstrate a story in development, a voice, a tone and an attitude trying to find an outlet. Sonically, the remastering is fantastic, and if you haven't heard the album for a while, you will experience a new depth to it all.

Digital remastering may have enabled bands to milk their back catalogues, but it has also enabled them to bring out nuances that clunky 1970s analogue technology lost. When the Rolling Stones reissued many of their early 60s ABKCO releases a few years ago with new digital technology applied, a remarkable new clarity came through.

The Stones have always had a very astute approach to business. Mick Jagger's recent endorsement of the EMI takeover by Universal was spoken as a businessman first, and artist a distant second. "Mick likes to run a pretty tight ship," Keith Richards once said of his fellow Glimmer Twin, and it is true that the London School of Economics-educated Jagger is as much the band's CEO as he is its lead singer.

With the Stones - like U2 - running their financial affairs out of the Netherlands, thanks to a generous corporate tax system (subsidized by the Dutch taxpayer, of course), each year they meet at the sumptuous Amstel hotel in Amsterdam for formal board meetings. Their business acumen has inevitably seen them mining their own musical archives for nuggets of green from their almost 50-year recording career.

Following last year's reissue of Exile On Main Street as a box set laden with extras and a price tag to match, their 1978 album Some Girls has now followed suit. Originally appearing at the tale end of punk and the height of the disco era, Some Girls projected much of the Stones' tax-exile, rock star playboys status, like a Jackie Collins novel with electric guitars, playing up their abandonment of gloomy, strike-bound, supertaxed Britain for the playgrounds of New York, Los Angeles and the Caribbean.

The Some Girls package contains the requisite goodies - remixed original CD and another disc of overmatter, a DVD of the album performed live in Texas, plus a vinyl single, hardback book, a set of postcards (surely the clincher...!), a poster and a set of Helmut Newton prints. Like Quadrophenia, it'll liberate around 70 quid from your wallet, which is a lot for what is essentially the double CD you're really buying.

Like most Stones albums, Some Girls lacks a centre, a groove to define the piece, but instead builds up a raft of blues riffs which extend into songs, and have lyrics added to them. Beast Of Burden is one such example, apparently representing a personal 'thank you' note from Richards to Jagger for putting up with him being out of it for much of the time due to being the original human laboratory.

The indulgence of the times frequently comes through Some Girls, channeling the prevalent louche behaviour into what is now regarded - rightfully - as the last great Rolling Stones album.

It's a sparky, tight album, and the first to feature Ronnie Wood as a permanent member of the band. Already, you can hear the empathetic guitar interplay between Keith Richards and Wood on the album, an understanding that, for all the headlines these two have generated (and still do), they are still ashamedly underestimated as guitarists.

On the downside, there is Miss You, which opens the album. A worthy hit, I'll grudgingly accept (though I'll never forgive any breakfast time DJ for playing it as its refrain will not leave your head all day), even if it does feature the embarrassing cod-disco feel Rod Stewart was also striving for around the same time. It also features Jagger's ear-grinding appropriation of Harlem patois: "What's the matter wich yo' boy?". Jagger, it is worth remembering, comes from Dartford in Kent.

The Some Girls sessions garnered a bountiful harvest of new songs - more than 50, apparently - which would later surface on the Emotional Rescue and Tattoo You albums. To make up the second CD of the box set are 12 of the unreleased tracks which are good enough to have been easily released as an album in their own right. Amongst them are gems like the country cover You Win Again, featuring some great slide guitar from Wood, and a clear nod to Richards' great hero Muddy Waters on the rocking blues When You're Gone.

There is no denying that these box sets are brazen, some might say, cynical attempts to bleed the music fan further. I'm sure the majority of baby boomers buying them will have little or no use for postcards, posters and all the other bundled bumph. As discretionary purchases go, there is probably little artistic interest in listening to a bunch of outtakes and demos, any more than watching the 'deleted scenes' section of a DVD will add anything the plot you've just seen unfold. But in the case of Some Girls at least, the two-CD 'deluxe' edition of the album's reissue, with the CD of unreleased tracks makes genuine sense to revive a great album 33 years on. And that might just be the reason the Rolling Stones are such astute businessmen.

God Save The Queen

2011-11-21T04:06:00.001+01:00

If ever you needed convincing that showbusiness is just that - show - something will come along to convince you.

Punk, we were told, was supposed to blast away at the gargantuans of rock and pop, and yet there is the fabled - and possible apocryphal - story of Topper Headon, drummer in The Clash, rushing up to Phil Collins at an airport to declare: "The other guys would kill me if they knew I was saying this, but I love your music."

On January 20, 1978 - two days after the Sex Pistols played their final show - Kate Bush released her debut single, a song as counter to the-then New Wave as it was possible to be.

After its tinkly, autumn leaves-a-fallin' piano intro came the opening line: "Out on the wiley, windy moors we'd roll and fold in green." This was clearly a different proposition to "I am an anti-Christ, I am an anarchist."

That single was Wuthering Heights. Inspired by the Emily Brontë novel, it launched one of the most extraordinary, idiosyncratic and artistically compelling careers in pop music, one which more than 30 years later has still only generated 10 studio albums - including the stunning 50 Words For Snow, which is released today.

With Adele blaring out of just about every shopping mall, Starbucks and, I discovered recently, North American restaurant, the idea of a gifted 19-year-old female singer-songwriter crashing the charts is today nothing new. In 1978, Kate Bush was alone. Six weeks after it was released Wuthering Heights went to No.1 in the UK, the first time a female singer had reached the top with a self-written song.

For a musician with such a frugal output and an even more reclusive profile, Bush was, for many years, the mainstay of womanhood in British rock music. For what seemed like an embarrassingly lengthy period, she was a semi-permanent nominee in the annual Brit Awards, battling yearly with Annie Lennox for the 'Best British Female' gong, only to be bothered occasionally by an Alison Moyet here and a Toyah Wilcox there. One year the award went to Tracey Ullman, who is an actress. Another year it went to Randy Crawford. Who is American. Not that there was anything wrong with either Bush or Lennox being rewarded so frequently. After all, their canon has deserved it.

So when, next February, the 2012 Brits are unveiled, it would be an extremely risk-averse individual who would bet against Bush and 50 Words For Snow featuring prominently. It is, without doubt, a high-watermark return for an artistry and eccentrically unfashionable approach to writing an album for popular consumption.

Comprising just seven songs, which vary in length from just under seven to 13 minutes, it is unlike anything else you'll hear this year. Including anything from Florence Welch.

Dare anyone else say it, but it's a concept album in principle, an album about winter. In that, it is a brave subject matter. Winter albums are usually Christmas tie-ins, made by cheesy game show hosts wearing Yule-themed knitwear, and containing a grisly assortment of the likes of Baby It's Cold Outside and Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree.

Then again, there is Walking In The Air from The Snowman. 50 Words For Snow probably comes closest to this. "I'd had this idea for some while to do a wintry album," Bush recently told The Independent's Andy Gill. "Pretty soon after I started writing for it, I homed in to the idea of snow," Bush told Gill. "It just seemed such a fascinating subject that it was very easy to think of so many ways of writing about it. It's such extraordinary stuff, isn't it? Even a single snowflake, when you look at it under a microscope, is such an incredibly beautiful thing. And apparently they are all different."

Take away thoughts of Mistletoe And Wine, or George Michael, Andrew Ridgeley, Pepsi and Shirley in a log cabin, and winter is indeed a very evocative season, and it lends itself well to Bush's signature Nymanesque, ambient piano which glistens throughout this album.

It is a gentle record, reflecting, perhaps, a 53-year-old mother of a growing boy. This continues a theme, commenced by her album The Kick Inside and continued on her last studio outing, Aerial, which was written primarily about living an ordinary, domesticated life in rural England with her teenage son Bertie and guitarist husband Danny McIntosh.

As an artist who has only toured once, her songs, her videos, her TV appearances have always trodden the boards of theatricality rather than the rock stage, and 50 Words For Snow is, arguably, Bush's most theatrical album, more the product of a dance studio, than the recording studio. Indeed, much of it feels like it had been written for choreography by Bush's hero, Lindsay Kemp.

Snowflake opens the album, with a dark, brooding piano motif and features young Bertie as narrator. It leads on to Lake Tahoe which, at eleven minutes long, is one that probably only Bush could attempt and succeed with, binding her sparse piano with a choral vocal arrangement in an apparent Victorian ghost story. You might want to read all that a second time to take it in. Having visited the real Lake Tahoe many times, in the deepest of wintry depths, I can now imagine this song as a haunting soundtrack to a moonlit walk along the lake's Californian shoreline.

The piano has often been disregarded as a jazz instrument, but when the late Richard Wright explained that the sonorous chord changes on Pink Floyd's Great Gig In The Sky were inspired by Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue, it all suddenly fell into better perspective for me. Thus on Misty - the album's thirteen-minute centerpiece - Bush builds a fleeting love story about a snowman (who are, let's face it, 'somewhat here today, gone tomorrow' cads), accompanied by the most warming of jazz vibes from contrabassist Danny Thompson (John Martyn's legendary sparring partner) and seasoned session drummer Steve Gadd.

Kate Bush's periodic visits to the avante garde neighborhoods of pop have been rightfully compared with those of Peter Gabriel, with whom she sang on his Games Without Frontiers, No Self Control and, of course, his prescient tale of 80s unemployment, Don't Give Up.

Though never romantically linked, it was that single's video which cemented in the minds of many that Gabriel and Bush were indeed a couple. They certainly are kindred spirits. Which is why, perhaps, it's no surprise to find Elton John - a long-time mentor - duetting with Bush on Snowed At Wheeler Street. This is Bush at her campest and downright belligerent.

Wheeler Street's story, should it matter, is of two star-crossed lovers who only ever meet at critical moments in world history. It is a song that, I imagine, Gabriel could have returned Bush the favour of Don't Give Up, but in picking up the story's male protagonist mantle, John delivers one of the best vocals of his recent career.

That, however, is it's best point. The story strains at the leash of credibility, just a tad, and does make you wonder whether Gabriel should have been at home, if and whether Bush had called. John's vocal performance - as good as it is here - reminds you why he's currently packing them in nightly in Las Vegas. Even for Bush and her trobairitz nature, it's a showtune wrapped in a bizarre cod-classical concept.

As if needing to chill out - no pun intended - after soaring dramas like Wheeler Street, there are more understated tracks on the album, such as the single, Wild Man, and the somewhat bizarre - even by a Kate Bush album's standards - title track. Bedded by a muted Latin drum rhythm reminiscent of Bush's 1981 hit Sat In Your Lap, it features the First Lord of Twitter himself, Stephen Fry, rattling off 50 words for, er, snow.

The track 50 Words For Snow is, I'm convinced, largely a joke based on Fry's polymathic quiz mastery on TV's Q.I., in which he (and, I suspect, a small battalion of researchers) bids to impress with a seemingly Poseidon-depth knowledge of trivia. Fry's mellifluous intonation recalls Viv Stanshall introducing the instruments on Tubular Bells, and in character - that of a Dr Joseph Yupik - adds another fatherly eccentric to Bush's writing (remember Cloudbusting, about cloudbusting scientist Wilhelm Reich, the video for which starred Donald Sutherland no less).

Ignoring the release, earlier this year of The Director's Cut (a somewhat inexplicable cut-and-shunt of Bush's Sensual World and The Red Shoes albums), the six-year wait since Aerial has been worth it. While such languid industry is easily eclipsed by the ten-year gaps between studio albums from Gabriel, and even longer from Leonard Cohen, there was always a fear amongst fans, on hearing about the wintry concept of 50 Words For Snow, that it would be a Christmas hits album, knocked out in time for Advent.

But that, frankly, wouldn't be Kate Bush. She denies being a perfectionist, and even earlier this year admitted annoyance at her apparent indolent output. "It's very frustrating the albums take as long as they do. I wish there weren't such big gaps between them."

In the periods between her ten albums, Queen Kate has seen plenty of pretenders come along to challenge her throne, whether it be Bjork for eccentricity, Tori Amos for trying too hard to be her, or Florence + The Machine for actually coming closest. In the end, though, there is only one Queen, only one monarch of a brand of pop music that nods a Victorian stovepipe hat to ballet, to musical theatre, to leather-bound tomes gathering dust on book shelves, a brand which will forever be intrinsically English.

She is, let's be honest, a national treasure. Some years ago, as Bush was being presented with a lifetime achievement trophy at the Q Magazine Awards, even Liam Gallagher took to his feet to hail her. On stage, presenting the award was that spitting prince of punk, John Lydon. Engaged in an unexpected gush of mutual appreciation, he turns, half to the audience and says: "You know what Kate? We are worthy. Your music is fucking brilliant." Lydon's praise was no affectation. He even, once, wrote a song for Bush. About parrots. To date, she hasn't recorded it, though it must only be a matter of time.

Stop the clocks

2011-11-20T23:53:00.001+01:00

British politicians have been arguing for more than 100 years over the pros and cons of putting the clocks forward an hour in the spring, and bringing them back an hour in the autumn.

Those in favour have claimed it improves national productivity during the lighter summer months, adding to the economy as people shop and dine out later in the evening, while saving on electricity used for lighting in the process. There are even claims that remaining permanently in line with continental European hours will reduce childhood obesity (I guess through more outdoor exercise, rather than later ice cream van patrols), as well as improving road safety.

One person who will probably appreciate some stability in the British clock is Roman Abramovich. Much like a vampire nearing sunrise, the Russian zillionaire must dread the onset of winter in Britain. For every time the clocks go back, Chelsea seem to fall into a mid-season slump from which they don't recover until the last of the Christmas cards are being put out for recycling.

One year ago, Chelsea spun into a November nightmare, starting with a 2-0 defeat away to Liverpool, followed by a limp 1-0 home win over Fulham and then a 3-0 kicking at the same venue from Sunderland, with not even a glimmer of weak, winter sunshine until a 7-0 fillip over Ipswich in the FA Cup in January restored confidence. By which time Carlo Ancelotti had already been marked as the next Chelsea manager to get the trademark Abramovich double-tap to the head.

Roll on 12 months and it's all looking worryingly familiar: yesterday's 2-1 loss at home to, yes, Liverpool, came too soon after that 3-5 humiliation to Arsenal at Stamford Bridge at the end of October, and the anaemic 1-1 draw against Genk (who they?) in the Champions League just three days later.

The difference is that this time around Chelsea aren't being managed by a veteran coach who had won the Scudetto, the Champions League twice and the Coppa Italia with Milan before winning the Premier League at the first time of asking with the Blues. Before getting fired, of course, for not winning it the second time.

No, this time Chelsea are managed by something of an experiment. André Villas-Boas, the 34-year-old Portuguese lad who, prior to becoming the club's seventh manager under Abramovich's patronage, had been, ahem, manager of the British Virgin Islands, Académica de Coimbra and FC Porto, winning with the latter Portugal's Primeira Liga, the Portugeuse FA Cup, and the UEFA Europa League Cup in his one and only season at the club.

As What Would David Bowie Do? remarked at the start of the season, it would appear that Charlie Buckett had unexpectedly won the entire Wonka industrial empire when the ginger-haired youngster was appointed to manage a side which contained players barely younger than himself.

So what's made the difference between this November and last? You could argue that Chelsea's slump last year had a lot to do with the summary dismissal of Ray Wilkins. No one has ever been certain of Wilkins' tactical nouse - good egg and media-friendly Chelsea old boy though he is - but his departure seemed to uncannily coincide with a loss of form that ultimately cost them a title they were due to win for a second time by coming out of the traps in August with all guns blazing.

This time there has been no behind-the-scenes politicking. All that could be blamed is the ongoing nonsense involving captain John Terry's alleged racist remarks to Anton Ferdinand in the game that arguably started the clocks-going-back slump, against QPR on October 23. It is entirely possible that the latest scandal to cast a long shadow over Terry's integrity is interfering with team unity, given the racial mix of the Chelsea squad. But the likelier culprit is the defense around which Terry is pivotal. Their vulnerability was self-evident yesterday against Liverpool, as had been savagely so against Arsenal and, bafflingly, against Genk - as toothless a side to have ever made it passed the Champions League qualification round.

For all the talk about Fernando Torres not scoring, Daniel Sturridge has proven to be a potent striker this season for the Blues, but for all the good he's doing up front, it is the backline that is letting things down.

Terry, for one, is a ghost of his former self, the invincible, never-say-die centre half. David Luiz, the frizz-haired Brazilian, when played next to him has been more of a liability than a help (Gary Neville - in a moment of unusual erudition - suggested that Luiz was playing like he was being controlled by a 10-year-old playing on his Sony PlayStation...). Even Branislav Ivanovic, who was becoming a dependable partner to Terry, has looked untidy and susceptible to oncoming strikers, while the unsettled Alex hasn't been much use to the centre of defence either.

And to complete the misery, Ashley Cole - in theory, still the finest left back in the world - has found himself too easily turned by strikers, with his right-sided counterpart Jose Boswinga looking just as faint when it comes to providing defensive cover up and down the length of the pitch. Even goalkeeper Petr Cech has been looking a worry, with doubts creeping in about his eminence, depute having been universally regarded as the best keeper in the world not so long ago.

It is only November 21st, and, as under-fire football managers are want to say, there is a long season still to come. "We need to organise ourselves a little bit better," Villas-Boas bravely tried to say at the post-match press conference yesterday. A little better? Now there's understatement. "We are a team that does not concede a lot of opportunities but the opponent has found the efficiency that we haven't found yet."

Even allowing for the fact that English is not his native tongue, effectively saying that opponents are simply being more efficient is a sniff of hubris AVB's mentor and compatriot Jose Mourinho would have raised a titfer to. The fact remains that, for the second November in a row - and not for the first time in their recent history, either - Chelsea are struggling as they face the pre-Christmas phase with tough fixtures ahead: Leverkusen in Europe, Liverpool again in the League Cup, a resurgent Newcastle away in the league, and then Manchester City at Stamford Bridge. With every chance that Spurs will, tonight, win over Aston Villa, the boys from SW6 will be down to 5th in the league.

"It is not impossible to turn it around," said Villas-Boas. "It doesn't look good 12 points behind a strong leader but the December fixtures give us hope and we have to make the most of them." We've heard all that before, and with a single again Guus Hiddink back on the market (managerially speaking - and not to be confused with Demi Moore by any stretch of the imagination), Villas-Boas better watch out that Abramovich isn't dusting off his Tokarev 9mm with screw-in silencer. For it was just after yet another winter slump that the World Cup-winning Luiz Felipe "Big Phil" Scolari was dispatched, to be replaced temporarily by Hiddink.

Confidently, Villas-Boas believes he's bullet-proof: "The owner didn't pay 15 million Euros to get me here from Porto only to pay another fortune to get me out," he said yesterday. Perhaps, but he shouldn't forget that Scolari was sacked after four losses in 25 league games, and Villas-Boas has managed to lose as many in just 12. Mourinho was sacked after winning the league back-to-back, while Ancelotti - the most successful coach to come to Chelsea - was sacked at the end of only his second season in charge.

True, the season isn't over yet, but to see Chelsea battling for fourth place takes me back to the pre-Abramovich era, when every season seemed to be a struggle for sixth-place mediocrity. Ironically, it was a Chelsea win over Liverpool which elevated them into fourth place and Europe in 2003 which made Abramovich's mind up to buy Chelsea and not Liverpool.

It's this time of year when he might well be wondering whether he made the right choice...

The history of Chelsea's mid-season Premier League slumps

Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash

2011-11-13T15:27:00.001+01:00

At the end of the same week that Paul Weller, when asked if he would ever reform The Jam, said: "Hopefully I'll never be skint enough", there were two announcements which seem to be indicative of each other.

Firstly, it was revealed that the legendary but beleaguered record company EMI was to be split into two, with the theme parks-to-film studios entertainment giant Universal taking over one part, and Sony taking over another. Then it was announced that hoary old metalheads Black Sabbath were to get back together again, presumably while they could still remember their own names.

At various points in its 114-year history, EMI had the likes of The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Coldplay, Robbie Williams and Radiohead on its books, with Frank Sinatra signed to its US subsidiary, Capitol. Its disappearance reflects the growing consolidation of an industry which appears to be collapsing in on itself like a dark star, largely the result of behaving like King Canute in ignoring the oncoming binary tide of digital downloads.

It's sad, of course, to see a famous name like EMI disappear, especially one synonymous with a golden age of music - an age which made Britain the epicentre of musical culture. We are to blame. Our reluctance to keep on buying overpriced CDs because downloads - legal and illegal - make much better sense, means that your average rock star is down to his or her last few millions.

In New York, still considered the capital city of the American music industry, it is significant that you have to travel far and wide to actually buy a CD. Tower Records has closed its nationwide chain, the Virgin Megastore on Times Square has disappeared, books, music and video retailer Borders shuttered its final two Manhattan outlets earlier this year, which means the electrical retailer J&R to be one of the few mainstream outlets in the city left to sell you a CD. And on the Saturday afternoon I visited it, the lack of clientele was telling. Contrast that with Paris, where the Virgin chain continues to do a roaring business in CDs and even vinyl LPs. The question is, for how long? Are the French really more attached to physical media for their entertainment?

Nostalgia may well be the only source of revenue the music industry can draw on. Pink Floyd, one of EMI's most lucrative acts, is currently re-releasing its back catalogue in various packages and box sets.

The 'Immersion' package of Dark Side Of The Moon will set you back $140 but will offer you a remastered CD of the original album, a CD of the entire album being performed live in 1974, a multichannel version of the album, a DVD containing various concert films, a Blu-ray Disc version of various concert films, a CD containing demos and rarities, and a load of merchandising paraphernalia.

The same approach is being applied to other albums in the band's history. If you don't fancy all that, you can buy the Discovery box set, priced at around $240 in the US, and which contains all 16 Pink Floyd CDs, remastered, of course. Presumably if you'd bought the previous two box sets - Shine On and Oh, By The Way, only the most cash-rich completist would consider another.

As good, sonically, as the remastering and repackaging of classic old albums might be, the cold hard truth is that the consumer appetite for buying them is on the wane. Whether we mourn for the gatefold album cover, with its Hipgnosis or Roger Dean artwork, or the experience of removing that 12-inch circle of vinyl from its sleeve, those days of tactile enjoyment have disappeared. Although there has been a fashionable resurgence of vinyl sales - up by 40 per cent, year on year - it is not going to reverse the overall decline in sales of "physical media".

Perhaps, then, the old heads who mourn the loss of such experiences are keeping the rock heritage trail open. Black Sabbath's reformation - they will record a new album, their first as the original four-piece lineup in 33 years, and embark on a world tour next year - smacks of desperation. Ozzie Osbourne and his brood may have earned a new fanbase thanks to his reinvention as a self-parody ten years ago with MTV's fly-on-the-wall series, but one wonders whether watching four old headbangers with a combined age of almost 250 cranking out Paranoid and Iron Man in 2012 will be anything to moisten the eye.

It is, let's be honest, about one thing: asked recently what it would take to reform the 'classic' Genesis lineup, Peter Gabriel - who left the band in 1975 - quipped "A large brown envelope". Jokes aside, Gabriel admitted that reforming for a one-off was an interesting idea, citing Led Zeppelin's reunion show in 2007 as an example of how to do it right.

The trouble is, do it once, and the expectation is that you'll do it more, until eventually you satisfy the demand of a listening public clamoring to recapture its youth. Led Zeppelin, to their credit, have refused to embark upon a lucrative reunion tour. "[The show] was an amazing evening," Robert Plant told Rolling Stone earlier this year. "But I've gone so far somewhere else that I almost can't relate to it. I know people care, but think about it from my angle - soon, I'm going to need help crossing the street." Plant's reluctance - or indifference - has been suggested as the reason the three surviving members of the band, plus John Bonham's drummer son Jason, have not followed up the show at London's O2 arena with more performances. "Playing at the O2, that was our reunion," Jimmy Page has said, adding: "if you're going to do a reunion, you need four members."

Pink Floyd have taken a similar approach to reforming. The appearance of Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright as the finale of Live8 in 2005 was widely hailed - and inevitably sent the rumour mill into a frenzy about a full reunion. Given the decades of acrimony, especially between Waters and Gilmour, getting the four of them on a stage together was a minor miracle in 2005. While their feuding has thawed - Gilmour appeared at Waters' London performance of The Wall earlier this year, sending the crowd wild by playing on Comfortably Numb - he has also suggested that things between the two of them are still not perfect. "I played on Roger's Wall show here (in London)," Gilmour said in an interview in September, "and I haven't heard a word from him since." That said, Gilmour hasn't exactly enthused over doing more work with his former bandmates. "I understand how other people want that sort of thing [a reunion] to happen, but I'm entirely selfish in thinking that I want to enjoy my declining years exactly the way that I want to... And that wouldn't be part of it."

The Eagles, once, were equally reluctant to reform, with Don Henley famously being quoted in 1980, when they broke up, that the ageing country rockers would get back together "when Hell freezes over." In 1994 they reformed for an MTV Unplugged show. The subsequent album and DVD was named Hell Freezes Over. Cute. But it's not just the venerable, however, who embark upon comebacks. Barely two years since Noel Gallagher walked out on Oasis, effectively breaking up the group, brother Liam has confidently predicted that they'll be back together in 2015 for a 20th anniversary tour of (What's The Story) Morning Glory.

In October, The Stone Roses broke new records for ticket sales by announcing that they would be reforming. Tickets for two outdoor shows next year in Manchester sold out in just 14 minutes, being snapped up by fans of one of the most iconic acts of the Ecstasy-enhanced 90s. For a band that fell apart like an IKEA wardrobe hell together by PostIt notes, their fervour to reform and possibly even record again smacks of money-making - with estimates that the band would earn £10 million from their shows at Manchester's Heaton Park next summer.

In recent years we've seen reunions by the likes of Take That, Pulp and, briefly, Blur, with the summer festival season proving to be particularly attractive opportunity to dust off the back catalogue.

"Money talks," Paul Weller said this week in his interview with Shortlist.com, when asked about the Stone Roses getting back together again. "We live in that age, though, don’t we? It’s either bands reforming, bands playing their classic album or tribute bands."

"I find the whole nostalgia thing very strange, right across the board," Weller added. "I also think it doesn’t help new bands. Don’t get me wrong — there aren’t a lot of great new bands, and there’s a lot of shit about. But it hurts new bands coming up because nobody’s looking out for anything new. It’s just tried and tested old music, and it’s weird to me. I think it’s a phase."

Standing up for Mr. Thicky McThick

2011-11-12T15:34:00.001+01:00

Idiocy comes in varying shapes and sizes. On a large scale, you have the Italian electorate, who chose Silvio Berlusconi as their prime minister. Three times.

On a different scale you have Karl Pilkington, the sometime radio "producer" whom Ricky Gervais turned into a media phenomenon by providing the opportunity to display his apparent imbecility in the very funny Ricky Gervais Podcast series.

There is, however, a difference between exploiting the simplistic prism with which Pilkington views the world, and the outright mocking of the afflicted that takes place with An Idiot Abroad. This series of fish-out-of-water documentaries - which should have been named A Gag Stretched Too Far - finds Pilkington tossed into unfamiliar situations. "With hilarious results", of course.

Then there is the more sympathetic representation of idiocy represented by the scene in City Slickers where Billy Crystal attempts to explain to Daniel Stern how a video recorder works. It's a modern classic, even if now somewhat dated by technological progress. Advancement has always meant making life easier or more convenient. But no matter how much easier it makes complex tasks simpler or removes tedium from repetitive chores, there will always be those who get left behind. The elderly for example. And me.

With this in mind, What Would David Bowie Do? comes to you today from 38,000 feet up in the sky. I have no idea how I got up here.

Well I do, sort of: I took a taxi to the airport, checked in, sat around in an Air France lounge getting bored, and then boarded my plane - the sixth Airbus A380 in the airline's fleet.

The 380 is an enormous aircraft. I've travelled on plenty of large airliners before, but despite being the same length as the big Boeings, its proportions just seem huge. It is so big that to get on board its upper story, I had to take an escalator at the departure gate itself. It is, basically, a double-decker bus with wings. It is designed to move as many people as possible across oceans and continents in one go. And thus it does: my flight is full, with some 500 passengers on board, which is roughly the same number on board a single car ferry crossing the English Channel. Getting us all on is the easy part of the equation to understand. Getting us up here is not.

I am, it should be said, a fairly frequent flyer, and over the last 30 years have flown in pretty much every type of commercial aircraft, from ghastly puddle-hoppers - aircraft which seem barely evolved from the Sopwith Camel - plying their trade between America's regional hub airports, to the big engined, wide-bodied flying limos that criss-cross continents and oceans. For the most part, they work, and without dwelling too much on the obvious, they only don't work when freak conditions weigh in, mechanical failures occur, or nutters with explosive underpants succeed in getting away with their nefarious intentions.

So why, then, after three decades of air travel do I still not get it? How the hell do they get up, stay up, and in theory and, mostly, in practice, come down again? Many have tried to explain it to me, dumbing it down to an insultingly condescending level of simplicity. But still, I remain a retard when it comes to understanding the principles of flight, which come as natural to almost every winged creature except the penguin, and which Orville and Wilbur Wright got down with a few lengths of balsa wood and a rubber band.

Before anyone takes it upon themselves to send me Flying For Dummies (it must exist), or directs me to Barney The Dinosaur explaining how planes work on YouTube, don't bother. I have come to the conclusion that this is just my blind spot.

No matter how often you tell me, I won't understand that what gets several tons of metal, flesh and matching luggage from one side of the planet to the other is air being forced over a wing to create a difference in air pressure with the air flowing under the wing. As it creates lift. Obviously.

Frankly, I'm still convinced that the brothers Wright carried out some form of sorcery at Kittyhawk. The takeoff in this A380 didn't seem to happen at all. We pushed back from the gate and trundled slowly along the taxiway for a few minutes - the entire journey presented for us on our seatback TV screens thanks to a forward-looking camera on the tailfin. Then we started moving a little quicker...and that was it, we were airborne.

There was no lurching pelt down the runway, no sensation of acceleration, or being pushed back into your seat. For a plane so logic-defyingly huge, it floated down the runway like a ballerina before lifting into the air with the gentlest of angles.

Of course, once airborne it is no different from any other airliner you've ever been on. After all, the 380 is basically a Boeing 747 with an extended hump. But that doesn't help you overcome the irrational fear that comes with in-flight turbulence, which I hate with a passion. Until 15 years ago, I would step onto any plane with boyish glee, caught up in an anachronistic, 1950s 'jet set' wonderment of it all. I still do consider flying to be something of a luxury*, even though I spend so much of my time doing it out of necessity.
*This obviously doesn't relate in any way, shape or form to any journey undertaken with Ryanair.

But then I was on a plane from London to Eindhoven. Actually, it wasn't a plane, more of a converted A4 envelope that someone had strapped a couple of propellers to, crammed us in and painted sky blue with 'KLM' in big bold letters on the side. On the night Geri Spice almost burst out of her Union Jack costume at the 1997 Brit awards, my fellow passengers and I were treated to the tail end of a near hurricane-strength storm. For much of the flight, the journalist sat next to me dug her nails into my right hand, causing bleeding that I didn't even notice until we had safely repaired to the hotel bar later that evening.

A month after 9/11 I flew to New York from San Francisco for a meeting. The mood on the half-full plane wasn't made any better by the fact that somewhere over the Midwest we flew into the kind of storm that, when you look out of the window, makes the wings flap like a bird's. This, I've been shown, is meant to happen. At the Boeing factory in Everett, Washington, they will demonstrate the wings of the giant 777 being put through a stress test in which they are bent through as much as 13 feet before anything really bad happens.

I was still unimpressed by the storm. And then I discovered Channel 9 - the service on then-United Airlines flights by which you could listen to the pilots talking to air traffic controllers up and down the country. It was the closest thing to actually looking out of the cockpit window, and very reassuring it was too. Even as we were being heaved around, listening to the pilots talking to other captains further ahead, hearing them requesting a higher or lower altitude to optimise the air flow, managed to make this back seat driver feel much better.

On the A380, the cameras do it for you. The ability to see straight ahead - especially when air turbulence is such a completely invisible force - was unbelievably calming. I'm not sure why no one has thought about it before - especially Richard Branson. Unlike the on-board cameras of Formula 1 cars, which capture the excitement of speeding along tarmac at almost 200 miles an hour, watching yourself travelling three times that speed, seven miles up, but apparently hardly making any progress at all over the clouds beneath you, is as hypnotic an experience as any I can think of.

The downside to cameras and having a pilot's-eye view of the journey is that if something were to happen - mid-air collision, UFO encounter, Ryanair publicity stunt - your final seconds will probably be spent watching yourself getting even closer to God.

And on that theological note, I'll return to enjoying the ride, even if I don't have a clue how I got up here. Which I don't. Still.

Coming into land at New York's John F Kennedy Airport.

The numbers all go to eleven

2011-11-11T12:33:00.001+01:00

For the start of my 45th year I am fulfilling Frank Sinatra's desire to wake up in the city that never sleeps, the self-styled "greatest city in the world" - New York. And if that isn't a mark of great pith and moment in its own right, my day of days falls on the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, in the eleventh year which, you've got to admit, in taking place only once every 100 years, is pretty cool.

I have always been justly proud of being born on 11/11 (apparently around 11.11am, although I've never had that verified by anyone who was actually there at the time), being only one of 12 days out of the year with such numerical symmetry. It also lends itself well to a blues lyric: why should Willie Dixon's Hoochie Coochie Man have all the fun because he was born on the seventh hour of the seventh day, of the seventh month, and apparently he's due a lot of luck?

The number 11, in itself, isn't particularly significant, unless you strive for louder guitar amplification. However wonks of all creeds and the chronically apophenic - spooked by the uniquely binary nature of today's palindromic date - are convinced that it means something of great portent, though nobody can pinpoint exactly what will happen.

An online survey recently came to the utterly banal conclusion that 47% believe something good will happen on a global scale today, 40% believe nothing significant will happen at all, and 14% believe something bad will happen. This information is about as useful as the statement that roughly half of us are male, and roughly half are not.

But if you do believe in lay lines and that Stonehenge was an ancient truck stop for passing UFOs, the unique confluence of elevens in the date means your sense of "waaahhhh" will be heightened today. For a start, I wouldn't recommend looking at any news coming out of Europe which, it seems, is being increasingly sucked into an economic depression of biblical proportions.

According to some, the worst that could happen today - and I've got to admit, it would be something of a bummer - is that the world will end. This is due to the comet Elenin, Mercury, Venus and our own planet coming into alignment, which is more than can be said for the leaders of the EU. Well if the planet is going to explode, there's probably no better place to witness it than here in New York. I've seen it happen a hundred times in the movies and it's usually quite spectacular.

For those with a rosier outlook on life, 11.11.11 is the day to do something special like get married or at least propose to a sweetheart, and although I'm not about to do that myself (mind you, the day is still young here) you've got to raise a hat to the romanticism of such an event. I expect the Empire State Building's elevators will be enjoying brisk business today.

Mysticism and romanticism aside, there is one true and serious significance to today: the anniversary of the 1918 Armistice. At 11am, on November 11, 1918, the guns fell silent after four years of the most senseless, industrial slaughter mankind had inflicted upon itself up until then.

It was called The Great War, though there was nothing great about it at all, and drew 70 million people together in armed conflict, resulting in nine million dead. It's immediate effect was the emaciation of an entire generation of men in Europe, but it went on to overshadow the 20th century itself, creating the conditions which led to World War 2, dictated the outbreak of the Cold War, which eventually unravelled the fault lines of the Balkans, and even today still has a hidden influence on politics in the region.

So, I will celebrate the start of my 44th year in style here in New York. Calls have been put in to Leonardo Di Caprio and the newly-single Demi Moore - whose birthdays also fall on this day - to see if they'll join me for a celebratory Guinness at one of the city's fine venues of Irish imbibement. And when we do (I'm confident that my calls will be returned), we will, I hope, raise a glass to those who have paid the absolute sacrifice.

The Return Of The Giant Hogweed and other tales from 1971

2011-11-07T04:10:00.006+01:00

There are two musical misconceptions that need to be cleared up, if I may, and this is the week to do so. Firstly, that 1967 - the year of my birth - was the golden year of musical creativity, and that secondly, punk was invented specifically to kill off progressive rock.

To the first question: it's true that 1967 gave the world Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, not to mention Are You Experienced?, the seminal Velvet Underground & Nico and The Doors' eponymous debut. But it was only the year that catalysed a period of experiment and creativity that wouldn't reach its true zenith for another four years.

The second misconception is somewhat more straight-forward to address. When The Ramones set out to offer, in 1973, "some pure, stripped down, no-bullshit rock 'n' roll", it wasn't the culture of prog rock - with its tendency towards lengthy songs, complex time signatures and Tolkienesque mythology - that punk sought to banish. No, it was the bloating of rock music. This was exemplified by the bombastic incorporation of the biggest bands of the day, writhing about in cocaine excesses on the diametric opposite side of the country to where New York's CBGB club spawned deliberate revolt.

Pink Floyd were one of the many bands to draw the ire of punk's angry young men. However, it wasn't that long beforehand that they were being hailed as the vanguard of a new movement. Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, their debut album in - guess what? - 1967, was championed for its psychedelic invention fused with co-founder Syd Barrett's pastoral English sound.

The bloating of rock music, at which punk aimed its richest phlegm, was what gradually unravelled Pink Floyd, as Roger Waters' gradual alienation from his audience reached its nadir with The Wall, preceeded by an ironically punk-like spitting episode during the tour for the Animals album.

Dark Side of the Moon established Pink Floyd as global superstars in 1973. It was their Sgt. Pepper, their Joshua Tree, their Born To Run. It was also, maintains Waters, the beginning of their end. The follow-up - Wish You Were Here (re-released today as part of the band's programme of releasing newly remastered 'experience' packages from their back catalogue) focused on the themes of absence and a creeping cynicsm by Waters towards the music industry and fame.

Wish You Were Here remains today my favourite Floyd album. It is hard to truly explain why, however. Perhaps it's because it was the first Floyd album I heard, but more likely because of it marked the maturity of a band that was still trying to find its voice, despite the success of its predecessor. Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts 1-5, introduced me, paradoxically, to blues guitar, thanks to David Gilmour's hypnotic two-note Stratocaster motif which unlocks the haunting 'dawn of time' chords - played on wine glasses - which open the album, and continues with the famous 'clang-clang-clang-clang' guitar riff, dripping in reverb, delay and flange.

Shine On is also famous for the story about Syd Barrett. Sacked some years before for his increasingly erratic, LSD-addled behaviour, he appeared unannounced at Abbey Road Studios during the Shine On sessions, much to the surprise of the band who had no idea who the obese figure with shaved head and shaved eyebrows was, clutching a plastic carrier bag.

Although Shine On wasn't written by Waters specifically about Barrett, his appearance brought a spooky poignancy to the song. Likewise, the album's title track, which opines of separation and alienation ("we're like two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year"). For a band supposedly on its uppers, the jadeness that Waters would take to an extreme with The Wall, was already evident with this 1975 release, and tracks like Welcome To The Machine and Have A Cigar.

The extended blues jam that fills up much of Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts 6-9 was typical of the sort of wigouts that Floyd had been indulging in during their live concerts for many years, and first found itself on a Pink Floyd record in 1971 with Echoes, on the album Meddle, which brings me back to the original misconception I addressed in this post.

1971 was the year where 1967's fertility really bore fruit. By the end of it, record collections had been augmented by a sizeable number of albums which are now to be considered classics of the form: the Rolling Stones brought out Sticky Fingers, Bowie gave us Hunky Dory, The Doors shut theirs with LA. Woman, and George Harrison and friends provided the prototype for Live Aid and its brethren with the legendary Concert For Bangladesh. Rock and roll clearly was very alive and kicking, but it was progressive rock - with its obscure lyrics, instrumental virtuosity and intriguing sleeve art - that, through coincidence or intent, set the years musical undercurrent.

The hallmark of many of the albums that spun on turntables in 1971 was that they aimed to tell a longer story: Marvin Gaye released what is today one of the best albums ever made - and one of the shortest - What's Going On, his earnest reflection of a world in trouble, embracing in its arc social inequality, environmentalism (hardly a fashionable cause 40 years ago) and the Vietnam War. Though not apparent, Who's Next - The Who's finest moment and another 1971 release - was another concept, rescued from Pete Townshend's aborted Lifehouse project, but inventing the Internet in the process, as well as giving the world the exhilarating Baba O'Reilly and Won't Get Fooled Again.

This week marks the 40th anniversary of the release of two albums which became part of a series of events and releases which marked 1971 apart. On November 8, 1971, Led Zeppelin released their untitled fourth album, known initially as the 'Four Symbols" album (and now, simply, as IV).

Containing Stairway To Heaven, along with Rock And Roll, the Tolkien-influenced Battle of Evermore, the hippyish Going To California and an adaptation of the Delta Blues original When the Levee Breaks (with its now much-sampled drum intro), it has since become the third best-selling album of all time in the United States.

Four days later, on November 12, 1971, a very different band, but with similar literary interests, released their third album. Nursery Cryme by Genesis marked the debut of what has become regarded as the band's "classic" line-up - Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford and then new recruits Phil Collins on drums and Steve Hackett on guitar.

The album has also become regarded as an exemplary addition to the prog oeuvre, opening with a tale of Victorian sexual deviancy, Musical Box, and including a mix of period whimsy and literary nods with The Return Of The Giant Hogweed, Seven Stones (which bears more than a hint of Coleridge) and the Greek mythology-founded Fountain Of Salmacis nodding more towards the classical public school education enjoyed by Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford at their alma mata, Charterhouse.

Amid the frock-coated yarns, Mellotrons and Hackett's inventive electric guitar work, Nursery Cryme gave a foretaste of the Genesis to come with For Absent Friends.

For a band which became known for its long, complex pieces, For Absent Friends is a short - just under two minutes-long - 12-string guitar-based folk song about remembrance, and is notable for marking Collins' lead vocal debut with the group.

Another short song, Harold The Barrel, nods to Pythonesque humour, recounting the story of a Bognor restaurant owner who goes on the run after serving his own toes up for tea. 24 years later, Blur entered similar territory with Ernold Same on The Great Escape, demonstrating that the art of prototypically English story-songs was alive and well.

Earlier this year Nursery Cryme was voted overwhelmingly the No.1 prog rock album of 1971 by readers of the UK's Classic Rock magazine. It shares prestigious company, including The Yes Album and the same band's Fragile, King Crimson's Islands, ELP's Pictures At An Exhibition, Meddle and Aqualung, the epic concept album by Jethro Tull.

To celebrate its 40th anniversary, Aqualung is being rereleased as a newly remixed album courtesy of my recently reacquainted friend Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree.

Wilson, who has also been retouching King Crimson's back catalogue, says that the key to the purple patch that 1971 appeared to represent is that the record industry had been forced into recognising that rock music was an art form and allowed - if it was allowed to be so. "There seems to be something leading up to 1971," Wilson told Classic Rock earlier this year, "which is when record labels started to get interested. That's usually when scenes start to die, but I think you can see 1971 as the zenith of creative expression for experimental music. The records were still very ambitious after that, but there's something about the spirit of '71 that was special and the peak of that whole thing."

Although it would be another two years before Pink Floyd would release Dark Side Of The Moon and another three before Genesis would release The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway - two of prog rock's undisputed masterpieces - the congregation of so many legendary albums of the prog rock genre in 1971 can certainly not be attributed to record company conformity.

This was the era of bands releasing albums on a six-monthly basis, touring relentlessly and building their following through hard graft and musicianship. It's unlikely that any of them would be allowed to flourish today. It took Genesis until their 1978 tour before they even broke even as a band, despite almost ten years of critical acclaim and success in Europe and in the US.

They, and all the bands around them, probably have The Beatles - more than anyone else - to thank. Sgt. Pepper had paved the way for albums to be more than just compendia of pop songs. Which, if you think about it, is an immense irony, given that the early Beatle singles averaged at around two minutes in length...

He's got a lot of Eminence Front

2011-11-05T15:07:00.003+01:00

Ever since Dylan went electric, pop music has been riven by a supposed rift between, well, not many people, actually, and those who have a passionate belief that music's life and soul rests not at the top of the charts but deep in the weeds. As much as I personally think that X-Factor and its excremental clan have all the artistic merit of toothpaste, there are those who believe with equal advocacy that music can be only regarded as valid if it is racked in the converted milk crates of an independent record shop or squeezed into the corner of a pub by a progressively-minded landlord pursuing his belief in promoting live music.

Taking at least one foot out of the stirrups of my own high horse, if there is one good thing to both the TV "talent" shows and the continuing existence of independent music outlets, it's that they are both still, in their own way, promoting the idea that becoming a musician is a sound aspiration that you can actually make a living out of.

The fate of the independent record shop comes into sharp focus this week in the UK with the opening of Sound It Out, a documentary by film maker Jeanie Finlay about Sound It Out Records, the very last record shop open in her native Stockton-on-Tees in north-east England.

Premiered earlier this year at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, this "accidental" film, as Finlay calls it, has been acclaimed, both for its depiction of smalltown English life, but also for its championing of the independent vinyl retailer - and the genuine eccentrics you're likely to meet there.

It is, says Finlay, "A distinctive, funny and intimate film about men, obsession and the irreplaceable role music plays in our lives. High Fidelity with a Northern accent." Shops like Sound It Out Records are dying at an alarming rate of 30 a year. This is partly due to the general decline in ownership of music in physical formats, but partly because a loophole in VAT has allowed the big online music retailers to operate offshore, VAT-free and offering cheaper retail prices (and without the overheads of a bricks-and-mortar operation).

"I’ve confirmed what I always suspected," she adds, "it’s so much more than just music and records. Vinyl holds memories and maps the soundtrack of people’s lives. You probably can’t remember when you downloaded an MP3 but I bet you can remember where and when you bought your first single, or the LP you fell in love to. People gravitate to the shop for a number of reasons, for [manager] Tom’s expertise, for the music he stocks and to just simply hang out in a place where they fit in."

Earlier this week, Pete Townshend - The Who's principal songwriter, windmilling guitarist and perennial Mod - delivered the inaugural John Peel Lecture, in itself a tribute to the legendary DJ who was as much a curator of the sort of music you'll find in Sound It Out Reords as radio personality playing it.

Peel, Townshend argued, represented a behaviour under-served today by mainstream radio's reluctance to abandon formula and go off range in the way the late DJ did. Peel played what either intrigued him, amused him, moved him or provided the perverted satisfaction of baffling and challenging the listening audience in equal measure.

"Peel was not a musician," Townshend said. "He was a listener, a patron of the arts, a broadcaster with almost no censorial mandate or agenda. He only played what he thought deserved to be played. I don't think it always mattered that he himself liked it. In China in Chairman Mao's day he might have been sent to prison if only for being the first to play Jesus and Mary Chain, the Undertones or the Proclaimers – all of them were a little bit political, but also radical and outspoken."

The lecture wasn't however, meant to eulogise Peel but to raise the flag - hoisted so often in recent years - about the new digital music culture and its impact on musical income, creativity and the somewhat hippyish ideals of what he called "John Peelism" - i.e. the free love of any form of music without condition. Sounding dangerously Luddite for a musician who has always been fascinated by new technology (the arpeggiated and synthesised organ on The Who's Won't Get Fooled Again was well ahead of its time), Townshend hypothesised that in the iTunes era online music services were simply providing a distribution and royalty collection model which was denying artists essential services.

"Music publishing has always been a form of banking," Townshend argued, "but – in cooperation with record labels – active artists have always received from the music industry banking system more than banking." He said that by essentially acting as nothing more than a brokerage for music, services like iTunes were denying artists the ecosystem that they would have traditionally been a part of, with labels and publishers providing editorial guidance, financial support, creative nurturing, manufacturing, publishing, marketing, distribution and royalty payments.

It is certainly true that with the disappearance of legendary impresarios like Ahmet Ertegun, and the replacement of music-minded record company CEOs with lawyers, investment bankers and similar forms of besuited chinless wonder who might consider Michael Bublé cutting edge, new artists today might lack the patient tutorage their ancestors enjoyed in the pre-digital era.

Today, Townshend said, the iTunes only offered a distribution and royalty collection platform. Taking his banking analogy, you could agree that the High Street bank - where a friendly (or unfriendly) bank manager might offer you a personal approach to managing your finances - has disappeared, and that banking today revolves around an impersonal experience of ATMs, direct debits and online banking whereby there is little human or emotional involvement.

Hiding behind the semi-fictional persona of "the inner artist", Townshend laid into Steve Jobs (annoyingly and, I suspect, quite deliberately pronouncing his name as the Biblical "Jobes"), branding iTunes a "digital vampire", a headline-friendly provocation if ever I've seen one.

Apple - and iTunes - came up with a workable model for online content distribution. It may not be entirely equitable to the artists, but I'd vouch that there were never any record labels or music publishers who designed contracts to be philanthropically beneficial to the artist.

This is not the first time, however, that iTunes has come in for criticism from an artist: AC/DC still refuse to distribute their music via the service on the grounds that it caters for people who want to download individual tracks rather than complete albums. One American blues-rock legend I ran into last year complained to me that the process of negotiating a distribution agreement with Apple is frustrating, to the extent he felt that he was being offered one of those "it's this or nothing" deals.

But for others, more pragmatically, they consider it to be an essential distribution mechanism, "a no brainer", another artist recently told me. It's there, people use it, you get money from it. Job done. As Michael Corleone famously told his brother Sonny: "It's not personal. It's strictly business". Pop music has always had its hardball types, and Apple is no different to any record company or music distributor that has come before. You still need to promote an album, you still need to perform live, you still - for the time being - need to have the means to sell CDs via High Street retail outlets.

The worry is that today, the music industry as a whole appears to have forgotten what it was that turned music into the predominant youth culture of the late 20th century. At least Steve Jobs, the archetypal Baby Boomer with his love of The Beatles, got it and did something about it. The music industry, frankly, took too long to embrace the digital age. When labels like EMI were still farting around appointing 'Executive Vice-Presidents of Digital Development' simply to "explore" the potential for digital music distribution, illegal file-sharing services were already in their prime and the horse was so far out of the stable that the stable door hinges had rusted away.

In branding iTunes a vampire, Townshend diminished attention for the more interesting argument of his thesis, that iTunes should do more to promote new artists. In this, I couldn't agree more. If I am to reluctantly give up the Saturday afternoon pleasure of browsing the racks of my local Sound It Out Records for browsing with a mouse (actually, it's now an Apple Trackpad), then at least do something to editorially draw my attention away from the FMCG brands like Coldplay and create attention for the emergent and the interesting. To Townshend's point, iTunes needs its own John Peel, someone who's curatorial mind can see potential whereas others might only see a long haul with limited return. Peel, while he bludgeoned on with patronage of bands like The Fall - such was his whimsy - had also been unafraid of championing the likes of Pink Floyd, The Faces and Roxy Music when they were regarded as either too avant-garde or simply unfashionable in their earlier years.

Rock stars - especially wealthy ones, pontificating over the inequalities of the "Wild West frontier", as Townshend somewhat anachronistically referred to the digital domain - will always appear to be arguing a fairly thin position. Although he "doesn't give a shit about money", as The Who's principal songwriter, his well-appointed mansion in East Twickenham (in a street backing on to where I used to live, if you must know) has been paid for by the likes of me buying original Who albums and then, in moments of weakness, buying them all over again when the box sets and digital remastered versions emerge.

I admire his passion for championing the need for iTunes as another element of the music distribution landscape to do more to keep the wolf from the door of those struggling to get on or up the ladder. But in the outcome, Townshend's lecture came across as no more than another old head bemoaning the march of progress.

Oddly enough, there's a box set containing a remastered Quadrophenia heading for your local record emporium. Just in time for Christmas.

Captain, Leader, Liability?

2011-11-03T06:39:00.001+01:00

In just over a month from now John Terry will turn 31, by which time it's possible that the "JT - CAPTAIN, LEADER, LEGEND" banner draped over the Matthew Harding Stand upper tier balcony at Stamford Bridge may have become both tarnished and redundant.

Without prejudging the two official investigations - the FA's and, now, the Metropolitan Police - into Terry's allegedly racist remark to Anton Ferdinand on October 23, the skies have certainly become darker over the Chelsea and England captain.

What is clear is that if either enquiry finds Terry guilty of abusing Ferdinand at Loftus Road - even in the heat of the moment - the Chelsea captain's career will be over.

Before getting into what JT did or didn't say to the QPR defender (who has "very strong feelings on the matter"), the broader issue is that the spotlight has once again fallen awkwardly on a footballer whose ability to attract negative publicity has been historically as accomplished as Uncle Albert Trotter's skill at sinking his own ships.

At this point I must declare my proprietary interest, which should be perfectly obvious but still requires me to hold up a palm and reaffirm my lifelong allegiance to Chelsea. I recognise that what follows here breaches several constitutional laws of fandom, including heresy and the one which states, quite categorically, that you never, ever question your chosen team or its players, no matter how far they transgress the law. However...

John Terry's status as a Chelsea Football Club legend has been built and maintained over 13 years by a number of factors. He is, first and foremost, a formidable central defender, hewn from the same lump of English resilience that attached the 'typifies the bulldog spirit' contractually-obliged qualifier to any mention of Terry Butcher. Terry (John) is a defender not afraid to put his forehead between a striker's boot and the ball on or near the goalmouth, the footballing equivalent of Spitfire pilots defending British shores with in the summer of 1940.

His elevation to first team regularity at Chelsea - and, indeed, the club captaincy - was, by turns, inspired and an almighty risk. By the age of 22 he'd already accumulated an impressive record of off-field misdemeanors which, were it not for his club's relative benevolence would have created a reputation so toxic that he would have been playing non-league football or driving a white delivery van around Basildon by now.

Terry was amongst a group of Chelsea players (Jody Morris, Eidur Gudjohnsen and Frank Lampard) accused of abusing American tourists at a Heathrow Airport hotel shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001; having been duly fined by the club for that incident, he was later caught in a late-night hue-and-cry at a London nightclub, in which a bouncer was injured. Terry - arrested and jailed for the night - was later cleared of all charges at a subsequent trial.

But despite these large and early blots on Terry's copy book, an inspirational piece of talent development by the Tinkerman himself, Claudio Ranieri, gave him his chance.

With Marcel Desailly out injured during the 2003-4 season, Terry - already identified as understudy to the French World Cup winner - was promoted to the starting line-up. The following season, Jose Mourinho took over, Desailly retired, and the boy King John was crowned, with Frank Lampard installed as his Lord Lieutenant.

Despite being born closer to Upton Park than Stamford Bridge, Terry has always been regarded (and has positioned himself) unquestionably as Chelsea "through and through", a one-club man. We'll ignore, then, all that nonsense about a lucrative new gig at Manchester City.

Since becoming Chelsea’s captain, he has led the team through the most successful period of its 106-year history, including winning back-to-back Premier League titles in the first two seasons under Mourinho, with Terry commanding the leanest defence in the league. Some might say, though, that Mourinho's partnering of Terry with Ricardo Carvalho, along with Claude Makelele in the holding position, was the real key to that robust defence, masking Terry's only playing weakness - his lack of pace.

But with Chelsea battling criticism that it was a team of foreign mercenaries buying the league title with Abramovich's plundered oil roubles, JT remained the club's pillar, the base of an English spine with Frank Lampard ahead of him in midfield, and the fans behind a team which, was at least English-led. When Mourinho was fired in September 2007, Terry emerged as a more influential figure at the club than simply it's on-the-pitch captain. Increasingly seen as a crown prince, and handsomely rewarded with the Premier League's then highest-ever weekly wage of £135,000 a week, Terry appeared bullet-proof.

No-one is bullet-proof, though, and in the British public eye, wearing body armour is an invitation to take potshots at the famous in all their finest hubris. So when Terry's penalty miss in the 2008 Champions League Final in Moscow condemned Chelsea to more frustration in its pursuit of the one prize it still covets, the world was given notice that he might be impervious after all.

Terry’s armour had been tested earlier in 2008 by the arrest and cautioning of his mother and his then fiancée’s mother on suspicion of shoplifting from a branch of Tesco (embarrassingly one of the official sponsors of the England team). The same month Terry himself caused more embarrassment to club and country by having his car photographed in a disabled motorists' parking bay.

His parents became a source of pride again in November 2009 when his father, Ted, was caught by a Sunday newspaper apparently trying to sell cocaine. Even with that hanging above him, Terry Jr. was dragged back into the spotlight the same month when another newspaper broke the story that the Chelsea captain was offering guided tours of the club's Cobham training ground for cash. Though later explained as a charity initiative, it cast another shadow on his integrity as leader of both his club and his country.

That integrity was stretched to breaking point early in 2010 when the 'super injunction' was lifted that had previously prevented reporting of an affair between the married Terry and Veronica Perroncel, then the girlfriend of his former club teammate Wayne Bridge. Whether this was the straw or not, England coach Fabio Cappello - who would potentially be including Terry and Bridge in the same squad - decided that the camel's back had been snapped, and Terry was stripped of the England captaincy.

Despite this Teflon Terry retained the Chelsea captain's armband amid stoic PR mumblings about "fine servant" this and "inspirational leader" that.

Managers come and managers go, pretty frequently at Chelsea, but Terry has remained rooted at Stamford Bridge, like a 1000-year-old oak that not even hurricanes can dislodge. However, the storm clouds gathering in the wake of the Ferdinand incident may, however, may lead to that tree being upended.

Stamping out racism is a point of principal to football's governing bodies, although the evidence of crowd behaviour in Russia, Spain, Serbia, Germany and Denmark would suggest that there is a long way to go. John Terry appears to have stumbled upon a land mine with a particularly sensitive pressure plate.

I'm going to tread gossamer-thin ice here: before I do, let me state for the record that I do not condone racism in any form: as a regular visitor at Chelsea in 1982 I remember Paul Canoville making his home debut as the club's first ever black player, where his arrival was greeted by obscene monkey chants and bananas being disgracefully lobbed onto the pitch. Today whether a player is black, white, yellow or pink is not an issue.

In football's topsy-turvy sense of morality it seems you can get away with almost anything of dubious personal conduct, but lose your cool in the heat of battle and make reference to another player's skin colour, and all bets are clearly off.

Terry hasn't helped himself, however, with any of his mitigation. If he called Ferdinand "blind" (as one initial explanation is said to have stated), it was still used as an adjective to the sexual epithet that followed, which in itself is offensive enough. If, though, he used the word "black" then clearly a line of stupidity was crossed.

Does it make Terry a racist? No, but then the FA and Metropolitan Police investigations won't be looking to find a KKK hood hanging in Terry's wardrobe - just evidence that proves conclusively that, even if just sledging a fellow player, he was guilty of using a phrase which drew attention to Anton Ferdinand's race, which is just the sort of behaviour football clubs and football authorities do not want to see any player - let alone the captain of a leading club and the national side - engaged in.

I don't believe John Terry is a bigot - but then I don't know him personally. Equally I can't say whether whatever he said to Ferdinand at Loftus Road last month was meant to be racist. It was unbelievably crass, especially in the modern game where high definition television scrutiny strips away any veil of doubt. And the sad fact is that one thing said in the heat of the moment could bring down the curtain of a career which may not have been glittering, but has certainly been full-on.

A 'tache of reality

2011-11-01T13:45:00.001+01:00

With Rocktober behind us and the eleventh month of the eleventh year under way, it is possible that you will come across a previously clean-shaven gentleman over the next 30 days suddenly possessing a fine display of top-lip topiary. If so, do not be alarmed.

While this could simply be a mid-life crisis taking an alarming direction or - on the basis that fashion is cyclical, and the Freddie Mercury full-on hedge approach will come back sooner or later - he has just adopted the 'in' look, it is more likely that the newly-moustachioed bloke before you is embracing Movember.

This is the admirable charity initiative designed to raise awareness and money to combat various men's heath conditions, in particular prostate cancer. To support it men (a fairly exclusive requirement) must register - by today - at Movember.com, commencing the month with a hairless visage and then do nothing other than maintain their facial garden for the remainder of the month while coining in donations for the effort.

I, alas, will not be joining them, as my attempts at selective facial hair design have been deliberately limited to either the full holiday beard or the David Brent-style goatee on the grounds that a moustache really does look absolutely ludicrous on me and would probably do more harm than good to the charity. Instead, please sponsor my game-for-a-laugh nephew James who, now he's reached shaving age (senile fool - what am I saying, he's 24 and married), is plunging in with great gusto - http://mobro.co/jamespoulter/d.

Cancer, as frequent flyers of this low-cost airline of mine will recall it mentioning in April, comes in some 200 varieties. Some aggressive, a few inevitably fatal, but with all sufferers benefitting from the earliest detection to increase the odds of prolonging life or, at least, improving or maintaining the quality of it.

Prostate cancer is the most common of all cancers men succumb to. In the UK alone, 40,000 men are diagnosed with it every single year. One man dies of it in the UK every hour and 250,000 British men are currently living with it. It is thought that half of all men might have the first symptoms of prostate cancer by the age of 50, and that by the age of 80, that figure has risen to 80%. It is, though treatable, but as my 82-year-old father - who has it - will testify, the treatment has some unpleasant side effects.

Doctors are currently engaged in a discussion as to whether the main means of prostate cancer detection - measurement of the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) protein - is as beneficial as it intended to be. PSA testing is a catch-all to identify any problem with the prostate gland, from infection to cancer. Two-thirds of men with a raised PSA will not have cancer...but there is a one in six chance that a man with a normal PSA reading will have the disease. That said, PSA testing can also help detect milder cancers that wouldn't have been found otherwise. However, some medical experts have questioned whether submitting men with even mild symptoms of other cancers to a range of treatments that might lead to permanent side effects such as incontinence or impotence is worth it, especially in younger patients to whom quality of life can be seriously impaired by such side effects.

The PSA test is not flawless, either: while it might pick up relatively harmless slow-growth tumors it might not be of any help to any man whose cancer is already advanced and aggressive. A raised PSA level might also be a symptom of something else, non-cancerous, but will lead to all manner of distress in men who receive a high PSA result for benign reasons, or even undergo a biopsy when often as few as 25% of men with an elevated PSA level actually have cancer in their prostate.

While the debate continues, any man over the age of 50, who either has a father or brother already with prostate cancer, or who is having to get up in the middle of the night more often than normal to take a leak, would do themselves an enormous favour and get themselves checked out properly.

We men are not at our proudest when discussing issues in or around the gentleman's area, but with the odds of getting prostate cancer so high, is the loss of pride really worth the risk? I don't think so.

L'histoire d'amour continue

2011-10-31T08:57:00.001+01:00

It was about this time last year I was sitting outside a Rue de Rennes cafe one crisp, autumnal Saturday morning, contemplating my then-forthcoming move to Paris. Sipping coffee and nibbling on a fresh croissant (I know "fresh" makes it sound like just-harvested mango rather than artery-hardening pastry, but...) I began writing a love letter of sorts that eventually took me forever to actually post.

The letter celebrated all the things that were drawing me to the French capital, deliciously buttery baked goods, amongst them. It took me until mid-January to actually post the thing, mainly because between that October breakfast and finding half an hour to actually do something with it, life became consumed by, well, life, and all the ups, downs and dramas that come with preparing to start a new one in another country.

There was another reason for that letter remaining 'in development' for more than two months: like any good love letter, there's always more you want to say, and either don't have the emotional vocabulary to express it, or the confidence.

It's very easy to become blasé about one's surroundings, and yet we dismiss as smug those who quit the rat-race to declare life's wonderment from a beach bar in Thailand. Paris - I can confidently say after even just ten months - has lost none of its lustre.

Perhaps it's just me: perhaps I'm just one of those people for whom childlike enthusiasm for the simplest of things doesn't wear off easily. I still hold Mr Bean-like excitement for air travel, despite being a fairly frequent air traveller for most of my professional life; the moments before a band comes on stage and strikes its opening chord are the minutes that remind me why I love live music to start with; and even after thirty years of walking up the Fulham Road on a Saturday afternoon to see Chelsea play, I'm still buzzed with the same degree of expectation I experienced the first time I visited Stamford Bridge well over 30 years ago.

So don't expect the stupid, loved-up grin to leave my face any time soon. A year ago my commute to work involved a gruesome two-hour train ride terminating in a town I would always have struggled to come to love. Now, I have a ten-minute ride by rented Vélib bicycle which takes me across the majestic Pont d’Iena, the Eiffel Tower rising before me like some colossal alien astride the Champs de Mars.

Gustave Eiffel's seventh wonder is a constant companion throughout my Parisian day: it towers over my office and then, as I fall asleep at night, it is there, less than a mile from my bedroom window, it's mad LED strobes glittering away every hour, on the hour like a Christmas tree on speed.

The tower's searchlight beam may scan the night sky like The Eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, but the sweep of its light provides Paris with a fulcrum of reassurance, a giant iron guardian standing over a city of intoxicating, almost excessive beauty. It is this which enables Paris to combine the normality of daily urban living with an ethereal, dreamlike experience whenever you venture out into its streets. No wonder poets, writers, dictators and romantics have fallen under its spell. And me.

Memories from the bottom of the garden

2011-10-30T15:07:00.001+01:00

The Daily Mail is the self-appointed beating heart of Middle England. Much of its 'news' coverage is enraged thundering about BBC excess, or gratuitious photographs of female celebrities dressed in such a way as to leave "little to the imagination".

The Mail's other stock-in-trade is reunion stories. These come in two versions: D-Day veterans meeting up for the first time since pegging it across Juno Beach under significantly inconvenient German gunfire; and tales of childhood sweethearts who, since sharing a bus ride in 1937, have lived separate lives until a chance encounter outside a High Street pie shop ignites flames of octogenarian passion.

Thankfully, the Mail is unlikely to catch up with my own story of renewed acquaintance: it may not compete with lead-dodging Tommies for drama or Sid and Doris and their romance rekindled for warming of the heart's cockles, but it does roll back more years than I'm really at ease contemplating.

It starts with one of those lost evenings on Wikipedia that Eddie Izzard warns against - clicking on one blue link leads to another, and another, before you've acquired - momentarily - a small pile of trivia you have little use for and equally little chance of retaining.

One Tuesday evening two years ago in late March, I was idly touring the Wikiverse, vacantly jumping from link to link about rock stars connected to my native suburb on the London/Surrey borders. I'd long been curious about the high concentration of talent to have originated from this corner of England: Eric Clapton was born in the idyllic village of Ripley, was schooled in Surbiton and launched his career in the riverside pubs of Kingston. Paul Weller hails from Woking and, ironically, now has his HQ in Ripley; The Rolling Stones built their reputation at Richmond's Crawdaddy Club, The Who put nearby Eel Pie Island in Twickenham on the map, Rod Stewart was discovered busking at Twickenham railway station, and The Yardbirds shared a house in Kew. And, as What Would David Bowie Do? has previously noted, John Martyn was born in my birthtown, New Malden.

The last blue link I selected that evening revealed that, on November 3, 1967, the Royal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames gained a new resident, Steven Wilson, lead singer, guitarist, principal songwriter and Grammy-nominated producer of Porcupine Tree, prolific collaborator of a restless number of side-projects including the highly acclaimed Blackfield with Israeli superstar Aviv Geffen, and more recently, taking on the task of remastering the entire King Crimson back catalogue.

Whether by fate or happy accident, some months before a colleague had recommended a listen to Porcupine Tree. I'd missed their emergence in the early 1990s - it happens - but dove in and acquired their albums Deadwing and In Absentia, discovering in the process a band that was regulalrly selling out legendary venues like New York's Radio City Music Hall and the Royal Albert Hall.

Although described as 'progressive rock' - by no means a derogatory description in my book - it was clear that Porcupine Tree's roots, ho-ho, lay in a rich foundation of influences, ranging from late ’60s psychedelia, early ’70s prog, ’80s metal and the more recent ambient/alt-rock scenes. Sitting, comfortably, somewhere between Muse, Athlete, Eno, Radiohead and TalkTalk, amongst other more extreme sources (German industrial rock is a strong possibility), it was a delight to hear an English band revelling in the musical territory I'd been enjoying since first taking interest in the fact I was taking interest in music itself.

So, back to my Wiki-clicking: the Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree fame was the Steven Wilson born eight days before I arrived in the same borough. This was odd since, for the first six years of my existence there was a Steven Wilson living around the corner from me, who was born the week before me, and thus along with me would have been doing a decent job of keeping our respective neighbours awake in those winter months of 1967 and 1968.

This could still have been a huge coincidence, but I thought the easiest way to establish the facts was to chance a "This might seem strange, but..." e-mail sent to Steven's management company. Within an hour - and with the intermediary "Stalker or legit?" from his manager - the man himself wrote back: "Yes, I'm me, and you are you." Contact made, after 36 years.

Steven and I were six when we went our separate ways. His father's work took the family to Hertfordshire which, while hardly emigration, felt that way back then. Having met at kindergarten, we became friends and would frequently play together, Steven appearing at the hole in the fence at the bottom of our garden (his house backed on to mine), me going round to his house (and once disgracing myself by tripping arse-over-tit on his mum's newly washed front step, spilling vast flagons of claret all over it in the process.

Connecting again with Steven bridged a strange chasm of distance. Facebook and its ilk age have ensured that keeping in touch with your past, with school friends and old colleagues, no longer requires the services of the Pinkertons. This, however, was different. At four, five or six years old, life lacked any greater purpose or importance than what would be the Action Man outfit your next birthday might provide.

We tend to chapterise our life history: Childhood, The Teenage Years, School, First Romance, Leaving Home, Starting Work, and so on - departments of a life lived to date, each with their own set of characters, experiences and associated memories. Steven and I, on the other hand, shared only a prologue, which made me at least realise that the passing of 36 years was an awfully long time.

Before, however, we could meet in person and wistfully recount the expiry of time, progress and, in Steven's case, extreme achievement, fate intervened for, apparently, the second time (while I was working as a music journalist several years ago, Steven had in fact tried to get in touch with me. Sadly, his letter went astray). With purpose, a ticket and a backstage pass for Porcupine Tree's Amsterdam show in October 2009, we planned to catch up properly.

Unfortunately this attempt was thwarted by the brand of officiousness that is an occupational hazard to habitual liggers, but should not come between two childhood friends getting together after three and a half decades. Armed with the aftershow 'laminate' (backstage pass by another name) Steven had generously arranged for me to have, I strode up to what turned out to be a colour-blind security guard who decided that my pink pass wasn't the same colour as the puce pass on his clipboard - which by now matched the puce complexion of my face. By the time he'd resolved the issue with someone more senior, the opportunity had been lost.

This week, 36 became 38, and Steven and I finally met in Paris. His excellent solo album, Grace Before Drowning, had brought him to the prestigious Bataclan theatre in Paris.

As with the Amsterdam show, there was something surreal about seeing him on stage. I've seen friends in bands perform before, but when the lead singer is someone you last saw at the age of six, there is little to relate to apart from the knowledge that you knew each other only as young children.

When we shook hands later it wasn't a moment of or for sentiment, nor was it meant to be. It was more a moment of novelty, like two passing acquaintances from many years before falling through the same hole in time and landing in a now empty, cavernous Parisian hall.

Although almost four decades is an awful long time to cover in the handful of minutes available - the chapters both too numerous and too irrelevant to recount - it was a moment of satisfaction.

There was also pride that someone from the furthest reaches of my past, from before any of us had formed ambitions or an idea of what they wanted out of life, apart from beoming Colonel Steve Austin, had become a talented, successful musician making the kind of music I like.

There was also the sense that, in some small way, falling through that hole in time and meeting the grown up, adult Steven, built an abstract bridge to an increasingly distant chapter in my life. One that will be filled in with greater detail I'm sure when the two of us get together for a proper natter.

Why Apple is, for now, up in the clouds

2011-10-22T10:27:00.000+02:00

The age of instant gratification hasn't been helped by Apple. Every time they launch a shiny new bauble, we want it now. Actually, we want it yesterday, and can't come to terms with the fact it won't be available until next week.

Steve Jobs, bless him, is to blame for this "I want it, and I want it now" mindset. The medicine shows he performed to announce his latest iElixir were always slick productions of front-of-cloth magic. Usually we were enticed by the wares he had to offer.

In June he told us: "We are demoting the PC and Mac to just be a device and moving the digital hub centre of your digital life to the cloud." This came more than ten years after he declared the Mac to be hub. That's progress for you.

The day before Jobs' death, Apple unveiled iCloud - the latest incarnation of its 'storage-in-the-sky' philosophy (predated by iTools, .Mac and MobileMe) - promising an end to the apparent frustration we experience to keep our music, videos and photos synchronised on the myriad devices we now own.

Personally I've never had a problem with keeping one set of albums on my iPhone and videos on my iPad, as I rarely - if ever - want to watch a movie on my phone, and only listen to music on the iPad when I'm sat on a plane or a train. And I'm quite happy keeping the variety of music different on both.

But when Apple finally launched iCloud, plus upgrades to iTunes and its iOS platform to accommodate it, the Apple fan community rushed like lemmings to download it all. Here the first wave of vexation wafted in, for it took - I kid you not - the entire night to download and update both the iPhone and the iPad. Furthermore, I still needed to connect these devices to a Mac to transfer the new software. This was, Apple told us patronisingly, the last time we'd need to physically hook up these devices to a computer.

Then it became apparent that most of my paid-for apps were missing on the iPhone, along with most of my recently purchased albums on iTunes. Not to worry, Apple assured us, as visiting iTunes and the App Store would enable me to download everything. Laboriously, app-by-app, album-by-album, and even song-by-song. Having spent an entire night acquiring the applications in the first place - and this via a relatively fast home Internet connection - I still needed a second evening getting back stuff that had been on my devices to start with!

This may sound like curmudgeon but the expectation of any Apple product is that it should just work. It's what has made us such slavish Apple devotees. They have a knack for making something you might not have considered important, indispensably good.

Now, I'm happy to say, it's all sorted. My initial fears about how iCloud would work when you have a storage disparity between iTunes content living on a Mac (my MacBook Air has a 128Gb hard drive which is stuffed full), and the smaller capacities of the iPhone and iPad (32Gb each), have been allayed by the fact that the much-vaunted automatic synchronisation can be controlled.

I am, though, left with the feeling that the absence of a USB cable between phone, tablet and PC is only a marginal improvement. Before, I ripped a CD, then hooked up my iPhone and there it would be, emporter, as the French might say. Now I need WiFi. Something presumptuous there.

I still don't have a huge need to keep everything synchronized on every single Apple device I own, but perhaps that's just me and the compartmentalised manner with which I regard the iPhone, iPad and MacBook I use.

True, the photo synchronisation is a very smart aspect of iCloud: take a picture on your iPhone and it's instantly shared with your other Apple devices.

All this, however, does make the assumption that you have either access to WiFi, or an accommodating 3G mobile provider. Carriers are increasingly imposing data limits on downloads and uploads, which raises questions about how viable a ubiquitous service like iCloud will be as such economies increase. And clearly you won't want this to be active when taking pictures on holiday.

The iCloud story is not yet finished, either. To come is iTunes Match, with which for a fee, Apple will miraculously scan the iTunes library on your home computer and 'add' the same songs to your iCloud content, regardless of how this music was acquired in the first place.

On this I remain sceptical: when you have somewhere over 1000 albums on a hard drive as I do, of which some are not widely available commercially or came off the front cover of a music magazine, I doubt very much that iTunes Match will be able to find them. More worrying is that as the service is based on your paid-for storage capacity, to maintain this wonderful idea will cost $25 a year on top of the additional iCloud storage you need to buy from Apple to accommodate it - and that could cost up to $100 a year for a maximum of 55Gb more (which is not enough, clearly, for all the content I might be storing in the iCloud).

There is much to like about iCloud's intentions. It can be a minor annoyance when you download the Bombay Bicycle Club's new album to your Mac on a Saturday and forget to add it to your iPhone before heading off to work on a Monday morning. But it is only a minor annoyance.

The cloud story is not yet ready for prime time. True, relying less on huge and breakable hard drives to store your content (that's right - you own it, you paid for it) is a good idea. But, like Google's idea of running laptops on cloud-based apps, it assumes that we're always on, and always connected.

When I can't get a decent 3G signal in the centers of London and Paris, let alone find a WiFi hotspot that doesn't cost an arm and a leg for just an hour's time online, the idea of ubiquitous access to content is still somewhat far-fetched. For now at least.

Brother Beyond

2011-10-18T00:19:00.001+02:00

Once or twice in a generation, pop music generates a rivalry that has the press gnawing upon it until they get bored and move on. The fact that the rivalry was, probably, their creation in the first place is neither here or there, the scamps.

In the 1960s we had The Beatles and The Stones; 20 years later, it was Duran Duran in a battle of hairspray with Spandau Ballet. They were followed after the intermission by Simple Minds and U2, a bout clearly won by the latter who went on to meet Coldplay in an exchange of ideas about fair trade coffee.

Thankfully, with the exception of Tupac and Notorious B.I.G., few have ever turned really nasty (although there were rumours of an ugly backstage spat between Mozart and that pipsqueak Beethoven at Glasto '90. 1790.)

It is, though, unusual that a member of pop's great firmament should find themselves absorbed by not one but two rivalries in the course of their career. Lily Allen came close by issuing the pop princess equivalent of the closing time "come on then!" to Courtney Love and Katy Perry, but to my knowledge, only Noel Gallagher has been embroiled in a full-on, no-holds-barred rock'n'roll dust-up twice.

The first came to a head on August 14, 1995 when, through either disruptive thinking or unbelievable stupidity, Blur's Country House was released on the same day as Oasis appropriately brought out Roll With It. Being the height of the silly season the event was marked by being the lead story on a host of organisations customarily indifferent to such triviality. It even made the BBC’s 10 O'Clock News, with summer stand-in presenter John Humphries harrumphing with unease as he introduced that evening's 'fancy that?' piece on the affair.

Planted, not particularly deeply, within the Blur-Oasis rough-and-tumble was the British class obsession: Blur's lower/upper-middle class art college background was pitched into the contretemps, with Oasis - hailing from Manchester's hardened streets - a journalistic gift. For a year or so it made for mildy amusing copy, but the true outcome of the handbags between Blur and Oasis (which saw Liam Gallagher turning his wannabe school playground bully persona up to 11) was to mask the simmering sibling rivalry within Oasis itself.

Part of me wishes it had ended like that. It would’ve made a great headline: ‘Plum throws plum'.

The sparring between the brothers Gallagher maintained the band's reputation from the moment they first emerged in the early 90s until its bitter end in 2009. For a while you could be forgiven for thinking it was part of their schtick.

Fast-forwarding through more than a decade-and-a-half of simmering fraternal discord, the eventual separation of Noel and Liam Gallagher, the spiritual heart of Oasis, came as no surprise to anyone. The denouement unfolded backstage at the Rock en Seine festival in Paris when a row about the junior Gallagher's Pretty Green clothing label led to him threatening his elder brother with, first a guitar, and then a piece of fruit.

"On the way out he picked up a plum and threw it across the dressing room and it smashed against the wall," Gallagher Senior recounted at a press conference last July to announce his debut solo album, Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds. "Part of me wishes it had ended like that. It would’ve made a great headline: ‘Plum throws plum',"

So, with Noel walking out of Oasis on the basis that he'd had enough of Liam being a twat (not necessarily his words, but not unlikely either), and his brother regrouping Oasis as Beady Eye, ("Shitbag" is all the monobrowed one could muster on Twitter) we have been presented with that hen's tooth of the pop world - a second great rivalry.

Musically, neither Gallagher has moved on with their respective projects. Beady Eye's Different Gear, Still Speeding and ...High Flying Birds could easily have been named Oasis: What Happened Next. Both Gallaghers remain rooted in the Beatles/Kinks/Steve Marriott-60s-vibe-with-psychadelic-hints that became the stock-in-trade of Oasis, and continues to be Paul Weller's muse to this day.

Solo albums invariably represent freedom and a chance to explore music that wouldn't have worked, or been accepted in a group environment. Some are pure self indulgence, some offer a cathartic release valve.

Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds is neither indulgent or cathartic as it's perfectly clear the 44-year-old Gallagher really couldn't care less about what anyone, least of all his brother, thinks of him. It might not offer any dramatic directional surprises, but it is certainly the album of a supreme and natural songwriter, confidently enjoying his job.

Scanning the track listing, titles such as The Death Of You And Me and If I Had A Gun might fool the lazy journalist into thinking this is an album about Our Kid. It isn't. The Death Of You And Me, the album's first single release, is a Ray Davies-esque jaunt which includes a riotously carefree New Orleans trad jazz accompaniment created, apparently, by the various members of the production team impersonating brass instruments.

If I Had A Gun is just an unashamed love song built around Gallagher's favourite F#m7 chord (think Wonderwall, viewers) and more Mellotron and grungy Gibson to keep things from getting too sloppy. The happy-go-lucky, hippy-dippy 60s sentiment continues with Dream On, picking up the Oasis template for such throwback fluff with a song Gallagher himself brands "pop for pop's sake - a tune so good maybe people won't listen to the words".

Where Gallagher does let loose with his creative spirit, and shakes off his clear affection for The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, you get something that would make you put down the dishmop. AKA...What A Life! is such a track. With its chugging piano rhythm - reminiscent of Al Stewart's On The Border, or perhaps On The Border covered by the Scissor Sisters - it pounds along with a thudding big sound that defies the fact it was recorded by Gallagher in a tiny studio with the teaboy providing the piano sample (fact).

In the olden days, a great album was marked by a bold opening track, something intriguing to end Side 1 and keep up interest to turn over, a lively commencement to Side 2, and a memorable closer with, ideally, a lengthy guitar solo to take you into the album's outro. Stop The Clocks has that. Written by Gallagher ten years ago while in Thailand, had it have been recorded then it may have been just another Champagne Supernova. Without the Manchester scally act, it takes on a much more interesting dynamic, as rich and as curious as anything on Paul Weller's 21 Dreams, layered with more prog-ish coatings of Mellotron, acoustic guitar and organ, and closing with a storming piece of guitar work from Paul 'Strangeboy' Stacey, a former Oasis session player who brings Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds to an end with fretwork that would leave the sky black with hats if it had Johnny Greenwood's name attached to it.

Noel Gallagher is, by his own admission, neither a great guitarist nor a gifted technical musician, but he gives what you and I want, sometimes, more than anything else in a record - a good time. Something to make the morning commute more bearable, something to tune the world out, to make washing up or other household chores pass by with vim, vigour and other brands of household cleaning products.

While ...High Flying Birds will never be a solo album to have the world shouting, in unison, "I never knew he had that in him", for all its resolute rooting in territory Oasis rarely - if ever - strayed from, it reeks of unbridled enjoyment. That of its originator, as well as that of us listeners.

Skirting the RIM of Hell

2011-10-16T11:29:00.000+02:00

Hello everyone. My name is Simon, and I used to be an addict.

I was using morning, noon and night. It was the first thing I needed when I woke, last thing I did before I went to bed. Sometimes I didn't go to bed at all, and continued through the night.

However, I sought help and sorted myself out, and that's why I'm here today to tell the story. I successfully rejected part of my life that was spiraling out of control with, frankly, only one outcome.

It is now ten months since I gave up my BlackBerry.

Today I'm completely clean. True, I have an iPhone, which sort of works as a phone and has all the non-phone things you expect these days. From a phone, of course. And although they say the first 100 days of sobriety are the hardest, these last ten months of abstinence have been relatively easy.

For a start, I no longer panic at the sight of a little red LED winking at me; I don't suffer spikes in blood pressure caused by the clanging chime of doom that annnounces a new missive; and my spine is returning to normal curviture, as I am no longer finding myself hunched over like an early 1970s prog rock guitarist.

That said, switching to methodone - sorry, iPhone - hasn't been without its side effects. Syntax, for exampled, has struggled, with coherence occasionally varying wildly.

E-mails to important people (you know, bosses, CEOs) have been hampered by words like "of" and "on" being autocorrected to "if"and "in" in the final article.

In fact this feature is so counter-productive I have terned it of and will now mayk do with my own spalling capeabillytees.

So while you congratulate my self-restraint, I have to confess that this last week I have been feeling terribly smug. Smug in a sort of German-standard-of-living smugness. Smug in a couple-posing-as-husband-and-wife-for-Sunday-colour-supplement-furniture-ad way. Smug in an "I invested well in my 20s and am now retiring in my early 50s to live in comfort and wear a lot of pastel" level of smuggery. I'll stop now with the smug references.

Because when people come to remember where they were during The Great BlackBerry Blackout I will simply recall enjoying the silence. No one was sending e-mails, so there were none to be read. Entire business meetings were conducted with near 100% attention. Train journeys became torturous events as newspapers returned to brief popularity. Conclusive, engaging conversations broke out in households. One person even walked across to my desk to ask me a question in person. In person!

People were left hurt, baffled and unable to cope (Colleague #1: "Where's the fax machine?". Colleague #2: "The what?". Colleague #1: "The fax machine!". Colleague #2: "What's that then?". Colleague #1: "Aaaaagggghhhhhh!"). Some threatened the return of Hotmail. Others took to begging in the street for just a fix, a sniff of e-mail. Just one - it didn't have to be an entire back-and-forth.

So, for a few days, people actually had to open their laptops to do some work. Engagement with others meant, for a short time at least, writing messages with thought, rather than stabbed out on a tiny QWERTY keyboard in the back of a taxi.

Ridiculous to think that BlackBerry's outtage (which, ironically, my iPhone's autocorrect thinks should be "outrage") should have been considered by many to be some sort of temporary return to Year Zero. As if being blamed for causing the UK riots wasn't bad enough, BlackBerry was now being held responsible for bringing the world of business communications to its knees during a time of worsening global financial mayhem.

Makes you wonder how on earth they coped during the great Typewriter Correction Fluid Shortage of 1981...

American Dreaming - tales about the Southland

2011-10-14T16:00:00.000+02:00

Alex Demyan and NewOrleansOnline.com

Exactly one month ago today I was setting off for a brief excursion through what Paul Simon called "the cradle of the Civil War", indulging in the music, culture, history and hospitality of the American South.

The trip - though criminally short - was nevertheless long enough to reinforce my belief that for all the exotic, fascinating and culturally diverse destinations the world has to offer, I am still drawn to - no, absorbed by - the United States, its people and its places.

A week earlier What Would David Bowie Do? had been on American soil for a business trip, and between this visit and the journey down south, spent an inordinate amount of time arriving at, passing through or departing from various US airports. It was an experience which served only to demonstrate what fascinating observatories of local life they are.

New Orleans' delightfully named Louis Armstrong International Airport (known locally as “Satchmo”) provided a perfect sample of the rich potpourri of the resident and the transitory, its waiting areas, walkways and lounges like a microcosmic fishtank sourced from the greater ocean of American life.

Amid all the usual departure gate hub-bub was a regular fixture at any US departure lounge: the Willy Loman. Conspicuously pacing up and down, feverishly pitching his wares via an apparently invisible Bluetooth headset, he appeared insanely animated in front of an indifferent audience. Next to me sat the sweet old gran heading home to visit the grandkids; across the divide, the single mum struggling with children and luggage; and - yes, fans of Airplane! - elsewhere at that departure gate was the obligatory nun. Can anyone remember the last time they saw a nun anywhere other than an airport?

I've been an annual visitor to the United States for almost 20 years, and lived there for two of them. I'm sure some will regard me as being of the barnyard for lacking breadth of horizon, that I should be spending my vacations backpacking through the Himalaya, exploring Mayan temples by kayak or in-line skating up the Ho-Chi Minh Trail. And while it's true that American travel doesn't present any greater challenge than deciding between the bewildering choice of drive-throughs and motel chains, the country isn't any less rewarding, enriching or invigorating a visit.

America has never failed to live up to expectations: my first ever visit took me to Los Angeles where - like Stevie Wonder's "hard town Mississippi" rural refugee - I couldn't help saying to myself, "Yeah, just like I pictured it".

You have to remember that I grew up in gloomy, grey 1970s Britain. LA - represented by Charlie's Angels and CHiPs - was America: a blue-skied paradise populated by big cars, perfect teeth and flawless beauty. Jaclyn Smith was her name.

I knew this was somewhere I wanted to visit, even be part of, and I eventually got my wish. Subsequently, and exhaustively, I've explored the better two-thirds of California - from San Diego to San Francisco, Venice Beach and Carmel on the coast east into and out of the deserts to the majestic Sierras, the jaw-droppingly beautiful Yosemite and the glorious tranquility of Lake Tahoe. I even know the taxi back-doubles to reach Los Angeles International Airport.

California was only the beginning: I branched into the Pacific Northwest - once known for Twin Peaks, Nirvana and Big Foot, and now, dreadfully fey vampires - coming across a bizarre mock Bavarian village in the Cascade Mountains and Greenpeace chasing Indian whale hunters around Neah Bay, the remotest tip of the 'lower 49 states'; I've been bitten to death in South Carolina and bored to death in southern Texas; I've hiked the steel canyons of Manhattan and barrelled through the sandstone canyons of Utah in a 4x4, blaring out The Clash, just in case an Osmond was lurking behind a tree. I've covered a lot of ground, but in truth I've barely scratched the surface.

Ever since Christopher Columbus misprogrammed his GPS and discovered India to be closer to Cuba than expected, America has been about aspiration. On my recent trip from Memphis to New Orleans, however, I received a timely reminder that aspiration continues to duel with adversity.

The South, today, may not be as dirt-poor as it was when share croppers came in from the fields to Memphis to find their fortunes - or the sanctuary of a Beale Street juke joint - but it still struggles. Mississippi and its southern neighbour Louisiana boast the poorest communities in the United States. Downtown Memphis, in particular, is marked by its vacant storefronts, its homeless and a noticeable lethargy, even in the middle of a normal working day.

And yet this is the corner of America from which pop music as we know it today was founded. The rhythms that emerged from its cotton plantations to fuse with gospel and folk, evolving, in Darwinian fashion, into blues and jazz, became the rock and roll that established music as the predominant youth culture of the last 60 years.

At risk of committing Lennonesque blasphemy - dangerous sport when it comes to the Bible Belt - there are parallels between the South and the Holy Land. To visit the original haunts of Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Son House, BB King and Robert Johnson (the founding member of the 27 Club) carries the same sensation of walking amid mythic history as visiting Nazareth, Galilee and other places of biblical history in Israel, as I was fortunate to do last year.

Memphis is Jerusalem and Clarksdale - a long, straight, hour-long drive away down Highway 61 (yes, that Highway 61) and into Mississippi, is Bethlehem. The crossroads where Highways 61 and 49 meet is Manger Square. Here, the story goes, Robert Johnson made a deal with the Devil for the ability to play the guitar. I won't dwell on the symbolism of the crossed guitars which now marks this junction, save to say it's a dilapidated symbol at an intersection few would want to linger at.

The blues spawned by the Mississippi Delta may have eventually found its way into British bedrooms in the 1960s, where it was indulged by white, suburban middle class boys, but the region bears little benefit today of the excess and opulence it gave rise to. Apart from the Delta Blues Museum and an arts center co-founded by local resident Morgan Freeman, Clarksdale has little else. Down at that crossroads you become conscious that time has scarcely moved on in the 80 years since Johnson's apocryphal satanic encounter.

As it was for those early blues pioneers, Memphis remains the area's aspirational magnet. Beale Street today might be a theme park version of the street it once was, but amid the bachelor and bachelorette parties staggering up and down its main drag of an evening, authentic, live blues can still be heard.

BB King's, at the corner of Beale and 2nd, is now part of a franchised chain, but the Memphis original is a must-see, if only for the quality of live acts it hosts every night, but also out of homage to its patron, who does still make appearances when, at the age of 86, he has time while remarkably still touring.

King, born in share-cropping farmland 130 miles away in Indianola, Mississippi, came to Memphis as a 21-year-old and picked up guitar-playing sessions on the legendary local radio station WDIA. It was while DJing and playing blues for WDIA that he acquired the nickname 'Beale Street Blues Boy' - B.B.

If you happen across the angular building at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis, on the corner with Marshall Avenue, go in, do the tour, and get to squeeze into the recording studio where, on July 18, 1953, an 18-year-old local truck driver walked in off the street, paid $3.98 to record three songs. The songs included My Happiness - a gift for, it is claimed, his mother's birthday.

He walked out with a 10-inch acetate disc of the recordings and that may well have been that. Fate - and producer Sam Philips' receptionist - brought Elvis Presley back to Sun Studios, where he recorded and released That's All Right in 1954 and sparked a global cultural phenomenon of seismic proportions.

In 1957, at the age of just 22, Presley moved in to Graceland, just nine miles south-east of where Sun Studios still stands today. The first thing that strikes you about Graceland is just how modest this cod-colonial pile is by mansion standards. Newly-minted English football players would consider it tiny. It is as much a shrine to the King of Rock'n'Roll as it is to what passed for rock star interior design in the era Presley lived in it.

Visiting it today, one sees a house frozen in time, with 70s chintz and patterns which would, today, come with a health warning. Graceland's modest size is tempered by the fact that its estate boasts a large shed full of Presley's cars - a mix of the gaudy and the opulent - as well as not one but two airliners, which used to fly under the call sign 'Hound Dog One'.

Such arriviste trappings might be incongruous to the poverty around Memphis, but Graceland is a revered local money-spinner. A lesser known local attraction is the Stax studio. Rebuilt to perfection (the original was knocked down by a property developer), it plays another important role in the cultural heritage of Memphis, celebrating both a record label and the single neighbourhood that produced Isaac Hayes, Ike Turner, Booker T. Jones, Rufus Thomas, Steve Cropper and Donald 'Duck' Dunn.

This was the multicultural backbone of Stax Records: a fusion of rhythm, soul, blues and gospel influenced which, combined, challenged the still-segregated landscape of American society in the early 1960s - in the very city where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated, outside room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel.

Today the hotel is a part of the Civil Rights Museum, a fantastically curated, chronological exhibition of a period of American history few can be proud of, and which depicts a story that spans multiple centuries to within my lifetime.

Heading south of Memphis, following the curves of the Mississippi, you encounter more of the impoverished rural landscapes people have either aspired to break away from, or reluctantly accepted to be their lot and stayed put.

Challenging this is Natchez, a Miss Havershamesque town overlooking the Mississippi as it bends between Louisiana and the state named after it. When cotton was the currency on the Mississippi - and a lucrative one at that - Natchez, with its commanding view of the river, was a wealthy town. Today, its wealth has visibly faded, although the town centre retains a fabric of suburban respectability.

Natchez is a charming town, but hardly worthy of an overnight stay. If you do, two attractions make it worthwhile. Firstly, there is the Under-the-Hill Saloon on Silver Street. This slightly creaky riverside pub, with its - how do you say this politely? - eccentric barman, Harley-riding clientele and eclectic decor (yes, that was a real hand grenade we saw behind the bar) is a local institution.

Above it is the three-room Mark Twain Guest House, to which guests share a single bathroom and, for their $100 night, do without in-room televisions and telephones in order to preserve the "somewhat historic atmosphere of our rooms".

Whether Mark Twain ever stayed there for real remains to be proven. If he had have done, he'd have certainly eaten at The Magnolia Grill next door which - either through a paucity of anything better or, simply because of the atmosphere of the evening - served up arguably the best meal of the entire week spent south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

First timers, travel writers and more seasoned visitors to the United States find it near-impossible to avoid commenting on the enormity of the country - its places and its people - or on the absurdity of its excess. And yet, in Natchez, What Would David Bowie Do? encountered perhaps the most wasteful application of a natural resource on God's green: a petrol-driven truck employed just to transport patrons less then 50 feet up and down the causeway between the entrance of a Mississippi steamer casino boat and the roadway where shuttle buses drop them off. Having picked them up from the car park further up a hill. Let me go over that again: a truck, which transports people 50 feet up or down a landing ramp.

And so on further to the mouth of the Mighty Mississip' itself, New Orleans - the final destination of this brief road trip. Simply put, one of the most charming cities on the map, even though a clearly pissed off Mother Nature did her best to wipe it clean off that map in 2005 when she sent Hurricane Katrina spinning across the Gulf of Mexico.

When she struck, Katrina breached the delicate acquaintance The Big Easy had enjoyed with the Gulf since the port was founded by the French in 1718. Flooding caused by the city's levees breaking killed more than 1000 residents and displaced tens of thousands more. In fact, exactly how many were displaced is still not known, six years later. Census figures have shown that New Orleans - once America's third-largest city - lost almost a third of its population over the last decade. Today it is America's 52nd largest city.

Built, largely, over reclaimed swampland, New Orleans is a cocktail bar's shaker of influences. With its clearly French foundation, the infusion of Creole, Haitian, Spanish and other European elements give the city a flavour unlike any other I've visited in America with, perhaps, the exception of San Francisco.

Cosmo Condina/NewOrleansOnline.com

The jazz music is there, but the good stuff needs searching for. Bourbon Street, like Beale in Memphis, may be the star of the show, but it is a somewhat tacky thoroughfare.

It is loud and colourful, with no shortage of bars to tempt you in. Some even have authentic jazz and blues. Others, however, are just garish karaoke bars, catering to the culture clash of Mid-West sales reps attending conventions and Mid-West rednecks who all converge on the city at the same time.

At least it's easy to set the two crowds apart: the reps are all dressed in sports jackets, their mobile phones holstered at the hip, while the rednecks almost exclusively wearing baseball hats, facial hair and capped-sleeve T-shirts bearing logos of a motor oil brands.

New Orleans is not, of course, just one street. During the daytime, the French Quarter provides both respite from the aching sun as well as a charming and thoroughly walkable area in which to step in and out of bars for a cooling drink, or to sample some of the food delights, especially creole cooking and, for the totally indulgent, a local speciality known as a Po' Boy.

These are, essentially, very large sandwiches - what Americans will refer to as a "submarine", owing to them being made out of a French baguette, are the size of an actual submarine, and are loaded with so much unhealthy crap that they can be legitimately be described as weapons of mass destruction.

The Po' Boy originated in the Great Depression, when a pair of entrepreneurial brothers came up with the idea of selling foot-long sandwiches to poor families on the basis that each 'Poor Boy' would adequately provide a meal to an entire household. Today they are far from cheap, and given the propensity for over-indulgence, you are unlikely to see a Po' Boy eaten by either a single family, or anyone on a low income.

Here, in fact, lies a pillar of the American paradox: the United States is the world's wealthiest nation, and yet 15% of its 312 million inhabitants live below the poverty line. That's the equivalent of the entire population of Spain. America remains highly aspirational: TV advertising is about doing well, living healthier and aspiring to own that next-generation SUV, despite the fact you will not be able to afford its fuel or, come to think of it, the house to park it outside. This is a country with a gross domestic product - of almost $15 trillion, but where child poverty is twice as high as many European countries, and where more than half a million children are officially listed as homeless.

Driving through - or driving past - poverty like this makes no difference as to whether you're in the USA or the outskirts of Mumbai. Of course, it asks moral questions of the traveller, but as self-indulgent as this sounds, my curiosity for a part of America which has struggled for long enough, and will, sadly, struggle for a lot longer, is driven by a celebration of the culture and pleasure it has provided the world.

Lacking any real erudition, I'll leave more dexterous reflections on Americana in general to Kerouac and Bryson: I wouldn't even dare suggest this dog-and-pony show of mine would, in any case, offer anything deep. But for all of America's critics and cynics, who say it lacks culture, history, society, I say take a closer look. Look deeper and you will find a country that might surprise you and even enchant you in the way it did me before I'd even set foot there - and has continued enchanting me ever since. My own personal American road movie is not yet past the opening titles. There is plenty more to come.

With strings attached

2011-10-10T05:00:00.000+02:00

On a recent flight to the US I was scanning the choice of on-demand movies available on the vision-challenging 'state-of-the-art' seat-back TV and came across the legendary This Is Spinal Tap. Regarded as the greatest movie - fictional or factual - ever made about rock music, I'd forgotten just how damn funny it was.

Few real bands - if any - have ever refuted its accuracy and the mirror it hilariously held up to rock's splendid talent for the self-regarding and the delusional. It was - and still is - a tour bus staple. A tradition amongst music journalists, on being invited in to the rock star's abode, has been to note the copy of This Is Spinal Tap in prominent view on a shelf.

Despite its popularity, rare is the band to say: "Better not do that - too Tap." Which is why, on the release today of New Blood, Peter Gabriel's orchestral reworking of selected songs from his 37-year solo career, he may not have taken into account an interchange in the film between bassist Derek Smalls and Spinal Tap's blond lead singer, David St. Hubbins. Following the departure of guitarist Nigel Tufnell - they ruminate on the "gift of freedom":

St.Hubbins: "I've always wanted to do a collection of my acoustic numbers with the London Philharmonic, as you know." Smalls: "We're lucky. I mean people...people should be envying us." St.Hubbins: "I envy us."

Gabriel is one of music's most mercurial talents. His notoriously laborious writing process is lengthy only because, in his own words, "I'm an awkward bugger". When not endlessly tinkering with layer after layer of sound on his studio albums, he's forming human rights charities like Witness, or The Elders, the thought leadership collective of former world leaders, or he's investing in technology interests like OD2 (the online music service later sold to Nokia), the music streaming site WE7, or the recording equipment giant Solid State Logic.

So the fact that Gabriel's latest album is a consecutive release to take the orchestral route, following last year's Scratch My Back, suggests an exhaustion of new ideas. Just as MTV Unplugged gave a new lease of life to many an electrified back catalogue, the orchestral revisit has often appeared in the absence of anything new. George Michael and Sting (someone never to shy away from demonstrating his apparent eclectic prowess) have both recently toured with orchestras, with Sting also releasing an album with full orchestral accompaniment, all in the notable absence of any new studio material.

Scratch My Back wasn't Gabriel's first recorded encounter with an orchestra - his eponymous debut solo album in 1977 contained the extremely cinematic Down The Dolce Vita - but it represented a new take, "reimagining" songs, such as a paired-down version of Paul Simon's Boy In The Bubble and a dark and dramatic read of Arcade Fire's My Body Is A Cage.

New Blood is a little more conventional: like it's predecessor, Gabriel and arranger John Metcalfe replace the rock conventions of drum and guitar with the polyphonic range of a 48-piece orchestra.

But whereas Scratch My Back served up some genuine surprises, both in the choice of songs as well as their execution, New Blood - perhaps because of the familiarity borne of over three decades of listening to some of the tracks - is more of an album of, well, Peter Gabriel songs set to an orchestra.

As one of the first owners of a Fairlight CMI, the sampling keyboard that came to define 80s pop music, Gabriel belies some of his inherited sense of innovation with New Blood (his father, Ralph, was an electrical engineer and inventor). That's not to say it lacks invention, it's just so tempting to think you're listening to an album of remixes. Orchestral remixes.

That said, as a long-term fan, I am bound to like the new version of San Jacinto, which is painted from a bigger palette and on a bigger canvas than the original on Peter Gabriel 4 (or Security as it was later renamed to help bewildered souls unable to distinguish between the first four albums, all named Peter Gabriel).

Equally, I'm intrigued by the new approach to In Your Eyes. In it's original form, a lively, African-rhythmed love song which has provided the keynote to many a new relationship; on New Blood, it is transformed into something sparse, choral and bewitchingly cold. Likewise, Mercy Street, Gabriel's tribute to the author Anne Rice, which is more open than the claustrophobic original on So. Others work less well: Digging In The Dirt, written as a therapeutic, analytic and somewhat angry conclusion to Gabriel's failed first marriage, loses the sinister tone with the addition of an orchestra, while Rhythm Of The Heat loses its unique - for 1982 - world music undercurrent, the African drumming that has since been used by many a lazy documentary director struggling to find an 'ethnic' soundtrack.

New Blood will be a fan's favourite for sure: we'll tolerate the mild disappointments and rave over the triumphs, as we're supposed to. We would just hope, however, that Gabriel will now return to the studio and make a 'proper' album, even if it takes another 10 years as all his others do.

Walt Disney or Willy Wonka?

2011-10-09T16:07:00.003+02:00

One of the many memorable moments in Steven Spielberg's E.T. prequel-of-sorts, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, is the sight of Roy Neary, Richard Dreyfuss' character, going mad and sculpting a flat-topped mountain out of mashed potato.

This was, we later found out, because aliens had planted the image of the very real Devil’s Tower in Wyoming in Neary's mind and were calling him - and others – to assemble there.

I was thinking about this last Tuesday, just as the media - and I don't just mean the technology media - were getting excited about Apple's latest press event. Not knowing why (though they presumed it was the launch of the iPhone 5) they dutifully assembled at Apple's very own Devil's Tower, 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California.

In the end there was no close encounter with anything other than a housekeeping update on what has made Apple the second-largest private company in the world (i.e. "We've sold lots of stuff, and Android is pants"), and that the iPhone 4 was to get a faster chip, a better camera and be offered as the iPhone 4S. Motoring experts will know that this approach is akin to putting 'Go Faster' trim on an existing Ford Fiesta to sell off inventory prior to a new model being launched.

The task of landing this non-news fell to Tim Cook, the company's new CEO who had, during Steve Jobs' various periods of medical leave, proven himself to be a steady-as-a-rock understudy. Since Jobs stepped down as CEO in August, Cook had eased the concerns of investors and employees alike. So, with the Apple obsessives entering overdrive and tech news websites offering Tweet-by-Tweet "live" coverage from the event - as if this made any more difference than more considered, consolidated coverage later - Cook, supported by assorted Apple upper managers, sought to make his mark.

The verdict was that, while Cook may be a worthy CEO, he is no Steve Jobs. 48 hours later, the copious outpouring of tribute and comment from journalists, peers and consumers at the news that Jobs was dead, underlined the point that there will probably only ever be one Steve Jobs.

Whatever your view about him, whether you saw him as the Da Vinci, the Walt Disney or even the Willy Wonka of his time, there is no doubt that the almost hard to take in explosion of media coverage marking his demise spoke volumes. People have likened it to the deaths of John Lennon or Elvis Presley. Actually, its volume has probably been closer to that which followed Princess Diana's passing. She was 'The People's Princess', but Steve Jobs was, we all know, just a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who, like many others in the Palo Alto and Mountain View districts, co-founded a computer business in a garage. Less than 30 years later - with most of the growth within the last decade - he'd turned it into a global corporate behemoth, not just a technology giant.

I'll spare the whole chronology - you'll have read it anyway in great detail since Thursday. The bottom line is that Jobs' ascendance to world-revered icon - credited with single-handedly transforming global culture through little more than silicon, software, good industrial design and an uncanny knack of knowing how to make existing technology both easier to use and desirable to those who'd otherwise be indifferent towards it - took just 13 years.

The original iMac presented the foundation: it challenged the idea of what a home computer not only should look like, but what it should do, and even who should own it. Add in easy-to-use software for otherwise professional applications like movie editing, add in connectivity for digital cameras, and the digital lifestyle for the non-geek was ready to go. Think back to that moment in 1998 when the iMac appeared in all its fruity-coloured versions, and then speed through the arrival of the iPod, iTunes, more iMacs, iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad to the iPhone 4S, and you see something which can only be regarded as breathtaking. This is the same company which, in 1998, was regarded as a niche player with a tiny market share.

Apple's progress, from once bankruptcy-threatened cult-in-waiting, to the world's eighth most-admired brand and a company with more cash than the US Federal Reserve can only be credited to one man. No matter what contribution Jonathan Ive's brilliant design has made, Phil Schiller's smart marketing or Tim Cook's solid operational management as COO, not to mention the tireless involvement of countless engineers and anonymous assembly-line workers in China, Apple today - the phenomenon that Apple has become - is down to Steve Jobs.

His instinct, as to what you and I as consumers would want, was the key. There were PCs before the iMac; there were MP3 players before the iPod; there were tablet devices before the iPad; there was music management software before iTunes. Jobs made them both attractive, aspirational and desirable, but also made them indispensable. Even when he apparently reluctantly opened iTunes up to the Windows PC, he was - like extra-terrestrial telepathy - planting the seeds that would hold consumers dependent on the Apple brand for their next generation of MP3 players and, eventually, mobile phone.

We all know the iPhone is lousy as a phone, but we make allowances because it does so much more which works well, which makes it satisfying to use - even fun - and has clearly been thought through, inside and out, inception to consumption. The Apple environment is a clever one - the blog post I write as a note on my iPhone over breakfast, is enhanced on the iPad while I fly across the Atlantic, to be rendered and published using the MacBook on arrival at the hotel. Pity me for having shelled out three times for the same functionality, but in having the vision and shear bloody mindedness to insist he knew what we'd happily fork out for in the pursuit of our digital lifestyles, Steve Jobs was an unparalleled genius - magician, vaudeville showman and street corner dime-bag pusher rolled into one.

What happens next for Apple is down to others. It's Jobs' legacy for them to enhance, maintain or ruin. If nothing else, the 13 years since he unveiled that very first iMac have been remarkable, breathless and deliciously good fun to have witnessed and, let's face it, bought into. At a premium, of course.

Steve Jobs

1955-2011

Low Fidelity

2011-09-27T14:53:00.000+02:00

Nick Hornby's High Fidelity brought into very sharp focus the fact that chaps of a certain tendency take inordinate pleasure in ranking things in lists. In the book - and Stephen Frears' excellent, John Cusack-fronted film adaptation of it - protagonist Rob augments the apparent boredom of running his own record shop by compiling lists, such as:

Most Memorable Break-Ups [in chronological order]
Top 5 Films (a predictable but nonetheless endorsable parade of The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and Reservoir Dogs)
Top 5 Subtitled Films
Top Five Elvis Costello Songs
And, for the vinyl-obsessive - Top Five Best Side One, Track Ones - Janie Jones (from The Clash), Thunder Road (Born To Run), Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nevermind), Let's Get It On (Let's Get It On) and Return of the Grievous Angel (Gram Parsons' Grievous Angel).

I once worked around the corner from an actual record shop in Islington run by a Rob. At the time, I was also working with a bunch of Robs. I was a Rob. We'd spend entire lunchtimes in pubs inconsequentially discussing unimportant items such as the relative merits of Scritti Politti's first and second albums and whether or not Haircut 100 were the new Beatles (they weren't, by the way).

Most Robs have now grown up and become respectable fathers, husbands - regular folk. Regular Robs: the kind of people who appreciate the lyric of Pink Floyd's Time: "And then one day you find/Ten years have got behind you/No one told you when to run/You missed the starting gun." The kind who find being English, middle-aged and melancholy are, apparently, part-and-parcel.

This week sees the 20th anniversary of Nirvana releasing Nevermind, an album whose perceived importance in the history of rock music meant that it - or at least its opening track - was, unsurprisingly, mentioned in one of Rob's lists.

The anniversary is being marked by being re-released as both a 'Deluxe Edition' and a 'Super Deluxe Edition', packaged by record company marketeers to add a few unreleased bits and pieces to one package, and even more bits and pieces to the other.

The album in its original form was fine. Adding in a pile of DVDs, bootlegs and outtakes doesn't really add anything, unless you are a Rob who has grown up to have a respectable job and a mortgage on a house with space for such paraphernalia.

So in the same week we read that EMI is re-releasing everything Pink Floyd ever released - on vinyl and amongst an eye-boggling array of formats, box sets and even - gasp - downloads. Same exercise - let's exploit the forty/fifty/sixtysomething's appetite for nostalgia while pulling in the completists who would probably buy up David Gilmour's broken guitar strings (or any other personal refuse, come to think if it) if it could be endorsed and sold.

Such gripes aside, are any of these exercises in repackage marketing worth it? For now, I'll spare you treatise on the Floyd releases, but will happily say that Nevermind was - is - a good album. Now regarded as the standard bearer of grunge, it's release on September 24, 1991 did for the so-called 'alt rock' movement what the Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bollocks had done for punk in 1976 - and with an eerily similar title. Neither are exactly the best albums of their respective ilk, but they carried important flags.

Thanks to its riff-heavy opener (Smells Like Teen Spirit successfully replaced Smoke On The Water - until Seven Nation Army came along - as the only song you would ever hear coming out of a guitar shop on a Saturday afternoon), Nevermind became the most talked-about album of the year...and perhaps the following decade, playing a leading role in blowing away the poodle-haired cock-rock and over-produced, lip-glossed and gelled-up pop of the late eighties.

But as with all these things, Nevermind didn't change as much as musos might think it did. Punk was the same: three years after the Pistols broke through, Pink Floyd released The Wall, as bloated an anti-punk record as there could ever wish to be. Three years after Nevermind, Nirvana came to a bloody end as Kurt Cobain became another successful applicant to the 27 Club (founding member, Robert Johnson, most recent admission, Amy Winehouse).

One of the problems with the Robs of this world is that once they arrive at convention, it's hard to break that convention loose. Nevermind is a good album, but like an unelected hereditary peer, it seems to guarantee permanent place in the upper reaches of many a Rob's Top 10 list.

Such lists, The Word (and former Smash Hits and Q) editor Mark Ellen told The Independent in 2007, have become predictable. "The list I can stand the least is the 100 greatest albums of all time. It makes my blood boil, I know what they're going to be," and lists Revolver by The Beatles, Radiohead's OK Computer and, of course, Nevermind. "It's utterly meaningless," Ellen added. "There's a vast orthodoxy that has built up around rock music where there is a consensus view of what is officially recognised as being classic."

And he's right: one Rob's Top 10 should be as individual as the next Rob's list. Because if all the Robs agree with each other on Top 10 lists, there would be nothing for them to talk about.

Criminal records

2011-09-19T15:11:00.001+02:00

The opportunity to board a plane and put distance between myself and life's current rich pageant has given occasion to tick off a few more items on the bucket list, including a maiden visit to New Orleans. Three years ago, when I was last in the South, I passed up the opportunity to add The Big Easy to my itinerary on the grounds that the city probably needed leaving alone while it continued its clean-up from Hurricane Katrina.

Now fully shipshape and Bristol fashion, New Orleans is open for business again and to accompany the journey there, Mr Jobs' digital jukebox has been playing Let Them Talk, the debut album from Hugh Laurie. Yes, that High Laurie. Worldwide audiences now know him as curmudgeonly doctor Gregory House, while us Brits still think of him as a combination of goggle-eyed Prince George/Lieutenant George in Blackadder, goggle-eyed Bertie Wooster and...er...goggle-eyed Hugh Laurie with Stephen Fry in A Bit Of Fry And Laurie.

Like a trail of offal left behind by a particularly vicious wild animal attack, musical history is littered with ill-advised examples of actors cashing in on incumbent fame by stepping into the recording studio. Let Them Talk, thankfully, is an earnest and half-decent homage to New Orleans and its music. Recorded partly in New Orleans itself - and with a title of admirable belligerence towards those who might sniff at Laurie's indulgence - the album finds the actor singing and piano-playing his way through a collection of original and vintage songs.

Laurie also collaborates with New Orleans natives like Dr. John, Irma Thomas and Allen Toussaint, as well as Tom Jones, who comes from Wales but has spent his entire musical career singing like he was born a few thousand miles to the south-west of the coal mines he grew up amongst.

Let Them Talk is not perfect, but Laurie is earnestly transparent in his admission that it is a celebration of his love of the Louisiana chapter of the American roots songbook. "I was not born in Alabama in the 1890s," he says. "I’ve never eaten grits, cropped a share, or ridden a boxcar. No gypsy woman said anything to my mother when I was born and there’s no hellhound on my trail, as far as I can judge. Let this record show that I am a white, middle-class Englishman, openly trespassing on the music and myth of the American south."

He's not the first white, middle-class Englishman to have done this - as the British blues boom of the mid-1960s will testify. Nor is Laurie the first actor to swap scripts for songsheets to venture forth into the recording studio. Some have been very worthy efforts: Juliette Lewis, for example, has forged a very successful career in both acting and music, forming the punkish Juliette and the Licks and, more recently, The New Romantiques. Likewise Jennifer Lopez, whose excellent turn in Out Of Sight with George Clooney included one of the sexiest bits of cinematic flirtation since Lauren Bacall asked Bogart if he knew how to whistle.

Some - no, sorry, most - actor-turned-singer efforts have, however, been shockingly bad vanity projects: Exhibit A, without hesitation, is William Shatner's bizarre Transformed Man, one of several albums in which the tubby space captain speaks his way through cover versions, including a mesmerisingly terrible Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. You Tube it. Clearly there was something in the water in the late 1960s as Richard Harris also committed himself to record with his cover of Macarthur Park. If only it had been intentionally tongue-in-cheek, such as Peter Sellers' brilliant reinterpretation of A Hard Days Night - performed as Laurence Olivier playing Richard III.

In 1968 a young Joe Pesci - yes, he of the seriously psychotic turn in Goodfellas ("You think I'm funny?") - recorded a mainstream album called Little Joe Sure Can Sing. The record included another Beatles cover, a creditable working of Got To Get You Into My Life, with Pesci sounding a lot like Neil Sedaka. We will gloss over Pesci's follow-up record, Vincent LaGuardia Gambini Sings Just for You, which was made 30 years later to cash in on his role in My Cousin Vinny. It featured a rap song, Wise Guy. 'Nuff said.

The actor-turned-musician oeuvre contains plenty more nightmares: David Hasselhoff's leather trouser-clad rock superstar status in Germany may say more about German musical taste - or lack of - but then I did once willingly own a copy of Bruce Willis' horrendous ego trip The Return Of Bruno. Exploiting his smirk-laden Moonlighting fame, Willis rattled through a bar-room covers roster of soul standards - including The Staple Singers' Respect Yourself, which even troubled the charts. Luckily, that was his only record. Shame Don Johnson didn't stop at one: he not only made two (awful, over-produced 80s schlock) but even had the nerve to release a greatest hits compilation based on his two-record canon called, laughingly, The Essential.

Of course there are many examples of pop stars going in the other direction: Elvis Presley made 31 movies which, though mostly dreadful teen fluff vehicles for either staged song sequences or driving cars very fast against a studio backdrop, still made more than $150 million at the box office. Then there are Mick Jagger's turns in Nic Roeg's Performance and in Freejack, Meatloaf has had quite an extensive film and television career, and Phil Collins, who had been a child actor, turned up in Miami Vice and starred in Buster - to name but a few. And, of course, Mr Bowie - the cracked actor himself - has a long list of film appearances, including The Man Who Fell To Earth, Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence and, most recently, The Prestige.

But to return to actors making records, and indeed to the current roadtrip, one more item on the bucket list has been to finally watch Crazy Heart. Jeff Bridges stars as washed-up country singer-songwriter Bad Blake, whose career has descended into a permanent haze of whiskey fumes as he drinks and drives his way from low-rent bar gig to low-rent bar in a battered old Chevy Suburban, chalking up marriages like frequent flyer miles.

Blake - an apparent amalgam of various real country performers including Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson (whom Bridges uncannily resembles) - calls into Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he falls romantically for single mother and journalist Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Vowing to get himself clean, sober, he attempts to pull his career back up to earn decent money in an effort to hold on to his relationship with Jean and her son.

It's all enjoyably bittersweet stuff, and Bridges turns in another fine performance, well worthy of the 2010 Oscar he won for it. Bridges also performs all of Bad Blake's songs himself, a reflection of his real-life talent as a pianist and guitar player.

Bridges has just released his second album, the eponymous Jeff Bridges, having been signed this year to the legendary Blue Note Records. The album of country songs reunites Bridges with T-Bone Burnett, the American roots music producer behind the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss hit Raising Sand, BB King's excellent One Kind Favor, and the soundtracks to Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and the Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line. Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, Jeff Bridges is very good, if you like country, and while it's unlikely to bother the Grammies, it is certainly authentic, well intended and the product of an actor who actually can sing. As opposed to an actor who only thinks he can...

Out of ammo, God save the King

2011-09-17T16:01:00.001+02:00

It's a cold, crisp but vividly sunny Sunday morning in November. Hatted, gloved and generally protected against the elements of the early Dutch winter, I'm walking amongst the dead.

Around me are the graves of soldiers. Captains lie next to privates, enlisted alongside conscripted, boys and men. All are casualties of one of the bravest, and yet most ill-judged operations of the Second World War, the Battle of Arnhem.

Known now as much for Richard Attenborough's star-studded 1977 film A Bridge Too Far, it erupted 66 years ago today on Sunday, September 17, 1944, when thousands of British troops landed by parachute and gliders into the fields north-west of Arnhem in the Netherlands.

The Arnhem mission was the final element of Operation Market Garden, a bold attempt to capture the bridges over the rivers Waal, Maas and Rhine, which would enable the Allies to push into Germany and end the war by Christmas. By the beginning of September 1944, Allied confidence was high: they had successfully invaded France on D-Day in June and then broken out of Normandy to liberate Paris and Brussels in the space of two months. Confidence was high, and General Bernard Montgomery, the enigmatic British military hero of the North African campaign, ambitiously devised Market Garden with the view that its penetration of Germany would make as good progress as the Allies had made from the beaches.

Market Garden's success relied on the deployment of over 30,000 airborne troops - many behind German lines - to take the Dutch cities of Eindhoven and Nijmegen as well as Arnhem, the furthest of the three. Intelligence reports had suggested that German tanks were hidden around Arnhem, but the British command - under political pressure to prosecute the mission - dismissed the information, infamously predicting that German opposition would be light - "old men and boys on bicycles". It was to prove to be anything but.

On the morning of the 17th, 2000 transport planes and gliders took off from England, laden with troops, vehicles and armour. Paratroopers of the British 1st Airborne Division landed just north-west of Arnhem, at Oosterbeek, from where they started for their main objective - the distinct arched bridge across the Rhine. The idea was to hold the bridge until tanks of the British XXX [30] Corps - commanded by the colourful General Brian Horrocks - arrived to shore up the crossing. However, logistics and German resistance along the road from Eindhoven slowed Horrocks' progress. Outside Arnhem, the Airborne troops encountered resolute German defence - far tougher than had been expected - taking casualties as well as German prisoners. Into the bargain, the British found that a large proportion of their radio equipment was either faulty or had perished in the glider landings.

Eventually, a Parachute Regiment force led by Lt. Colonel John Frost reached Arnhem and took up position at the northern end of the bridge. Although the Germans had been genuinely caught short by the Allied attack, the German area commander Field Marshall Walter Model mobilised the 2nd SS Panzer Corps under the battle-hardened General Wilhelm Bittrich. Armed with the latest, factory-fresh tanks and armour, Bittrich unleashed an astonishing barrage on the town of Arnhem in an attempt to demoralise and flush out Frost's troops. Over the next few days, the British Paras fought on bravely - sometimes with just their bayonets - but dwindling in number as casualties mounted up. Further down the road, the XXX Corps tanks were making slow, difficult progress from Nijmegen.

By the Thursday morning those who were left - the injured and those who had volunteered to fight on to protect the injured - were taken prisoner. A final message - transmitted by one of the few working radios in British possession - said, simply: "Out of ammo, God save the King". Arnhem had become a bridge too far.

Although some 2500 Paras managed to get out of Arnhem, 1500 were killed and a further 6000 taken prisoner, including Frost. Today the bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem is named the John Frostbrug in tribute to the plucky British colonel who, with his huntsman's horn, gathered his troops with rifles and machine guns to take on some of the most powerful weapons in the German army, commanded not by old men and boys, but by elite soldiers.

War stories have a habit of celebrating heroism and triumphalism. The story of Operation Market Garden is certainly about heroic bravery, but also of epic military arrogance. Rather than shorten the war, it probably extended it: by December 1944, Hitler felt suitably confident to sanction the so-called 'Battle of the Bulge', the surprise counter-attack through the forests of the Ardennes in Belgium, leading to a miserable winter of terrible attrition which could, so easily, have reversed all the progress made since D-Day.

The Commonwealth War Graves cemetery in Oosterbeek contains the final resting places of almost 1800 casualties of the battle for Arnhem. Walking along the well-tended rows of headstones, there is an eerie calm around the woods where the cemetery is located. It is also provides a fascinating snapshot of the sacrifice made by soldiers of both sides. The graves bear ages - 17, 20, 21, 25, 30 - and English, Welsh and Polish names, the occasional Star of David, as well as every conceivable rank and duty from officers to glider pilots, cooks to medical orderlies. Significantly, they also bear the dates - September 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25, 1944.

Operation Market Garden, in total, cost the lives of several thousand Allied soldiers and a large but undetermined number of German troops. More than 500 Dutch locals were killed in the fighting. The Dutch population paid a terrible price in the winter that followed, as they were deprived of food. But their appreciation of the doomed but brave effort of the Allies to capture the bridge at Arnhem and shorten the war in the process continues to be recognised even today. Every year local children from the Arnhem and Oosterbeek area join the few remaining veterans of the 1st British Airborne to lay flowers at the cemetary. As World War 2 - and its survivors - disappears further into history, it's a genuine and heartwarming gesture of remembrance. Remembrance of an episode in military history some might prefer to forget.

Insomnia at the Dream Factory

2011-09-16T14:17:00.002+02:00

Hollywood has, apparently, run out of ideas. Really. A visit to your local multiplex over the next year or two is likely to be a horrendous case of déjà vu as remakes of Footloose, Point Break and (it is rumoured) even a 3D retread of Top Gun appear to underline the current depth of the film industry's creative profligacy.

I'm not, however, knocking the prospect of an eager young director attempting to breathe new life into an old story: Chris Nolan's Batman reboots have been amongst the best movies made in the last 20 years, but haven't attempted to remake, script-for-script any of the Dark Knight's previous celluloid outings. Sequels and prequels are also fine, if they add to a story arc. But what good could possibly come from redoing Footloose, a dreadful Kevin Bacon vehicle to start with, made worse by Kenny Loggins' theme song?

"Beyond improvement" may be superlative praise in other application, but in the case of Point Break, Kathryn Bigelow's FBI-meets-surfing-parachutists heist caper, which starred Keanu Reeves at full width of his legendary acting range, improvement would be beyond hope. There is worse to come with Colin Farrell taking on the Arnold Schwarzenegger role in Total Recall. While most of us would see the benefit of a thespian upgrade to the original, do we really need it?

Like endless sequels of Die Hard (run for the hills - a fifth is coming), Terminator (another rumoured - possibly featuring Arnie as an angry cyborg from the future hunting down divorce lawyers) and, yawn, another Beverly Hills Cop, there must be a slew of thirtysomething producers who clearly had their heads buried in Sesame Street during the 80s. Have they simply failed to notice these films have already had their time? Why else are we likely to see Red Dawn being remade with the Russian invasion of the original's premise replaced by Chinese soldiers landing on American soil.

The mainstream film industry long ago stopped being anything of any wholesale artistic integrity. Today it's just another FMCG business. Focus groups and demographics determine content and drive the mass production of sequels, franchises and the inexplicable rise of 3D, a medium no one - as far as I recall - asked for, and yet no visit to the multiplex today is complete without being handed a pair of imitation Wayfarers to enjoy the "enhanced reality".

“The studios have lost their nerve,” a senior movie executive told The Times this week. “There’s original writing out there. What’s lacking is the balls to give it a chance. That’s why you’re being fed sequels, superheroes and remakes.”

Some of this commercial risk aversion isn't particularly new, of course. The so-called 'Golden Age' of cinema was all about exploiting the box office pull of marquee names. But like so many aspects of the entertainment industry, creativity is being usurped by homogenous predictability. I know mainstream cinema subsidies more interesting, eclectic filmmaking; I understand that for films of the quality of The Godfather, Schindler's List, Apolcalypse Now! and Taxi Driver to be made we also need Pirates Of The Caribbean and its brethren to fund them. But how long can a cash cow be milked?

This brings me neatly to yet another home video release from the Star Wars series: when junior school resumed for the Autumn term in early September 1977, the classroom chatter was dominated by how many times everyone had seen Star Wars over the previous six weeks.

Long before we were overloaded with convoluted back stories, CGI-infested prequels and the revelation that the first three films were actually the last three, we had an entertaining movie. Star Wars quite unashamedly nodded to the swashbuckling Saturday morning matinees of George Lucas' youth, coupled with Second World War epics like Guy Hamilton's Battle of Britain. It introduced us to the surround sound experience, with the famous opening scene - now used excessively in science fiction - of a large, rumbling Imperial battlecruiser filling the frame from, apparently, behind the viewer. It was an incredible experience.

In 1977 there was no mention of "A New Hope", The Empire Strikes Back or Return Of The Jedi. But just after the first sequel appeared, the new medium of home video started to take off, and all of a sudden, Star Wars became Episode IV: A New Hope. In the years since, the original three films have been re-released theatrically, on VHS, on LaserDisc (technology dear old Philips first developed in 1969) and on DVD a number of times.

Now, as if our video shelves don't have enough copies of the whole sequence, not to mention all the other paraphernalia and Lego we've been peddled over the last 34 years - the inevitable Blu-ray Disc box set is being released today - Star Wars: The Complete Saga.

Blu-ray, perhaps the final suck at the optical disc teat, has given Hollywood a vital lifeline to plunging home entertainment sales. Those truly fussed by the additional quality the medium offers, have embraced the medium enthusiastically. But with online movie distribution clearly the way forward - offering both HD quality and the convenience of not having to find shelf space for all those movies you buy but only watch once - Blu-ray is likely to be the last instalment of a movie franchise in its own right.

I'm sure Blu-ray releases of the Star Wars sextet will be hugely popular. I'm sure the HD picture quality will be spectacular, perhaps to the extent where the viewer pays more attention to the cinematography than the wooden script of The Phantom Menace. I'm sure the 6.1 DTS sound will add crispness to Ewan McGregor's scenery-chewing dialogue in Episodes I-through-III.

But, knowingly drawing accusations of being an old fart for saying this, nothing can recreate the first time that spaceship appeared from Row Z, the sound swelling over and around my head, and a truly unique movie experience, about a galaxy far, far away, kicking into gear.

Unplugged at last

2011-09-15T17:44:00.000+02:00

With the majority of summer tans now less deep mahogany as peeling like a Minnesota blizzard, What Would David Bowie Do? has finally down-tooled, thrown a selection of tastefully decorated Tommy Bahama shirts into a bag and jetted away for its first proper break of 2011.

In so doing, colleagues have been left behind still trying to get on top of the e-mail deluge that mounted, like pizza delivery leaflets behind the front door, during the Great August Exodus, when the office made the Marie Celeste look like Oxford Street on Christmas Eve.

As I sink the first of many cold ones to toast Brer Rest and Brer Relaxation, I'll be counting on the goodwill of others to ensure my week-long sojourn is uninterrupted by the expectations placed upon the modern worker bee. In particular, I hope the Out-of-Office notification is actually heeded, and I don't receive any of those "I know you're on holiday, but I just wanted to grab a couple of minutes of your time" phone calls that beggar belief at their downright ill-consideration.

The nerve of these calls notwithstanding, it is, sadly, a facet of modern working life that, thanks to the electronic age, time off is rarely that. More than a third of us now have a smartphone with ownership rising at a phenomenal rate. But in these uncertain and insecure times, taking time out to recharge the batteries is regarded by some as high risk, and by others - clearly on the extreme edge of rational thought - an act of professional perversion worthy of the white feather of conscientious objection.

As each summer in our 24/7-connected world comes along, more and more workers are taking to their holiday sun loungers with paperback, Factor 50 and a BlackBerry. Worse still are those who take their company laptops with them. I've even been on conference calls where the sound of crashing waves and partners complaining about sand in awkward places can be heard in the background.

Can we, today, realistically switch off completely while on holiday? Some manage just fine. Others struggle to make the transition between replacing the proverbial bowler hat and umbrella with the four-pointed handkerchief. Some find a system ("I'll check my e-mail once a day while the wife takes a shower and then I'm done"). Others don't, judging by the frequency throughout the working day with which I received e-mails in August from people who were meant to be amid their kith and kin on a beach.

There was a time when going on holiday meant queuing up to use a public pay phone if you had any reason to connect with home, office or both. Now we don't even send postcards - we have the tools at our disposal. It's our own fault.

Or is it. A study earlier this year by Virgin Atlantic found that a quarter of bosses thought it was acceptable to call an employee while they were on holiday. Worse, 14 per cent of employers have even telephoned minions to reprimand them during their holiday! Choosing exotic timezones for a holiday might thwart managers (though not all) ringing up in the middle of the night, but the study found that Europeans choosing a European destination for a holiday dramatically increased the chances of a boss calling on the grounds that they were 'only' in Europe.

If you're self-employed, an eminent heart surgeon or Prime Minister of a country suddenly overun by hooded youths torching shops and stealing sportswear, then the interrupted holiday comes with the territory. The poor old US President can't travel anywhere without a Navy officer standing behind him carrying 'The Football', the briefcase containing the codes to start nuclear war. For everyone else, nearly a quarter of adults don't think they're paid enough to warrant employers calling up during their holiday, even if possession of a company-supplied mobile phone gave greater justification for doing so.

Technology is to blame. It's not just the fact that digital umbilical cords like the BlackBerry make it easier to stay on top of work - for some it's just a force of habit. We Brits, apparently will check our mobile phone for e-mail messages up to 12 times a day while on holiday and, over the course of a two-week holiday, send as many as nine e-mails or text messages.

For Americans, who typically only get a couple of weeks off a year, giving up precious holiday time to deal with the office carries greater risks than just a ticking off from the significant other. Studies several years ago found that Americans who didn't take holidays stood a higher chance of developing heart disease, and the risk of a heart attack increased by a third. Spending your holiday at the bottom of a beer glass, of course, may not exactly reduce the chance of a major cardiovascular episode, but taking a week or two off is, most therapists agree, as beneficial as ensuring eight hours' uninterrupted sleep every night.

So, while it's impossible to completely drown out the cacophonous soundtrack created by the electronic noise of modern life, it may be better to get stressed out by not answering the phone when the boss dials up during your holiday, than accepting the call. After all, there's an off-switch on your phone for a reason.

Ten Years On

2011-09-11T08:27:00.000+02:00

"From the firefly, a red orange glow.

See the face of fear, running scared in the valley below."

Bullet The Blue Sky, U2, 1987

Ben Hughes was an 11-year-old Massachusetts schoolboy on the day the world changed forever. "When I arrived home [from school] I asked my mother if I could watch the news reports, and for what seemed like days we sat there, in both awe and terror. It was the first moment in my short life where I felt entirely helpless."

Hughes wasn't alone on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. His nation's president was helpless. And we were helpless, too, as we watched the enflamed North and South towers of the World Trade Center and saw people jumping from windows 100 floors up - choosing that over being burned alive.

Ten years on, a generation has grown up in a world changed forever. Almost 2700 families still grieve for the loved ones who vaporised in the toxic pile of concrete, steel and flesh that the Twin Towers became, little more than an hour after Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi sliced them open with the planes they were piloting.

Husbands and wives still ache at the absence of wives and husbands who went out to work one day but didn't return. A city remembers the firefighters who went up a staircase and never came back down. Proud parents, partners and children remember the courage of those who tried to do something about it before perishing in a Pennsylvania field.

Ten years on, there are still troops in Afghanistan, conducting what began as a fightback but has become another attritional war in that country's long and bloody history of attritional conflict. Osama Bin Laden may be dead, but air travel remains more inconvenience than convenience thanks to his followers who continue to regard commercial aviation as a viable platform for further savage mayhem.

Ten years on, people still struggle to make sense of it all. Myself included. Trying to understand what and how and why 19 young men could carry out such an audacious act of searing violation. The roots, origins, motivation and planning of the 9/11 attacks have been examined inside and out by commissions and investigative journalists alike. The conspiracy theorists have had their say - some with arguments that definitely warrant explanation.

In the run-up to today's tenth anniversary of 9/11, the hand-wringing has intensified. More theories as to what may or may not have happened and what should or shouldn't have been done. With every year beyond the original event, more information comes to light - tapes of air traffic controllers, the decision-making of military officials, and new insights into the hijackers themselves, all adding further pixel-level detail to the picture of that day.

Knowing more might help understand it more, but only just. Yes, Bin Laden had declared war on American decadence and, yes, New York represented that. Yes, Bin Laden wanted to punish America for its post-Gulf War military presence in his Saudi homeland and, yes, Washington D.C. and the Pentagon represented that. But with terrorism, beneath the ideology - flawed or not - beats a psychopathic appetite for carnage.

Poignant reflection
Of all the countless documentaries, books and articles about 9/11, the most poignant media reflection on the atrocity came from an unlikely and, on initial thought, inappropriate source.

David Letterman returned to his late night CBS talk show on September 17, 2001, a week after the attacks removed all entertainment programming from the 'big four' US TV networks' schedules.

The Late Show has always been a 'New York show’, recorded at the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway. That Monday night it opened without its usual Manhattan-themed opening titles - just a fluttering American flag.

Letterman sat behind his chat show-staple desk, with a sombre expression on his face. "This is our first show on the air since New York and Washington were attacked," he intoned, "and I need to ask your patience and indulgence here because I want to say a few things, and believe me, sadly, I’m not going to be saying anything new, and in the past week others have said what I will be saying here tonight far more eloquently than I’m equipped to do. But, if we are going to continue to do shows, I just need to hear myself talk for a couple of minutes, and so that’s what I’m going to do here."

Now whether you regard this as indulgent, mugging for the cameras, or over-the-top American sentimentalism, Letterman's apparently unscripted opening monologue remains one of the most emotionally charged moments I've ever seen on television. It ran for the best part of 20 minutes and was a more impassioned, more heartfelt and display of raw emotional expression that I'd seen or read or heard in any presidential speech or newspaper leader column on the 9/11 attacks - then or since.

"I just want to go through this," Letterman continued, "and again, forgive me if this is more for me than it is for people watching, I’m sorry, but uh, I just, I have to go through this, I’m…", and he broke off to gather his composure.

"The reason we were attacked, the reason these people are dead, these people are missing and dead, and they weren’t doing anything wrong, they were living their lives, they were going to work, they were traveling, they were doing what they normally do. As I understand it (and my understanding of this is vague at best), another smaller group of people stole some airplanes and crashed them into buildings. And we’re told that they were zealots, fueled by religious fervor… religious fervor. And if you live to be a thousand years old, will that make any sense to you? Will that make any God-damned sense?".

The applause that followed was polite and enthusiastic, but respectfully lacking the usual whooping and hollering typical of talk show audiences. Letterman had captured the world's hurt, anger and bewilderment. Who cared if it was an act of misplaced religious zeal or an inside job to justify war with Iraq - did any of it ever make any sense?

Folded corners
Commemorating a first kiss, first date, first argument, starting a new job, passing a driving test, buying a house - whatever - anniversaries make retrospection easier. They provide a sense of order, a notch on our own timeline, like folded page corners.

Some don't see the value of looking back; some only look to the future, out of positive hope. I can appreciate that.

Anniversaries of unhappy events open wounds that probably should have healed a long time before. 9/11 is no different. But if nothing else, the 9/11 anniversary draws a necessary spotlight to how a sequence of savage events changed the world forever, and how it led to a further sequence of savage events - Afghanistan, Iraq, Bali, Madrid, London.

If Al-Qaeda's intention was to wipe the look of affluent contentment off our faces, it achieved that. 9/11 brought to an abrupt halt the good times that had preceded it and commenced a decade of uncertainty, jitteriness and mistrust. It wrought havoc on the global economy, and no sooner had things improved, than the world was plunged into another mess we're clearly not out of now.

Materially, there's not a lot of difference between the ninth anniversary of 9/11 and the tenth. And I somehow doubt there'll be much difference between the tenth and the eleventh next year. We have lived for ten years with near-perpetual economic uncertainty; a generation of Muslims has grown up with nothing but hate for the US, Britain, Spain and the other willing participants in the War on Terror; and all this time, the piles of soldiers' limbs have mounted in Afghanistan. All because, ten years ago, 19 hijackers, four planes and the deaths of almost 3000 people changed the world order again. Forever.

Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now

2011-09-06T13:16:00.000+02:00

You know me: likes a laugh. Why else would this blog have covered death, war and football so copiously over the last year or so? So, to keep things light and breezy, let me turn your attention to depression.

A couple of years ago the excellent BBC 6 Music radio station drew up the definitive Top 20 list of songs to listen to while depressed. The station's intention was to highlight, rather than mock, the depressive condition, but I'm not altogether sure the final chart did anyone any favours.

Topping these particular pops were (in at No.1) The Smiths' I Know It's Over, followed by REM's torturously whiny Everybody Hurts and, at No.3, that well-stocked barrel of chuckles, Comfortably Numb. It was the original version of Pink Floyd's opus of gloom of course. The Scissor Sisters' cover might have had a more uplifting effect.

The reason for dragging all this up now is that a research project in Finland has discovered that music may actually help people with depression. A study of 79 sufferers by the University of Jyväskylä found greater progress in the treatment of their condition when exposed to music therapy than those undergoing conventional treatments alone.

Professor Christian Gold, who lead the Jyväskylä study, thinks that music therapy might offer a unique solution for people with depression. "Music therapy has specific qualities that allow people to express themselves and interact in a non-verbal way," he says, "even in situations when they cannot find the words to describe their inner experiences."

"Music-making is social, pleasurable and meaningful," British mental health specialist Dr Mike Crawford commented about the Jyväskylä research in the British Journal of Psychiatry. "It has been argued that music making engages people in ways that words may simply not be able to," he added. "These results suggest that [music] can improve the mood and general functioning of people with depression."

It is well known that a vigorous workout will give release to endorphins (not sure what the endorphin's collective noun is - I'm tempted to offer 'pod'), leaving the excerciser out of breath but on a natural high and with a grin fixed somewhere between Jack Nicholson's Joker and the average male at the moment of arrival.

This goes a long way to explain why exercise is regarded as one of the best aides for coping with depression, amongst many other conditions. Music therapy has, for a long time, been an effective recovery aid for both mental and physical trauma. A few years ago I had the great privilege of visiting Nordoff Robbins, the music therapy charity, and saw for myself the cognitive improvement people with a range of disabilities were enjoying as a result of interaction with music.

So could music really treat those struggling - and I use that word with caution - with depression? Music has always been able to capture the human condition and wring it dry. The blues probably wouldn't exist if it wasn't for downtrodden tales of loneliness and romantic failure. Why else would lovelorn middle-class white boys have fallen for the music of the American South's immigrant underclass?

But is it music itself or the choice that makes the difference? One man's tonic might be Leonard Cohen while another's is Lady Gaga. My own spirits will be lifted instantly by an outing for Solid Air or What's Going On in their entirety, or simply the opening chords of the Rolling Stones' Monkey Man. By the same token, don't count on anything flushed through the televisual sewer that is The X-Factor to raise more than a dull, nauseated pain.

One of the joys of having a decent-sized music collection - or, simply, a fully paid-up Spotify account - is the ability to match music to mood. It's a theme explored superbly in the fascinating book This Is Your Brain On Music by San Francisco-born overachiever Daniel J Levitin (I say 'overachiever' out of profound envy: Levitin is a real-life version of Buckaroo Banzai - prominent neuroscientist, psychologist, record producer, sound engineer, music consultant, musician and writer).

In his book, Levitin opened up "...the intersection of psychology and neurology..." as it relates to music, meaning, enjoyment - and emotion. In particular, he drew attention to the commonality of purpose with which advertising executives, movie directors, military marching bands and lullabying new monthers use music or song to evoke a certain emotional response.

Levitin points out how an advertising creative will give the Ford Focus some gravitas by bedding a 30-second spot for it with an operatic excerpt; the film maker, on the other hand, will use music as part of the narrative, a practice dating back to the silent era when pianists and organists accompanied the screen from the orchestra pit. Think about Jaws and John Williams' tension-building theme, or the pivotal application of Barber's Adagio For Strings in Platoon. For a master of the brilliantly evocative soundtrack, listen to Michael Mann's eclectic, hand-picked choice of music in Heat, Collateral and, don't laugh, the original TV series of Miami Vice.

Levitin's own research identified how the brain responds differently to variations in rhythm, tempo, pitch and timbre. This is something you can easily put to the test: load up your preferred MP3 device with your favourite songs, head to the gym and see how your effort peaks and troughs as your workout soundtrack varies.

I know from personal experience that my response to London Calling and Led Zep's Immigrant Song differed dramatically to the random inclusion of a more mellow track by Richie Havens, but avoid doing - as I did - and including Wings' Live And Let Die on the playlist: the Nordic cross-trainer didn't know what was going on as your sweating correspondent peaked and troughed between the song's frantic rock and stretches of cod-reggae. Even now, I think the machine might have been mistaken into thinking its guest was having some sort episode...

Don't mention the war

2011-09-03T13:35:00.000+02:00

To state the bleedin' obvious, war is neither entertaining nor funny. But this being the 3rd of September provides gratuitous opportunity to offer you my favourite opening to any book ever written - Spike Milligan's Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall.

"HOW IT ALL STARTED. September 3rd, 1939. The last minutes of peace ticking away, Father and I were watching Mother digging our air-raid shelter. 'She's a great little woman,' said Father. 'And getting smaller all the time,' I added. Two minutes later, a man called Chamberlain, who did Prime Minister impressions, spoke on the wireless. He said, 'As from eleven o'clock we are at war with Germany.' (I loved the WE.). 'War?' said Mother. 'It must have been something we said,' said Father. The people next door panicked, burnt their post office books and took in the washing."

The British are often accused of being fixated with events of 72 years ago. Our apparent love of war humour does underline the point. If you listen, however, to the many WW2-themed episodes of The Goon Show - the seminal 1950s BBC radio comedy which Spike Milligan wrote and performed in with Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe - you'll hear an old soldier expunge six years of slaughter. In particular, you'll hear him reflect on the cost to his mental health (Milligan suffered chronic manic depression after the war, which he attributed to the effects of a mortar shell exploding near him in 1944).

As the World War Two generation has receded, the politically correct have frequently stepped in to complain about anyone finding humour in war. It depends on how you look at the subject: Robert Altman's M*A*S*H is generally regarded as one of the sharpest satires on the insanity of armed conflict, especially as it appeared in the midst of Vietnam (a war notably lacking comic reflection, Robin Williams notwithstanding). In the Netherlands, bafflingly, the BBC's 'Allo, 'Allo was a huge hit, even though the Dutch have as much right as any to be offended by occupation-themed comedy (a variable description given the laboriousness of some of the series' jokes...). I've even heard German friends of mine repeat the immortal Fawlty Towers line: "Don't mention the war - I mentioned it once and think I got away with it."

September 3, 1939 was merely the day that Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany. The six years that followed were, clearly, anything but a laughing matter: the Holocaust; the devastation of Poland, Russia and the Baltics, 60 million deaths throughout the world - 40 million civilian, 20 million combatant; the eventual first use of a nuclear weapon in anger; the start of the Cold War thereafter.

But while we rightly remember the days when wars ended - the 1918 Armistice on November 11, for example, or the two-day Dutch Nationale Dodenherdenking (remembrance) on May 4 and Bevrijdingsdag (freedom) on May 5, would remembering when and why these wars started help prevent them happening again? It's just a thought.

Like Punk never 'appened

2011-08-31T23:50:00.001+02:00

Yes, I know. I've begged forgiveness for the obiturist nature of past What Would David Bowie Do? posts and sought to rectify this a couple of weeks ago by offering thoughts on rock stars retiring ('What will David Bowie do now?'). However, I must return to the funereal theme with the question: "Is rock music really dead?"

Earlier this year the UK's perennially with-it newspaper The Guardian lobbed this particular editorial hand grenade into the fray when it ran a whole stream of leaden pieces under the banner 'RIP, Rock'n'Roll. The paper surmised that with the number of "rock" songs reaching an all-time low for appearances on the UK singles chart (less than 3%) of all entries, rock'n'roll had gone the way of just about every individual who has sat on a Spinal Tap drum stool.

My view is that rock's supposed demise - much like Mark Twain and Paul McCartney's - has been greatly exaggerated. While there's a 13-year-old somewhere in the world badgering a parent to buy an electric guitar, there will be rock in some form.

That, however, didn't stop Paul Gambaccini, the self-styled sage of pop, to perform the last rites on the genre by declaring: "It is the end of the rock era. It's over, in the same way the jazz era is over." "Amazing", I thought when I read that. News travels fast from the 1920s.

Gambo's point, to be fair, was to say that rock, having defined popular music culture for the last 50 years, had given way to other genres. Record companies - or what's left of them - have been moving away from bands and focusing their investment on short-term opportunities plundered from the effluence of TV talent shows. I'm not so sure. There is still plenty of gas in that particular tank. Just look at the storming performances given by Muse, Elbow and others at last weekend's Reading Festival.

I recognise that my perspective is shaped (or mishapen) by my personal preference for acts who play instruments, often with them actually plugged in, and who have some understanding that a quaver isn't a cheesy snack that melts in your mouth, but a musical note. So I like it loud? Nowt wrong with that.

Album and single sales may have dwindled to an all-time low, but live music remains in the rudest of health - for those happy to pack a club or, worse, fork out ridiculous amounts of money to crane their necks at a stadium. Television, for many, is the preferred medium. The problem is, the medium is bereft of decent programmes to showcase live music.

With the exception of Jools Holland's eclectic and ever-dependable Later..., options have been limited, on British TV at least, to live specials or the rare (and I mean hen's teeth-rare) occasions a band performs live on a chat show.

Elton John - who, despite a somewhat grandmotherly image these days, is one of the world's greatest music enthusiasts (he still has HMV package up four copies of every major CD release each week and send them to each of his four homes around the world) - complained some months back that there was a dearth of TV outlets for live music.

Reg was speaking at the revival - of sorts - of a British music institution - the Old Grey Whistle Test. Hoary old heads will recall the early days of Whistle Test, fronted by Richard Williams and 'Whispering' Bob Harris - both ex-music hacks (replicated in later seasons by the likes of Mark Ellen and David Hepworth). Between it's inception in 1971 until its 1987 finale, Whistle Test captured the mood as psychedelia gave way to blues-rock, prog rock gave way to corporate rock, punk gave way to new wave, all until the late 80s brought the show to a jangling, jacket sleeves rolled up end.

The BBC is celebrating Whistle Test's 40th anniversary by having Bob Harris present a sixteen-part radio series featuring performances from the TV show's archive.

And it's a bountiful archive: I recently dived into the Whistle Test DVD box set and was richly rewarded by gems such as Bowie's Oh! You Pretty Things, Talking Heads, Curtis Mayfield, The Ramones, Ottway & Barrett, The Jam, early Springsteen, Randy Newman, Bill Withers and Blondie, as well as the downright nuts, such as yodelling Dutch loonballs Focus, and the overblown, over-the-top nonsense that was Edgar Winter's Frankenstein.

While the Old Grey Whistle Test may have lent itself best to an era when music fans were A) male B) single and C) wore army surplus greatcoats buttoned up to their beards, there is nothing any longer on TV to match its musical spirit, if not its musical earnestness.

But let's not get too maudlin. Pop music may now be little more than a ringtone (evidence suggests that teenage music consumption is today restricted to mobile phone downloads and video game soundtracks), but that's not to say that the good times won't roll again.

"Music is a cyclical business," the NME's Paul Stokes told The Guardian in their 'rock is dead' piece. "We've been told rock was dead before, in the late 80s, late 90s, but it came back."

And if rock comes back, rock TV might too. Nice....

Desperate Times, Desperate Measures

2011-08-30T18:17:00.002+02:00

During these austere times we are regularly informed of the “private concerns” of top British military 'brass' on the inadequacy of the country’s armed forces to operate.

The usual form is that Admiral Dave This or General Sir Jock That will, via the thundering columns of the Daily Telegraph, unleash withering invective on Her Majesty's Treasury for reducing the RAF to a squadron of box kites, and the Army to fighting the Taliban with shelled peas fired from elastic bands attached to classroom rulers.

Ironic, then, that the football team known as The Gunners finds itself in the same position. Yesterday, Arsenal Football Club sought to rectify the abject misery of Sunday's capitulative 8-2 defeat by Manchester United by offering rail ticket refunds for the poor fans who watched the wretched display at Old Trafford. Needless to say, Twitter and message boards were awash with comments along the lines of "We need Arsenal to spend cash on new players, not PR stunts". And they are right.

Arsenal fans have been amazingly tolerant of Arséne Wenger's profligacy, although his dogmatic refusal to break the club's wage ceiling has been equally admirable. Insisting on buying youth over more bloatedly overpriced experience has been genuinely refreshing, even for this Chelsea fan whose club has, at times, spent money like a Lottery-winning chav with a reluctance to take professional financial advice.

Sadly, however, the game has moved on. Worthy as Wenger’s stance may be, the Premier League’s elite has accelerated ahead in firepower. The pace has always been set by Manchester United. But with Manchester City spending like it’s going out of fashion - and clearly reaping the rewards - Arsenal has been left looking like a dilapidated high street, populated only by pound stores and charity shops while the supermarkets have moved out to ‘big box’ retail parks.

Sunday’s annihilation by United just didn’t seem like Arsenal. We’ve had some incredible encounters between these two teams down the years – the infamous photograph of Martin Keown monstering Ruud van Nistelrooy after the striker’s 2003 penalty miss capturing the rivalry vividly.

On Sunday, Arsenal looked broken. I’m sure there is many a Gooner who would have left Old Trafford satisfied – relatively speaking – by a 3-2 defeat. But no professional football team – least of all a club of Arsenal’s standing - should go down to a score closer to rugby union than football.

"There are much lesser teams with much less talent than Arsenal who will come to Old Trafford this season and make it doubly as difficult as they did today," observed Paul Merson on Sky Sports.

"You have got to have tactics," Merson added. "You can’t just have a Plan A, you have to have a plan B. The way Wenger set up wasn’t good enough. You can’t put teams out all the time and just say ‘go and play the Arsenal way’ – that isn’t fair on the players."

David Seaman took a typically more blunt, Yorkshireman's view: "When I played for Arsenal," he wrote on Twitter, "we were expected to win trophies - this is not good enough."

So what now? Inevitably, with 48 hours to go before the summer transfer window closes, Arsenal has being linked with every Tom, Dick and Harry (or Thomas, Richard and Hervé). Wenger is sitting on a cash pile of £65 from the sale of Fabregas and Nasri.

So far this summer Arsenal has spent £26 million on Jenkinson, Gervinho and the exotically-named Oxlade-Chamberlain (a nightmare for the club shop’s replica shirt printers). The Manchesters have, by comparison, spent more than that on individual players.

As insane as that might be – and this coming from someone who thought Trevor Francis was overpriced at a million – the market price for quality has simply gone up. And Arsenal needs to match it. Desperately.