Like Punk never 'appened

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

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.

What will David Bowie do now?

In a recent posting to this whoopee cushion of laughs I call What Would David Bowie Do? I begged allowance for the regularity with which dead musicians get laid out on the mortuary slab of editorial examination.

So to change the mood a little, let's discuss retirement: earlier this week it was reported that the man who lends his name to this very blog "may" have reached for the pipe and slippers.

This isn't, generally, in the script. Rock stars are meant to die before they get old, or rock on until they drop.

Nowhere does it say that they should, at a certain moment, chuck it all in for a gold carriage clock and the chance to work on their allotments, or to take up Crown Green Bowls.

However, it can't be ignored that our rock stars are getting on a bit. The Rolling Stones now have a combined age of 264. Mick Jagger, at 68, is still prancing around like someone a third his age (or, roughly speaking, the same age as Ronnie Wood's latest girlfriend), while Keith Richards (67) continues to defy all known terrestrial medical science by simply being alive. There have been rumours for a while that the Stones might be planning one last hurrah of a tour to celebrate their 50th anniversary, but so far nothing.

Retirement was, nevertheless, an option pursued by 60-year-old Phil Collins, who announced earlier this year that he’d hung up his drumsticks for good. This was partly because of a chronic back problem which meant he could no longer hold his drumsticks without having them taped to his fingers (which probably means he's off Chinese food now too). Collins also wanted to focus on bringing up his two young sons, while at the same time spending more time with his model trains and bizarre obsession with the Alamo (the battle, not the car rental company). All fine, I suppose, but it shouldn't be forgotten that drummers generally don't retire. As Spinal Tap once explained, drummers expire in bizarre gardening accidents or on-stage explosions. Or in the case of Keith Moon and John Bonham, caning it.

So what about David Bowie? According to Paul Trynka, author of this year's excellent biography Starman, The Dame might not record again. “My heart says he’ll come back,” Trynka told Spinner, “but my head says he’s likely not to.  I think he would only come back if he thinks he could deliver something that will be seismic. It would be a bit of a miracle if he comes back, but miracles do happen."

Bowie certainly hasn’t released any new material since Reality in 2003, with the exception of an unofficial 'lost' album, Toy, which was leaked on the Internet earlier this year. At the end of Bowie's 2004 tour he underwent an emergency angioplasty for a blocked artery. While hardly a career-ending procedure, his public appearances have been sporadic and few ever since, and there has been no sign of his Thin White Dukeness visiting a recording studio.

If, at 64, Bowie has scaled things down, he will certainly be living comfortably off the royalties of his considerable back catalogue. This is the rock star's pension plan. Long after you've decided to leave behind the touring, the 48-hour studio sessions and the cocaine lifestyle, you can at least be assured of royalty cheques dropping through the letter box from record sales and radio airplay in far-flung places.

Perhaps ironically, one of the few public performances David Bowie has made since 2004 was to join David Gilmour on stage at London's Royal Albert Hall in 2007 for a performance of Pink Floyd's Arnold Layne. It was a tribute to Syd Barrett, who'd written the song and had passed away the previous year. Long after the madcap Barrett's sad reclusion from society, Gilmour - who had replaced him in Pink Floyd - continued to ensure he received his royalty cheques at his semi-detached suburban Cambridge home. Legend has it that they had gone uncashed for a number of years.

For the rest of us, unfortunately, we don't have such a lucrative legacy to draw from in our dotage. Indeed, the idea of retirement is an increasingly distant one, thanks to the global financial turmoil which is squeezing private and national pension plans. Inevitably, many of us from the baby boom and post-baby boom will be expected to work, like seaside donkeys, well beyond current statutory retirement age. Unless we are lucky enough to have 43 years of albums to sustain us - which pretty easily answers the question: what would David Bowie do?

Where it's Shark Week every week

© Shark Trust

There aren't many true certainties in life, but if nothing else, we can be sure to be never more than a few weeks away from another Shark Week.

What sounds like an annual event seems to happen with alarming regularity, as good patrons of the Discovery Channel will know: a seven-day festival of hefty, triangular-toothed fish zig-zagging ominously through the brine, launching themselves like piscine missiles at unsuspecting seals, or chewing away on scraps of tuna lobbed into the sea by "experts" to drum up business for the cameras.

Sharks are amongst the majestic of all apex predators - perhaps the most incredible creatures in Earth's vast and open menagerie. For all their menace and undeserved reputation, they are also one of the greatest pieces of design in both the animate and inanimate worlds.

Cars should look like sharks - most fighter jets already do, and surely boys (let's face it, we chaps are more likely to give a crap about this sort of thing) wouldn't we all want our cars to look like fighter jets?

The shark is an incredible survivor. It has managed to stay at the top of the food chain for millennia, just getting on with being the biggest beastie on the block with the Don't [expletive deleted] With Me attitude.

Being the European landlubber I am, I've yet to see a proper shark up close. I've seen lemon and baby leopard sharks at the excellent Museum of Sciences in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and the Monterey Aquarium, but never one of the real monsters we, Peter Benchley and Shark Weeks passim have been guilty of demonising. I've driven up and down California's Pacific Coast Highway in the vain hope of seeing a large dorsal fin break the surface, but alas, nothing. And that unconvincing lump of animatronic rubber at Universal Studios certainly doesn't count.

All this points to one, simple realisation. Sharks live where they do, we live where we do. Just as I'd be surprised to be sat opposite a Great White in the Paris Metro tomorrow morning, I'm sure Jaws would be equally curious to find me swimming around his back garden.

Which brings me to this week's tragedy in the Seychelles, in which British honeymooner Ian Redmond was fatally attacked by - according to local  authorities - a "rogue shark". The perpetrator - most likely a bad-tempered Bull Shark - is now being hunted down in case it turns out to be the shark responsible for killing a French diver in the same area earlier this month.

Bull sharks are notoriously aggressive, prone to foraging in shallow water, and have even been known to swim into freshwater inlets and rivers. Admittedly, that does change the odds a bit, but you still stand more chance of getting knocked down crossing the street than you do being attacked by a shark - even in shark habitats.

© Shark Trust

Sadly, the Seychellois authorities need to hunt down Ian Redmond's killer, not out of revenge, but to remove a threat to the Seychelles' vital tourist economy.

With shark numbers being heavily eroded by the savage practice of chopping off their fins to make soup, leaving these animals to bleed to death, taking another out for having made the mistake of targeting one of us is unfortunate.

As tragic as it is for Ian's now widowed bride and their families, a shark attacking a human is no more rogue behaviour than your pet cat biting your finger. If we humans put ourselves in someone else's environment - especially when that someone else is a perfectly evolved predator weighing anything up to 700 pounds and over 11 feet long - we must play the odds.

It's the same as putting ourselves - and, specifically, our schoolchildren - on an Arctic ice flow, in an area known to be inhabited by polar bears. These are probably the ultimate apex predators, which means that one whiff of human to a creature starved by shrinking habitat is only going to end badly.

When Steven Spielberg's Jaws came out, the film was justifiably hailed for its tremendous suspense. It was, ultimately, a sophisticated slasher movie, with the chief antagonist being a shark rather than a lunatic in a hockey mask. Sadly, it cast a shadow over an animal that has been hard to lose. We should respect sharks and respect their habitats. And yes, sadly, we will continue to have tragic encounters with them, but not without remembering that we humans run into them where they live, not the other way around.

Normality returns

In the memorable words of John Fogerty, "Here we are and here we are and here we go, all aboard and we're hittin' the road, here we go". Now I know what you're thinking: it was "ver" Quo who gave us Rocking All Over The World, but you would be wrong. It was Fogerty, and with his following stanza, "well giddy up and giddy up and get away", we doff a welcoming cap to the 20th Barclays Premier League season.

Finally, after several weeks of finding something more meaningful to do on a Saturday or Sunday - like talking to loved ones, for example - the real thing is upon us. And it's downhill from here.

After the first eight games, we know this: QPR, after an expensive 0-4 lesson by Bolton are as good as relegated (source: most people); Joey Barton has guaranteed himself pantomime villain-in-chief status for the remaining weeks of the transfer window until Newcastle offloads him; and Arsenal have continued in the manner to which they've become accustomed under Le Professeur, i.e. a lot of attractive thrashing about but no result. You can make up erectile dysfunction jokes about that comment in your own time.

Liverpool, allegedly revived under 'King Kenny', failed to deliver more than a point from their home encounter with Sunderland, while football's very own Charlie Bucket, Andreas Villas-Boas, celebrated his first competitive outing in charge of the Wonka chocolate factory by delivering a 0-0 draw against Stoke with a Chelsea side which didn't look all that different from the last Chelsea side to be coached by Jose Mourinho. Four years and four managers ago.

Unlike Arsenal, some things are reassuringly unchanged: Manchester United got straight back into their annoying habit of nicking winning goals in the closing stages of a game, after West Brom had held them at 1-1 for the best part of 45 minutes. Throw into the mix the fact that Alan Hansen hasn't come up with any new insight or analysis on Match of the Day (viz: "they lack pace", "they've got strength and depth", "the have fantastic pace", "they lack any strength or depth" - apply to the team of your choosing).

So the opening weekend of the Premier League has come and gone with the most remarkable stat being that no home side recorded a win in any of the fixtures played. Spurs-Everton will wait for another day, thanks to a group of morons in hoodies, so we only have Manchester City's band of mercenaries tomorrow night to give us a home win as they take on Prem new boys Swansea at Eastlands.

You would expect this encounter will follow the script. If it doesn't, two things will happen: firstly, there will be one or two beads of sweat rolling down temples within the well appointed court of Sheikh Mansour. Second, a large percentage of us who follow the beautiful game will yawn, tediously, in acceptance of the reality that we are now in the Phoney War of the Premier League, echoing that period between September 1939 and the spring of 1940 when nothing much happened between anyone, save Hitler's occupation of Poland, and various diplomats writing very cross letters indeed.

This having been the opening weekend of the 2011-12 Premier League, we have already been provided with the most irrelevant thing since the book of Italian motoring etiquette was published - the first league table of the season. I'm sure, right now, Bolton fans are positively beside themselves at being top of the league on alphabetical grounds, and that there are young lads in Lancashire who will cherish this moment until their dying days. I'm sure they will pay little attention to the binary nature of the points table after Game One. But, what the hey - when every pundit to a man (and the odd woman) is predicting another Man U, Chelsea, Man City, Liverpool/Arsenal final four - or any combination therein - optimism over Bolton's current position is as misplaced as predicting a Lib-Dem landslide at 8pm on election night. Sorry son - it ain't gonna happen.

Don't shoot the Messenger

At the end of a week in which Neanderthal instincts came to the fore in Tottenham, Clapham, Croydon and other parts of England, we are told that the human brain may have reached the limit of its development, and may even be genetically starting to shrink. 

Being the energy hog that it is (you'll have burned five calories just reading this post), scientists believe that our brains are finding ways to conserve energy, and shrinking - perhaps to the size of our early ancestors' brains - is a possibility. 

This follows another recent piece of neurological research which suggested that computers and the Internet are causing us to use our memories less, as we use the likes of Wikipedia and Google more as a form of 'offline' storage. With most of us now online and more people carrying smartphones around, information is instantly available - so why waste our own storage capacity when someone's cloud server can take the burden?

Blaming technological progress has always been too easy. Caxton's printing press opened up the spread of knowledge, but was also demonised in fundamentalist quarters. The Internet has faced a similar gauntlet. 

The World Wide Web - which, coincidentally celebrated its 20th birthday this week - has, along with most other forms of information and communications technology, revolutionised life and transformed everything from education, commerce and travel, to government, economic development and social interaction. The list of things we just did differently before Tim Berners-Lee came up with his interconnected network is endless.

But just because a group of hooded miscreants, who've bought into BlackBerry's marketing of BBM to non-business users, started lobbing wheelie bins through the windows of Currys and Foot Locker, we end up with politicians calling for smartphones, Facebook and Twitter to be curbed.

Weren't we, earlier this year, praising these very same tools for their role in transforming the political and social landscape in Egypt, Tunisia and other parts of the Middle East? Didn't Twitter provide a vital lifeline to the victims of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami?

No sooner had popular revolution in one part of the world become popular revolt in another, than the politicians were leaping on the technology involved in it. Don't shoot the messenger.

Whether the orchestrators of this week's mayhem used BBM, SMS or World War One carrier pigeons to marshall the looting, it wouldn't have made a difference. Those bent on theft and arson would have caused it anyway.

People who have been quick to apportion blame have been equally quick to forget that it was Facebook, Twitter and, we assume, BlackBerry and other smartphones, who galvanised the community response. When 200 people take part in a riot, and 500 come together via a social network to clean it up, I think it's safe to say who the winner is.

England. August 2011.

England. Late 1983.

The Clash - This Is England (Strummer/Rhodes)

I hear a gang fire on a human factory farm
Are they howling out or doing somebody harm
On a catwalk jungle somebody grabbed my arm
A voice spoke so cold it matched the weapon in her palm

This is England
This knife of Sheffield steel
This is England
This is how we feel

Time on his hands freezing in those clothes
He won't go for the carrot
They beat him by the pole
Some sunny day confronted by his soul
He's out at sea, too far off, he can't go home

This is England
What we're supposed to die for
This is England
And we're never gonna cry no more

Black shadow of the Vincent
Falls on a Triumph line
I got my motorcycle jacket
But I'm walking all the time
South Atlantic wind blows
Ice from a dying creed
I see no glory
When will we be free

This is England
We can chain you to the rail
This is England
We can kill you in a jail

Those British boots go kick Bengali in the head
Police sit watchin'
The newspapers been read
Who cares to protest
After the attacker fled
Out came the batons and
The British warned themselves

This is England
The land of illegal dances
This is England
Land of a thousand stances
This is England
This knife of Sheffield steel
This is England
This is how we feel
This is England
This is England