We knew it was him

If you had only ever watched the same handful of American TV shows from the 1970s – let’s say Columbo, The Rockford Files, Charlie’s Angels, Quincy and CHiPs, just for starters – it is likely that you will have seen countless pop-up performances from an equally small group of character actors, such as Leslie Nielsen, Charles Napier, John Vernon and Anthony Zerbe.

The 1970s film industry employed a similar repertory company for myriad generic roles, people like Robert Vaughan, Harry Dean Stanton, Burt Young and, again, the prolific John Vernon turning up in support of or as foils to the real stars of the era, like Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood and, of course, arguably the two greatest actors of their generation, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.

While Pacino and De Niro have, to date, knocked up almost 130 movies between them, one of the most significant actors who appeared with both of them only made five films in his entire career - The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon and The Deer Hunter, all of which were either nominated for or  won the Oscar for Best Picture. The actor's name was John Cazale, and he died 34 years ago today aged just 42. And he was probably the greatest actor you’ve never known.

Born in Boston in 1935, Cazale built his career in theatre, running into Pacino in the process (although they actually met for the first time while working in menial jobs at Standard Oil in New York, in between parts). Their careers – and their friendship – remained inextricably linked until Cazale’s death. "When I first saw John, I instantly thought he was so interesting," recalled Pacino in an Entertainment Weekly interview in 2003. "Everybody was always around him because he had a very congenial way of expressing himself."

It was playing the good-hearted but “weak and stupid” Fredo Corleone that shifted Cazale’s career from solid theatre performer to the ‘almost’-movie star he became. Fredo set him up to play similar characters in Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon (the jumpy Sal Naturile opposite Pacino's first-time bank robber, Sonny Wortzik) and the shrew-like Stan in The Conversation (filmed almost concurrently with The Godfather Part II and also directed by Francis Ford Coppola).

"He had all the qualities I had hoped for in Fredo, and there was no hesitation to cast him," Coppola recalled in the 2010 HBO documentary, I Knew It Was You. As the weakest of Vito and Carmela Corleone's offspring, Fredo becomes ballast between the headstrong Sonny and the apparently naieve Michael in the wake of their father's failed assasination in New York, a position underpinned by his failure to get a shot off after the Don's would-be assassins. Cazale stole the assassination scene entirely, sitting on the Little Italy curbside, weeping.

In an expanded role in Part II, Fredo is the older but resentful Corleone sibling. Although Michael's underboss, through a favour of a favour he is working for the family in Las Vegas - where he ends up betraying his younger brother. In the role, Cazale turned Fredo from the drunken loser of the first film into a sleazy Vegas playboy - whose weakness for women (and Mob vulnerability to hinted-at homesexuality) leads to his exploited betrayal of the clan - and his eventual murder on a Lake Tahoe fishing boat. It is this, pivotal, plotline that leads to Michael's heavy fratricidal guilt for the remainder of the epic trilogy.

In 1977 Cazale was cast alongside Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino’s epic rites-of-passage saga of a group of small town Pennsylvania steelworkers who are shipped off to fight in Vietnam and return to indifference.

As filming began, Cazale had been diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. Cimino rescheduled the actor’s scenes so that they would be filmed first, a morbid but necessary measure to ensure that the one of Hollywood’s greatest ‘nearly’ men would have his final performance on screen. Cazale completed his scenes but, sadly, didn’t live to see the film’s premiere in 1978.

“I learned so more about acting from John than anybody,” Pacino said in the 2010 HBO documentary I Knew It Was You. Generous actorspeak, you might say, but there were plenty of lead actors who owed their performances to Cazale’s acting behind them. Gene Hackman, on the other hand, found Cazale’s shadow in The Conversation a little intimidating and “extremely intense” – probably one of the reasons Coppola had cast him following his experiences with the actor in The Godfather Part II, even writing the role of Stan especially for him.

The documentary also afforded Streep a rare opportunity to open up about her relationship with Cazale, with whom she was dating at the time of his death (and was at his bedside on March 12, 1978 when he passed away).

“We would talk about the acting process endlessly,” Streep said in the programme.

“He was monomaniacal about the work. I think I was more glib and ready to pick the first idea that came to me. He would say, ‘There are a lot of other possibilities.’ That was a real lesson. I took that to heart. I always think about it.”

Streep’s relationship with Cazale was a mixture of romantic love and professional appreciation, Pacino’s bond was similiarly profound: “All I wanted to do was work with John for the rest of my life,'' Pacino revealed in I Knew It Was You. ''He was my acting partner”.

Perhaps it was fate that brought Pacino together with Cazale, in turn bringing him to the attention of Lumet and Coppola, and made him a ‘must-have’ for The Deer Hunter, one of the seminal star vehicles of the ‘70s.

But whatever it was, for five brilliant films and the final six years of his life, John Cazale played an integral part in the gathering reputations of a group of actors who are still, today, at the top of their game. Their success owes more than a little to the character actor with the mournful eyes and pallid complexion, the spindly appearance and the receding hairline who was every bit the star himself.

The angry man of pop turns 60

We’ve grown so used to old rockers reaching their 60th birthday – with The Sun making unfunny remarks about Johnny Rockstar being old enough to claim his free bus pass – that it tends not to garner comment any more.

But today we should celebrate the 60th birthday of one particular British musical institution – the one which launched my media career: the New Musical Express.

First published on March 7, 1952, the NME became, during the late '70s and '80s part of a quintet weeklies with its two main broadsheet rivals, Melody Maker and Sounds, Record Mirror and Disc (not to mention the frothy Smash Hits - a pure pop tome that had started life a postermag).

Pop music was a rather genteel affair when the NME first went to press. The No.1 that week was Al Martino's Here In My Heart). But as rock'n'roll took off over the following decade, the paper became a more crucial barometer of popular taste, chronicling the rise of Beatles and Stones, of the Merseybeat and British Blues Boom, not to mention pitching the rivalries that made the era so easy to write for.

As pop morphed into rock as the '60s evolved, and chirpsome two-and-a-half minute hits gave way to gargantuan wigouts, the NME transformed further into a more serious organ for the more serious punter. Gigs at London's Rainbow Theatre and The Marquee would be populated by bearded, earnest young men in army surplus greatcoats, clutching copies of the NME and the latest album of whomever they were there to see, frantically scribbling down meaningful observations about the 20-minute guitar solos they were then being subjected to.

The '70s became the NME's golden era: it was a decade that began awash with denim and ended with the almost illogical event of Pink Floyd's Another Brick In The Wall Part 2 topping the UK charts, giving rise to the oft-used phrase "Like punk never 'appened". The '70s was also the decade that British music journalism found its editorial feet, leaving behind the somewhat convivial relationship it had with the 'press agents' of major acts in the previous decade, and developing a voice of its own...with an attitude.

NME writers like Charles Shaar Murray and Nick Kent took on the cultural zeitgeist of the day, becoming 'names' in their own right. There is an apocryphal tale about Kent being asked for his autograph as he sat down for lunch with David Bowie and Lou Reed in a Manhattan restaurant, though this had less to do with his writing prowess reaching New York and more to do with the fact he looked more like a rock star than most rock stars. It was a time where rock journalists enjoyed a different type of relationship with the artists they were covering, and the NME reveled in this coseyness (and a shared enjoyment of certain substances).

Punk was arguably the NME's zenith. It became the maypole around which the paper's most pungent legends danced, be it stories of journalists overdosing or having proper office punch-ups. As the mainstay bands of the British music press focused on their seemingly endless American stadium tours in 1974 and 1975, it became clear that something was stirring in the clubs of New York. Soon something was stirring in London, too, and the NME threw out the challenge for a pair of "hip young gunslingers" to join the editorial team and report on the burgeoning punk scene. The successful applicants were Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill. Under pioneering magazine legend Nick Logan as editor, Parsons and Burchill (then still a schoolgirl from Bristol) sunk themselves into the music scene at a raw pitch.

"I was just a kid from Billericay," Parsons remembers in The History of the NME: High Times and Low Lives at the World's Most Famous Music Magazine, Pat Long's excellent book chronicling the NME's 60 years to date. "[I was] 22 years-old, probably a young 22 years-old, and there were people who spent the weekend not just taking heroin but taking heroin with Keith Richards. Not just smoking dope but smoking dope with Bob Marley. It was like joining bohemia. This was '76: post-Pill, pre-AIDS. It was pretty wild."

Parsons' style of decidedly unsycophantic writing was exactly what the NME was about: " When my feelings about music were changing in the eaely ’70s NME seemed to articulate that," he tells Long. "I was a David Bowie fan and I took my first girlfriend to see him at Earl’s Court on the Aladdin Sane tour and it was a horrible experience. There were people everywhere being drunk and vomiting and the bouncers were very rough and Bowie was disengaged – probably coked out of his mind – and it was not that intimate inclusive experience that the music was to me. Nick Kent wrote a very vicious bitchy review in the NME and I just thought ‘that’s exactly how I feel'."

As I found myself - writing my first live review for the NME while still at school - the paper was open to younger journalists, cultivating a justifiable reputation for tapping into the street, rather than an elevated view of the street. It was with this sprit that Parsons and Burchill heralded in the next generation of star writers, the likes of Paul Morley, Barney Hoskyns and former fanzine writer Danny Baker (who joined originally as the paper's receptionist at it is legendary Carnaby Street offices).

The NME was, though, at times an intimidating newspaper to write for, thanks to the establishment of unassailable reputations and rock star-sized egos to match. "The NME was hard work, especially on the editorial side," former editor Neil Spencer recently recalled. "The writers had more of a demented ride. They'd go off and take drugs with musicians in exotic locations and enjoy themselves, and then come back and write their pieces overnight and deliver them by hand. It was crazy, but ultimately you've got to have somebody signing off pages and writing headlines, and it was very tough at times, especially when writers flaked out as they did. What do you do on Tuesday afternoon at the printers with half a cover story on Boy George? It still annoys me."

Before the NME moved to corporate IPC Magazines offices near Waterloo Station (and, at one point, High Holborn), it had been based in London's Carnaby Street. The street had long since abandoned its Mary Quant 'swinging sixties' cool and had become a rather depressing thoroughfare of crap tourist-mugging shops. The NME office was, according to Spencer, "a bear pit." He recalls: "Everyone had very abrupt opinions on who should be on the cover and how many words everybody should have and who was going to write the lead review and so on. There was a lot of turf being fought over, so a big part of my job as editor was to balance the factions in the paper."

 

Margaret Thatcher winning the 1979 general election changed so much about the UK. A country that had seemed grey and dull, but livened up by the sheer audacity of punk in 1976, suddenly became a colder, more fearful place. Amid the post-punk musical backdrop of acts like Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, Nick Lowe, Ian Dury & The Blockheads and Squeeze, not to mention the resurgence of ska and the Mod revival, came a new political sensibility that pulled the NME into another new editorial direction - and arguably marked the start of the decline in the music press being the force of influence it once was.

Internally the NME's journalists became embroiled in the sort of arguments about direction that the artists they were supposed to be covering got into. As the pop of Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet chided with the emerging hip-hop scene, factions developed between those who felt the NME should cast a wider net of the entire cultural universe, and those who felt it should maintain its denim dependency and write only about rock.

On the bright side, the NME opened itself up to women, both as readers but also as writers. Julie Burchill had challenged the paper as a bastion of testosterone-fuelled rock, and in her wake - and, ironically, shadowing the rise of Thatcher - the paper became more inclusive of women on the staff and female acts appearing on the newsprint itself. There are those who don't look back on the early 80s in Britain with the same lens of doom and gloom. Margaret Thatcher may have made the UK a fearful and hope-free place to be young, but music, nevertheless, provided the release. Amid race riots and anti-nuclear protests, the NME ploughed on, undergoing further transformation from earnest rock fan to all-round cultural observer.

"Music and politics became inextricably entwined," wrote Neil Spencer in The Observer in 2005. "As ever, there was plenty of escapism - it's one of pop's jobs to provide Durans and Hayzee Fantayzees - but there was also idealism, anger, and artistic adventure. There was, for sure, a surfeit of earnest young men with George Orwell haircuts posing disconsolately in the shells of dead factories, one response to the 'No Future' we had been warned of by the Pistols."

Looking back, however, the '80s weren't so kind to the NME, and not just because yours truly posted possibly its first and last Phil Collins live review. It didn’t just struggle to choose between music genre, it struggled to choose between being a music magazine and a watchtower for the socio-political cultures of the time. The rise of CND, the miners strike and movements like the Labour Party-supported Red Wedge came along (with Paul Weller and Billy Bragg as its standard bearers) appeared to pull the paper in the direction of becoming a student agit-prop magazine with added album reviews, a seriousness that clashed with the brighter moments of the decade which Smash Hits covered with delight.

The arrival of Britpop in the '90s gave the NME second wind. As Oasis and their breed unashamedly raided their parents' record collections to recreate, if nothing else, the pulse and vibe of the '60s - whether the Gallaghers' Beatle fixation or Blur's flirtation with the psychedelic whimsy of Syd Barrett - the NME took a ringside seat as the likes of Pulp, Elastica, Suede et al bridged Indy cred with mainstream acceptability.

The rivalry between Oasis and Blur was a boon to the press in general, but to the NME in particular. On August 12, 1995, the paper ran its famous 'Blur v Oasis' front cover.

"It was the cover that defined my editorship," Steve Sutherland, who was at the NME's helm at the time, told The Guardian recently. "It also defined my era and it put NME back on the map as central to what was going on in Britain culturally at the time. And it made us famous for a brief period, so it was all very good."

"Noel Gallagher was saying things such as: 'Blur are a bunch of middle-class wankers trying to play hardball with working-class heroes'," says Sutherland. "It was brilliantly fuelled by both bands' cocaine input. They were both at the top of their game and both very competitive."

The rivalry - one which went way beyond the rough-and-tumble of the Beatles/Stones era - ratcheted up a notch after the NME's news team learned that Blur and Oasis were scheduled to release their new singles - Country House and Roll With It - on the same day. "We decided to have a bit of fun with this and make some mischief," says Sutherland. "We created this front cover with Damon Albarn on the left looking very arrogant and Liam Gallagher on the right looking very combative, and we modelled it on an old Ali v Fraser boxing poster. We set it up as a proper sporting event."

Blur eventually won the chart bout. "It was a soap opera," Sutherland said in The Guardian. "Soap operas are great for people who work on newspapers and magazines because you can become part of the story and it never really ends. We sold a lot of copies off the back of it, and the NME became famous again, and it became synonymous with the glory years of Britpop."

While Britpop was gurgling away like an overactive child that had been overdoing the sugar, 'upstairs' at the NME its publishers IPC Magazines were scratching their heads trying to work out what the new-fangled Internet meant for the increasingly expensive publishing industry. As hikes in raw newsprint prices continued, and magazines started shedding editorial staff left right and center, the NME and its brethren were facing an uncertain future. In 1996 the NME launched an online edition, getting ahead of the curve with its core readership who were soon to start abandoning physical media altogether for their music consumption.

"There are two types of music, good and bad, and genre doesn't come into that."

Today, 60 years-old, the NME is still going, abeit no longer a "music paper" but a decidedly more populist glossy magazine. And, shock-horror, since September 2009 it has been edited by a woman, Krissi Murison, who took over the reigns at the age of 28.

"One of the main challenges I faced when I took over the NME was making a 60-year-old music magazine as relevant today as it always has been," Murison told The Guardian.

"Added to that, I'm not just editing the print version, it's the website as well, and now a lot of people get their daily NME fix via Twitter and Facebook, so managing all those strands is a big challenge."

Perhaps unconsciously drawing reference to the internecine editorial wars of her prededecessors, Murison appears to maintain a clear head when it comes to what the magazine - in all its forms - has to cover: "People always say to me that such-and-such is an NME band but that doesn't mean much to me. There are two types of music, good and bad, and genre doesn't come into that."

A touch of class

There are some artists who will forever be associated with a certain geography, no matter where they end up. The Eagles will be forever southern California, largely because they were formed in Los Angeles, they all had beards, and their most famous hit was called Hotel California. Similarly, Liverpool and The Beatles will always be intertwined (even though they were all living in Surrey within three years of Love Me Do becoming a hit) while Manchester and New Order, the Stone Roses and Oasis are virtually interchangeable.

London also has its associated haunts: think Muswell Hill and The Kinks; Camden Town and Madness; Barking's very own 'Big Nosed Bard', Billy Bragg; Basildon and Depeche Mode; and without The Clash, Notting Hill would just be a West London neighborhood populated by people called Tristram who speak in a cod-patois and whose families own Lincolnshire.

People have made locational misassociations, too: Steely Dan were often considered the archetype West Coast group, even though songs like Hey Nineteen and Show Biz Kids - which had a Californian groove and were about LA themes - were written in New York's celebrated Brill Building.

Other locales go without association: Ripley is a post card-charming, sleepy English village in the county of Surrey. It bears little resemblance to the steaming cotton fields of Tennessee and Mississippi, and yet it is where the young Eric Clapton taught himself the blues of the American South, learning and ingraining himself in its poverty and woe. Ironically Paul Weller - who hates being compared to Clapton (and I mean, really hates being compared) has his recording studio in Ripley, a short drive away from the town of Woking where he grew up, absorbing all that it meant to be a working class mod in the 60s and early 70s.

Even so, you'd be hard pressed to associate either Clapton or Weller with a discernible 'Surrey sound'. Likewise, you'd struggle to see either as badge-wearing representatives of the English working class. Both would argue that class is how you carry yourself, rather than the logo on a shirt you wear.

Bruce Springsteen, on the other hand, is seen as nothing other than a working man's man. Cut him open and you'll find performance-grade STP motor oil coursing through his veins, his flesh made from pure denim. He is the very ideal of jeans-clad, workboot-wearing, plaid-shirted man of the people. And, in particular, a son of New Jersey.

Ever since his 1973 breakthrough, Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ, Springsteen has assumed the mantle of the American everyman, a stirling representative of the industrial north-eastern seaboard of America channelling the spirit of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger through tub-thumping, rousing songs about the real America, full of real Americans living real American lives.

New Jersey, for those who've never passed through it, isn't one giant steel plant. The Garden State is, in fact, a very pretty landmass fanning north and west and south from the Atlantic, with the Jersey side of New York City in one corner, and thousands upon sprawling thousands of acres of farmland radiating outwards. To the north-west of Newark lies the real Sopranos country around Orange County and towns like Montclair, while to the south are the hilly, Rockwellesque, white picketed communities of Essex, Somerset and Monmouth counties, stretching away from the hectic metropolitan. Springsteen himself now lives in the comfortable Jersey town of Colts Neck, a farming community where much of the farmland has been turned into golf courses, but is still just over ten miles away from coastal Long Branch where he was born and grew up, along with Asbury Park where his music career began in the slightly rough-and-ready Stone Pony pub.

This is, however, what makes Springsteen, Springsteen. Americans take him to heart because he is one of them. He is, as they are prone to stating, "meat and potatoes" - 'what-you-see-is-what-you-get'. He looks like them, dresses like them, talks like them. Whereas Eric Clapton, at one point, disappeared into a variety of fashion addictions including Armani suits, Versace shirts and hairstyles that were oddly bouffant for a man of middle age, Springsteen has steadfastly remained of his roots (and I'm not still talking about hair).

He has mostly transcended the cynicism associated with Bono for coining it in while singing about the human condition. That streak of avoidance is set to continue with the release this week of Springsteen's 17th studio album, Wrecking Ball, which extends a post-9/11 reflective state that began with The Rising, the 2002 album inspired by the events observed from across the Hudson that sunny September day the year before.

Wrecking Ball is the Springsteen album for the age of Occupy, and it is no surprise that he has cited the protests as a major ingredient to the album. It opens with the rowsing We Take Care Of Our Own, an uncompromising stadium stomp which largely does what it says on the tin - sentiments such as "We take care of our own/Wherever this flag's flown" and "From Chicago to New Orleans/From the muscle to the bone/From the shotgun shack to the Superdome." It's the sort of song that will at some point in the future, I'm sure, either be the soundtrack for an American political campaign or a recruiting ad for the US Marine Corps.

Easy Money might sound like a big ol' barnyard bluegrass hoedown, but there lies a deeper anger aimed at "...all them fat cats.." still creaming it in on Wall Street while "your whole world comes tumbling down". There is the strong suggestion that on the "far shore" of the Hudson (i.e. southern Manhattan...) the song's protagonist is likely to pitch up amongst the bankers with "...a Smith & Wesson 38..." with an account to settle. The American Way.

Like Peter Gabriel's bittersweet Don't Give Up, Springsteen's Jack Of All Trades adopts the same 'I'll do anything I can to keep the wolf from my door' approach, using a slow waltz and mournful brass to mount another scathing observation that American workers have been reduced to the self-sufficiency of clearing their own gutters and repairing their own cars, overstating that "the banker man grows fat, while the working man grows thin". In its lyrical simplicity - and clear homage to Guthrie's Depression-era songs - it holds another violent reference to having a gun "and shooting the bastards on sight", which is not the most responsible advice, given the propensity with which Americans scale clock towers armed with high-powered rifles when the going gets tough.

This downtrodden theme continues with Death To My Hometown, with its Celtic pipes and drums unashamedly drawing the north-eastern blue collar vote with a tale of urban blight, followed by This Depression, a sonic boom of of a song with a David Gilmour-style pitch-pedal guitar solo, a cold edge to its sound but a sympathetic warmth to its vocal.

The highlight of Wrecking Ball is its title track: arguably the most traditional 'Springsteen' song on the album, it reminds the listener, mid-way through, that the record is deliberately painting the bigger picture of 2012 America, that here is your humble rock star, "raised outta steel here in the swamps of Jersey", and that the rest of the set is his national perspective from this north-eastern enclave. As a good Springsteen song should, it has all the hallmarks of a great concert finale - all big brass (including, significantly, the final performance on a Springsteen album by the late Clarence Clemons) and woah-woah-woah choruses, the kind that fans will be singing long into the night as they crawl out of the stadium parking garage in their SUVs.

To return to the Springsteen look for a second, he has rarely changed his appearance, or his musical tone. He may have ranged from bombastic, Spector-style stage fillers to acoustic mountain folk, but the range of variation has never been shocking. There have been the occasional moments of pop, such as Dancing In the Dark (with that embarassing video featuring The Boss, sans-guitar and dressed as if a stylist attacked him a dark alley, plucking a rather gauche pre-Friends Courtney Cox from the audience to 'groove' into the evening with her).

The title track marks a turning point in the album, as if marking an intentional interval before things take what sounds like an experimental turn. Rocky Ground opens with samples and a drum machine before opening up into a feel-good slice of Gospel. Unfortunately it feels less satisfying, sounding more like a high school stage production that has pursuaded Bruce Springsteen to phone in a few lines.

Land Of Hope And Dream returns to something more Bruce-like, big drums and big theatre (and an undercurrent of Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready), before We Are Alive blows dust off the Great American Songbook with a campfire singalong from somewhere along the frontier trail, borrowing, I suspect, from Johnny Cash's Ring Of Fire as well as a pinch of Marriachi. All very rootsy.

I've always been amazed by the ignorance with people have misappropriated Springsteen's Born In The USA as flag-waving patriotic bombast when anyone with half a brain would know that it was about the toxicity with which soldiers felt on returning to their homeland from Vietnam. It's unlikely that Springsteen sought to redress this with American Land, the closing track of Wrecking Ball, but I'm sure it will do the job nicely. It springs about to an Irish jig, capturing the spirit of Gangs Of New York and the New World hope of Ellis Island and what a jolly old place it is with "diamonds in the sidewalk, the gutter's lined in song/Dear, I hear that beer flows through the faucets all night long". It may not knock The Pogues' Fairytale Of New York off the shamrock charts, but with St. Paddy's night coming up in a couple of weeks, it would certainly make the Guinness flow with just a little more swing than The Best of Enya.

Odd, then, that this treatise of a Bruce Springsteen album should end up in almost cartoon "Begorrah, begorrah!" territory. Springsteen has Irish blood in him, along with the Dutch of his father's name and a mix of Italian from his mother, These are qualifications that, from one side of the American Dream, cast him as an American thoroughbred, with more right than any to look upon his country with a mixture or pride and disdain.

There are, then, many symbols of America, the country which invented branding. You could say that the White House, the New York skyline, Mount Rushmoor, the Lincoln Memorial, the beaches of LA, the deserts of Arizona, the art deco of South Beach, the steel factories of Pittsburgh - I could go on - all symbolise perfectly what America is about.

But at its simplest, Bruce Springsteen is America. America is Bruce Springsteen. Meat and potatoes. A denim-clad toiler, pumping away at a blond Fender Esquire, singing "There's treasure there for the taking, for any hard working man, who will make his home in the American Land."

Real Gone Kid

OK, hands up who had nine months? Come on, someone must have had André Villas-Boas getting fired after nine months in the betting pool, surely?

It was hardly the most difficult prediction to make, given that Chelsea managers are usually fired in January or February, unless they're extremely unlucky and fatally piss Roman Abramovich off in September, as Jose Mourinho did.

It's actually become quite boring to be referring to Chelsea's managers as dead men walking so soon into their tenure; the history of Abramovich's patience wearing thin has become such a well trodden path there's not much point retracing it again now that AVB has inevitably bitten the dust.

The question is what does Chelsea do next? If Champions League and World Cup-winning managers aren't going to last, then Chelsea could just keep going through a never-ending list of people until, probably, they end up with me, and still not find the satisfaction the club is looking for.

Was Villas-Boas the right man for the job? Who knows? Nine months to turn a team built around an ageing spine of powerful egos, with the promise of blooding younger players and importing others, doesn't seem long.

AVB was an almighty gamble when he was hired last June, following the briefest of ascendance in the Portuguese league, with an admittedly intriguing success in landing the national title in Portugal and the Europa League with Porto at the first attempt. But should he have been immediately imported into the Premier League and a club like Chelsea with a trap door so poorly disguised Indiana Jones would swerve around it with ill-concealed contempt?

We are now playing with hindsight. If Chelsea were currently flying away with the league and chugging into the final 16 of the Champions League barely out of third gear, Villas-Boas would be being hailed as a boy genius, football's equivalent of a precocious teenager who has outwitted the cream of academia to win Mastermind.

The reality is that Chelsea are in no such position. A barely contained fifth place in the league, not helped by another anaemic performance, with a resugent West Bromwich Albion recording their first victory over Chelsea since Christopher Reeve made his screen debut as Superman. Next up will be an unnecessary FA Cup replay against Birmingham City, followed by an always-tricky home league fixture with Stoke. And then, on March 14, will be the potential home banana skin against Napoli, as Chelsea attempt to reverse a two-goal deficit against the potent Italian street fighters.

It's all depressingly familiar. Aren't we exactly where we were a year ago? Then we were only to Carlo Ancelotti's second season as Chelsea boss (his first ending with a league and cup double at his first time of asking) and in turn four years since they'd won the league twice on the run under Jose Mourinho. Factor in FA Cup wins and Champions League semi-final and final appearances, and Chelsea's record hasn't been too bad since Roman Abramovich bought the club in 2003. I'm sure there are Arsenal fans who would take a recent history like that quite happily.

So why has such a track record been regarded so indifferently by Abramovich? Is it really as simple as the fact he expects success without question, and no matter who he puts in charge? If Chelsea won the quadruple every season with Dale Winton as manager and a selection from the cast of Glee as his team, would he really not mind as long as the silverware was stacking up?

Somehow I doubt it. Which begs the question, does Abramovich and his coterie of acolytes running Chelsea really know what they're doing? Were Mourinho, Ancelotti, Scolari and even Avram Grant really doing that badly when they were fired? Was Andre Villas-Boas, at 33 and with no comparable experience of football management at this level really the only option open to a club of Chelsea's wealth and stature? What was this ridiculous three-year "project" they kept talking about?

The thing that winds me up more than anything else about Chelsea is the sheer waste - of money, of time, of resources, of reputation, of people. Chelsea's executives really do give the impression that they don't have a clue. They quite happily spend £50 million on a useless pup like Fernando Torres, or blow £13 million on buying an inexperienced young manager out of his club contract in an inferior league, and nine months later wonder where it all went wrong.

So, for the seventh time since Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea we're about go through the guessing game of who will be the next mug to fail to live up to expectation. Will it be Barcelona's Pep Guardiola who, despite creating one of the most exciting and invincible teams in the history of club football in any country, is starting to show signs of weariness (though it shouldn't be forgotten that he, too, was a novice when he became Barca manager in 2008)? Or will it be Mourinho, again? Or maybe one of a number of exotic sounding managers currently plying their trade in the Spanish or Italian leagues who, on paper at least, might tick the box marked Exotic, but once embroiled in the rough-and-tumble of the English Premier League soon find themselves unprepared for the sort of combat that more seasoned home-grown managers take for granted.

And what if Chelsea took the domestic approach, of bringing in a David Moyes or even gazumping Harry Redknapp from under the noses of the FA? Would they fair any better? Would Abramovich's expectations of European glory without question and with style still prove too much?

The point is, no one really knows. For the next 48 hours, at least, the back pages will be filled with speculation and, probably, names you or I haven't ever heard of before, but which make you wonder just where Abromovich's people are doing their talent scouting.

Years ago, on arriving at Brussels Airport, I jumped in a taxi and asked to be taken to the airport Hilton, only to be informed by the driver - who, bizarrely, was British - that it was right next to the hotel, and promptly got out the other side of the cab. I only thought such gags happened in comedies, but it happened for me in real life. I've since realised that it also happens on an annual basis at Stamford Bridge.  And with the revolving door still spinning from the last departure, Andre Villas-Boas is coming out of the 'In' door almost as fast as he entered, another pointless experiment in the branch of Muppet Labs that Dr Bunsen Honeydew-Abramovich seems to be administering in his quest for who knows what.

Management expectation

There has been an awkward vibe around football this week: with André Villas-Boas clinging by the last layer of fingertip flesh to his job at Chelsea, his compatriot and mentor Jose Mourinho reappears in London to meet an estate agent.

Given Mourinho's penchant for the theatrical, The Sun’s blurry snap of his meeting all but lacked the Portuguese conspiratorially twirling his moustache like a silent movie villain, a tinkling piano signaling impending doom for some young damsel tied to a railway track. Which is how Villas-Boas must feel right now.

In another part of the capital, however, a 49-year-old Sex Pistols fan who goes by the name of 'Psycho' was preparing to lead out the England team in a somewhat pointless friendly against the Netherlands. You could be forgiven for thinking that the Stuart Pearce had won the one-off chance to manage England in a competition on Blue Peter, such is the unlikelihood of him being anything more than a temporary appointment while the Football Association works out how to get Harry Redknapp out of Spurs.

For all Pearce’s status as a minor national treasure for his unbridled patriotism – his sinew-stretching pre-match singing of the national anthem and that fist-pumping, post-penalty elation that he shared with the entire country after the England-Spain shootout during Euro’96 – few England fans would say he has the credentials to take England into and beyond the 2012 European championships. It is something that Pearce humbly and characteristically suggested before last night’s game, that he “didn’t have the CV” to become the permanent England manager, a point he then repeated after the 2-3 home defeat to the Dutch. "The full-time manager of England at this moment in time is probably somebody else, not me," he reflected.

While it would be tempting to feel a little sorry for Pearce, having been given the chance to manage the senior team for one game, but his brief spells in club management were less than stellar (although compared with Villas-Boas, Pearce is positively weighed down with experience). His ongoing management of the England Under-21 squad, while positive, hasn’t given the impression that, charged with the next generation of England player, he would be lifting silverware any time soon.

In the end, the sobriquet ‘caretaker’ was more than appropriately applied to Pearce. Although he effectively suited up for the night, adopting the Italian/Spanish style of dark suit, dark tie, tan shoes, tan belt, the end result for England was less than spectacular. It wasn’t bad. Just not good. As caretaker, Pearce stood on the touchline, waving his arms in the manner managers are meant to wave their arms, even though it rarely does anything to make the team perform any differently. Meanwhile, we watched on trying to work out what the plan was. There didn’t seem to be one, although if it was “contain Robben”, it had clearly been forgotten.

I don’t wish to knock Pearce, and he certainly won’t brook any sympathy. If he wants the England job full-time, dressing smartly for the press isn’t really the most important requirement. The trouble is, no one really knows what is required to be the new England manager. If it is managing the egos of a group of ageing stars, then Capello was your man, until his fit of pique over John Terry saw him flounce off.

If it is about bringing through a new generation of players, motivating them and making them want to play for themselves as a team, not for their own individual reputations, then there would be no one better than Redknapp. True, Redknapp’s trophy record at club level hasn’t exactly been remarkable either, but most fans would agree that he’s the best option left untried in the never-ending search for an end to English expectation.

When Three Lions replaced God Save The Queen (the original version) as the temporary national anthem in 1996, “30 years of hurt” seemed a long time then for England to go without a tournament trophy. “46 years of hurt” in 2012 not only doesn’t scan (so please, anyone considering re-recording that song before this summer bear that in mind…), it is also a perilous reminder of the length of time with which the country which founded association football has been potless.

We all know that, however. No need to remind us. No need to drag up the fact that every four years we talk of another ‘golden generation’ who flatter to deceive and fail to deliver. No need to recall how often we’ve heard the phrase “If this team can’t win the tournament, then none of them can”.

The World Cup in 2010 was supposed to be the opportunity for England: a sharp team, playing at the highest level of the Premier League, under one of the most respected managers in football. And yet it ended in durge and another early departure.

Perhaps our expectations are too high? Perhaps 1966 was the fluke Germans still claim it was? Perhaps England – despite being the home of arguably the most tactically exciting domestic league in world football – just can’t cut it as a national side. Perhaps England is the mirror reverse of the Netherlands, which has some of the most dire domestic football and yet consistently puts out incredible national teams, albeit frequently self-destructive teams.

But back to the job of England manager, because no matter what, he will bear the heaviest weight of expectation of all. Which is funny, because the parallel between that position, and the manager’s job at Chelsea is starkly similar. Both are the most poisoned of chalices; both have, over the last few years, been the subject of experiments (be it the shot in the dark that is Villas-Boas and was Steve McClaren; the boutique appointments that were Sven Goran-Ericsson and Fabio Capello; or the “inspired” appointments of Mourinho, Ancelotti or Scolari which ended in acrimony); and both seem to be appointed without any clear plan, just a ‘let’s see if this works’.

The FA is, according to Sir Trevor Brooking, in no immediate hurry to appoint a permanent successor to Capello, even though we're now just over three months away from the kick off of Euro 2012. Perhaps it will be Harry Redknapp or perhaps it will be a complete surprise. Perhaps the FA will do what the BBC did when Angus Deayton was sacked as host of Have I Got News For You, and there's a guest manager for each game England plays. Surely you'd eventually find someone who could win something...

Don't believe the you-know-what

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

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.