I’m not sure when the glossy French magazine Le Point went to press with its brand new edition, but the front cover declaring Francois Hollande “Le Président” seems a tad presumptuous.
Still, it was clear that Nicolas Sarkozy went into yesterday’s presidential runoff with the rope burns on his lower back still red-raw from the first round of elections two weeks ago.
In the end, the final round was decisive, though hardly a TKO - Hollande winning by just 3% of the vote in an election which saw an impressive 81% of the French electorate turning out to vote.
The outcome was a vote for change. “Un choix historique”, trailed Le Figaro on Saturday morning, requiring little embellishment with the follow-up this morning: “François Hollande président”, with Les Echos going with the more emphatic “François Hollande à l’épreuve du pouvoir” (“Francois Hollande has stood the test of power”), an endorsement of the president-elect's lack of experience in public office.
Like Britain in 1997, France has decided that 17 years of centre-right conservative rule had to end, beckoning a form of post-modern socialism to address what Hollande had claimed was the failure of the Sarkozy economic approach. Actually, France has voted for normality in abnormal times, a vote as much for more agreeable grocery bills each week (which, if mine in Paris are anything to go by, are horrendous nationwide) as much for the Élysées Palace to be occupied by someone with less stardust and fewer famous connections.
Quite how normal France will become under the somewhat dry Hollande remains to be seen. He has promised to increase taxes by Eur 40 billion to fund increased public spending, at a time when the French budget deficit needs to be reduced by Eur 18 billion over the next year or so. That will hurt the wealthy – and it remains to be seen just what threshold the description “wealthy” crosses. Those at the top end of corporate remuneration will certainly have their salaries come under scrutiny: on the campaign stump Hollande promised to raise taxes on the country’s biggest corporate citizens, with individuals earning more than a million euros a year facing a tax rate as high as 75%.
Certainly Hollande will push to invest in the public sector, including education (he used to be a teacher), creating 60,000 new teaching jobs in the process to boost France’s educational base in the global economy. With a despondent French youth bearing the brunt of austerity, such measures will go a long way to instil a sense of hope in a country where, away from the swank of Paris and its obvious opulence, hope has gone wanting.
Inevitably, however, France’s domestic challenges will continue to be played out on the European stage. Hollande has argued throughout his campaign that austerity measures in the Eurozone have failed and that the EU needs to reset its thinking. No surprise, then, that at the top of Hollande’s dance card is the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. Hollande wants to redefine the EU agreement on financial discipline; Merkel has said “nein” to revisiting the fiscal pact. Compromise seems inevitable, but there is still a lot to be done to appease the European stock markets, with the euro dropping as bourses opened on Monday morning (though notably London was closed for, ironically, the May Day holiday).
Challenging the mechanism of restriction (“austerity can no longer be the only option”) won’t calm nervous investors in Europe, either. Hollande is an unknown quantity as far as experience of government is concerned, but despite his socialist colours, no revolutionary either. “The left should embody grand hopes,” Hollande was quoted in Saturday’s Le Monde, adding: “but it must not reduce itself to grand moments”. His goal is a long-term transformation of France and French society. That, for now, appears a long way off.
Hollande was born in Rouen, the focus of vicious fighting between British and German forces in the aftermath of D-Day. A prescient historic detail for the incoming president, a relatively sombre personality going into battle against the abstemious economic mood. But compared with the man he replaces, criticised for his lifestyle and friends, the highly educated Hollande is more administrator than showboat political superstar. And that, perhaps, is what France wants. What he will have to remember is that D-Day represented only the first 24 hours of French liberation. A long campaign lay ahead before VE Day – on May 8, 1945. 72 years ago tomorrow.
You really didn't want to be around me yesterday. Think of the most excited seven-year-old on Christmas morning, then amplify that level of annoying to the power of ten. Then you'd be getting close to what I was like. Then add in mild traces of hangover, thanks to indulging in White Russians with visiting rock stars at 2.30 in the morning.
I was probably best left alone, but that's pretty much how I should always be on FA Cup Final Saturday. I am just too excited by a spectacle, an event, an amassing of people around the world to watch a football match that will conclude several months of endeavour for both the biggest and the smallest teams in England.
This year, however, some chinless arse chose to move the fixture from its traditional kick-off to 5.15pm. 5.15pm on a Saturday is not a football kick-off time - it's when the news starts, or a Tom & Jerry cartoon, or some ghastly entertainment show with Noel Edmonds. Not the FA Cup Final.
The Cup Final kicks off at 3pm. End of discussion. It doesn't get moved to accommodate a lunchtime kickoff elsewhere, as there shouldn't be any other matches taking place on Cup Final Saturday. Nor should it be taking place at teatime simply to build an audience for Britain's Got Talent, or some other God-awful alleged talent show with a similarly grammatically-challenged name.
The FA Cup Final is more than just a football match. It is THE football match. It's a global event, watched around the world by 60 million people, the climax to the oldest football competition in the world. It is about tradition, which is why yesterday's final between Chelsea and Liverpool was about more than just whether it was a decent 90 minutes of football or not.
To the non-footballist, that might sound absurd, but the reason for my childlike skittishness each year - regardless of whether my team features in it or not - is what the Cup Final represents. Over successive years since I was a child, the Cup Final meant being in front of the TV at noon to watch the build-up - interviews with players present and old, the pundits and the minor celebrities who suddenly come out of the woodwork with a declared interest for one of the finalists or the other. Or Bruce Forsyth, who manages to turn up in any case.
Before the kick-off you have the obligatory live shots of the team buses arriving at Wembley, the players walking across the Hallowed Turf™in their Cup Final suits, and then, as the teams start their warm-up routines, an hour or so of endless conjecture from anyone with a half-opinon about how the game will go.
Being at the game itself is a different experience altogether. There is nothing - nothing - to compare with hearing 80,000 people at Wembley singing Abide With Me followed by God Save The Queen (the original version, I should add, not the Sex Pistols' cover....) before the match gets underway, and then watching the incongruous sight of the regimental band of the Grenadier Guards criss-crossing the turf at half-time playing Colonel Bogey's March on something similarly rousing.
The "magic of the cup" might be a phrase you'll hear bandied about going back to the very early stages of the competition, when non-league clubs commence their well-intentioned efforts to proceed to later rounds when they might come up against professional league opposition.
And thus, come May, the denouement takes place at Wembley. It's a knockout competition, so the two teams have survived through guile, cunning and little luck along the way. They may not always be the best teams, either, but that doesn't matter, as the football is only just one component of Cup Final Saturday.
This year's Cup Final had an odd component to it, and not just because of the fact someone had tampered with the kick off time. Chelsea's season didn't seem to start until March 4, when Roberto Di Matteo was installed as "interim first team coach" and results, team unity and Fernando Torres' shooting boots all started to go the right way.
Liverpool have had a similarly indifferent season, with an expensive striker (Carroll) proving profligate in front of goal, and manager Kenny Dalglish - the closest thing to a saint, the Dalai Lama and royalty rolled into one person on Merseyside - facing questions from even the most loyal Scousers as to whether he is doing the right thing for the club.
By half-time yesterday, most pundits were commenting that the 131st FA Cup Final was a tepid affair. Ramires' clever goal putting Chelsea ahead at the interval, but that's all. When has this been ever different? It's hard to remember the last FA Cup Final that was an exciting display of football, of intelligent passing and clever build-play, of tactical ingenuity and perfect finishing. Watch any tie in the earlier rounds and you'll see 'win at any cost' being the motto. And that's why the Final itself is so much more the sum of its parts. Tradition, as I've said before, counts aplenty.
That Didier Drogba scored in his fourth FA Cup Final yesterday, that Ashley Cole has now amassed a record seven FA Cup winner's medals, and that Di Matteo became the third Italian manager in a row to win the trophy, on top of the fact he made records as a player (1997 - scoring for Chelsea on just 43 seconds), underlines the romance of the FA Cup and what it means to play or to watch it.
Yesterday's game may not have been perfect, but in many ways it was. Blues versus Reds, two teams who've played each other more than any one else over the last decade, a team that was going nowhere fast now competing for the two biggest club competitions in the game, and the seemingly fairytale of a caretaker manager who keeps pulling off remarkable successes (played 18, won 12, drawn 4, lost 2).
So it was a couple of hours late? The Magic of The Cup still exists. Roll on Munich.
“Do not underestimate the determination of the quiet man,” is the oft-quoted protestation of former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith who, during his time running the blue faction of British politics, rarely demonstrated any form of impactful oratorial qualities, and was ritually "shushed" ironically by Opposition MPs whenever he stood at the dispatch box.
With an acronymic name like IDS he didn't stand a chance. It sounds too much like "IBS" to survive in an environment of formerly playground-bullied bed-wetters like the House of Commons. Not that Ed Balls exactly comes off any better in the realm of tauntably-named politicians.
Anyway, I have no interest at all in former Tory leaders but, instead, today, I concern myself with the fortunes of Roy Hodgson, the softly-spoken Croydon lad who took the silent route to seniority in his football management career by pursuing that unlikely of English sporting paths - moving abroad. And he has now been unveiled as the next England manager.
When Woy, sorry, Roy, pitched up at the newly-minted Blackburn Wo...er...Rovers in 1997 he had already managed four Swedish clubs - Halmstad, Oddevold, Örebro and Malmö - along with Swiss outfit Neuchâtel and the Swiss national side itself. Not to mention a little club in Italy by the name of Internazionale.
Only Kate Moss has since eclipsed Hodgson in making good of a Croydon upbringing on the global stage. Actually, Hodgson may have reclaimed that crown by the time he accepted Mohammed Al Fayed's pieces of silver in 2007 to manage Fulham, having added a second spell at Inter, the Zurich club Grasshopper, FC Copenhagen, Udinese, the United Arab Emirates,Viking in Norway and the Finnish national team to his CV. And since then a sorry spell at a politically fractious Liverpool and, until the end of this season, a solid but unspectacular stint at the Hawthorns running West Bromwich Albion.
On paper, this collective expertise makes him an obvious choice for the vacant England manager's position. So why is it that, until Sunday evening when the FA took the unprecedented step of pre-announcing Hodgson as the only candidate to be interviewed for the job, the nation had collectively installed Harry Redknapp in the role - almost as soon as Fabio Capello flounced out of the Wembley in a huff over John Terry's sacking?
Indeed, it wouldn't be unfair to say that news on Sunday evening of Hodgson being invited in to meet the FA's four-man selection panel - David Bernstein, Alex Horne, Sir Trevor Brooking and Adrian Bevington - came as a surprise to Hodgson himself.
Hodgson is in stark contrast to "Flash" Harry, whose wheeler-dealer history and bright orange wife has made him as much a character form Minder as one of the most prolific club managers in England. And yet, we all thought the England job was his.
Even his February residency at Southwark Crown Court on tax evasion charges didn't swerve our opinion that he was a shoe-in at the end of the season to take over England and take them into Euro 2012 in Ukraine and Poland. In fact it may even have, in our twisted football-supporter logic, galvanised our view that he'd be ideal. This is the same twisted logic that regarded the Krays as folk heroes, not that I'm lumping Redknapp in the same company, but you know what I mean - we love a lovable rogue.
By all accounts, it didn't necessarily swerve the FA, either. So why did they, all of a sudden, go exclusively for a manager who'd hitherto been mentioned as a "possible" also-ran in the betting, along with Newcastle's Alan Pardew, Glen Hoddle (again), Jose Mourinho (no chance) and current caretaker Stuart Pearce?
Redknapp's fiscal challenges and residual reputational issues may have warded off the Football Association. If there is one thing we know about the FA, they are as adept at avoiding scandal as a Parisian is at dodging street-strewn dog poo. Just ask Glenn Hoddle and his, erm, beliefs.
Then there is talk that Redknapp had a very different view to the FA's longer-term vision. What, then, makes Hodgson more appropriate? He has held 19 managerial positions - some barely a single season long - and not in that time picked up any silverware. Granted, he took the Swiss national side to Number 3 in the world rankings, and he has demonstrated an ability to man-manage average-looking sides to mid-table mediocrity. That's no criticism. The facts speak for themselves.
Hodgson may be no more than a middle-management civil servant being given his chance - at 64 - to step up to run the one department not on his CV. His journeyman resumé suggests average managerial talent, and his reputation for a somewhat old-fashioned - some might even say stale - style of training does not necessarily indicate a new broom about to breathe new life into England's jaded, over-pampered, overpaid superstars, whose hubris has been repeatedly lanced by excess expectation turning to disappointment.
However: "He is probably the best man-manager I worked with," former Swedish international Stefan Schwarz told the Daily Telegraph. "He had the knack of knowing when to give a player a kick up the backside and when to build them up." To that, Schwarz cites Hodgson's skills in dealing with problems and, countering rumblings from one or two of Liverpool's malcontnents, a professional approach on the training pitch. Swiss international Ramon Vega echoed this sentiment, who claims Hodgson has a good tactical approach. We shall see.
Hodgson will have to win over the current crop of England stars. Today's Sun helpfully noted that, with Twitter the unofficial channel of record for just about every professional footballer these days, there was absolutely no reaction at all when news emerged from Wembley on Sunday that Hodgson was to be interviewed. In contrast, when Capello quit, England players couldn't wait to install Redknapp (“Harry Redknapp would be my choice by a distance,” tweeted Rio Ferdinand while Wayne Rooney posted: “Gutted Capello has quit. Got to be English to replace him. Harry Redknapp for me.”).
Perhaps Hodgson is ideal for England. For too long we have regarded ourselves as world champions-in waiting, whereas in reality anyone else around the world sees England as anything but. We may well have invented the modern game, but in the almost 46 years since we last won a trophy, our footballing prowess has been determined more by the wheelbarrows of cash being lugged around the Premier League rather than any on-pitch ability with which we could be truly compared to the likes of Spain, Brazil, the Dutch, Italy or even the United States.
Bringing in an experienced but unspectacular manager like Hogdson, with his subtle urbanity and suburban newsagent's demeanour, may be the best decision the FA could make. We're not going to win anything anytime soon, so we might as well bring in a manager who'll ensure we won't lose too badly either.
This is the key to judging England. I was recently admonished by a Dutchman of some considerable wisdom who said: "You English think too highly of yourselves, and that's why you'll never win anything. You go into every tournament thinking you are supposed to win it, when in reality there are better sides, like Spain. They win without expectation, England lose because of it." Well, true. What was it that gave us the right to believe we were the best in the world? 1966? The Premier League?
The England job, we all know, is football's most tainted poisoned chalice. Your time in the job is spent like James Bond in Live And Let Die, stepping stone-leaping across the open mouths of snapping media alligators. No one is safe, no one is immune. Even Stuart Pearce has suffered all the usual slings and arrows and he's only been in temporary charge. Will Hodgson be able to handle this any better? Redknapp certainly would have done. During his lengthy tenure of West Ham and time in charge of Portsmouth, Southampton and Spurs he has been able to deftly balance egos and modest budgets, giving him at least one vital skill for managing England.
However, since Redknapp was first pre-installed as England boss by the unofficial selection committee on Twitter the wheels have started to loosen at Tottenham. The suggestion is that the England job turned Redknapp's head and, in the process his focus. Today, even with Spurs still, in theory, in with a shout of Champions League football next season, you could hardly say that the north London club is poised to challenge the Manchesters for the top spot any time soon.
And given that Redknapp's trophy cabinet isn't any more full than Hodgson, is he really - today at least - any better a candidate for the job than Hodgson? Harry Redknapp might be a more colourful character, but this may be the time for the Quiet Man to step in and take over an impossible job.
Stop press: Owls that look like Roy Hodgson - here!
Plenty of things get up us Brits' noses. For a start, we're islanders, which means a predisposition to dislike foreign food. And foreigners who don't respect queuing. And foreigners.
Secondly, we get easily upset when you mess with our music television.
When Top Of The Pops was shipped off to a Dignitas clinic after 42 years of poor miming, a faux party atmosphere and the inexplicable contractual provision of work to 'zany' Radio 1 DJs, there was national outcry.
It was, nonetheless, a mercy killing, but it was received publicly as if Auntie Beeb had slipped something lethal into an elderly relative's mug of tea.
It had been a long time since "The Pops" had been 'destination TV', to use the terrible American marketing term. Conceived in 1964, just as The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were getting up steam, two, even three generations grew up with the show.
In its heyday, BBC1 at 7 o'clock on a Thursday evening meant Bryan Ferry's creepily shrill vibrato and Alvin Stardust, dressed head-to-toe in leather with a gloved index finger pointing straight down the lens; The Sweet camping around to Blockbuster and Mud (with their culottes-wearing bass player, whose mum worked in my local Sainsbury's) jiving around to Tiger Feet;Ron Mael of Sparks spooking everyone out with his his mad stare and Hitler moustache, and Pan's People creating the first stirrings of pre-pubescent awkwardness by as they pranced about to a T-Rex backing track because the bookers couldn't actually secure Bolan's presence in in the studio.
TOTP survived punk and the invention of the pop video. It's only real competition - if you wanted to see pop stars in the flesh on TV - was Saturday morning kids' TV (a choice between Noel Edmonds' highly sanitised Swap Shop or ITV's more anarchic TISWAS) or the grown-up Old Grey Whistle Test, over on late night BBC2. Whistle Test, in any case, catered for bearded musos to "catch" live performances by the likes of the Edgar Winter Band or daft Dutch prog combo Focus. And it was also presented by bona fide music journalists like Richard Williams, not Tony Blackburn and Dave Lee Travis, like its BBC1 cousin.
Given all this, Friday, November 5, 1982 brought about a minor revolution that would have unnerved even Guy Fawkes himself. Because that was the day The Tube arrived.
Broadcast for an hour and a half every Friday evening live from Newcastle, it reflected everything the brand new Channel 4 was about, and everything the BBC and even ITV wasn't. The Tube was brash, it was chaotic and it was at times so rough around the edges you wondered whether you were watching a rehearsal.
The Tube's debut was an aftershock of a larger temblor that had taken place in British broadcasting just three days previously: in the 20 years before Channel 4 arrived on November 2, Britain had got by with just three national TV channels. When you consider that, today, there are more than 30 channels on Sky devoted exclusively to music, a new music show on a new channel was a seismic event.
It's presenters were relative unknowns: Jools Holland had been the keyboard player in Squeeze, and won his gig on The Tube after being noticed larking about in a documentary about The Police, with whom he'd been on tour.
Paula Yates was born into an entertainment family (Jess Yates was supposed to be her father until she learned otherwise...) and was plucked from the showbiz desk of the Daily Mirror.
There was also a never-ending stream of new second-string presenters, such as the punkish Scot punk Muriel Gray, actress Leslie Ash (post-Quadrophenia and pre-Men Behaving Badly), and Nick Laird-Clowes, once of The Dream Academy, famous for the hit Life In A Northern Town.
The interviews were hammy at best: Holland wasn't - and still isn't - an interviewer of any depth, and Yates, who at least had some journalistic chops about her, tended towards grotesque flirtation in most of her interviews (meeting the zenith of her craft with Michael Hutchence...).
From time-to-time The Tube included magazine elements and filmed features, along with "alternative" poetry from Mark Miwurdz and comedy bits featuring Jim Moir - later to become Vic Reeves - various members of The Comic Strip gang (then Channel 4 darlings) and Rowland Rivron, a drummer friend of Holland's.
However, you didn't tune in to The Tube for variety, or to hear Holland losing his thread mid-question, Gray being sarky, or Yates fluttering her eyelids at some snake-hipped rock god. It was about music. But not as TV viewers knew it.
"It infuriates me," The Tube's executive producer Malcolm Gerrie told me in 1987 in an interview for LM magazine, "that we have to be compared with Top Of The Pops. Because when you broadcast pop music you are merged into a market, one area. If Channel 4 or ITV had asked to compete with Top Of The Pops you'd have seen a very different Tube."
As a platform for live music during its five-year run, The Tube provided storming early TV appearances for Madonna, R.E.M., Bon Jovi, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and a little four-piece from Dublin called U2. The Proclaimers can even point to their debut appearance on the show as the moment they took off with Letter From America.
The mainstream of the day was also well represented, with Duran Duran, Culture Club, Simple Minds, Alison Moyet, Elvis Costello, Paul Young, The Style Council, Tina Turner and Whitney Houston amongst hundreds more all performing live in an eclectic mixture that Jools Holland has continued today with his ...Later show. On any given week, Cliff Richard might be on with The Art of Noise, Bon Jovi, and the Cocteau Twins.
What made this all the more remarkable was the fact that The Tube was produced 300 miles north of where most bands, their managers and record companies were all based. It's possible that until The Tube came along, the last Londoner to head up to Newcastle had been Michael Caine as Jack Carter.
Music biz people thought Channel 4 and Tyne-Tees Television were mad trying to persuade bands to fly up to Tyneside for a TV show on a Friday evening. But that's exactly what Gerrie - a proud Geordie then - managed to pull off. "I think that if it came from anywhere else," he told me 25 years ago, "it would be a totally different program. There's an energy and freshness up here that seems a tradition in the rock bands from this area - from Bryan Ferry, Sting, Dire Straits and David Coverdale to even Hank Marvin!"
The Tube also helped put Newcastle on bands' tour schedules, as well as drawing attention to the north-east's own music scene - acts like The Kane Gang, for example, ("Before The Tube it used to be bloody difficult to even get an A&R ['artist and repertoire'] man up here", Gerrie at the time).
As the show gained in prominence, credibility and notoriety, it became required weekly viewing. Just as some radio DJs had become outlets for exclusive first listens, The Tube soon became the show to premiere new music.
On March 6, 1987 The Tube was given a world exclusive: the first play of the video of a new song by U2 - With Or Without You. Whatever your opinion of U2 now, this was A Moment, and the moment in particular that tipped them from simply "interesting" Irish rockers into global superstars.
I was lucky to be up at The Tube that particular Friday. It was the day of the Zeebrugge ferry disaster - I recall watching live news coverage of it in the reception area of Tyne-Tees TV.
By chance, it was the week that Holland returned from suspension, the result of 'accidentally' mentioning the phrase "ungroovy fuckers" in a live trailer that went out just before 5pm. Even for 'Channel Filth', as the Daily Mail branded it, this was a little bit too strong for kids' teatime TV.
Yates introduced the new U2 song and, as its first bars of synth pad progressed, the video faded from black to reveal Bono singing "See the stone set in your eyes, see the thorn twist in your side". Hairs on the back of every neck crammed into the control room of Studio 5 - including mine - were raised in unison. No one then in that studio knew what With Or Without You and its parent album, The Joshua Tree would go on to do.
One thing, however, that everyone working on The Tube that Friday did know was that the show was coming to an end. For months there had been rumblings: concern about the programming by the Independent Broadcasting Authority, the resignation of a high-profile Channel 4 executive because of it, and then Holland's faux pas which resulted in the boogie-woogieist being suspended for six weeks, and the show itself being blacked out for three.
At the end of its 1987 run, The Tube came to halt. 25 years ago this week. Axed in its prime. All had not been right for a while, and the Holland affair merely accelerated the show's exit. There were murmurings from within the production team that the show had changed too much in five years, that it had lost its cutting edge and had started to become diluted. The end, it was suggested, was inevitable.
On Friday April 24, 1987, The Tube went out with a bang. Duran Duran, seen largely as poster boys for 80s glam pop and global warming (Smash Hits used to run regular features referring to the band's copious use of ozone-depleting hair spray), produced a storming live set which went on long after transmission had ended. It enhanced their reputation, no end, and perfectly underlined the strength of The Tube, that getting even pop's most pop bands to come on and plug in, they could showcase their musical credibility as much as their should pads.
Afterwards the production team, the presenters, the bands from the final show - and, I'm proud to say, yours truly - slipped off to a nightclub in Newcastle's Bigg Market for a rousing end-of-show wake. It was a glorious evening, one - which I'm also proud to say - went on long into the morning, as a somewhat inebriated What Would David Bowie Do? and comedian Rowland Rivron staggered through Newcastle in search of Central Station and our train back to London.
Some might say - and, indeed, did - that The Tube was an experiment that went on too long. "To be given the brief that The Tube has," Malcolm Gerrie told me all those years ago, "and to do that at 5.30 on a Friday evening is really difficult." He would have preferred a later show, one which would have been edgier by nature. But even now, credit must be given for a getting away with something which dared to be different, and didn't go for popularity or ratings. Its legacy wasn't the anarchy, or the chaos, or the other rough edges that attracted the tabloid attention. It was its sheer love of live music.
"It'd be the simplest thing in the world to pack the show with videos or Madonna or Springsteen or whatever meganames you want," said Gerrie. "But part of the brief was to showcase new bands. I'd rather have the penalty of lower ratings and have the freedom we've had on Channel 4."
Perhaps that freedom went to far, but today, please raise a hat to a show which, in the pantheon of television, may now, 25 years on, be just another entry, but which raised the bar high for British music television.
What Did David Bowie Do on The Tube - the Dame discusses Let's Dance with Jools Holland
Hear that? That growling noise? That's the sound of indignant vitriol. Football purists complaining that Chelsea have somehow defiled the beautiful game in their unlikely defeat of Barcelona over two legs. For the next four weeks we will have to put up with griping about how the greatest club side of the modern era were "cheated" out of some divine right to play at the Fußball Arena München on May 19.
Well, sorry if it was "win ugly", but Chelsea are through to the 2012 UEFA Champions League Final and Barcelona are not. Deal with it. What was Roberto Di Matteo going to do? Put out a combative side that was weak and exposed at the back but may - may - have scored one or two goals past an ageing Barça defence? Of course he wasn't.
The likeable Swiss-born Italian was always going to park his expensive bus in front of Petr Čech, whether at Stamford Bridge or Camp Nou, and hope for the best. And it worked - the hope part. Over 180-plus minutes Chelsea rode their luck, on a scale of Mr Magoo hitching a ride on the back of Moby Dick.
This morning that first leg in London seems a long time ago. A game comprised of Chelsea punting the ball upfield to Didier Drogba for 90 minutes, with the Ivorian either running with it, falling over with it or, on one solitary occasion, scoring a goal with it, was indeed a poor advertisement football, I'll concede. But you couldn't fault its effectiveness.
So with that slender away goal advantage, Chelsea took to Barcelona a slim hope that they could, against apparent odds, do the seemingly impossible. I must admit, I was not confident. The statistics didn't help. The size of the Barça pitch wouldn't help. The fact that Lionel Messi had scored on his own almost as many goals as the Chelsea outfield players combined simply added to the hoodoo.
But as soon as Turkish referee Cüneyt Çakır blew his whistle to get the game under way, we were into unknown territory. For 93 minutes it was hard to know where to look. Or for how long. Or why. I'm not even sure it was a game of football. Well, it was at the initial kick-off, when there were 22 players on the field.
If there was a script, no one was remembering their lines. After just 30 seconds Chelsea almost had an unlikely opening goal, before losing Gary Cahill to a hamstring injury after 10 minutes. As Jose Bosingwa - one time first-choice right-back and now spent force - came on you felt that the "blue angel" Ruud Gullitt kept referring to on Twitter was preparing to leave and grace someone else's fortunes.
Sergio Busquets' goal for Barça on 30 minutes restored faith that there may have been a script after all, and that the barely-disguised pundits' view that Chelsea had pushed their luck too far in the first leg meant that the second would be a foregone conclusion to their European adventure.
But that was before the kind of moment of madness that hangs a player out to dry. Remember Beckham's sending off against Argentina? Rooney's against Portugal? Add to that John Terry's sending off against Barcelona. What he initially suggested was an accidental shove against Alexis Sanchez was quickly seen by everyone - at home, in the pub, in the stadium - as a stupid and intentional knee in the back. He deserved to go.
Quite what that did to Chelsea may never be fully understood. To the neutral or even the mildly indifferent, being down to 10 men with its recognised central defensive partnership off the pitch, it looked liked the floodgates were being unlocked. The prospect of a side, whose defensive frailties have been largely to blame for their domestic league position for the first two-thirds of this season, holding out for another hour seemed about as unlikely as the outcome of the Siege of Malta.
Sometimes adversity brings out a strange response. There are stories of those who, like the Incredible Hulk, in a fit of pique perform remarkable acts of physical bravery, freeing people trapped beneath a car by lifting it, despite being a seven-stone weakling. Chelsea, perhaps aggrieved by Terry's red card, or by the genuine fear that, for many of them, this would be their last chance of playing for the opportunity of reaching a European final, dug in.
Discipline - Chelsea's - started to fray, and this proved to be Barcelona's undoing. Barely minutes after being needlessly booked for dissent, Ramires chipped Valdes almost on half time and the script was, all of a sudden, in the shredder. Any hope of the purists' dream being fulfilled, and the rightful order of football being restored by Barcelona walking into another Champions League Final and, probably, the title itself, fell royally on its arse as Ramires restored balance to the aggregate.
In its entirety, the second half of the second leg of the 2012 Champions League Semi-Final between Chelsea and Barcelona was not a football match as anyone would recognise the description. It was now a surreal dream, a baffling footballing version of a David Lynch film in which actors speak dialogue, but you have no actual idea of in what context.
Two minutes into the half, Drogba upended Fabregas inside the box and a penalty was given. It was here, however, that I experienced an odd feeling. As Messi stepped up to take what, surely, would have been a decisive penalty, something made me think that either the heroic Čech would save it, or it would miss the goal itself. And so it did. I can't explain it. In any other game - in any other life - I would have expected Messi to score. But in this freak show, this parallel footballing universe that had somehow crossed into ours, he did not.
Undeterred, the Catalans pressed on and on and on, with Chelsea acquiring yellow cards and suspensions for the-then hypothetical final like an over-eater racks up Nectar points at Sainsbury's. Much of the remaining 40 minutes was played within a 35-yard radius of the Chelsea goalmouth. Kalou, Drogba, Meireles and Ramires looked far more convincing as a back-four than the makeshift back-four itself.
Chelsea still had an aggregate advantage, of course, but as time and nerves ebbed away, the odds grew impossibly that something wouldn't happen, even if, mostly privately, Chelsea fans were thinking the seemingly impossible. That, however, depends on your concept of impossible. When Di Matteo brought on Torres for the tiring Drogba ten minutes before the end of normal time, it was the final signal for Chelsea to batten down the hatches fully. All respect due to Torres, but he wasn't expected to do much other than be downfield to pick up one of the myriad balls being punted out of the Chelsea penalty area with the rapidity of an intense game of squash. The casual nature with which Torres trotted around suggested that he was still warming up, rather than on the field of play.
And then it happened. Like some gem of a secret track hidden on a CD, the Blues lifted another ball out of their penalty area and, 40 seconds into injury time Torres broke away from the Barcelona pack that had camped inside Chelsea's final third. Running in on Victor Valdes unchallenged Torres slipped past the keeper to score a goal that, on any other night this season, he could have easily fluffed.
It was here that the correct emotional response was difficult to pick. Amazement, bewilderment, tears of joy, tears of confusion, borderline mental breakdown, as it became difficult to comprehend exactly what had just happened. In the cold light of day, it's still not easy to work out what happened. Or what has been happening since March 4 when André Villas-Boas was replaced by Roberto Di Matteo as 'interim first-team coach'. A team that had lacked confidence, lacked defensive cohesion, lacked goal-scoring potency and, worst of all, lacked team unity, has restored more or less all of those attributes.
As hangovers pound on today like the Guns of Navarone, there are still many questions for Di Matteo and his side to answer. One of the most obvious improvements in recent weeks has been the defence. Cahill and Terry have started looking like a decent central partnership, Cole has continued to bust a gut on every occasion, and Branislav Ivanovic has continued - when fit - to demonstrate being Chelsea's best outfield player this season. But with Terry and Ivanovic suspended - along with Ramires and Meireles - for the final, and David Luiz continuing to be out injured, much will fall on the shoulders of a recovered Cahill in Munich. The downside is that he's likely to have Jose Bosingwa alongside him, and possibly the veteran Paulo Ferreira rolled out, like an ancient blunderbuss in a modern firefight involving automatic weapons.
Between now and May 19 Chelsea have also got to tackle the politically tricky home fixture this Sunday against QPR, and another tough home match against the strident Newcastle next Wednesday, followed by an FA Cup Final against Liverpool the Saturday after that. But with the unlikely manner to which the team's luck has been stretching so far under Di Matteo, whose to say that these aren't mere hurdles.
"It's an incredible achievement by this group of players. A lot of people had written us off," Di Matteo said after last night's match. He was referring specifically to the Barcelona result, but it more than adequately appraises Chelsea's recovery under him.
It is, sadly, unlikely that Roman Abramovich will appoint Di Matteo permanently to be Chelsea's manager next season.
The feeling inside Stamford Bridge is that, while the Italian has done a remarkable job in restoring the wheels that had fallen off Chelsea's season under his predecessor, his lack of experience in overhauling an ageing squad will count against him.
I'm not so sure: perhaps with a more experienced director of football - Guus Hiddink anyone? - Di Matteo could be left to do whatever it is he has done against the odds in the last seven weeks. Then again, perhaps his magic has only worked with this group of players, and once Abramovich achieves his intention of breaking it up to bring in new blood, the chemistry will be undone.
Chelsea, we should remember, haven't won anything yet. But the fact that they're in the finals of two of football's most prestigious club cup competitions at the end of a season that, until March, was looking to be a write-off, hats should be flying skyward in recognition of an achievement that even the most churlish of purist would have to concede. Even begrudgingly.
There are many cities in the world which serve as shorthand for what seems to preoccupy their incumbents. With Paris, I'm told, it is love. In Glasgow it is drinking and fighting and in Las Vegas, gambling and sin.
Nashville, by similar token, is country music. You can’t escape it. Drive down Broadway and it twangs out of every honky-tonk bar lining the mile-long drag. As the self-styled “Capital of Country” Nashville represents a certain brand of American conservatism, held together by the values of country music which are still preached each week from the hallowed radio pulpit of The Grand Ole Opry.
You might say that the only thing Jack White has in common with the capital of Tennessee is his surname, which covers the dominant ethnicity of those who patronise those honky-tonk bars - blondes squeezed into stonewashed denim, men almost uniformly sporting untucked shirts, jeans, tennis shoes and baseball caps.
It may be atypical eccentricity, then, that White now resides in Nashville himself, given that for 15 years the 36-year-old has been confounding those unable to work out whether he is just a brilliantly post-modern blues journeyman or the living amalgam of every character Tim Burton has made Johnny Depp play.
It's not that White is bizarre. Just...strange. The "coolest, weirdest, savviest rock star of our time", the New York Times recently headlined, and in that you have an incontestable description. When they first came together in 1997, The White Stripes were an all-senses assault on convention: a guitarist with a vibrato voice pitched barely an octave lower than Tiny Tim's, accompanied by just a drummer who may have been his sister or may have been his ex-wife or...no one even now seems to know. And were they blues, or some form of alt-rock? No one ever did reach that conclusion, either.
Deep within the shag pile of White's musical foundation was his Detroit upbringing - one of 10 children in a Catholic family of Polish/Scottish/Canadian origin living in a Mexican district. Somewhere in that mix he was turned on to authentic bluesmen like Son House and Robert Johnson which he later interpreted idiosyncratically in the Stripes, The Raconteurs, The Dead Weather and the numerous other side projects that seem to spring up without warning.
So, yes, "idiosyncratic". Probably the best word to describe Jack White. Even when he and British model Karen Elson divorced the couple threw a party to both celebrate their sixth wedding anniversary and mark the "making and breaking of the sacred union of marriage." Elson remains on the roster of White's Third Man Records label, part of his studio, production and retail empire set up in Nashville.
It is in the studio of Third Man Records that the Prince of Paleness has also produced his first solo album, Blunderbuss. It is by far the closest White has come to convention, but that doesn't mean it's a sellout. Far from it. It's just that White has welcomed accessibility. Or, at least, his version of it.
Blunderbuss is certainly a gentler White, to a degree. Missing Pieces eases awake the record with a gorgeously floaty Fender-Rhodes electric piano, although this soon proves a false dawn for a track about self-dismemberment.
There is certainly something of The South, too, about the album, with a lap-steel and battered upright church hall piano tinkling up the title track, and adding to the ageing, All The Young Dudes-feel of Hypocritical Kiss.
And if this is supposed to be his divorce record, you'd struggle to look for the catharsis. For starters, his ex- herself sings on several tracks (an option Marvin Gaye passed on with ...There My Dear), such as Love Interuption (which sounds like an unlikely duet between Robert Plant and Dolly Parton) and it flits briskly between the familiar White Stripes staccato of Sixteen Saltines to the theatrical, Who-like Weep Themselves To Sleep, stopping off at a playful cover of Little Willie John's I'm Shakin'.
The voice of Plant comes back again on Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy and the dreamy On And On. It's here that you begin to wonder whether White has simply found a route back to where Led Zeppellin left off. It's not that appearing with Jimmy Page in the musos' dream documentary It Might Get Loud must have rubbed off on White, but in trying to understand what it is that gets him out of bed in the morning to pick up a guitar, it's clear that the same strain of blues that carried the Zepp through their career is alive and well in White's own musical genetics.
It would be wrong to get stuck on such comparisons. This is a Jack White album that happens to enjoy a shared heritage, but you have to wait until the final track, Take Me With You When You Go, to fully realise this point. Split into two, it's first half is a pleasant quicktime, all square-dancing violins and more of that church piano, before it breaks into classic White treated guitar and a mad appropriation of an Andrews Sisters chorus.
Blunderbuss may not be as confounding as some of White's earlier canon, but it doesn't suffer as some might expect such apparent normalcy would cause. It's a grown-up album by a musician who revels, quietly, in being pop's outsider, Edward Guitarhands if you will - the strange boy who traded one great musical metropolis for another one. And a splendid record it is too.
For a place of such rich reward, visiting a record shop as a teenager was an experience of some intimidation.
Perhaps this is a discussion best had with a mental wellbeing professional, but walking into my local high street record shop as a 14-year-old (kids - I can explain the concept of a high street record shop later) was a fraught experience.
Because there, behind the counter, would be the coolest individual in the neighbourhood. And he knew it.
For a start, he spent his day in a record shop, playing whatever music he wanted to. Bliss. Secondly, he got his hands on the best new stuff through connections with record company promoters. And thirdly, because he had the power to look down his nose at anyone who came in asking for anything even remotely uncool.
This might sound too much like Barry in High Fidelity but such was Nick Hornby's sharp observation (and Jack Black's borderline sociopath portrayal in the film adaptation) that almost anyone of a certain age will be familiar with both the shop and its employee.
Photo courtesy of Laurence Arnold/Flickr
Mine was MJM Records in New Malden. It is here that my record collection commenced, first with the album Songs From Chigley & Trumpton and The Laughing Gnome by you-know-who (and you'll have to accept that I was but a babe-in-arms when these were purchased), and later, with the benefit of disposable personal income, Reggatta de Blanc by The Police. Clearly no one would deny that owning records is a matter of taste.
When I got a Saturday job in my local branch of Boots, I was delighted to find it was literally across the road from MJM. That meant lunchtimes, most weeks, pouring through its record racks - under the glare of Intimidatingly Cool Bloke - to see what singles had just come in, and discover EPs with extra live tracks and back catalogue LPs to fill out my burgeoning library (which then only occupied a black vinyl carrying case, rather than the furniture-requiring array things became).
The record shop is - or perhaps was - a rite of passage, and it's no surprise that icons of music itself hold the experience of trawling racks of 12-inch cardboard sleeves in search of a hidden gem in such treasure. Wistful, perhaps, but in this era of iTunes and the painfully obvious disappearance of shops selling any form of physical media, they are memories of endless happiness.
"The Meet The Beatles album cover, those four head shots — I remember, I seen 'em at J. J. Newberry's," recalled Bruce Springsteen during his incredible keynote at SXSW a few weeks ago.
"It was the first thing I saw when, you ran down to the five-and-ten cent store," Springsteen continued. "There were no record stores. There weren't enough records, I don't think, in those days. There was, like, a little set, by the toys where they sold a few albums. And I remember running in and seeing that album cover with those four headshots. It was like the silent gods of Olympus. Your future was just sort of staring you in the face."
Today, Saturday 21st April, is Record Store Day, a concept created in 2007 by a group of Americans to celebrate the hundreds of independent record shops that survive today. It's a day for anyone who draws pleasure from the search, who happily loses themselves for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon in the hope of finding something new, something different or something long-lost.
It's also a day for the owners of these shops themselves to celebrate a retailing culture which, even if populated by the likes of Barry and Intimidatingly Cool Bloke, has a unique place in so many people's lives.
"After 28 years as proprietor of an independent record store and weathering all the industry changes," says Tom Kohn, owner of Bop Shop Records in Rochester, New York, "I firmly believe the future of the music industry lies in the hands of the independents. We push the envelope by taking chances on and promoting lesser-known artists, and are passionate in our support and beliefs."
"The independent record store," adds Kohn, "is a place where folks can gather and connect around a common interest, and in that respect, bears little difference from the quintessential social networking sites - the old book and record stores of the 50s and 60s."
Record Store Day is an admirable effort to celebrate an experience shared by so many of us, but as CD sales continue to fall off a cliff, and digital downloads take over as the predominant means of acquiring music, there is a danger of it turning into an enthusiasts' adventure, a Campaign For Real Ale for vinylholics.
Last year, UK CD album sales fell by 12.3 million and there are fears that British high streets will soon be bereft of any major record stores, such as the dwindling HMV chain, echoing the disappearance of chains like Tower Records in America.
There's no doubt that downloading is a convenient alternative, but at risk of sounding like a dreadfully old head, it does completely lack any degree of emotional satisfaction in the act of purchase, even if the end result - the music itself - is.
More worrying is the effect on independent music that the decline of physical music formats is having. Just because CD sales are being replaced by downloads doesn't mean things are any better for the artist.
New York-based singer-songwriter John Lester agrees: "As an independent artist the CD remains a good source of income when I play on the road. CD sales have accounted for half of my income, the rest being performance fees."
"However," says Lester, "as CD sales drop because people 'can' download my songs, the income from downloads is falling far short from that of CDs. Often, if people don't buy a CD or two after the excitement of a live show, the moment is lost and they often don't get around to downloading later."
So, the message is - support your local record shop if you love music. And if you're looking for a rarity, you never know what you might find, if you can get past the intimidating glare of the impossibly cool bloke behind the counter.
Details of the 2012 Record Store Day can be found at recordstoreday.com.
