New York - yeah, just like I pictured it

Picture: Simon Poulter

New York was - like Stevie Wonder's Mississippi émigré in Living For The City - just as I'd pictured it when I first came here almost 20 years ago.

American cities are like that. You almost know what you're going to get before you get there. What never prepares you is the scale and, in New York's case, the energy. It's hard to describe, but when you're here, you feel it. It pulses from every street and every block, night and day.

Like all great cities New York commands superlative. Even in the face of Chinese urban expansion, New York is still the world's most densely populated city, and it feels it.

It's 12 million citizens may sprawl across five boroughs but for the most part we think about Manhattan, that Daliesque teardrop of an island seemingly built on one flat piece of Lego and piled high with hundreds of multi-story Lego columns sprouting upwards.

23 square miles of steel and concrete, streams of yellow taxis and constant bustle. New York's energy keeps it going 24/7, and that's just one of the reasons why I love this self-styled "greatest city in the world". It is here that epitomises the image of steel canyons more than anything else.

It's here you want to be, whether melting you credit cards in the 5th Avenue boutiques, or doing equal financial damage for a Broadway show ($200 at face value prices to see Al Pacino in Glengarry Glen Ross anyone?), or the needle-bearing haystack that is Manhattan's bewildering away of restaurants.

You can come here for the weekend and just for the hell of it. Because it's a seven-hour flight that makes a weekend trip doable, because - or, in my case, it's just before Christmas and I needed to come back. I've developed a craving for New York. I don't want it all the time, mind, but having last been here just over a year ago - for a memorable birthday on 11.11.11 - I wanted to gulp in another extended breath of New York's chilly winter air and a whole lot of the holiday season.

New York is an incredible hub of world life. From publishing and fashion to music and theatre, more than any other city in the world, it's where the good things in life take place. It's also where some of the less good things in life take place, but as a tourist, there's very little to bring you to Wall Street.

Not far away, however, is a reason to venture south: the 9/11 memorial. It's hard to imagine the Twin Towers that once stood on that plot. But I remember being overawed by the size of the World Trade Center on my first visit here, taking the Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island excursion from Battery Park, with the towers in the background.

They looked like steam funnels, representing the toil and graft that New Yorkers put in, regardless of their trade. Exactly a month after 9/11 I was in a taxi coming over one of the bridges from Queens and I was just stunned by the gap in the skyline. 

The absence of those towers made New York's topography look like an old man's teeth with the front set missing. But on that same visit, I got to recognise the real New York: it's not a compressed jungle of anti-social curmudgeons, but a city just getting on with life. To stand on a street corner and watch ordinary people - office workers, shoppers even street hustlers stop and spontaneously applaud a passing fire engine brought a lump to my throat and a simple memory I will never forget. Because that was New York getting back on its feet.

Picture: Simon Poulter

A month ago it was doing it all over again after Sandy tore up the Atlantic states, turning New Jersey and New York upside down in particularly unpleasant fashion. Once again, New York cleaned up and got back on with being New York.

If you're in the privileged position of having holiday days to burn off before the end of a year, a three or even four-day trip to New York is the perfect destination: never too short to miss out on the mustn't-miss attractions, never too long to feel like you're running out of ideas.

It is absurd to think of Manhattan - even at this time of year - as merely an elongated shopping mall. From a European perspective, retail therapy is still the main reason people come. For Brits, the days of 2-for-1 currency exchange are long gone, but with a pound and and even a euro buying you a dollar-and-half, it still makes sense filling up your second permitted suitcase here (another reason to keep the loathsome Ryanair in Europe...).

Picture: Simon Poulter

But once your plastic has been slapped about like La Motta in Raging Bull, there's no shortage of places to go and things to do, depending on your tastes and interests.

First-time visitors will make a beeline for the Empire State Building, but there is just as thrilling an experience to be had at the top of The Rock, the observation deck up on 30 Rockefeller Plaza - yes, 30 Rock.

For culture you have the magnificent Museum of Modern Art, MOMA, New York’s most popular individual attraction hosting more than five million visitors every year. And it's not difficult to see why.

You may want to spend your entire weekend in New York shopping, but do allow yourself some time to come here (and it's open on Sundays, too, so there's no excuse).

Equally, a little bit of Subway time (and I'm not talking about six inch sandwiches) and you can get out and see the bits of Brooklyn, Queens or rustic Staten Island that Sandy left standing.

All three are areas to devote time to: Brooklyn is a city within a city, and as ethnically diverse as any in the fabulous melting pot that is New York itself. And, should you be so inclined, includes Coney Island, the somewhat quaint seaside resort with its fairground rides providing thrill-seeking New Yorkers with a different type of adrenalin rush that that they normally get just crossing the street.

Then there's Queens, New York's dormitory, founded by the Dutch (the influences are still there - Flushing was named after Vlissingen), and the first borough you're likely to see if you fly in via Kennedy airport. Staten Island is a charming, peaceful appendage to New York, more village than urban sprawl, it is a place to pull on walking boots and explore, and it's only a short ride across the bay on the Staten Island Ferry.

Picture: Simon Poulter

For me, the jewel of New York City is Central Park. Plenty of cities enjoy giant green lungs places like this - London's Regents, Hyde and Richmond parks, Berlin's Tiergarten, Amsterdam's Vondelpark, the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, and so on - but somehow Central Park is the greatest of them all, a beautiful and tranquil oasis in a truly hectic metropolis, curtained by the über-expensive properties of the Upper West and Upper East sides.

Picture: Simon Poulter

Here you can bike ride in safety, stretch your legs and feel at peace with the world, even the at-times crazy world on its borders.

Here you'll also find the tranquil Strawberry Fields, the memorial to John Lennon, who was shot dead in front of his apartment building, The Dakota, just across from the park.

New York can be a mad place. Lennon's death no better example of the kind of darkness that can befall America.

20 children and six adults shot dead yesterday morning at a Connecticut junior school demonstrate how that madness never goes away for long. But that should never be a reason not to come here. New York may be loud, brash and intimidating, but it's intoxicating energy is like the metropolitan equivalent of a shot of Red Bull. You would't want to be drinking it all day long, but a blast every now and again does the soul good. It's great to be back.

Remembering Mr. Pitiful

Early one May morning in 1965, Keith Richards woke up in his St. John's Wood flat with a three-note riff in his head. He grabbed a cassette recorder and an acoustic guitar and quickly committed the riff to tape before going back to sleep. Or so he thought.

"Thank God for that little Philips cassette player," Richards recalled in his autobiography, Life. He knew he'd put a brand new tape in the night before, but on inspection, saw that the tape was at its end. "Then I pushed rewind and there was [I Can't Get No] Satisfaction," and, he explains, 45 minutes of snoring.

"It was just a rough idea," Richards remembered, "the bare bones of the song, and it didn't have that noise." That noise being the demonic Gibson fuzzbox-fed sequence of notes that would become the Rolling Stones' signature song.

Mick Jagger recalls that his Glimmer Twin's original sounded more country on the original acoustic guitar-played tape. "It didn't sound like rock. But [Keith] didn't really like it, he thought it was a joke... He really didn't think it was single material, and we all said 'You're off your head.' Which he was, of course."

Richards' dissatisfaction with Satisfaction was that he felt the riff should, in fact, have been performed by horns rather than a guitar. Two months after a horns-free Satisfaction was recorded for posterity - and acclaim as one of the greatest pop songs ever - Georgia-born soul and blues singer Otis Redding walked into Stax Studios in Memphis to record, over the weekend of July 9, 1965, his third album, Otis Blue.

Amongst the songs - and at the suggestion of Booker T & The MGs guitarist Steve Cropper - Redding took a stab at Satisfaction Richards' guitar riff was replaced by a more upbeat brass fusillade by Wayne Jackson and the Memphis Horns. The song, dreamed up thousands of miles away in a North-West London apartment, was finally recorded as Keith Richards had imagined it.

With a collection of Redding originals like Respect and I've Been Loving You Too Long and covers like Satisfaction, Sam Cooke's Change Gonna Come, Solomon Burke's Down in the Valley, and B.B. King's Rock Me Baby, Otis Blue established Redding as the undisputed King of Soul.

It was, however, a throne he would continue to occupy for just two more years before - until December 10, 1967 - 45 years ago this week - when he tragically joined Buddy Holly, Jim Reeves, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens in a tragic line-up of early pop stars to die in plane crashes.

Redding's Beechcraft Twin Beech plane - which he often co-piloted - was a symbol of his rapidly acquired business acumen.

Unlike many of his blues and R'n'B contemporaries, who invariably had found themselves ripped off contractually and perpetually touring to pay off divorces and paternity suits, Redding had, by the time he died at just 26, built a portfolio of good investments, such as the plane and his beloved 'Big-O' ranch in Round Oak, Georgia.

Born in the small Georgia town of Dawson (Pop. 5500) on September 9, 1941, the Redding family moved to the 'big' city of Macon, 100 miles away. At school, Otis discovered a talent for music, repeatedly entering a local talent show, winning its five-dollar prize 15 times before being barred from entering the contest further.

By the age of 21, Redding had become a member of a local Macon band, Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers. When they landed a recording session at Stax Records in Memphis, the tall, striking Redding managed to secure a solo recording for himself - which produced the ballad These Arms of Mine.

Like the hits that followed - Try A Little Tenderness, My Girl, Mr Pitiful and I Can't Turn You Loose (later adopted by The Blues Brothers) - These Arms of Mine instantly captured Redding's strength: a formidable voice, seeped in the South's gospel, blues and even country music, that was both hopelessly romantic and rebelliously sexual at the same time.

Satisfaction and Otis Blue catapulted Redding into another level of superstardom, notably a black performer challenging the pop charts at a time of continued segregation in America.

As the '60s progressed - in all meanings of the word - so did Redding's career as he established his leadership of the soul movement, leading packaged tours of Stax artists throughout North America and Europe, touring along with protogées like Eddie Floyd, Carla Thomas and Arthur Conley.

Redding made worshippers out of young British blues performers, like Eric Burdon of The Animals who became a close friend, and Pete Townshend of The Who, whose 'maximum R'n'B' maxim fitted perfectly with the sweaty soul that the elegant Redding had crafted in Memphis and exported across the northern hemisphere. Another disciple was schoolboy Peter Gabriel who, in 1967, travelled up from his outrageously exclusive public school, Charterhouse in deepest Surrey, to see Redding play in London.

"I was extremely lucky, when I was 17 years old, to go and see Otis Redding perform at the Ram Jam Club in Brixton," Gabriel told ABC's Nightline in 2010. "When he came on, it was like the sun coming out. It was just this amazing voice, totally in command, great band, great grooves and passion that permeated everything." 19 years later, Gabriel repaid the impact Redding had had on him by releasing Sledgehammer, an unexpurgated tribute that even included Wayne Jackson and the Memphis Horns on the track.

When The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, on June 1, 1967, barely five years had lapsed since them recording the sugary I Wanna Hold Your Hand. And yet here they were with an opus of free-thinking psychedelia, that opened up and expanded people's minds in a way few recordings had done before. Otis Redding listened to it constantly as he took temporary accomodation on a houseboat on the other side of the San Francisco Bay in the hippy commune of Sausalito while playing a week's residency at the Fillmore West. Inspired by Sgt. Pepper and the body of water between him and San Francisco, he wrote his own signature song, (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay.

Compared with the energetic oomph of much of his other songs, Dock Of The Bay was a gentle, simple song, musically and lyrically. A strummed guitar motif, which seemed to copy the gentle lapping of the cold bay's water against the houseboat, was married to the down-home story of Otis's life so far - "I left my home in Georgia, Headed for the 'Frisco bay". It became his biggest hit. And the last song he ever recorded.

On the night of Sunday, December 10, 1967, while at the pinnacle of his career, Otis Redding's Beechcraft crashed into a lake in Madison, Wisconsin, while attempting to land at the nearby municipal airport. The crash killed Redding and four members of the Bar-Kays, his backing band. He was just 26-years-old and left behind his wife, Zelma and their three children Dexter, Carla and Otis III.

"The irony of Otis Redding was his personal ambition to fill the gap left in the soul world by the shooting in 1964 of Sam Cooke," wrote Soul Music Monthly magazine in a tribute published soon after Redding's death. "In an all-too-short career he achieved that ambition — and achieved it so decisively that in the last four years no one has filled the even larger gap left by his own death."

"His loss was all the greater because he was the man who turned soul from a minority interest in Britain into a major explosion," SMM added.

There have been plenty of soul singers since - singers cut from the same southern traditions, white singers like Janis Joplin who have channeled the same vocal passion. But not even contemporaries like Wilson Pickett, James Brown, Eddie Floyd, Isaac Hayes, Ike and Tina Turner, Al Green, Marvin Gaye or Sly Stone came close to the lethal cocktail that Otis Redding perfected for the five short years of his career.

"His death was a loss to the whole world," said Steve Cropper at the time, reflecting the sentiment of the entire 'Memphis Brotherhood'. "Nobody will ever know what he had in store for them. He was just starting to get into something. He was starting to get out of hard rhythm and blues. He went beyond that. He was hitting everybody all over the world."

Redding's influence found its way far and wide: Peter Gabriel may have been hiding it while performing Supper's Ready in Genesis, but as a former drummer stimulated by 'groove', there was a frustrated soul boy fighting to get out of that prog rock titan. You could say much the same about Robert Plant - a blues singer performing heavy rock - he, too, was channeling the boy from Macon, Georgia.


Otis Redding may have been a soul performer, but the southern blues were within him. The irony, however, of him covering the Rolling Stones' most famous song is that he helped turn them into an even bigger R'n'B band, still going 45 years after that fateful night in 1967.

Dignity restored?

Many years ago, when he was a stand-up comedian and not creating musicals about Queen, Ben Elton performed a brilliant routine about our small-mindedness when travelling on public transport.

In particular, he drew attention to how we become utter gits when trying to avoid spending a train journey sat next to anyone, and especially anyone undesirable, you know, moron with tinny music seeping from his headphones, musty old person chain-sucking Worthers Originals, any member of parliament.

Thus, Elton surmised, we wait at the platform gate with "Double seat, double seat, gotta get a double seat," riffing away in our heads because, let's face it - when it is clearly better to arrive than to travel, because the latter is usually purgatory - having that single space next to you on a train is public transport nirvana.

When sharing your travels with others, space - and especially personal space - is a premium. Like prisoners sharing overcrowded cells, any square inch you can call your own is a square inch of dignity maintained. This - and Elton's 'Double Seat' bit - reared up in my consciousness this week when European budget air travel pioneer easyJet announced that it was "phasing in" allocated seating. In other words, phasing out the dignity-stripping experience of you, your travelling companions and the little luggage you can take on board, legging it across a rain-strafed apron to be up the plane steps to bag yourself a window seat or a row of three.

Like Elton's granny-bashing charge to acquire dual-perch rail comfort, the queue for an unallocated seat with airlines like easyJet brings out the very worst in people. Everyone is considered an adversary, no matter how benign their appearance. You stand there in the queue, shuffling inch-by-inch as it hunches closer to the thin strip of elasticated tape that is the only thing keeping you herded in like sheep, waiting for your boarding group to move.

If you've paid for 'Speedy Boarding', you smugly look upon those without, knowing that your 50 metre dash to the aircraft door will reward you with an entire jet plane to choose your seat from. You momentarily think of those poor suckers in their 'ordinary' groups who'll just have to take their chances like refugees fleeing a war-torn country. Yes, I'm not proud, but I, too, have compared those passengers in the final boarding group to those desperate Vietnamese trying to board the last American Huey out of Saigon.

When the airport's most powerful person - the airline employee whose swipe card opens the departure gate exit - finally declares its time to go, normally decent people are unleashed on each other in feral competition. You couldn't imagine Cary Grant traveling this way.

So, following a trial early this year, easyJet has decided to join the grown-ups of air travel and is introducing allocated seating. This, trills their press release, "because passenger research showed that the boarding process could be a source of stress for some customers and in some case,  a barrier to them flying with easyJet." No shit, Sherlock.

"Offering allocated seating on all of our flights is the single, biggest change the airline has undertaken in its history and an example of easyJet trying to do all it can to make travel easy and affordable for our passengers," explained the airline's UK director, Paul Simmons, stating that passengers had told them  that allocated seating "was important to them", presumably because that's how it has worked throughout the modern history of commercial aviation, where you would at least be offered "window or isle", and in the bad old days of flying like a beagle in a perfume laboratory, "smoking or non-smoking?".

I know it's naughty of me to chide easyJet alone: flying Southwest Airlines in America - the airline on whose business model was largely copied by easyJet and the other low-cost carriers - is an exercise in tactical gamesmanship that wouldn't go amiss on the sports field.

As someone who used to fly Southwest frequently out of Silicon Valley's gateway airport, San Jose, I got to recognise the lengths fellow passengers went to ensure they were in 'Boarding Group A', and avoid the badge of condemnation that was 'Boarding Group D'.

There was a technique to getting into Group A, but it required dedication. Getting to the gate by 6.30am for a 7.30 flight to San Diego was rarely enough when you'd arrive to discover a small troop of hardened road warriors camped out in front of the desk, having been their since 3am the day before, as if queuing outside the Apple store for the latest iPhone. Madness. Just to get a window seat.

Budget air travel may have brought us closer the destination, but certainly not the experience. In giving us affordable access to exotic city destinations, or in Ryanair's case, airports 100km from exotic city destinations, our inner gits have been unleashed cheaply on the world.

This is a far cry from the era when jetting off for a weekend in Biarritz meant wearing a suit and smoking a pipe while stewardesses - as they could be called then - served martinis at 30,000 feet. Now, you have to be dressed for hand-to-hand combat at the gate.

That said, 9/11 took much of the blazers-and-pearls glamour out of air travel. In America, where prior to that atrocity getting on and off planes was somewhat akin to catching a bus, flying by plane became a shoe-removing, belt-undoing, strip-searching ordeal, replicated everywhere else. Before you'd even started struggling with that packet of in-flight nibbles, you were exhausted by the sheer D-Day landing craft crapshoot of getting on to the plane itself.

While the nightmare of airport security may be something we all have to endure - regardless of the class of travel - the notion of elitism between travel classes has never been a major problem.

However, the idea that, by paying an extra £7.50 for easyJet's former Speedy Boarding option gives you a decidedly unegalitarian edge over your fellow passengers, who will sit in the same seats, with the same class of service, and the same menu of extortionately-priced sandwiches and soft drinks, makes it all the more absurd.

I made it a personal policy not to fly with the budget airlines some time ago. For a start, I discovered their savings were rarely that. Once you add up all the extras, fees and spurious charges, you more or less pay the same with a 'scheduled' carrier as with a low-cost flyer. And why should you have to be put through the grief of paying for your ticket, paying extra for your boarding card, extra for a bag slightly larger than a pencil case, a 400% mark-up on refreshments? It doesn't make much sense at all.

However, easyJet's abandonment of the free-for-all hasn't been at the expense of extra charges. You will still be charged £3 if you want a specific seat, £12 for a seat in the front row or £8 if you want sit in rows 2 to 5. Bizarrely, if your preference is an exit row, which will have a little more knee room than the rest of the plane, easyJet will take £12 off you. It's worth noting that on most easyJet flights - which operate Airbus planes - the mid-plane exits are over the wings. Which are also the planes fuel tanks. Not that ideal a location in the event of a crash. Just sayin'.

Ryanair, the market leaders in finding new ways to screw money out of the passenger, have also introduced preference-paid seating. However, in charging £10 for an exit row seat, reports started appearing that their aircraft were taking off without anyone sat next to an emergency exit, a legal requirement under many aviation regulators - and which prompted the Irish Aviation Authority to investigate.

Still, easyJet maintain that it's us, this is all about. "This is an example of easyJet trying to do all it can to make travel easy and affordable for our passengers," said Carolyn McCall, easyJet's chief executive.

"Our customers asked us to trial allocated seating and we are really pleased with the positive passenger feedback during the trial". As should McCall's shareholders. The new system means that easyJet will now be able to make money from all seats on a plane rather than the 30 they reserved for Speedy Boarding passengers.

Travel does broaden the mind, and unleash our fantasies. Who doesn't feel like James Bond when first entering a hotel room, opening and closing wardrobes just to ensure trouble isn't lurking. But the experience of getting there comes at a cost.

The King of New York

When your boss comes storming into the office one morning, breathless and late by even his usual standards, and barks at you to stop immediately what you're doing your attention will be captured.

When the urgency to immediately watch a video tape, recorded the night before on a German satellite TV channel and featuring someone called "Popa Chubby", you begin to splutter nervously, it being 10 in the morning and you're in an open-plan, mixed-gender office, and all.

However, this is the Tuesday morning in 1997 when I was introduced - somewhat forcibly and via a hastily taped recording - of perhaps the most exciting blues guitarist either of us had ever encountered. Then or since.

Popa Chubby (as in "pop a..." - work it out for yourself) is, by his given name, Bronx, New York-born Ted Horovitz. A colossal individual with a talent to match, and an early history that walked the sort of path from which blues music is traditionally spawned.

The blues have a long reach: in the early 1960s they arrived in the London suburbs, other English cities like Newcastle, Birmingham and Manchester, and to northern Germany, where a visiting bunch of Liverpool lads added it to their canon of influences. The blues spread from the American Deep South up the Mississippi to Chicago. They even found their way to New York City, where they ran into the teenage Horovitz.

Apparently self-raised from the age of seven, when his candy store-owning father passed away, in his teens Horovitz took, initiatlly, to the drums and then guitar, embracing the blues and classic rock of Led Zeppellin (and, I suspect, Humble Pie), the Rolling Stones, Cream and Jimi Hendrix, of whom he retains a particular passion for today. In his late teens, New York City became the fulcrum of Horovitz's life, the mid-70s punk scene in particular providing a life and even a living, and, eventually, the dependency of a lengthy heroin addiction.

"Right from the start I was taught about rock'n'roll as theatre," Horovitz says, citing a performance artist called Screaming Mad George as a heavy influence, along with the other bands appearing at legendary club CBGBs at the time, such as The Ramones, the Cramps and Richard Hell, whose band, the Voidoids, Horovitz even joined. The spirit, he says, was that "...rock'n'roll should be dangerous. Musicians like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols weren't just bands. They were a threat to society!".

Like so many of his blues heroes, however, Horovitz channelled life's very real experiences through the six strings of his guitar, emerging in 1990 as Popa Chubby, an utterly unique performer, but one who also captured the creative expression of Jimi Hendrix, the explosive chops of Stevie Ray Vaughan and the down-home raw honesty of Rory Gallagher in his prime.

By the time I came across Chubby in 1997, he already had a prolific catalogue of albums under his belt, including his debut, It's Chubby Time, which featured early favourites in the Chubby band's stage set like Sweet Goddess Of Love And Beer and Stoop Down Baby. By the time of my Tuesday morning epiphany, Popa Chubby was already established name as a purveyor of, as a Dutch magazine recently put it, "aggressive, sweaty and filthy blues".

It has taken me 15 years to finally catch up with Popa Chubby in the flesh, so to speak. For a decade and a half, fate conspired to ensure that whenever a Chubby gig was taking place somewhere I should be able to get to, something ensured I was somewhere else entirely.

So, with purpose, I made a point of being in Hamburg last Saturday night for a show that met with a Saxon welcome as enthusiastic as that which I saw on that video tape a decade and a half earlier.

Having learned his chops in the pubs of New York City, places with names like Manny's Car Wash, as well as at blues bars and festivals across the US, Fabrik in Hamburg is a comfortable fit.

A former factory, it now resembles one of those wooden-framed rural country and western dives you find throughout the American Mid-West.

Which made Saturday's audience - a mix of jet black BMW-driving corporate affluence and beer-chugging biker boys - all the more amusing to observe. The clipped, older punters nodded their heads conservatively to the raw and raucous blues the Popa Chubby Band powered through, while the biker boys merrily quaffed more brew and got on with enjoying themselves as if Oktoberfest had moved north after leaving Munich in its wake.

Looking at the 52-year-old, 300-pound, shaven-headed and ultra-tattooed Horovitz today, you could say that he still conveys the threat to society of his punk influences. But this is, still, rock'n'roll theatre. You get the sense that, just as Hulk Hogan in person will disarmingly say, "Brother, call me Terry"), there is a careful balance going on between Popa Chubby the character and Ted Horovitz the artist.

Somewhere near the surface resides a very earnest blues performer, with a repertoire spanning the blues genres - bar-room, Delta, Chicago, Texan - and throwing into the mix Bach and stunningly different version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow (covered by many as a saccharine ballad, performed here as a demonstration of fretboard virtuosity, subtlety and shade).

To demonstrate further the blues' geographic spread, from the dusty Clarksdale drawl of Robert Johnson to the Texan swing of ZZ Top, Popa Chubby's own repertoire covers much the same ground. An innovative, wah-wah-heavy take on BB King's Rock Me Baby encountered a more traditional approach to Muddy Waters' Hoochie Coochie Man.

That said, you still have to remember that this is a Bronx native playing his blues through the filter of a punk upbringing. But like Fun Loving Criminal and fellow New Yorker, Huey Morgan, there's more going on with Popa Chubby than just theatricality. His stage presence offers light and shade: one minute, a snarling Bronxite, the next a broad entertainer, dueting with guest vocalist Sari Schorr on an enjoyably chugging version of Etta James' I Just Want To Make Love To You.

With a clear love of Jimi Hendrix (what started as a set at a tribute show turned into a set of Electric Chubbyland CDs featuring the most definitive Hendrix covers I've ever heard), the Fabrik audience were treated to blistering versions of Hey Joe, Purple Haze, The Wind Cries Mary and, later into the set, a stunning version of Voodoo Chile.

The fact that the Popa Chubby Band - comprising Erik Boyd on bass and former Rollins Band drummer Simeon Cain, together with Horovitz - perfectly resembles the Jimi Hendrix Experience didn't get lost on me.

Eric Clapton, in his carefully constructed late-middle age Armani chic, Chubby is not. Nor does this man mountain, with a preposterously good gift for making a battered '66 Stratocaster sing and dance, conform to your expectations of a Bronx-raised, Jewish New Yorker. In his hands, the Strat can be either a weapon, the most delicate of instruments, or an expansive, room filling, polyphony.

15 years ago in in London I seem to recall using the word "extraordinary" an awful lot as we sat through that video tape. In my head, I kept hearing those same words all through Saturday night. And you will, too. So, if the chance comes your way, if Popa Chubby comes your way, or if you can come Popa Chubby's way, don't leave it as long as I did. Go and see the man, and enjoy a remarkable live experience.

From Russia With Impatience

With his scruffy little beard and penchant for cheap-looking nylon leisurewear, the multi-billionaire Roman Abramovich doesn't exactly cut the image of a prototypical James Bond villain.

He may not (to my knowledge) possess a white Persian cat, which he strokes for camp and menacing effect, but like 007's nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Abramovich is clearly capable of dispatching underlings whenever the whim takes him.

So here we are again. Another November, another dip in form, and another Chelsea manager looking for work. Roberto Di Matteo took a decent and dignified stride in his brief managerial tenure at Stamford Bridge. But from the moment he was euphemistically installed as "interim first team coach" he knew he wasn't exactly the anointed one. He may even have been another 'dead man walking', as Victim No.1, Claudio Ranieri, referred to himself.

Go back two managers, which in Chelsea years means to last March, and Abramovich had grown impatient with his bizarre gamble - football's very own Charlie Buckett, Andreas Villas-Boas - and in looking for a replacement was desperate for Barcelona's Pep Guardiola. But with the 41-year-old Catalan making clear he was, at season's end, taking a year's sabbatical in New York with his family, the unemployed Rafa Benitez was being fitted up for a temporary spell in the manager's chair.

But when Benitez threw one of his customary hissy fits at the prospect of being a mere seat warmer, Abramovich had no option but to install, quickly, the popular old boy, Di Matteo. The club's history of appointing from within has not always gone well: Ruud Gullitt and Gianluca Vialli both fell foul of Ken Bates over money, while Ray Wilkins felt the sharp end of Abramovich's sword for, it would appear, looking at the Russian the wrong way.

Di Matteo - a club hero still for scoring the fastest FA Cup Final goal after 47 seconds of the 1997 final - had been AVB's assistant, fulfilling a role similar to that Wilkins had been employed for at Carlo Ancelotti's side - a link to the club's history for both fans and players.

But in being condescendingly titled Interim First Team Coach, it was clear that Di Matteo was only installed by default.

How embarrassing, then, that he should go on and end Chelsea's desperate hunt for the European Cup, land yet another FA Cup trophy at the same time, and galvanise a fractured dressing room.

Perhaps Chelsea had to accept a moral obligation to give Di Matteo the job full-time after all that. Drop him then and Chelsea's reputation for lousy manager management would have made the club toxic for anyone else to become interested - least of all, Pep Guardiola.

Abramovich had been making overtures to Guardiola again in the run up to Di Matteo's sacking. But this obsession with landing him is turning the Russian into the greatest stalker since Max Cady came after Sam Bowden and his family. And he's done it before: so the story goes, Abramovich fell in love with football by watching AC Milan, and set about buying the club. With that not possible, he set about recreating the club by buying Chelsea and installing Andrei Schevchenko, the rossoneri's star striker, while trying to lure Carlo Ancelotti as coach,

He didn't, but then he got Jose Mourinho, and that didn't work out too badly. Or, at least, until Chelsea's results started to go "in the wrong direction", the self-same excuse given for firing Di Matteo. Like Mourinho, Di Matteo delivered silverware and good times for the club. But as soon as things started to cool off - i.e. results went against them - they were summarily fired by the itchiest trigger finger since Dirty Harry.

Abramovich, then, has a totally unrealistic level of expectation. But he also appears to lack strong leadership and footballing advice around him. There's a reason why Manchester United are the most successful football club in history - it's because they've had the same manager for 25 years, who has built, invested and reinvested in consistency and excellence. Personally I loathe the old Scottish git, Alex Ferguson, but you could never knock his record, or indeed his club's ongoing support for him.

For Chelsea, eight managers in as many years is not only inconsistent, it's an embarassment. We want success and we've had success. We want our club to be led by a dynamic manager whom we can get behind. We had that in Mourinho, we had that in Guus Hiddink, we had that in Ancelotti and we could have had that in Di Matteo.

But, from now until the end of this season (and, it is claimed, with an extension to next season if "mutually acceptable"), Chelsea will be managed by the most divisive managerial appointment it would have been possible to appoint: Benitez.

You may, already, sense some antagonism towards Benitez. That's because many Chelsea fans consider him a tactical fool, more interested in defensive formations and squad rotation than anywhere near the attractive, free-flowing attacking football Abramovich himself is said to desire.

It's also because he spent an inordinate amount of time as Liverpool manager winding up Chelsea fans and, especially, Mourinho, and then behaving like an emotionally challenged teenager whenever things went wrong. He's been out of work for two years, with only a short spell at Internazionale since leaving Liverpool. That speaks volumes.

Abramovich has, at times, treated Chelsea like a plaything. When he's pumped more than £1 billion into the club since 2004, that's his prerogative. But you wonder whether he has always had the best advice. Did the club really need a physically crocked Andrei Schevchenko, or a mentally and physically crocked Fernando Torres, each for vastly inflated transfer fees and equally inflated wages?

The problem is impulsiveness and impatience. If Roman wants a bigger yacht, he orders it. Bigger mansion? He knocks through the rest of the street. This has been the 'see it, want it' nature of his ownership of Chelsea (which isn't that dissimilar to the way many Premier League players splash the cash around). More than just an oligarch, like some emperor acquiring lands at will, he has made some ridiculously rash decisions at Chelsea.

Benitez is going to have to endure six months of indifference and hostility from Chelsea fans. Even after Di Matteo had been appointed in March, Chelsea fans still let it be known at Di Matteo's first home game in charge that Benitez wasn't and would never be welcome. And so here he is, like the frog in Peter Gabriel's song Kiss That Frog "all puffed up, wanna be your king".

At any other club, the sort of success Di Matteo brought in just 167 days in charge would have had his name emblazoned above a new stand at the stadium. But not at Chelsea. This is a club which, for all you or I know, may have fired Benitez before he's even begun, and hired - and fired - his replacement.

Benitez has a rough ride ahead of him. Even if he does well, he'll be out on his ear as soon as you know it. Pep Guardiola knows it too. Just as Ancelotti was the coveted one, once, there is no life expectancy at Chelsea. And if he has any sense, Guardiola would give Chelsea one almighty swerve.

A guide to Sicily that only mentions the you-know-what twice

© Simon Poulter 2012

Welcome to the thick of Autumn. Summer Time has officially ended and the first frozen fingers of Winter have already caused "travel misery" in Europe. Across the northern hemisphere, firewood and electricity bills are being stockpiled for the chilly weeks between now and the next hosepipe ban, which should be declared around March.

For most people who took a summer holiday this year, memories will have evaporated as fast as that small epithelial rug of peeled skin that formed beneath them. All this means it's time to start thinking about your next holiday, if for no other reason as warming autumnal spirits like a 40-tog onesie.

My own summer escape this year took place, as usual, in September, when it is still summer enough to feel summery, but with the majority of tourists back home packing children off to school. For me, it has historically been the perfect time for a summer break. Most places are still warm and sunny, hotel staff appear generally relaxed, and for the impatient, must-see attractions are unimpaired by the midsummer hordes.

© Simon Poulter 2012

Apropos of any particular reason, apart from the fact I like the place, I returned to Sicily, that flaccid rugby ball perched on the toe of Italy's stiletto-healed boot.

Extending Europe to within 100 miles of Africa, and covering an area almost the size of Belgium, Sicily ticks all the boxes an Italianophile might seek - warm sun, beautiful beaches, dramatic scenery, Mediterranean ambiance, gallons of history and a richness of culture.

September and October are also, in my view, the best months to visit the island. The searing mid-Summer heat it shares with its African neighbours will have subsided somewhat, as will the crowds that flock here from Italy's northern reaches, presumably to escape the posh Brits in their Jags and panama hats who, each summer, turn Tuscany into a branch office of Chipping Norton.

September is, according to statistics, notorious for two life-changing events: firstly, it is second only to January for divorce spikes as, clearly, two weeks of enforced togetherness is too much for some. Secondly, September is when more people decide to change job or career than at any other time in the year.

Visiting Sicily, however, is unlikely to have you to jack in your moribund accounting job to live the dream as one of the island's traffic police, parking inspectors, road standards managers, driving instructors, highway code authors or refuse collectors.

Because Sicily contains, apparently, the most under-policed highways (many of which are more pothole than road), while chronically lacking anything resembling parking skills. And for all its natural beauty, every thoroughfare on the island seems to be uniformly decorated with piles of uncollected rubbish in plastic bags.

All of which is a shame, really. Because before you've sampled the sumptuous wines, smelled the aroma of freshly grilled swordfish, or marvelled at the breathtaking landscapes that undulate throughout the Sicilian interior, you will have had your wits scared out of you by the drive to your hotel.

Once you've been on the island for 48 hours, however, you soon assimilate into the local driving habits. You may not come away feeling particularly proud, but at least you feel like you've both blended in and let your inner lunatic Italian driver out. And, on top of this, assuming you get to the hotel in one piece in the first place, Sicily will reward you with the some of the  warmest hospitality in the Mediterranean.

Sicily is an island of some complexity and more than a little mystery. It's an autonomous region of Italy, and yet at times you feel that you're not a part of Italy at all. At its narrowest, the gap between Messina and the Italian mainland is only three kilometres wide, but the distance between Italians and Sicilians is far greater.

© Simon Poulter 2012

Being large enough to consider itself a country in its own right. locals revel in their autonomy. But that independence may be more a product of the island's history of ownership, the deeds of which have been passed from one absentee landlord to another, from the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks and Romans, to the Moors, Byzantines,  Spanish and Normans.

Sicily has, obviously, long been a huge strategic prize, a large lump of half-volcanic rock jutting into the Mediterranean and well endowed agriculturally (and, latterly, in other resources worth plundering).

The Allies in 1943 chose it to mount the first major take-back in Europe against the Axis forces, with General Patton famously invading along the southern-coast. Rumours have rarely subsided since that the Mafia helped his advance. Whether that was the case or not, there are still signs of flimsy German and Italian defences dotted along the island's southern rim, from Syracuse to Agrigento, with pill boxes and bombed-out, bullet hole-ridden buildings in evidence still today.

© Simon Poulter 2012

Sicily's more interesting history, however, stretches back much further. Having first been settled by Sicanians from Iberia, Trojans from Libya and then Siculians from the Italian mainland, all so far back vinyl was still the preferred medium for recorded music, Sicily is rife with heritage, if you go looking for it.

Some of it is obvious, like the stunning, partial remains of Greek temples at Agrigento, or the eight UNESCO World Heritage of Caltagirone, Militello Val di Catania, Catania, Modica, Noto, Palazzolo, Ragusa and Scicli.

Noto, Ragusa and their provincial capital, Syracuse, are amongst the undisputed highlights of Sicily's south-eastern hump, an area rich in forests, valleys and olive and lemon orchards, as well as these stunning towns that were rebuilt to pristine condition after a massive earthquake in 1693.

© Simon Poulter 2012

Noto is breathtakingly beautiful. Situated in an area first settled during the Bronze Age, and the adminstrative centre of the Val di Noto since the Arab occupation, the city was completely flattened by the earthquake.

It was rebuilt, literally from the ground up, some 12km from the city's original location, exclusively adopting the Baroque architectural style prevalent in 17th Century Italy.

Entering via the Porta Reale, the city's main gate on its eastern side, Noto's beauty becomes instantly obvious as you wal up Vittorio Emanuele, the Church of San Francesco to your right and, further down, Piazza Municipio and the Noto town hall, Palazzo Ducezio.

Heading back out of the Val di Noto and into the Sicilian interior, you head towards the towering city of Enna. I say towering as it sits on top of a 1200-metre summit, like a giant lookout post erected in the middle of the island. Unsurprisingly, this mountain-hugging city has been besieged more than any of Sicily's much-fought over territories, and one can't help being reminded of Edoras in Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings, towering over the vast plains of Sicily's interior.

© Simon Poulter 2012

They say that on a clear day you can see the entire island from the citadel at the top of Enna. It's certainly possible to see across to the east and the permanently smoking chimney that its Mount Etna, Europe's only active volcano.

To the south you can make out the grim oil refinery at Gela, a much-needed employer in Sicily's increasingly impoverished southern half, but still a visual blight on the coastline. To the north you should be able to see towards the Palermo coast, but given the size of the island, it's optimistic at best to hope to see much further than the hills around Corleone. Yes, that Corleone.

Which brings me back to the Sicilian driving culture. Speed limits are, much like red lights in Amsterdam, more of a suggestion than an enforcement: the polizia stradale does exist, but like hen's teeth.

Their speed traps, too, are bafflingly predictable: see a bridge coming up? Slow down. If a pair of constables are waiting for you, they'll be doing so conspicuously, under the bridge with their Alfa's tailgate up. The officers themselves will be standing around smoking, talking animatedly and admiring their over-polished caps and sunglasses in the windows of their vehicle. As you zoom past.

However, should you find yourself driving too slowly for the tastes of a local, you'll soon know about it. Overtaking in Sicily is something of an art form, a skill that sits somewhere between using The Force and possessing the flying skills of pilots in the Red Arrows' Synchro Pair.

White lines, double white lines and no overtaking signs are mere decoration. If you are deemed to be driving too slowly, regardless of your place within or outside the speed limit, you'll be overtaken. The vehicle overtaking you will be of indeterminate age or roadworthiness, but you will be passed. This is fine, until you encounter a motorist overtaking someone else coming towards you. On a fast bend. Which you haven't yet gone round.

It's at such moments that you actively consider the possibility that those piles of rubbish everywhere are in fact crash barriers, much like the tyre wall on a Formula 1 circuit  and have been benevolently left - replete with fetid contents - to absorb the force of your hire car being forced into it by an oily-haired male wearing oversized Aviators.

Regardless of which side you choose to drive, some of Sicily's roads are truly awful. That said, there also some truly wonderful driving roads that the island's breathtaking interior, winding in and out of the hills, mountains and moors before crossing bridges that span vast, chasms of draw-dropping, Monica Belucci-cleavage depth.

Some are so high, such as the Guerrieri bridge at Modica, you see towns far below you, giving you the closest experience to flying a car short of joining Bo and Luke Duke for an afternoon out in the family ride.

It does make you wonder how a nation which, in an earlier form, developed almost half a million kilometres of roads to improve communications throughout its empire, and which turned bridge building into an art as much as an engineering skill, could now have roads in such indecent repair that you understand why even the most modest of hill villages has a small platoon of car mechanics.

The Sicilian driving experience is a decidedly clutch-testing application of all gears your car might possess. With the exception of reverse: stopping in towns rarely seems to require the application of parallel parking skills. On any street - especially those main thoroughfares that cut through each town, you pull in nose-first as soon as you see a space, and without any consideration for whoever might be behind you, or for the fact that you've left your backside out in the middle of traffic for the duration of your pitstop to grab groceries or a quick espresso. Quite why Italian drivers need any more stimulation eludes me.

These are, however, relatively minor gripes. There are worse things to complain about. Sicily is a beautiful island, and its people warm and welcoming. But it is an island being dragged increasingly into poverty.

Graphic courtesy of Business Week.

The small mountains of rubbish everywhere, while not as bad as the refuse crisis that engulfed Naples some years back, is still an unfathomable eyesore. Everywhere there are half-finished buildings, construction projects that appeared to have stopped abruptly.

It's not uncommon to see a row of shops with the skeleton of three or four stories of unbuilt apartments above them, looking for all the world like buildings shelled by heavy armour, but in reality have just suffered from a downing of tools. What - or perhaps whom - is the cause is never clear. Some blame the economy, some blame the unions, some blame the Mafia, some blame the government.

A recent Business Week article, Sicily, a Portrait of Italian Dysfunction, noted that the town of Giarre on the eastern slopes of Mount Etna today boasts 27,000 incomplete building projects - the most in Italy and the equivalent of two-and-a-half for every 100 residents.

Five years since my last visit to Sicily, and the signs of Italy's economic struggle loom large. Myriad restaurants and pizzeria that sit in every town and dotted along the highways stand empty and abandoned. Even for September, when most of the tourist trade has gone home, there is a weariness about some bar owners, as if they'd rather be closed than taking in business from the occasional visitor that calls in looking for a cheap meal.

It can be - and is - at times depressing to see Sicily like this. But if you can ignore the increasing signs of man-made shabbiness, there is so much to love about this island. What it lacks in the party spirit of the other rocks that dot the Mediterranean it more than makes up for in culture and heritage and more.

My two weeks there last September were two of the most relaxing two weeks I've ever spent on holiday. That's the magic of Sicily: if you want to go tearing about in a hire car for a couple of adrenalin-rushed weeks, it's there for you. If you just want to sit on a quiet, secluded beach, reading a book to the sound of the sea gently washing ashore, it's there for you too. Either way, you'll never get bored.

© Simon Poulter 2012

We've been expecting you - Skyfall reviewed

I shouldn't have been, at my age, but I was giddy. Like a child on Christmas morning. I was even queuing an hour before kickoff, but then when I saw what passes for queuing in Paris, I was wise to be early.

A packed cinema served to remind, if a reminder was needed, that this wasn't just an opening night screening but part of a global event involving a cinema marque as magnetic, as universally understood, and as powerful as any of the brands who pay handsomely to have their wares displayed within.

11 months since a London press conference confirmed the production of 'Bond 23', I found myself in an aggressive scrum anxiously squeezing through the single set of doors of a Champs-Élysées auditorium for, what is appropriately named in French, a séance of Skyfall.

In principle, a 23rd of anything doesn't sound good. 23rd helping of tiramisu? 23rd series of Celebrity Big Brother? Now That's What I Call Music 23? You wouldn't willingly stand in line to watch a 23rd outing of Police Academy or the Twilight franchises, none of which should ever be allowed out of the single digits.

Bond has, however, proven the exception to the rule, quite rightly reaching 23 instalments in half a century by doing 'Bond' better than anyone or anything else, on average earning more than $500 million a film. Something it is still doing after 50 years.

Bond has seen off the imitations like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Matt Helm, and spoofs like Get Smart, Austin Powers and Johnny English. While no imitations, the first three adaptations of Len Deighton's Harry Palmer novels, starring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer, provided an antidote to Bond, while Jason Bourne has, since, come along to inform Bond how he should appear in the post-9/11 age.

Bond has proven indestructible, onscreen and off. Not even the MGM studio's serious financial troubles proved fatal. But when 'Bond 23' was announced just 51 weeks ago, the talk was of what a Bond directed by a 'serious' actors' director like Sam Mendes would end up like. The suggestion was that it could be a dour, thesp-fest, restrained by both budget limitations and a director not known for action on the scale (both in terms of expectation and execution) of 007.

When producers later announced the title, Skyfall, there was further consternation, mixed with curiosity. If the film stank, critics and headline writers would be gifted variations on "Awfull". And with a cast bringing Daniel Craig and Dame Judi Dench together with Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes and Albert Finney, and the ever-so slight disappointment of Quantum Of Solace in the not-too distant past, a lot would be resting on Mendes' shoulders. An awful lot.

Quantum was, scriptwise, a blip. But despite its lack of narrative, and an over-reliance on the Vesper Lynd revenge arc, it was still a good Bond, and a great, modern spy thriller (and there are others in the series that you could aim harsher criticism at - Die Another Day comes straight to mind...).

So, Skyfall. It is good. Exceptionally good. It has been talked of as the best yet. Maybe. But it is very good. In fact, the last time I came out of a cinema that exhilarated I'd just seen Christian Bale and Heath Ledger pitted against each other in The Dark Knight. Yes, that good.

Without revealing anything you haven't read already, there is so much to admire in this film. Stuff that just puts a smile on your face in near-incredulity at moments you've just seen. Firstly, Skyfall feels like a new kind of Bond film, and that has everything to do with Mendes.

'New' usually unnerves Bond fans - remember when the idea of a blond Bond had the fanboys up in arms? The Daniel Craig era has been notably different from its predecessors - mostly bereft of gadgets and an avoidance of epic final battle scenes in hollowed-out volcanos and submarine-swallowing oil tankers.

Skyfall seems scaled down: the "exotic" locations are still there - like Istanbul and Shanghai  - but  plot-pivotal scenes in Scotland and, for probably the first time in 50 years, a London-centricity, the story has more to do with Bond and M's respective histories than carousing gratuitously from destination to destination.

There is, as a result, a strong parallel to The Bourne Ultimatum, and not just the appearance of Albert Finney. Amid the action, Skyfall takes us into M and Bond's past, with ultra-camp villain Javier Bardem as the tour's brilliant guide. It's tempting to compare his Silva to Heath Ledger's Joker, though for pure psychopathic terror, the latter would win on points.

Mendes has a wonderful sense of photography. His Road To Perdition won an Oscar for its cinematography, and it is noticeable how rich the imagery in Skyfall is, using colour, light and artistic composition in a manner you don't expect in an action movie. Scenes in Shanghai, for example, reminded me of Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights. Not the normal reference point for some camp old spy dust-up.

But, don't worry. This is still a Bond film. The opening scene is breathtaking, probably the best Bond opening scene ever. At its end, as the screen fades into the title sequence and Adele's dreary theme song (the only real disappointment of the film), I actually felt that I'd just seen an entire film in its own right. I could understand how this scene took two months to shoot in Istanbul. It is simply stunning.

There was something oddly theatre-like about Skyfall, in so far as you felt you were watching a series of filmed acts from a play, such was the temptation to applaud certain scenes at their conclusion. Indeed, the appearance of Bond's Aston Martin DB5 prompted spontaneous applause from my fellow Parisian patrons. A lovely moment.

Skyfall fulfills every expectation. Daniel Craig has warmed into the Bond role nicely. This his third. Remember Connery in Goldfinger. While Craig will never have Connery's balance of charm and brawn, but he is still miles above most of the other Bond actors, and Skyfall

"Men want to be him, women want to be with him" runs the usual journalistic cliche. Craig displays more vulnerability than any previous Bond but, that aside, the formula has changed all that much. The haircuts, tailoring, cars and budgets may have changed over the last 50 years, but fundamentally James Bond on screen is still the same character who first appeared two weeks before the Cuban missile crisis  erupted.

Around him, the supporting cast has been allowed to evolve. Dame Judi Dench continues to play M with stern dryness befitting of the character's seniority, though the humour between M and Bond is cleverer by far than in the days of Bernard Lee and the three Bonds who served under him (Connery, Lazenby and Moore).

Indeed, the jokes in Skyfall are, rather than the sometime crass affairs of Bonds past, delightfully weighted. Encounters between Bond and Q have always been the main source of laughs, and in Skyfall, the first meeting between Craig and his Q (Ben Whishaw) is superbly unforced, like a number of knowing gags throughout the entire film, suitably self-depreciating in the manner we Brits revel in.

When you audit Skyfall it checks more or less all Bond boxes. There are gadgets, there are girls (the excellent Naomie Harris and Bérénice Marlohe returning 007 to the traditionally un-PC habits of being somewhat discarding of his conquests) and there is villainy and suspense. Listed like that, I know, could be the formulaic description of any action franchise produced to order by studio marketing executives.

Bond may be like be a simple, anyone-can-do-it recipe - like Spaghetti Bolognese (onions, garlic, celery, carrots minced beef, can of tomatoes, oregano, salt and pepper served over spaghetti), but there is finesse in the cooking process that makes a Terence Young Bond subtly different from a John Glen Bond. This Sam Mendes Bond is different once again. And it is utterly, utterly brilliant. And worth queuing up for a second time. At the very least.