WWDBD? goes to Montreux: Pharrell

Picture courtesy of the Montreux Jazz Festival © 2014 FFJM - Lionel Flusin

Holidays are supposed to offer a fresh perspective on things. Read a book, learn a language, visit a museum - stuff you won't get to do in the daily maelstrom. Sometimes you arrive at your new vista by design, by forcibly escaping routine and seeking out opportunities that might otherwise be ignored. And then, sometimes, you trip over it quite by accident. 

Though hardly epiphanous in the grand scheme of things, my eye-widening moment occurred midway between the shallow and deep ends of the hotel swimming pool (luxury, eh, Glasto, punters?). Miley Cyrus's Wrecking Ball came blasting through the sound system. 

I was, it has to be said, a particularly captive audience, given that there was little-to-no chance of making a dash towards a safer, Cyrus-free locale. But as a result of this aquatic entrapment, I came to appreciate - over the course of two-and-a-half more lengths - Ms. Cyrus's power ballad as astonishingly good pop music. No, really.

Given that the song was propelled to the northern reaches of the charts by a somewhat toe-curling video in which the 21-year-old swung naked on the titular demolition apparatus while fellating a sledgehammer, and that this has inevitably led to questions about the parenting acumen of her parents (one of whom is the grandson of a Bible belt preacher), you might think that What Would David Bowie Do? should jog on and not add further oxygen to the whole "look, no pants!" exhibitionism of Cyrus junior. But, no. Tabloid froth and nonsense aside, it's as good a three-minute, 41-second pop song as you're likely to ever hear. And, no, I didn't have water in my ears.

Luckily for the good people of Montreux, neither Cyrus is, to my knowledge, in the Swiss Riviera this week, which means a blessed lack of paparazzi hoping to capture the tongue-poking, twerking minx doing her thing. That, though, doesn't mean that contemporary music doesn't have its place at the Jazz Festival. 

Montreux has had its fair share of serious jazz musicians, replete with its fair share of serious jazz fans nodding their heads sagely to twenty-minute bass solos. But it has also given a platform to plenty of more populist acts over the festival's 47 years. 

And despite its somewhat staid image, I can assure you, Montreux does like to partaaayy. Which is why 3000 people are crammed, sardine-like, into the Auditorium Stravinsky for a standing room-only performance from the current golden boy of pop, Pharrell. 

This last year has seen the diversely applied Pharrell Williams get married, be a part of two huge albums - his own GIRL and Daft Punk's multiple Grammy-winning Random Access Memories - score gazillion-selling hits with DP's Get Lucky and Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines, and made even the most curmudgeonly among us curl their mouths at the edges with the insanely infectious Happy.

All of which - one suspects by the fact that his band are on stage and hanging about in darkness for a full quarter of an hour before he comes on stage - that Williams has already achieved diva status. Be that as it may, he has the crowd jigging about within the first seconds of his Montreux showcase finally getting going with Lose Yourself To Dance, the second of his contributions to the Daft Punk album.

It is slick, polished and pristine, and embellished by the six female dancers that remain for the rest of the show, and the requisite collection of session players filling out the stage. There are early suspicions in the crowd that Williams might be relying on a backing tape, rather than his own voice. From its claustrophobic pocket barely a few metres from the front of the stage, What Would David Bowie Do? is undecided. You can usually tell. And you'd hope it isn't, for the memory of Claude Nobs if nothing else.

Brass in pocket: WWDBD? is somewhere in this melee 

If Williams is miming, the majority of the crowd doesn't care, responding to being in the presence of pop's current 'it' name by hoisting their smartphones in the air, presumably for the benefit of YouTube.

Williams works his way through his own material, including his debut solo single Frontin', and Come Get It Bae and Marilyn Monroe from GIRL along with a cover of Snoop Dogg's Drop Like It's Hot, before halting proceedings to declare 2014 "the year of the woman". It's not entirely sure whether this was on the UN's calendar this year, but Williams applies plenty of old-school soul star smooth when he declares that 2014 is the year when things change for women.

"My new album is an ode to women," he advises, adding "I make no apology. I love women in every kind of way", before inviting the women in the crowd to make their voices known, followed by the men to shout their approval, and then everyone giving it some. Hard to tell whether this is a large wheel of Swiss cheese or a somewhat awkwardly pitched bid for gender diversity.

A pop star hides behind some smartphones
© Simon Poulter 2014

If it is, then the choice of next song, Thicke's Blurred Lines, is baffling, seeing as it was flooded in the sort of controversy Miley Cyrus could only dream of, the result of one promo featuring topless models and an awful lot of media chatter about misogyny and flames of promoting date rape.

Things don't get much better, thematically speaking, when Pharrell's next song is Get Lucky, the Grammy-hoovering paean to landing some hows-yer-father.

"I told you, it's all about women," Williams adds in commentary, tongue possibly searching for a parking space in cheek.

At that goes for the tried-and-tested 'awwwww' approach,  plucking a bewildered young lady, Silada, from the audience, who promptly bursts into tears and struggles for composure at striking lucky herself (geddit?). 

"We are depending on a girl like you to grow up and change the world," Williams tells Silada as she remains on stage. Everyone goes "aah". With that the band launch into Happy, sending the heaving crowd understandably wild and Silada into another burst of tears. 

It is a stupidly enjoyable song. Sure, it doesn't exactly push back the boundaries of rock'n'roll invention, and like any pop song built around a hook that won't quit, it will test human tolerance when it turns up on unrelenting rotation on radio stations, in holiday resort nightclubs, and from the music systems of just about every retail establishment in the western hemisphere. But it is another example of the perfect pop song. By turns annoying and annoyingly familiar.

For Pharrell, however, it is the limit of his live performance. Barely an hour after going down, the house lights are up and the packed crowd in its forced intimacy starts looking around to see who it was jabbing them in the back for the duration of the show. These are minor irritations, however, when compared with the grumblings being heard as WWDBD? leaves the Auditorium Stravinski from the ticket-paying public expecting more than nine songs for its less than modest outlay.

The Beatles, it should be remembered, would play for just 30 minutes at the height of Beatlemania, maintaining that they could have played anything for all the pubescent screaming that drowned out their shows. Pharrell is nowhere close to - and should not think himself - in the same category of pop accomplishment as the Fabs, but there is no denying the sheer force of his nature.

If this nine-song set was merely an extended promo, rather than a traditional sit-down-and-take-notes Montreux performance, I doubt the vast majority of the audience cared. Williams is, as he himself acknowledged, in the sweet spot of his career, in possession of the right amount of talent and charisma to make even the briefest of evenings in his company fun.

WWDBD? goes to Montreux: The Tedeschi Trucks Band & Buddy Guy

© Simon Poulter 2014

At risk of stepping on the toes of blasphemy, I must confess to holding a somewhat fundamentalist view on music, equating the blues as Old Testament and pretty much everything else as New.

The simplest explanation is that in the biblical sense, the Old Testament is the foundation, and the New Testament builds on it. Or to put it another way, and in the words of Willie Dixon, "the blues are the roots, everything else is the fruits".

However, before this analogy overreaches itself, and this latest post from Montreux turns into a sermon, let me turn your attention to Blues Night at the Jazz Festival. To start with, it is hosing down, biblically so. At some point Noah is going to pitch up with hammers, nails, timber and a clicker.

Montreux is prone at this time of year to spectacular thunderstorms that creep up from the Mediterranean bearing rain-leaden, planet-sized clouds. Framed by the Alps, they suggest the arrival of an alien mothership, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind-style, dumping a significant quantity of water on Lake Geneva and its surroundings, which all seems somewhat unnecessary.

During the July weeks of the Jazz Festival, it is actually quite refreshing, as long as you're not dressed up to the nines, as the predominantly Eurochic clientele that pours into Montreux at this time of year are.

Needless to say, What Would David Bowie Do? is well and truly soaked as it gets directed mistakenly to the wrong venue, the result of being given the wrong coloured bracelet by a now mortified gopher. As much as it would have been interesting to have seen Eels play the Jazz Club, good money was spent on seeing The Tedeschi Trucks Band and Buddy Guy play the Auditorium Stravinski, and so no amount of precipitation is going to get in the way of seeing a return on that investment.

As it is, getting well and truly drenched doesn't dampen the experience, any less than the opening act of the night - blues power couple Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks and their substantial ensemble - warm the soul.

Compared with the previous evening's stripped-down acoustic guitars, from the drummer's count-in, this is a full-on event. And proof-positive that, against the prejudices of those who think of the blues only in terms of the plaintive "I woke up this morning...", the blues comes in a spectrum of shades.

It is also the root of virtually every form of popular music to have emerged in the 20th century, from jazz to rock and roll, hip hop to R'n'B. Blues music is the heart and soul of Americana, blending the sweat and toil of cotton field labour, with immigrant spiritual and folk music. At it's simplest, it's a blind man with a one-stringed guitar and an empty beer bottle.

At it's broadest, it's a ten-piece supergroup, sewn together by the marriage of a New Englander with a powerful, God-given gospel voice and a guitar-playing gift, to a Jacksonville blues slide prodigy who grew up around The Allman Brothers Band (his uncle, Butch, is its drummer), eventually being invited to join the group at just 20.

Picture: Mark Seliger

Since deciding to pool their resources three years ago and effectively create a husband-and-wife supergroup, Tedeschi and Trucks have elevated their game considerably. The Tedeschi Trucks Band's first album, Revelator was just that, a perfect storm of the Delta and rhythm and blues, with added funk and soulful Southern good times, earning itself a Grammy and Rolling Stone's verdict "a masterpiece". Their 2013 release, Made Up Mind brought TTTB on further, with a stronger fusion of the gospel vibe of Tedeschi's musical upbringing, and a delightful, carefree turn-of-the-70s feel to it (with, even, a flute making an appearance - yes, a flute!).

It's on that note that I suddenly realise, as The Tedeschi Trucks Band starts to warm up the sodden Auditorium Stravinski audience that we are, in fact, witnessing the reincarnation of Delaney & Bonnie, the first white group to sign for Stax and which, at various times featured Eric Clapton, George Harrison and Duane Allman, and led to the former forming Derek & The Dominos, from which Trucks earned his Christian name. Do you see how rock music works? Back to the Bible again - there's a lot of "X begat Y" and "A, son of B, son of C".

The set draws on a broad church of TTTB material - much drawn from Made Up Mind, such as the bright and breezy Do I Look Worried, as well as the odd cover, including Derek & The Dominos' Keep On Growing, an expansive song to begin with, and made even more so by the musician-packed stage with Trucks' stunningly fluid slide work at its centre. Throughout, Tedeschi's voice is unrelentingly fabulous, one that inevitably draws comparison to Mavis Staples and indeed Bonnie Bramlett.

© Simon Poulter 2014

There is a notion that proper, old-school rock'n'roll died out a long time ago. I can assure you, it is very much alive, and the Tedeschi-Trucks supergroup lives it comprehensively. This is the sort of show that leaves little room for breath, such is it's supremacy as entertainment. That might sound like hyperbole, but when you consider the vapidity of most, if not all, pop being churned out by a business focused on the short-term rather than the long, @derekandsusan - as their delightful Twitter handle reads - are keeping alive a spirit that can be traced back to the very era in which Claude Nobs launched this magnificent annual celebration of the best of contemporary music.

TTTB shuffling off stage would normally be the end of it. An evening well spent in the warm embrace of utterly infectious blues-soul-whatever. But this being Montreux, we're only at half-time. In fact, after a 30-minute beer break, the fun - and surprises - are a long way from over.

© Simon Poulter 2014

At 77, Buddy Guy isn't the oldest of the still-performing 'original' Delta bluesmen. BB King is till going, just about, at the age of 88.

And even though Guy is just eight years older than British invasionists like Clapton or Jimmy Page, there is no questioning his authenticity. Born in a Mississippi-side rural community in Louisiana, Guy followed the mighty river north to make use of his guitar skills in Chicago, falling under the mentorship of Muddy Waters, soon playing alongside Howlin' Wolf  and Sonny Boy Williamson, and contemporaries like Otis Rush and Magic Sam.

Even if the increasingly frail King remains king of the blues, Guy is without doubt still its most vibrant original. Dressed in his now trademark polka-dot shirt (a matching Fender Stratocaster is also available, amongst other lucratively marketed merchandise in the bluesman's very astute commercial endeavours), from the very beginning he is showering the audience in charisma that is the very antithesis of sneering, indifferent rock stardom.

With Clapton talking of giving up touring - and, frankly, looking increasingly bored on stage - with his recording output weakening with every release (Old Sock was, largely, just that), it is not only a joy but a privilege to find an elder statesman like Guy still giving and showing total enjoyment of his craft.

From the outset, Damn Right, I've Got The Blues, he's on absolute form. His shows could easily be played as cabaret reviews, but the set remains firmly entrenched in the blues, with brilliantly faithful covers of Waters' She's Nineteen Years Old (famously slipped into Led Zeppelin's I Can't Quit You Baby), Hoochie Coochie Man and I Just Want To Make Love To You, Guy provides an education in the very Chicago blues recorded at the Chess studio I got to visit last August.

Throughout, there is the cheeky humour that lies beneath most blues songs (forget that they're all about human misery), with 74 Years Young being 'upgraded' to "77", Hendrix's Voodoo Child (Slight Return) getting a dusting off for the sheer hell of it, and John Lee Hooker's Boom Boom providing another connection to the incredible canon of Chicago's blues heritage.

I mentioned earlier in this review that there were surprises in store. Well, one: Quinn Sullivan. If people marvelled at the teenage Derek Trucks, and the 17-year-old Clapton playing in The Yardbirds and later becoming "God" in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Sullivan is having much the same impact. Indeed, more so.

First spotted at the age of just seven - yes, seven - Quinn has been championed by Guy, joining him on tours. He is, quite frankly, a jaw-droppingly good guitarist, working his Strat like someone several decades his senior...and he is still just 15 years old.

Uncanny: Sullivan (15), Clapton (17)

It's hard to comprehend just how accomplished a player Sullivan is by these words alone. And while it is tempting - when you see the child Sullivan being hawked around American talk shows - to suspect some exploitation going on, you have to recall how Stevie Wonder and Jimmy Page were the same age when they began their professional careers, Clapton the same when he was busking in the pubs of south-west London. Michael Jackson was only six when he made his professional debut...

Throughout Sullivan's turn in the spotlight you can't help but notice Guy beaming at his protegé.

For someone like Guy who has seen it all, in his journey up the Mississippi to become one of the blues' most senior living legends, he demonstrates a visible delight for his teenage discovery, one that first saw him give Sullivan a guest spot on his 2008 album Skin Deep (at the age of nine...).

After working their way through the likes of Cream's Strange Brew, Guy invites Tedeschi and Trucks back out on stage for the obligatory blues jam, Sullivan remaining with them. I say that as if we're being inflicted with a hackneyed tradition. We're not. In fact we're getting the sort of joyous finale that only musicians of this instinctive talent can pull off, extending the evening's double-bill with a coda that, frankly paid for the entire week in Montreux.

Noticeably dryer than when I entered the Auditorium Stravinsky, I make my way out, vowing to never pick up a guitar again. After all, what's the bloody point when you've got a 15-year-old making mincemeat of everyone else?

Picture: Facebook/Montreux Jazz Festival

WWDBD? goes to Montreux: Bastian Baker & Everlast

So, the summer then. Dig out the flip-flops and prise yourself into a pair of ill-fitting, age-inappropriate shorts. While you're at it, take yourself off to a summer music festival. The common concept is that such a festival is, in essence, a variation on Glastonbury: a largely white, middle class affair at which latter-day hippies and Shoreditch hipsters ponce about in £150 Hunter wellies and push bewildered infants in Porsche push-chairs through fecal matter cleverly disguised as mud.

Far better, in my view, is to go Swiss. The late, great Claude Nobs launched the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1967, just before the wave of pop, rock and blues jamborees that ended the 60s with a puff of free-lovin', let-it-all-hang-out dippiness. For the cognoscenti, Nobs created the music fan's music festival. Authentic, discreet, exclusive, Swiss.

"Funky Claude" is, sadly no longer with us - the result of a tragic skiing accident in the mountains around the canton he helped put on the map, firstly as a tourism officer and then as founder and mainstay of the Jazz Festival which this year celebrates it's 48th edition. It has, though, long since ceased to be 'just' a jazz event. For its week in Montreux What Would David Bowie Do? will embrace blues, world music, rock, trip-hop, and a lot of what American music executives like to call "crossover". No, me neither.

To get things off to a representative start, we are down in the Montreux Jazz Club, a long room in the basement of the main Festival venue, the Stravinski Auditorium, for an evening of acoustic singer-songwriting fare. And here's where things instantly get interesting, and totally in keeping with the stupendously high standards of Nobs' curation.

First up is Bastian Baker, a local lad. He is, however, no token nod to the Swiss music scene, nor some local talent competition winner who got lucky. He is, at 23, a remarkably accomplished performer, singing in English, speaking in French and German, and for effect, Italian (thus demonstrating Switzerland's complex split personality). He is also ridiculously handsome, a point I bring up on the back of 46 years' unblemished heterosexuality. With his James Dean quiff and an instant beguiling relationship with the audience, Baker charms the crowd with low-key banter while he detunes and retunes his guitar between songs that are lyrically sophisticated and possessing a maturity way beyond his relatively slender age.

It would be very tempting to compare Baker to Jake Bugg - there are skiffle elements to his exclusively acoustic guitar-performed set that merit similarity - but whereas Bugg has drawn inspiration from the tough environment of housing estate Nottingham, Baker - who is from the aflluence (even for Swiss standards) of Lausanne - concentrates on life's romantic travails.

With a single album, Tomorrow May Not Be Better under his belt, Baker delivers a sturdy 45-minutes of his own material, save for one cover - Don McLean's American Pie. At its introduction, I cringe: this is a song done to death by wine-fuelled office karaoke nights and Tube station buskers, not to mention Madonna (and the less said about that the better). 

And although Baker milks it's singalongability for all it's worth, there is an admirable earnestness about his performance, with a strong voice and an equal adeptness with the guitar helping eradicate any over-familiarity. 

Baker is unsurprisingly an increasingly big star in Switzerland and, bizarrely, in Belgium where he was involved in their version of The Voice. Globally, of course, a drop in the ocean, but with the right promotion, there is no reason why his talent and charm can't be unleashed on audiences more broadly and, who knows? 

Claude Nobs' engagement of up and coming acts like Baker was always matched by his sponsorship of acts that, on paper, were not what you would expect to be Montreux material. But, then, with a history that stretches from Pet Shop Boys to Pink Floyd to Prince, it's hard to truly define what shouldn't be at the Festival.

Take Everlast, for example. Since his second album, Whitey Ford Sings The Blues introduced rap to blues and country-influenced guitar, the now 44-year-old has become the Johnny Cash of hip-hop. 

He hasn't abandoned his rap roots completely - his seminal outfit House of Pain came together a few years ago as the side project La Coka Nostra - but his current focus (an the evening's headline act) is the somewhat unplugged project of his current album, The Life Acoustic, a career retrospective that turns much of his earlier work - including the obviously hip-hop material - into what he describes as a cross between "construction-site country and Southern rock".

I'll be the first to admit I've never been a fan of rap, but stripped down to lyrics laid over a single acoustic guitar and piano (the latter provided in Montreux by LA-based keyboard player Bryan Vasco), Everlast delivers a compellingly soulful performance.

His vocals - a whisky-hewn Southern drawl - are perfect for the bluesy treatment of impassioned songs about Afghanistan (Stone In My Hand), the first flush of romance (Black Coffee), dealing with his daughter's cystic fibrosis and his own brush with death (Put Your Lights On - the Grammy-winning song originally recorded with Carlos Santana). And, equally, he adds a brilliant grit to covers of Bill Withers' Lean On Me and, bravely, Cash's Folsom Prison Blues, which he pulls off with perfection.

Everlast takes his time to warm up to the audience - compared with the evening's previous act who was all about engaging the crowd - but when he does, he does it with self-depreciating warmth and the heckler skills of a stand-up (including a great gag about normally singing about "poor people", noting how that might be lost on the "rich people" of this audience), which adds additional irony to the trailer park anthem White Trash Beautiful.

Almost from the moment he walks out stage, voices in the audience call for Jump Around, House of Pain's 1992...erm...crossover megahit, and the song which triggered Everlast to make the The Life Acoustic album. At almost every acoustic show he'd been playing, someone would suggest it - "jokingly", Everlast says - but here it provides a brilliant, bouncing finale to the show, inspiring even the more reserved members of the largely local audience to start grooving away.

When it began in the early 1990s, MTV's Unplugged series reintroduced a welcome informality to live performances that had been lost in all the bombast of the previous decade. Many noted the similarity to Elvis Presley's 1968 televised 'comeback special'. So, on the 60th anniversary of Presley recording That's All Right Mama at Sun Studios with Scotty Moore and Bill Black - white musicians playing a black blues standard - setting in motion the chain of events that would invent rock and roll and teenagers in one single measure, there's a neat closing of the loop in hearing a rapper of Irish ethnicity with an acoustic guitar and a southern voice singing "I got more rhymes than the Bible's got psalms".

I think it's going to be a beautiful week.

Half-way to paradise - the greatest World Cup ever?

Cast your mind back to the summer of 2012. July, to be precise. The British media, along with Republican American presidential hopefuls, were convinced the London Olympics were going to be a disaster.

Miserablists and professional curmudgeons (our old friend the Daily Mail, obviously) were predicting doom and gloom on a massive scale: this wouldn't work, that would be on strike, and London would be deserted by Londoners in a mass exodus to escape the chaos. Things were so bad that anti-aircraft missile batteries were installed on East End tower blocks, the SAS were on five-minute standby, and even the Queen had to arrive at the opening ceremony by parachute, accompanied by James Bond.

By the time The Who were bringing London 2012 to an ironic end with Baba O'Reilly ("teenage wasteland, it's only teenage wasteland"), it was being declared the greatest summer games in living memory and an unfettered carnival that turned the British capital - never normally the most welcoming of places - into a giant street party.

Let's bring things forward to earlier this month, and the eve of the FIFA World Cup 2014 Brasil™. Simply put, it wasn't going to happen. Donkeys were replacing striking taxis, the stadia were unfinished building sites and, well, everything would be a shambles.

So, imagine our surprise on this, the middle weekend, that this World Cup is being hailed the best of all time. Now, I imagine there have been better World Cups, but let's not dampen the ardour.  So far, we've had nothing but magic. Even Nigeria against Iran had its moments.

By the end of the group stage on Thursday there had been an average of 2.83 goals per game, the highest goal average since 1958, which had included Robin van Persie's remarkable flying 'Superman' volley in the Dutch team's unprecedented 5-1 demolition of the reigning world champions, Spain. That sentence alone says almost everything you need to know about how spectacular these tournament has been - the 2010 winners beaten - and eliminated in the group stage - by a four-goal margin that included one of the most balletic strikes I've ever seen.

But there's been so much more. Yes, Luis Suarez's brace against England, Tim Cahill's left-footed wonder against the Dutch, Lionel Messi's dying-second punt against Iran and Neymar's stunner against Croatia. We've also seen more decisive games - in the group stages a record 83% of games ended with a conclusive result, with just under half being decided by a single-goal margin.

Statto stuff aside, there has been the whole vibe: we at least hoped that Brazil 2014 would be a vibrant World Cup, but we've been rewarded handsomely, and then some. The blaze of colour from the home and visiting fans, national anthems properly sung passionately by South American footballers who seem to give more of a damn about this sort of thing than those from certain Old World countries, and even the elimination of Spain, England, Italy and Portugal - painful and grossly unexpected for some - have actually added to the fun. Simply put, none were good enough to proceed. Doesn't bother me, and I'm a proud Englishman whose second team is always Italy.

Suarez's ridiculous bite on Tuesday added some frisson. Enough has been said already - and there's probably plenty more to come - on this moment of repeat madness, but the only thing it should overshadow is Uruguay's tournament. Uruguay's national denial and the ludicrous claim of a FIFA or Anglo-Italian media conspiracy to disgrace the fanged forward has damaged the nation's reputation a hundred times over compared with what it may have done to the World Cup itself. Still, as Frank Rijkaard and Rudi Völler did in 1990 and Zinedine Zidane and Marco Materazzi in 2006, these incidents - as condemnable as they are - do have the notorious benefit of being part of the entertainment.

And then there's Team USA. The United States' traditional indifference to football - that's "football" - has often been used as an excuse to dismiss the the US team as somewhere between johnny-come-latelies and the nation that got a place at the World Cup by sending off a prize entry to a contest advertised on the back of a packet of breakfast cereal.

True, it is baffling that the world's biggest team sport has seemed to pass the United States by, along with Formula 1, while the NFL, basketball, ice hockey and baseball seem to provide a more nourishing attraction, and maybe their moments of glory this time around will still prove to be fleeting. But who hasn't enjoyed getting behind Team USA?

Who hasn't at least given some appreciation to the fact they've stepped up and taken on those football behemoths Portugal and Germany and stood up well to the challenge. Even if they do have a player - Kyle Beckerman - who'd look more at home in a Glastonbury yurt.

Who hasn't been amused by the Americans' sudden mass conversion to the sport we've loved all our lives? Even President Obama got in on the act, with a photograph of him watching the US-Germany game on Air Force One tweeted around the world in much the same way as the 'Situation Room' shot of POTUS and his entourage watching Bin Laden go down.

I shouldn't mock the US for joining the World Cup party 12 years after they actually hosted the event (without recognising that they had). But if nothing else, their continuing presence has woken up loony right-wing commentator Ann Coulter, who unleashed this week one of the greatest examples of uneducated ignorance since Dan Quayle misspelled "potatoe".

"Any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation's moral decay," Coulter opened he rant with, then clumsily trying to make McCarthyite references to football being somehow un-American: "Do they even have MVPs in soccer? Everyone just runs up and down the field and, every once in a while, a ball accidentally goes in. That's when we're supposed to go wild. I'm already asleep." Coulter even uses the World Cup as an excuse to tap a pop at Europe: "Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it's European. Naturally, the metric system emerged from the French Revolution, during the brief intervals when they weren't committing mass murder by guillotine." Muppet.

So let's leave crass and stupendously ill-informed idiocy to one side and return to the premise that we are mid-way through the greatest World Cup. Ever. Well, the greatest if you don't include the poetic beauty of Italia '90, the visual blessing that was the aftermath of the French win in '98, and the joyous organisation by Germany of 2006. There is more to come and, at risk of re-inserting a note of negativity, at the end of it we will hear what FIFA has to say about the alleged corruption surrounding 2022. FIFA may have organised something special this time, but that will not excuse them of the shabbiness we already know has taken place in the name of world football.

But that's for later. Last night's knockout stage opener between Brazil and Chile, followed by Colombia against Uruguay, reinforced the belief that this is Latin America's World Cup, and I mean that in the sense that the Latin American teams are earning their place in the latter stages through shear entertaining endeavour. OK, I know that Germany and the Netherlands look strong, France and Switzerland are still in it, but really - is it too much to ask that at least one of the South American teams makes it to the final on July 13? Please?

Mega bite

It's one of the voicemail messages a parent least welcomes: "Hello Mrs. Suarez, it's the school here. I'm sorry to report, but your boy Luis has been involved in another 'biting incident' with a boy from another class. This time we have to take it very seriously indeed. Could you come in to school to meet with the headmaster?"

Up to a quarter of all toddlers will bite another, apparently. Child psychologists say such behaviour could be a response to being over-stressed by another child, to seek attention, or through an inability to express themselves properly through speech. Others, however, do it because they're copying other children.

So, then, Luis Suarez. What adult (of 27 summers) goes around biting another? Anywhere. Under any circumstances. And especially for a third time in your professional career.

I'm no psychologist, but there is clearly something mentally wrong with Suarez to apparently do something that impulsive for a third time when under the sort of normal duress any footballer faces in a match. "If it's happened before, it'll happen again," sports psychologist Tom Fawcett has told the BBC. The almost unfortunately-named Dr. Fawcett suggests that this is just Suarez's nature and no amount of therapy is going to get it out of his system. "The formative years of people's development do contribute to their personality," Fawcett told the BBC." If you look at his history, Suarez had a fairly hard upbringing, which would have been fighting for survival - he was streetwise."

Reuters/Tony Gentile

Streetwise or not, not even in the most feral urban cultures do you find people biting each other like rats. Shooting and stabbing, yes, but not sinking incisors and canines into someone else. The fact that the Uruguay and Liverpool striker has done this twice before - last year, when he bit into Chelsea defender Branislav Ivanovic and in 2010, while playing for Ajax, when he applied his fangs into PSV Eindhoven's Otman Bakkal - makes a third incident, even after therapy, unbelievable.

Biting can happen in any close-quarter sport: in football, Jermain Defoe was accused of biting Javier Mascherano on the arm in 2006; South African rugby player Johan le Roux was banished from a 1994 tour of New Zealand after biting the ear of opponent Sean Fitzpatrick. And, of course, Mike Tyson actually separated part of Evander Holyfield's ear during a world heavyweight title fight in 1997. 

There's no excuse for such bestial behaviour, however, even if you are Mike Tyson. In all three bites involving Suarez, it is clear that frustration has played its part. But now you have have to wonder what frustration Suarez will experience if punished retroactively for the alleged bite on Chiellini. 

The irony of all this happening on the day England began their sorrowful trudge home is that Suarez getting banned could end up being the one crumb of comfort for English fans. Suarez is a brilliant striker: his redemption last season at Liverpool manifested itself with two excellent goals against England, for which he clumsily tried to explain were inspired by his mistreatment by the British media.

Until yesterday, he had a point. Suitably rehabilitated after the Ivanovic incident, Suarez turned himself into one of the most vital players with a ball at his feet in the Premier League last season. But one moment of madness, one moment of frustrated insanity, and again the world is looking at Suarez like football's own Hannibal Lecter. Brilliant, but don't let him into your mind. Or your shoulder blade.

For all his mercurial wonder, there is clearly a very dark side to Luis Suarez, and one that doesn't appear to be tameable. If you ignore his childlike petulance - his tendency to fall down as if felled by a sniper armed with a Barrett M107 - his viperous response to being persistently hassled by defenders is one that should genuinely raise questions about his future in the game. Because in his past there is too much to show that he is just not right in the head (a popular tale well told is that as a teenager he severely headbutted a referee - that should have been a warning). When he's not biting opponents, he's racially abusing them, as he did to Patrice Evra in 2011, warranting an eight-match suspension.

This time Suarez should recognise that his entire footballing career is on the line, if the incident with Chiellini is proven (at time of writing he has been charged by FIFA). Television pictures appear to show Suarez biting into the Italian's shoulder, with the player also showing clear indentations in his shoulder blade. Suarez denies it and blames Chiellini for shoving his shoulder into him).

To add to the confusion, Suarez's teammates are rallying around him Uruguay captain Diego Lugano typifying the denial, even echoing the anti-British media belligerence that Suarez himself had been expressing last week. "What incident?" Lugano told the BBC. "The [television] pictures don't show anything. They show an approximation." And he added, "Everybody knows the British media have an issue with Suarez. It must sell newspapers in England."

That may be so, but television pictures and the circumstantial evidence of dental indentations in Chiellini's left shoulder might suggest otherwise.

The punishment for biting Ivanovic was a ten-match ban. It would be reasonable to expect FIFA to take a very dim view of Suarez being found guilty of a repeat offence, carried out on football's biggest stage. Although the referee in Uruguay's 1-0 win over Italy didn't actually see the Chiellini incident, the world's cameras did. At the very least, Suarez can expect his World Cup to be over. At the very worst, will he find himself ejected from Liverpool (which he apparently wants, anyway) and if so, who would then have him?

A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

Dr. Hannibal Lecter, The Silence Of The Lambs

You WERE supposed to blow the bloody doors off

Even by our usual standards of gloom, to be mourning the inevitable after just 180 minutes of major international tournament football feels like a new low for England fans.

At least in 2010 we'd had a full run of abject performances, followed by the usual death-by-a-thousand-German-cuts, before bags were being packed for the dejected journey home.

Going into last night's encounter between Italy and Costa Rica, there was still the mathematical chance of England getting through to the knockout stages (much as there remains a mathematical chance of becoming betrothed to Cameron Diaz). In the end the Italians just weren't up to the job.

Not that England really were to begin with. Even with one more game to play on Tuesday - their own encounter with Costa Rica - it feels like England have made barely a cameo at World Cup 2014.

We know it's easy to be wise after the fact: when Greg Dyke was photographed, displaying arch gallows humour at the World Cup draw, making a cut-throat gesture when England were put in Group D, commentators were undecided as to whether the English FA chairman was being typically self-depreciating or demoralising of the team's chances. But we expected something out of this tournament. After all, the English national team is comprised of players from one of the toughest football leagues in the world.

There are many ways to look at England's brief but dismal run in this year's World Cup. We can look proudly on that game in steaming Manaus which, while ending in a 2-1 defeat to a stylish Italy, gave faith in Roy Hodgson's focus on blooding in youth, especially the breakout performance by Raheem Sterling. And we can look disappointingly at the defeat to Uruguay, in which the defence were overwhelmed, the midfield had more holes than Swiss cheese, and the forwards had clearly left their shooting boots in the Amazonian rainforest.

Because if we examine England's two games so far - both losses to the same 2-1 margin - you couldn't devise a greater comparison if you tried. Against Italy, England were masterful, resourceful and determined, with teenager Raheem Sterling quite rightly being named Man of the Match for his lionhearted performance. Against Uruguay England were pitiful, lethargic, lacking creativity, flimsy on the flanks, and gaping wide open in midfield all the way through to Joe Hart's front door.

So where does that leave us for a verdict? Expectations weren't particularly high, even if failure feels just as raw as before. For a start, no one was building up the latest Golden Generation™ to succeed. So pillorying them now doesn't seem to make sense. And, ultimately, it's a tournament - some win, some go home early. Like the previous world champions, Spain.

Spain's exit, however, provides no crumb of comfort. England's own exit, this time, feels more caustic. In the past we've sort of accepted, with characteristic good humour, the quarter- and semi-final defeats to Germany on penalties. We've made light of these failings by having our unfortunate stars make pizza commercials. Yes, England really are, to quote José Mourinho, specialists in failure. Why else would the England team be accompanied to every major match by a brass band hammering out the theme from The Great Escape, regarded as a national cinematic treasure, despite it being ultimately about a catastrophic failure?

Post-tournament fault finding has become as much a national pastime around England as football itself. England haven't even left Brazil and already the car is up on a hoist with mechanics pulling it apart.

After one game we were all taking defeat on the chin while praising the performance. After Uruguay, we were dismantling the England set-up nut by nut. Yes, Steven Gerrard had a shocker and could be blamed in part for both goals; Gary Cahill, in particular, looked lost without John Terry at his side; Glen Johnson has never been a high quality right-back (one of the reasons I wasn't sad to see him leave Chelsea); and Jagielka and Baines don't seem to cut it at this level.

And, then, Roy Hodgson. I like Roy. Most people do. But opinion is clearly divided: advocates say that he was just the sort of character England needed in charge, after the expensive experiments with international glamour. Ironic, then, that England should be sponsored by Vauxhall, because that is exactly the brand you'd associate with Hodgson - a dependable but not notably exciting car (as opposed to Eriksson's Volvo and Capello's Italian luxury marque).

He is The Quiet Man of football, the urbane, Croydon-born nomad who has managed to high success in Sweden, Switzerland, Italy (Inter, no less), Denmark, Norway, Finland, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as at Liverpool, Blackburn and West Brom. Actually, an impressive CV covering almost 40 years in club management.

For 2014, Hodgson's genuinely progressive youthful squad selection has been welcomed by many. Others, though, saw a lack of experience as an issue (love him or loathe him, England sorely missed Ashley Cole on Thursday night). But for me, one of the biggest failings was the fact that the England that emerged from half-time in São Paulo didn't look any more motivated than when they'd gone down the tunnel 15 minutes earlier. And responsibility for that ultimately has to fall to the head coach.

Hodgson shouldn't, however, resign or be sacked. Yes, it's a pisser that England have come up short so soon, but what this team needs isn't another manager that's going to fail too, but a new national football culture, prepared to develop the new talent, not just paper over the old.

On paper, you'd select - more or less - the same squad as Hodgson has done. Because on paper those are the best 23 players England can muster. But put them up against international competition, and the gulf in quality becomes embarrassingly real.

We have allowed the Premier League to make millionaires out of mediocrity, while undermining the national game by minimising opportunities for home-grown players. Of course you'd select Wayne Rooney every time - and should Gerrard stand down he would be my choice of captain, based purely (and surprisingly) on seniority. But the fact that he is deemed to be at the top of the elite demonstrates the paucity of talent at England's disposal.

It's always easiest to blame someone else, but if we were to be really honest, England's early, painful and downright embarrassing exit from this World Cup really is not going to be about the manager's failings or those of the players individually: it's that England just aren't good enough in general. And that is probably the hardest and most jagged thing to swallow of all.

Bought the T-shirt... Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures

As any music head will tell you, usually at length, the golden age of record buying was in part defined by the artwork that appeared on their covers.

Sticky Fingers, Sgt. Pepper, Warhol’s work for The Velvet Underground & Nico, Houses Of The Holy, all those Roger Dean prog covers, Barney Bubbles’ work in the New Wave, and Pennie Smith’s iconic photograph of Paul Simonon smashing up his bass on the cover of London Calling - prime examples of an era when records could be framed and hung on a wall or filed, spine-out on a shelf.

But one record stands apart, 35 years after its release on this very day in 1979, for remaining an icon for its cover as much as the music within: Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures.

It was their debut album, an appropriately gothic, nihilistic serving of profoundly Mancunian gloom, providing the raw blueprint for almost every indie and electronic album to follow in the 1980s, from OMD and Heaven 17 to Gary Numan and even U2.

Consciously or unconsciously it quite liberally evoked The Velvet Underground, The Doors’ Strange Days and Bowie's Berlin era, largely thanks to Martin Hannett’s spacious production and use of tape loops, non-sequitur sound effects and recording in basement toilets just to deliver the right degree of ambient froidure.

Hannett has quite rightly taken much of the credit for creating Unknown Pleasures' musical reputation, but as with so many impactful debuts, production had to have raw material to work with: thus, Ian Curtis, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Bernard Sumner were like tent pegs at each corner of a tent, maintaining a taught, nervy dynamic.

For its legend, Unknown Pleasures is far from perfect: Curtis’s vocals sound, at times, like he was making demos.

Sumner has complained that Hannett flattened the guitars so much that Joy Division's aggressive stage sound completely disappeared from the record, while Hook has compared the album's overall moody sound to Pink Floyd. And not in a good way.

Morris, on the other hand has been far more complimentary about Hannett's production, although his experimentation with the-then new syndrums (you hit a pad and a synthesiser plays a fart-like drum sound, as opposed to just hitting a drum…) is one of the album's weak points.

But, then, compared with some of the over-produced monstrosities that were to engulf pop music over the following decade, Unknown Pleasures stood out as an album that baffled, shocked and even frightened those unused to such spartan qualities.

Which is what makes its cover art so distinct. Created by Factory's in-house graphic designer Peter Saville, it was based on an image of image of radio waves from a pulsar that Stephen Morris had come across in The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy, reversing it into a monochrome white-on-black waveform resembling some sort of Middle Earth mountain range.

Much like Storm Thorgerson's Dark Side Of The Moon prism, Saville's cover art for Unknown Pleasures has remained a source of ironic hipster attire long after making its debut.

30 years ago I remember seeing Marillion's Fish wearing a capped-sleeved Pleasures shirt at The Marquee. More recently, Twilight's alabaster-skinned (and 24-year-old) Kristen Stewart was papped wearing one.

It has endured like no other album cover I can think of, appearing on just about every possible form of merchandise you can think of, from skateboards, coffee mugs and shoes, to - unbelievably - a deeply edgy Disney T-shirt that was subsequently withdrawn.

Few of those buying the Unknown Pleasures T-shirt today will have much knowledge of the original album, let alone any kinship with its angst, with the punk movement that inspired it and the Manchester at the start of the Thatcher era that shaped it. But that doesn't prevent the knowing teenager appreciating the design simplicity of that waveform on its front cover.

"The reason I got that top is because I thought it was a cool design, but also because my mum mentioned it was a famous design," says Paige, a couple of weeks shy of her 17th birthday. "She said I would look cool in it and told me they were really famous." And she does. Which makes mum quite cool too.