Net losses

Google started life as a research project just fifteen years ago, Facebook celebrates its mere seventh birthday this year and Twitter is barely out of short trousers and for the music fan, the Internet really has changed everything. An invaluable resource of listening, discovery and information, the days of waiting for a magazine to update you on your favourite bands are gone. Now we simply use a website, a social network or a blog.

But is this really a good thing?

It’s easy to adopt a contrary viewpoint and fetishise physical magazines but former big names, Melody Maker, The Face and Smash Hits have all fallen by the wayside. This may not seem like big news, but Melody Maker alone led to the formation of Depeche Mode, Suede and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. It’s true that magazines used to fail in the pre-Internet era too, but magazine readership has been decreasing for a good while. Last year, circulation of the NME fell by 17.3%.

So, now the value of magazines as a source of news has all but disappeared, they’re more of a niche interest. David Hepworth launched Q, Mojo and The Word Magazine (as well as The Rocking Vicar), and has observed a staggering change in the role of the music magazine:

“The economic basis of the music magazine used to be: readers who needed to buy them to keep up and advertisers who needed them to reach record buyers. Both groups have gone away. In their place you have: readers who like to read and advertisers who need to reach this valuable minority. It's not the same.”

So, how do music magazines buck the trend? Why should people pay for writing when the Internet is full of music websites offering their content for free? One idea is brand extension; you’re not just buying a magazine, but entering into something much bigger. For example, as well as a monthly magazine, The Word gives away cover mounted CDs with each issue, releases a weekly podcast and has a thriving online readers’ forum. These extras don’t directly generate money, but they do make readers more likely to continue to buy the magazine. This is the Holy Grail for magazine publishers: subscriptions from content. David Hepworth explains:

“We really value the site, the podcast, the Twitter feed and all the other means of interacting with the readership but the only one we can get any kind of revenue for at the moment is the magazine. I think they make people feel closer to the magazine, which is good.”

Equally vital to a loyal readership is a consistently high standard of professional writing. So it’s no accident that the biggest music magazines don’t make all their content freely available online. Most UK newspapers make their content available for free via their websites but expect people to pay for the physical edition too. Unsurprisingly, this seems not to be a sustainable business strategy, and advertising revenue isn’t filling in the gap. We’re in very real danger of welcoming a generation that believes all recorded music and quality journalism is and should be free. Eamonn Forde is a freelance music journalist and is worried:

“I think people need to know that it [art] has to be paid for, whether that’s by handing over money in a newsagent’s or a paywall payment every month. But the culture of free, where everything’s free and everything’s going to be paid for by advertising, what you’re going to get is that all culture’s going to be like Metro.”

Metro is a free newspaper distributed throughout the UK, where it’s typically found in train and underground stations. Thanks to the fact it’s free, it’s advertising heavy and features lighter news items, rather than hard-hitting, factual reporting. We can assume Forde isn’t a fan: “It’s going to be this say-nothing, kind-of-press-release, unquestioning, uncritical smug culture and that’s bad for culture overall. I think quality products should come with a quality price tag. I think Metro is like an early warning from history and there is the thought that we get the culture that we deserve. But if that’s culture, then creatives will go somewhere else because they have to make money.”

So, if newspapers and magazines need to make money to stay in business, but their readership expects at least some content for free, how does the professional writer feel about their work being given away?

Jude Rogers is a freelance journalist who writes about music for The Word, The Guardian, The Times and website The Quietus. She recognises not everything can be free, but having your work widely available has its advantages:

“Everything can be linked on Twitter, which is really helpful to spread your work around. I love the fact my stuff’s on The Guardian and people can read it and if you want to pitch your work, you can say, ‘Look, here’s my stuff on The Guardian‘.”

She also has first-hand experience of the News International paywall, which charges for access to their titles:

“I did an interview, last summer with a Tory MP called Louise Bagshawe who also writes trashy, holiday, chick-lit novels, and she came out with some really juicy stuff and I thought everyone would be talking about it, but it was behind the paywall. It’s frustrating when people can’t read my stuff; in a professional capacity I’m more than happy for people to read it for free online.”

It would be a little premature to read physical newspapers and magazines their last rites just yet, but it is a fact that the current trends don’t look good and need to be addressed. A combination of professionalism, goodwill, advertising and innovation is just about enabling the industry muddle along, but surely that can’t last.

For the print media, the Internet has been a cures and a blessing – opening up limitless possibilities while making awakening the industry’s darkest fears.

Of course, there is a future for newspapers and magazines. This is the information age after all. But whether that future lies with a website, behind a paywall, downloaded to a slate or transmitted directly into your readers’ cerebral cortex is a long way from certain. There’s a bewildering wind blowing through the business but when the storm subsides, someone will have put their finger on the new model and how to make it work and pay. That person is almost certainly working in the media right now. We can only hope they realise their greater purpose very soon.

Joe Rivers, March 2011

Are you sitting comfortably ...?

Can I ask you this? When you’re attending a rock concert (not an 02 Academy club style affair, but a more sedate allocated seating event) at what point do you fetch drinks, buy food or have a pee?

If you go right at the start when everyone’s arriving, good for you. That’s when I use the facilities too. Or perhaps you attend the bar and lavatory between the support and the main act. Again, perfect choice, that’s what the interval is for - no argument whatsoever.

However, if you wait until a band is on stage and your fellow ticket holders are concentrating on the music, then push your way past the entire row, ensuring you shove your rear end into the faces of its occupants, before returning five minutes later with large beakers of beer, bags of Doritos and even pizza, repeating the process in reverse, can I ask you this?

What in holy hell do you think you’re doing?

A gig by a 'name' act now costs upwards of £35. Like me, you paid to attend. Unlike me, you have little or no interest in the performance, the band or their work. You can’t have. Because if you did, you’d sit and watch and listen and enjoy. The band is likely to be on stage for little more than 90 minutes. Are you really unable to pass that time without alcohol, snacks or several wee-wees? As if you were six?

This week I was very happy to attend the show staged by The Feeling and Squeeze at the Royal Albert Hall in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust. The RHA is a great venue. It’s not literally ‘in the round’ but because of the circular building, it has that intimate feel. It’s high and plush and thanks to roof-mounted baffles has a very crisp sound. Which is just as well, as Danny from The Feeling had a noticeably heavy cold (he called it flu, the big softy) and his projection needed that lift.

When I first heard this band on the wireless, I was rather underwhelmed. Had I never caught them live, that’s pretty much where I’d have rested. But after four evenings in their presence, I really like them. They remind me of those early 80s new-wave acts like The Jags and The Knack – all
skinny ties, wedge hairdos and uplifting power pop love songs. What’s more, they seem to have the enviable ability to build instantly memorable and lovable tunes with lyrics in similar territory to those of Neil Hannon or Paul Heaton.

The Feeling look good, love to show off and genuinely enjoy themselves. That’s a spirit you quickly find very infectious.

Between bands, those of us not at the bar or the smallest room in the Hall received a  spirited presentation on the work of the TCC, including testimonials from two young men whose illnesses had been tempered by the charity’s work. So I’d just like to give a special mention to the two women sitting in front of us, who spent this entire section (and indeed most of the rest of the evening) nattering incessantly about their dull careers and aimless office lives. Thanks for that, it added to the atmosphere and experience no end.

Being tagged ‘the new Lennon & McCartney’ is no blessing. It does nothing to manage people’s expectations and insults the originality and personality of a band’s work. Squeeze have been party to this lazy labeling, but they shouldn’t – and probably don’t - care. After all, it should be obvious to any fan of popular music that Chris Difford and Glen Tilbrook have spent over 30 years crafting a collection of songs so unbelievably attractive, they defy idle comparisons. As they canter through ‘Is That Love?’, ‘Annie Get Your Gun’, ‘Black Coffee In Bed’ and over a dozen more stone cold gems, it’s the undiminished clarity and idiosyncratic tone of Tilbrook’s vocal one notices most. ‘Slap & Tickle’s bridge (“If you ever change your mind …”) is as nasally and brilliantly sharp as the venerable single version. The man’s larynx is either touched by a divine hand or the result of regular hot water, honey, lemon and Scotch.

By the way, alongside their regular cohorts, a 26-piece string section – very appropriate considering the venue, accompanied Glen and Chris. Now I’m a big fan of the old violins and cellos in pop music. From Spector to The Manic Street Preachers, they rarely fail to get me all roused up. And their addition to the comedy and tragedy of the Squeeze repertoire worked perfectly well. But to say this mini-orchestra was on stage throughout the set, they seemed strangely underused, only kicking in about a quarter of the way through. It would be churlish to suggest an opportunity was missed, but that was the niggling doubt by the time ‘Cool For Cats’ tore the house down. Perhaps it’s an idea needing more development, because there’s definitely an exciting kinship between Squeeze’s ear-worm melodies and a wash of orchestral arrangement, but they're not quite connecting just yet.

There's no doubt, if they choose it, Squeeze's story will run and run, such is the affection they generated here. And there is no reason The Feeling’s third album shouldn’t see their stock rising nicely.

But whether there’s a future for this punter and the modern concert going audience is something that is very much more uncertain.

Magnus Shaw, March 2011

Eat my sport

Richard Keys opened the huge, overwhelming chasm of the show he presents with Andy Gray by issuing a plea for callers to debate the great footballing matters of the day – including MK Dons’ (of the third tier in English football) splendid victory over Peterborough the previous evening.

From the hosannas of the Champions League to the Denbigh Stadium in Milton Keynes in five weeks.

After the supplication for listeners to call in, there was a queue of football people waiting to feel a metaphorical arm round the shoulder and a 19th hole style of chit chat. It would be over stating it to call them interviews.

Craig Bellamy; Karl Robinson, youthful manager of the previously mentioned MK Dons; and Ugo Ehiogu. The drums were beating to a rhythm of favours called in.
Bellamy and Ehiogu said nothing; Robinson bounded along like a puppy off the leash in the spring sunshine, but also said nothing.

As pretenders for the crown held by Five Live, talkSPORT are caught between the longing for credibility and the struggle for the legal tender. Keys(ey) and Gray, there for the former ambition, adopt their Sky Sports personas with the comfort it brings them in this not so brave, not so new, world of downsizing. They chase and reach for testosterone like bulldozers chasing butterflies. Bulldozers that are low on fuel and lost in dreams of the past.

Riffing, or flying by the seats of their respective pants, whichever you prefer, through the first forty five minutes, there were in fact, no callers.
Keys continues his matey, sit down lawn mower, Sunday roast, man of the people role. Gray makes no contribution for several minutes at a stretch, to the point of a jolting reminder he’s still there when he generously supplies an over-hearty “Ha, Ha, Ha” to a weak anecdote or dreary pun.

I went away, got on with life, drove across London, pushed the preset a couple of hours later, and they were still there; talking about Leyton Orient.
There had been no breaking news. Nothing had happened. They were talking about Barry Hearn as if their lives had always intended to be this way. They sound like broken men.

This is the herd of elephants in the talkSPORT studio and they aren’t only trampling Keys(ey) and Gray. The reality is, in sporting circles in the vast, gaping expanse of any given week, nothing happens. Transfers are embargoed. Players train in security heavy compounds from which they drive out furiously, hammering the gas, behind their tinted shades, in their Hummers with tinted windows.
Presenters are left hanging around like mice outside the lions’ cage, hoping that a shard of discarded flesh will tumble their way.

A UK radio station dedicated to sport can only talk about the last game and preview the next one. To string out that premise over a twenty four rolling format is like trying to fill a hall of mirrors with smoke.

Keys(ey) and Gray try and fill fifteen hours of this enormous hole of limited possibilities each week.

They fill it with desperation and abandoned hope.

Terence Dackombe, March 2011

Go your own way

I imagine it will be one of those too-cheerful-by-half doctors who seem to run their surgeries from the studios of breakfast television that will write it. Probably launched in time for Valentine’s Day next year, “Your Guide To Maintaining A Partnership For Life”. Something like that, only with a sexier title, obviously.

There will be two people in this world who will definitely not be consulted as expert contributors to this no doubt great work. Stevie Nicks, and me.

As my haphazard history of relationships with women is of little interest beyond my world of memories of “It’s not you, it’s me” and “I hope we can still stay friends”, the reader may be pleased to know that we are instead going to try and unravel a period in the life of Stevie Nicks, when overlapping relationships, torrid break-ups and splintered friendships led to her spilling a million dollars on cocaine.

There’s a book and a movie to be written about that period in the lives of the members of Fleetwood Mac; the four years from when Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined, through to the disintegration following the recording of the ‘Tusk’ album.
An entanglement that would tie Pete Frame in knots.

There will be errors here as even Stevie herself says that she can’t quite recall the order of what happened when, and to whom.
In a way, the detail is the least important aspect of our quest, for this imbroglio of romance led to the construction and recording of one of the finest, most evocative, and emotionally draining songs in the history of pop music.

Stevie Nicks was the partner of Lindsey Buckingham. Their relationship was hitting turbulence.

Stevie began an affair with Don Henley, who, using his newly acquired riches, sent his Lear jet around the world to pick up Nicks, bring her to his house, and then ‘deliver’ her back to the Fleetwood Mac tour. Stevie Nicks was not the only dalliance that benefitted from this luxurious commute. The practice became so commonplace that Eagles’ roadies referred to the process as “Love ‘em and Lear ‘em”
At this time, Nicks was also seeing J.D. Souther, so when she became pregnant there was an understandable confusion; but Henley and Nicks both knew that he was the father, and together they decided an abortion was the answer. Stevie called the unborn child ‘Sara’ after her closest friend, Sara Recor.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the Henley/Nicks alliance didn’t survive, and Stevie began a relationship with a member of the Fleetwood Mac road crew.

Mick Fleetwood was married to Jenny Boyd and over a short period of time they were to divorce, remarry, and divorce again. Whilst Fleetwood and Boyd were still married but not too comfortably, he began a clandestine affair with Nicks. However, Fleetwood simultaneously started a relationship with Sara Recor (who was also married at the time).
Stevie found out, and naturally was deeply upset; yet she blamed Fleetwood, and for a time at least, her friendship with Recor survived, to the extent that Nicks wrote the song that encapsulates this era, with Sara Recor sitting beside her at the piano.

The original demo for ‘Sara’ ran to sixteen minutes and is an unburdening of the soul. There are verses alluding to each individual member of Fleetwood Mac and the song includes references to this extraordinary entanglement of lives, love, and pain.
Over the years reviewers have seized on the obvious but misleading conclusion that the song is wholly based on Stevie’s relationship with Recor, but researching many interviews and snippets from news sources and magazines reveals a wider panorama.

The 6:27 version of the song leaves the multiple references behind and brings a zoom lens towards the Henley, Nicks, Fleetwood, Recor quadrangle. Although the four sides are criss-crossed with overlapping triangles of love and regret.

Only those with a soul hewn from the toughest flint can fail to feel their heart flutter and a misting of the eyes as Stevie Nicks sets out an almost unbearable sadness of Janov proportions.
Fleetwood is a ‘great dark wing’; Recor is the poet in Nicks’ heart, and it is almost too much to hear her calling out to Henley, “When you build your house.... call me....”

There is no other performance of a song that attempts to unburden the writer and help find some peace as the operatic drama Stevie Nicks brings to ‘Sara’.

Yet the most poignant references are almost impossible to hear for the casual listener. In the fade, Stevie (and it is heart breaking) pleads to her terminated baby:
“All I ever wanted was to know you were dreaming; there’s a heartbeat. No it never really died; you never really died.”

Stevie and I share a problem. It is so much easier to build a house than build a relationship.
“When you build your house, call me.”


Terence Dackombe, March 2011 



Sources:


Marc Eliot - To The Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles
Barney Hoskyns – Hotel California
Michael Walker – Laurel Canyon
MTV archives
VH1 Storytellers
US magazine
Interview with Tommy Vance, 1994
Daily Telegraph interview, 2007

Slipped discs - the worst singles ever (pt.3)

10. Simple Minds - Kick It In

It pains us to include the once mighty Minds in this list as they have produced some wonderful singles in their time. This however is the most tuneless, empty bluster disguised as a rock song we can recall.


9. Outhere Brothers - Boom Boom Boom

Just the kind of call-and-response record that goes down really well at a party for five year olds who are all hyped up on Tizer.  No use whatsoever to anyone else -  unless of course the musical equivalent of a head injury is your bag. And don't leave the album running as it contains a charming track called Fuk U In Da Ass.


8. Reel 2 Real - I Like To Move It

In the mid 90s there was something of a boom in these lumpy, growly, vulgar dance records and they were all unfailingly awful (see above). This one features some berk called the Mad Stuntman rapping about girls not wearing make up. Music for the evolutionarily challenged.


7. Puff Daddy - I'll Be Missing You

The Diddy Man was so distressed by the death of his pal Biggie Smalls, that he couldn't be arsed to write a proper song about him and instead chose to cover The Police's tribute to stalking 'Every Breath You Take'. Badly. With lyrics, he must have cobbled together while waiting for a bus. Astonishingly, this won a Grammy. Jeez.


6. R. Kelly - I Believe I Can Fly

While quite admirably leaning towards the utterly bananas, even eccentricity cannot excuse Mr. Kelly's 'inspirational' ballady tribute to jumping out of windows. He thinks about it every night and day, apparently.


5. Bryan Adams - Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?

Non-threatening Canadian rock type Bry, has a go at a Spanish slush fest with a lyric so bum tighteningly mawkish it can actually induce light-headedness and projectile puking. To his credit, he never tried it again.


4. Chris Rea - Tell Me There's A Heaven

So your gruff uncle from South Shields has decided to pay an unannounced visit. Only you were out so he went to the pub and downed his bodyweight in export lager. Now he's back and trying to wake you by singing through the letterbox. Either that or it's this turgid Chris Rea record.


3. Kiss - God Gave Rock And Roll To You

If only he'd kept it out of the hands of you buggers.


2. Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody

People who know nothing about music hear this once and declare it to be a profound work of genius. In fact, it is an over-long, overrated, pretentious, preposterous and pathetic mish-mash of unintelligible themes, unappealing camp and fake emoting. The reason the punk wars had to happen.


1. Cliff Richard - Milennium Prayer 

There's only one problem here: the entire premise for the song. Cliff seems to think, that by some cosmic co-incidence, the words of the Lord's Prayer fit neatly and precisely to the tune of Auld Lang Syne. Unfortunately for him, they don't. Not in any way whatsoever. He probably noticed this when he was recording the single, but was already so taken with the idea, he managed to convince himself all was well and he'd truly uncovered a deeply spiritual relevation with which to guide us all into the 21st century. The daft twunt.

Anyone who had a chart

Watching Top Of The Pops was a big part of my life; it was the first television programme I was allowed to “stay up” to watch, and I would sit attentively for half an hour, enraptured. I loved finding out what songs had gone up, what had gone down, and best of all, spotting the new entries in the chart.

As I grew older and my interest in chart music waned, the Top 40 became less important. Then, in 2006, Top Of The Pops was cancelled, and since then I’ve hardly been aware of what was at the summit of the charts.

So, this week, I decided to listen to the Official Charts in their entirety, on Radio 1. Three hours later, I was exhausted and suffering from pop music overload, but what had I learnt? I’d discovered that a young man named Bruno Mars would go to such lengths for his beloved that he makes Meat Loaf look uncommitted; I’d found out that twelve years after his chart debut, Eminem was still unfeasibly angry about something or other; and I’d realised that a bright young thing called Jessie J has a fairly lose grip on the difference between the genders.

Recently chart music was described as “variations on the same shade of beige” but that’s not really the case. While there were similarities between many of the tracks, to call them “beige” would be to suggest they were insignificant and content to blend into the background. 

That couldn’t be further from the truth; most songs demanded attention from the moment they began. Every possible space was filled with sound, leaving the songs strangled of any semblance of character; instead conjuring a relentless assault.

Music is so ubiquitous nowadays; you want to make yourself heard, and heard now. Today, music is often heard through MP3 players and faces tough competition from outside noise: traffic, and the general hubbub of daily life so it’s no surprise that the average chart entry displays all the subtlety of a seaside kiss-me-quick hat. 

The leading example in this week’s crop appears to be Jessie J, whose debut hit, ‘Do It Like A Dude’ displays an approach to production that is akin to banging your head against a wall; repeatedly.

The singles market has actually experienced a renaissance in recent years, largely thanks to the advent of online music stores, like iTunes and in 2007, with eligibility rules relaxed, songs could enter the charts based on downloads alone, regardless of whether they’d ever been officially released as a single. 

However, there will always be loopholes, and the latest to benefit is the mysterious American rap troupe ‘Hype Squad’ who have capitalised upon the buzz surrounding the as-yet-unavailable Wiz Khalifa track, “Black and Yellow”, and rush-released their own version (which sounds strangely similar to the original). Those who pine for the Wiz Khalifa version can’t wait, apparently, it for its UK release so Hype Squad’s ingenuity has given them a Top 40 hit.

Frighteningly, the average age of artists making up the Top 10 this week is less than 22, with the aforementioned Hawaiian, Bruno Mars, representing the old-timers, clocking in at a not-exactly-decrepit 25.

The  lack of what we’d probably call traditional bands is striking It’s no secret that dance and R&B are the sound of the 21st Century generation, but there are only two acts, Foo Fighters and Noah & The Whale, who have a classic pop/rock line-up consisting of a guitarist and a drummer. 

Does all of this mean it’s time to denounce chart music and claim things were better ‘back in the day’? Well it’s true that the trend of (perceived) “maximum impact” production is a little unsettling, but there is always room for invention and experimentation in pop music. 

It may not be to everyone’s taste, but the exhilarating dubstep of Breakage shows promise, and the collaboration between Tiesto, Diplo and Busta Rhymes is oddly thrilling. For anyone wishing to write off the class of 2011, it’s worth bearing in mind that the current number one is Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’, a timeless piano-led ballad fit to top the charts of any era.

Of course, looking at the charts of one week in isolation doesn’t provide a watertight conclusion. It’s a snapshot.

The charts of 2011 are brash, an indictment of our obsession with celebrities, and display a severe shortage of guitars, yet the Official UK Top Forty still provides surprises and a few traces of gold amongst the silt.

Sunday at 4.00pm on Radio One – bring your own sieve.

The Top 40 (well, most of it) on Spotify >

Joe Rivers, March 2011

Dark side of the Mac

This week, as Steve Jobs and his ill-fitting jeans, were holding a press conference to launch the i-Pad 2, members of staff at a major broadcasting outlet were standing round a telly, watching and applauding.

Imagine for a moment, this behaviour was triggered by the appearance of Muhtar Kent, the CEO of Coca-Cola or Tommy Davis, leader of the Church of Scientology. Wouldn’t it be regarded by most folk with a mixture of discomfort and horror? After all, aren’t major corporations and powerful organisations supposed to be viewed with at least some suspicion or even contempt. Particularly by the free minded, intellectual media classes. So what on earth is happening here?

What is happening is ‘the cult of Mac’.

Since IBM, Microsoft and Apple MacIntosh peeled away from
each other in the race to perfect a micro-computer for the mass
consumer market, Apple has always been the one to deviate from
the expected path. They were first with the mouse, which incredibly
was widely dismissed at the time, they also used graphics as buttons and drop down menus when the competition was concentrating on glowing green text. However, far from bringing them huge and immediate success, Apple came very close to insolvency as this new technology found it’s level and the market settled. Indeed, had Steve Jobs’ firm not captured the graphic design audience so comprehensively, they would probably have succumbed to Bill Gates’ dominance in the same way IBM caved.

Instead, they sought to drag the computer out of the mathematics lab and into the world of interior design and objects of desire. From the PowerMac to the i-Book, they did this with considerable aplomb and when MP3 showed itself to be future of recorded sound, the pulled off the same magic with the mighty i-Pod.

It is not for me to scoff at the achievements of this corporation and, in fact, I believe they have a remarkable flair for building very functional and rather beautiful kit – albeit using Chinese low-wage, non-union labour. No, it’s their disciples that leave me bewildered. And ‘disciples’ is not too strong a word.

Quite what inspired a section of 21st century society to fall in thrall to a range of metal and plastic boxes filled with wires and circuits, I can’t begin to guess. Do we ever meet people who evangelise about a particular dishwasher, at length, at dinner parties? Or come across folk who sneer with superiority at your choice of calculator? Of course we don’t. But we all know individuals prepared to take such stances on the subject of their computer or music player.

An Art Director of my acquaintance once told me he believed his Mac had a soul and PCs were just toys. All other evidence suggested he was a reasonable and rational fellow, but he was quite serious when describing these emotions and ascribing them to his machine and screen.

I’m a PC user by habit. Nevertheless, I have no inclination to defend Microsoft Windows and am very happy to admit is quite badly designed and prone to cause frustrations from time-to-time. But, on the whole, it works, delivers the functions I ask of it and does so at fairly reasonable price. To that extent, it’s no different from my fridge.

The Mac adherent, however, is liable to extol the virtues of the device and its operating system in much the same way a street preacher would recommend a particular route to salvation. That is, without exception, without question and with a slightly scary zeal.

Not only is this not a healthy relationship to have with a company which sees you as little more than a revenue unit, it is a rather sad attempt to assert some kind of techno-exclusiveness in order to belittle the non-believer.

Naturally, Apple is more than happy to exploit this unwavering devotion. The firm is delighted to continually re-release its products with slight modifications, in the knowledge there is an immense army of devotees only too happy to bin the previous model and fork out another several hundred pounds for the new. Lest they should slip from grace and be black-balled from the club which gives them so much status and self-affirmation.

The OED defines the psychological term ‘fetishism’ as:

‘A form of desire in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object’

That is what Mac lovers are indulging in – a fetish. And like all fetishes, it only really arouses a certain kind of person. For various reasons, I’m actually writing this on a MacBook Pro. Sadly I remain entirely unmoved and notably flaccid.

Magnus Shaw, March 2011

Altered States

“I like to be in America
OK by me in America
Ev’rything free in America
For a small fee in America”

Today, in England, and without even paying that small fee, I can live my life as if I was in Boston, Milwaukee or Los Angeles.
I can access live American TV, the New York Times is just a click away, and thanks to my iPhone, I can drive along the M4 surrounded by the urban sprawl of West London, listening live to KTYD-FM in Santa Barbara and imagine I am driving the Pacific Highway, just like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.

In 2011, we are closer than ever to being the 51st State, if only in the cultural sense of interaction and accessibility.

To a boy (well, this boy) growing up in a 1960s England that was just beginning to finally shake off the exhaustion of  post war rationing, and starting to come to terms with the loss of Empire, the United States of America might as well have been somewhere a million light years away in another solar system.
America was the land of plenty, of excess, where there was space, room to breathe and a burning optimism for the future.

But nobody hopped on a plane to the States. There were no holidays in Florida, no weekend getaways to New York.

America!
In the 1960s I loved America from afar, glimpsing, through black and white grainy televisions, the Beverley Hillbillies and (when ITV hadn’t sold enough advertising for the commercial breaks) occasional clips of the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons.
I really did believe that in Gotham City, Chief O’Hara would breathlessly and excitedly inform Commissioner Gordon that The Riddler was leaving diabolical clues to dreadful crimes all over the city, and that a call through on the Batphone was the only way for the villain to be apprehended.
(Batman, in Episode One: "The Riddler's mind is like an artichoke. You have to rip off spiny leaves to reach the heart!")

I wanted to go and live in America more than anything else in the world.

In the tiny sweet shop around the corner from where I lived, near the Thames, in Middlesex, I would browse the carousel of American comics inexplicably on display amongst the ageing copies of Woman’s Weekly and The People’s Friend. There was a battle for supremacy between Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics, which were certainly seen as the cooler option, and DC Comics which seemed a bit more establishment, but DC had Superman.
American comics were like a spy hole into a world that was so far removed from a small town twenty five miles outside of London that could ever be imagined.
It was the advertisements. Grits (what were they?), guns and gum. And ant farms; in a small quarter page advert, these tiny ranches of insect colonies would be depicted as the most exotic and educational talking point that could feature in your home. I dreamed of owning an ant farm, though I suspect my mother would have taken an opposing view following their almost inevitable escape and creation of a new home under the floorboards.

Then, through the almost impossibly romantic medium of pirate radio ships bouncing on the North Sea swell, ‘God Only Knows’, ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘California Dreamin’.
The Beatles produced Penny Lane and The Kinks sang of the sun setting over Waterloo;  but gorgeous hymns that they are – we knew these places. They were our identity and our home.

We knew nothing of the life of a Wichita Lineman and we didn’t know the way to San Jose.

The first time I flew to America, I had to catch my breath as we descended to Chicago O’Hare and I could see the yellow taxi cabs on the city streets way below.  The Man From UNCLE, Mr Magoo, and Top Cat; the yellow taxis had become icons of this mysterious but desirable lifestyle, so far away across the Atlantic to a dream filled teenager in England.

Nothing, really nothing, in America disappointed me. My dreams came true and I found new loves: stores called Piggly Wiggly, drive through banking, diners in the north of Wisconsin where the menu hadn’t changed in fifty years and waitresses flirted with the customers in the hope of larger tips.

So now that we have moved further on from the global village and the world is inside our houses and apartments, I know everything there is to know about America and Americans.

Nah, of course not.

Every week, Ira Glass offers us a window to the soul of America. ‘This American Life’ reports on stories of people doing extraordinary things in ordinary lives.

If like me, you are fascinated, sometimes appalled, often enlightened, by the astonishing way that the U.S.A. manages to bring all of its disparate parts together, then This American Life will only add to your journey of understanding.

‘TAL’ as we shall call it here, is produced in Chicago for the National Public Radio (NPR) network, and is easy to find as a podcast from several sources.

Here’s the best place to find links to current This American Life shows, and the entire archive can be accessed for free.

I can’t guarantee TAL will make you fall in love with America to the same degree of giddiness that is in my heart, but I shall accuse you of having flint for a soul if you don’t find yourself moved by This American Life – The Parent Trap.

This week I have:


Been reading ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ – Peter Doggett’s splendidly researched book about the painful separation of The Beatles through their latter years of untogetherness


Viewed the first five episodes of The Big C – a very watchable, light and shade comedy drama about a suburban woman, recently diagnosed with cancer


Been listening to the works of John Tavener – here’s a Spotify link to the slightly scary Lamentations And Praises (I suggest a dark, candle-lit room for this one)


Decided not to fly to Libya for a short ‘get away from it all’ break

Terence Dackombe - March 2011 

(follow me on Twitter at @sirterence)

Slipped discs - the worst singles ever (pt.2)

19. 2 Unlimited - No Limits

Nothing, perhaps, more cringeworthy than an underground music movement being overtaken mainstream by 'artists' who just don't understand it. And the masters of this offence were these two (unlimited) and their 'Techno, techno, techno'. No lyrics.


18. Whigfield - Saturday Night

There's something quite cheery and unifying about a record that has a nice dance to go with it. Somehow, however, this hit managed to fill us all with a terrible sadness.


17. Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You

It's not the song - Dolly's version is quite passable. No, it's the bleeding lungs delivery, overblown melodrama and sheer number of notes that makes this almost unlistenable. Sounds like she had to be dragged from the mic.


16. Madonna - Dear Jessie

There is no doubting that Madge has turned out some outstanding pop numbers in her lengthy career (Vogue, Express Yourself). But she is also more than capable of scraping the floor beneath the barrel and this nonsense about pink elephants and lemonade sets oen's teeth aching.


15. SL2 - On A Ragga Tip

If you were to lobotomise some gibbons and lock them in a room with some dustbin lids, kazoos and samplers - the results would sound almost sublimely subtle and searingly intelligent than this mindless racket. Don't do that though.


14. Maroon 5 - This Love

Remember Hootie and the Blowfish? Very safe, conservative campus, American pop rock. Well, they sound like a lost Captain Beefheart bootleg in comparison with this bunch of stiff faux-funk bores. Excruitiating orgasm reference too.


13. Radiohead - Pyramid Song

Yes, you read that correctly. This is the rock equivalent of people looking at a lump of old chewing gum in a glass case at a 'modern' art gallery and pretending they can see something profound. This is not an artistic statement, it's a miserable bloke wailing away while he plays off-key piano to a lucicrous time signature. And nothing more.


12. Crazy Town - Butterfly

Even if you've never heard this dreadful attempt to blend hip-hop and white rock in a style the kids are all loving, the fact that the band are called Crazy Town should tell you all you need to know.


11. Sigue Sigue Sputnik - Love Missle F1-11

Great band name, excellent title for the single, unprecedented use of PR and hype - surely we were entitled to expect the new Sex Pistols. Unfortunately what we got was something which may well have been cobbled together by some ten year olds who had borrowed their brothers' synths and guitars before getting bored and going out to play on their bikes. In short, a right ruddy let down.

NEXT WEEK: The world's worst singles numbers 10 - 1